Firedoglake asks the question:

Anyone else noticed that somehow the banks and brokerages and so on getting all the huge bailouts don’t seem required to come up with a plan for “long term economic viability”, but somehow the Big 3 do? Why is that? If it’s true that this financial crisis is such that banks can’t be expected to be viable on their own, why is it that Detroit has to be?

My best answer? Citibank is not troubled by labor unions.

I just finished reading Chris Hedges’ book American Fascists. Hedges is a Harvard Divinity graduate and a deeply religious man, the son of a minister. He’s put off by the Christian Right, and in the book likens their leaders to others with less savory reputations, like Mussolini, Stalin, and Godwin. I found the book interesting, but I think a bit overblown. The right wing Christians are useful to politicians, but are much like Fredo Corleone – that is, even though well connected, out of the loop.

But lately (Vice President Sarah Palin anyone?), they’ve been having close encounters with real power. It is troubling.

Here’s what Hedges has to say (in an interview with Michelle Goldberg) about the persistent question on whether George W. Bush is a true convert or a poseur:

I think he’s a believer, to the extent that this belief system empowers his own arrogant sense of privilege and intellectual shallowness. When you know right and wrong, when you’ve been mandated by God to lead, you don’t have to ask hard questions, you don’t have to listen to anyone else. I think that plays into Bush’s character pretty well.

I think there are probably other aspects or tenets of this belief system that he finds distasteful and doesn’t like. But in a real sense he fits the profile: a washout, not a very good family life – apparently his mother was a horror show – he was a drunk, allegedly used drugs, coasted because of his daddy, reaches middle age, hasn’t done anything with his life, finds Jesus. That fits a lot of people in the movement.

There’s a chapter on this weird Rapture stuff – the idea that true-believing Christians will be taken from the earth, that the rest of us will die horrible prolonged deaths, and then they will come back to rule. (A priest once told my son that they really blew it when they put the Book of Revelations in the Bible – they should have used Star Wars instead.) In another part of the book, Hedges mentions in passing the concept of the “Master Race”. That’s all that their eschatology is about – the penultimate time for them, when they take control of all. They are the Master Race.

They’d be just another cult waiting for a comet if there weren’t so damned many of them. They have untoward effects on us all. They threaten the first amendment, the separation of church and state, and are really bad for the environment – they believe that since the end is near, there’s no sense in preserving the earth’s resources. God will provide in abundance anyway. (Many of us remember James Watt, an end-timer who was Secretary of the Interior under Reagan. He once told Congress “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.”) They can do real and lasting damage.

I get a bit testy around fundamentalists. You can’t reason with them – they are out of reach. They are so certain they are right that they can be Machiavellian in pursuit of their goals, as when, according to Stephen Spoonamore, a few of them rigged the 2004 presidential election in Ohio (“saving babies”). When you are right, when you know you are right, when you know everyone else is wrong, when God is on your side, any means justifies your ends. Hence, Inquisitions.

This too shall pass, I keep thinking. But it’s lingering. We have people in high office with crazy belief systems, like Rep. Michelle Bachman and Gov. Sarah Palin and U.S. Senator Mark Pryor, who said in Bill Maher’s movie Religulous that you don’t have to pass an IQ test to be a U.S. Senator. But there’s a supreme shallowness with these people that they exhibit before us proudly – they are not interested in complications or nuance. They are simple people with simple answers.

Throughout U.S. history there have been extremes of religious fervor, which we call Great Awakenings. What’s happening now is merely a continuation. The U.S. is off-the-charts religious and fundamentalist. It’s a wonder that we get intelligent pragmatists elected to the presidency. It’s time now for the Republicans to control their base. They are coming too close to the seat of power. Give them minor jobs, keep them busy, but by all means, keep them out of power.

Even Newt’s family doesn’t love him.

Joe Lieberman wants to be president. It’s as plain as the nose on my face. His first chance was in 2000, as Al Gore’s running mate. Though they didn’t win, it did position him favorably for a shot at the 2004 nomination. Jo-mentum ran that year, but was never taken seriously, never rising from low digits in the polls. He was probably insulted.

In 2008, Joe probably saw a road to the White House through John McCain. He probably thought he would be the running mate, and would land, at last, the vice presidency, and later the presidency should McCain kick off early or decide not to run after four years.

The parties don’t disagree on Iraq, or Afghanistan, or the so-called War on Terror. There was no substance to Joe Lieberman supporting McCain beyond his own personal ambition.

He’s not that hard to figure out.

From Digby:

In a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), [Senate Majority leader Mitch] McConnell urged Reid to adopt a more conciliatory tone and warned him that Republicans will unite against Democrats if he does not. The letter was signed by all 40 GOP senators and two Republican incumbents who are awaiting the results of elections in Georgia and Minnesota.

That would include moderates Olympia Snow and Susan Collins of Maine. The Republicans run a tight ship. With the likes of Joe Lieberman and Diane Feinstein in the mix, I doubt that the magical sixty vote marker is of any importance.

Steve Forbes, late of planet Forbes in the Lassaiz-faire solar system, has a great idea for all that ails us. Hair of the dog.

Between the early 1980s and 2007 we lived in an economic Golden Age. Never before have so many people advanced so far economically in so short a period of time as they have during the last 25 years.

He needs to get off his planet and visit ours occasionally.

For those who don’t know me, I am a CPA living and working in Bozeman, Montana. I received a phone call a couple of weeks ago from a man who was interested, he said, in engaging my services. We set up an appointment.

