The Hood Ornament Effect or, Why the U.S. Needs a Parliamentary System

Orson Bean once told Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas that he did not read the newspaper, nor follow current events.

"Reading a newspaper is like focusing on the hood ornament of your car while you're out driving in the country," Bean explained. "You miss the beauty of the world around you."

Watching the talking heads on Face the Nation and Meet the Press (John Edwards and Mike Hucakbee, though not sure which was on which), it dawned on me: American politics essentially is hood ornament-gazing.

I haven't "blogged" in almost two weeks as, frankly, following American politics and politicians disgusts me. Reading blogs one realizes that there actually is a disease called graphophilia, where someone becomes addicted to writing. Like "Thomas Wolfe" disease, that is, diarrhea of the pen, the political junkie infected with graphophilia writes on and on, day after day, until he (and its always a he) has created a mountain range of molehills, a range that in the junkie's own mind rivals the Rockies or the Andes, nay, the Himalayas. And they are still molehills.

The beauty contest that is the Presidential selection process essentially is about electing the Mole-in-Chief. Is it no wonder why the Presidency and American politics is such a tragicomedy? Tragic when seen up close, a comedy when one steps back, then a tragedy for the rest of the world that has to bear the brunt of the Mole-in-Chief's policies for four-to-eight years.

Look at the wallpaper in your room, or some object on the wall. Take your index finger and bring it very close to your thumb, and then bring it up to your eye If you are concentrating on a small detail on the wallpaper, suddenly, framed in such a way, it has assumed massive proportions. It has filled the "space" and psychologically, has become the "world" from this Point of View.

And it is false, just like the American Presidential election process is false.

We are focusing on personalities rather than issues. One can say we are focusing on the way a candidate, like Barack Obama, articulates the issues, but we would be wrong. We are focused on the way a candidate like Obama frames the issues, markets the issues, which is essentially thumping the tub for him or herself.

In a parliamentary system, the party picks the leader and the candidates who will run for a seat in Parliament. The voter focuses on the party and the issues, not on the personalities. One votes one's interest, as articulated by the party, not because John Edwards is better looking, in his WASPy button-down way, then Bill Richardson, whose face is a map of Mexico.

In a parliamentary system, a man like Richardson with his full resume (cabinet member, United Nations ambassador, governor) would be the head of a party. The press, and I mean the Boston Globe, not the National Enquirier, would not make up fantasies that Obama's world travels as a boy uniquely position himself as a diplomat (which he hasn't been -- this incidentally, is Obama's own fantasy that the Globe, seeking for a Rockefeller Republican, bought), ignoring the fact that Bill Richardson actually IS a diplomat.

This is insanity.

On the one hand, you have the real thing, an experienced man with executive and international experience, and he is ignored by a major American newspaper to tout the more marketable brand.

My father said that the essence of American life is that someone, sometime, is always trying to sell you a horse made out of horseshit, claiming its a real horse.

In the late 1960s, when the book The Selling of the Presidency came out, revealing how during the 1968 Presidential contest, the two candidates (Humphrey and Nixon) used Madison Ave. advertising firms who sold them with strategies used to flog dogfood and cigarettes, American pundits were outraged. Now, the talking heads on the boob tube hail Mitt Romneys religion speech, utterly devoid of substance, as a good "marketing move," a canny "advertisement for myself" from Mitt to evangelical Christians.

It's not the tail wagging the dog, it is a horseshit simulacrum of a horse being bridled and piss-tested and entered into the Kentucky Derby. It is baseball on steroids, which the sporting press was entirely conscious of us, and indeed, was part of the conspiracy to sell that conglomeration of horseshit to the sports fan, who is a dumb slob and could care less. Integrity is something for other people.

The United States, which has just endured seven years of a Mole-in-Chief who has utterly disgraced this country, is going to reap the rewards of the dragon's teeth it has sowed for the last generation.

Barack Obama: "There is only one America, the United States of America"

Funny, as an African American -- or is he, since his father was African, not African American, and his mother was white -- he should know in American history, there has always been a multiplicity of Americas. The very Constitution itself is a testament to that multiplicity, of the fundamental duality of America: the slave states and the free states. The Founding Fathers created a no-party/one-party state (the same thing) and created an electoral college, and gave the slave states the counting of 3/5th of each slave towards the apportionment of seats in Congress and the electoral college, to keep the slave states viable, politically, vis a vis the free North. The Constitution wallpapered over the weak joint in the union caused by the duality of their being fundamentally two Americas, to create the fiction of one United States of America. These two Americas persist, Red States & Blue, the Solid South realigned from the pro-segregation, anti-black Democratic Party of 1876-1964 (this is just its core years) to the anti-black new GOP created by Nixon and Reagan.

