Memnison Journal

Details after the cut.

Seems that the lack of vetting that McCain did was the same that Bush did. (starts singing from Fiddler on the Roof here)

Next time around, I suggest that they use a divining rod or the Urim and Thummim - especially if it’s Romney.

The name Yoshi Tsurumi is one you probably have never heard of; he was George W. Bush’s macroeconomics professor at Harvard Business School, and he presently teaches at CUNY.

He remembers Bush well - as one of his worst students ever:

Bush, by contrast, “was totally the opposite of Chris Cox,” Tsurumi said. “He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him.” When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, “Oh, I never said that.” A White House spokeswoman did not return a phone call seeking comment.

In 1973, as the oil and energy crisis raged, Tsurumi led a discussion on whether government should assist retirees and other people on fixed incomes with heating costs. Bush, he recalled, “made this ridiculous statement and when I asked him to explain, he said, ‘The government doesn’t have to help poor people — because they are lazy.’ I said, ‘Well, could you explain that assumption?’ Not only could he not explain it, he started backtracking on it, saying, ‘No, I didn’t say that.’”

Bush once sneered at Tsurumi for showing the film “The Grapes of Wrath,” based on John Steinbeck’s novel of the Depression. “We were in a discussion of the New Deal, and he called Franklin Roosevelt’s policies ’socialism.’ He denounced labor unions, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Medicare, Social Security, you name it. He denounced the civil rights movement as socialism. To him, socialism and communism were the same thing. And when challenged to explain his prejudice, he could not defend his argument, either ideologically, polemically or academically.”

Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. “In class, he couldn’t challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that’s how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy.”

“At first, I wondered, ‘Who is this George Bush?’ It’s a very common name and I didn’t know his background. And he was such a bad student that I asked him once how he got in. He said, ‘My dad has good friends.’” Bush scored in the lowest 10 percent of the class.

Tsurumi just gave a set of interviews to a Korean news organization that pretty well sums up why we got to the present financial mess.

Going back to my response posts,  I want to stress that I never assume that anyone voting against Obama is a racist, or that Republicans are racists, or that either on the Republican ticket is a racist.  I know better.

I’ve lived with serious racists, had racism and sexism used against me and mine (you do know that I’m a Race Traitor for adopting a non-white, right?).  I’ve listed to my daughter ask me about swastikas that she saw marked up on her school grounds, and have to explain about people who hate her for her ethnicity.  I’ve seen it in action for nearly fifty years, in all of its ugliness.  I know better than to apply that badge easily or thoughtlessly.  And that racism is something that is everywhere, in every country and racial group.

However, I do think that McCain is an opportunist without honor who has thugs working for him who are willing to pull every trick in the book and use any tool to get him elected, including racist ones to amplify the stuff Hillary first brought out and tried to use against Obama.   If McCain had any honor, he’d go out of his way to squelch it all.

The people who support Obama the most, by and large, are the young who are civic-minded and are beyond the ideas of racism or absolute adherence to a party. The people who are the most against him tend to be the older ones who can’t get past the idea of voting for a Democrat (no matter how bad the Republican) or a black (no matter how awful a candidate the white guy is) for President.

And there are people who have very specific issues.  If you are totally wrapped around anti-abortion issues, you may well feel that Palin’s basic advocacy of that position trumps anything else.  If you are fixed in the idea that taxes are an evil in all situations, and you make over $600,000 a year, you may find McCain’s low tax strategies far more important of an issue than any other.

Much more below the cut.

And reformers can be undone by machines, when they trade their aspirations for power:

Recently, a good friend of mine who I disagree with politically laid out his concerns and objections around the present electoral cycle. I started to reply as a comment to his posting online, and then I quickly found that what I was saying was waaaaaay too long winded to work as a comment. For one thing, the blogging software in Live Journal wouldn’t let me!

So I had to sit down and write the whole thing out on a point by point basis.  And even so, I have to break up my long-windedness a bit over a couple of posts.  So you’ll forgive me if I go on a bit.

Sarah Palin, against all legal advice and court orders, decided to use the office of governor as a means to get back at an already went-through-the-system enemy who worked for the state of Alaska - and firing the people who refused to break the law to help her. If this is someone you want to see as a President, with the will and desire to toss the law aside in pursuit of someone she didn’t like, by all means, vote for her.  But don’t call her a breath of fresh air - it’s Bush, Nixon and the worst of American politics with no judgment all over again.

“I mean, can we really hand over things to someone that inexperienced in government?”

From the Wall Street Journal:

Come November, voters will have a chance to rid themselves of a political order that they have come to hate. Sen. Obama’s task is to help them heave it overboard.

