A little soon, perhaps, to blame it all on Barack

The man has just about been written off at this point.  The leftist cadres who expected so much from Barack are now resigned to his government of the "center-Right,"  and as proof they cite his staffing with Clintonite pragmatists and Realpoliticians.  Quod erat demonstrandum, as the educated wig-wearers intone down at the Inns of Court.

He's still okay in my book.  I'm not a professional pundit and so feel no pressure to meet a daily news cycle in which the entire future must be predicted on a daily basis, even when on a day-to-day basis the entire future is predicted in ways entirely inconsistent with each other.  I keep in mind that Barack has not been inaugurated yet and can only sit anxiously on the sidelines while Bush finishes up his sabotage rearguard actions.  Bush, at this point, is a little like Saddam Hussein toward the end of the first Gulf War: firing his own oil wells with high explosives and opening the pipeline spigot to dump oil into the Red Sea.  The Treasury Department is printing "money" at an insane rate and injecting cash as fast as humanly possible into every bank or investment house with a pulse.  When the final "accounting" is done in late January, the fiscal situation in the USA will be unrecognizable in terms of historical standards.  All of this has happened so fast, as the cascading defaults brought on by the imploding mortgage-backed security markets and credit default swaps created a fiscal Black Hole sucking the nation's wealth over the event horizon, that we haven't been able to clearly conceptualize it yet.  Where are we now?  What's really left?  Do we have an auto industry?  Any banks?  Any investment houses?  A housing market?  Is there any actual "real" money left in the United States or is it all now pledged to government purchases of the entire private economy?

I think these are unanswered questions.  That terribly worried look on the usually uncomprehending face of George W. Bush in the late summer of 2007 as he emerged from a meeting with Bernanke and Paulson - I remember writing about that, how strangely frantic the usually What-Me-Worry? Kid seemed.  He'd been given The Word at that point.  The Dow Jones was beginning its inexorable slide toward the "psychological resistance point" of zero.  All the Wall Street investment banks were in deep trouble and most would fail.  The entire body politic was infected with the "toxic" virus of over-leveraging and too-complicated-to-understand algorithmic investments, and they were all going bad.  IT was everywhere and there was no way to isolate it.  Bush was a shaken man, and bitter that he was not going to be able to escape the White House under the mythical cover of the "ownership society."  Nope, George - the only one who owns anything anymore is you, and you own this one, lock, stock & barrel.  It will be your enduring legacy - the Man Who Wrecked America.

So at least be realistic where Barack Obama is concerned.  If the "progressives" were expecting Obama to install socialized medicine in the first six months, forget about that.  What really is the "liberal agenda" everyone was expecting?  What is the basis of the disappointment, and why is everyone so angry that Obama is choosing people with experience to deal with what may prove to be the greatest economic catastrophe in the history of the Republic?  

For my part, I am simply relieved that Obama, without question, will at least restore basic guarantees of procedural due process to the legal system of the U.S.A.  The outrage of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp will be stopped once and for all, and the true stories of the hundreds of men who have been imprisoned for years on end without a shred of evidence against them, their lives ruined, and all this outrage in service of the gung-ho fantasies of Bush & Cheney (the ultimate Chicken Hawks) as Anti-Terrorist Heroes - will emerge into full public view.  Bush & Cheney set in motion so much malicious shit that it will take quite a while just to restore the government and the courts to basic working order.  And from there, if there are time and money enough, Barack Obama can embark on "progressive" issues.

Bear in mind, all ye 52+% of the American electorate who put Barack in office, that the first task is to undo the massive damage caused by the 49% minority who put Bush within cheating distance of the Presidency (and Pope Scalia's ordination) in 2000, and by the 51% of the Befuddled Masses who doubled down on this error in 2004.  That is an awful lot of crap to clean up.  It may not even be possible.  Bush not only wrecked the machinery of government, he squandered the wherewithal to repair the mechanisms.  None of that is Barack Obama's fault. Give the brother, you know, a frigging break.

With God on Our Side

Masterpiece Theatre recently aired a conspicuously brilliant episode entitled "God on Trial."  It was set, as all too often, in Auschwitz, or more specifically and accurately in Birkenau, which is where the real methodical Nazi killing took place. The drama is intercut with scenes of visitors to the modern day museums which now stand where Auschwitz-Birkenau were located.  One of the visitors is an old man. 

Birkenau was the combination work camp and murder factory run by Germans in the south of Poland.  I have visited Auschwitz and Birkenau.  The evil of the places seeps into your bones. For a long time after visiting I was in a kind of daze, and afflicted by a malaise akin to a physical sickness.  I suppose that anyone who can do so should visit Auschwitz once, but it comes with this caveat: you will never look upon your fellow human beings in quite the same way again.  The simple truth is that Homo sapiens, as a species, is capable of evil on a scale that dwarfs any other force in the history of our planet Earth.  It is not even reasonable or fair to claim that humans can be "bestial," because other beasts do not carry on like humans when on a murderous rampage.  The true horror of the Third Reich was the application of cold human intelligence, that most evolved of all human traits, to the systematic extermination of other human beings.

In destroying its German Jewry, Germany destroyed itself, of course.  The Nazis were indiscriminate in their choice of annihilation: doctors, lawyers, judges, physicists, artists, composers, writers, rabbis, the educated elite of German society.  All dehumanized and spared or killed on the basis of superficial physical attributes: could they do menial work for a short duration before starving or freezing to death?  The Jewish prisoners in the long house in "God on Trial" have just been through the initial evaluation process.  Stripped naked and shorn of their hair, they have trotted down the length of a room where a "doctor" waited at a small table.  This judge of their fitness, distracted and indifferent, indicated whether the prisoner was to go left or right.  Those to the left were condemned.  All of the men return to the long house and wait, their assignments now clear.  New arrivals wearing regular clothes are pushed into the long house to wait with them, then they too are put through the process of "selection."  

To pass the time while they wait for the "selected" to be led away to their deaths, they decide to put God on trial.  Among them are lawyers, theologians, physicists, and a judge -- brilliant men who have been deprived of their wives, children, possessions and dignity.  Yet they can still argue and reason, their minds are still their own.  And so they posit the question: did God break His covenant with his Chosen People?  Is God guilty of breach of contract with the Jews?

In their delirious pain and fear, the arguments advanced have a stark and terrifying immediacy.  There is no time for trivial ruminations or cavils.  Some, of course, are bitter about God's betrayal: how could He permit His own people to be rounded up and shipped like cattle to death camps?  How could He countenance the Holocaust, the murder of innocent children, the destruction of a culture?  Others do their best to remain philosophical and "objective:"  God moves in mysterious ways, this is a trying of Jewish faith in God, much as God tested Abraham with Isaac. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple and in so doing acted as an "agent" of God; wasn't Hitler in the same role? In the end one can be assured that Hitler and the Nazis will be destroyed by God's wrath, and those among them awaiting death must see themselves as martyrs in this dramatic confrontation of Good and Evil.  A physicist notes the existence of the billions of stars in the Milky Way, the billions of suns with planetary systems, and argues for the extreme unlikelihood that God actually designed all of the Universe with just the fate of one people on one small planet in mind, that it is all a case of human presumption to imagine that God is real or created any of this.  These condemned Jews are alone, and it is the folly of believing in any God at all which has contributed to their helplessness.