Barack Obama is a black Republican, a throwback to the time before the 1964 coup staged by Barry Goldwater, that the Republican Party was the Party of African Americans. He does not represent working people (that falls to John Edwards), but is the candidate for the upper-middle-class voters and wannabes who would have been Republicans before the social revolution of the 1960s, and now are Democrats due to social issues.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?

-- George Orwell, 1984

The Democrats Need a Toussaint L'Ouverture, Not a Rockefeller Republican

Toussaint Breda took the surname "L'Ouverture" -- one who finds an opening -- after his brilliant generalship brought the French to their knees in Haiti, and also fought off British and Spanish Armies who invaded Hispaniola to take advantage of the French debacle. Toussaint was born a slave, but his father had been born free back in Africa. Raised as a house slave by a liberal master, he learned to read and write, and was influenced by Enlightenment philosophers such as Rousseau and Voltaire. Fired up by the rhetoric of the French Revolution, such as the Rights of Man, the slaves revolted in Haiti, and lead by Toussaint, punished the French military.



The Jacobins washed their hands of Haiti, and Toussaint ruled the country as the de facto governor. After their fall from power, Napoleon eventually came to power and established himself as a dictator, but L'Ouverture defeated his armies also. Napoleon sued for peace in 1803, extending an offer of an armistice with the proviso that L'Ouverture retire from his role as the Napoleon of Haiti. The slave general/governor did, but several months later, Napoleon deceived the general, a modern Spartacus, by offering him a safe conduct so Toussaint could negotiate further terms of native Haiti's relationship with France. L'Ouverture was seized and imprisoned, where he was allowed a slow death from neglect.

The treacherous Napoleon was asked during his exile at St. Helena Island about his treatment of Toussaint L'Ouverture, his doppelganger, who was known as "The Black Napoleon" due to his remarkable military success and his ability to lead a government. The Corsican Corporal's response was, "What could the death of one wretched Negro mean to me?"

Going to Yahoo

Is it just me, or is anyone else disgusted when visiting Yahoo (my home page is Google) and having to look at the insipid news items, all that "celebrity" heavy bullshit and gossip, items fit for the checkout counter at a grocery store. I went to check an email account and had to be assaulted by a blurb for "Katie Homes spills the beans on what turns her not-homosexual husband on."* It was enough to make me sick.

Yahoo, THESE PEOPLE ARE DISGUSTING. THEY ARE AN OFFENSE TO MAN & GOD. And that's all you put on your site, similar bullshit about TV "celebrities" and people on some godawful reality show only the irredeemably brain-/soul-damaged would watched without being given a massive shot of Thorazine in the ass. I can visit Google and have a plain page and not want to slash my wrists for having been born American in the late '50s and having to witness the Fall of the American Empire.

Why is it I can visit AOL when using my mother's PC at her house and not feel like I am going to lose my lunch? They fill their page with tidbits too, but not rancid celebrity porn-slash-gossip.

GROW UP!

I know I probably could rig my Yahoo page to eliminate that crap, but I'm not going to remain signed in on any page.

* What are they NOT, I suddenly wonder, but want to resist in order not to payoff Yahoo by accessing the article and having their driven ads foisted upon me.....

...Shaved & oiled buttocks,
Pink little ding-a-lings,
These are a few of my
Favorite t'ings!

Who is Katie Holmes? A has-been TV actress that failed to make a movie career, despite oodles of free publicity for getting allegedly knocked up by a man who is NOT our generation's Rock Hudson? She looks like a slob. WHO THE FRIG CARES???

There's an old ditty -- attributed to Henry Chinaski, methinks -- that goes:

There's a rumor going about town
That Tom Cruise likes it in the brown (not);
He eschewed the nubile maids &
Is flirting with a case of AIDS.

....

Those who finally got him
Penetrated his well-rounded bottom.

...

When down in Tijuana Town, when asked,
"Hey meester: Do you wanna f#@% my seester?"
Tommy Boy replied: "Hell no!
"SOCK IT TO ME IN THE KEISTER!!!"

--attributed to Henry Chinaski, circa 1985

Since the ditty is over 20 years old, seemingly it could not be about Tom Cruise, although he was making his first inroads towards superstardom then. Most likely, it was about Rock Hudson, whom Tom Cruise is NOT our generation's version of.

Please remember, "I don't make the news, I just report it!"**

Incidentally, I have an article over at Associated Content on Rock and Henry Willson, his agent.

** Blow-off usually attributed to the late, great Jean Shepherd

The Selling of the President, or the Obama & Oprah Show

Was the US ever a real democracy? I had this conversation with my niece's husband, who is going back to Macdeonia (with her) rather than stay in the States. He simply cannot believe that the US is not a parliamentary democracy, let alone one with proportional representation, and that the Presidency is a beauty contest. (The Founding Fathers never gave much thought as to how, that is who, was elected president. An intelligent gas from Pluto could make the cut, if he/she/it could prove he/she/it was born in the U.S. and 35 years of age or older, for all the FFers could care.)