This is as it should be. From the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Justice Department, our government seems to have been driven into the ground by hacks, cronies and profiteers. From the moneyed halls of K Street to the gated suburbs of the big contractors, Washington now looks like a town of predators, not public servants. And from former Rep. Tom DeLay to Sen. Ted Stevens, the great men of the conservative era have been dropping in disgrace, leaving us the staggering bill for their follies.

The best that conservatives can hope for, I think, is that public opinion will simply harden into a cynicism toward government generally — that people will transfer the blame for the recent period of conservative misrule to the very institutions that conservatives have abused so grotesquely. There are, naturally, plenty of pundits who have encouraged this blame-the-victim interpretation over the years, and they will be gratified to learn that the public seems to be buying it.

If he is to prevail in November, Mr. Obama cannot allow the right to profit from the discontent stirred up by their own misbehavior. Talking about “hope” is very nice when you’re leading by 20 points, but what the Democrat has to do, now that John McCain has evened up the score, is take control of public outrage. He should not recoil from the bitterness that’s out there. He should speak to it.

At the very least Mr. Obama must begin to offer an explanation for why things have gone so very wrong over the past seven years. He should tell us how, say, the failures of Iraq reconstruction were made inevitable by the conservative philosophy that “government should be market-based,” as Mr. Bush once put it.

Besides, attacking Mr. McCain himself is pointless. The man no longer stands for anything. He has transformed himself from a maverick into a cipher, a hood ornament on a hit-and-run machine. He has no more political content now than the constantly changing cast of cynical right-wingers aboard his campaign plane.

That’s why this election must be a referendum on Republican rule and the destructive doctrines behind it. It is a contest to put the blame where it belongs.

From the BBC’s news:

In a telephone call to Georgia’s leader Mikhail Saakashvili, the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, said Russian aggression “must not go unanswered”.   President Bush said he had expressed his grave concern to Moscow at the military’s “disproportionate” response.

And what, pray tell, do you two suggest as an answer?  Anything that isn’t already tied down with a nitwit war that was unnecessary, remarkably stupidly planned and executed at political levels, and that you lied to get us into in the first place?

Me, I suggest that our answer be Dick Cheney, five-time draft dodger, leading a group of Shotgun Warriors against the evile Russian threat.   Complete with those cool Cossack great coats with a bazillion shotgun shells built into them (or the gaziry holders at least).

Bushco: Ok, just sign here that we can stay as long as we like, do whatever we want in Iraq without being bothered, and sign over all your oil to our pals for development.

Iraqi PM Maliki: Screw that noise. No deal.

Bushco: Dude, we own you.  For good.

Iraqi PM Maliki: ‘Fraid not. Hey, Salim?

Assistant: Yes, Boss?

Maliki: Call up those German reporters who wanted an interview and get ‘em over here. Bushco doesn’t own them like he does Fox.

German Reporters: We’re ready to interview, and the tape is rolling.

Maliki: Good. We want the Americans out of here Yesterday, and Obama’s timeline for getting ‘em out sounds cool to us. We’re not interested in being pwned by the USA. And Obama’s got duds nearly as cool as mine.

German Reporters: Thanks! (publishes story)

Bushco: (reads story) Ack! Thbbbt! (starts to choke on pretzels) (spasms)

Bushco minion: Ooh, I get to send the story to all of our Now-What-Do-We-Do-To-Get-Out-Of-This list of wingnut pundits! They’ll tell us how to get out of this! (Sends story from White House to Entire Press Corps instead.) Aw, crud!

Press: (reads story) Hm? Bwahaha!

Bushco: Ack! Isn’t anyone here competent?

Rest of the World: Not that we’ve noticed.

McCain: (reads story) Ack! Thbbbt! (spasms) He couldn’t have said that! There goes the election!

Bushco: Make it go away now! Get someone up to say it’s all a mistake!

Iraqi dude with the US Army in Iraq: Uhhhhh - It was just a mistranslation. He meant to say something else.

German Reporters: Nope. Here’s the tape. (hands it to other news agencies)

Other reporters and their interpreters: No mistranslation. He said it, all right.

Maliki: Yep, that’s what I said.  Regime change is a wonderful thing, right?

Bushco and McCain: (more gasping and choking) Uh…the Iraqis don’t know what they need. They need us. There. Forever. Obama just wants to surrender! Victory!

Joe Blow Voter: The Iraqis want us out? It’s a deal!

Bush and McCain: Suurrrge! Victory! Pay no attention to the Iraqis!

Halliburton and Cheney: Nuts.  There go the oil contracts.

…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works.

Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ’sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and dying, the second has to deal with the corruptions of the Chinese Communist Party system, and the last has to do with who think they can make up their own reality as they go along, and has most pointedly been used against George W Bush and his pals for this sort of thing:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

I have studied this at length. Maybe it’s because of my love of understanding The Big Picture, maybe my love of historical alternates, my love of politics, or a number of allied areas. Certainly, it’s from my deep dislike of people’s approaches to life that involve huge amounts of denial and fantasy to avoid things. I can understand a little of it; but I’ve seen too many that let it take over their lives.