It is left to Akiba, one rabbi with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Torah and the singular odyssey of the Israelites to place all in perspective and to provide the answer which none of the others either could refute, or under the exigent circumstances of the imminent arrival of the Nazi killers, had time to refute.  Akiba, calling on the great knowledge of other rabbis and scholars in the long house, takes the prisoners through the many instances of God's retributive justice: the Great Flood and the annihilation of almost all humankind. The Ten Plagues and then the killing of the first born of the Egyptians. Not Pharoah, but the innocent children of his kingdom.  Of the mass killing by King Saul and his legions, and how Saul had "killed his thousands," but King David was greater because he had killed "tens of thousands."  Of the brutal and horrific massacres of the Ammonites, close relatives of the Israelites.  The thousands of enemies of the Israelites who were forced to lie on the field of battle where one was spared and two chosen for death.  Of David's lust for Bathsheeba, and his manipulation of her husband into death in a distant battle.  Of the parting of the Red Sea, how God had not only made passage safe for the Israelites, but timed the inundation of the soldiers who pursued them for maximum destructive effect.  

At the end of this explication, Akiba prepares the ground for his conclusion with a simple observation: the Nazis who came to take him away wore belt buckles inscribed with the legend "Gott mit Uns."  God with Us.  And who could really say He was not?  So at the end of his closing argument, Akiba, this rabbi of great piety and deep erudition, electrifies his rapt audience with another simple observation: It was not that God was good; He had simply been "on our side." And now He was on someone else's side, and the Jews in that long house selected for gassing knew what it was like to be an Egyptian first-born, or an Ammonite, or a Philistine, or a soldier drowned by the closing waters of the Red Sea.

The drama ends in present time, with visitors leaving Birkenau and reboarding buses to take them away.  The old man tells a young woman that the prisoners, in fact, found that God was guilty.  He had breached his covenant with the Israelites and the Jewish people.  In their extremes of terror and desolation, who knows why men would resort to a moot court to question their own faith?  Out of bitterness and despair?  Of course that goes a long way toward explaining everything.  Yet Akiba, to my way of thinking, unlocked the door to a simple truth.  A wrathful, jealous, destructive and partisan God may be a fickle ally in one's hour of greatest need.  Maybe what we have called "God" in the blood-soaked histories of Judeo-Christian holy books is a rationalization for our very own worst instincts, for our own intolerance and murderous proclivities and insatiable greed.  Perhaps God did not create Man; maybe Man created God as a personification of his own evil shadow.

They were only following orders

It seems to be the consensus of opinion that the Obama Administration will not tarry over the Bushian crimes of the past, nor prosecute violations of the War Crimes Act for torture or other outrages against humanity.  This is no great surprise.  Beltway wisdom, as Glenn Greenwald over there on the right hand column points out on a daily basis, always leans in favor of collegiality and sweeping things under the rug.  Even Patrick Leahy (D, Vt.), one of the more vociferous and effective critics of the Bush Administration's detention and interrogation tactics, does not favor any kind of Justice Department action against U.S. officials.  Rationales are easy to find for this sort of soft-peddling of criminal acts.  For example, the following reasoning:

"Pre-emptive pardons would be highly controversial, but former White House counsel Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr. said it would protect those who were following orders or otherwise trying to protect the nation.

"I know of no one who acted in reckless disregard of U.S. law or international law," said Culvahouse, who served under President Ronald Reagan. "It's just not good for the intelligence community and the defense community to have people in the field, under exigent circumstances, being told these are the rules, to be exposed months and years after the fact to criminal prosecution."

We haven't heard that one in a few decades: they were only following orders.  As indeed they were, I'm sure, but that's sort of the point of an investigation of the "higher-ups:" to determine what the legal basis for ordering violations of the the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act was in the first place.  The "preemptive pardons" which Mr. Culvahouse mentions would only be icing on the cake, given the retroactive immunities granted by Congress, discussed below.  Anyway, I personally agree that the operatives "in the field" should not be the focus of any inquiry, and that we do make a hard job impossible by threatening them with prosecution for following Presidential directives.  The point is that it is not difficult here to find the higher source of this "banality of evil."  It's all in writing and admitted to by the President's inner circle.

Nikita Kruschev was faced with a similar quandary shortly after assuming power in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.  At the 20th Party Congress in 1956 he asked for special permission from the Presidium to deliver a detailed critique and denunciation of the atrocities of the Stalin Regime and the "Cult of Personality."  He was refused permission inititally by Molotov, Kaganovich and other high Communist officials.  Part of their angst was personal; many of them (and including Kruschev) had been involved in the purges, murders, and Gulag-related outrages of the Stalin Regime.  Using a parliamentary trick, however, Kruschev managed, about ten days into the Congress, to deliver a lengthy, detailed and extemporaneous denunciation of the Cult of Personality, and the transcript of that secret proceeding was spirited out of the inner sanctum of the Central Committee to the general Soviet populace.  It had an electrifying effect and set up many of the reforms which were gradually introduced over the course of the next eight years or so.

We're clearly not going to have such a moment in the United States.  Some features of the Soviet situation seem analogous to our own.  Congress embedded retroactive exonerations for war crime violations in the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act; essentially, reliance on the "advice of counsel" to assure one that following orders was okay cleans the slate of detainee abuse.  Thus, under U.S. law waterboarding of suspected terrorists, whether or not they were capable of producing actionable intelligence on an emergency basis (the "24" scenario), is forgiven retroactively, and a key element in such exoneration is the reasonable belief that the "advice of counsel" gave one the green light.  A majority of Democrats and Republicans, therefore, have joined forces to make certain that no effective prosecutions under the War Crimes Act ever take place, and part of the reason for their resistance is the extent to which they are all co-opted now by complicity in the "tactics."  We do not have a Kruschev on the horizon to bull his way through the stonewalling, so the matter will be put to rest.

The United States did undergo the ravages of a "Cult of Personality" over the last eight years, although I'm not entirely certain whose personality it was.  It seems almost comical to ascribe it to the feckless person of George W. Bush.  The Cult centered around the arrogant promotion of the Unitary Executive, with its signing statements abrogating legislative enactments and secret procedures for dealing with America's enemies.  America did establish its own Gulag, and did kill people under torture.  These are well-established facts.  Unlike Stalin, the American Cult of Personality did not mainly turn its ferocity against its own people, and that is why we are apt to be so forgiving and to "move on."  The victims to us are mostly faceless and anonymous, and it's not in our nature to worry too much about them.  Whether we can really "move on" without the archetypal "accountability moment" may prove to be a more serious question, however. I don't think human psychology permits such an open-ended progression.  At some point, we need to find out what we did, why we did it and what we're going to do about it.