The U.S. was set up to be a republic, that is, a democracy (which George Orwell in Politics and the English Language said was a word that meant whatever the rulers wanted it to mean) wherein a small elite could control a large population. The U.S. originally was a slaveocracy, in which the South dominated the North until population pressures shifted Congressional representation to the free states circa 1860, which threatened to upset their lock on the electoral college, which meant a veto on any anti-slavery politician.

Four of the first five presidents were from Virginia, and in the first 36 years of the Republic, Virginians held the presidency for 32 years. Virginia reneged on its offer to give half of the land to the District of Columbia, it was so politically potent. The District is just Maryland territory. (Why it was never taken after 1865, I'll never know.) Then, Jackson of Tennessee, a late comer to the Union but still a rebel state, was president for another eight years after John Adam's son did his 4 year stint.

So, in the first 48 years of the Republic:

Rebels: 40
Yankees: 8

And the population of the North was more than that of the South, which is why they made slaves count as 3/5ths as a person to apportion Congress (and taxes). To boost the South. Why not give factory owners an extra vote? But they didn't. Such was the price of union. Like the confederation of Canada, it means that the South has had its hand in the North's pocket for 200 years! (Quebec will never secede, a real issue in my neighborhood when I was a kid, because it would lose its welfare check from Ottawa.)

The heyday of the GOP from 1865-1933 obviated the Slave Power, but it came roaring back (the Solid South) with FDR in the Thirties, and has maintained a stranglehold on politics ever since, first as part of the New Deal coalition, then as part of Nixon-Reagan's Southern Strategy appeal to bigotry.

Now, the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination seemingly is Obama Baracka -- I mean, Barack Obama (just had to look it up), who qualifies as a "Rockefeller Republican." This is Senator Ed Brook, with a hipper "aura." I actually like what I hear from him, the professorial touch, which means there's no way this guy can win a general election! But the fact is, Hillary Clinton is right: He has no experience in government, outside of a few years in the state Senate of utterly corrupt Illinois, and a short stint in the equally corrupt U.S. Senate. The man is brilliant, but I remember that F.D.R., the greatest president since Lincoln, was a B student at university, but had great executive ability which was in evidence at Harvard College. Managing a government and inspiring people are two different things. (F.D.R. could do both.)

Bill Clinton was a governor. It seems to be a better training ground for the presidency, a governorship, than does the Senate. Andrew Young was right: Baracka will be eaten alive, should he ever get elected. Then again, Jimmy Carter was a governor, but only for four years (Clinton was governor of Arkansas for over 12 years. The again, F.D.R. was govenror for only four years, but he was "to the manor born", so to speak.)

Carter was a pitiful president, but a great ex-president. Can we afford an Obama presidency, which likely would be a debacle that would had the White House back to the GOP for a generation?

It is unlikely, with the Blue States being anchored in the old slaveocracy of the Confederacy, that Obama could win the presidency. Any Democratic candidate starts out down by over 210 electoral votes, at a minimum, and there is no way that he would make any inroads into the Reagan coaltion, based as it is on the South defecting to the GOP over integration. A Republican has to win 60 electoral votes to win the Presidency, whereas a Democrat has to win far more.

The Democrats pretend this isn't so, but it is the reason Gore lost the election, and even more spectacularly, that Kerry lost an election to a man the country didn't want to re-elect. You will find many if not all liberals, like former Goldwater Girl Hillary Clinton, support the electoral college, as it is a good device to keep the n------s in check. Granted, liberals love black people: it's n-----s they hate. (One has to protect one's property values, and keep taxes reasonably in check.) So don't take it personal, Obama.

Barack Obama has replaced O.J. Simpson as "America's favorite Negro." It's a post that hasn't been properly filled since the unfortunate slayings outside of Nicole Brown's condo almost a generation ago.

What turns me off of Obama -- is his first name really Barack? -- is an ad he ran here in New Hampshire, in which he gives an "inspirational" stump speech saying there is no two Americas, no Republican America, no Democratic America, and then has colleagues from the Illinois state senate thump the tub for him. It's all bullshit. John Edwards is far more dead on accurate in saying there is two Americas. Dam -- there are a multiplicity of Americas, and Obama's third-grade civics lesson isn't going to change that.

Hillary Clinton is right: Obama is running for the Presidency for his own vanity. That's about it.

Oprah Winfrey came to New Hampshire to headline a rally for him, and his poll ratings shoot up. THE PRESIDENCY IS JUST A PART OF SHOW BUSINESS, like baseball and other sports have become. Style IS substance.

In 1968, the book The Selling of the President was considered hot shit, that Madison Ave. was being used to sell Nixon (who graced the cover) and Nixon like cigarettes or boxes of soap. Twitt Romney gives a crappy, non-committal speech on religion, and he's praised for a good MARKETING strategy.

It's all meretricious and a joke.

* Up from 202 in 1988.

