Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it. – Theodore Roosevelt

The Wall Street Journal is a good source for no-nonsense news. The reason is simple – its readers are sophisticated and accept nothing less. They are the true ownership society, and as owners of most of our wealth and as people having large investments all over the globe, they need straight talk.

So when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation took over ownership of the Journal, I wasn’t worried that he would ruin it. I expected that its news would still be the best in the country, and that its right wing editorial page would stay right wing. But odd things are happening – the Journal has opened up its pages. It is allowing opposing views in the editorial room on a limited basis.

Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” is now a regular contributor. Today he has a piece called “It’s Judgment Day for McCain“. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would read such a screed in the hallowed pages of the Journal.

Speaking of McCain, Frank suggests that in advocating for a commission to find out what went wrong on Wall Street, that he pull over the “Straight Talk Express” and interview the people aboard. He suggests that he interview 1) himself, 2) Phil Gramm, and 3) Phil’s wife, of Enron fame, Wendy Gramm. Each of these people have been part of the deregulatory mania that has gripped this country since Jimmy Carter set the airlines free in the late 1970’s.

Frank also suggests that McCain interview one of his senior economic advisers, Kevin Hassett, who in March of this year declared that the financial crisis was the result of “out-of-control government regulation”.

Frank also mentions the unmentionable, something that should be part of our campaign dialogue, and is not for reasons that are unfathomable:

Maybe the McCain Commission on Deregulation can kick off with a statement from the candidate himself. It will be helpful for the public, if painful for the senator himself, to hear about Mr. McCain’s own close brush with one of the towering figures of financial deregulation, Charles Keating, the master of Lincoln Savings and Loan. Keating had a special, urgent interest in getting Big Brother off our backs: in 1986 some meddlesome agency suspected him of massive violations of S&L regulations. Keating fought back by recruiting a handful of legislators, including Mr. McCain, to pressure S&L regulators to leave his S&L alone. A few years later, Lincoln became one of the largest financial failures in U.S. history.

John McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal is not part of the current campaign discussion. That’s a monumental failing on the part of the Obama people. What scares them?

John McCain is a deregulator, and has been for all of his time in Washington. He’s attempting now to change his spots now for the LIV’s – low information voters – who don’t know his past. Thomas Frank’s piece in such a prominent publication as the Wall Street Journal is a big boost for Obama. It’s not a great piece, it doesn’t cover new ground. It’s just that fact that it is carried now in the most prominent and prestigious newspaper in the country.

Thank you, Rupert.

I haven’t been putting up anything substantive lately – I go by my own standards, so I decide what has substance, what doesn’t. Lately I’m not much into deep thought. After all, it’s the political season, and we are surrounded by stupidity as the candidates try to gain the votes of those people who pay the least attention, who are most susceptible to the 30 second sound byte. It’s rather discouraging.

Do check this out – there’s a good deal of heat and not much light, but it was fun. Carol and Friends at Missoulapolis are defending Sarah Palin, well, sort of, and get this – Carol thinks that Barack Obama, who was a highly accomplished student who graduated from Harvard Law School Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude and who edited the Harvard Law Review, might be the beneficiary of affirmative action. I think that might be a tad racist. Further, she thinks his degree is “mushy”.

I pointed out Sarah Palin’s academic credentials to help the grasp the high absurdity of this:

In 1982, Sarah Palin enrolled at Hawaii Pacific College but left after her first semester. From there she transferred to North Idaho College, where she spent two semesters as a general studies major. From the community college she then transferred to the much larger University of Idaho for two semesters. During this time Palin won the Miss Wasilla Pageant beauty contest, then finished third (second runner-up) in the Miss Alaska pageant, at which she won a college scholarship and the “Miss Congeniality” award. She then left the University of Idaho and attended Matanuska-Susitna College in Alaska for one term. The next year she returned to the University of Idaho where she spent three semesters completing her Bachelor of Science degree in communications-journalism, graduating in 1987.

Mush, doggies. Mush!

It gets better. Her grades are not available.

You can’t make this stuff up. This is what we have become. This is who they admire.

