Ciao

I expect this to be my last posting of the 2008 election cycle. There are two principal reasons for this decision. The first is quite selfish; turning out a posting every day is very difficult as I do my own research and try, while strongly supporting Obama, to be fair to the opposition, and it is not easy without a copy editor to catch my errors. I also think that I’ve made as much impact as possible on readers; everyone on the list – and I hope those to whom it has been forwarded and those who stumbled onto the site - can’t help but be clear that I support Obama and why.

My other reason for ceasing is that Virginia is a battleground state, among the closest of these. Therefore, I’m going to spend as much time and energy as possible in making telephone calls around the Commonwealth in support of Barack Obama, Mark Warner – the Democratic party candidate for U.S. Senate in Virginia - and the various Democrats running for House seats in the jurisdictions that I call.

I think that personal contact can make huge difference in whether voters turn out on Election Day, so on a cost benefit basis, I think I can do more good for Obama by making these calls in Virginia than by preaching to the choir on my blog. I know that there are McCain supporters who can’t wait for the daily post and that I was close to converting most of them to Barack’s camp, but with daily time to ponder what I’ve said over the past six or eight weeks, they’ll finally see the light and vote the correct way anyway.

I’m convinced that this is the most important election since 1932. The country is facing economic and political problems unprecedented in my adult lifetime, and this will be the third epochal change that I have lived through. The first was the New Deal, Fair Deal and Great Society periods that culminated with the great legislative achievements of Lyndon Johnson that transformed America but unfortunately ended with the Vietnam War.

The second great change was the conservative whirlwind led by such folks as Barry Goldwater and Newt Gingrich but most exemplified by Ronald Reagan. It had a run of more than thirty years and did much good in its early days. Sadly, it ended in hubristic overreach during the last eight years leading up to the election to be held twelve days hence.

The election of Barack Obama will represent not only an epochal change in policy direction but a new day for America. A black American will be the first leader of this generation long shift coming, but he will be followed by women and perhaps representatives of other racial and ethnic groups. Of course white men will preside again, but they will be elected by a very diverse and different pool of voters than those we’ve known.

America will soon be restored to prosperity and to an honored place among the nations of the world. It will be great just like always – but different.


Now it can be told: ****, the one who really goofed it is George W. Bush who, thank goodness, has only 89 days let to serve in the White House. And ^^^^ ^^^^^^ the guy who guided **** down the garden path is - I'll bet you guessed it - Darth Vader - I'm sorry, Dick Cheney.

I hope I’m around for the next election cycle as this is really fun for me.

And I ain’t b.s n’ ya.

He loves you not

Are you the owner of a small business? If so, you are revered by President **** and worshipped by Senator McCain, just ask him; no, don’t bother, he’ll reach out to tell you that you’re an American hero. You’re one of the people he’s trying to protect from the socialist ideas of Barack Obama. McCain says that Obama wants to tax you out of business and destroy your ability to create jobs for your equally worthy neighbors.

In 1997, the Congress mandated that the federal government set aside 23% of its procurement dollars for small businesses. They realized that you and yours are the engine of employment in the nation’s economy and wanted you to get a share of the tax dollars that you paid in to Uncle Sam. That’s in addition to other set asides for small firms owned by minority and other disadvantaged people. Isn’t that super; your government has a heart. You didn’t know?

When **** assumed the presidency, helped greatly by your contributions and leadership, you must have been salivating. Imagine a government headed by folks that loved you and who were committed to sending at least 23% of the huge federal pie to you. It would be for work that you could do well, so there was every reason that this would be a symbiotic relationship as well as patriotic one. How about that?

It was all bovine waste. You think you’re tight with these folks and that they love you and the ground you walk on. Wrong buffalo breathe, that policy is for show and not for go. It turns out that if you make pencils, erasers, coffee mugs or any number of products not produced by some of the nation’s largest and most powerful companies, you were welcome to apply for the crumbs. If on the other hand, you wanted to play in the sandbox occupied by the real people, it was time to cover your eyes as you were going to have the sand kicked in your face.

The Washington Post did an analysis and today ran an expose that shows the depth of the **** administration’s love for you. It’s kind of like the love that the sons of the robber barons had for upstairs maids, it kind of meant a different kind of love; you love and they shaft. The cavalier treatment was most striking with the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security where the money’s big and the purchases are high tech, you know somewhere you might actually have a chance of becoming a big business if you could produce.

Some of the nation’s and world’s biggest firms such as British Aerospace, Northrop Grumman, Science Applications International Corp., Lockheed Martin, Dell Computer and others got the lion’s share of your dough. Both the Post and the government make it clear that it wasn’t the fault of these firms. The contracting agencies simply didn’t care whether they followed the rules.

So when you hear John McCain sing his love song to Joe the Plumber, just remember as long as Joe doesn’t mind fixing toilets, he’s a hero, but if he – or you - want to cut out a big high tech firm, he’ll find himself in an outhouse.

Here’s the story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/21/AR2008102102989.html?hpid=moreheadlines

I ain’t b.s.n’ ya; you gottta be big to be loved by these guys.

McCain must be defeated

There are two new wrinkles to the McCain campaign. The first calls for us to vote for McCain in order to assure divided government, something that even I have advocated for many years, and the second actually denounces the **** administration and says that McCain can provide the change needed for us to overcome the damage wrought by ****.

The problem with the call for divided government is that the power of the presidency has grown so great that the constitutional checks and balances cannot be easily overcome with the wrong division of power. By that I mean a change in philosophy is needed in the executive before we can adjust the problem by electing the out party to head up the Congress. If Obama is elected and assumes the many powers grabbed by the presidency since Ronald Reagan, I will almost certainly switch parties and support a Republican, but that means that I would actually have to come to see a pattern of abuse such as that practiced by **** and ^^^^^^. I do not foresee such an outcome at this time.

I was born and raised a Democrat. Over the course of my adult life, I came to examine my support of my party and concluded that I was becoming a moderate with more than a little sympathy for republican positions. I came to see Richard Nixon as a very good president until his character flaws tipped me against him personally but not philosophically, but it was not until Gerry Ford’s run for president that I was able to break my lifelong party affiliation and vote Republican.

Much as I have maligned ****, I will admit to having voted for him in 1980. Frankly, I was quite satisfied with him in the very early days of his presidency and it was not until I was horrified by the prospect of waging a preventive war against Iraq that I turned on him with a vengeance. The folly of the venture and the radical call for massive spending and cuts in taxes turned me back into a Democrat – a moderate one.

Initially I supported Hillary Clinton in this year’s primary campaign. The centrist presidency of Bill Clinton with its moderate approach to governing – even though I had not voted for him – led me to conclude that Hillary was the one. Over the course of the campaign I became attracted to Obama and by the time of the North Carolina primary – and after some very bad campaigning by Clinton – I came to support him.

The McCain proposal to vote for divide government is based in artful but ridiculous logic. McCain clearly supports the hubristic foreign policy of the **** administration and he publicly supports retaining the **** tax cuts even on the wealthiest Americans. He supports deregulation, except in the most exceptional circumstances, and on and on. What he proposes is simply more of the same but with a promise of better management and a better outcome. In reality it is a desperate effort by Republicans to maintain power. In my view **** could not have done this rotten job all by himself or even with the exclusive the support of ^^^^^^.

This fiasco that we are experiencing came about through the concerted efforts of the administration, the Congress and Republican donors and voters. They were wrong and are now all pointing their fingers at ****. Of course, he’s a fool; of course ^^^^^^ is obsessed with imperial power for the country. But the party and its voters and sympathizers forced this mess on us. As **** and ^^^^^^ must be sent away in disgrace, so must their enablers in Congress be turned out of office.

The argument for divided government is just as bad. McCain proposes to maintain all of the powers captured from the Congress and the courts by the ****/^^^^^^ administration, only he says he’ll use them benignly, except of course for the ability to wage war unilaterally and to appoint radically out of step rightists to the courts. It won’t wash; he has to be defeated as a lesson to all enablers that they cannot step away from calamities such as those we face and that he enabled without some adverse consequence.

It’s time for a change. Vote for Barack Obama!

I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

Trickle this

Let’s be clear, federal deficits are going to grow big time no matter who wins the election. The United States is going to embark on a huge public works program centered on roads, highways, bridges and other public infrastructure. It can’t be otherwise; it’s the fastest way to jump start the creation of jobs and for getting money – lots of money - flowing again. These programs will begin even before the new president is inaugurated, and a special session of Congress to implement such a push after the election is already being discussed – and lamented by republicans.

This doesn’t mean that John McCain has turned democrat or that Barack Obama is a hopeless leftist. It means that your new president and the Congress understand that this is a crisis and that they better get cracking. If you’re looking for a government job, start at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving; they’ll be cranking out greenbacks faster than Michael Phelps swims laps.

Tonight John McCain has to jump start his campaign if he’s to win the election, but he signaled earlier this week that he represents four more years of the **** presidency. He told the world that he’s no maverick and that his main economic thrust would be to cut taxes, all taxes. He was very clear that he supports the policies of the past eight years and would rely on the rich to create the jobs – beyond the public works program that is coming regardless of how painful it will be for him to endorse it.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, will embrace the spending on infrastructure and he will think up or go along with other measures to get money into the hands of the middle class. His tax cut proposal that was unveiled even before the meltdown of the financial market is a great example of how he thinks that the economy must grow from the bottom up. On this, his policy couldn’t be much clearer.