San Francisco Chronicle piece on the Mortgage Meltdown

While the phony Boston Brahmins on the Globe apologize for Mormonism's insalubrious past and dis California (such bravery!), the San Francisco Chornicle ran an interesting piece on the mortgage crisis. My take is that essentially, the mortgage crisis came about as a way to juice the economy by allowing bankers to treat the white middle class as it always has treated people of color, i.e., vicious, inexcusable exploitation via the "balloon note." The balloon note, redubbed the "subprime mortgage"much as a labor scab was redubbed a "replacement worker" and "torture" is redubbed -- well I can't remember -- the idea of a balloon note was to capture an African American in a financial trap, with the idea that their home would be repossessed in several years (to be peddled again) As long as blacks were the target of this exploitation, everyone was fine with it.


MORTGAGE MELTDOWN: Interest rate 'freeze' - the real story is fraud; Bankers pay lip service to families while scurrying to avert suits, prison
Sean Olender, S.F Chronicle
Sunday, December 9, 2007

New proposals to ease our great mortgage meltdown keep rolling in. First the Treasury Department urged the creation of a new fund that would buy risky mortgage bonds as a tactic to hide what those bonds were really worth. (Not much.) Then the idea was to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy the risky loans, even if it was clear that U.S. taxpayers would eventually be stuck with the bill. But that plan went south after Fannie suffered a new accounting scandal, and Freddie's existing loan losses shot up more than expected.

Now, just unveiled Thursday, comes the "freeze," the brainchild of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. It sounds good: For five years, mortgage lenders will freeze interest rates on a limited number of "teaser" subprime loans. Other homeowners facing foreclosure will be offered assistance from the Federal Housing Administration.

But unfortunately, the "freeze" is just another fraud - and like the other bailout proposals, it has nothing to do with U.S. house prices, with "working families," keeping people in their homes or any of that nonsense.
The sole goal of the freeze is to prevent owners of mortgage-backed securities, many of them foreigners, from suing U.S. banks and forcing them to buy back worthless mortgage securities at face value - right now almost 10 times their market worth.

The ticking time bomb in the U.S. banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process.

And, to be sure, fraud is everywhere. It's in the loan application documents, and it's in the appraisals. There are e-mails and memos floating around showing that many people in banks, investment banks and appraisal companies - all the way up to senior management - knew about it.

I can hear the hum of shredders working overtime, and maybe that is the new "hot" industry to invest in. There are lots of people who would like to muzzle subpoena-happy New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to buy time and make this all go away. Cuomo is just inches from getting what he needs to start putting a lot of people in prison. I bet some people are trying right now to make him an offer "he can't refuse."

Despite Thursday's ballyhooed new deal with mortgage lenders, does anyone really think that it can ultimately stop fraud lawsuits by mortgage bond investors, many of them spread out across the globe?

The catastrophic consequences of bond investors forcing originators to buy back loans at face value are beyond the current media discussion. The loans at issue dwarf the capital available at the largest U.S. banks combined, and investor lawsuits would raise stunning liability sufficient to cause even the largest U.S. banks to fail, resulting in massive taxpayer-funded bailouts of Fannie and Freddie, and even FDIC.

The problem isn't just subprime loans. It is the entire mortgage market. As home prices fall, defaults will rise sharply - period. And so will the patience of mortgage bondholders. Different classes of mortgage bonds from various risk pools are owned by different central banks, funds, pensions and investors all over the world. Even your pension or 401(k) might have some of these bonds in it.

Perhaps some U.S. government department can make veiled threats to foreign countries to suggest they will suffer unpleasant consequences if their largest holders (central banks and investment funds) don't go along with the plan, but how could it be possible to strong-arm everyone?

What would be prudent and logical is for the banks that sold this toxic waste to buy it back and for a lot of people to go to prison. If they knew about the fraud, they should have to buy the bonds back. The time to look into this is before the shredders have worked their magic - not five years from now.

Those selling the "freeze" have suggested that mortgage-backed securities investors will benefit because they lose more with rising foreclosures. But with fast-depreciating collateral, the last thing investors in mortgage bonds ought to do is put off foreclosures. Rate freezes are at best a tool for delaying the inevitable foreclosures when even the most optimistic forecasters expect home prices to fall. In October, Goldman Sachs issued a report forecasting an incredible 35 to 40 percent drop in California home prices in the coming few years. To minimize losses, a mortgage bondholder would obviously be better off foreclosing on a home before prices plunge.

The goal of the freeze may be to delay bond investors from suing by putting off the big foreclosure wave for several years. But it may also be to stop bond investors from suing. If the investors agreed to loan modifications with the "real" wage and asset information from refinancing borrowers, mortgage originators and bundlers would have an excuse once the foreclosure occurred. They could say, "Fraud? What fraud?! You knew the borrower's real income and asset information later when he refinanced!"