I know what it is – I know why the dense stupidity. I can be frank here – this is a blog and we bloggers are not accountable. It’s the fundamentalists. They are not smart people and are easily fooled, easily led from point A to point B by any charlatan who claims to be one of them. The reason why they are so enamored by Palin is that she thinks the planet is 6,000 years old, that people walked with dinosaurs, and that a man who made his name by assailing people he accused of witchcraft is a good role model. (That’s her pastor, Thomas Muthee.)

These people are of low intelligence, and they are such an important part of the Republican Party’s voting coalition that the party leadership, who are not stupid, have to throw them a bone. Sarah Palin is that bone. She’s nothing more. She’s nothing. But they are circling the wagons around her.

I spent some time in the mountains this past weekend, and had a chance to read the words of a wonderful cynic with better-than-average writing skills, Mark Twain. The following passages are from Letters From the Earth, where the narrator is Satan, and he is enthralled by us:

This is a strange place, an extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the “noblest work of God.” This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a new idea with him, he has talked it through all the ages, and believed it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it.

Moreover — if I may put another strain upon you — he thinks he is the Creator’s pet. He believes the Creator is proud of him; he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn’t it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for help, and favor, and protection, every day; and does it with hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered. The daily affront, the daily defeat, do not discourage him, he goes on praying just the same. There is something almost fine about this perseverance. I must put one more strain upon you: he thinks he is going to heaven!

He has salaried teachers who tell him that. They also tell him there is a hell, of everlasting fire, and that he will go to it if he doesn’t keep the Commandments.

In America, our base Christian fundamentalist instinct has ebbed and flowed. These are not unusual times. We have had Great Awakenings in the past, and Christians have spilled over into our public lives. It is never good – they are not a force for good. Underneath their pieties and preaching lay an ugliness. They want control. They want the reins of government, and when they have it, they will quash the one thing that bothers them most: personal freedom.

Fundamentalist Christians are dumb, and Republicans have had their way with them. I take solace in their dumbness, and would fear them even more if they were smart. As it is, they can do great damage in their ignorance, but at least it can be said that most of them are not malevolent. They are just misguided fools.

Have a nice day!

It’s not so much that John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. That was a calculated political move, and typical of the masterminds of that party, it was brilliant. She all at once roped in the religious wackos, and brought along the no-guv is good-guv crowd too. And as VP – well, they’ll find something for her to do. She’s short on ability, so maybe she can take a shot at climate change or ethics in government – you know – something a five-college journalism major can handle, and the sort of thing Republicans don’t care about anyway.

That’s all baseline America now – individually we’re not dumb, but collectively we’re a bunch of Neanderthals. Politicians do their business on us with the same cynicism as Krusty the Clown. They must be laughing at us as half of us form a protective circle around Palin. It’s just crazy that people don’t see clear through her to China. She’s painfully obviously unqualified for public office. Painfully.

Americans are as politically naive as a kid in a whorehouse who sees important people coming and going, but has no idea what they’re up to. Our elections have sunk to the level of MTV pop culture. McCain’s not even trying to give us a serious campaign, but he’s consistently pulling 43-45% – that’s enough to allow election fraudsters to cement his victory. President McCain. Vice President Palin. I can see Russia too. It’s looking pretty good.

Someone else is venting that frustration too, and I step aside for His Excellence. Here’s Matt Taibbi from the current issue (10/2) of Rolling Stone Magazine:

Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

“And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she’s a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant sized bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the sizzlin’ picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because that image on TV reminds him of the mean brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

“Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – and this country is going to eat her up, cheering every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.”

Here’s John McCain:

“While Fannie and Freddie were working to keep Congress away from their house of cards, Senator Obama was taking their money.”

“My friends, this is the problem with Washington. People like Senator Obama have been too busy gaming the system and haven’t ever done a thing to actually challenge the system.”

“We’ve heard a lot of words from Senator Obama over the course of this campaign. But maybe just this once he could spare us the lectures, and admit to his own poor judgment in contributing to these problems. The crisis on Wall Street started in the Washington culture of lobbying and influence peddling, and he was square in the middle of it.”

I know, these guys don’t write their own thoughts, and someone in the McCain campaign has a strategy in mind in writing this, but it is classic projection. Imagine someone, anyone, saying these words about McCain himself. It would be dead on.