George W. Bush's Coup de Grace

The latest figures available for fiscal year 2009 (that ending September 30, 2009) indicate that the federal deficit for the year so far is about $232 billion.  This represents the deficit for the month of October just past.  Annualized, the deficit for the year at this rate, in other words, would reach $2,784,000,000,000, or nearly 3 trillion dollars. We have, ladies and gentlemen, entered the Realm of Weimar, that crucial threshold where all semblance of rationality, manageability, and sanity is gone.  Our situation is now analogous to the coked-out movie star who has become indifferent to the repo men who have scaled the security gate and are systematically hotwiring and driving off his Rolls-Royces, and hijacking his Gulfstream Jets in midflight and and holding auctions of his Beverly Hills mansions - but not only indifferent, but manically screaming that he needs more coke and whores and tells his henchman, as he waves his gun around, that he demands a new Mercedes and a villa on Como.

You know, that point at which it's a joke to imagine any realistic way out of it. Congress is frantically "authorizing" "money" to buy all the investment banks, recapitalize all the commercial banks, buy AIG, salvage the Big 3 auto makers, and omigod! what just happened over there! There are so many "programs" to save so many vital aspects of the American economy that we haven't had time to sit down and calmly appreciate that this is madness.  The federal government was broke before it started doing all this.  Its Triple A credit rating was already in doubt.  If we push the national debt to $20 trillion, and if $15 trillion of that is "true" debt owed to outside creditors (and not to the bankrupt Social Security & Medicare funds); and if we have to pay 10% interest to attract all the money we need to borrow, isn't it obvious the major part of the federal budget will be used increasingly to pay interest on what we just borrowed? Nobel Prize winning columnist Paul Krugman is urging Obama to "go big" to get the U.S. economy moving again; in other words, ignore the deficits and move full-speed ahead. I guess so - if the collective worldwide hallucination of American solvency is not disturbed, that's what Obama will have to do.

George W. Bush is going out in a blaze of destruction, that we can clearly see.  With just over two months left, Bush could not quite get the pneumatic jacks to work well enough to hold up the White House roof long enough for him to get to Dallas.  Like Maxwell Smart, he missed it by that much. I saw him yesterday giving a brief talk to the Manhattan Club, extolling the wonders of the free market, gloating over the failed economy of Cuba, smirking, winking, wrinkling that narrow brow. The whole shtick.  I noticed that the jaw twitch was back in force; it's a spasmodic sideways jerking of his lower jaw while his mouth is held slightly open.  I don't know what it means.  Some have suggested it's a tic symptomatic of central nervous system damage brought about by substance abuse.  At this point, it's not even really interesting to speculate anymore.  Of course there are serious things wrong with him, but the true thing is that he's been President for the last eight years.  Of that we can be sure.

The graphs in the upper left were put together by a talented scientist in the Southwestern United States.  They depict slopes based on 3rd order polynomial calculations and offer graphic evidence of what happened to the United States once we abandoned the principle of intelligent management in favor of amiable idiots appealing to "values voters."  America had experimented with idiots before.  Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover, for example.  However, the drastic consequences of entrusting a system as complex as the American economy to dumb guys included the Great Depresssion, so that the electorate was chastened into voting once again for competence. For a long time, then, we placed the stewardship of the United States only in the hands of intelligent, competent leadership: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Carter.  

But as Santayana warned us, those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.  So we elected the first of the amiable dunces, Ronald Reagan, who made all kinds of stupid pronouncements about the "irrelevance" of federal deficits, or the principle of fiscal prudence in general, and who went on a spree of massive military spending while simultaneously drastically reducing the government's primary source of revenue.  Reagan saw the government as the enemy, although the government, really, is just us. So we declared war on ourselves, and we won.  And lost.  We followed Reagan up with the first of the Bushes, then took a shot at another smart guy, and look what happened?  Even working against a Republican Congress for six of his eight years, a Congress which wanted to attack and hamstring him with endless moralistic crusades throughout his tenure, Clinton began to bring the financial house back to some semblance of order, even to produce a budget surplus in his last couple of years.  And then Bush II:  the Coup de Grace, finishing the dark work of Reagan and his father.

With the sort of prudent guidance which Al Gore would naturally have carried forward, that hypothetical extension in graph #2 could have been our reality.  We would have innovated, dealt with global warming, adapted to changing circumstances, revitalized the economy. Gone $20 trillion in the black, enough to do whatever we needed to do to change energy paradigms. Alas, it was not to be.  For 20 of the last 28 years, we have squandered our resources, bankrupted our country, fought needless, ruinous wars, and destroyed the legacy of America for our children.  At a point very soon, the world is going to finally, regretfully conclude that the USA does not have all the money it is "spending" to bail itself out of every exploding catastrophe.  We are in the position of a man standing on a ladder, a few feet short of the roof, trying vainly to lift the ladder with his own hands.  It is entirely possible the world will not allow us to forget this particular lesson of history and make the same mistake all over again.

Captain Barack of the S.S. Carpathia

So Bush has 68 days left; does the United States?  This is pretty excruciating to watch, the clock ticking down on an utterly failed presidency while the stock market continues to tank, the auto industry verges on collapse and the same clown troupe presides over the bankrutpcy of the federal government.  "President" Bush seems as oblivious as ever.  I guess he honestly doesn't notice that anything whatsoever is wrong anywhere.  Everything is fine; c'mon in, Barack, let's sit in the Oval Office and talk shop.  There is so much you need to learn from me.

The sales of General Motors are down 45% this year compared to last.  Its stock capitalization is now 4% of the value of Toyota.  During the Eisenhower era, the saying was that "as General Motors goes, so goes the nation."  This is about exactly right; the Dow Jones is at 8,400 currently, versus a high of 14,000.  Let's go to the chalk board and figure that one out. Wow, wouldn't you know it?  That's a 40% drop.  Ike was right!  

And here's a video of some wise guy with a foreign accent uttering the unthinkable:

"The United States may be on course to lose its 'AAA' rating due to the large amount of debt it has accumulated, according to Martin Hennecke, senior manager of private clients at Tyche.

"The U.S. might really have to look at a default on the bankruptcy reorganization of the present financial system" and the bankruptcy of the government is not out of the realm of possibility, Hennecke said.

"In the United States there is already a funding crisis, and they will have to sell a lot more bonds next year to fund the bailout packages that have already been signed off," Hennecke told CNBC."

You'll notice that the disputatious guy with a different foreign accent takes issue with the doomsayer by trotting out the usual bromides; the US prints the world's reserve currency, it has an infinitely elastic capacity to raise money through taxation, etc.  Then, sensing that's not enough, he throws in everything else: the USA is "innovative," and resilient, and, and.....IT'S GOING TO BE OKAY, DAMMIT!  

Things are not getting better fast.  Of course, as Mr. Hennecke points out, we have a lot of company around the world.  Maybe the World Trade Organization could be rechristened the DTO, the Deadbeat Trade Outfit.  Instead of Triple A ratings, we could simplify to three new ratings: A: We'll probably have something for you later in the week. B: Things are a little tight right now.  C: The check's in the mail.

68 days to go.  Bush can do a lot of damage in 68 days.  He has no peer in the modern world when it comes to wreaking havoc.  Sure, it looks easy to take the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in only eight years, but that's just because you've never tried it.  And the stock market? Where should the Dow actually be at this point?  Let's say, to be generous, that Bush began at about 10,000.  Let's compute a rate of return of 7% on that level for 8 years and see what we get, shall we?  

