It’s only the primaries, but something unmistakable is going on. In each contest tonight, forget about Hillary, Barack Obama outpolled the entire Republican field.

And John McCain, the brave man who bombed North Vietnamese civilians, is always shorter than the people around him. Maybe just symbolic of a moral pygmy, maybe significant.

From Glenn Greenwald:

The Senate today — led by Jay Rockefeller, enabled by Harry Reid, and with the active support of at least 12 (and probably more) Democrats, in conjunction with an as-always lockstep GOP caucus — will vote to legalize warrantless spying on the telephone calls and emails of Americans, and will also provide full retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, thus forever putting an end to any efforts to investigate and obtain a judicial ruling regarding the Bush administration’s years-long illegal spying programs aimed at Americans. The long, hard efforts by AT&T, Verizon and their all-star, bipartisan cast of lobbyists to grease the wheels of the Senate — led by former Bush 41 Attorney General William Barr and former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick — are about to pay huge dividends, as such noble efforts invariably do with our political establishment.

What is interesting about this is the Silence of the Blogs. They’re running Obama-put-to-music clips as the real business of the Democratic Party goes on without notice.

Keep in mind too – this is always true – a vote is not a vote if it doesn’t change anything. A vote in favor of a bill they know will fail or be vetoed means nothing – only the vote to override a veto has substance, and that only if successful. Democrats are great at playing cat and mouse with us. With a few notable exceptions, it’s very hard to know where any of them really stand.

For instance, on the telecom bill, twelve of them are selling out. That’s the required number. But what if they needed thirteen? The thirteenth vote is most assuredly there, hiding in the bushes. It’s Bob Dole’s axiom of politics: You can never go wrong voting for a bill that fails or against one that passes.

UPDATE: Far more than the necessary 12 Democrats bolted and joined the president in granting immunity to the telecoms. Here’s a list of the deserters:

Bayh, Inouye, Johnson, Landrieu, McCaskill, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Stabenow, Feinstein, Kohl, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar, Carper, Mikulski, Conrad, Webb, and Lincoln. Obama voted against immunity, and Hillary Clinton was the only Senator not voting.

As always, Obama’s vote might mean something, might mean nothing. See the Bob Dole axiom above.

The bill can be stopped in the house. Go here to sign a petition urging them to stop it.

From Dog Owners Quarterly:

The peril of any utopianism, of course, is how it suspends rationality and pursues a dream. In the case of millennial American conservatism, the political dream, for all its responsiveness to the tangible self-interest of rich constituencies, has been the illusion of markets as potential parliaments rather than descendants of carnivals, as rational decision-makers rather than precarious litmuses of human nature. (Kenvin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy)

I often get into it with right-wing-free-market fundamentalists. It’s not a pleasant experience, but it is illuminating. For one thing, these Randians treat us all with disdain, as if we simply cannot grasp their elemental genius. For another, they are impervious to experience. Every incidence of failure of markets to satisfy the greater good or basic human needs is turned back in our face: It’s government’s fault. Their ideal world is one where government is reduced to a few basic tasks: Deliver our mail, protect our shores, and stay the hell out of our lives.

So we see now on a charred landscape with wide swaths of destruction. It was brought about by feverish lending and borrowing and a speculative bubble. From this we are to conclude that markets are intelligent and should be left to their own? Not hardly. Markets are like fire – they can both serve us and destroy us, keep us warm and burn us to a crisp. As with fire, markets serve us best when regulated.

In the current crisis there are many culprits, and a lot of finger pointing is going on. Generally, from the right, it’s home borrowers getting the finger. And indeed, they did get sucked in – they did refinance to spend their home equity on consumer goods and pay down their high-interest credit card debt. They did fall for teaser rates and take on financial obligations beyond their ability to repay. They were not exactly smart borrowers. And they should pay a price.

On the other hand, we have the lenders, and in general, the repeal of the New Deal. In the wake of the Great Depression a large number of regulatory protections were put in place to keep the financial sector from flaring and burning, as it is known to do.

Economist Robert Kuttner:

[today we have what we would] call securitization of credit. Some people think this is a recent innovation, but in fact it was the core technique that made possible the dangerous practices of the 1920. Banks would originate and repackage highly speculative loans, market them as securities through their retail networks, using the prestigious brand name of the bank – e.g. Morgan or Chase – as a proxy for the soundness of the security. It was this practice, and the ensuing collapse when so much of the paper went bad, that led Congress to enact the Glass-Steagall Act, requiring bankers to decide either to be commercial banks – part of the monetary system, closely supervised and subject to reserve requirements, given deposit insurance, and access to the Fed’s discount window; or investment banks that were not government guaranteed, but that were soon subjected to an extensive disclosure regime under the SEC.