McCain is very clear that trickle down economics is still his game. And, of course, there’s more than a little something to the trickle down theory, if you like working as housekeepers and groundskeepers on neo-golden age mansions on the Hamptons and in Newport. For the last decade middle class wages have been stagnant at best while the rich have gained a far greater share of the national wealth, and they showed a great willingness to spend it on bashes on Long Island and in Steamboat Springs. So if you look good in a uniform and don’t shake while pouring, there’ll be work out there for you.

Make no mistake, this election is about power, naked power. As all the wags in the swamp on the Potomac know, government is about who gets and who pays. John McCain sheds tears over the class warfare symbolized by taking money from the top one percent of earners and giving it to you in the form of the tax refunds proposed by Barack Obama. If you haven’t figured out that you’re not in the group favored by McCain stop reading and go check your latest retirement account statement.

The republicans have been geniuses at convincing middle class people they’re part of the ruling elite. Get with it; they’ve been playing footsie with the masters of the universe on Wall Street who’ve been getting rich while you thought that you were, too. Sorry about that; it’s sad to realize that as you were using your house as an ATM machine to pay for what appeared to be an increase in your standard of living, they were selling all your paper to parties unknown and pulling their bonuses as the storm was building and which pumped up your 401- but not forever.

So if John McCain can convince you that every small business owner makes more than a quarter of a million dollars a year and that if Barack Obama is elected you’re mother will be laid off down at the local Dunkin Donuts, go for it. Me, I already voted for Obama and won’t need any more convincing why I did.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

Drool radio

By now you must realize the service I provide by listening to conservative talk shows for you. Running my single daily errand to a doctor’s office, pharmacy, liquor store, donut shop or barber shop – that’s what old men do to fill the day – provides ample time to sample the reason de jour the country is going to hell in a hand basket, according to those who love freedom and liberty and checking on your roommates. Surely you know that for every hour spent in this quest for knowledge hidden from you by the mainstream media I age two, a great sacrifice that I make gladly.

Yesterday, guilt by association was the topic of choice across the right wing airways. Stung by the lack of traction in attempting to connect Barack Obama with William Ayers, the bloviaters are sputtering about the unfairness of it all. Obama’s campaign has created a video that describes John McCain’s role in the Keating Five scandal and the windbags cannot fathom how it is unfair for them to be charged with dirty politics while Obama’s poll numbers rise, apparently unhurt by such unfair tactics.

I listened as one blathering blowhard lamented that Obama was getting away with past associations with a terrorist while McCain’s connections with a `banker’ was killing him. Naturally, the callers screamed their support for the show’s host and that poor innocent, John McCain, and they frothed over the unethical and near criminality of the dastardly Barack H. Obama. (The `H.’ is now the snide and winking shorthand smear after being chastised for using the full middle name of Obama.)

Let me stipulate that Obama’s connections with Ayers were not smart, especially if Barack had any inkling that he wanted a career in politics that might one day land him in Washington. But it is obviously silly to attempt to connect the terrorist activities of Ayers with an eight year old Obama living more than a continent away, and the public is not having any of it thus far. There can be no doubt that Obama’s explanations of the contacts and his present association with Ayers have been bought by the voters or at least trumped by the frightening economic situation. Still, young politicians should learn from this episode.

While Obama hasn’t made a great deal of the connection between McCain and Charles Keating, it is very clear that relations between the two men are far more relevant to voters today than the smear efforts being made against Obama and his connections with Ayers. McCain’s handlers can rail about the mainstream media’s greater concern with Keating than with Ayers, but there’s no getting around the fact that McCain’s poor judgment in connection with Keating bears on his views on banking, the only topic of the election at this moment.

Keating wined and dined five U.S. Senators, including John McCain, in an effort to get them to exert pressure on federal bank regulators to permit his Lincoln Savings and Loan Association to invest in very risky and highly leveraged investments. These investments, far in excess of regulatory maximums, ultimately failed bankrupting the S&L and resulting in the losses of billons of dollars in investments by unsuspecting depositors.

McCain paid back the tens of thousands of dollars in questionable perks from Keating but has admitted that his appearance in front of regulators gave the appearance impropriety. Since Senator McCain supported deregulation of S&Ls that led to an earlier financial debacle that cost taxpayers billions, and since he has many times supported similar deregulatory efforts of the financial sector since, and since even in the present presidential race he has called for the government to get out of the way of people trying to bring prosperity to the country, his views on regulation past and present is very relevant to his candidacy.

The illogical connection of the banker and the terrorist in presidential race is having little or no traction. The importance of the financial crisis has focused the attention of the mainstream media on what is truly the issue that is of concern to most voters, the economy. My only question is, if 100% of the callers on right wing talk shows drool their agreement that Obama and Ayers are a twosome, do you think this is a random sample of those actually dialing up the chatterers? Your humble servant is beginning to so think.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

He did it

The conspiracy against you and me is clear now. Until the last few days all of my sources for information about the worldwide financial meltdown came from the mainstream media. I had no idea that such entities as Time Magazine, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN, NBC, PBS, NPR, and hundreds of other sources that I had trusted were out to elect Barack Obama and ignore the truth.

Quite by accident, while out and about doing ordinary old man errands, I came upon conservative talk radio, apparently a medium being suppressed by the mainstream media and unavailable to ordinary people such as total innocents like me – and you.

Until I heard the truth from right wing luminaries I was under the impression that the financial meltdown was caused by entities pointed to by that same mainstream media. Their culprits of choice are hedge fund managers, Wall Street tycoons, **** administration regulatory officials, investment banks (now gone to hell, deservedly), mortgage giants like Countrywide, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other similar villains in Europe and Asia.

My guess is that most of you were complaining about these institutions and the men and women who ran them. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! If you would only tune in to your local right wing talk radio outlet, the answer is right there for you to learn and to hate. But no, you insist on watching CNN, reading Newsweek and listening to NPR as you go about your ordinary almost traitorous, LIBERAL lives.

Like me, some of you probably claim to be moderates but in the black and white world of conservative talk there are no such beings, so get over it; if you’re not a conservative, you are by definition a LIBERAL. A LIBERAL is far worse than a communist or socialist. I don’t really know why yet, but now that I have found the source of the information, I’ll continue to tune in and let you know in good time.

So for a couple of hours last week I tuned in and found out the name of the person who really caused the multi-trillion dollar meltdown of the global financial system. This person is the most powerful man who has walked the earth since Joe Stalin and is truly far more dangerous. A simple statement of what this person desires is enough to cause the government of the United States to completely change direction, to cause panic on the Asian stock exchanges and to bankrupt small countries like Iceland and Ireland.

The meltdown of the world financial system goes back to a time when this man was masquerading as a minor official in the United States government but spoke up and damned a proposed bill by the majority party in the U.S. Congress, the Republicans, and President ****** *.**** that would have forestalled all of the problems we now face, including acne and ingrown toenails. But this person said, “No!”

What could they do? If he said it shouldn’t pass, what could they do? You really have to understand wasn’t just `no’ it was a LIBERAL `no’. They were obviously powerless, so the leaders of the free world had no choice but to forget about preventing what they knew would be a worldwide financial meltdown and panic.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the man who said `no’ to reining in some of the free market regulatory proposals of the Republicans caused it all single handedly, the most powerful and evil man on the planet is Barney Frank, Democrat Congressman from that LIBERAL bastion, Massachusetts. And you know what; he’s mean to Republicans and sarcastic, too. So tune in conservative talk radio and you’ll find out how you have to vote to stop this powerful enemy of freedom. Darn right!

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

Choice made - vote cast

I voted Barack Obama today. By casting my absentee ballot I have decided that no matter what kind of October surprise occurs, at least one vote will be in the bank for my candidate.

I am convinced that the times are too perilous to entrust our most important office to someone too rash, impulsive, and angry and who despite his self proclamation of being a maverick has been in almost lock step with the leaders who brought us to the edge of the abyss in both foreign and domestic arenas.

John McCain’s two heroes, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, do not fit the mold of the types that give great comfort in what could be the desperate hours that face us today. T.R. was as impulsive and reckless as McCain and Reagan was the most important American leader who set us on the course that brought us to where we are today.

During the campaign, Obama has exhibited the qualities of my political hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt; he has been cool, calm and resolute in the face of the problems he will inherit from what has been an incompetent and reckless administration headed by President ****** *. **** and Vice President ^^^^ ^^^^^^. Barack Obama is the man of this hour, our hour. The times look bad and we need an intelligent and resolute hand on the tiller. The Civil War made Lincoln. The Great Depression and World War II gave FDR his stage. Barack Obama is the man for this crisis.

**** attacked Iraq based on poor intelligence. More importantly, the information used to justify the preventive war was controversial even within his intelligence community. Almost six years later, we find our selves with more than 4,000 army, navy, air force and marine dead and 30,000 wounded, many disabled to the point of damaging their ability to lead productive and happy lives when they return to civilian life.

The economic and financial situation that has become obvious to all over the last few weeks can be traced directly to the philosophy, policies, actions and inactions of the **** administration, directly aided, abetted and championed by John McCain. Even today, McCain’s most important message harkens back to Reagan’s view that the government should be moved aside and let the markets bring us unlimited bounty.

