Note to GOP: Please, Please Shut the Government Down

It's just that we could all use a break.

The major objection to making them all just shut the hell up and go away for a while is that the Social Security checks which would otherwise be sent out or directly deposited in recipients' accounts on March 10 (the first distribution date after the March 4 expiration of the "continuing resolution" under which these clowns continue their act) will be interrupted. I concede that is a cause for concern, but c'mon, even these brain-dead politicos can surely find a solution to that. The FICA payments will keep coming in; can't someone, just one clerk, stay behind and make sure the mail goes out?

That wasn't so hard, was it? Okay, so the one real problem with disbanding the federal government has been handled.

The beautiful part, the hopeful angle, to the government shut-down is that it will happen unless Congress does something to prevent it. We know how good they are at that kind of thing. These are the same people running a $3.8 trillion operation on a $2.2 trillion budget. As noted, the "continuing resolution" which permits the government to spend money will expire on March 4, which is only 11 (eleven!) days from now. They have to use a "continuing resolution" to begin with because there is no real budget in place, and hasn't been for a very long time (Obama did not propose one for the previous fiscal year) which is to say, the continuing resolution is itself a sign of the extreme dysfunction in Washington's governance. Emblematic of its lack of realism, of its tendency to procrastinate and to act like little children. The GOP wants Obama to enact its meaningless series of token, mean-spirited, Luddite budget cuts, which are all aimed at favorite conservative voodoo dolls, like the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Education, and scientific research, and solar energy, and the rest of their list of Liberal targets. The Democrats resist all of these token gestures in favor of token gestures of their own.

"That's the wrong $30 billion to cut out of the $1.6 trillion deficit!" is the moving battle cry of the Democrats, our liberal heroes. "If we're going to eviscerate government spending by cutting nearly 2% of the budget, excuse me, deficit, then we need to target carefully the budget cuts we choose, because the American people are counting on us to do our jobs!"

They all agree on only one thing: the Department of Defense must have its money.

See what I mean? Are you coming around? Can't they just all take a hike, like the Democrats in Wisconsin did? The Donkeys in Wisconsin went to Illinois; the asses in Washington, D.C. have all fifty states to choose from. Anywhere other than the District of Columbia, which is where they screw everything up.

Do Tom Coburn and John Boehner realize just how much of an Uncle Remus situation this is? Please oh please, Congress, don't throw us into the brier patch of a government shutdown! What would we do without you?

Obama will veto your spending cuts, because he's a man of principle. He believes that if we're going to save money, we should do so by cutting LIHEAP, the assistance to low income families that allows them to avoid hypothermia during the arctic months of winter in the Northeast and Midwest, particularly in those areas which are not reliably Democratic. The O-Man has argued strenuously for slashing this unconscionable waste of money from its present $5 billion to $2.5 billion. Saving this money will allow us to continue nation building in Kandahar, which is where our interests really lie, not in those row houses in Philadelphia where the gas was turned off a month ago and the interior temperature has that same invigorating, chilly zing! as the air outside. Well, who voted for Hillary in the 2008 primary?

So many heroes, so little time to choose. The question is: which side to support? Where should we be spending all that money that Congress needs to borrow in order to spend almost anything? Should we borrow money and spend it on education, or borrow money and spend it on suppressing the Taliban a while longer, since the first decade of suppression hasn't quite done the trick? These people obviously know what they're doing, and I want to be sure they have the tools to do their jobs. But just to give them time to reflect on their priorities, to make sure they "get this right," as they all like to say - maybe they should take off for a couple of years and think it all through. You know?

Whistling past the bankruptcy court

My thinking has been in a state of backwardation lately because I just can't get past this game of charades that Congress and the President are playing concerning the budget. Nomi Prins wrote something kind of funny about it the other day; to wit, two firemen are standing on the sidewalk across the street from a burning house, and they're arguing about whether it would be better to use a teaspoon or a teacup to put the fire out. Think of one as the Democrats, the other as the Republicans, and that captures the essential absurdity. President Obama has talked about eliminating "$1 trillion" from the budget; however, he's talking over the next ten years. The Republicans want to cut $100 billion this year, if they can find some place to start. I'm not seeing the real difference between these two futile gestures.

The impotent paralysis of the federal government in its attempts to grapple with a budget deficit of $1.6 trillion is something to behold. Holograma has put out forecasts of tremendous growth in tax revenues over the next 4 or 5 years, increasing from its current anemic $2.2 trillion to $3.5 trillion in just a few years. This will apparently be accomplished without any real increases in taxation levels; indeed, Obama would be an odd person to lead such a change since he just got through capitulating on large tax decreases in yet a further attempt to ingratiate himself with his Stockholm Syndrome Keepers.

Here's what I think lies at the root of this collective psychosis. The Very Serious People in Washington have themselves convinced that the Depression which engulfed this country in 2007 is simply and only a function of a discrete event, to with, the securitized-mortgage (and related derivatives) meltdown which arrived in its most florid form in the fall of 2008. The financial precariousness of the banks, their inability to lend - these are the things which caused the system to "freeze up" and interrupt the Great American Wealth Creation Machine.

Your faithful diarist, however, has never seen it that way. Here among the quiet, virtual snow banks beside my virtual Pond, it seems rather to me that 2008 (the stock market meltdown really began in the summer of 2007) simply marked the endpoint of America's desperate effort to prop up a false standard of living through the relentless accumulation of unpayable debt. Real wages in this country, for the vast majority of people, have never kept pace with the liabilities assumed or with the standard of living which such debts implied. Things have been moving this way since at least 1973, and all graphs and other empirical evidence point in exactly this direction.

The housing bubble was the last gasp effort of American society to fend off the moment of recognition. The "wealth effect" of house-as-ATM, as store of value, as a substitute for making any freaking money with a job -- this kept the decade of the Aughts going for a while, sustaining the illusion. However, the inability of the populace to service the debts taken on, often in the form of loans which did not represent their real long-term carrying costs, meant that default would become epidemic, and as that happened, the market value of houses suffered a nationwide collapse. All of this has happened against the backdrop of a relentless hollowing out of the manufacturing base which once sustained the middle class, as opposed to the crap jobs of the service economy. In this view, the fall of Wall Street flowed naturally from the default of American society as a whole. None of this is to exonerate the crooks and swindlers who arranged things so that the inevitable meltdown would accelerate, perhaps even overshoot the downside implied in the collapse, and all as part of their orgy of greed. But in a larger sense, the fact that this is the sort of thing we do now to make money, participate in non-productive rackets, is symptomatic of the overall malady.

Obama, Congress, the D.C. Establishment much prefer the Meltdown-as-Interruption thesis to explain away our problems. The $2.2 trillion in national income, in this way of looking at things, is an aberration, a momentary setback, until the juggernaut of the American economy gets underway again. There is no need to scale back federal spending, the $1.6 trillion deficit is workable, the practice of the Federal Reserve in conjuring money out of thin air to buy our own debt -- all these things are just stopgaps until hiring picks up and the economy returns to those halcyon days of 2005. In the meantime, let's just keep spending as we always have, we'll borrow from ourselves if we have to, but in a few years when federal revenues have increased by 75%, this will just be an unpleasant memory.

That, I think, must be the plan. All these Very Serious People are standing around in a circle and telling themselves these things over and over. This is a great country, don't bet against America, we're innovative, entrepreneurial, it's just a matter of time.