There's your basic formula.  This innocent looking equation is not very kind to Mr. Bush; you see, 7% is actually a pretty reasonable estimate of bull market returns back in the good old days.  Future value = present value times the sum of 1 plus .07 multiplied by itself 8 times.  Which equals 17,181. We've come this far; let's check the current value as a fraction against this fantasy result had we been governed by a real president: 8,400/17,181 = 49%.  That again seems about right; about 49% of the electorate voted for George W. Bush in 2000.  How's that working for you?

I suppose the rest of the ghoulish games that might be played between now and January 20, 2009 include over/under guesses on the unemployment rate (official version).  We're at 6.5%  I'm confident George can get it to 7.5%.  If GM goes, the ripple effect would get us to 10% all by itself. How about a guess as to the federal deficit for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2009?  Anyone doubt that George W. Bush will smash all records, maybe by a factor of 3?  If you doubt it, you just don't have the kind of faith in our boy that I do.

Perhaps this is a little like the situation in 1912.  Barack Obama is the captain of the Carpathia. He hears the distress calls of the Titanic.  He's steaming in the direction of the doomed ship, but it's breaking in half and going down.  The survivors in the life boats are looking frantically for their loved ones in the icy waters.  By the time the rescue ship can reach the scene, a deathly silence prevails over the black sea.

The Prop Eights of the Future

From the irrepressible, indispensable Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, the new and future genius of all things statistical: 

At the end of the day, Prop 8's passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two. It appears that the generational splits may be larger within minority communities than among whites, although the data on this is sketchy.

The good news for supporters of marriage equity is that -- and there's no polite way to put this -- the older voters aren't going to be around for all that much longer, and they'll gradually be cycled out and replaced by younger voters who grew up in a more tolerant era. Everyone knew going in that Prop 8 was going to be a photo finish -- California might be just progressive enough and 2008 might be just soon enough for the voters to affirm marriage equity. Or, it might fall just short, which is what happened. But two or four or six or eight years from now, it will get across the finish line.

Just as an aside, I noted on election night that Chuck Todd, MSNBC's former electoral genius, appeared to be hearing footsteps.  He seemed to strain to find some way to discover a miscalculation in all the pro-Obama forecasts, particularly those of Nate Silver.  Nate's serene, eerily calm and consistent prognostications of an Obama landslide were, of course, vindicated in force.  You had your run, Chuck; problem is, you've been supplanted by a genuine number-cruncher, a guy who's not so telegenic but can do something you can't: understand statistics.  If you want a further example of just how deep Nate goes, read his current comments on the Franken - Coleman runoff in Minnesota.

So take heart, marriage rights advocates.  The old homophobes aren't going to be around forever and your day will come.  Coccooned within their religious dogmatism, the Evangelicals, Catholics and Mormons who are so certain that marriage is only "between one man and one woman" (although the Mormons, at least, have not always thought so), cannot see that the future will be very different.  Procreation occurs between one man and one woman, one must grant that.  But it is just like the religious, who are so confused about so many biological things (like evolution), not to see the distinction between this fact of life and emotional commitment, which is available to a broader class of humans.  To everybody, in fact.  I know enough about the generation to come, the kids who are now in their twenties or so, to know that they simply don't care at all, by an overwhelming majority, who gets married.  If heterosexuals want to get married, fine; if gays want to get married, fine; if nobody wants to get married, that works too.  

The religious, after all, are weighted down by ancient myths devised in the pre-scientific era (thousands of years ago).  Thus, naturally they are prey to ideas of "sin" in connection with sexual preference -- one chooses to be gay out of an errant appetite.  Silly beliefs like this cloud the perception that homosexuality is hard-wired, which is why religious zealots find themselves in the ridiculous position of arguing against studies, for example, which demonstrate homosexuality among penguins, specifically, Silo & Roy at the Manhattan Zoo.  Personally, what Silo & Roy do on the privacy of their own ice floe is without consequence to me.  Mormons, I guess, are somewhat freaked but can handle it as long as S&R don't try to sanctify their relationship with marriage.  Which is a shame, because they're both already wearing tuxedoes.

One way that the Prop 8 dreariness doesn't have to be repeated is if an Obama-liberalized U.S. Supreme Court considers the issue under an Equal Protection analysis.  Think about it.  In Brown vs. Board of Education, the issue was whether providing "separate but equal" schools for black children comported with Equal Protection.  No, it didn't, said the Warren Court.  The stigma of separate facilities makes such a practice inherently unequal.  Because of the fervent and irrational quality of homophobia, it is difficult for the intolerant to see that the issue of gay marriage is more or less exactly the same.  Providing civil unions while denying marriage stigmatizes a minority of citizens who possess a trait (sexual preference) over which they have no control, as assuredly as race.  

Most of us are now completely at ease with the holding of the Court in Brown.  Naturally, there are lingering Jim Crow advocates who will disagree now and disagree forever, as George Wallace said about segregation.  And there will be religious zealots who justify their bigotry and intolerance now and forever against gays, but history will also push them aside in the long run. They see their lingering battle as heroic; I think it's simply one more obstacle to overcome on the road to Equal Rights.

You Go, O

It's distressing, only in the sense of unfamiliarity, that Barack Obama is doing so many things right already.  I have read that the most profoundly unsettling thing about international travel, for example, is that nothing is where it usually is in your life and you have to adapt every waking minute.  That's probably why you can remember the details of trips so well: you had to focus, whereas one's usual somnambulant routine requires no such concentration.

I watched the interview of Barack's campaign team last night on "60 Minutes."  They were calm and matter-of-fact.  No Drama Obama apparently ran his campaign exactly as it looked: no frenzy, no extreme highs and lows, just relentless organization and hard work.  In two years, a guy with very little name recognition (and with such a strange name for American politics) went from a kitchen table meeting with David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Robert Briggs to a landslide victory last Tuesday.  Their success was a classic example of the application of high intelligence to a complicated process.  Axelrod, whom many regard as a kind of electoral genius, nevertheless said that Obama was the single brightest man he had ever been around.

So the President-elect is this highly gifted and intelligent man who happens to have come from definitely tough family circumstances, who therefore knows what it's like to try to struggle to make a living and survive in American society, and who furthermore has devoted his vocational life to the amelioration of poverty and social injustice. He demands competence from himself and from those around him.  Can you imagine in your wildest dreams, for example, the image of Barack Obama playing air guitar in Southern California while black families sat in terror atop their houses in the rising waters of New Oreleans? It turns out, furthermore, that he has had about 50 lawyers working for months examining the more outrageous and insupportable Executive Orders and signing statements of the current incumbent, and he's going to spend the first day or so working up a powerful cramp in his left (3-point) hand reversing every last one of them.  He's also going to close down America's concentration camps and bring the United States back into compliance with the Geneva Conventions, the Federal Anti-Torture Statutes and the War Crimes Act.

