Even George W. Bush was the Democrats' Fault !!!

Ann Richards was a straight-talking, admitted ex-drunk who won the Texas Governorship in 1990. You cannot imagine a more likeable and liked governor. Even the Republicans had affection for her. Her magazine cover on the Harley was preceded by another cover where she took off a cowboy hat to reveal her hair done up in the shape of her hat.

She is famous for her opinions:

• Poor George, he can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.
• I've always said that in politics, your enemies can't hurt you, but your friends will kill you.
• I believe in recovery, and I believe that as a role model I have the responsibility to let young people know that you can make a mistake and come back from it.
• I have always had the feeling I could do anything and my dad told me I could. I was in college before I found out he might be wrong.

I lived in Texas at the time and I thought Ann Richards could be trusted even when I didn't agree with her because she had her own integrity. She was great!

And, then, she vetoed a law permitting the licensed concealed carry of handguns. She believed it was a bad idea. Texans were incensed and unforgiving. She lost her bid for re-election . . .to George W. Bush. No one knew W. No one liked W. No one believed W. was even a Texan. All folks knew was that W. was not Ann Richards, who vetoed the concealed carry bill.

If Ann had signed the concealed-carry bill, George W. Bush would have stayed on his ranch. Instead we had eight years of the most intellectually lazy president in our history. There have been dumber presidents, but none more disinclined to think about his responsibilities.

Starving the Soul

"We are mistakenly led to believe that the world is as secular as it appears to our eighteenth-century Enlightenment eyes. As a result of this secular philosophy, the divine is met only in our profound social problems and in our personal psychological and physical illnesses. . . .As long as we leave care of the soul out of our daily lives we will suffer the loneliness of living in a dead, cold, unrelated world. We can "improve" ourselves to the maximum, and yet we will still feel the alienation inherent in a divided existence. We will continue to exploit nature and our capacity to invent new things, but both will continue to overpower us, if we do not approach them with enough depth and imagination."

This is from Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore. This observation most eloquently explains the despair and isolation that are all around us. It applies equally to our politics and our arts and our most intimate encounters.

I commend this insight to you for consideration.

How W's State Department Sabotaged W's War in Iraq

Prior to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, the #3 at State - Marc Grossman - and the #2 at Defense - Paul Wolfowitz - went to Turkey, to secure permission to move US troops through Turkey into northern Iraq.

The short story is Turkey said, "No."

Don't be mis-led.

The long story is that Marc Grossman purposefully mis-handled the negotiations in order to get a "no" - in order to make the war impossible. The top guys at State were making their own policy decision, to oppose and undermine the President. Isn't that special!

Paul Grossman served seven years as a diplomat in Turkey - three in Adana as consul (where he married a Turk) and four in Ankara as ambassador. He knew very well that, in Turkey, the military is a fourth branch of government. Yet, Grossman excluded the military from consulations and argued for his superior knowledge of the country against suggestions/objections put forth by the Defense Department that the Turkish military should be consulted.

Hurriyet, Turkey's highest circulation daily newspaper, reported the results in the paper of December 4, 2002: 8:30 pm Foreign Minister says okay; 11:15 pm Turkish General Staff says we made no such decision; 12:30am Foreign Ministry spokesman says Turkey has not agreed. As one 3-star general told me, "Ankara is boiling."

Marc Grossman risked creating a military coup in order to sow the confusion and discord that flowed copiously from his actions. He played a three-cushion billiard shot and pulled it off.

At that time the new religous Ak Party government had been in power for only 18 days. The leader of the party, Tayyip Erdoğan, had previously been mayor of Istanbul and had no experience in national government. The new government was caught unprepared.

The new Turkish government haggled. The party leaders came to Washington. They were eventually offered incentives worth more than $2 billion.

The party leader, Tayyip Erdoğan, decided to be clever. He announced that the Parliament must decide "yes" or "no" so that he could distance himself from the approval if events called for such a tactic. Nothing in Turkish law or government practice called for a Parliamentary vote. Further, Erdoğan announced that he would not enforce party discipline - that each representative could vote as he chose. Erdogan never imagined that the vote would be "no."