Since repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999, after more than a decade of de facto inroads, super-banks have been able to re-enact the same kinds of structural conflicts of interest that were endemic in the 1920s – lending to speculators, packaging and securitizing credits and then selling them off, wholesale or retail, and extracting fees at every step along the way. And, much of this paper is even more opaque to bank examiners than its counterparts were in the 1920s. Much of it isn’t paper at all, and the whole process is supercharged by computers and automated formulas. An independent source of instability is that while these credit derivatives are said to increase liquidity and serve as shock absorbers, in fact their bets are often in the same direction – assuming perpetually rising asset prices – so in a credit crisis they can act as net de-stabilizers.

It’s not like blaming this president or that one will help us now, but if we must place blame, it falls on the shoulders of Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan. Clinton gave us Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who ushered through repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, a post-depression piece of legislation that prevented conflicts of interest in lending, among other things. When Rubin left the administration, in a colossal conflict of interest, he became chairman of the executive committee of Citigroup, which was an enormous beneficiary of the repeal of Glass Steagall.

Citigroup would both originate home loans and allow borrowers extremely high leverage, and at the same time repackage those loans as securities. It’s a nice scheme that looks a lot like what we did in the 1920’s with other securities, and it works fine in a speculative bubble, but comes falling down when housing prices decline. Greenspan, for his part, kept interest rates so low as to perpetuate the bubble. He should have seen it, should have stopped it. It was only his job.

It could have been prevented, should have been prevented. We had the tools, but since the time of Jimmy Carter we have been either ignoring these tools or repealing the laws that gave them to us.

Which brings us back to Randian capitalism, unfettered markets, and what Phillips called “the illusion of markets as potential parliaments rather than descendants of carnivals.” The question before us now is do we have the political will to reimpose discipline on markets? Are the Democrats part of the solution or part of the problem?

Hillary Clinton, whose husband presided over deregulation that caused the problem, offers us nothing beyond the current stimulus package – no re-regulation, no discipline to be imposed on markets. Same song and dance. Nothing of substance comes from Barack Obama either. There’s nothing, of course, from McCain and the Republicans. That’s our most basic fundamental flaw: When both parties are captive of the same financial interests, neither has the will to impose the discipline necessary not just to remedy the immediate problem, but also to enact the long term structural fixes that need be made.

Let’s eat, drink, and enjoy our tax rebates. There is no fix in sight. The coming election is about nothing in particular. The Democrats are not your father’s Democrats. They don’t have the political will to do the real fixing that needs to be done.

Pitchers and catchers report in eight days. In the meantime, baseball fans are bored. The question asked this morning at my favorite baseball blog was this: Which movie did you most anticipate that most disappointed you?

These are mostly young people at the blog, and they have heard a lot about great movies from the past. So they have rented or purchased them, and were deeply disappointed. It’s an interesting glimpse into the minds of younger movie lovers.

Generally, the reason given for not liking a movie from years ago is that it is boring. And indeed, people these days are used to heavy editing and rapid scene-shifting. But they are also inundated with special effects and violence has risen to new levels. But many movies that were big hits years ago were also pretentious and too-cool, and simply don’t stand up well.

Anyway, here’s what young people think of movies we (well some of us) thought were cool:

The Shining: Not nearly so scary now as then. What’s changed?

The Graduate: Mass market soundtracks were relatively new, and Simon and Garfunkle caught a wave, but this movie is tiresome and tedious.

Birth of a Nation: My oh my – was racism so common back then? I’ve heard enough about this movie to be happy never seeing it, but the theme was ordinary in its time. How we have grown!

Psycho: This movie actually was remade in 1998, scene for scene, line for line, and really did bomb. But when it originally came out in 1960, it scared people. The shower scene is often mentioned as classic. It’s fairly mundane.

Easy Rider: Reading a little too much into hippie communes and bikers, type-casting rednecks. There was not much there there.

Cannonball Run: Meant to be a slapstick comedy, it fails to raise a yuck when watched today. $5.00 at WalMart, and worth every penny.