Yesterday, I listened to the radio as conservatives swore that the prosperity of the past twenty-five years was unprecedented in human history and that we should stay the course with Reaganism. That the house of cards on which that prosperity was created, deficit spending and a deregulation policy that virtually assured abuse by clever and overly greedy people is now crumbling about us and that the measures of prosperity – using the market as indexes – have given back virtually all of the gains of the years of the **** administration.

Our housing values are retreating and will soon have given up virtually all recent gains – with millions of American destroyed in the process. Retirement plans of millions have been altered, postponed and many millions will die before they can recover anything like what has escaped their desperate clutches.

All of this was enabled by John McCain. His self proclamation of being a maverick is completely unconvincing. The Republican Party has been captured by fools. They must be turned out in droves to lick their wounds and to contemplate what they have done to the nation. Only when they can demonstrate that they are true conservatives – fiscally and in foreign affairs – can they be worthy of our trust again. And it is going to take many years.

Be gone, you fools!

And I ain’t b.sn’ya.

401 Blues

This is going to be short. I got my quarterly 401(k) report this morning and have been in bed ever since. My intravenous Budweiser input and my catheter are in perfect balance so don’t worry about me. My ****/McCain tax obligation just went up again at exactly the same rate as the retirement account and the value of my house went down. That I’m paying a higher rate than many millionaires is damn disturbing. Thank goodness the report cut off on the last day of September as it's been in free fall ever since.

It’s absolutely startling how I – and millions of other Americans who are in our houses using the most conservative of purchasing methods and who invested in securities, again through the most conservative ways of diversifying our mutual fund accounts as recommended by the folks walking away from their failed hedge funds with tens of millions of dollars in severance packages suggested – got sent to bed. But now I find that the whole shebang was a house of cards.

That it was a house of cards was bad enough but that it was well known to all these big timers long ago is what is so galling. That the Wall Street crowd knew all the time that after they withdrew their millions – billions if you add them up – that their reps in Washington – that’s short for the **** administration and their enablers like John McCain – would have to bail out the entire system.

Now one of their chief representatives in Washington, their loyal servant in deregulating them so they could speculate beyond their fondest fantasies and dreams of avarice, John McCain, is running for president under the banner of punishing the greedy evil doers. Way to lock that barn door, John Boy, but that horse was stolen so long ago that we can’t remember its name.

As I was typing this in bed, I had to turn up the input, so before it overwhelms the output, I’ve got to go. But I know damn well who I’m blaming for my new tax and for my condition; you’ve got it: ****/McCain – no third term for taxers like them.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

It all Depends

OK it’s official; I’ve put on my Depends, and I’m scared stiff. These morons in the **** administration and the Republican Party have officially driven all of us into a ditch and the whole world is frightened. Listen up; it’s my blog and I make all of the official declarations of scared.

John McCain, one of the chief enablers of this economic fiasco, who is running on the new and exclusive idea of directly bailing out those who bought houses they couldn’t afford while his running mate whose only job is to damn Barack Obama for guilt by association, associations she was unable to comprehend only a week ago, has now abandoned reason and is begging for your vote based on fear, mostly fear of Barack Husein Obama, whose very name they've turned into a smear.

Fear is me, and I’m for sending every Republican office holder in the country into the Gobi Desert for forty years – or longer if they don’t put the old time conservatives back in power or until I get over it, whichever is longer. The neocon wing with its imperial aspirations and the evangelicals with their intent to get into your bedrooms have got to have their butts kicked - hard.

I used to be a Republican, a cloth coat Eisenhower, Ford Republican. I have no desire to run the world or to look over the transom as you breathe heavily doing whatever you do – don’t even tell me what it is; I don’t care. I just want America to be a place where all children are above normal and where people mind their own damned business.

To me the bad guy is Ronald Reagan. He’s the guy who through his political genius forged the coalition of neocons, evangelicals and real old fashioned republicans. I bought into it until it became obvious that the **** Doctrine of preventive war and the ^^^^^^ Doctrine that Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter debased what was probably a far more benign view of the country and the world in the hands of a simpler and definitely kinder man.

Whatever psychological failings drove **** to prove that he was tougher and smarter than his daddy are no longer important. We attacked a country that did not have weapons of mass destruction to topple a very bad man and party who were doing very little harm to us. We quickly substituted our idea of what an Iraqi government should look like and it hasn’t been pretty. The prime minister of Iraq is making kissy face with a truly dangerous foe of the U.S., Iran, and we’re having to adjust to getting pushed out of the country.

Reagan and his girlfriend, Dame Peggy, bought into an economic system that has proven – at least in the hands of the less talented zealots who followed him – to not work to the benefit of our citizens and the country, indeed the world. These lesser pols were simply not flexible enough to simply invoke the great one’s name and not be slavish to the foolishness of carrying on in the face of obvious crises.

McCain is a warrior who proclaims day after day that he knows how to win wars and to solve our economic problems. One of his former favorite themes was to hold folks accountable for their failures. George Will compared McCain quite unfavorably with the Queen of hearts whose only response to bad news was to cry, “Off with his head.”

So McCain demanded the head of the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission without a clue as to whether the official had acted responsibly. Fire this one and that one – some obviously quite correctly in the case of Don Rumsfeld but others not. Yet McCain does not want to held accountable himself. That he was wrong on leading us into Iraq while Afghanistan was not finished and thus permitting Osama bin Laden get away with most of his leadership cadre should not be held against him. That’s looking backward.

That he chose an unqualified and very nasty vice presidential candidate who cannot string two sentences together that do not call for an affirmation of `darn right’ and whose only role is to feed red meat to the evangelical base is to be ignored as looking backward. McCain’s judgment on selecting a running mate who is the laughingstock of the country and who with a wink and a nod attempts character assassination and spreads hate and fear wherever she stops is beyond poor.

McCain has no philosophy. “I know how to win wars.” “I know how to solve the economic crisis.” He wants to be president to outdo his father and grandfather. We can’t stand four more years of presidents who simply want to outdo others.

It’s not good for the country and I’m scared silly. McCain has aided and abetted **** in virtually every decision that got us in these fixes, and it’s time for a change. Speaking of change, my Depends are calling.

Aside from a few thousand hedge fund managers and CEOs, how many of you – the very big you out there – are better off today than four years ago? OK, you two vote for McCain and the rest of you start working your butts off for Barack Obama.

I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

Champagne Music

John McCain has one really difficult job tonight. Imagine being the front man for the republican brand at this time? Now that’s a selling job for you. But I’ve got the music down. Lawrence Welk playing his Champagne Music will be the theme with bubbles bursting all over the stage at Belmont University in Nashville.

McCain will be quick to point that last year’s leading man, ****** *. ****, is not to be confused with his personal hero, the host of TV’s Death Valley Days, Ronald Reagan. There’ll also be some confusion about McCain’s relationship to the Republican Party since while it is technically correct that he is that party’s nominee, he’s actually running against them, except for the part that calls for campaign donations and votes. He’s a maverick, you know.

McCain’s mantra of saving $18.5 billion annually in earmarks kind of pales in the face of the $10 billion a month be burned up in Iraq, especially since about a $100 billion in tax breaks for business and earmarks is what it took to bring his republican congressmen on board with ****’s bailout of the financial sector last week. He’s going to name names of the culprits, but only if he’s elected.

He’s also caught by the format of the debate, a town hall meeting in which the inmates ask and expect something akin to answers to their questions asked as compared to Sarah Palin’s total kiss off of the need to even listen to the question before spouting the next talking point on her pad. She’s a maverick too, you know.

It’s going to take some doing to twist questions about the economy into links between Obama and Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, but John’s going to do his best. I suppose it would go something like, “Yes, the stock market’s in the tank, but Barack Hussein Obama’s pal, Bill Ayers, hates the market and all it stands for and his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, prayed for the fall.”

But McCain has to keep in mind that Obama has a list of talking points in his hip pocket about the much older candidate’s poor judgment in dealing with the Savings and Loan crisis in which he was charged with exercising poor judgment in dealings with Chuck Keating, the felon whose methods were not far too different than those used by the bad boys in the present debacle.

Speaking of old, Obama is being tagged with unfair campaign practices in pointing out the differences in the ages and physical condition of the two major candidates. It is a fact that McCain is seventy-two years old and has had four bouts of serious cancer and that Obama is forty-seven and in good health. What’s unfair about stating those two facts? While McCain is just a kid to me, I’m not running for president – at least until 2012, at which time the republican nominee, Sarah Palin will probably call my rheumatism to the attention of voters. Darn right that would be unfair.

That old elephant logo sure is an endangered species. If McCain and Palin get beat in November, McCain won’t be the only one trying bag it. There’ll be all out war within the party and the neocons and evangelicals better watch their backs as the geriatric crowd of cloth coaters still surviving from the Daddy ****, Gerry Ford and even the Eisenhower days will be spitting mad and looking to kick some butt. Darn right.

Tune in tonight and see if John McCain can reach into that bag of republican manure and pull out the pony he’s been looking for since he was a young ’un. He’ll be tryin’; darn tootin’.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya

The past is prologue

Tell you what; I want to look back – in anger. John McCain does not want us to; his mantra is that we have to clean up the problems and not look back as fixing blame is so old fashioned.

Call me old fashioned then because I want to hold people accountable for what’s happened to the country over the last eight years. If the buck stops in the Oval Office, I want to hold ***** *. **** responsible for the mess we’re in. Naturally, even someone as incurious and thoughtless as **** could not accomplish these fantastic feats of folly without help. In some respects Vice President ^^^^ ^^^^^^ made **** do it, but **** is the president, so he’s numero uno. It’s now a solid smash; he’s crushed the granite floor that James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover set in establishing their claims of being the worst presidents ever.