The key is to refinance borrowers whose current loans involved fraud in the origination process. And I assure you it was a minority of borrowers whose loans didn't involve fraud.

The government is trying to accomplish wide-scale refinancing by tricking bond investors, or by tricking U.S. taxpayers. Guess who will foot the bill now that the FHA is entering the fray?

Ultimately, the people in these secret Paulson meetings were probably less worried about saving the mortgage market than with saving themselves. Some might be looking at prison time.

As chief of Goldman Sachs, Paulson was involved, to degrees as yet unrevealed, in the mortgage securitization process during the halcyon days of mortgage fraud from 2004 to 2006.

Paulson became the U.S. Treasury secretary on July 10, 2006, after the extent of the debacle was coming into focus for those in the know. Goldman Sachs achieved recent accolades in the markets for having bet heavily against the housing market, while Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch and others got hammered for failing to time the end of the credit bubble.

Goldman Sachs is the only major investment bank in the United States that has emerged as yet unscathed from this debacle. The success of its strategy must have resulted from fairly substantial bets against housing, mortgage banking and related industries, which also means that Goldman Sachs saw this coming at the same time they were bundling and selling these loans.

If a mortgage bond investor sues Goldman Sachs to force the institution to buy back loans, could Paulson be forced to testify as to whether Goldman Sachs knew or had reason to know about fraud in the origination process of the loans it was bundling?

It is truly amazing that right now everyone in the country is deferring to Paulson and the heads of Countrywide, JPMorgan, Bank of America and others as the best group to work out a solution to this problem. No one is talking about the fact that these people created the problem and profited to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars from it.

I suspect that such a group first sat down and tried to figure out how to protect their financial interests and avoid criminal liability. And then when they agreed on the plan, they decided to sell it as "helping working families stay in their homes." That's why these meetings were secret, and reporters and the public weren't invited.

The next time that Paulson is before the Senate Finance Committee, instead of asking, "How much money do you think we should give your banking buddies?" I'd like to see New York Sen. Chuck Schumer ask him what he knew about this staggering fraud at the time he was chief of Goldman Sachs.

The Goldman report in October suggests that rampant investor demand is to blame for origination fraud - even though these investors were misled by high credit ratings from bond rating agencies being paid billions by the U.S. investment banks, like Goldman, that were selling the bundled mortgages.

This logic is like saying shoppers seeking bargain-priced soup encourage the grocery store owner to steal it. I mean, we're talking about criminal fraud here. We are on the cusp of a mammoth financial crisis, and the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury are trying to limit the liability of their banking friends under the guise of trying to help borrowers. At stake is nothing short of the continued existence of the U.S. banking system.

Sean Olender is a San Mateo attorney. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/09/IN5BTNJ2V.DTL

Boston Drivers Blow (Like a Nor'easter)

Here's yet more proof that the Boston Globe is in eclipse, Back at Ya by Katherine Ozment, in the December 9, 2007 edition.

Of all the things to write about California, and specifically Berkeley, the fact that Californians and Berkleyites are polite drivers would be the last subject that would come up in my mind. The Nazi meter maids of Berkeley would be one subject that comes to mind. Ozment, though, indulges in that popular past-time of stuck-up Easterners who are so desiccated emotionally they can't appreciate paradise, let alone live in it: The "Aren't I better than the goofy Californians" story. However, I must admit she gives it a new twist.

I went to school, briefly, in Monterey, California in 1985, then lived in the Bay Area from 1989-1992 (cherchez la femme), when I -- after breaking up with la femme -- moved back to Cambridge. I insisted I had hated California the entire three years I was there.

I lasted six months -- the harsh winter and harsher attitudes of Bay Staters (to say nothing of rotaries) drove me back West, where I stayed through to 2000, when I moved to New Hampshire for 18 months. Then, back to Northern California and then, sadly, back East to take care of my ailing father.

Katherine Ozment did not live in California long enough to find out something about herself, or what is more likely, lacks a capacity for self-awareness. I, like many an Easterner, was quite an obnoxious driver when I went West. (I was quite an obnoxious person.) Eventually, I learned that the problem was in myself, and began to relax. I began to learn something invaluable from the lack of pretensions of the Northern Californians.

The ability to process feedback is a requisite for maturity, and is something lacking in Ozment. Somehow, I do not believe the innocent scenario she sketches out, about being a wholly innocent party. While it is true that northern Californians find a Boston-area accent to be quite hilarious, and when I was at Berkeley, the pretensions of Bostonians were lampooned (being from New Hampshire but schooled in the Hub, it hurt), no Californian, native or transplanted, has ever been as rude or nasty as an Easterner.

Taking care of my late father necessitated living in New York State ('round Tarrytown) and then in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and while the Hub can never claim to be as obnoxious as those two hitching posts of Hell (Yankee country)...still: It's not a positive thing to be a hot-blooded, hardheaded obnoxious ass.