This is from Huffington Post, which links to Contingencies, the magazine of the American Society of Actuaries. McCain, talking about health care:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation

That’s right – McCain, who was right in the middle of all this deregulation nonsense, wanted to apply the same scheme to health care.

Now he’s talking as if he were not part of the problem. He’s a regulator now, a tough guy, who wants to fire the head of the FESEFCCSPIC. If he can pull this off, if he can change his stripes while in a dead run, our media is brain dead.

Speaking of deregulation nonsense, it’s worth some of our time to read Dave Budge on the meltdown – he’s got the most to lose, as that is his business. The man has a good brain, if only he weren’t knee deep in libertarian ideology. He can’t see that the very best system we can have, the one that serves all of us best, is capitalism, but regulated. Without regulation, it tends to go haywire. Dave thinks government causes problems and that markets function well on their own, and blames the current crisis on us “socialists” who wanted affordable housing. (What’s a little bait and switch – i.e., ARMS – among friends? They sold sophisticated financial products to the most unsophisticated among us, assuming real estate was a bottomless well, and are now blaming the victims. Like the lending people didn’t know what they were doing.)

If the evidence that deregulation leads to disaster were not right in front of our noses, it would not seem so ludicrous.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

I’ve been watching Rachel Maddow’s show (7PM mountain time, MSNBC) when I can, and I cringe when she has guests like Bill Maher on. He has a tendency to say things that are true, and that could get her canceled. Who does she think she is?

Maher did a program on ABC called “Politically Incorrect”, and not too long after 9/11 said “”We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.” Nothing wrong with that, from a truth standpoint. We are cowards who prefer to do our killing with elaborate devices rather than face-to-face, and when we bomb these backward countries, our pilots always come back alive. (Suicide bombers, on the other hand, rarely return from their missions.) But his statement created an uproar, and his advertisers demanded that he be canceled, and he was toasted over an open fire.

Note that good ratings did not help him, just as high ratings did not save Phil Donohue in the face of the jingoist post-9/11 tide in 2002. He was canceled despite being the highest rated show on MSNBC at that time. He was beating Chris Mathews. But advertisers rule, and they have a right wing ideological agenda that overrides business sense. (Click here to see a list of Fortune 500 companies that are boycotting Air America.)

Maddow’s show beat Keith Olbermann in the ratings last week. She might think she has job security for a while. But if she keeps pounding the progressive drum, if she keeps having guests on like Maher and allowing them to speak freely, she’ll go down in flames. And that’s too bad. She’s quick-witted, friendly, smart, and a nice balance to all of the conservative agitprop we see on regular TV. Glenn Beck can spew what right wing blather he pleases, Joe Scarborough can beat the drum for McCain all he wants, and right wingers are normally cock of the walk all over the dial, but there are limits on what can be said in response. Maddow’s show is refreshing, but treads dangerous ground. It’s not a liberal media – right leaning liberals are welcomed, but lefties are only barely tolerated (if given face time at all).

Conservatives play their greatest strength – control of the media, as their greatest weakness – “the liberal media”. It’s a brilliant strategy – it keeps everyone on air in a defensive posture, always placating the right. Maddow is an anomaly – she is only on the air at Keith Olbermann’s insistence. I cannot imagine she will last.

Maher also said “I keep going back to this cynical view I have, and people jump down my throat, but the underlying problem we have in this country is that the people are too stupid to be governed.” That’s probably true. He used the analogy of a dog that understands inflection more than actual commands. That’s perfect. For the American public, everything has to be reduced to utter stupid simplicity.

For instance, the energy issue is complex – we have to consider climate change and alternative sources and balance our need for resources with another asset, a clean environment. We shouldn’t let our need for oil override all the other issues. It takes thoughtful leadership to find the right balance.

Right? No, wrong! “Drill baby drill!” That utterly trite pearl of idiocy carries the day.

It’s election time. Fido – speak!

Footnote: Maher is doing well on HBO, which has no advertisers and mostly responds to viewer preferences.

The whole point of the Palin assault on our intelligence has been to get the lies out there and in circulation before anyone could challenge them. And the McCain people have done so. It matters little now that, two weeks later, NBC is finally doing its job. It’s way too late.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. (Mark Twain, attributed.)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

There’s a widely-shared perception out there that goes something like this: When America does something, it’s right.