^^^^^^ appears to be the main man in telling **** that deficits don’t count. ^^^^^^ also gave personal guarantees on the weapons of mass destruction that were known to be all over Iraq and that our troops would be welcomed as liberators. I could list lots of other high level neocons and big time administration operators who seconded these items and many more fantasies along the way, but we’re just trying to decide who will be the next president.

**** also had help from the Congress and members on both sides aided and abetted him in Iraq and enabled him when it came to the economy. I shouldn’t forget the Federal reserve, but there are only so many people we can tar and feather with only one goose and one pot of tar. Naturally, since I’m for Obama I blame the republicans far more than the democrats, but I’ll stipulate that neither party was pure in driving the ship of state aground.

The job of voters is to determine if we’re really on the rocks and for whom to vote if we are or aren’t. Since we’ve been in a war that **** proclaimed the mission accomplished nearly six years ago and yet it still chews up bodies and treasure and since **** has spent the last ten days begging both parties to pass the largest financial bailout package since the Great Depression or the economy and the country will be – to mix my metaphors – in the toilet. I find conclusively that we’re in bad shape.

Since McCain was one of ****’s great champions on the war and now takes almost full responsibility of the success of the surge that he says is winning the war, should he be held to be without blame? As for going to war, there can be no doubt that he was one of ****’s principal enablers. I will stipulate that the surge worked, but the war never ends and there are other major causes for the reduction in violence in Iraq.

The war is not ending in victory; it appears now that the end game is an agreement being forged by **** and the Iraqi government that will call for a withdrawal of American forces in some sort of reasonably short time frame. One of the few major political operatives not on-board with this is John McCain. In the vice presidential debate, Joe Biden said flat out that Obama would end the war. His opponent called that the waving of the white flag of surrender and there was almost no fallout. Obama wins.

Obama is among the relatively few high profile people in the country who can claim good judgment in the sad process that took us to war. But I’ll stipulate that he was less than prompt in seeing on the ground improvement as a result of the surge. But there is really no contest on the war. Obama has been far clearer and better in his positions on the war and world affairs in general than McCain.

The democrats do not have entirely clean hands on the economy. Their lobbying and voting records on Fannie May and Freddie Mack over the past years contributed to the mortgage mess and the overall economic problems. But they were pikers next to the **** administration and the republicans in Congress in failing to regulate the financial community, in seeking to deregulate it even further and in bowing to the financial forces they serve as part of their economic philosophy.

The country is in bad shape in the world at large and worse in domestic economic matters. The major fault lies in the simplistic, virtually religious and thoughtless approach to government set by Ronald Reagan. While Reagan might well have been an adroit enough politician to steer away from the shoals we’re foundering on, the people who followed him were truly fools unable to do anything but blindly carry on in his name.

So, in looking back - and forward – while I find that my scales are not completely empty on one side or full on the other, there is no doubt in my mind that they are tipped against the republicans and their leader ****** *. ****. They are primarily responsible for the foundering of the ship, and therefore they must pay by being sent away from Sin City. John McCain is their candidate and he bears significant responsibility for both the foreign and domestic problems cited and therefore should be sent packing.

Vote for Obama!

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

P.s. I’m attaching a cartoon sent to me by a reader of this rag that I had actually sent to others earlier. Both of us thought it summed things up quite nicely.

http://wpcomics.washingtonpost.com/client/wpc/nq/

Dressed debates

Even as she winked at me, Sarah Plain did not brag about dressing a moose last night. She has shot and killed a number of these large beasts and assures us that she has dressed – that is, butchered - them, but last night she killed and butchered the American Presidential Debates as we’ve known them since 1960. In front of what will be the most people ever to watch the vice presidential candidates square off, she ended these hokey dog and pony shows for all time, and nobody seemed to care. Certainly, I don’t give a moose’s butt.

While the demise of the debates looked like just one woman in a moose blind, it was the cynical McCain campaign that held the beast as spunky Sarah put one between its eyes.

Ever since the nation was transfixed as John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon battled it in an overheated TV studio, candidates have worked to undermine the system and deliver their messages de jour. But always these corruptions of the system could be written off as gaffs, unintended mistakes or lapses. Last night was different. Sarah Palin flat out said that she had no intention of abiding by these silly, hoary rules.

Governor Palin told her opponent, `Joe’, moderator, Gwen Ifill, the live audience in St. Louis and the mega-millions watching in TV land that: “I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I’m going to talk straight to the American people.” AND SHE DID for ninety minutes – and effectively at that.

Sarah Palin had no intention of debating Joe; she was going to check off her talking points one by one and the debate system be damned. AND SHE GOT AWAY WITH IT.

Actually, if she hadn’t killed off the system, she would have been a joke, but as she blasted away, it became clear that this was a successful strategy. Obviously, the dam has failed and whenever it suits the purposes of future candidates for president or VP, they no longer have to even pretend that they’re in a debate. Just let it rip and to hell with the commission that runs those silly talk shows anyway.

Both candidates satisfied their bases – draw. Back to the top of the tickets for the main event.

I had only one quarrel with Palin’s talking points. Her rant on global warming was completely ridiculous, illogical and stupid. I would hope that whoever wrote this element would try again, but it’s not likely since she got away with that one too.

The governor acknowledged global warming was real. She then said that it might well be simply a product of normal cyclical climate factors. So far so good; this is the normal argument for those who do not acknowledge the human impact on warming. After stating her reservations about human impact, she then said that we had to do something about carbon emissions. Why?

If our power plants, cars, furnaces, etc. and their obvious emissions are not adversely impacting global climate change, why on God’s green earth would you care how many tons of CO2 we’re blowing into the sky? Isn't it harmless? And why would you spend trillions to stop the emissions or clean up coal or whatever? So if the handlers are among the tens of thousands reading this electronic rag, please re-write that little section of the speech. It would help me sleep. Thanks.

Frankly, these debates don’t serve much of purpose, and after last night, they’ll e even less useful. No heroic resuscitation efforts, please.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

Always wear clean underwear

“Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?

YES!

How about a dollar?

What kind of a person do you think I am?

We have established what you are, madam. We are now merely haggling over the price."

This of course, was the famous George Bernard Shaw observation to his lovely dinner companion.

We are about to determine if Shaw’s observation can be stood on its head in America. Today or tomorrow our representatives in the halls of Congress – at least twelve of them – are going to be examined as if at the Pearly Gates to see if they are principled or if they are available for filthy lucre.

More than one hundred of our beloved republican representatives stood on principle earlier in the week and rejected the bailout of evil, greedy Wall Street – on, I repeat, principle and only principle.

What do we take these paragons for? Communists? Socialists? Populists? Not on your life, they are republicans and believers in freedom, liberty and the free market system. That is why when their president, ****** * ***, and their leaders called on them to vote for the bailout – and only partly because Nancy Pelosi said mean things about them – they voted `no’ with a vengeance.

Their leaders – after properly blaming that meany, Nancy - went back to the drawing board and re-crafted that unprincipled piece of legislation. As you know, re-crafting is shorthand for adding money to the bill for their favorite causes. It’s sort of like adding the earmarks that people like John McCain abhor.

Nancy and the even meaner Barney Frank are waiting for the these principled folk to carefully consider this great piece of legislation so that they may assure themselves that the bill has been re-crafted in a manner that will permit them to vote for it. It is said that Frank is going to install a jumbotron screen in the House Chamber with up to the minute market figures and futures from around the world scrolling for our fiends to weigh as they vote. He wouldn’t do that would he?

So, in the caucus of the House Republicans, those very same arguments in favor of ever smaller government and ever freer markets will be tossed around and examined from every conceivable angle to assure that no taint of communism, socialism, nationalization or any other evil word could be attached to the re-crafted bailout bill.

While cynics might opine that the only changes to the bill they voted against earlier is the addition of more and bigger government and greater spending, these principled beings who were not swayed earlier by rabid call from back home demanding that they remain true to their principles – because they always were - and who have since been inundated by even angrier demands from those watching from afar to pass the damned thing.

So as every car dealer, restaurateur, teachers’ union chief, financial advisor and 401(k) holder back home watches their own principled republican live on C-Span as he or she casts that very principled vote, there's really little to sweat for the truly principled. Right?

My only advice to each of these souls is to smile while they’re on Candid Camera for we’ll all know what to take them for.

And I ain’t b.sn’ ya.

Statistics are so unfair

In surveying the many hundreds of readers of this blog today, I made a startling discovery. To a person, they believe that this week’s polls that showing President ****’s approval rating of 23% is the lowest ever, and that’s simply not true. This rating is simply the lowest ever since polling of this type has been conducted in the United States. No matter how I try to explain this, they just don’t buy into it and they declare **** the worst ever.

I’ve come at it from many directions. We do not have records on just how unpopular James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover were during their sad days in the White House. Several readers countered that historians rate this pair at the bottom of the forty-three man pack, and I, no matter how forcefully I defend ****, am unable to persuade them that despite their obvious incompetence, accurate polling data that would solidify their claim to the bottom did not exist and **** is stuck.