I am now relocating to Washington, D.C. for law school and appreciate the fact that the locals are so friendly and the city is more thoroughly integrated than Boston, New York City or San Francisco, the places I spent most of my adult life. Having learned in California, like Cassius, that the problem is in myself, I still need occasional reality checks to see that I remain pleasant and not revert to my old obnoxious New England self.
Travel is a way to broaden horizons, Ms. Ozment, not to reinforce one's own prejudices.

I really have nothing much to do with Boston anymore, except to occasionally visit friends. One thing I noticed while being in New York: like an Ivy League education for a mediocre person, the East allows someone relatively small to experience an aggrandizement from association with a city or region they believe superior. (In fact, New York City is a place 10-15 years behind the Left Coast.) One doesn't see that ego-inflation in
California.

BOSTON GLOBE: "New Mormon History"

The Boston Globe published an article "Making Mormon History" about the New Mormon History (new history, same old apologists) that if it were intellectual electricity, it couldn't spark a firefly's ass!

What has happened to the press in America? It no longer fills any role other than an advertising medium platform.

Would you vote for a Scientologist? Mormonism is the Scientology of the 19th Century? How could you vote for an adult that could believe such claptrap? The idea that this doesn't effect his politicos is absurd, since his duplicitousness (the man is a serial liar, as his governorship of Massachusetts shows) is part and parcel of his religion, which holds non-Mormons as despicable "gentiles".

Are you one of these liberal political correct-crowders who ascribe to the proposition that the Book of Mormon is a "Christian gospel"?
Religion has gotten out of hand in America. The Church of LDS, I'm assured by non-Mormons living in Mormon-dominated states, is a mafia. The church invested $1.5 billion in shopping malls one year, which was twice as much as it had given to charity over the previous 10 years. Churches use their tax-exempt status to compete with private businessmen and women, gaining an unfair advantage.

This country is sick, terribly sick. The idea that the Anti-Christ (one of the most fundamental tenets of the A-C that he fits, Jay, is that Mitt Romney has been reincarnated, by Mormon doctrine, having been a "spirit" child and offspring of one of the "Gods" who walked the world as a man before retiring to his own planet to breed with multiple wives) could run for office and no-one question this crackpot religion, or make excuses because of their own sins.... and by sin, I mean the sins of these multiple Christian denominations that are pledged to "Prosperity", i.e., materialism rather than spirituality. It's not so much that these kettles needn't dare can't call the pot black in so much as they WANT the A-C to be crowned as then they can really LOOT without any compunction whatsoever.

I see the modern evangelical movement as being the essential ingredient for the rise of the Anti-Christ (figurative, not literal, though with the destructive power enjoyed by the president, what's the difference?).

Mike Huckabee's "Willie Horton"?

In 1985, Wayne DuMond, a Vietnam War vet with three previous arrests for sexual assault, was tried and convicted of the rape of Ashley Stephens the previous year. Stephens, who was a 17-year-old cheerleader when she was assaulted, was a distant cousin of then-governor Bill Clinton. Her father was a prominent businessman who had given campaign contributions to Clinton.

D.N.A. evidence was then in its infancy and conclusions were sketchy; the “evidence“ failed to positively link DuMond to the rape. However, Ashley Stephens positively identified DuMond as her attacker. DuMond was convicted by a jury of his peers and was sentenced to life in prison, plus 20 years.

DuMond’s sentence was reduced to 39 years by Bill Clinton’s successor as governor of Arkansas in 1992, and he eventually was pardoned by Huckabee in 1999. DuMond subsequently moved out of the state and relocated to Missouri, where in in January 2004, he was convicted of murdering a woman, 39-year-old Carol Sue Shields. DuMond was convicted of the 2000 slaying of Shields, who was found bound and suffocated in the apartment of a man with whom she was having an affair. Implicated by D.N.A. evidence found under Shields’ fingernails, DuMond was sentenced to life in prison for the second time in his life. DuMond. DuMond later died in prison.

Though some are speculating that DuMond might become Mike Huckabee’s “Willie Horton”, it is unlikely to occur as Mike Dukakis was a liberal who backed liberal policies while Huckabee is a paleolithic conservative whose unabashed Clinton-hating, which was at the heart of his decision to parole the rapist who went on to commit murder, will not detract from the faithful reactionaries he is making his presidential pitch to. America remains a hooligan nation whose thirst for blood, be it in rape, murder or lynching, remains in check by the law, a law which the Huckabees feel free to bend to their own ends more than any liberal.

It is this hooliganism which is the essence of the post-Nixon/Ford Republican Party.

During the St. Petersburg debate, Huckabee quoted scripture to denigrate the idea that every word in the Bible should be taken literally. “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” In the relatavist world of Mike Huckabee, that of Christian, evangelical relativism in which Pat Robertson can apologize for abotion in China lest it bitch a sweet financial deal he had struck with the Reds, “If the conviction of a rapist offends thee, then pluck him out from behind bars.” That he went on to murder is irrelevant, to this relativists: The women he killed was a jezebel.