It’s an important concept to grasp, because America has done things that are wrong, even criminal on a massive scale. Yet when we look at those things, we judge them to be right.

The invasion and continuing continuing occupation Iraq, against the will of its government and people, would be judged a crime if done by any country but the United States. And it’s not that we are insensitive to criminal behavior. We easily saw that Iraq was wrong to invade Kuwait in 1990, and Soviets doing Afghanistan in 1980. President Bush condemned Russia for its actions in South Ossetia last month, saying “bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.” Even the guy who who did the big wrong, the one who ordered the criminal invasion of Iraq, can spot criminal behavior when the Russians do it.

But he’s operating on a solid and widely accepted premise: When America does something, it’s right.

Whoever this guy Montana Headlines is is having a nice time with me because I compared the Bush Doctrine to the crimes for which Nazis were hanged after World War II. There’s even something larger at stake, a Nuremberg Principle, which is the idea that if an act is criminal, all that follows that act is criminal. Therefore, Nazi and Japanese officers were judged to be culpable for war crimes committed in the wake of their invasions even though they were hundreds of miles removed from those crimes. Japanese generals were hanged for atrocities committed by soldiers in the Philippines even though they didn’t even know the atrocities were going on. They started it all, and were therefore judged responsible.

George W. Bush launched an illegal invasion of a sovereign state based on false evidence and a massive propaganda campaign. As a result of that invasion, hundreds of thousands of people have died, millions more have fled the country, and 4,000 American soldiers have perished too. He is personally responsible for every one of those deaths.

There’s a high principle at stake here – the Nuremberg Principle: When a crime is committed, all that follows rests on the shoulders of those who committed the crime. George W. Bush is a war criminal, and ought to face justice.

Maybe that’s why he bought land in Paraguay – he’s planning on hiding out when the charges come down. South America has long been a hideout for war criminals. There’s no extradition from Paraguay.

Footnote: To complete the circle, Nuremberg itself was farcical because the Allies only prosecuted crimes committed by Germany and Japan. If the U.S. or Britain did massive bombing of cities with no military objective, then such an action was justified because … we did it. When America does something, it’s right.

So Governor Schweitzer made what appears to be an insider’s joke when addressing trial lawyers. Not my kind of humor, but then I didn’t think Tropic Thunder was funny either. What’s interesting is now how the right has reacted, but rather how they react lockstep, as if they all gather around a fire the night before and decide to write about something (among other activities). Check this out. And, this, this, and this. And never out of step, this one.

They’re so predictable. They tripped over each other racing to embrace the remarkably average-yet-pretty Sarah Palin. They all pretend that John McCain’s walker is really a fighter plane. When needlers began to make fun of Obama as a messiah, they failed the originality test and jumped on board.

The lipstick-on-a-pig fiasco was interesting not because it told us anything about the candidates or had any deep significance. It merely demonstrated the power the right has to control news – they all shout in unison. Here in Montana, where we don’t matter, right wing blogs tend to do the same thing.

It’s kind of boring.

Two news items of note:

1) Obama raised over $66 million in August and drew in over 500,000 new donors. Let’s hope they have a clue how to use this money. The huge influx comes from reaction to his acceptance speech, but also to the nomination of Sarah Palin by the McCain people.

2) An anti-Palin rally in Anchorage drew 1,400 people, the largest political rally in the history of the state, says Mudflats, an Alaska blog. Of course, national news focused on the Palin rally held earier that day, which drew about a thousand people. National media people don’t exactly do the burrowing thing. They miss more than they cover.

Sarah Palin is having an impact on the campaign. She’s the focus on the Republican side, as the moribund McCain pushes his walker from one scintillating event to another. But she is also energizing the opposition. She’s a powerful polarizing force. She’s Bush in drag. I wonder if the people around McCain punched that in to their calculator when they chose her.

If you have a few minutes, go to the SNL web site to see the Palin/Clinton sendup from last night. I cannot embed it here, as it runs automatically and anyone coming here for two weeks would get it, want it or not. But it’s a riot – Tina Fey nailed her from the Minnesota-like Alaskan accent to the high-pitched condescension. Amy Poehler as Hillary has some great lines, but doesn’t channel Clinton as Fey does Palin.

There was a time when I was awake at 10:30 on a Saturday.