Well, what else can they say? The alternative is pretty unthinkable. How do you cut a budget of nearly $4 trillion roughly in half? The really, really weird part is that's actually the point we're at. That's the part that isn't made up. The forecasts, the projections, the political posturing, the speeches, the blame-games, the conjured money, the pretend Treasury auctions-- those are all make-believe. That we're broke - that's the reality.

The breathtaking elegance of national debt financing

It took me a while to catch on, but I think I've figured it out. In his new budget proposals, President Holograma has forecast really awesome numbers for federal revenue over the next few years which will gradually eliminate the deficit and restore America to prosperity. Since I can't really see how this can be accomplished with the materials at hand, you know, just looking around at the jobless situation and rather ungraciously noticing that the actual number of full-time jobs in the US of A is about the same now as in the year 2000 (about 130 million), I'm tempted to ask a question with the same initials as Win The Future, only different. I mean, how can the O-Admin project revenues for the feds of over $3.0 trillion for the fiscal year two years from now, and then rising sharply to $3.5 trillion right after that, when income currently is scraping along the bottom at under $2.2 trillion? That's a 50% increase in revenue in two years, and 75% a few years out!

Then it occurred to me: aside from the fact that Congress, in order to avoid a People's Temple scenario, absolutely needs to believe that such a thing is possible, the Treasury may have an ace up its sleeve. All that debt we're drowning in? Why not put it to work for us?

This is so beautiful it's difficult to write it down cogently, because my mind wants to race ahead to the thrilling conclusion and skip any intermediate steps. It's just that good. But one or two preliminary points: We all know by now that the Federal Reserve Bank has been indulging itself in something called Quantitative Easing for quite some time. They have bought all kinds of stuff, including well over a trillion dollars in mortgage-backed securities (MBS), but lately their focus has been exclusively on buying Treasuries in the "secondary market," primarily, naturally enough, from the Primary Dealers who in many cases did not actually "own" these "assets" which the Federal Reserve "purchased" for much more than a week or so. Using this "asset purchase program," the Fed has become the world's largest holder of Treasury "securities." (I just love all these sophisticated, reasonable, business-like terms in the context of what's obviously a huge Ponzi scheme.)

The Fed now owns well north of $1 trillion of such Treasuries, and under what's euphemistically called Quantitative Easing II, the plan is to keep "purchasing" Treasuries in the "secondary" market at least through June, at which point it will be extended again through QE 3, to QE 4, to QE n, to QE to the Moon. You may think to yourself that this is a somewhat ridiculous situation, for the "money" the Fed uses to "buy" such "assets" is simply a figment of Ben Bernanke's imagination. The "quantities" he's "easing" into existence are hallucinatory. Yet, and here's the beauty shot -- once the Fed "owns" these "securities," they earn "interest" just like everything else. Maybe the Fed "bought" the Treasuries with hallucinated money, but that doesn't mean the Fed isn't entitled to a return on its "investment." And where does the Treasury get the money to pay the Federal Reserve interest, or coupon payments, on the Fed's Treasuries? Glad you asked: from the Fed's program of Quantitative Easing. And to whom or to what is the money remitted to the Fed by the Treasury ultimately paid? Well, to the Treasury, because it's the Fed that holds the Treasury's checking account.

Are you impressed yet? I sure am. Under this program, the deeper the United States Treasury goes into debt, the more money it makes on the investments it makes by buying the debt it just created. Joseph Heller's jaw must be dropping at seeing the imagination of his creation, Milo Minderbinder, one-upped in real life. This is a can't-miss, fool-proof system for national solvency. So of course the federal government's revenues are going to go through the ceiling over the next few years. The federal government will be receiving all that money it owes itself regardless of what the unemployed taxpayers chip in, and the Treasury will be receiving all that income, just to skip a couple of confusing, irrelevant steps, from the money it creates out of thin air.

I don't see any reason the rest of the world's economies should be uneasy about the way we're dealing with Earth's reserve currency, do you? So completely straightforward, fiscally sound, and ingenious. It's one of the many ways we continue to be Exceptional.

The Greenhouse Effect & Fat Tail Distributions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j1KGHOvSkM

Somewhat unAmericanly, when I am interested in scientific data beyond my own cognizance or competence, I find myself consulting sources of information where the people writing about the subject know something, you know, about what the hell they're talking about. This is not actually a bad approach to the arcane and complicated, I find. When in doubt, read something by someone who has studied the subject thoroughly and has come to some honest conclusions about what he or she has looked into. Following such a practice, of course, can place one at odds with the predominant style of opinion-formation in this great land of ours, which might be called blowing it out your barracks bag.

For example, on this global warming issue, which has been relegated to the back burner, so to speak, I read the comments by trolls on various websites and come away with an impression, which is certainly not based on an unskewed sample (because AGW denialists, by their very nature, patrol the vast Internet looking for opportunities to wreak destruction on future generations with a triumphant display of their conventional ignorance and borrowed "gotcha" points, a current favorite being the "solar maximum" argument), and I wonder: does anyone have a simple way to explain the extremes in either direction which seem to be plaguing the world weatherwise? (Today's Secret Word, and I'm sorry Groucho Marx's bird can't drop down to reward you.)

It's been cold and snowy back East this year, although probably not a lot different from the weather which prevailed in the Northeast at the end of "a Little Ice Age" around 1970 (this period of abnormal cold also was present in New England during Thoreau's life there, as reflected in Walden's descriptions of intense cold and deep Pond freezing), so people look at all those snow-blowers and conclude that global warming is a hoax. My own surmise, which is confirmed to a degree by what I read (see above) is that the introduction of all that "forcing energy" in the form of trapped solar infrared radiation would naturally power more violent winds, more copious uptake of ocean evaporation, more of everything, and in cold weather months you would get exactly what we're seeing, blizzards and howling winds, although not necessarily record cold temperatures. All of this happens against a backdrop of an inexorably warming Earth, because there is also no doubt that year after year, the planet is setting records for "warmest year on record, warmest decade on record," et cetera.

The graph above is an elegant depiction of how this works. The bell curve of temperature has been shifted to the right by global warming, reflected as the red curve on the x-axis. The y-axis represents the distribution of weather events, with most of them clustered around the normal range, as is the case (by definition) with bell curves. Along the x-axis, under the fat tails, we can see the effect of skewing the average temperature to the right (warmer). The probabilities of events associated with abnormally warm temperatures (Australia's floods, Russia's epic heat wave destroying 30% of the wheat crop, China's wells going dry), increase in likelihood because the region of distribution (the "fat tails) has been enlarged. Meanwhile, because the average temperature of the Earth has increased on a constant basis, the ongoing problems continue at an accelerating rate (the cascading meltdown of Greenland, Himalayan and South American glaciers, the softening of the tundra, chunks the size of Massachusetts breaking off Antarctica).

It's a kind of dismal consolation, but at least this graphic depiction enables one to grasp why we're seeing the patterns we're seeing. The destruction already caused by AGW seems pretty far advanced, but one can cling to the hope that educated countries outside the theocratically-inclined United States might still organize to do something about it.

How long can bin Laden stay on dialysis?