Since I was born in the depths of the Great Depression to a family in which each member until their last breaths swore to me that Puddin’ Face Hoover was the most evil man who ever walked among civilized people, I took this as a slightly biased view of Herby. Sadly, while these same wonderful folks were fairly well read in history, none of them ever shared their deepest feelings about Buchanan. While I’ve read bad things about the poor fellow, I’m not about to say that he was more unpopular than ****. It simply wouldn't be fair to either man, especially if this is important to ****.

So let me try one last time to straighten this out. **** polls out as the least competent and least popular president ever. End of story, It doesn’t matter that Herb or Jim might have won these titles had there been modern scientific polling; there wasn’t and **** is stuck with the Oscar, Emmy or whatever they award for this one.

It’s also very unfair to **** in the waning days of his presidency to see virtually his entire party, the Republican Party, turn against him as they seek to extend their reign while on the one hand praising supply side economics which he pursued with a vengeance in keeping with the first and greatest of them all, St. Ron. That the house of cards collapsed under **** seems so unfair. He was doing what the Gipper would have done – or so he thought.

Vice President ^^^^^^ told **** and the world that St. Ron proved that deficits don’t matter. It sounded good to **** and if it was good enough for St. Ron and Dame Thatcher it was good enough for him. But they did matter, and **** got stuck holding the bag and the poll ratings. How sad; how unfair.

Now John McCain is seeking to rally the party faithful and independents to elect him as an endorsement of the eight long years of the **** White House. But even most republicans are having a difficult time with this and have had to twist their brains in such a fashion that John McCain never had anything to do with **** or any of his failed policies. Sadly, independents just can’t get by the fact that John McCain sided with Bush MORE than 90% of the time.

Poll numbers be damned! Bush may well not be the least popular president in history. I think the republicans should stand by their man. Let **** be **** and say you were with him all the way. It couldn’t be any worse. Could it?

Would I b.s. those poor folks?

Thanks for your help

Thanks for writing your representative in Congress on my behalf. You sure told him – or her – that we shouldn’t be bailing out those fat cats on Wall Street and should protect the interests of little guys like me, and I greatly appreciate it. In fact so many of you wrote that you scared the hell out of them.

Thank goodness that you believe so strongly in the capitalist system and the philosophy of Ronald Reagan that you protected those hundred republicans from themselves. They might actually have voted against their principles if you hadn’t intervened. Imagine having to come home and explain to you that they’d gone `wiggly’ as Dame Thatcher would have termed it. But you saved them from having to explain why they’d abandoned the Gipper and gone socialist. Thank you (for me and them).

Not only did you save that pure heart representing you in Washington, you showed those greedy horned devils in New York City a thing or two. Two – why yes; you scored a twofer. Imagine one letter nailing two pigs without makeup – New York and Washington. I often feel the need to express my horror at the behavior of New Yorkers but am so wimpy that I limit my wrath to the Giants and Yankees – the Evil Empire, but I’ll save that for another day. Thank you again.

The Wall Street crowd is so afraid of you that they panicked when that stupid bailout failed and knew that you’d found them out. Boy, did you see them dump that stock? That’ll teach them. They say that more than a trillion dollars was wrung out of the economy. They’ll never doubt you again. Thanks for representing my interests.

President **** looked like a truck hit him. I watched him on TV about an hour ago. He’s just a comedy act now; his own party doesn’t even know his name or hear a thing he says. He vowed to resurrect that lousy plan that he (actually his boys Hank and Ben) and leaders of both parties worked day and night on for more than a week. What morons, they just don’t get it that purists like you believe that those that took the chances should bear the risks. Those hundred republicans bucked **** and their leaders and rejected that slimy package, and if you have to write and call them again to bust it up again, I know you will. Thanks from the bottom of my heart.

Regardless of what that nasty tongued Nancy Pelosi says – and thank goodness for those sensitive republican members for teaching her a lesson in manners - or what that discredited `high grade moron’ **** (Chris Mathews hung that one on him) recommend, we can count on you to keep your eye on the ball and keep on kicking those greedy evil doers on Wall Street. I’m praying for you; you’re so good. Thankfully, Congressman Eric Cantor (R. VA) was sensitive to the forked tongue of that awful Nancy and led the revolt on our behalf. Thank you and thanks, Eric.

I don’t follow the news very closely, but I’m looking forward to getting my quarterly 401K statement at the end of the week. Since you made sure that the fat cats took the hit, I’ll be looking forward to big gains. After all, you went out of your way to protect me. Surely it’ll all work out for you too.

And – obviously- I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

A hundred times no

Let’s get this straight. The financial bailout bill is a republican plan. It was submitted on behalf of President **** by his Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson. The republicans got us into this jam and the crisis happened on ****’s watch.

While the democrats carried the heavy water on the bill, it is and always must be seen as a republican bill. That Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have propped up Hank and Ben doesn’t mean that the republicans are not the supplicants in this crisis.

Because John McCain blew into the hell hole on the Potomac in which republicans must wear gas masks to embark o a bi-partisan mission that turned out to be simply a way to charge up republican conservatives in opposing their own party’s bill doesn’t mean this pile of crappy paper that we’re buying won’t always have a `Compliments of President ****** * **** and the republican nominee for President, John S. McCain and their market driven theories’ stamped on every over priced page.

Now those principled republican morons stepped up to the plate today and said nay in overwhelming numbers and caused the bill to fail. John McCain blamed Barack Obama for the failure. Thank goodness that John is not a finger pointer by nature. The republican members did not blame Barack; they blamed Nancy Pelosi who said mean, mean things about republicans. Therefore, these same republican grade schoolers did what children everywhere always do, they punished everybody except Nancy. Mass punishment is big among juveniles, but this is large even for them.

President **** was disappointed – really - in the outcome because it showed to the American people that even the republicans have forgotten his name and face – or want to anyway. But **** is desperate as a number of democrats are seeking an earmark to put his and Herbert Hoover’s paper mache heads up on a landfill in New Jersey as a regional counterpart to the classic earmark on Mt. Rushmore. John McCain will publicly name the members behind this corrupt project.

The Dow dropped almost 800 points today, an all time record. Republicans are blaming Nancy. How could anyone blame the majority of republican house member for voting against a bill that would wipe out billions of dollars of the life savings of ordinary Americans in retaliation? Doesn’t this woman understand that her words can make hardened politicians cry? I’m going to send her a copy of this posting, so that she can understand the power she has over grown men and women.

Barney Frank is going to apologize to those broken hearted republicans. Maybe then they can put this Humpty Dumpty back together again, maybe.

By the way, this is the last day of a quarter, so the folks on Main Street – and your street - will get their 401K reports in a few days, so those members opposed will get an earful. It will be reconsidered, and a plan will pass.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

Same but different

The world is out to get Governor Sarah Palin and that’s the only reason the ****/ McCain Campaign in full third term mode has been protecting her from the mainstream media. They’d love to turn her loose on the New York Slimes, but the editorial board and columnists there distort everything, so she won’t really have a chance to strut her intellectual stuff until after this week’s debate.

But thank goodness she’ll be prepared to deal with her democrat counterpart Joe Biden and evil doers everywhere during the contest as she’ll be the only one in the arena standing by her Second Amendment rights in case the questioning gets too hot.

John McCain has complete confidence in his running mate because she’s been fully briefed on foreign and domestic policy. You remember when Henry Kissinger was the most eligible bachelor in the Nixon administration in the middle of the last century; well old Henry woke right up from his nap when he was introduced to the governor and offered to tell her all about all his foreign affairs and about how he used to run the world. His eyes actually opened when telling her about his time in Beijing on behalf of the free world and about the time he and Dick got down on their knees to pray for Judge John Sirica, a truly deep religious experience.

After giving the governor his seven minute condensed version of his seven year Harvard Ph.D. program in political science, Dr. Kissinger pronounced her ready to be President of the United States. The governor, in accepting the degree, praised Henry as one of the greatest Americans who ever lived and thanked his mother for not aborting him saying it just goes to show that a person with a speech impediment can do great things.

As far as that view of Russia from the governor’s backyard boat dock in Wasilla, it’s really just the other side of the lake, but Russia and Alaska look pretty much alike so it’s really the same thing but just different. The governor took the VIP tour of the United Nations complex last week and spent almost half an hour on the flags of member countries, so I expect that she’ll be able to get a solid gentlelady’s `C' when she has to name the flash cards.

The economy’s tougher. `Tranche’ is going to be tough and if Gwen Ifill, the moderator, asks the governor to use it in a sentence there’ll be hell to pay, double ought buck hell. Chuck Schumer was the only person only Capitol Hill who was able to use it correctly, at least while on camera. Barney Frank said he could but chose not to try while front of a live microphone. `Derivative’ will be easier for the governor, as she can fall back on her high school chemistry.

So if you see Governor Palin having to explain how mortgages will be bundled into tranches and how they’ll be priced by Hank Paulson while Biden is asked, true or false, “It is best to buy low and sell high. Or, yes or no, “There really is a free lunch.” you’ll know that the democrats have been successful in getting the fix in on working the debate system against her.

Let’s hope that she doesn’t have to pull out the debate at the request of President **** and John McCain to save the country from a derivative multi-faceted tranche meltdown. But don’t be shocked, it could happen.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

The **** plan to save us

Republicans are so afraid to run on the party brand name that they’ve taken to putting themselves forward as representatives of the G.O.P. As the sea of mortgages, derivatives and stocks reaches their nostrils, they proclaim that they are all mavericks who never really bought into the policies of the **** Administration, a group that never really was republican but that usurped the elephant logo and is now stuck with it. So the newly minted G.O.P., Gagging On Paper, boys and girls are demanding that they be allowed to run on the new title for the fetid old product.

