Mr. Moderate

According to this article on the CNN web site, Rush Limbaugh spoke Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC, where he continued to display his deliberate confusion over the founding documents of our government. According to that CNN article, Rush said this:

We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom — and the pursuit of happiness.

For the record, here is the actual preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Rush was confusing the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence, whose text includes the words Rush attributes to the Constitution:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Continue reading ‘Rush Limbaugh Is STILL A Big Fat Idiot!’ »

Anybody who believes we ought to just adopt the proposal put forth by Secretary Henry Paulson needs to study the “Mega-Million Dollar CEO Payouts” article from ABC News. Look for Henry Paulson under Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson was paid nearly $164 million by Goldman Sachs when he left to become the Secretary of the Treasury. I’m sorry, but that smells an awful lot like a pre-bribe, given that Paulson made a “mere” $4 million the year before and only about $12 million the year before that.

Can anybody honestly believe that there isn’t going to be a good chunk of the $700 billion bailout going to help Paulson’s friends at Goldman Sachs? Even if it is just $7 billion of good taxpayer money going to Goldman Sachs, that is still a pretty good payoff for a $164 million “pre-bribe.” I rather strongly smell a rat, and I’m a long way from Washington DC!

Let me begin by quoting the final words of my previous blog post:

The Republican kleptocrats have probably stolen over $1 trillion this time around, and the United States is hovering ever closer to bankruptcy as a consequence. How much more taxpayer wealth are we going to allow them to suck out of the Treasury before we decide that deregulation is the real source of this fiasco? I don’t know, but it sure seems to me that the American voters just don’t get it (yet)!

In a fine above-the-fold article in USA Today, David Lynch notes that the seeds of the recent meltdown on Wall Street were sewn back in 1999 with the repeal of key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933:

By the time of the 1990s boom, the financial services industry was campaigning to repeal Glass-Steagall, arguing that foreign rivals were hobbled by no similar restraints. In 1999, Congress assented.

“The pressure was so great that Congress really couldn’t resist it,” says economist Peter Bernstein. “Nothing really bad had happened since 1982, and those bad things that did happen were transitory.”

If important financial institutions failed, market participants and lawmakers alike felt that market forces could restore order on their own, with only minimal government aid.

Maybe they were wrong.

It isn’t just that they were wrong. This isn’t a case of bad judgment. This is a case of deliberate theft where these large financial institutions effectively socialized their risks while privatizing their profits, as many commentators have noted, among them Professor Nouriel Roubini in his recent blog post. Roubini is referenced in the Lynch article:

Former White House economist Nouriel Roubini, who forecast the current financial storm two years ago, has a harsher verdict. He says the USA is turning into “the United Socialist State Republic of America.”

Those may seem like harsh words to use on alleged “conservative” politicians. However, as I’ve noted in a previous blog post, there is actually very little overall difference between communism and fascism, so it isn’t surprising that a fascist Republican Party would act to socialize those business entities they feel they need to preserve in order to continue ruling the nation.
Continue reading ‘Welcome to the Fascist States of America!’ »

Few people today will realize that one effect of the Reagan Revolution was to convert the government of the United States into a kleptocracy. Now, the United States doesn’t have the usual form of a kleptocracy, which is actually denounced by the President’s Statement on Kleptocracy. In the usual form of kleptocracy, the higher the rank of the leader (up to and including the highest ranking leader of the nation), the greater the amount of ill-gotten gains which end up in the leader’s own personal bank account. That sort of thing is just a bit too obvious for politicians in the United States as the voters still have a bad habit of usually tossing out any politician who is stained with corruption. (There are, of course, exceptions to any such rule.)

The United States has a very indirect form of kleptocracy. While in office, most politicians will only receive campaign contributions from the thieves who stand to gain from the government. However, once they are retired from political office, they will receive large advance payments for a book or books they intend to write and they will receive additional large payments for speaking at meetings of (largely) thieves and others who have benefitted from the policies followed by the former office holder. But of course, there are many ways around the usual restrictions. The boldest is to simply direct the payoff to a spouse or family member, usually through the grant of a job or participation in a “sweetheart deal” where the outcome is virtually guaranteed. Many current political campaigns have accusations of this sort buried somewhere within them. And this isn’t really new. Just research the television holdings of Lady Bird Johnson and ask yourself if being married to Lyndon Johnson had anything at all to do with her owning those lucrative franchises.