Even before the Clinton Presidency, when the forces of reaction were arrayed against him, DuMond became a symbol of the Clinton-haters in Arkansas, who convinced themselves that the convicted rapist had gotten a raw deal, likely due to then-governor Clinton’s intervention, a charge never proven. The DuMond sympathizers forgave a convicted rapist in order to score points against a hated political adversary. Their sympathy also was rooted in the fact that he had been castrated by hooligans while out on bail prior to his rape trial. (The media eventually linked the castration not to vigilantes, but to muscle employed by Sheriff Coolidge Conlee, who allegedly was afraid that DuMond might expose his car-theft operation. Conlee, who later was convicted of narcotics trafficking, extortion and racketeering , later was successfully sued by DuMond, who won a $110,000 judgment against Conlee for displaying his severed testicles in a formaldehyde-filled jar in his office.)

Governor Mike Huckabee used the sympathy for DuMond to ignore the outrage of Stephens and her family and supporters to secure a pardon for the rapist. DuMond’s original life sentence + 20 years had been commuted to 39 years by Joe Guy Tucker, who had succeeded Clinton as governor of the "Wonder State." The reduction in sentence had made DuMond eligible for parole and gave Huckabee his chance to right what he saw as a wrong.
However, it took three years for Mike Huckabee to exercise his idea of Christian compassion and secure the pardon for DuMond.

Huckabee’s initial attempt to pardon DuMond after becoming governor of Arkansas in 1996 was abandoned due to a public outcry. Finally, in 1999, with the Lewisnky scandal raging, Huckabee saw his opening. The governor energetically intervened with the state parole board to secure DuMond’s release. Huckabee’s reasoning was that DuMond had been convicted with flawed D.N.A. evidence: The testimony of the girl he raped was discounted, apparently as her father was a Democrat and “Friend of Bill” and likely as she was only a woman, a lower order of “Man” in the fundamentalist mind-set. An evangelical, Huckabee is an ordained Pentecostal minister who eschews Jesus for the Old Testament god(s) represented as Yahweh, who has no qualms about taking vengeance.

It is important to remember how Republican Party as a whole, not just its hardcore reactionary elements, exploited the public’s unease with Bill Clinton during the 1990s for political gain. One must also not forget the sexual roots of this affliction, both in the sense of Clinton’s philandering, the nerves touched in the psyches and subconscious of his inquisitors (Chief Inquisitor Newt Gingrich also was having an affair at the time he was attempting to manufacture political coin from President Clinton’s adultery). One also must be cognizant of the gender issue as encapsulated in President Clinton’s relationship with his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, which reportedly was of a “European” cast, i.e., the two had long since ceased co-habitating as husband and wife in a love match and were in a corporate relationship, a partnership, that permitted Clinton, and possibly his wife, to take lovers on the side. These are the political and psycho-sexual roots under-girding the Passion of Bill Clinton, as played out in the House of Representatives during the 1999 impeachment trial.

A generation after most of the Anglo-Saxon democracies and much of the industrialized world, including Pakistan, has had a woman “on top” politically, America remains a deeply sexist nation. Polls indicate that Hillary Clinton’s high negative ratings among half the electorate is rooted in traditional American misogyny. Americans associate competence and success in a woman with negative stereotypes. Never one to miss exploiting a wedge issue, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is running a sexist pitch in New Hampshire to tap into this sentiment.

Mitt’s ad goes even farther in stripping Clinton of any humanity whatsoever, as a woman in Romney’s Mormon religion is little more than a maid and broodmare, a sexual organ, fore sure, but one that needs to be disciplined and exercised by the social equivalent of a hot-walk boy at a stable. In Romney’s ken, Hillary Clinton is an abomination who threatens to revisit the Oval Office with the sexual debasement of her husband’s administration, except in Mitt’s fervid scenario, it is Hillary who will play the “intern” and be sodomized by men: Congressmen, lobbyists, foreign “dignitaries”, etc. It is the lot, the fate, of a striving woman to be thus compromised, as it is in her nature to fail and, part and parcel of the universal dynamics, for such a woman to be sorely chastised. Hillary as President would lead to the rape of the country.

This is not far-fetched when one realizes that before the advent of the electronic media’s primary, the allegory of the “Rape of the States” was currency in the U.S. up through the 1950s, when F.D.R.’s New Deal State and the Warren Court had eroded state’s rights, i.e., segregation and the economic exploitation of the underclass.