And the vote was "no." The Foreign Secretary, who had initially said "yes" had voted "no." So, Turkey was stuck with a decision no one wanted.

The US went ahead with the invasion anyway.

The Turks lost $2 billion in aid. The Turks lost long-term strategic importance, since the US now had bases in Iraq and other countries beyond Turkey. And, very important, the Kurds who supported US troops, The Peshmerga, became folk heroes in the American press. This undermined important Turkish diplomatic positions concerning the Kurdish terrorists, the PKK, and Kurdish efforts to create their own country from territory now party of Iran, Iraq and Turkey.

Without a doubt, this was all engineered by Marc Grossman. Would Marc Grossman have acted without consulting his Secretary of State, Colin Powell. I don't think so.

There are important lessons here for how Washington really works and how the Turkish government made a mess through lack of astute leadership . . .as well as how this particular set of decisions came to be made.

How Ronald Reagan is Partially to Blame for Our Aesthetic Famine

Ronald Reagan is guilty in this matter only to the extent that he did not intercede in the aftermath of the 1979 Supreme Court decision known as the Thor Power Tool decision. The court case dealt with the valuation of inventories for tax purposes. It was applied to book publishers which had, by long practice and tradition, been given special treatment.

Before Thor Power Tool, publishers showed the printing expenses of a new book in the year it was printed, even though the books might sell over a twenty-year period. This reduced the taxable current profits and, therefore, current taxes. It was a special priviledge given to publishing, in the interest of public education,

And then, with Thor Power Tool, the IRS took the priviledge away. The publishers now had to re-calculate their income and tax according to the new rules on their entire 20-years of accumulated inventory. Afterward, the new rule would bump up annual income and tax, but the spike in income and taxes on the entire inventory in that first year was like a tidal wave.

More books were destroyed by that IRS action than any other event in human history. Millions of books were pulped or burned to avoid the taxes.

The choice of paying taxes or destroying books also motivated the corporate consolidation of American book publishing, the take-over of book publishers by entertainment conglomerates and the eventual preponderance of non-US ownership of those conglomerates. The IRS publishes statistics for 2002 - US book-publishing is 63% foreign-owned, US film-and-video is 64% foreign-owned.

And the price of books sky-rocketed. One of my favorite books is The Embassy Letters, by Mary Wortley Montagu. She was the wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Sultan. Her book describes the overland voyage from London to Istanbul in 1716. Her book has been in print for almost 400 years, as a colorful description of daily life at that time. I watched the price of the Modern Library hardback go from $4.95 to $13.95 - the price of paying both the back taxes on the inventory and the new corporate overhead.

If only Ronnie and the guys around him had intervened on the application of Thor Power Tool to publishing, our cultural landscape would likely be far deeper and richer than it is today.

Two fuses linked all the nastiest bits of the 2008 Economic Collapse

Seven years before, in 2001, with the genuine concern and hypocritical posturing that followed the Enron collapse, a law was passed in Congress known as Sarbanes-Oxley that required that securities (bonds, stocks, other fiduciary instruments) be valued at current market prices on a corporation's balance sheet. The valuations had to be current; the standard of what is current was made the current day's price. This was to prevent the vastly overstated valuations that had supported Enron, prior to its collapse.

That was the first fuse.

The PBGC - Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation - is a quasi-government agency, set up to prevent other past scandals. At some point, PBGC required that the securities held by pension plans must be insured by private insurance before PBGC would guarantee the pension plan. The meant that all sorts of bonds had to be insured with companies like AIG. Premiums were paid on even municipal and state bonds, which have extremely low default history as they are guaranteed by tax revenues.

Sounds great - protect pension benefits with insurance . . .by law. This was the second fuse.

The Economic Collapse of 2008 was not every one's fault, but almost. There is plenty of blame to spread around . . .but this is how it happened.