"Archaeologists originally set the date of the scrolls at 4,000 B.C., or just after the massacre of the Israelites by their benefactors. The writing is a mixture of Sumerian, Aramaic, and Babylonian and seems to have been done by either one man over a long period of time, or several men who shared the same suit. The authenticity of the scrolls is currently in great doubt, particularly since the word “Oldsmobile” appears several times in the text..."

Woody Allen, "The Red Sea Scrolls," from Without Feathers.

No day is completely lost when you can quote Woody Allen. For reasons best known not even to me, I became curious about the current state of the hunt for bin Laden. I know that years and years ago, George W. Bush said something to the effect that "I don't really think about it that much," when asked where bin Laden was; but W never really evinced thinking about much at all, so I don't know how definitive that is. I thought there must be more to the story. After all, when you think about it, bin Laden was the occasion for Bush to use the phrase "casus belli" in a press conference. I remember the sly grin on his face when he said those words. You could tell he was pretty sure the half-wits in the press corps probably didn't know what he meant - a chance for George to throw some Latin around at their expense! I was proud of him, I really was. He overdid it when he started using the phrase again in relation to Iraq, but that's another story.

Well anyway, the casus belli for Afghanistan was a meticulously constructed argument built upon the following premises:

1. Osama bin Laden was the mastermind behind 9/11.

2. OBL lived in Afghanistan, Kandahar to be exact, and the Taliban "harbored" him, thus enabling OBL to plan "further attacks," using the Fiendish Jungle Gym Complex at his camp.

3. Anyone harboring terrorists is with the terrorists under the Bush doctrine that you are either with Bush or against him (echoing things he heard every Sunday at United Baptist: "I would that ye were either hot or cold, for if ye be lukewarm, I will spew thee out of my mouth.").

4. We must therefore invade Afghanistan, depose the Taliban, and install someone like Hamid Karzai, former PR man for Union Oil and current heroin dealer.

There may be some causal links in there confounding the "belli" part, but I think that's pretty close. Just about an airtight case, any way you look at it. Some caveats were noted:

A. Bin Laden himself denied any involvement in 9/11.

B. The Taliban, who had previously met with Cheney & others in Texas for a barbecue to discuss the construction of a Union Oil pipeline across Afghanistan (prior to W's ascension to the Bush Throne), asked for, but apparently did not receive, some sort of definitive proof that OBL was actually involved.

C. No one involved in 9/11 was actually from Afghanistan. They were all from Arab countries, principally Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE, and the mastermind was probably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Gurgling Confessor of waterboarding fame, who was only too glad, between swallows, to finger OBL as much as the CIA wanted. Indeed, there seems to be a substantial pesonnel overlap between 9/11 and the Bojinka Plot and the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

But what the hell do I know? I do sometimes think, however, that one problem with a certain vintage of the Baby Boom set (among whose number you can count me and W) is that we were overexposed to the Dick&Jane primers in grammar school, and as a result a kind of infantilization of logical processes took root in the cerebral cortex and has controlled our thinking ever since. This theory, again, will make people forget neither Godel nor Boltzmann but it's maybe something to think about. That list of 1 through 4, supra, is suggestive of this weakening of the analytical faculties, because, really, that list just doesn't make any frigging sense whatsoever. And when you think that we have waged a war that has lasted almost ten years on the basis of that list, then perhaps you know all you need to know about the state of the nation, circa turn of the Millenium.

Nevertheless, I got to thinking again about the Arch-Nemesis, the Mastermind, the Lex Luthor of the Neocons' perfervid nightmares: Osama bin Laden. And it occurred to me: ten years is a long time to be on dialysis in a cave in the mountains of Tora Bora. So I Googled the Dude. The consensus of opinion turns out to be that he died on December 13, 2001, in Tora Bora, of complications from acute kidney failure. Among the people holding this view are Robert Baer, the highly-quotable ex-CIA agent who is a persistent critic of America's anti-terrorist wars; former Pakistan "President" Pervez Musharraf; the aforemention Hamid Karzai; Donald Rumsfeld, when you get right down to it; Dale Watson, head of the FBI's Counter-Terrorism division; the Israeli Mossad; and lots and lots of other people. Were you aware of this general trend in thinking?

But haven't there been videos of bin Laden after December 13, 2001? Highly debatable. There is strong evidence that a "double" appears in those videos, including the famous one where bin Laden sits and discusses the fine points of the 9/11 attacks. Cynics have noted that bin Laden referred to melting "iron" in the Twin Towers, while a person trained in engineering (as bin Laden was) would have known the towers were built of steel, not iron. Plus, he appears to write something with his right hand in the video, and bin Laden was left-handed, not to mention that the person appearing in these videos is darker than OBL, with a black (not salt-and-pepper) beard, and with a broader and flatter nose.

All "9-11 conspiracy" stuff? What's harder to believe is that an abnormally tall Arab could actually make his way around in mountainous terrain for a decade tethered to a dialysis machine, with a $50 million price on his head, and not attract some attention, somewhere, somehow. Yet what is most astounding to me is why the press has never really zoomed in on this story and figured it out. Leaving aside the invasion of Iraq, which was a foreign policy aberration of George W. Bush and had nothing to do with the "war on terror," the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is built wholly and solely on the association of bin Laden with that country. So if the guy died within a couple of months of our invasion, isn't that, you know, newsworthy? Just how lame are the Mainstream Media?

I suppose if Elvis is still alive, then bin Laden might be too. Driving around somewhere in Waziristan in his vintage Oldsmobile.

High Speed Rail & Schizo-Politicosis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMLgEnDGkG4

As I fumble my way toward my magnum opus, trying to define my topic, trying to describe the underlying connections between certain modern, media-related phenomena that have made our lives seem so alien to us...

One idea that keeps coming to mind, and I don't know how it relates to the overarching Theory of Everything, is that political discourse in America has taken leave of any lingering connection to reality in favor of an ideologically-driven style of "thinking" about all problems. As one example: as I played chess online, I listened with one ear to President Holograma's State of the Union Address. I believe at one point he voiced his support for high speed rail and talked about demonstration projects in different locations around the country. And the thought occurred to me: why don't you just build an intercontinental system? We have lots of unemployed people in the construction and manufacturing trades. We have tons of unused factory capacity, such as in Detroit (Michael Moore had the canny idea a couple of years ago that Obama ought to convert a lot of the auto manufacturing business to building locomotives and rolling stock for a national rail system, instead of propping up General Motors). Hire all those people and let's get to work. We need transportation. We need jobs. Air travel is a killer when it comes to carbon dioxide pollution. We need a way to get away from the single-auto mode of moving around.

Just build the damn thing. We must have the money, because we always find it when we need to invade the Middle East. Why can't we invade our own Midwest, say, with a high speed rail project?

It's right at this point that the insanity sets in. Immediately. First, everyone must consult their internal ideological gyroscope: is this Socialist, or is this Free Enterprise? That's the first cut. Obama must be very cautious (second nature to him) because he knows that Jim DeMint does not want anything whatsoever done that even sounds like government involvement in doing something other than building bombs. It might be better to "seed" private enterprise and just kind of hope that the private sector does it. The Obama Administration is sinking a whole $27 million into "promising" solar projects, for example. Imagine that. $27 million. And, over a very long period, $18 billion into high speed rail, if Congress will let him have the money after he's already out of office.