The central component of the Bushian approach is to use propaganda, PR and control of the methods and means of communication to build up a shining concept of what they’re doing that will ensure, as my grandmother would have put it, that ‘their $h!t don’t stink’. If someone calls you on it, pull out the blackjacks (metaphorically speaking) and either pressure them into silence or drown them out in loud catcalls.

Of course, the problem with this approach is that such people are sure of their situation, sure that they’re going to get away with whatever, and will scrap to the end to push it. They are not terribly interested in doing something for the public good, but for the good of their bloc of supporters and their internal safety net, and loyalty to The Vision, whatever the party line happens to be today, is paramount.

Which means that while they can and will hire good, expensive lawyers to throw at you as necessary, anyone inside that group tends to have a poor and unclear notion about what’s *really* going on. Competence isn’t important if loyalty is, and having your internal idea that the world is supposed to work this way because the party line requires it will blind you to the oncoming truck on your side of the road.

Another element here is that you can’t deal with Bad News. You don’t admit that it exists. If the house is on fire because you were smoking in bed, you can either deny that the dropped cigarette and lighter caused it, or blame it on an outside plot, or deny that the house is on fire at all.

It’s a funny sort of morale thing. Bush has said over and over that he doesn’t admit to mistakes except in the most empirical manner possible, and admitting defeat openly would cause everyone in Bushco, troops, whatever, to lose hope in the greater vision, so you don’t admit that either. There’s no recession coming, no oil crisis, no failures in Iraq, no nothing. Unless he can figure out a way to blame it on the people he opposes.

When it was pointed out that drilling in the coastal regions and ANWR would not produce any extra oil for many years, and not much at that, McCain said - well, yeah, but the psychological impact of knowing that that oil would be on the way someday would cause everything to be all right in the oil markets now, so it’s the only answer to the crisis. (Bush has said that sort of thing tons of times before, as if believing that there’s no crisis will fix things.)

Going over McCain’s campaign stuff, it’s obvious that there’s a major disconnect in what he says to which people. The only things that seem to be constant are re-iterations of Bush’s policies - which he gives to red-meat Bush followers.

To the rest, he throws out references to his older stands in an oblique ‘trust me, you know I’m a good guy maverick’ manner that leans on his 2000 race. But if you start trying to pin him down to specific policies, especially ‘what do you do to fix Bush’s mess’ or ‘how do you differ from Bush’, the specifics vanish. Everything becomes very vague or aspirational (”I’d like to have the war over by 2013″ ) with no plan as to how you get there.

Even how he intends to maintain the burden of the tax cuts (and more tax cuts) and the war and whatnot is vague. He keeps going on about cutting pork, but so did Bush, and it sure didn’t happen.

Solving any problem becomes a  matter of applying message control. Tell the EPA you don’t want to read their email that says CO2 needs to be regulated. Set up a photo-op but neglect to send help. Deregulate to ‘get the government off the backs of business’ to the point that business can do anything it wants - put out contaminated food and drugs, inflate the price of oil, you name it.

Right now, hearings are going on where the the regulators of oil and other commodities are admitting they haven’t a clue as to what’s the ‘real’ price of oil or how much the commodity traders and hedge funds have pushed the prices into the stratosphere.  Part of it is that they’ve been told at the highest levels and through controls placed on them by Bush and McCain (such as the ‘Enron loophole’) that they’re not really supposed to regulate or enforce the regulations in any meaningful way, so why should they keep that close track of things?

But the real situation comes back to bite at the worst times.

Spend no money on government programs that don’t include sizable rakeoffs for your supporters…and borrow rather than tax. If you can endlessly spend and borrow more, who cares about paying it off someday?

But no money for vital infrastructure, and roads, bridges, canals, levees, dams and whatnot fall apart. No money for education, and the level of the schools goes to hell.

Ignore the injured and damaged warriors, and you don’t have to spend any money on the saps that bought the part about ‘fighting for freedom’ while you gut the Constitution and let your pals get rich from war profiteering. Ignore the hurricanes and the floods and the damage therefrom and have your battier supporters blame it on God’s Wrath that we don’t toast faggots over an open fire and let them Parade In The Streets - rather than spend money on the little guy.

This isn’t Republicanism. This isn’t Conservativism. This is just blind greed and a sloppy, stupid will to power. This is ’screw-you-jack-I-got-mine’ at its worst.