Insurers like AIG faced their own collapse, due to their guarantee of mortgage-backed securities that were rated by the rating agencies from wonderland. When those insurers defaulted, their insurance on an entire range of securities vanished overnight.

By law, the trustees of pension funds across America were required to eliminate that entire range of securities immediately because the securities were uninsured. All kinds of bonds and other securities were dumped on the market for sale at the same time. There were nowhere near enough buyers because all of the guaranteed pension plans were selling simultaneously and were forbidden to hold or buy.

Banks and other financial institutions saw the market prices of their capital reserves (held in securities) fall to near-zero - overnight. Prior to Sarbanes-Oxley, the banks would have held their securities and waited for the market to recover but in 2008 they were required to value their reserves at that day's market prices.

In a single day, pension plans liquidated huge volumes of securities because the law required them to do it and the banks were required to value their capital at the near-zero prices that resulted. Immediately other laws governing bank capitalization - passed to protect depositors - mandated closure and government take-over of the banks. All of this happened together, within 24 hours.

The Economic Collapse of 2008 was a government-mandated financial panic - mandated by the laws and regulations mentioned above.

The Economic Collapse of 2008 had many contributing factors but these two fuses set it off.

These fuses were laid by Congress, with noble intentions, 20/20 hindsight and appalling ignorance. Risk is inherent in life. Risk cannot be eliminated by law; risk can only be hidden and/or displaced.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_economic_crisis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-to-market

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_Benefit_Guaranty_Corporation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act

Arlen Specter and more on Edward Kennedy

I had intended to write a blog on Arlen Specter and then old Arlen proved truth is stranger than fiction.

Arlen worked in Washington once upon a time. He was a Democrat. He was a staff lawyer for the Warren Commission and devised the famous "one bullet theory" of the Kennedy assassination to force the evidence to fit the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Whatever the truth was, Arlen was working in the service of baloney.

Arlen was tough-on-crime District Attorney in Philadelphia once upon a time and then was celebrity defense attorney for an peace "activist" turned girl-friend-killer, the Unicorn Killer, Ira Einhorn. Ira jumped bail that had been posted by Seagram's heiress, Barbara Bronfman, and was only brought to justice in 2008.

Then he ran for the Senate. That's another story. The man's karma could scarcely be blacker. He was the big noise in the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings.

The above was originally intended to show that I can write unpleasant things about Republicans . . .and then the scum jumps the aisle.

~ ~ ~

Now back to the sainted old lion of the Senate. Please don't look at his wife too closely. She works for a great many lobbyists (some would say crooks, gangsters and terrorists) whose seek the old lion's influence and support. Robert Bauer's book on the CIA, See No Evil, documented this. There were recent requests for her to make her tax returns and client list public and these requests were ignored. He's sick. One brother died flying in WWII. Two brothers were assassinated. His father was a gangster. His own life has been in the service of himself. Many lives are messy. Edward Kennedy's life is more messy than most.

Arlen Specter and Edward Kennedy are soul mates.

The Obama Mess really is Bush's Fault

The 2008 election results were the consequence of Bush's terrible mis-management of the 2006 Congressional elections.

If Bush had replaced Rumsfeld the day before the 2006 election, instead of the day after the election, how many voters would have given support to the Republican administration? Across the USA, how many votes went Democratic simply because voters were sick of Rumsfeld?

Ditto for Ashcroft, who was appointed Attorney General as consolation prize because he lost his bid for the Senate in 2000 to a man who had died in an airplane crash during the campaign.

Nationally, how many votes swung Democratic just because Bush and Cheney were so damn smug about themselves?

The Senate swung to Democratic control in 2006 when Richard Allen lost Virginia by 1,500 votes. Could 750 voters have changed their minds if, when confronted with a meaningless media frenzy over the use of a meaningless word, "macaca," that, in North Africa, is a disparagement . . .and Allen's mother admitted that her family had been Jewish in Tunisia generations back and had hidden it by becoming Catholic (without telling her son) . . .and dumbass Allen said, "Gee, I didn't know" where he could have said, "Gee, how about that! Isn't that great and a lesson to us all!"