In China, Japan, Germany, France, Spain and the rest of the civilized world, they do not really detain themselves with ideological debates before they build high speed rail networks. It's assumed that such public facilities will require government support. They don't have to "pay for themselves." A Harvard economist named Edward Glaeser recently wrote a series of posts at the always-helpful New York Times in which he knocked HSR around because of its costs and other problems he foresaw. He used a hypothetical HSR line from Dallas to Houston for his model, which raised an immediate question in my mind: why would anyone in Dallas want to go to Houston? His hit pieces can be found here: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/high-speed-rail/ Thanks a lot for that, Mr. Glaeser, you buzzkill. The one thing I noted, in skimming through his analysis, is that all of his estimates are complete guesswork: cost per mile of construction, maintenance cost, everything. It's a complete GIGO situation that doesn't explain anything. After reading his blog posts, I had to ask myself whether it was simply a hallucination that I rode the AVE Spanish high speed train from Madrid to Seville, or the TGV from Lyon to Paris. Did those rides really happen, or can Prof. Glaeser correct my faulty memory? How were these other countries able to build these trains and continue to operate them?

I wonder if the free market extremists, in demanding that any good new idea always pay for itself, ever consider that the federal government currently taxes gasoline sold in this country to the tune of 18 cents/gallon, and that the money in this fund is used, among other things, to maintain the interstate highway system. Why don't the conservatives demand that the highway system pay for itself and refuse to drive on the nation's roads until they become self-sustaining? Why do we have a Federal Aviation Administration? Shouldn't the planes be allowed to collide in midair rather than risk doing something so obviously Communist?

Anyway, building a high speed rail system connecting all the major metropolitan areas in this country would really be something, which is why I suppose it has zero chance of getting anywhere over the next twenty years or so. We always begin every debate over doing anything with a very long, protracted discussion about which kind of "thing" it is, socialist, capitalist, anarcho-syndicalist, and expend all of our energy in this pointless drivel confirming everyone in their ideological purity. Then we move on to the next thing we don't do.

As I say, somehow this tendency, this increasingly ingrained habit of mind, has something to do with my Overall Theory of Everything. I don't think it will make anyone forget Godel's Incompleteness Theory, but perhaps 'tis enough, 'twill serve.

A note on the unemployment rate

Various wags around the blogosphere are having a lot of fun at the expense of Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor, and her Bureau of Labor Statistics, which some have taken to calling the Ministry of Truth with reference to the dystopian misinformation bureau in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The latest fuel on the fire came in the form of Friday's NFP (Non-Farm Payroll Report) which claimed that 36,000 Americans found jobs in the prior month, and that as a result the U-3 unemployment rate (which is the only one the media/political class ever pays attention to) had fallen from 9.4% to 9.0%.

Since as everyone knows (because the fact is repeated endlessly everywhere you look) the United States hatches about 125,000 to 150,000 new workers each month just through the maturation of the population, many looked askance at the effect of a number approximately 1/4th the size of the average of these two numbers in lowering the overall UE rate. Some cynics then suggested that if 36,000 new workers could lower the UE rate by .4%, then a bonanza month of hiring, say on the order of 360,000, well within historical precedent for previous recoveries, should take us all the way down to about 5%, which in Darwinian capitalism (the kind we practice) represents full employment. In other words, we're almost there.

Yet that seems a little crazy. How could such a huge problem of unemployment be solved with one fairly average good month, and with such a paltry number compared to the problem? Thus, rather than being like the other guys & gals writing about this, I decided to hike on over to the Bureau of Labor Stats website and see what was going on. Is Hilda, the lovely child of Mexican and Nicaraguan immigrants, a loyal cadre of BarackObama's 2008 campaign who was rewarded for helping the O-Man with the Latino vote with a plum job in his administration despite virtually no visible qualifications for the position - is she cooking the books?

Of course not. For one thing, Hilda began as a supporter for Hillary Clinton and only started delivering La Raza for Barack when that fell through (though I was thinking, she must be quite an operator to turn on a dime like that and convince the wily Obama she was worth bringing onto his team). Hilda's a good California kid from the San Gabriel Mountains area, educated at Cal State Poly-Pomona, who worked her way up through the ranks of California state politics. It's just a guess, but I doubt that she knows anything more about statistical manipulation than she does about labor policy, whatever that might be. In general, with the notable exception of Steven Chu at Energy, there isn't much correlation between career expertise and cabinet position. It's more what the cabinet-appointees "have been interested in" at some point, such as a rancher being "interested" in the Interior or Eric "Place" Holder being "interested in" law.

But one thing I learned at Albion H. Horrall Elementary School in San Mateo, California, in the halcyon 1950's of this great country of ours was that a percentage is essentially a conversion of a fraction. 3 is 60% of 5 because 5 divided into 3 = .6. It's just that simple. So these cynics and carpers can go on all they want about the ridiculousness of 36,000 hires lowering the UE rate by .4% but it still all comes down to a matter of a numerator and a denominator. And the denominator is the Obama Administration's friend, see, because the FAQ for the BLS tells you exactly who is in that pool:

Who is counted as unemployed?

Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work.

Workers expecting to be recalled from layoff are counted as unemployed, whether or not they have engaged in a specific jobseeking activity. In all other cases, the individual must have been engaged in at least one active job search activity in the 4 weeks preceding the interview and be available for work...

So there you go. Now if I can do that, why can't the other wiseguys? It's right there in front of us. Hilda has delivered once again for Obama, because I can assure you that the number he's going to use is that 9.0%, not some exotic indicator like the U-6, which sounds a lot worse, and he's not going to go into a lot of detail about how the denominator for U-3 is calculated. That's how politics works in a mass-media society, a subject which admittedly fascinates me. The public, the media, everything and everyone, are simply worn down by the repetition of the residual number, in this case 9%. There just isn't the patience or the mental space in our frenetic, crowded culture, every damn time out, to go into a whole routine about how the U-3 actually got better because the economy is so uber-shitty that no one even bothers to look for a job anymore, which is the actual, literal truth, but to point that out takes time and understanding, and those things don't exist anymore. The key to effective Presidentialness, and Obama understands this, I think, better than he understands anything else (it is the whole secret of his success) is to seize the headline numbers and make them work for you because no one, ever, is going to look at anything else, and your opponents are going to battle you on that turf.

Which is to say: modern mass-media politics is not actually about reality. It is essentially, only, exclusively, about the management of perceptions. It cannot do anything about real problems because it does not engage real problems; it only engages their simulacra, their indicia, their Platonic Shadows on the Cave Walls of Reality.

Laughing at the Apocalypse

Dmitry Orlov has a new video up which is worth watching in its 1/2 hour entirety. I was intrigued to hear him echo something I wrote about a while back in these very pages, the idea that what the United States is involved in now, toying and tinkering while it verges on collapse, is not in any sense necessary or inevitable (a million electric cars by 2015! Now I see what Obama meant by Change! That's nearly 1/2 of one percent of all cars on the American road!). As a uniquely positioned nation, in terms of latitude, resources and relative remoteness, the USA has always had it within its potential to order its economy and political arrangements so that all basic human needs are met. Orlov, in fact, sounds a great deal like Thoreau when he talks in these terms, especially when he describes the "ambitious" human activities that not only are not necessary but actually detract from a worthwhile and enjoyable life. It is all these "ambitious" and grandiose pursuits, such as a world empire and the globalization of the economy, which have led to the precarious position the USA now finds itself in. The video is on Orlov's cluborlov.blogspot.com website, or here in YouTube format:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zrz5ucQACo8

I'm always amused by Dmitry's deadpan, phlegmatic delivery, which makes Noam Chomsky seem like an ADD sufferer by comparison. The contrast of style with Orlov's subject matter could not be more stark. Who else could calmly discuss a die-off of 5/6ths of the world's population and a reversion of human civilization to hunter-gatherer status without ever betraying any angst? Only Dmitry, I think.