And there’s a very good chance that people are seeing through this because it’s gotten pretty damn obvious enough that they can’t run the country anywhere but into the ground. Now, if we can just keep people from going on about Flag pins or who-knows-Osama-might-kill-you-if-you-don’t-vote-for-us out of the airwaves and people’s heads, we may actually get a Congress and a President interested in straightening out this mess.  And since McCain is not interested in bucking the real Bushco system, his only way through is to  (as Charlie Black, his campaign manager said the other day and McCain himself has said in 2004 and the more recent past that) think that a real terrorist attack will be a huge boon to the campaign.

Or if it isn’t coming, scare people into believing it might, and that a black guy with an ay-rab name might just join in and show his deep moo-slim self.

Some issues-oriented campaign.

There was a revelation in the TODAY show interview of Scott McClellan that had Bush admitting to McClellan that he was the person who started the whole Plame leak fiasco going.  And so various people are now saying that ooh, caught Dubya in a impeachable offence, either the leak thingy or the pardon resulting from it.

Legally, sure.  But as the only person here who sat in person at the 1974 House Judiciary Committee hearings on impeachment of Richard Nixon (well, probably), I gotta remind you that the impeachment process (House impeaches / indicts for a Senate trial that requires a 2/3ds vote to remove from office) that even if you could get this through the House and into a Senate trial before Bush / Cheney left office, you would never get 66 or 67 votes for removing Bush from office.  I don’t care how guilty the man is, you’d have to motivate a lot of Republicans to vote that way.

Impeachment and Removal from Office is a political event, not a legal one.

NYT reports that high gas prices are driving people towards higher use of mass transit.  (My office offers us a tax-free subsidy for using mass transit, to a ceiling of around $110 a month.  And yes, we use mass transit and the subsidy…)  However, there’s a problem:

But meeting the greater demand for mass transit is proving difficult. The cost of fuel and power for public transportation is about three times that of four years ago, and the slowing economy means local sales tax receipts are down, so there is less money available for transit services. Higher steel prices are making planned expansions more expensive.

Typically, mass transit systems rely on fares to cover about a third of their costs, so they depend on sales taxes and other government funding. Few states use gas tax revenue for mass transit.

In Denver, transportation officials expected to pay $2.62 a gallon for diesel this year, but they are now paying $3.20. Every penny increase costs the Denver Regional Transportation District an extra $100,000 a year. And it is bracing for a $19 million shortfall in sales taxes this year from original projections.

“I’d like to put more buses on the street,” Mr. Marsella said. “I can’t expand service as much as I’d like to.”

Average annual growth from sales tax revenue for the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, a rail service that connects San Francisco with Oakland, has been 4.5 percent over the last 15 years. It expects that to fall to 2 percent this year, and electricity costs are rising.

Which goes back to the proposition that people always want government services, but they don’t care much to pay for them.   The big problem with the idea of doing a gas sales tax ‘holiday’ is that (1) doing that will mean that there’s no money to repair road infrastructure - which leads to deferred maintenance until the bridges start collapsing.

And people who say this can be taken care of by a windfall tax off of the Big Oil Bidness people have to guarantee that that money is actually going to be paid, not just kicked along to consumers, and that the tax itself will be enacted over the votes of a recalcitrant We-Like-Big-Oil GOP group in the federal and state governments, who will scream RAISING TAXES at the top of their lungs and protect their corporate sponsors.  I’ll believe all that will take place - maybe after the next election puts in a more responsible set of jokers in the government.  I’m not holding my breath.

Interesting article about patriotism and actions:

In 1961, a young African-American man, after hearing President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” gave up his student deferment, left college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines.

In 1963, this man, having completed his two years of service in the Marines, volunteered again to become a Navy corpsman. (They provide medical assistance to the Marines as well as to Navy personnel.)

The man did so well in corpsman school that he was the valedictorian and became a cardiopulmonary technician. Not surprisingly, he was assigned to the Navy’s premier medical facility, Bethesda Naval Hospital, as a member of the commander in chief’s medical team, and helped care for President Lyndon B. Johnson after his 1966 surgery. For his service on the team, which he left in 1967, the White House awarded him three letters of commendation.

What is even more remarkable is that this man entered the Marines and Navy not many years after the two branches began to become integrated.

While this young man was serving six years on active duty, Vice President Dick Cheney, who was born the same year as the Marine/sailor, received five deferments, four for being an undergraduate and graduate student and one for being a prospective father. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both five years younger than the African-American youth, used their student deferments to stay in college until 1968. Both then avoided going on active duty through family connections.

Who is the real patriot? The young man who interrupted his studies to serve his country for six years or our three political leaders who beat the system? Are the patriots the people who actually sacrifice something or those who merely talk about their love of the country?

After leaving the service of his country, the young African-American finished his final year of college, entered the seminary, was ordained as a minister, and eventually became pastor of a large church in one of America’s biggest cities.

This man is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the retiring pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, who has been in the news for comments he made over the last three decades….