It’s not so bad that these weasels are running from their roots, the sad part is that lots of morons think it’s a great idea. “The voters won’t know the difference, and half of us will get elected.” What’s frightening is that they might be right.

To get back on track, John McCain doesn’t have the luxury of demanding a new label on the nation’s ballots. I’m sure they tossed it around, but its’ just too late to make it happen, so he’s stuck with the next best thing: he’s a republican who never left a fingerprint on any policy that might look bad today. Maybe he could say that the ninety plus percent of the time that he was caught voting with **** was actually an exercise in bi-partisanship. Maybe they could dress up **** as a pig and put a little lipstick on him and call him a uniter. On the other hand, that one was probably rejected early on in the crisis.

The folks I pity are the House republicans. They’re caught with voting for every key **** Administration proposal for the war in Iraq, deregulation of the financial system and every controversial aspect of violating the privacy of citizens. Doubling down, their pictures giving standing ovations to **** every time he mentioned WMD and noted the direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda are being played on home town TV stations in the ads of the democrat opponents.

Now the chickens are coming home to roost and with only thirty-seven days until D-Day. What they’d like to do is trade party labels for just a little over a month, but it’s not to be. **** announced, without understanding, that the financial system is in grave crisis, and his appointees – Hank and Ben – are taking the lead in crafting a solution. That’s great except that the solution is something that could have been dreamed by Karl Marx. They were hoping for one by Groucho that they could support unanimously, but Karl stuck in their collective (Ooh!) craws.

So they decided to rebel and stick with their republican free market principles, and that was that. But that horrible Nancy Pelosi and her card carrying friends in the majority won’t play ball. That meany Nancy says this is a republican caused meltdown, so in the spirit of bi-partisanship, the House republicans and John McCain are going to have to own this rescue plan. So there’s no way out except for republicans and G.O.P. folks but step forward and say that the **** plan is theirs. And if they don’t agree to do it by sundown tonight they’ll have to identify who **** is for the newspapers and TV stations back home. Now that’s mean.

What’s worse, Barack Obama is going pin the donkey’s tail on them and on John McCain and reveal on national TV the identity of ****.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

A lot of bull

It was all there for the voters to see; the Merrill Lynch bull on display for the TV audience and for those in the arena in Oxford. Eyes flashing, head shaking and in full attack mode, John McCain demonstrated for all to see that he can barely contain his violent and well known temper, even when that was a prime goal.

Here was an unapologetic neoconservative proudly pawing the ground ready to take on Iran, Russia, China or any other nation or group with or without allies. As Barack Obama parried and flashed his cape on why John McCain was wrong to support the invasion of Iraq, the Merrill Lynch (or should I say the Bank of America) Bull could barely contain himself. At every opportunity he simply hurled personal insults rather than policy differences at his younger opponent whom he held in open contempt.

Even his build up to the confrontation in Mississippi was wild and wooly – excuse the non-bovine metaphor but McCain could just as easily be compared to a ram. He suspended his campaign and charged into the capitol to shake the troops up and just about derailed the possibility of an agreement between two parties already acting like scorpions in a bottle – another of today’s stinging metaphors.

All in all McCain showed clearly that he is disdainful of others and does not have the temperament to be president of the United States. His view of the American empire was obsolete within months of the Roman Triumph aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and his position of the economy showed significant lack of understanding of what got us in the fix we’re in.

His rationale for staying Iraq skirted the edge of madness in that he implied that more lives and treasure should be thrown at the problem to demonstrate that all that had already been chewed up had not been wasted. On the other hand, Obama’s position was that we should only fight when in it is in the nation’s interests and not to avoid losing face.

McCain’s pandering of veterans was so obvious as to be difficult to watch. We know that he loves them – we all do – but if he’s such a champion why didn’t he break the scandalous situation at Walter Reed? The clear implication was that the democrats would not act in the best interest of those in uniform. It was too lame for Obama to even waste time on.

This debate on foreign policy was supposed to be McCain’s last best chance. While Obama simply had to play defense and prevent a disaster, McCain had to handle his opponent with ease. Based on the expectations, Obama was the clear winner despite yesterday’s McCain campaign ad proudly proclaiming the old guy to be the winner that was accidentally flashed to the world before his arrival in Oxford.

McCain’s job was clearly to separate himself from the Bush administration’s sorry stewardship of the nation over the past eight years. As of this morning, he has failed in that effort.

The next bout takes place next week when the vice-presidential candidates square off, and things ain’t looking good for the incumbent party.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

Obama supporters; read this and weep

I’m writing Saturday’s posting ahead of time on this Friday afternoon secure in the knowledge that McCain has already won the debate. I know because the McCain camp has already prepared the ad saying so and – accidently – posted it on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page. Here’s a screen shot of the ad. It’s not many times that we get to read tomorrow’s news today, so savor it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/images/26Sep_Friday_WSJ.JPG

Now that’s great news for old duffers like Senator McCain and me. We’ll be able to nod off during the debate secure in the knowledge that we know the outcome. That’s really important for old timers staying up well past their bedtimes.

It must be a real confidence builder to know that you won before the fight, sort of like a palooka entering the ring for a bout with a younger stronger fighter confident that fix is in. But I think there might be a surprise for the old fella; Barack Obama is in fighting trim and he hasn’t got the word that he’s done.

So as McCain naps on the way down to Oxford, I hope his handlers don’t wake him to share that little possibility. It’ll be better if he shows up believing that he at least has to try to spar with the younger trimmer fighter. Only after it’s over, will they tell him he’s the champ.

Either way I win. I’m well on my way to meeting my posting deadline without even having to break a sweat.

By the way, despite the foregone conclusion, I’m going to tune in to the debate just in case McCain trips over his own ad and blows it like he has so many things during this financial meltdown.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya

Multi-tasking

If you think reading this electronic rag is tough, you ought to try writing it. A daily deadline is too tough for anyone not on booze; fortunately, I have an ample supply of Busch Beer which sustains me and its rhyming name (really it’s a homophone) reminds me of why I’m cranky.

When I started this blog on September 8, I had no idea that we would be in a financial meltdown within days. Of course, we all knew that there were problems. We’d passed through a gauntlet of multiple popping bubbles and were kind of homed in on the mortgage problems. Housing prices were down, some – in few places, substantially – in many, and greatly – in more places than we care to contemplate. But things seemed controllable.

Then came the Hank (Paulson) and Ben (Bernanke) show and they had the inside skinny on how the country was racing into situation that could turn into the worst meltdown since the Great Depression. (Any financial crisis that demands that we label it in capital letters after three fourths of a century must have been bad.) As I remember that period quite well, take my word for it, it was very bad indeed.

Loyal servants that they are, Hank and Ben stood behind the great one, the president of the United States - whatever his name is, and told him to say that we were in deep, deep financial manure, and he did, not that anyone still remembered his name. They quickly added that he should demand that the Congress solve this problem by Friday, and he did. Not that they cared what he thought, Congressional leaders believed the stage whispers of Hank and Ben, and proceeded to hammer out a deal.

Meanwhile back in Oz, John McCain’s advisers alerted him that the financial system was melting down, that he was going to lose election as he represented the party associated with the fiasco if he didn’t do something fast and suggested that he avoid the debate on Friday by suspending the electoral race and acting presidential. Startled from his nap, the old boy jumped to attention and blew off the David Letterman’s show – but not Katie Couric’s - and said that he was in charge and would not debate or campaign until the problem was solved.

His opponent, Barack Obama, indicated that he, too was concerned about the financial crisis that John had contributed to in a big way and would gladly return to Washington should he be needed – although the Hank and Ben show had seemingly sufficiently caught the attention of the Congress that was well on its way to dealing with the problem.

Barack added that the debate in Mississippi should go on as scheduled since presidents should be able to solve problems and explain them to the people in bad times; `multi-tasking’ was the term he used to John who seemed genuinely confused by it. Barack explained to John that some of our presidents, especially the great ones, had proved able to `multi-task’ in times of national crises.

Not that you, dear reader, need reminding that some of our greatest chief executives were quite good at ‘multi-tasking’, many friends in the mainstream media, including The Guardian, pointed out that Abraham Lincoln was able to run for president and deal with the greatest Constitutional crisis in history in 1860 and to run again in 1864 as the Civil War raged.

Barack, if not John, was also aware that Franklin Roosevelt was able to actively campaign for president even as the – truly – greatest financial and economic crisis in the nation’s history almost ruined the capitalist system and caused fear – “…nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror…” - throughout the land. He also knew that while the Nazis prepared for world conquest and, indeed, as they waged the most terrible war in human history, FDR felt quite up to running for president in 1940 and 1944.

While John McCain seemed unable to both run for office and contribute to the solution of our present problems, Barack Obama was. And while no one – certainly not an old b.ser like me – would suggest that John McCain was afraid to face the music in Mississippi, there were the cruel among us who immediately thought that John McCain was afraid to debate – as he had long agreed.

Meanwhile back in Washington, that evil place where republicans get hives on entering the city, Hank and Ben had already agreed with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd on the outline of a plan to rescue the financial system, Barack and John were summoned to the Oval Office to meet with you know who to bless a plan that had already been worked out so that John could say that he made it all happen – much like he had invented the Blackberry.