Billy Jack: A man of peace kicks the crap out of everyone he hates. Maybe a prequel to Kung Fu, the terrible TV show about a martial arts expert in the cowboy west.

Star Wars I, II, III. These movies answer the question in reverse: they would have kicked ass in 1975.

The Big Lebowski: A snoozer that was supposed to be funny?

Dr. Zhivago: Shot in North Dakota at a time when Russia was a dark and foreboding place. Loooooong love story, schloppy theme song that sold many 45’s.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Great vehicle for two cool guys of their time that happened to be a western that happened to mention two historical characters.

Thelma and Louise: Yeah, well, so what?

There’s been discussion among Democrats about the Montana Republican Party decision to hold caucuses this year instead of a popular vote to decide how their delegates will vote at the Republican convention. Read all about it here, and here.

That’s an interesting discussion. Next I will consult the Democrats about their view on whether or not we should refinance our mortgage. I mean, as long as they are meddling …

Voting is overrated. It’s a right, but it’s only one. Taken outside the others, isolated, it’s an exercise in futility. A right to choose between a hard right wing Republican or a centrist right-leaning Democrats is kind of a silly right, and I don’t blame people for turning away, for going to the beach on election day.

The “right” to vote carries with it some duties, and most people ignore those duties. I mean, it’s only one vote, won’t change the outcome, and these days we don’t even know if it will be counted. It might even be flipped to the other side. But we are required by tradition to put the body politic on a pedestal. I don’t. Most people are smart – smart enough not to waste their time on political candidates. Some of us ain’t so smart.

Let’s be blunt – it’s not about voting. It’s about deliberation and dissemination of information on which to deliberate. The American media is perhaps the worst in the industrialized world, maybe the non-industrialized too. They are all about horse race. They don’t cover issues. Take this Obama-Clinton race. Most people have no clue where either candidate stands on important issues. So is the act of voting in such a vacuum something we should consecrate?

We don’t get much information. Candidates, on one hand, know all there is to know about us. We’re polled to death. They know we want health care reform. They know we want the Bush tax cuts repealed. They know we want out of Iraq. They know we like Social Security and want it preserved.

They know all of that stuff, but are powerless to give us what we want. Real political power in this country is in the corporations and wealthy families that own most of the assets outside the commons. They determine what is attainable in the political sphere.

But politicians have to face us every two or four years. So they get cagey. They entice us with promises that will be forgotten the day after they are elected. We know very little about what candidates intend to do once elected. New faces enter office with high ideals, but soon run into hard cold reality. Here’s some of the basics:

1. The public pays very little attention to what goes on in the political sphere. There’s a great flurry of interest and activity around election day, but it is unfocused and quickly evaporates.

2. Office holders can do the right thing by the people who elected them, but there’s usually no reward – in fact, they are punished as they see campaign contributions go away to potential opponents.

3. Office holders can do the wrong thing by the people who elected them. There’s usually no punishment. In fact, they will be rewarded by a media that allows them to operate behind a curtain, and campaign contributions rolling in the door.

So here is the choice that Jon Tester, for example, currently faces: Do the right thing, get no reward, face stiff opposition in the next election and have fewer campaign funds to operate with. Do the wrong thing, have the media on your side, and run a well-oiled campaign next time around.

It takes an exceptional person to do the right things under these circumstances. Most fold under the pressure. Some, like Conrad Burns, came into office already folded.

Anyway, about voting – it’s no big deal. If we had an open media, if we had public financing of campaigns, then voting would be right up there on the list of cherished freedoms. But we don’t, and voting, all by itself, means very little.

I was studiously curious about the outcome of yesterday’s primaries, and my gut was pulling for Obama. That’s an emotional response, nothing more. Obama’s got nothing for me – he’s smooth and vacuous and kind of pointless. I saw the way my son was roped in by his charm, and thought that it’s not a bad thing for a young person to get caught up in political idealism. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a leader who could turn on a crowd. So I was pulling for him.

Hillary Clinton represents the cold cynicism of machine politics to me. I’m snake-bitten by her husband – he plays a liberal on TV these days, but when he had power, he governed like a Republican, prancing around like an Ivy League scholar while beating the tar out of liberals. Republicans have the luxury of putting up candidates who reflect their deeply held views. We on the Democratic side have to hope that our candidates really mean what they say. They usually don’t. We’re supposedly the liberal party, but we’re not allowed to have liberals represent us. Always some bland centrist-righty.