The so-called “Keating Five” scandal gives us another look at how high level politicians can be bought and paid for by high level crooks. Charles Keating used political contributions and the influence they purchased to shield his crooked bank dealings from investigation by federal bank regulators.
Continue reading ‘Republican Kleptocracy’ »

Michael Savage is a conservative radio talk show host whose program I listen to and whose web site I link to here on my own blog. First and foremost we must recognize that Michael is an entertainer, with millions of listeners, and it is the job of an entertainer to entertain. Entertainers will frequently use exaggeration to get our attention, and Michael is one of the greatest exaggerators I’ve ever listened to. Last week Michael started a controversy about autism when he exaggerated the over-diagnosis of the disease. Media Matters then picked out his most-overblown statements:

On his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage claimed that autism is “[a] fraud, a racket. … I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’ “

Many people reacted to the above statements with anger and strong complaints against Michael Savage, trying to get his program thrown off the air for those remarks. One conservative blogger even called Michael “the most hated conservative in America.” Well, in some sense I suspect that Michael relishes the label of “most hated” so long as it gains attention for his talk show and increases his base of listeners.
Continue reading ‘Michael Savage and the Autism Controversy’ »

We all know the classic image of the ostrich with its head in the sand while its body is exposed to whatever comes along. In our culture, we interpret this image as a refusal to see the obvious. Well, Lyme Disease exists, but 9,999 out of 10,000 doctors have their heads in the sand when it comes to properly diagnosing and treating Lyme Disease. But anybody can go on the Internet and find a picture of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria which causes Lyme Disease. It shows that the organism is a spirochete, or “corkscrew-shaped” bacteria. How can Lyme Disease not exist? This gets to be a real mystery, so please read on.

This is the first of a two-post set, the other of which discusses the claims by Michael Savage that the mental diseases of autism and ADHD are vastly over-diagnosed in this country. As I say at the end of that other post, what is totally a mystery to me is this: Why does the establishment (schools, doctors, drug companies, etc.) want to diagnose kids with autism and ADHD and yet they refuse to diagnose kids (or adults) as being sick with the actual bacterial disease of Lyme?
Continue reading ‘Lyme Disease and Medical Ostriches’ »

Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
…

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
– Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who

One of my favorite quotes of all time is by George Santayana (from The Life of Reason [1905 1906], Volume I, Reason in Common Sense, Chapter 12):

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. . . . Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981, and a large part of what he pledged to accomplish was to “get government off our backs” by deregulating various industries. One of the deregulated industries was the Savings and Loan industry which, I’m afraid, you need to be fairly old to understand how critical that industry used to be to the American economy. But in its zeal to eliminate government regulations that prevented businesses from seeking profits wherever they could be found, the Reagan administration convinced a Democratic Congress to vote away the governmental controls which ensured that industry remained healthy. However, they did not vote away, but actually increased, the guarantee of health provided by the US taxpayer through the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC). This was, of course, a recipe for disaster as the greedy owners and managers of savings and loan corporations sought vast personal wealth for themselves without one thought for the safety of the federally-insured funds they were using to create that wealth. This led to the Savings and Loan Crisis (or S&L Crisis) of the late 1980s, which was the precursor to the current subprime mortgage crisis. Apparently, we never did really learn our lessons from the S&L Crisis so I’m going to begin with a discussion of what went on with that mess.
Continue reading ‘We’re Getting Fooled Again!’ »

The politicians in Washington are now preaching that, because the American people persuaded their elected representatives to kill the “grand compromise” bill (which was neither grand nor a broad compromise, having been hammered out in secret by a small group of senators) we must now accept that nothing will be done about illegal immigration until 2009.

Says who?

Secretary Chertoff said that “some necessary tools … were left on the floor of the Senate” when the Senate killed that bill. Who says that those tools cannot be enacted one by one? Who declares that it is “all or nothing” with respect to the bill that was just killed (for the second time)? Can’t the people demand that Secretary Chertoff receive all of the “necessary tools” without enacting any of the highly-objectionable aspects of this huge piece of legislation?
Continue reading ‘Immigration - What Next?’ »

… “no man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.”
Judge Gideon J. Tucker, Final Accounting in the Estate of A.B. (1866) [1 Tucker 248 (N. Y. Surr. 1866)].

Congress has reopened the can of illegal immigrant worms many thought had been buried a couple of weeks ago. It seems that more than 60 senators have agreed to go forward with the current bill provided two dozen amendments are considered before a final vote is taken. It isn’t the least bit clear what all is in the two dozen amendments or what chances of passage any of them or the bill itself might actually have. During the last go-around, one significant amendment was enough to get a majority to refuse to go any further with consideration of the bill. If it gets through the Senate, it will move to the House, where the Democrat leaders can use any number of tricky rules to ram the mess through without any real input from an extremely upset American public. So, for those of us who oppose this stinky diaper of a bill, this week’s prospective set of votes in the Senate is somewhat “do or die.”
Continue reading ‘Immigration Redux’ »

I hate to harp on the housing crisis but several new articles came out today and if you didn’t know what the underlying story was you might tend to believe that everything was well here in America. The housing market will not be cured for many months, and perhaps years to come. However, that does not mean that certain local markets might not experience a short-term boom on occasion. If you are “flipping houses,” there may yet be some room to maneuver if you are in the right market. But sooner or later, if you are not careful, you will get caught holding the bag and one bad deal can destroy all of your profits.
Continue reading ‘Denial Is Not A River’ »