He has obviously thought very deeply about the subjects of global warming and peak oil, and the basic problems he outlines are impossible to rationally dismiss. The calm denial of the human race in the face of what's coming is not so surprising, of course, since it is that attitude which has allowed the problems to go past the point of no return. I agree with Orlov that we're now in the adaptive rather than ameliorative mode. When you get right down to it, that's just how mankind rolls.

Welcome to the Midway

Something in a comment on a Zerohedge post rocked my thinking: the United States government is now in a position where it needs to borrow one-half trillion dollars every three months just to stay in business. One arrives at this conclusion by considering that the official deficit is $1.5 trillion, which is the difference between tax revenues and federal outlays, and then noting that the national debt grows by $2 trillion per year, reflecting that the Treasury must also borrow money in order to pay maturing (rollover) obligations coming due, with Niagara-like relentlessness, on an ongoing basis.

When you think about things like that, you begin asking yourself: Does America even have an economy? We may, in fact, have entered a period which one could call the Postmodern Economy, one in which almost all income-producing activity is accomplished by illusion and sleight-of-hand. The fiscal position of the U.S. government, in this sense, is simply illustrative of the underlying reality, or lack thereof. America has become completely dependent on its status as the printer of the world's reserve currency. That is not only our ace in the hole, it is our entire hand at this point.

Consider that the Federal Reserve Bank is now the single largest holder of Treasury debt in the world, bigger than China, bigger than Japan. This fact alone must cause a thoughtful person to wonder just what the hell is going on. How can the Federal Reserve Bank, which is the bank where the Treasury Department maintains the U.S. checking account, and is in some ways the alter ego of the Treasury Department, also be a creditor of the U.S. government, especially when the Federal Reserve Bank is also the entity responsible for creating U.S. money in the first place? How can an entity which creates money at will for the debtor become a creditor of the entity which it creates the money for?

Add to this observation that the "debt" which the Federal Reserve Bank holds is "purchased" by the Bank with money which it creates out of thin air. The Permanent Open Market Operations (POMO) of the Federal Reserve are illustrative of the shell game methods by which this is accomplished. The Treasury auctions off bonds of a certain duration. Among the participants in such auctions are the Primary Dealers (PDs), a group of 18 banks and broker-dealers which are required, in order to avail themselves of the many benefits of being in the In Crowd, to participate in such auctions. Let us say that the PDs take down about 50% of the total auction, and let's say the total auction equals $15 billion. Thus, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, et al, pay in $7.5 billion. A short time later, often the next week, the Fed conducts a POMO in which it goes into the "open market" and offers to buy back the same Treasuries which were just auctioned off. The PDs then regurgitate a significant fraction of the bonds which they just bought back at the Fed, often selling at a premium, functioning, I guess, as some sort of reward for their cooperation in keeping the shell game going.

Where does the Fed get the "money" to "buy" these Treasuries from the (very) recent purchasers? It creates the money out of thin air. Now ask yourself a simple question: is there a material difference between what just happened and the Treasury simply buying its own debt? One might point out that the Fed has only purchased a "fraction" of the just-sold bonds. True, but that's for each POMO operation, and the Fed just keeps buying, with at least $600 billion planned for the latest go-round of Quantitative Easing. Another question is equally obvious: would the PDs, the Kool Kids on Wall Street, even bother with these ultra low yield instruments if they did not know the Fed was planning to buy them all back, plus a kicker, in the next week or so?

The Treasury's ability to raise money through bond auctions, in other words, is heavily subsidized by the actions of its own bank in creating an immediate secondary market for the stuff it sells, and that bank, the Fed, creates the money for the secondary market by hallucinating it into existence.

We do not need to be detained by shell games, since we are innocent bystanders not directly involved in this conspiracy. We can collapse the process and simplify terms, using Occam's Razor to avoid the multiplicity of entities involved. If we simply equate the Fed to the Treasury and call it the TRED, for example, then we can see that what is really happening is that the TRED, or the Treasury itself, is creating the money to buy its own "debt" to a significant fraction of the total debt issued, probably at least on the order of 50%, and this fraction is increasing. Thus, while Ben Bernanke has sworn under oath that the Federal Reserve would not monetize debt, this, in fact, is exactly what the Fed is doing: it is monetizing America's huge, gaping deficits by printing money and running it through a complicated shell game to conceal just how close we are to the abyss, and to hide the very scary truth that no natural, realistic market for American debt exists at any interest rate which the country could afford to pay for the amounts of trash we need to issue to keep the game going.

An organic, actual economy, of the kind the United States once had, where Americans had real jobs and made real money, and sold actual stuff to foreign markets, and where large percentages of the American populace were engaged in productive activities such as agriculture and building cars and fabricating steel, produces a tax base which allows the federal government to function more or less in balance with the underlying activity. That American economy is gone, hollowed out by globalization and the impoverishment of the populace. About 47% of the American working age population actually has a real, full-time job. All kinds of games can be played with metrics such as U-3 and U-6, with its many categories of part-time, marginally attached, discouraged, etc., but those figures are strictly for the election cycle and for the economics departments of universities with close government connections. They do not reflect the underlying reality in the country. Close to 50 million Americans receive food stamps so they can eat. That is about 16% of the entire population.

Anyway, I think I answered my own question.

Strike Two for Obamacare

Judge Roger Vinson's opinion in the Florida case striking down the Obama health care law is a far more serious problem for the Democrats than the previous district court ruling in Virginia reaching the same result. No doubt the case of McCollum vs. Dept. of Health & Human Services was helped along by the forum shopping available to state actions. The Florida Attorney General chose Pensacola, in the Redneck Riviera, as the venue and probably hoped that Judge Vinson, a Reagan appointee, would wind up with the case. All of this went according to plan.

McCollum (wasn't he one of the lawyers who appeared on TV regularly during the Gore-Bush Florida thing?) was joined by 25 other states in challenging the constitutionality of the law. Most of those states are among the group you would expect to join Florida, but there were a few surprises, such as Maine and Washington. The challenges to the law were fairly sophisticated; in addition to the Zen-like question framed in the Virginia case, is the not doing of something an "activity?", a second argument, which I think is actually more compelling, was involved in the plaintiffs' complaint. Namely, if you force the states to expand Medicaid (as the act does) by expanding the boundaries of poverty to include those not currently eligible for Medicaid, but do not provide the funding for the expansion, is Congress engaging in unconstitutional coercion of the states in violation of the Tenth Amendment (the "states' rights" Amendment). I wondered about that myself. Bush's No Child Left Behind program suffered from the same problem - a massive mandate from Congress impinging on local budgetary decisions about schools with no earthly way to pay for it all.