Take Social Security, for example. Republicans want to privatize it. That’s scary and dangerous, but make no mistake about their position. Hillary? She wants a bipartisan commission to study it. A bipartisan commission! That’s what I mean – you never know what you are getting with these centrist Democrats, but it is discomforting.

Here’s a passage from Alexander Cockburn’s review of Sally Beddell Smith’s book, The Clinton’s, For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton, The White House Years:

Bill Clinton “typically had a half-dozen books going at any one time.” His briefing primers “ran more than one hundred pages.” … He would jolt officials out of a deep sleep “to discuss policy questions.” Bill’s old friend David Leopoulus “believed that ‘the job of the presidency’ was ‘all that Bill and Hillary talked about.”

But the gabfests went round and round in circles because very early in Little Rock, Arkansas, Bill and Hillary had also learned conclusively that a hundred worthy position papers, each a thousand pages long, weigh less in the balance of forces than a single phone call from the CEO of Georgia Pacific or Tyson Chicken or WalMart. In tune with the decay of liberalism in the 1970’s and 1980’s, their political lives were permanently schizophrenic: on the one hand, rhetorical ardor for reform as expressed in Hillary’s speeches as board member of her friend Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund, on the other hand, as Bedell Smith convincingly displays, time after time chill betrayal: in the case of welfare, Hillary was the one who ordered the president to sign the Republicans’ bill, thus betraying everything Hillary claimed she stood for. Bill refused to back Marian’s husband, Peter, in his hopes for a federal judgeship, on the grounds that he was too liberal, and then was too chicken to tell him. Edelman learned of his betrayal in the morning newspaper.

This is the essence of Clintonism – fiery rhetoric, intellectual depth, vacuous positions, and backstabbing. Did Bill lack the courage of his convictions? No – not likely. He was too cowardly to openly face people he betrayed, but it goes deeper than that. He merely lacked convictions.

Hillary, on the other hand, apparently has convictions. Only, she’s not letting on what they are. That will come as a surprise, the result of some bipartisan commission. We’ll read about it in the morning paper.

The guy who did us in, the real culprit, was John Edwards. When he was in the Senate, he was a conservative southerner. Where rubber met road, he was a righty. Then this campaign – he said all the right things, enticed us, gathered us up to make a run for the prize, and then unceremoniously dumped us. It seems that when a Pied Piper is needed, one emerges – Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and John Edwards in 2008. John Edwards made certain that the nominee of the Democratic Party would be a conservative Democrat. Whether he intended that or not is immaterial. That is the end result.

So I awake on the morning after Super Tuesday, and rush to the computer to find out who won California, because I want Steve to be pleased. There’s not much more in it for me in this silly election.

I couldn’t help but notice with this image of Roger Clemens that he looks to be busting at the seams, his head seems very large, and that he just looks like a guy who’s been juicing.

Could be the camera angle.

There’s a lot of credulity in this country, and I noticed it when we saw Hillary break down before the New Hampshire primary. News reporters took it to be the real thing. Supposedly this led to a surge of votes for her in that primary, but the truth is that we’ll never know. The Kucinich recount in that state was halted when he dropped out of the race, and the whole process has been so sloppy and compromised that it’s just a black hole.

It’s credulity that leads us to trust e-voting without paper ballots. The very idea that a vote can be cast and counted in a black hole without chance of audit is supremely stupid. Turning our elections over to private corporations using proprietary software is a monumental violation of public trust. Those officials that have done this need to find other work.

Here’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., writing in the 2/7/09 issue of Rolling Stone, on an audit done of Ohio’s voting system:

When Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner ordered an audit of electronic voting machines in her state last year, she fully expected to uncover a host of security flaws. As I reported in “Was the 2004 Election Stolen” (Rolling Stone 1002), Ohio’s touch-screen machines were open to hacking, flipped votes from John Kerry to George Bush, and on one case spontaneously cast 3,893 votes for the president.

But even this dismal track record didn’t prepare Brunner for the verdict returned by two teams of independent researchers in December. “I was shocked and dismayed,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep for days after I first read these reports. All of the systems failed miserably.”

The Ohio audit is the most exhaustive study of e-voting machines in the nation. Two teams of nonpartisan researchers – one composed of corporate-security experts, the other of academics – found that the terminals are so insecure they simply cannot be trusted. “There is the ability,” concludes Brunner, “to mount a wholesale attack on our voting system.”