Rick Santorum lost Pennsylvania for himself and the Republicans by 15,000 votes. That's after ignoring the advice of professionals to campaign on what he had done for Pennsylvania. He preferred to talk about terrorism. And the majority of Pennsylvanians thought that the Democratic candidate was the ex-governor, when the candidate was the ex-governor's son with the same name.

The result was a muddle, 2006-2008, so that voters couldn't distinguish what was Bush's fault and what was Pelosi's and Reid's fault . . .and the Dem's were happy to blame it all on Bush.

This mess is Bush's muddle, in the sense that he set the stage for it in 2006.

GM bond holders win by losing?

The Truth About Cars website has an item today on how outstanding credit default swaps off-set $34 billion in debt with a net profit of $2.4 billion. The item states that the CDS losses are insured or off-set by guarantees given by the federal government to the banks who hold them.

My point is that, once government intereferes in financial transactions, those transactions lose their ability to reflect reality. Mistakes are always possible but government interference makes realistic behavior impossible (except by mistake or coincidence).

The link is here: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/credit-default-swaps-sink-gm/ .

The American Gulag . . .Dykes, Drunks and Dick-less Dwarves

One day, in your mail, you find a letter from your local U.S. Attorney. It informs you that you are “a person of interest” in an on-going federal investigation.

What happens next? You find an attorney and pay a retainer of at least $50,000. Federal law forbids your employer (if this involves the employer) from paying your legal fees. You are on your own. Will you have to sell your house?

Quite likely you will lose your job – even if the investigation does not involve your employer – if you hold most kinds of licenses or are bonded. If you apply for work at the FBI, they will ask you, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” Good for them. Virtually every other job application you will see in your lifetime will ask you, “Have you ever been arrested? Have you ever been the subject of a federal investigation?”

Also, quite likely, you will never be charged with a crime – i.e., you will never be called before a Grand Jury to explain yourself and defend against indictment. You will never be tried – i.e., given an opportunity to defend yourself or to require the prosecutors to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The U.S. Attorney’s office will never give you a letter releasing you as a “person of interest” – not ever . . .unless you cooperate by incriminating someone else. You have a life to live – perhaps a family to support. Imagine you’re an orthopedic surgeon with a 12-year professional education, a practice that employs 20 people, $3 million in debts and a family; would you? Do you act as an informant? Imagine you’re a single-mother, working as an administrative assistant, who desperately needs the medical insurance from your job; do you make up a story to incriminate your boss? Would you really do that?

This is not the world of Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn. This is America in the 21^st Century. You are in The American Gulag with an unknown, uncounted number of other citizens. Estimates of your Gulag companions range in excess of 300,000.

Who are the Dykes, Drunks and Dick-less Dwarves? Those are the federal prosecutors who send you letters and hold your files, thus described by a prisoner of The American Gulag.

For one modest window into the Gulag, look here:http://74.125.93.104/search?q=cache:RMtF_nXS3J0J:suebobsdiary.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/columbia-prosecutor-probes-a-city.rtf+hca+debra+kanof&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

What could be more fun than . . .INTERNET MONKEYS !!!

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."

Thus Robert Wilensky, professor of Information Science at the University of California at Berkeley, quite good-naturedly characterized the omnipresent detritus of our Cybertimes.

And now, permit me to tiptoe through the tulips of our basic aesthetic dilemma:

• If a monkey (or a million monkeys) produced the works of Shakespeare, would it be art? Not from the monkey's point of view unless the monkey understood the inestimable insights it produced. Not from the reader's point of view, unless the reader is similarly capable of understanding the insights.
  
• If the Works of Shakespeare were produced on the Internet (by monkeys or otherwise), how would we (the general and, presumably, curious public) learn about them, read them and find art therein?
  