That's more than just a good start - that's phenomenal.  It was more than I'd dared to hope.  I mean, what next?  Actual competent staffing of the Justice Department?  A director of the Environmental Protection Agency who is not drawn from a K Street coal and oil lobby?  Global warming reports written by scientists and not censored by an oil company attorney-hack with no scientific training?  Unfettered stem cell research so our best genetic researcher (from UCSF) can return from England and do the world's best work again? Yep.  An ability of Nongovernmental Agencies working with foreign countries on birth control to discuss the full range of family planning alternatives, including abortion, which are legal under such countries' laws?  Yes again.  Shutting down the Legal Black Hole of Guantanamo and outlawing the use of hearsay testimony extracted through torture?  Uh-huh.  Tax incentives, instead of tax obstacles, to the development of mass solar arrays, wind power and geothermal?  Ditto.  Hope? You got it.

I've just got one problem - what the hell am I going to write about?

America's Bush-Induced PTSD

Naturally, all of us here "progressives" (who may eventually summon the courage to call ourselves "liberals" again) are having a hard time believing that anything really good can come out of the election of Barack Obama as President.  I hear and read about it everywhere, this reluctance of good-hearted folk to take yes for an answer.  We're suspicious, wary, maybe slightly paranoid.  We startle at sudden noises.  It's difficult to sleep, we have intrusive hallucinations in which we wake up and discover we're still being ruled by an inarticulate little despot from the West Texas District of Connecticut. 

Okay, that last part is not a hallucination.  Bush is actually the reason for our national Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  The Chief Dude, with his snarling sidekick Dick "The Dick" Cheney, absolutely trashed the United States. They hammered away at our self esteeem and patriotic pride.  They destroyed the world's finest legal system, left the economy a shambles, made the USA a feared and despised nation.  Certain tasteless jokes are circulating that with this big of a mess, naturally we'd hire a black man to act as janitor.  We are loath to trust The System to make any fundamental changes.  We'll keep both wars going, we'll maintain our various concentration camps in Guantanamo, Bagram, other black sites.  We'll keep illegally spying on ourselves.  Attorneys general with advanced cases of amnesia will say stuff like habeas corpus is not actually a part of the U.S. Constitution.  Joe Biden will refuse to comply with any Congressional investigations on the basis of a contention that the Office of Vice President is not part of the Executive Branch, nor the Legislative Branch, but is perhaps a wholly-owned subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase.

Well - time will tell, is all I can say.  Is the cruddy, dilapidated, depressed state of the Union the New Normal, from which there is no escape?  Will Barack Obama like all this "Unitary" power which Bush arrogated unto himself with the acquiescence of a prostrate Congress?  

I doubt it.  It's hard for me to imagine, for example, that Barack Obama and Joe Biden would sit down with a cadre of warmongering thugs, like the Neocons, and concoct a pretext for invading a country as a means of ensuring their reelection in 2012.  While Bush has never had any compunction about killing all those American soldiers in the Iraq war, and refusing even to count the Iraqis who have been killed, a war which the editorial page of The New York Times called "pointless" the day after the election, I just don't think Mr. Obama thinks or feels that way.  Imagine the callousness it requires to kill people in a pointless war simply for your own aggrandizement.  It's mind-blowing.  Yet there it is; that's our current President and the way he rolls.  Whether we realize it all the time or not, we've internalized all that, we have had to come to terms with having a President who operates at that debased level.  It creates a dark mood which haunts every aspect of American life, provokes a cognitive dissonance in which we cling to old images of ourselves while trying to reconcile the actual barbaric and uncivilized practices of this Administration.  Torturing human beings, ruining the lives of absolutely innocent men, such as the Chinese Uighurs finally, finally released from Guantanamo Bay after years of completely baseless captivity, simply because Bush & Co. could not be bothered to institute a humane system for reviewing their cases.

No, I do believe things will get much, much better.  We have to understand, at a deep level, that the fundamental problem with George W. Bush was that despite his occasional displays of maundering sentimentality, at his core everything he did was anti-human.  Don't ask me why. Don't ask me why he actively opposed and worked against the interests of the very people who elected him.  But he did.  And his malevolence had a global reach.  He also did everything he could to interfere with any international efforts to ameliorate global warming and ocean acidification.  He tried as hard as he could to fire up the Cold War with Russia into a new conflagration.

I guess the psychoanalysts and the social psychologists would tell us that what we have here is a serious case of co-dependency.  Bush has been enabled every step of the way by the reflexive respect and deference the citizenry shows to the office of the President, never mind the flesh and blood occupant.  So we have accommodated his outrages.  Even now he's spending his last days in office doing everything he can to despoil federal lands by opening up pristine wilderness to mining and exploitation.  Why, you ask?  Because it's who he is.  Because he's the President, we look for excuses for his mania for violating us, abusing us, cynically using the military under his command, but there's really no excuse.

So after such a bad relationship, it will take quite a while for us to trust again.  Gee, maybe this new guy is the well-intentioned, humane, compassionate fella he seems to be.  We guard our feelings however.  We're not sure.  We've been taken for a ride before.

Obama Presidency Fails; Anxious Voters Look to 2012 for Salvation

Last night on The Rachel Maddow Show, Ms. Maddow lamented the choice of Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff as a sure sign that Barack Obama had succumbed to Beltway Politics As Usual; thus; there was now no hope of real Change®.  She asked to be "talked down" by a guest commentator (from her hysteria, I guess), and he gamely tried without noticeable effect.  Well, let's face it; it's pretty obvious all is lost, isn't it?

At least we gave Barack a fair shot.  It had been nearly 48 hours since the election was called in his favor, and the pundits, bloviators, bloggers and other members of the Permanent Commentariat had waited a decent interval before pronouncing Barack's presidency dead.  You can't wait forever, after all. And the choice of Rahm Emmanuel, who's the brother of the guy who serves as the model for super-agent Ari Gold on HBO's "Entourage," well, what more can you say?  The Obama Presidency is doomed.  Rahm is "tough."  Some say he's ruthless, a hammer, that he once sent a dead fish to a Republican opponent, in the style of "Godfather I."  Barack's so nice we were all expecting him to appoint someone like Mr. Rogers to the post of Chief of Staff.  

What's the computer IM expression?  Oh yeah: STFU.  Shut The F*** Up.  Not that there is any chance whatsoever of that.  The blogosphere and the 24-hour news cycle of cable television were kicked into permanent high gear by the outrages of the Bush Administration and there's no going back now.  Everyone loves the sound of their own precious opinions too much - hey, I ought to know.  But still:  don't you think it would be a good idea to allow Barry the chance to take the oath of office (which he will actually uphold, by the way), settle into the Oval Office and, like, do the job for a year or so before we summarize his presidency?  

People are writing blogs like mad right now with titles like "What Barack Must Do in His First 15 Seconds in Office."  "Nine Critical Tasks During the Drive from the Inauguration to the White House."  "The 223 Most Important Issues for Michelle Obama to Consider in Assuming Her Role as First Lady."  "Melia & Sasha: What Should Be Their Role in Barack's Foreign Policy?"  "The White House Puppy: Would a Black Dog Be Too In-Our-Face?"  "Barack & Basketball: Should He Post Up Once in a While or Just Keep Firing Away from 3-Point Land?"