Looking a little less backward in time, we can see a Clinton-hater such as Huckabee ignoring justice for the assailed girl on at least two fronts: her relationship with Bill Clinton and her gender. As the victim was Clinton kin, she is seen as a debased or “Scarlet woman” by association, akin to Hillary Clinton, and therefore deserved her chastisement at the hands of an ordinary Joe Six-Pack like the blue-collar Wayne DuMond, a handyman and father of six, the likes of whom make up the backbone of Ronald Reagan’s heritage G.O.P. Ronald Regan never made it in Hollywood as did Bogie, the man he allegedly lost the role of Rick in Casablanca too, but he was firmly of the school whose creed was “I never met a dame who didn’t know a sock to the mouth or a .45 slug to the belly.” As an ordinary rape victim, the girl got her just desserts as in the fundamentalist and reactionary’s mindset, a girl invites her own rape, such as we see in the meting out of “justice” in another fundamentalist country, Saudi Arabia. (The hatred of the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian, as well as Mormon, for reactionary Islam must be the hatred of one for its “other” or doppelganger.)

This attitude, the rape victim “asked for it”, that she engendered her rape due to her gender (Eve being a wicked woman and a foul temptress in the Christian world since at least St. Jerome) was the standard “Point of View” of Americans up until at least the 1970s, when reforms were implemented to take the onus off of rape victims at trial. Reforms implemented by lawyers such as the hated “Lesbian witch” Hillary Clinton, as leading fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell claimed her and her ilk to be.) Huckabee and his ideological kin seek to set back the clock to the pre-Warren Court time where blacks and other people of color were kept in peonage and women were enthralled to men.

The mass media, enslaved to advertisers and owing a fiduciary responsibility to their conglomerate parent’s stockholders which obviates any type of criticism that might roil Wall St., refuse to question a candidate’s religion on the basis of a “political correctness” such as that would be mocked by Romney and other reactionaries if they weren’t so keen on adapting it to their own ends to obviate criticism of their outrageous world views.

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See full article, written by yours truly, at Associated Content

Herr Einstein & The Modern GOP

"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." -- Albert Einstein

"Wanna bet?" -- Mike Huckabee

"'You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time....' Here's where I prove Abe Lincoln a liar!" -- Mitt Romney

Dead Men Talking: The St. Pete GOP Debate

The U.S. is in a time-warp, created by the constitutional election system that enables a small minority to control the government. Thus, a small group of white men who do not even represent the majority of their own party, let alone society at large, utterly dominate the GOP, and with the 250+ assured electoral votes of the "Red" states, are practically assured of winning the Presidential election. Most reports hold that more than two-thirds of Republicans do not want the government regulating abortion, but like the New Hampshire "Tax Pledge" (requiring candidates for governor to pledge to veto a sales of income tax), the "Pro-Life" Pledge was out in full force.

Except for Rudy Giuliani, not one of the candidates was in touch with the 21st century. It might has have been 1964 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Let's look back at 1964, the year the "conservatives", i.e., reactionaries, hijacked the Republican Party.

The triumph of Barry Goldwater and the reaction against the “Eastern Establishment” that had dominated the Republican Party since at least the 1876 Presidential election was ratified at the convention held at San Francisco’s Cow Palace in between July 13 and 16, 1964 Goldwater’s triumph was complete when convention delegates rejected moderate William Scranton, the moderate governor of Pennsylvania who had won the delegations of 10 states, whose name was put into nomination by none other than Milton Eisenhower, the brother of the only Republican to hold the Oval Office in 32 years. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the scion of the Eastern Establishment, had been bested by Goldwater during the primary season, which was still a relatively new vehicle for allotting convention delegates.

When they weren’t gamboling at the Cow Palace, Republican delegates frequented North Beach, where the new phenomenon of go-go dancing had reared its…top. Miss Carol Doda, one of the dancers at the Condor Club, was touted with a variation of Goldwater’s “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right” slogan when she made her debut, sans top, on the last night of the convention:

IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW SHE’S RIPE.

The country, still to be racked by urban riots and the escalation of the Vietnam War, was not ripe for Goldwater’s brand of reactionary conservatism, but Doda‘s daring act signaled the sea change in morality that would create the “Silent Majority” that would be tapped by Richard Nixon and later by Ronald Regan, a Goldwater supporter who rose to prominence at the ’64 Convention.

Rockefeller had attacked Goldwater for being an ostrich with his head in the sand when it came to the problems of 1960s America: "Americans will not and should not respond to a political creed that cherishes the past solely because it offers an excuse for shutting out the hard facts and difficult tasks of the present.”

In the race for the critical California primary, the forces supporting Goldwater, down 13 points in the polls behind with a fortnight to go, pulled out all the stops to counter Rockefeller’s expensive campaign. Rockefeller bankrolled an expensive, negative campaign that cast Goldwater as a dangerous extremist politician who might pilot the world to a nuclear holocaust. In response, the Goldwater forces engaged in “disruptive tactics that included bomb-threats made to the Rockefeller headquarters.”1

The forces of hooliganism that culminated in the 1995 Oklahoma City attack were clearly on display during the St. Pete debate, with videos from gun fetishists and fundamentalist Christians.

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This post is more fully developed at Associated Content.