Judge Vinson essentially passed on the "coercion" argument and stated that at the present time it's not possible to tell whether the states will ultimately benefit from Obamacare or go broke trying to comply. Since he was ruling on a Motion for Summary Judgment (a proceeding without a formal evidentiary trial), he gave that one to the DHS on a TKO.

As to the Zen koan, however, Judge Vinson was much more thorough and scholarly than the earlier Virginia judge, and cited numerous Commerce Clause cases which dealt with the "activity-nonactivity" dichotomy involved in Congressional authority to regulate. Essentially, as I read his long, 78-page opinion, Vinson essentially forced the DHS and the U.S. Government to admit (and remember, the U.S. team is ultimately headed up by Eric "Place" Holder, perhaps the most passive Attorney General in the history of the Republic) that there are no cases where Congress regulated what is so clearly a "non-activity" or a "non-decision," and he did a very good job (bordering on masterful) of making ridiculous the DHS's strained efforts to demonstrate that not buying health insurance is an "activity," or that the "activity" can be supplied by Congress fining or penalizing someone who chooses not to buy health insurance. Vinson pointed out that if the second criterion worked under the Commerce Clause, then Congress could regulate anything so long as they attached a penalty to not doing it. Touche, with or without the accent.

Since Judge Vinson found that the plan can't work at all without the individual mandate to buy insurance, he declared the entire law unconstitutional (nonseverable, in law-speak). This again is an extension of the previous ruling against the DHS.

I would say that in some ways the ruling opened my eyes. I did not realize on what shaky Constitutional grounds those hacks in the Democratic Party were operating on in coming up with this massive gift to the insurance industry, the individual mandate requiring the purchase of a private commercial product from a private corporation on pain of a federal penalty. It turns out they were venturing into the unknown in their craven desperation to avoid confronting the real and obvious solution: a single-payer system where you just get rid of this whole merciless, stupid idea of profiting from the illnesses of American citizens.

As I said before, who knows what the Supreme Court will do with this thing? Scalia is a "strict Constructionist" so he might favor a narrow reading of the Commerce Clause. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito are corporate stooges who probably like the idea of an expanded market for their friends in the insurance industry. Thomas will do what Scalia does. The rest will probably be pro-government, except not necessarily Justice Anthony Kennedy, who will decide the fate of Obamacare, as he decides the fate of every big decision divided along partisan lines. It all depends on what he has for breakfast the day the case is decided.

9 on a scale of 10 sphinxter response

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHngF_b3NuE&feature=related

First, an updating of the Riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and struggles on three wheels as it fights for lift-off in the afternoon? Answer: Hosni Mubarak, as a child, as an adult and then as a deposed dictator trying to flee in his Lear with most of the country's gold reserves.

With that out of the way, about this situation in Egypt: first, it's damned inconsiderate of the Egyptian masses to carry on this way because it forces the U.S. government to come up with some way to make glad noises about freedom, self-determination, et cetera, while hoping against hope that in some way or other we can keep our corporate-friendly thug in power so the real business of America, business (Calvin Coolidge said that, I think, or maybe it was Hoover) can proceed as planned. I watched the outgoing Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, writhe and squirm for about a half hour yesterday trying to find different ways to say "we're monitoring the situation," including "monitoring closely," "following the situation closely," "in regular contact with the situation," and other similar filler. Nevertheless, no one seems to think Hosni is going to survive this uprising, so Egypt's version of Dr. No, Mohammed El-Baradei, is being warmed up in the bullpen so we have someone we can control when the dust settles. You'll recall Ahmed Chalabi, Iraq's embezzler/carpetbagger/Friend of Cheney, who was going to be installed by the Neocons after the fall of Saddam. The best laid plans of mice & men aft gang aglay...

This thing with Mubarak is pretty dicey. You can probably recall President Barack Holograma's speech in Cairo a couple of years ago when he limned the sorry tendency of America to be on the wrong side of history in the Third World, usually siding with the resident Thugocracy instead of the uncontrollable masses. Thus, going with the Shah in Iran instead of their constitutionally elected president, pulling the same trick in Iraq before Saddam, and like that. I remember Charles Krauthammer, he of the train-tunnel-sized nostrils and haughty manner, questioning in the Washington Post whether Mr. Obama was actually fit to be President when he harbored such anti-U.S. sentiments. Now the Egyptians themselves, the very people the O-Man was talking to, are presenting a test of the sincerity of the statements therein expressed.

Iraq was easy compared to this. George W. Bush could sincerely celebrate "freedom on the march" there because Saddam was seriously contemplating getting into oil deals where the euro would replace the greenback as the reserve currency for settling Iraqi petroleum sales. This little move threatened the very lifeblood of American hegemony. Almost any puppet regime, and most certainly Dr. No, a sympathetic crook, was preferable to letting that trend gain traction. Plus, W reasoned he could go the prissy GHW Bush one better by finally toppling Saddam once and for all, and with that cakewalk under his belt (sorry, that's a mixed metaphor worthy of Thomas L. Friedman - well, it is Sunday, and there's no Tom to read because of his book leave) W's reelection would be assured. Imagine W's consternation when it almost cost him the whole deal, but fortunately, George was running for reelection in the United States of America, where scarcely 40% of the populace believes in science. So how hard was it to convince about 79% of them that Saddam had personally planned 9/11 on his Compaq Presario? More cake under W's Lone Star belt buckle. (If Friedman doesn't come back, I think I'm ready to take over.)

Back to the Land of the Pharoahs. Egypt presents a different kind of Pyramid Scheme from the one the Wall Street gangsters (and the U.S. Treasury) have perfected here at home. As the Egyptian riot police fire American-made rubber bullets and American-made tear gas cannisters at the rebels (all this ordnance helpfully stamped with its place of origin, the better to display on Al Jazeera), Obama and his team of corporate insiders feverishly look for just the right way to remain publicly noncommittal while quietly hoping that Egypt, home to half the world's Arabs, settles back into a nice, quiet, dependable tyranny, where a friendly guy who manages to win 99.9% of the vote every few years, and has been doing so for 30 years despite the overwhelming opposition of the electorate, can find a way to hang in there until this whole thing blows over, the way it did in Iran. Because now things are beginning to heat up in Jeddah, and while losing Egypt to democracy could probably be folded into our globalist scheme, the idea of the Ghawar reserves, the longest-tusked of all the Elephant Oil Fields, falling into hands other than the bony grasp of the gerontocrats who rule Saudi Arabia (described by one Berkeley prof as "less a country than a family-owned filling station")...is just too much to bear. The world is at oil equilibrium about now, no doubt we're at peak, and any sizable disruption (and the Saudi contribution would certainly be that) would expose the terrible miscalculation of the federal government in not switching to a non-oil-import paradigm for American transportation a long, long time ago...about when Jimmy Carter gave his famous speech about energy independence.

Things could get very interesting indeed if that happens, and it probably will. Do we then invade Saudi Arabia to save a dictatorship? If we don't, are we all going to wind up walking...like an Egyptian?

Do the States Belong to the Union?

I have read different legal opinions on the right of the states to secede. There is the Governor Rick Perry approach, which seems to assume, without citing authority, that if Texas wants to leave the Union, it is free to do so, although in truth I have read analyses which support the governor's view. (He and I have had a symbiotic relationship ever since his campaign, misunderstanding the irony in one of my posts, quoted Waldenswimmer at length in a refutation of Keith Olbermann's sarcastic handling of Perry's claim, which was correct, that Texas is economically better off without the United States than with it.)