Enough already.  Let me just note one thing.  Yesterday I saw some footage of Barack arriving at a meeting, perhaps his first security briefing.  He got out of the back seat of a car, stood for a moment waiting for an aide to join him, and then walked through a door.  He was carrying a briefcase, a kind of soft valise, with the strap over his shoulder.  Get it?  Barack had information with him.  He'd been reading.  Have you ever seen any film of George W. Bush carrying anything, let alone a briefcase?  No, you haven't.  It's W's conception of the CEO Presidency.  He just listens to other people and then makes the call "from his gut."  That gut, at this point, has just about dissolved all of us in its digestive juices.  Someone with an intellect, however, knows that one can never understand the essential nature of an issue without running the details through one's own cerebral cortex, and the very best way to analyze information is through the ingestion of data through the reading process.  Barack Obama knows this and has always done it. It is why he is such a graceful and fluent writer himself.  It is why he was the President of the Harvard Law Review.  It is why he was a Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago.

We have elected a deep thinker, a fast learner and a decent, mentally healthy man as President of the United States of America.  Let us sing hosannas from the highest roof tops for now, then stand back and let Barack grow into the job.  He's always grown into everything he ever tried.  He will not disappoint us here.

.

Howdy Doody, New America

I caught Spike Lee on "Morning Joe" the day after the election.  He was in great form.  His funniest take was on the crowd that heard John McCain's sanctimonious, saccharine concession speech in Phoenix, the one in which McQueeg tried to reinvent himself as a decent human being. Spike noted the distinctively "pale" appearance of McCain's rabid followers, the ones who booed when L'il Johnny mentioned Obama by name.  This isn't the America of the 1950s, Spike reminded that crowd, although they "apparently didn't get the memo.  This isn't the America of 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Father Knows Best,' and 'How-dy Doo-dy.'"

No, indeed.  Spike spent half the preceding day in Obama HQ in Chicago and described the overwhelming energy of the place.  I spent a little time in the Obama HQ in South Florida on Monday, before heading out to a precinct in Mangonia Park on election day, and can attest to the same thing.  McCain field offices nationwide were apparently moribund joints, understaffed, with low morale and poor organization.  Obama staffers got out the vote for a solid two weeks in South Florida during early voting, as they did everywhere else that allowed the procedure.  McCain's people used an old-fashioned 72-hour approach to canvassing and motivation.  They lost the election before November 4 ever arrived.

The truth is the Republicans could have picked a wino up out of any alley in America, put an "R" next to his name, and the alkie would have won at least as many states as McCain did.  If they could dress him up a little, give him McCain's makeup artist, and if the guy had a little flair and charisma, which McCain would never have in a million years, the wino would probably outperform McCain by a mile.  McCain sucked as a candidate.  His running "mate" (and he wanted her to be so much more) does not know that Africa is a continent.  I am not making that up.  That's the person McCain decided to put one sketchy heartbeat away from the Oval Office.  "Country First," huh Johnny?  I could put an artful pun on that word "country" that would be closer to what you had in mind.

I think we've arrived at the point where the Evangelicals have been taken for a ride about as far as they ought to go with the Republicans.  In Europe they have parties (such as in Germany) with names like the "Christian Democratic Union," for example.  Why don't the Evangelicals unite with the Mormons and do the same?  Truth in advertising.  Stop kowtowing to the plutocrats and white supremacists and run on a straight Bible ticket.  Call yourselves the United Evangelicals or something.  Run directly on a platform that contends the Earth is 6,000 years old, that evolution is a myth and that fertilized cell clumps of 50 mitoses or so have souls with a destiny in Heaven or Hell.  Just put it out there and stop horsing around with fakes like McCain.  If you do so, it will probably promote the proliferation of other political parties to the left of the Democrats, like the Greens.  Then some real changes can start in this society instead of politics conducted only through these huge, monolithic dinosaurs we're currently saddled with in this country.

Meanwhile, I'm overjoyed that the unbroken string of pale folk in the White House has been broken.  In our orgy of self-congratulation (such as the anodyne history lessons of Chris Matthews on election night), let us humbly remember that African-Americans have been in this country for nearly 400 years, and that for the first 250 years they were owned by whites and worked for nothing.  America's early wealth was founded on this outrageous injustice, along with displacing the first "people of color."  White people don't really own the cuntry (oops), they just had a period of ascendancy which, as Spike pointed out, is drawing to a close.  As usual, as ever, as during Reconstruction, the po' white folk of the Deep South and rural America are totally freaked about that, but it won't change a thing.  That's just the way it goes.  Get used to it if you can.  The accommodation of reality was ever the wisest course.

The Nouri Chronicles: Let's Take the Sofa & Go Home

An international diplomat once described concluding a deal with the Russians as "first signing the agreement, then beginning negotiations."  There are always, of course, cultural differences about the art of the deal.  We tend to borrow British ideas, whether we always realize it or not.  That stiff upper lip, honorable forthrightness, blah blah.  We assume that's how everyone either does it or should do it.  Not really so.  

 So the U.S. is deadlocked in its back-and-forth with the Iraqi government over the Status of Forces Agreement, a continuing drama which I find peculiarly fascinating, probably because I've spent most of my professional life cutting deals of one kind or another.  I've thought from the beginning that the American team was in over its head.  Only recently have they begun to play hardball with the Iraqis -- sign or we pull out and leave you to your fate.  

 Of course, that's the last thing the Bush Administration really wants to do.  They've been forced into it because they've been outmaneuvered by the Iraqis.  The Iraqi negotiating team kept a close eye on the leverage points.  They knew that Bush would see a pullout from Iraq as an ignominious defeat, especially because of the relevance of the UN Mandate.  When the Mandate expires on December 31, an extension would have to be approved by Vladimir Putin, and Bush is not going to go hat-in-hand to Pooty-Poot and ask for a favor.  They also know Bush has virtually no credibility at home - even with this anemic Congress, his ranting and raving is not going to get him anywhere with an unpopular war, the way it used to do.  The clock favors the Iraqis in myriad ways: the UN Mandate runs out, Bush's tenure in office runs out.  Where's the rush?  

 

"We obviously want to be helpful and constructive without undermining basic principles," Bush said in the Oval Office during a meeting with Massoud Barzani, president of the semiautonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. "I remain very open and confident that the SOFA will get passed," he added, using the acronym for Status of Forces Agreement...Dabbagh said other amendments sought by the Iraqis include a clear definition of "off-duty" when cases arise involving crimes committed away from U.S. bases. The Iraqis also want to inspect all U.S. military shipments entering or leaving Iraq.

That's the kind of word usage I'm going to miss so much when Bush is gone.  He remains "very open and confident" about the SOFA.  What does it mean to be "open and confident?"  "Open" in that sentence doesn't really mean anything, does it?  And yet there the word is, a completely meaningless word uttered by the President of the United States of America about his signature project while in office.  Did he hear "hopeful" in his head and it came out "open?"  Did Bush realize that saying one is "hopeful and confident" sounds a little internally inconsistent and thus switched to a meaningless word at the last second to avoid saying something that would have sounded even sillier?  Like so much Bush has said over the years, it really doesn't matter at this point. He just uses words very strangely.