• No matter how we tiptoe through the tulips, our path leads to a fundamental notion of DISCRIMINATION, of the necessary and fundamental task of distinguishing art from junk, music from noise. It is the act of making a judgement based on one's PRINCIPLES and one's UNDERSTANDING.
  
• The "Marketing Revolution" has been largely successful in removing the notions of discrimination, principle and understanding from popular awareness and replacing it with the far less taxing phenomenon of IN-YOUR-FACENESS, once the exclusive domain of demanding children and street-vendors. With in-your-faceness to light one's way, one chooses from what is thrust upon one and the labor of marketers acquires the dignity of a Presidential news conference.
  
• One of the very few reassurances I have recently had of divine justice was a visit to the annual meeting of the MLA - The Modern Language Association - the conference and meat market for university English teachers. Thousands of naifs pumped full of post-modern pilf and competing for a few dozen university teaching positions that are not, in essence or in name, English as a Second Language (remedial English). If students are not forced to read crap, they won't. The real damage is that few will read persist to read anything else, except vampire novels.
• The response to this New Age, to this new onslaught, was brought to us by the most unlikely of guru's, Nancy Reagan: JUST SAY "NO!"
• Coming posts will suggest books and sources of books for those looking for what was once called a good book.
• I'll also explain in a future post how Ronald Reagan is partially to blame for this aesthetic famine.

Rocky Horror Show . . .James Joyce's Ulysses . . .No Contest!

James Joyce sat in Paris and wrote his Ulysses, his tale of wandering about Dublin "from memory," with a commercial directory of Dublin and a digest of world literature by his side. These books provided his mock-epic with geographic minutiae and a chronological succession of literary styles. Is this wit? Is this art? Is this crap?

Richard O'Brien wrote his musical Rocky Horror Show by juxtaposing seventy years of cinematic horror upon the popular music and social conventions of America in the 1950's.

Attach the following adjectives to one of the two: funny . . .fun . . .witty . . .dramatic . . .boring . . .informing . . .surprising . . . .

Watch this blog for similarly subtle treatment of Jacques Derrida*, the imperious and impenetrable propagandist of post-modernism. Coming soon!

* http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article492903.ece

Calumny . . .and Portuguese Water Dogs

FDOTUS (pron. fodotus) is really cute. *

And then I read that Bo is a gift from Ted Kennedy, who has three Portuguese Water Dogs. No doubt, their names are Mary, Jo and Kopechne**.

That’s a morbid joke but not an anti-Dem joke - just a very old, very angry morbid joke.

Any bastard who drowns his pregnant mistress and goes on to life in the Senate, instead of in prison, deserves to have the calumny haunt him at least until he is dead.

How exponents of women's rights resolve this issue at his funeral will be interesting to watch. Will they treat Kennedy as a great man and drop the memory of Mary Jo down the well . . .or will they drop Kennedy down the well when he can't help them anymore? Place your bets!

~ ~ ~

* First Dog Of The United States - The Washington Post provided witty coverage of every doggone detail: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/11/AR2009041102484_pf.html

**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Jo_Kopechne

Defining Failure Before the Next Election

Republicans and Conservatives are realizing immense and unpleasant truths: the critical issues of the Obama Presidency do not and will not sell themselves, while the media available to move opinion are biased and shifting.

• Moreover, the decisive votes cast in 2008 - and those that will be cast in 2010 and 2012 - were cast by Gen-X'ers and Gen-Y'ers whose educations were purged of context - civics, ethics, history and geography. Jon Stewart's television show is "teaching" these folks what they didn't get in school - unless someone provides a countervailing point of view in acceptable and comprehensible terms.

Gen-X and Gen-Y do not know what failure looks like. They know only what a loser looks like. *

• What the Right should do is establish "The Of-Course Task Force" to promulgate the certainty that Obama will be a one-term failure. A cottage network must be built to describe endless reasons, rationales, scenarios and speculation to prepare people to believe it.