Abraham Lincoln led the Union in the Civil War to quell what he considered an unconstitutional multi-state breakaway. The South, of course, called Lincoln's action the "war of Northern Aggression." Since might makes right, the actual underlying legalities were never resolved. I have the general feeling the issue is going to arise again. I have felt for a long time that the United States, as presently constituted, is unworkable for reasons of regional incompatibility, size and complexity. It remains together, I think, primarily for reasons of institutional inertia. For example, President Barack Obama cannot really be president of the United States of America if those very states cease to be united. Many, many political, economic and media elites rely upon the existence of the USA as presently put together for their livelihoods, prestige and reputations. To a great extent, institutional perpetuation is more important to these opinion leaders than whether the union makes a whole lot of sense.

Yet the question whether it actually makes sense remains. As Chalmers Johnson predicted with deadly accuracy, the strains of empire and unsustainable debt are now beginning to work a fierce toll on the body politic. The Hologram did a nice job on Tuesday night of trotting out, one more time, the usual bromides around American Exceptionalism ("winning the future;" maybe just getting there would be enough), but what was notable was how little impact this cheerleading had on the national mood. Almost within minutes the Congressional Budget Office was out with the alarming news that Social Security is now in the red; that the deficit for this fiscal year will be around $1.5 trillion; and that we're probably stuck with the same pitiful income (around $2.2 trillion) as last year, thanks to the wisdom of the Republican/Hologram pact to reduce American income through tax tinkering. I don't believe there is any earthly way for the two ossified political parties which control this country to reach a rational compromise on making the country solvent again, and meanwhile the great mass of Americans remain essentially unrepresented by their representative government. The central government simply acts as the enabler of a small stratum of multi-national corporate operators who themselves are only marginally attached to the United States (and those attachments are purely financial and have nothing to do with "patriotism."). These elites use the Third World's labor supply and America as headquarters for their farflung enterprises, but the participation of about 89% of the American people is limited to buying what these companies make (given that manufacturing is only 11% of the American economy).

The United States has a large enough land area and population to support about four countries the size of Germany (actually, geographically we are much larger than that), or six or so countries the size of France. Within our large boundaries we have populations which favor theocratic rule (the Deep South, Western prairie areas such as Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, et cetera) the same way that many Muslim countries prefer Sharia law. Yet Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia and the rest are frustrated in their attempts to install the Bible as their foundational legal document by the heathens of the Northeast and West Coast. Their goals are simple in a way: to make abortion murder; to outlaw the teaching of evolution, global warming and science in general; to make school prayer mandatory; and to put a gun in the hand of every citizen. The "progressive" areas of the country want to proceed with the 21st century, to advance scientifically, to deal with the world in a factual way rather than on the basis of delusions and mythology, to cope with environmental catastrophes so that the human species survives, and other modest aims, which are in a way consistent with the approach of the social democracies of Western Europe. Some areas are more ecologically oriented, some agrarian, and so forth. Just like the rest of the world.

Something has to give. A federation providing for reasonable common defense, along the lines of NATO, could achieve the one overarching area of shared purpose among the new nations of North America and perhaps avoid an internecine war among the new polities. The European Union could serve as a model for cooperation and freedom of travel, although I suspect that strict immigration controls would be necessary to ensure rational planning in the new alignment.

The Eastern Bloc, Yugolslavia, and many other areas have achieved stability following an initial period of sometimes chaotic disintegration. It appears that the archaic dictators of the north of Africa are now beginning their disappearance from the world stage, and that process will probably spread to the Middle East in general (Saudi Arabia, Yemen and others). Change is in the air. It is a propitious moment to begin thinking of ways to stop throwing good money after bad and to cease operating on the illusion of a shared common purpose which has probably not actually existed since the 1960's.

A rational reorganization would certainly beat the hell out of a breakdown forced upon us by bankruptcy or military overthrow. Maybe Jerry Brown of California and Rick Perry of Texas could discover they have something in common after all. Haven't both of them, after all, wanted to be the President of someplace themselves?

On the Appalachian Trail: The Governor & Maria

Mr. Smooth

It's interesting to watch something like the State of the Union on a live feed without commentators talking over the audio. I could hear what President Obama was saying as he entered the House chamber, undiluted by Chris Matthews telling me that "the President can really work a room." He can, but I was able to figure that out better without Chris's help. Obama, like a lot of upbeat extroverts, seems to take energy from human interaction, in the same way Bill Clinton did. You could see with George W. Bush that the whole process was pretty wearing. He just wanted to crawl into bed, or maybe into a whiskey bottle.

The O man is a master of the small, personalized comment, the bro-hug, the chaste kiss on the cheek (particularly of the women of color in government), the back-pat, the handshake that swings into position in a roundhouse loop. He's charming and he puts people at their ease, and watching him up close (with no Chris Matthews in your ear), you got a palpable sense of his charisma. He's the goods, alright. Particularly in a room full of nerds and geeks, Barack Obama stands out as an actual guy.

As for the speech, well, what the hell can you say about a speech anymore? It was fine. Barack doesn't try to scale the rhetorical heights these days. He's above average in his delivery, his timing and cadence are good, but he's left off from the old style Baptist Revival stemwinding. Anyway, it's hard to get too worked up over stuff like spending freezes - the phrases sort of die on delivery.

Like a lot of charming, intellectually shifty operators, the President doesn't betray any kind of embarrassment over obvious reversals in his position or his adoption of the rhetoric of the former opposition. Indeed, this has become something of an Obama trademark. Take, for example, what he had to say about Iraq:

Look to Iraq, where nearly 100,000 of our brave men and women have left with their heads held high; where American combat patrols have ended; violence has come down; and a new government has been formed. This year, our civilians will forge a lasting partnership with the Iraqi people, while we finish the job of bringing our troops out of Iraq. America's commitment has been kept; the Iraq War is coming to an end.

This looks innocuous enough, even meaningless, but consider for a moment: Obama ran for office declaring that the Iraq war was a "dumb war." He was certainly right about that. What "commitment" did we keep? We invaded Iraq because the Bush Administration told us that otherwise the bad news might arrive "in the form of a mushroom cloud." Remember? We invaded Iraq because of its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, not as an exercise in nation building. It appears to me that Obama is conceding, as he has on other points concerning the Great War on Terror, that Bush and Cheney were right all along and he was wrong.

Then there's this:

We are living with a legacy of deficit-spending that began almost a decade ago. And in the wake of the financial crisis, some of that was necessary to keep credit flowing, save jobs, and put money in people's pockets.

Not quite, Mr. President. Why is Obama carrying Ronald Reagan's water? That's where the big impetus to deficit financing began, not "almost a decade ago." It was Reagan's administration which, after sharply increasing FICA taxes, began raiding that very surplus created, a wholesale thievery which continued until the system could simply not produce a surplus any longer. $2.55 trillion later, however. It was Reagan who decided to ignore Dwight Eisenhower's warning about the "military industrial complex" and switch the country over completely to "military Keynesianism." Granted, the deficits and the national debt are now totally out of control, and our only hope for funding ourselves is to engage in Ponzi schemes like the Federal Reserve's massive purchasing of our own debt. But this was a problem created over a three decade era, not just in recent years.