He is running a new start up company that specializes in helping small businesses obtain credit. It’s an interesting concept – a multi-leveled service that would build up credit ratings, set up web pages, and overall help these unemployed carpenters and plumbers and bank executives become credible.

He didn’t want my services. He wanted my client list. He said I would be doing them a favor by hooking them up with him. End of story.

Here’s what is most interesting – up until June of 2008, my client-to-be was in the mortgage business – he ran a storefront. He said he left while the leaving was good.

I doubt the foresight to leave before the crash – I think he’s just trying to land on his feet. But here’s the bottom line – the flimflammers that were enticing people into ARMS, offering mortgages and refinances to gullible and unqualified people (and pocketing exorbitant fees), are the same people who are always with us. In the late 1990’s, they were probably doing dot.com startup companies. When things are slow, they sell used cars. They also run small casinos. They cannot resist the lure of the fast buck.

Now that the mortgage business has gone belly up, they are looking for new scams. Buyer beware.

From Andy Borowitz:

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama’s decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it “alienating” to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.

“Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.”

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, “Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate — we get it, stop showing off.”

The president-elect’s stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

“Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can’t really do there, I think needing to do that isn’t tapping into what Americans are needing also,” she said.

[I’m feeling lazy today, and a little self-congratulatory as I watch Joe Lieberman, pro-war Democrat, have the last laugh again. The following piece was written in January of 2007, and I wouldn’t change a word.]

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I’ve been suspicious of the Obama parade from the beginning – it’s been my experience that ‘attractive’ Democrats whom the media fawns over and regard as safe can usually trace their roots back to the Democratic Leadership Council, otherwise known as the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.

Obama’s no easy case, though. There are messages in the smoke.

Alexander Cockburn, as left as left can be, has written a couple of pieces on Obama. This was before the media discovered him. That’s a recent phenomenon.

Here’s Cockburn:

It’s depressing to think that we’ll have to endure Obamaspeak for months, if not years to come: a pulp of boosterism about the American dream, interspersed with homilies about “putting factionalism and party divisions behind us and moving on.” I used to think Sen. Joe Lieberman was the man whose words I’d least like to be force fed top volume if I was chained next to a loudspeaker in Camp Gitmo, but I think Obama, who picked Lieberman as his mentor when he first entered the U.S. Senate, is worse. I’ve never heard a politician so desperate not to offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to be fearless and forthright.

That’s right – Joe Lieberman is Obama’s mentor, and Lieberman brags that Obama picked him, not the opposite.

Cockburn also notes that Obama, around the time that Murtha was making a stink about Iraq, spoke before the elite of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Democrats fled Murtha, few with more transparent calculation than Obama who voyaged to the Council on Foreign Relations on November 22, there to ladle out to the assembled elites such balderdash as “The President could take the politics out of Iraq once and for all if he would simply go on television and say to the American people ‘Yes, we made mistakes'”, or “we need to focus our attention on how to reduce the U.S. military footprint in Iraq. Notice that I say ‘reduce,’ and not ‘fully withdraw'”, or “2006 should be the year that the various Iraqi factions must arrive at a fair political accommodation to defeat the insurgency; and , the Administration must make available to Congress critical information on reality-based benchmarks that will help us succeed in Iraq.”

Smooth as syrup. There’s a wave of discontent in this country, voiced in the November elections, that we want out of Iraq – no redeployment or scaleback, but o-u-t. No worthy politician can ignore this. But the war from the beginning has been an elite undertaking with unstated objectives. Americans have only been cajoled and frightened into following, and are seeing more clearly now.

It is going to take a politician of considerable skill to 1) heed to public demand to get out, and 2) keep us in. The media, subservient to power as always, will glom on to any politician who can serve those objectives. So, for now, Obama is their man.

[Obama] lobbed up the first signal flare during the run-up to his 2004 senate race, when his name began to feature on Democratic Leadership Council literature as one of the hundred Democratic leaders to watch.

The DLC doesn’t necessarily pre-select candidates, but they do keep an eye out for possibilities. Obama has been on their watch-list for some time. Now that they see his sex appeal, they may rally behind him. He could be Hillary without the polarizing effect, a real possibility to hold the office.

Obama has voted to close filibuster on both of Bush’s Supreme Court selections, to re-up the Patriot Act, for “tort reform”. He’s sent up plenty of signals that he could be Republican-lite enough to be ‘electable’ – code word for no threat to power.

Obama is one of those politicians whom journalists like to decorate with words as “adroit” or “politically adept” because you can actually see him trimming to the wind, the way you see a conjuror of moderate skill shove the rabbit back up his sleeve. Above all he is concerned with the task of reassuring the masters of the Democratic Party, and beyond that, the politico-corporate establishment, that he is safe. Whatever bomb might have been in his head has long since been dis-armed. He’s never going to blow up in the face of anyone of consequence.

There will be other candidates testing the wind. Tom Vilsack, another DLC guy, might catch on. Anyone of the left need not apply – Feingold has already ascertained that there is no support among those who matter for a man who really would get us out of Iraq, who really would change our health care system, who really cares about campaign finance reform. We’re pretty much stuck with the DLC, sex appeal, and no substance.

Obama had his fingers stuck in the wind as always. He bends to every breeze, as soon as he identifies it as coming from a career-threatening quarter. This man is no leader.

Check it out. (Rated R, for revealing).