Meanwhile, there are those crafty Iraqis again, drilling in on this "off duty" idea.  When is a U.S. GI really "off duty" so the mullahs can try him for a "serious crime?"  Look, Condi: will you get serious for a minute?  Let's not sign a deal with the Iraqis which exposes American soldiers to the whims of Shariya law, okay?  This whole dumb idea has gone on long enough.  We have asked enough of these men and women stranded in the desert so far from home.  They are not going to be tried in an Iraqi court for anything, and if that means we start packing up now so we're out by December 31, so be it.  Use that as an exit line.  We invaded, according to you, Ms. Rice, so Saddam's imminent threat to America would not "come in the form of a mushroom cloud."  Remember that one?  Okay, we've accomplished all that.  No Saddam and no mushroom clouds.  Now don't compound this original, enormous, virtually unbelievable error in judgment by insisting that we stay in Iraq under a SOFA which involves the certainty that American soldiers will be subjected to Medieval notions of trial and retribution by a government where the major party is named the "Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq," and where it is most likely that all of their legal procedures and punishments will be modeled on Iranian concepts.

The bad joke's over.  Get all of those soldiers home.

 

Land O' Goshen

So here we are in another election year with the country as riven as always into its Blue/Red dichotomy, with both candidates forced to pitch their "platforms" to some nonexistent middle supposedly representing the political consensus.  Every four years it gets weirder.  The modern process can be dated to Nixon's Southern Strategy, that regressive pandering to the Dixiecrats of the Old South, those former segregationists who used to vote Democratic but found themselves abandoned in their prejudices by the liberal likes of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

We wind up with a system where the compromises become more and more loathsome to both ends of the political spectrum.  We hear more often about how the progressives are "held back" by the theocratically inclined, but I have little doubt that it's just as troubling for the Evangelicals and social conservatives to find themselves immersed in a Godless, secular America over which they feel they have no control.  Despite the largely ineffectual sops thrown by the Republicans to the religious, the country keeps getting more and more socially liberal.  As a trivial example, on an episode of "Two And A Half Men" the other Monday night, a lap dance performed by a former kindergarten teacher figured prominently in the plot line. The dance was pretty explicit, too.  In prime time, on network TV.  Moving the other way, Barack Obama promises to continue the dubious practice, at least under one reading of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, of faith-based initiatives using federal tax money.

Sarah Palin's meteoric rise to celebrity is symptomatic of the fundamental divide in the United States.  She doesn't believe in mankind's contribution to global warming (which, as a corollary, means she doesn't believe that the lowered pH of ocean water, which is a scientific fact, is actually a scientific fact).  She thinks that intelligent design or Creationism should be taught in public schools.  She believes that abortion should be illegal, under all circumstances, as a species of murder.  Sarah Palin attends the Assembly of God and believes in the inerrancy of the Bible.  I think it's fair to say that she is far more popular among the Evangelical base of the Republican Party than the interloper John McCain.  McCain's big problem, indeed, is that he has nothing much going for him other than the Republican brand.  He's an old boring guy with watered-down views and little passion for religious fervor.

When you look at a Red/Blue map of the U.S. , it's pretty obvious where the Republican base is located: the Deep South, other than South Florida which because of its large Jewish population tends to be liberal (as if the Israelites have once again effected a parting of the Red Sea); the Mountain States, with their large Mormon populations (Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, etc.). And the Grain Belt middle of the country, Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas.

I sometimes wonder (to say the least) whether the United States wouldn't do better as some sort of federation rather than this increasingly unsatisfactory arrangement as one nation all subject to the same laws handed down through Constitutional interpretations.  Maybe it would be better, for example, if Kansas could teach Creationism in their schools, and hold prayer sessions in public class rooms, and outlaw all stem cell research.  Maybe Georgia should be allowed to make abortion illegal once and for all.  Maybe same sex marriage should be banned in Utah in exchange for the Mormon promise that they'll leave California alone (as I think they might: the Mormon funding of the Yes On Prop 8 drive no doubt is based on their fear that freedom might spread across the whole country if it takes root in California).

It would not be as difficult to accomplish these things as you might think.  Here's the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: 

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

And what did Thomas Jefferson have to say about that?  "The States should be left to do whatever they can do as well as the federal government."  The mischief really began with the Ninth Amendment's liberal interpretation by a liberal Supreme Court.  And what does the Ninth Amendment say?  

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

That's it.  The entire edifice of "privacy rights," such as the freedom of married couples to do whatever they want in the privacy of their bedrooms (Griswold vs. Connecticut), is built on this amorphous "reservation."  Roe vs. Wade was premised on this amendment.  Was abortion a right retained by the people in 1789?  Who knows?  If Justice Harry Blackmun says so, then I guess it was.  

Now, I concede freely that the abortion debate is really a theological question dressed up as a secular/legal argument.  It is that investiture of a soul at the moment of conception that lies behind the controversy.  Same with stem cell research: George W. Bush bravely stood up for all those frozen cell clumps in embryo banks around the country, all those "snowflakes," because they are souls-in-waiting who must not be murdered.  The homophobia of the religious is based on their concept that homosexuality is a "choice," a decision made with free will to live in sin. The fact that a gay person might otherwise be an exemplar of moral behavior, perhaps in many cases far morally superior to a heterosexual detractor, does not explain away this failing. 

Do I think these ideas are nuts?  Sure, of course I do.  The problem for me is that so much of our national politics and legal process have become hostages to these theological questions.  For a Supreme Court nominee, one question and one question only: would you overturn Roe vs. Wade?  It distorts everything else.  How does a judge stand on issues such as the President's right to declare war without the consent of Congress?  In our country, unfortunately, the theocratically inclined judges who would overturn Roe vs. Wade will probably also believe in an authoritarian political system and the "Unitary Executive," thus abrogating the role of the people in deciding to go to war.

Maybe what will happen over time is that a distinct "Land O' Goshen" will be carved out of the middle of the United States where the Tenth Amendment is restored to its former glory and the states individually are allowed to decide all these questions for themselves.  A theocracy not so different from Iran or the developing Iraq where the entire litany of religious ideas are allowed full sway.  A pregnant teenager in Utah, raped by her father or brother, say, could still get a visa to drive to California to take care of things.  A search for cures for Parkinson's Disease using stem cells could still go on in Massachusetts.  In Kansas, however, everyone could hunker down and learn about the beginning of the Universe six thousand years ago, in a land where everyone is straight, mostly white, and definitely religious.  To say the least, Land O' Goshen would elect its own President, or whatever they would call their leader.  Whatever Sarah Palin wants to be called, I guess.  We'll need one more Constitutional Amendment, of course; eveyone who doesn't want to live in a theocracy will be given three years to get the hell out of the Land O' Goshen.

Hillary's Predictions Revisited

If you haven't checked out Nate Silver's polling analysis site at FiveThirtyEight.com, I would highly recommend that you do so.  Silver, who has achieved a minor celebrity because of the thoroughness and originality of his work, essentially does a meta-analysis of every major poll done in the United States on the presidential and senatorial races, corrects sampling and interpretation errors, and runs simulated elections based on the results.  Under his FAQ section, he explains how the simulations are done to produce the "win" percentages:

“What is Win % or Win Probability? Simply, the number of times that a candidate wins a given state, or wins the general election, based on 10,000 daily simulation runs.