Clearly, John McCain's resurrection of Al Haig's "I'm in charge" act has laid an egg, so it’s unlikely that he can show his face in Mississippi tonight. The rush to Washington, like Haig's before him, has probably sunk the Straight Talk Express. This looks bad for John’s being able to `multi-task and to answer that 3:00 AM phone call.

Of only one thing am I certain - but won't be able to prove, the president, old what's his name, will be voting for Obama on November 4. Mr. X must absolutely despise McCain who once again has made him look like the moron we suspect him of being.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

Reckless John

John McCain did it again. He's fourth and goal from his own five and sees no alternative to the longest Hail Mary of all time. He won't debate and and he demands that the campaign for president be suspended so that he can look like he's in charge. He doesn't seem to understand that he's running for president as compared to being president. Sad.

Actually, I should have known, as yesterday I found out that John McCain is the problem. He lost the election due to his own incompetence. That’s the word from el Rushbo. I was out and about and tuned into the Excellence in Broadcasting Network and to the bloviater-in-chief to find out what the ditto heads were being fed, and that’s it: John McCain is doing it to himself and the party.

McCain’s not letting Palin be Palin. He’s not answering the lies of the LIBERALS. He’s not defending himself from the mainstream media, especially the New York Slimes. So when the dust settles and you have the untested empty suit Barack Hussein Obama packing up to move into the White House, it’s not the fault of supply side economics. It’s not the fault of a neocon inspired insane foreign policy. It’s not because of the disastrous and wrong war being waged in Iraq. It’s not because of mad deregulation of the financial sector. No, my friends and ditto heads, it’s because of the stupid campaign being run by John McCain.

The right wing maniacs are already gearing up for their comeback after the disaster caused by John McCain and his handlers. Rush Limbaugh could tell them how things should be run, but the McCain campaign doesn’t want to hear it. They’re going into the toilet and don’t seem to care. Here they’ve selected the best possible vice presidential candidate but they have her muzzled and are keeping her on the phony message of change that is just a cheap copy of Obama’s erroneous campaign that has no faith in freedom and liberty and in the American people.

By turning his back on his party, John McCain has sealed his own doom and is taking down the party of Ronald Reagan with him. Sad. By turning his back on solid republican principles of free markets low taxation and joining the democrats in jumping to solve what is merely a market correction, he is a traitor to his party and all those wonderful people on Main Street who would love to support him if he’d only be true to what brought him to leadership of the party.

McCain could have been president, but who cares. He’s not really a republican. He was and is a maverick without a brain. Rush knew that McCain was never a conservative and not much better than a LIBERAL. He’s running the worst campaign since Tom Dewey and deserves to lose. What’s sad is that he’s taking down those wonderful conservatives with him.

This is what the ditto heads are being fed, and, based on the call ins that I heard, they’re buying it hook, line and sinker.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya!

Grinding John McCain

I don’t mean to keep picking on John McCain despite his being about the easiest person in the world to needle. Today it is my sad responsibility to tell you that John McCain is going to crack. Years in a Hanoi prison cell under direct and ferocious torture could not make him cry, `Uncle’, but he now faces a far more formidable foe, the enraged taxpayers of red and blue states who are demanding a pound of someone’s flesh.

Little did John McCain realize that when he flip flopped on torture by agents of the United States that he would be the first visible victim. The first inkling of our inhumanity was the Washington Post – ABC poll that shows the senator suffering the electric shock treatment that he has fallen far behind in the election.

It’s bad enough that McCain has been linked by the taxpayers/voters with the culprits of the present financial calamity, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but the representatives of both parties on Capitol Hill are preparing any number of devices to assure that the voters can have no doubt that John McCain is as responsible as the beloved pair he is being chained to as victims are offered to the public.

Congress and George W. Bush are going to bail out Wall Street and Main Street, but there will be no bill unless John McCain personally approves it. As you know, John’s out on the hustings telling his beloved and fast shrinking voter base that he’s got a rope and he’s going to use to hang the evil greedy bankers from the tree that grows in Brooklyn.

Sadly, only now is John wising up to the notion that he is going to hauled back to the nest of evil doers second only to Wall Street, Washington, D.C., where he will be publicly tortured in the well of the Senate.

As you know, John McCain has blamed democrats and republicans, President Bush and SEC Chairman Cox, the regulators and the deregulators, and, I believe, you and me, dear reader, for the financial debacle facing the country, indeed the world. The only two people not on the candidates list of culprits are McCain and his running mate.

So as those kind, generous and always gentle folk on Capitol Hill prepare a package to bail out wall Street, Main Street, your moronic neighbors who bought far too much for far too dear, and everyone else who can vote on November 4, there’s one little extra waiting for Mr. Clean, John McCain, he’s going to have to pay – big time.

The bailout won’t happen unless John McCain walks into the well and votes “Aye.”

Has there ever been anything more cruel devised in America? I think not.

But as John slinks into the well, he can take heart by reciting Dickens, “It is a far, far better thing that I do now, than I have ever done before…it is a far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known before.”

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

Stop naming buildings for Reagan

The republicans are fighting for the soul of their party – what little there is left of it. Even though they’re in the midst of a pivotal election that could cement their hold on the courts and provide four more years of free plane rides, the defeat in the 2006 bi-election demonstrated to old time republicans that their party was completely bankrupt. With this in mind, check out George F. Will's column which appeared this morning: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/22/AR2008092202583.html?nav=hcmoduletmv.

The Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Rockefeller wing of the party – of which I was member until the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq - had been driven out to pasture by the Goldwater/Reagan forces that had combined their strength with the neocons and evangelicals effectively leading the party to power then to excess and now to ruin.

The democrats faced a similar situation in the sixties when Lyndon Johnson had dreams equal to those of St. Ron and ran the party and country aground with both the Great Society and Vietnam. Years in the wilderness led – after many groups fought for the leadership of that party - to a desire to win despite ideology after twelve years of St. Ron and the first Bush – the party to turn to the center and elect Bill Clinton.

After eight years and thousands of smears, the republicans, not having run their mad course of Goldwater’s “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” had yet to peak and the party was set to test its limits.

George W. Bush, a self styled uniter, fell under the influence of Dick Cheney who found the perfect candidate to run with Bush, himself. The moderates were done, and the inmates were in charge of the asylum. Deficits did not matter. Shock and awe would demonstrate that the U.S. was in charge and able to enforce its will on any nation or group.

After 9/11, two laboratories were needed and in Saddam’s Iraq the empirical one was found. In the second, and co-equal to the first, spending was unleashed while taxes were cut for all Americans, but especially for the rich; all the while deficits spiraled to previously undreamed of amounts. `Shop till you drop,’ was the mantra for civilians at home.

Shock and awe carried the day in Iraq and Saddam’s government fell in weeks. An imperial Roman triumph was held aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln; the mission had been accomplished. Unfortunately, the rationale for the war was flawed and there was no real plan for the aftermath of the conflict and we did not have the power to enforce our will on the Iraqi people. Things went terribly awry, and the conflict proved terribly costly in blood and treasure.

Deficits continued to spin out of control. The deregulation of financial institutions that had been another mantra of the St. Ron branch of the party - and which had been long supported by John McCain - led to excess and to a breakdown in the financial markets and to the events of the last weeks. It was a house of cards and the fools in charge had nowhere or no one to turn to except traditional republicans as it began to collapse. The Hank and Ben show was the only game in town and they pulled away the curtain on the cringing morons no longer in charge of anything.

They’re done, of course. Their empire is in tatters, and we’re going to have to begin to bring the troops home. The great leap forward instituted by St. Ron is in shambles. Bush lives in a dream world, one in which he’s in charge of everything.

John McCain, perhaps a natural member of the moderate wing of the party – although with a temper suited for an emperor (or the Queeen of Hearts as shown by George Will) - has no real philosophy of his own and can only think of winning office without a real cause other than his ego to save the nation. He’s stuck with empire which he likes and tax cuts that he doesn’t to assure party unity for one last time in hopes of assuming the mantle of St Ron and the Bushes.

McCain, out of desperation, threw a Hail Mary and selected a running mate from the evangelical wing of the party. (I know the metaphor is ridiculous, but I’m old, cranky and angry.) The neocons are out. The traditionals were out but, like Cincinnatus, had to be called back to save the country and party and they were sick of the madness. They will save the party and the nation. But they all have to go away to contemplate what they have done to us.

Barack Obama will win if you vote, work and donate. Most importantly, it’s time to stop naming buildings after St. Ron; I get confused and enter airports to mail letters and post offices to fly. You have save me; vote for Obama.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.

More power

The George W. Bush eight year run is analogous to Tim Allen’s TV situation comedy show, Home Improvement. Tim Taylor – Tim the Tool Man – spent almost eight years with the constant answer to everything being - `more power’.

Somehow George Bush, under the direction of Dick Cheney, saw the answer for himself, the presidency and the nation to be `more power’. Poor Dick, his formative years under the tutelage of Don Rumsfeld during the decline and fall of Richard Nixon, viewed the presidency as weakened beyond belief by both the Congress and the courts during the Watergate scandal, and his mission in life seems to have been the restoration of those powers.

Cheney also viewed the Reagan era through a zealot’s eye and saw the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the United States to the unchecked empirical power as a near religious experience. Similarly, Dick took the tax, fiscal and monetary policies and their initial success as the end of economics as it had been known throughout history.