The Of-Course Task Force should be writing ubiquitously not just about how Obama will fail but also about what Hillary will do and how the Dixie Chicks will feel. In order to prepare Gen-X and Gen-Y, the strengths and weaknesses of those demographics must be accepted and utilized - the obsession with entertainment and celebrity, as well as the confusion and hunger for something that makes sense.

• There are only two scenarios for the preservation of the American Republic - swing voters are prepared or panicked. Unless our republic is going to be wagered on the likelihood of panicking swing voters with war or terror or economic disaster, the task of the Right now is to define (but not illustrate) failure. The present reality is that internet propaganda, counter-intelligence and counter-propaganda have been and are handled much more deftly by the Democrats.

The face of failure must be presented in a hundred ways, so that voters will expect to see it, will know to look for it and will recognize that failure when they see it. Issues and events must be made obvious (the "of course!"). The preaching of a campaign (even an extended campaign like 2008) will not affect those not already prepared to change their minds.

• A long, patient and focused program is called for to alter the context of the coming campaigns - by making what is now unthinkable into what is expected and, thereby, self-evident and obvious. Somewhere in-between unthinkable and obvious is the point where things become "edgy" where late-night comedians and pundits think they are clever. Jon Stewart suggesting that Democratic appointees might pay their taxes is an illustrative and constructive step.

Three years is enough time to accomplish these changes; 18 months is probably not. The 2010 election will turn on panic or it will not turn.

~ ~ ~

*for a demonstration of how Gen-X and Gen-Y can recognize a loser, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z0h1NNk1Ik&feature=related

Decriminalization of Drugs

Portugal decriminalized drug use in 2001. Its experience over the past eight years is enlightening and does not support the slippery-slope/panic-inducing scenarios often posited.

Certainly the resources expended by the US on The War on Drugs (tm) would be well-spent on The War on Terror (tm) or simply wisely not spent. The misery inflicted on those ensnared and inprisoned is immense, as is the misery imposed upon their families.

Support for decriminalization seems to be growing in Washington. In addition to ascribing wisdom to America's policy makers, I Googled some related queries. On April 6, 2009, I found the following statistics:

"Politician's son busted for cocaine" 14,300 hits

"Politician's daughter busted for cocaine" 49,400 hits

"Politician's son busted for marijuana" 24,600 hits

"Politician's daughter busted for marijuana" 132,000 hits

"Politician's son busted for heroin" 15,000 hits

"Politician's daughter busted for heroin" 30,000 hits

More busts (or, at least, more articles) on daughters than sons. That's interesting.

It's easy to laugh at hypocrisy but there is real and pointless pain attached to all this. In addition, I am compelled to contemplate the pernicious interaction between police powers and legislative responsibilities here; criminalization gives politicians, prosecutors, police and press powers to extort, as well as enforce.

History is not legislated in a democracy. History is written by historians.

I wrote those words to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell before he addressed the legislature of the State of Maryland in 2001, when it was contemplating a resolution condemning Turkey for "genocide" of Armenians in the 1920's. He used those words in his speech to the legislature.

In 2006, I shared those words in e-mail with then-Turkish Ambassador to the US, Osman Faruk Logoglu and I shared these words in e-mail with then-Foreign Minister of Turkey, Abdullah Gul. These men used these words.

Turkey continues to use these words and this wisdom. As I write this, this wisdom seems to have become the keystone in a renewal of relations between Armenia and Turkey. There have been accusations of forged documents, as the venue of the debate has moved to historical research, but this represents enormous progress.

At this point, the loser seems to be Azerbaijan, whose province of Ngorno-Karabagh has been occupied by Armenia for fifteen years. Turkey's solidarity with Turkic and Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan has been affected by the possibility of resolving the issue of Turkish and Armenian war-deaths in the 1920's. This is an example of The Law of Unintended Consequences.


UPDATE HERE: http://memeticsmarketing.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-efforts-bear-tangible-fruit.html