“How is Win Probability determined? By simulating the election 10,000 times each day by means of a Monte Carlo analysis, based on the current Projection in each state. The simulation accounts for the following properties:

(i) That the true margin of error of a poll is much higher than the sampling error, especially when the poll is taken long before the election.

(ii) That polling movement between different states tends to be correlated based on the demographics in those states.”

Using this approach, Silver estimates that Obama has about a 97% chance of winning the general election next week.  A prediction for every state individually is also given; for example, Obama has a 100% chance of winning New York and Massachusetts; he has a zero percent chance of winning Utah or Texas.  West Virginia was thought to be “in play” at one time, but not really, it turns out.  Obama has a 2% chance there.

So, to a certain extent, Hillary Clinton was right when she said that “hard working Americans, white Americans” preferred her.  They do indeed.  I imagine that West Virginia would poll very differently if Hillary had been the Democratic candidate.  On the other hand, FiveThirtyEight (named for the total number of electors in the American system) estimates that Obama’s current chances of carrying Ohio are about 84%; that was another state which Hillary won handily.  States such as Pennsylvania, another state carried by Clinton, will probably vote for Obama.  Silver estimates his chances at 99% currently.  538 also gives Barack the nod in Florida, to a 79% certainty.  The True Blue Bastions, such as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and California, of course, were always going to vote for the Democrat, so Hillary’s protests about being the more electable candidate did not make much sense with reference to these mortal locks.

 The most interesting states will be North Carolina and Virginia, come election night.  Because North Carolina has a Democratic governor (Mike Easley), and an ardent Obama supporter at that, it will be harder for the Republicans to cheat in the Tar Heel state, and cheating is the only practical way for the Republicans to steal this election.  They must cheat often, early and massively in order to compete at all, when you get right down to it.  Of the preferred sites for Republican cheating, Ohio and Florida, it has become more difficult in the Buckeye State because of a change in regimes at the Secretary of State level.  So the GOP effort will be aimed primarily at Florida, where voter ID laws of highly questionable constitutionality (picture ID with signature required, reminiscent of old poll taxes and “literacy” tests used to disenfranchise African-Americans in the Old South) are the latest Republican gambit for defeating the will of the majority.

 So 5,000 lawyers are flying into Florida just to keep an eye on things, among them your faithful correspondent.  It won’t stop all the cheating but it may help to keep things vaguely within the lines, a reasonable goal in the World’s Greatest Democracy, after all.

The Need to Believe in Barack

"Black Swan" theories posit the occurrence of outlandish, seemingly impossible events in the financial world which, despite all risk-hedging mechanisms, show up and knock all prior assumptions concerning safety asunder.  The failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 was one such Black Swan. The mathematical algorithms which guided LTCM's investment strategies, as amazingly complex and sophisticated as they were, failed to take into account all the permutations in international finance which could set into motion a series of cascading failures.

The possibility of the bankruptcy of the United States, and its default on its Treasury-security obligations, is not, unfortunately, classifiable as a Black Swan.  Maybe a little off-white, or with distinctive markings on its bill, but not wholly anomalous.  The truth of the matter is that the U.S. government's fate, and the fate of the American economy, is not really completely, or even mostly, within our control any longer.  It is indeed fairly easy to picture scenarios in which the American economy is simply rolled up.

The bailout programs unleashed on the private sector by Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke depend on the manufacture of money which the United States does not actually have.  It's all very well and good to promise $700 billion to rescue distressed assets from banks and investment houses, or to pledge $550 billion to relieve money market funds from the stresses of redemptions, or to buy huge insurance companies like AIG, or to keep throwing colossal amounts of money in every direction in an effort to restore the U.S. economy to exactly its perceived condition in about July, 2007.  But a moment's reflection tells you that the U.S. cannot possibly have all this money available.  The federal government, every year that Bush has been in office, has run deficits of about 1/2 trillion dollars.  Part of these deficits are the result of borrowing the "excess" from the Social Security and other trust funds, which simply delays the moment of truth to the date that such funds become insolvent. When that happens (and it will happen within a decade), the United States is simply going to declare the Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs bankrupt and that will be that. But about half represents real debt owed to real, and mostly foreign, creditors who buy U.S. Treasury bonds.

The entire sustainability of the dollar as the world's reserve currency depends on the willingness of foreign creditors to keep funding our (1) federal budget deficit and (2) our current account deficit (trade deficit), which runs about $55 billion per month.  The problem is that foreigners are losing interest in doing so.  While large foreign banks (and sovereign wealth funds) are propping up the dollar by buying large amounts of Federal Treasuries (to protect their own large holdings of dollars), foreign private investors are barely buying any Treasury securities at all.  The influx of money into the Treasury recently simply reflects the redistribution of investment from terrified investors who are bailing out of the stock market.  That won't last.

So where's the money going to come from to fund all this "restructuring" and social engineering? Asked another way, if the U.S. consumer is tapped out, which s/he is, and cannot afford to buy all those imports from China or all that oil from Saudi Arabia, what is the motivation for these countries, and many others, to continue to buy U.S. Treasury bonds which, after inflation, actually return less than zero?  And a related question: if the United States continues its bellicose posturing, threatening this country and that, including many of our creditor countries (Russia, e.g.) and energy suppliers (Venezuela, e.g.), why would the targets of U.S. aggression continue to finance their own insecurity?

We're not used to asking such questions, but that is all going to change.  We continue to regard our standard of living as "nonnegotiable" (D. Cheney), and it is certainly higher than that found in Russia or China.  The problem for us is:  there is nothing fundamentally different that we are doing here in the U.S. which assures that will continue to be the case.  We began with a huge head start, but we've been coasting without the necessary investment in education, infrastructure or energy innovation necessary to sustain our standard of living without massive borrowing on highly favorable, impossible-to-maintain terms.

That's the fundamental reason I don't want John McCain to be president.  I think he's completely locked into a business-as-usual approach to this enormous challenge.  He simply cannot see America in any terms other than as a world-dominant superpower which can impose its will on the rest of the world simply by dint of historical momentum.  But that's actually gone. That's what the current financial crisis is really all about.  These are the first, very ominous signs that the American system is fracturing apart.  We are completely dependent on massive borrowing to "fund" our way out of it.  

Some people see this clearly, and that is the reason you have seen an unprecedented number of defections from Republican ranks toward Obama.  Much is being loaded on the slender shoulders of this young man.  In truth, I think his qualities are being exaggerated by the desperate hopefulness of those who see him as some sort of savior.  The editorial boards of all the major newspapers, "traitors" like Colin Powell, Scott McClellan, Christopher Buckley (and the closet traitors like David Brooks and George Will), all of them fear John McCain and his robust nationalism because they know it will lead to perdition.  I think this dread, this unease has an inchoate quality in which the underlying reasons for the fear are not always completely understood by those drawn to Obama.  They're too blinded by their own jingoism to admit it even to themselves.  But this election could very well be it.  This is the All In moment.  This might be the last chance.