Ah well, I think in many ways Mr. Obama is a man for our season, a sunny optimist with a nice list of bromides and a charming way of delivering them. Americans don't really want to hear the truth anyway, and if we're going to be lied to, then we may as well hear it from such a natural crowd pleaser. He makes us feel good about ourselves, even when there's absolutely no reason to feel that way.

Preview of post-SOTU analysis

(On an MSNBC sound stage):

Chris Matthews: I'm top dog again. I run this place, not the ESPN guy. But I do want to say something about Keith before we start - he got real, and he paid the price. I hope we can all take something away from that.

Lawrence O'Donnell: Good point, Chris. That's where his sports background let him down - it's okay to sound critical, but within limits. You have to finish on a high note, that despite everything you just said, indicating that things can't possibly be okay, that everything is, in fact, okay.

Rachel Maddow: It is okay, but it's not really okay, but being able to say it's not okay means this is still the greatest country on earth.

CM: Thanks for saying that, Rachel. It's something we need to remind ourselves of - we don't get everything right, but in some completely nonquantifiable, unverifiable way, we get almost everything right so that we're okay.

L O'D: I thought the great thing about the speech tonight is that the President brought that fact home.

CM: What did you think of the Republicans and Democrats all mixed up in the seating? Optics, real?

L O'D: Real in an optical way. The optics were there, it's good, I think we're feeling better knowing that bipartisanship is not just an illusion but a seating chart.

CM: I got the old tingle up my leg looking at it. Jesus, what a country!

RM: It's significant, and the President is the main beneficiary. He waited this country out - he kept insisting we could overcome our differences, and his patience now looks visionary. The 100% Republican House vote to repeal his most important legislative achievement can be put in perspective now - just politics, but working together is the way forward.

L O'D: It is the way forward and I think you'll see a change in tone now. Barack Obama met the Republicans halfway, three-fourths of the way, seven-eighths of the way, three million nine hundred fifty seven-three million nine hundred fifty-eighths of the way, whatever - I'm not a mathematician, I'm a screen writer.

CM: It's thrilling. The tingle is really something tonight. I can't wait to take my pants off later.

RM: Obama said he could politic, or politick, doesn't matter, I'm saying this not writing it, pretty good, and I think he's proving that he knew something about himself that others thought maybe he had forgotten, but those Republicans sitting with those Democrats to me indicates that his message has gotten through and now we're going to pull together and become that competitive place he was talking about, going head to head against the best the world has to offer.

CM: In some ways I think Keith got out just in time, because his shrill tone just doesn't fit this new America we saw tonight, the one with Republicans and Democrats all jumbled up in the gallery, and it was thrilling to me, tingly, seeing that really the one thing everyone has in common is that they're just Americans, at the end of the day, and that's just it.

RM: Thanks for saying that, Chris.

(Fade out.)

There's No Escaping This Conclusion

Note to J.M.: I agree with you that the Republican "cross-sitting" (and thanks for that funny description) is probably not related to Congressional gay cruising. It just seemed somewhat out of character for the Republicans to cooperate with Obama about anything, although now when I think about it, quite some time back the President met with the Republican House Caucus for a Q&A and they positively gushed over him - like groupies or something. Which makes the spooky solidarity in everything they do all the weirder, but perhaps typical of authoritarian thinkers who love being part of a Movement. Anyway, I doubt that the gallery action on Tuesday night will look much like the Dom DeLuise scenes at the close of "Blazing Saddles," but who knows. Even if I'm right, it's important to quote Seinfeld at this point: not that there's anything wrong with that.

On an unrelated note, thinking about the Clear and Present Danger presented by the prospect of another Friedman book, I was moved to read again the two funniest book reviews I've ever read, both by Matt Taiibi and both about the hilariously misplaced self-righteousness of the "porn-stached" columnist of the New York Times, which I link here. Taiibi was born going for the jugular, I think, and when he's done with one of his literary demolitions his target is in the same shape as Carthage after the Romans: not a stone standing upon a stone.

http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html

http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html

O & the SOTU

Ho-hum. Tuesday night we will hear President Obama's State of the Union speech. Although I don't have cable television anymore (it's a personal thing between me and Comcast - okay, I'll tell you what it is. See, for some reason my county granted Comcast an exclusive right to dig trenches in all our streets and to install cable so that Comcast, and only Comcast, can deliver cable TV. And what does a monopolist do when given an exclusive market? That's right. Well, mister, I'm not going to play that game. Sure, I could go back to satellite, but to tell you the truth, it's not bad not having TV. For example, I read on the Huffington Post that Keith Olbermann doesn't have a show on MSNBC anymore and you know what I thought? So what. It's not my problem. I used to watch his show once in a while, but after ten or twenty of those "Special Comments," which he would portentously announce during his show ["I'll have a Special Comment on that at the end of tonight's show"], he started to bug me as much as Glenn Beck and his pathetic stick-figure blackboard lectures. Olbermann, right down to the "good night and good luck" sign-off, was consciously modeling his show on Edward R. Murrow, but he did not have the gravitas to pull it off because he's essentially a jumped-up sports announcer trying to pull off a Tom Paine act.)

(Can't seem to get out of these parentheses for some reason. [Actually, I know the reason: it's because the idea of thinking about Barack and his upcoming Student Body President Nothing Speech is pretty boring.] Really, though, there's another, deeper reason that none of these cable shows actually work to mold public opinion, and that's the McLuhanesque explanation. What Olbermann was actually communicating was his anger - that's it. TV is pretty good at getting emotion across, which is why those dumb 60-second commercials can make you cry. But it's terrible at delivering information in a linear way that you can actually follow logically and retain usefully. A lot of the civil liberties issues that Olbermann used to yell about when Bush was in office [denial of habeas corpus, rendition, indefinite detention, military tribunals, the Bagram Black Hole, Guantanamo, targeted assassinations without due process, etc.] have all continued, or even been extended, under President Hologram. So where did Olbermann get with all that ranting and raving? Well, he made a lot of money. The "Special Comment" was his shtick and it was fun while it lasted.)

Bringing us back to the SOTU, I guess. Since I'm an Obama supporter, a campaign donor, I've received advance texting and email on this exciting, upcoming oration. It should be a real barn-burner. Deficit reduction! Working together! We're starting to get somewhere economically!

Ugh. This isn't working. The Hologram really has his work cut out for him trying to make such topics interesting. Maybe he should try the speech in "Special Comment" form. That would be fun, to see the O-Man get wild-eyed, flecks of spit at the corners of his mouth. Although certainly not very likely. What the media will focus on, I guaran-damn-tee, will be this novel "mixing of the parties in the audience" routine they're going to introduce. That will be the theme-meme-trope of 90% of the commentary. I have to say that the willingness of Republican members of Congress to go along with this bipartisan gag is a major coup for Barry. I can't figure out why they would do it, although I have a sneaking suspicion. I think it's because so many Republican Congressmen are gay. They want to meet some new guys. Sexual rationales can often explain the otherwise inexplicable. Worth considering, and perhaps it's yet another way the Imperial City of Washington is beginning to resemble the libertine omnisexuality of Ancient Rome. You'll never convince me a lot of those Republicans wouldn't like to attend next year's SOTU wearing a toga.