Researchers were able to alter election results using only a magnet and a personal digital assistant. Forty percent of touch-screen machines manufactured by Diebold – now known as Premier – flipped votes, and one of the company’s machines erased votes without warning once its memory card was full. Even more alarming, electronic ballot counters could be rigged by poll workers to disregard votes without anyone knowing. “If that were done for just a few minutes every hour, you will have a final vote total that doesn’t look too far off,” says Brunner. “Unless you did a hand count of every ballot, you’d never know it.”

Brunner is urging state lawmakers to replace touch-screen equipment with paper ballots that can be electronically scanned and tabulated by bipartisan election boards. But the danger posed by touch-screen machines, she warns, isn’t confined to Ohio – her audit confirmed flaws that have been uncovered from California to Connecticut.

“Systems used across the country have critical security flaws,” she says. “Public officials have an obligation to act on this.

When we have to rely on paperless e-voting to count our votes, our only audit check is pre-election and exit polls. They’ve been widely variant since the advent of gadgetry, leading trusting souls to speculate that polling is no longer a respected science.

Is there some kind of award for that kind of naiveté?

I just finished reading Matt Taibbi’s The New Nixon in Rolling Stone. It’s written with Matt’s usual freshness. He’s not buying Clinton or Obama, calling them

…a pair of superficial, posturing conservatives selling highly similar political packages using different emotional strategies. Obama is selling free trade and employer-based health care and an unclear Iraqi exit strategy using looks, charisma and optimism, while Hillary is selling much the same using hard, cold reality, “prose not poetry,” managerial competence over “vision.”

“Kilgore” wrote about Democratic prospects over at Left in the West a few days back. It was a sad piece, reminiscent of 1968 (long before his time, I’m sure), when the only hope of stopping the war in Vietnam was presented in the form of two pro-war candidates. (But vote, dammit. That’s what makes us a ‘democracy’.)

Kilgore strategizes on the prospect of a Democratic victory – can Hillary beat McCain? Will Obama unfluff? And then this:

With Edwards out, the chorus from the diehards in the blogosphere that Obama and Hillary are Republican lite is going to intensify. We face the same danger that we faced in 2000, when many on the left felt that Gore just wasn’t good enough. Add in the fact that Hillary is disliked strongly by at least 45% of the population and I think we sill be worse off with Hillary as the nominee.

Well, here you go, Kilgore. I’m carping about Republican ‘lite’ candidates, but I’m more with Taibbi – these are not ‘lites’ at all. They are conservatives. That’s why the media fawned over them, ignored Edwards, and spurned Kucinich. The corporate media cannot stomach liberals, and will only grudgingly allow us to fantasize a little bit over what liberal potential we might realize if we elect one of two Republican Democrats. It was foreordained.

Side note: I’m 57. I want to collect Social Security in a few years. The system is solid through the 2040’s if we respect the concept of a trust fund. But Republicans have tried to destroy it, without success. Only a Democrat, in ‘Nixon goes to China’ fashion, can get the job done. So vote for Obama. Vote for Hillary. They are can-doers.

Which brings me home again. Taibbi:

That was where it all came rushing back. Hillary’s stunning [New Hampshire] victory had been in the books for mere minutes before we were all suddenly reminded of all the reasons we came to hate the Clintons over the years — why there were scores of very smart people who by November 2000 were actually willing to pull a lever for Ralph Nader rather than go anywhere near a Democratic Party ticket. Seven years is, it turns out, a long time, just long enough to forget that Clinton fatigue was what saddled us with George Bush in the first place.

Ralph Nader is exploring another run. We’ve been chastised now for seven years – Nader prevented Gore. Not true. Gore prevented Gore. Gore ran as a conservative. He had a conservative running mate. Nader that year put out t-shirts with ten principles on the back – things like environmentalism, feminism, social justice and grassroots democracy. Gore could have driven a fatal stake in Nader’s heart had he chosen to lead on just one of those principles. Instead, he opted for Shrum-tested center-righty nonsense.

He blew it. He ran away from his base. But there’s wisdom behind it. Democrats exist to absorb and neuter forces for change. When we place our hopes in them, we invite things like Gore’s 2000 campaign.

And we’re about to do it again.

It’s Nader time. Maybe he can kill the Hillary before she breeds. Maybe he can disillusion us of Obama. It’s the only hope I have of ever collecting Social Security.