The rise of the neoconservatives and their constant harping on the economic and military power convinced the director and the decider that all rules were off when it came to the place of the United States in the world after the Cold War. Russia was a shell of its former Soviet self. China was barely on the horizon. And we were now an empire, an empire greater than that of Rome, England and all others at the greatest extent of their powers.

So, directed by Darth Vader and enabled by the likes of John McCain, George Bush ran roughshod over the Congress and the courts in seeking to restore what little power had not already been grabbed back and snatched new power wherever it could at the expense of the other two branches. New opinions from the Justice Department led the way to snoop on citizens and to interrogate those deemed our enemies. And they got away with it.

But the greatest mistakes of the Decider and the Director were in economics. They concluded that because Reagan got away without a scratch when huge deficits appeared on his watch that even greater shortfalls did not matter. But they did, and ultimately the spigot for new loans for we pawns and for the big boys and even the government itself would no longer be open.

They watched as the economic crisis played out hoping against hope that a third term could be won by their candidate, John McCain, thus validating their sorry butts. They almost got through the election cycle unscathed – but not quite. Last week the entire system trembled like a great fault line that was well past overdue and scared the hell out of thinking people everywhere.

Hank and Ben had to step in and stanch the flow of treasure by guaranteeing that all those lousy loans held by far over-leveraged greedy banks and institutions, so that the entire financial system of the country and maybe the world would not collapse.

So much for the genius of Reagan and the fanatical beliefs of George and Dick in `more power’; they couldn’t abolish the business cycle no matter how hard they prayed.

So it’s up to us to elect Barack Obama and turn these other bums out in shame.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ you!

Poor babies

Don’t you feel sorry for Rush, Ann, Sean and the rest of the loud mouths on the right who’ve labeled anyone who thought even slightly left of Attila the Hun to be a LIBERAL at best or, in their darker rants, even a COMMUNIST? Starting yesterday they had to adjust to their team, the Bush McCain third term truthiness express, being in the driver’s seat to the greatest nationalization since the 1918 Russian revolution.

Let’s be straight, I support the Hank and Ben show. There doesn’t seem to be any real alternative to the course they’ve set. I was born into a Franklin Delano Roosevelt household, so drastic action in the face of a meltdown of the financial system does not stand my hair on end as I know it must poor Ann’s who must look like a refugee from a Halloween party this morning.

John McCain’s first reaction to the AIG bailout was to revert to the standard Rush talking points, but as the day wore on, he became a converted SOCIALIST like most of the rest of us, not to get our votes you understand but to show he wasn’t as bad on the economy as he claimed earlier.

But John McCain’s a flexible guy. He recognizes that real old time republicans are now in charge of the party, so at least from now until the election, he’s got to pretend he’s Ike. It won’t be the toughest act in the world as the neocons and the evangelicals are catatonic over what Hank and Ben have wrought. Poor babies, it’s like they seen the second coming of Karl Marx. Since John has already explained away his 180 degree switch on nationalization to be no flip flop, he won’t have to deal with any of this in the debates with Senator Obama, right?

Florida is solidly in the McCain camp’s orbit. It’s not? Goodness, all those old folks get antsy when someone mentions that their early bird specials are threatened, but they needn’t worry, Hank and Ben are rushing to cover their money market funds that are falsely threatened by the Bush McCain financial miracle. But they shouldn’t worry; George Bush is in charge for another 121 days

Surely, John will be able to waltz through the debates clearly showing that he has always been consistent on regulatory matters as he’s been the Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee where he oversaw all the wonders worked by George W. Bush, and he’ll gladly tell us why he’s now the SOCIALIST that was his true inner self.

Surely you can’t wait; neither can I, and I’m not b.s.n’ you.

Flip flop

It’s too bad that George W. Bush wasted those Medals of Freedom on the likes of Tenet and Bremer as Henry Paulson may well have saved us all from financial ruin and prevented a real depression and is truly deserving of the honor.

Of course our die hard brethren of the right wing talk show variety have old Hank labeled a communist for his moves over the last two weeks. Actually by nationalizing banks and insurers he is more analogous to a South American dictator like Hugo Chavez, but who cares he really had to act and move the other players along. The rationalization will simply have to follow at a later date.

Bush, the deer in the headlights, was told to look presidential and act like he knew what he was doing when all of the new policies were announced. By performing that little minuet, he saved himself from being labeled the worst president of all time on two fronts instead of just one. Herbert Hoover still nips today’s man in the White House for the race to the bottom on the economics and financial fronts, but it’s close.

John McCain, the self proclaimed non-economic expert, was out and about denouncing everyone he could remember for greed or malfeasance and was completely against the nationalization of AIG until his experts told him he was for it. But, it’s O.K., he’s got it straight now: he’s for it, and he’s not a flip flopper; just ask him.

John’s back in his comfort zone denouncing earmarks which total less than one percent of federal expenditures and some of which actually do good and all of them grease the process. Of course he’s still lying through his teeth about that bridge to nowhere and about how the administration in Alaska has religion when it comes to taking such funds. In truth they beg for them and take every penny available and then some.

The McCain campaign is also doing its damnedest to denounce the efforts of the Alaska investigator looking into the allegations that the governor misused the office to fire an official who stood in the way of settling a family feud. This is another of those embarrassing flip flops; first they were for the investigation but then they were against it.

It is evident that McCain has no clue about the financial calamity that Henry Paulson is beating back – and we can only hope successfully. Yet, in the face of this once in more than a generation crisis, almost half the nation is willing to elect him president when all he is able to offer are republican bromides as a solution. He denounced Mitt Romney as a flip flopper throughout the primary campaign, yet daily he’s forced to restate what he really mean the day before.

The McCain campaign is also a great place to work. Every day spokespersons have to go on television to restate the campaign position on the one the old man blew the day before. It’s also clear that McCain is simply a commodity for the campaign managers; they have no difficulty in saying that the candidate has no qualifications to run this or that, after all he’s only running for president of the United States.

While perceptive observers might find sense in his statements such when you look down from oil rigs you see fish, many fish, but it takes a degree in environmental science to do so. Of course, lots of his supporters have such degrees, right? Oops!

You’re not going to hold the republicans accountable for the last eight years?

Surely you’re b.s.n’ me.

Listen up!

Most of you know that John McCain is running for president of the United States. What almost all of you do not seem to realize is that he is the nominee of the Republican Party. Senator McCain has taken great pains to hide the fact that he ran for and won the nomination in primary contests that featured millions of republicans voting for him because he is a member of the party in good standing as he has been for most of his adult life and that he is indeed the nominee of the Republican Party.

His opponent, Barack Obama, has repeatedly chided Senator McCain for supporting republican policies during his quarter of a century in congress and for standing shoulder to shoulder with the present incumbent, George W. Bush, more - way more - than ninety percent of the time. Senator McCain responds, of course, by ignoring the fact that he is a member of the G.O.P. and that all of his backing is from members of that same party – again that Republican Party which has been in charge of the nation for the past eight years and for most of the last generation.

John McCain is in lock step with George W. Bush with regard to the two wars we are fighting. He agrees with Bush that tax cuts for large corporations and for the richest among us should be made permanent. Until it became unpopular with voters, he was with Bush in wanting to privatize Social Security. I could go on, but even those of you who support Senator McCain must agree that he certainly appears to be a republican, even if he says doesn’t act like one. It’s kind of like the actor who says he isn’t a doctor but plays one on television; John McCain isn’t a republican he just wears the label as he plays one on the hustings.

Were John McCain to be elected – and I use the subjunctive with great hope – he would proudly wear the label `republican’. He would choose the overwhelming majority of his cabinet and thousands of other appointees from the ranks of what? That’s right, the Republican Party. Now just what kind of change would John McCain bring to Washington? None, you say; you’re damn right, `none' is the answer to that great question.

Now bear with me for just a few more minor points of logic. If John McCain is the nominee of the Republican Party, and if John McCain appoints almost all republicans to senior positions in the government, and if John McCain continues the foreign policy of George W. Bush, and if John McCain supports virtually all of the domestic policy initiatives of the George W. Bush administration – as he has for these woeful last eight years. Can we properly label him both a supporter of George W. Bush and above all can we categorize him as being a republican? YOU’RE DAMNED RIGHT WE CAN.

Just a little bit more now; stick with me. I – like the vast majority of the American people – blame George W. Bush for a terrible foreign policy that led us into one war that should never have been fought, a war terribly costly in blood, treasure and international prestige; the policy that fought the war that should have been fought without the necessary men and munitions because the president took his eye of that war to fight the unnecessary one. I – again like most Americans blame - George W. Bush for ignoring the financial crisis that built like a tsunami on his watch that has now led to the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. In all of this, John McCain was and remains one of George Bush’s greatest enablers.

George W. Bush and John McCain are joined at the hip. They are members of and true believers in the in the philosophy and polices espoused by the Republican Party and both have been supported in their leadership of that party as they took us down the road that leads to ruin if we do not change course.

The Republicans have put us in the position we are in as a nation. George Bush and his prime supporters, including John McCain, have now entrusted the leadership of the party and – they hope – the nation into the hands of John McCain.

Obviously, if you have a brain and you have read and understood the above, you will be punishing the Republican Party and its new leader, John McCain, for leading us on fools’ errands both foreign and domestic, and you will all be voting for Barack Obama for president of the United States on November 4, 2008.

If you’re not for Obama, you’re clearly b.s.n’ me, but, more important, you’re b.s.n’ yourself.