Month: October 2011

I am writing this on a MacBook Air that you all bought for me, but I could be typing it on my iPhone, or CabinGirl’s iPad, or her MacBook Pro, or her iPhone. Steve Jobs is dead. That’s a technical term. In reality, he lives on through his creations. His vision has so infused how we go about our lives that he doesn’t seem dead at all. Thank you, Steve.

I suppose we should expect this from any Republican candidate running for President, but even so, it comes across as mean nasty and dishonest to blame Obama and the unemployed for their plight, and excuse the years of Republican sponsored deregulation and the fraudulent actions of the Big Banks for our current economic disaster, especially in light of the Republicans who refuse to consider any measures to increase jobs at home other than tax breaks to Billionaires and Multinational Corporations who outsource their workforce overseas or eliminate jobs even as they make profits: Here’s the video, courtesy of TPM and (cough, cough) the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal:

Here’s the transcript:

“I don’t have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated, to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration,” Cain said. “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks — if you don’t have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself!”

Interviewer Alan Murray asked: “You don’t think the banks have anything to do with the crisis that we went into in 2008?”

“They did have something to do with the crisis that we went into in 2008. But we’re not in 2008 — we’re in 2011!” Cain replied. […]

[After interviewer challenges Cain on responsibility of Banks for the economic mess we are in, this was his response]

“Okay. Yes, they had a big part to do with it. And obviously you could go back and say okay, what did the banks do, to do this? These demonstrations, I honestly don’t understand what they’re looking for. To me, they come across more as anti-capitalism. That’s basically what it comes across as.

“When I was growing up, I was blessed to have had parents that didn’t teach me to be jealous of anybody, and didn’t teach me to be envious of somebody. It is not a person’s fault because they succeeded — it is a person’s fault if they failed. And so this is why I don’t understand these demonstrations, and what is it that they are looking for.”

The key words are in his first sentence: “I don’t have facts to back this up …” Well, we learned long ago that Republicans and their base don’t care about the facts if it gets in the way of the propaganda story they want to tell and/or hear. I’ll give the WSJ interviewer a small dollop of credit for pushing Cain on his statement that the the Banks (who made massive profits after the bailout and paid massive bonuses to their top executives) bear little responsibility for the current state of the economy, but not much because he failed to ask him the hard questions regarding the Bush administration’s policies of financial deregulation, non-enforcement of the Securities laws (a practice that has sadly continued in the Obama administration) and the failure of the Republicans in Congress to consider any legislation to increase demand for goods and services, even policies that Republicans formerly supported.

And the idea that Obama is behind the Occupy Wall Street protests is laughable, much less unsubstantiated. But, hell, that’s what the Republican primary voters want to hear from their candidates — that the protestors are all a bunch of Dirting F***ing Hippies, Slackers and Obama operatives! God forbid Cain should actually back up his “belief” with any evidence. And as for blaming the victims, well that’s Standard Republican Operating Procedure, unless they are claiming to be the victims, of course.

As for not knowing what the protestors are complaining about, well since when do millionaires living lives of wealth and privilege ever understand what “the little people” have to complain about. They must be anti-capitalists and lazy bums, right?

New Yorkers and tourists at Zuccotti Park have varied reactions to the ragtag incursion. Richard Oranger, who said he worked in insurance, expressed contempt.

“Lazy bum Marxist freeloaders,” he said. “Their sign right there saying capitalism doesn’t work? Oh yeah, it doesn’t work?” He gestures sarcastically at the skyscrapers above. “Capitalism built this city up!”

Yes, that must be it. Well, not according to Professor Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics, who predicted our current financial crisis long before it happened. This is what he has to say about our unfettered Disaster Capitalism that is shredding the world’s economy for he benefit of a few at the top of the wealth pyramid.

In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. […] All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. […]

Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. […]

[M]ost important, a modern economy requires “collective action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead.

None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had.

I guess he’s just a DFH, anti-capitalist Marxist, too. By the way, Stiglitz nailed it on why Herman Cain and other Republicans are so willing to blame the unemployed for their own plight: “[The wealthy] become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had.”

Listening to Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck discuss politics can blister your cerebral cortex. They are fools who operate without the most basic facts or any accurate historical framework. That is why O’Reilly thinks that Mitt Romney is an Eisenhower Republican and Glenn Beck thinks that Obama is a radical socialist who doesn’t like white people. I want to make a point about trying to assess the ideological bent of presidents and potential presidents. You can’t go by their record alone, or by their rhetoric. They will do what it is possible to do, not what they would do if given a free hand. Mitt Romney, if elected, will be faced with one radical bill after another. He will not veto them all. He will not go to war with a Republican Congress. He will sign most of their radical agenda into law. He will not stand up to the radical right any more than Eisenhower stood up to Joe McCarthy. The difference today is that McCarthy is no longer an outlier in the GOP, but the norm.

If you want Eisenhower Republicanism, you already have a fairly good facsimile in the Obama administration. It’s not that Obama is on the same ideological plane as Eisenhower, but when you combine a fairly orthodox Democrat in the White House with a radically conservative Congress and a Democratic Party that isn’t united behind the president, what you get looks a lot like what Eisenhower produced. It wouldn’t be too bad if the economy wasn’t so crippled and Congress could actually agree on anything.

As someone from the White House told me, the president didn’t run for office to spend all his time bickering about the goddamned debt ceiling. Where we are is not where he wants us to be. The same thing would hold true with Romney. If you elect Romney, you get a massive rightward lurch, even if Romney himself isn’t that crazy.

You already may have read “the diary” (you know the one I mean) over at DKos. I’ll bet some of you emailed or tweeted it or posted in on your Facebook page. I’m willing to bet that some of you who did got responses back that claimed that this was only one person, and just anecdotal evidence (so not worth bothering about). Or that this story is probably fake (yeah, I got that one myself).

In short, the usual denial regarding the crisis of our jobless economy from certain people who believe that what we have allowed the wealthy and powerful in our country to do to our democracy over the last 30 years is a good thing, and that anything our government does to help people (other than people we help kill and torture in far away lands) is a bad, fascist-socialist-marxist evil that should be eradicated so we can save our freedoms, blah, blah blah.

Unfortunately for those people, the diary in question does not represent an isolated incident. In the NY Times on Sunday, Craig E. Pollack, a “professor of internal medicine at Johns Hopkins” AND Julia F. Lynch, A “professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania” wrote an op-ed that demonstrated desertguy is not alone in his suffering. Far from it.

A growing body of research shows that foreclosure itself harms the health of families and communities. In our 2008 survey of 250 people undergoing foreclosure in the Philadelphia area, 32 percent reported missing doctor’s appointments and 48 percent said they let prescriptions go unfilled, significantly higher rates than others in their community. A paper released last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that people living in high-foreclosure areas in New Jersey, Arizona, California and Florida were significantly more likely than those in less hard-hit neighborhoods to be hospitalized for conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and heart failure.

More than one-third of homeowners in our study had symptoms of major depression. The N.B.E.R. study found significantly more suicide attempts in high-foreclosure neighborhoods. For every 100 foreclosures, it found a 12 percent increase in anxiety-related emergency-room visits and hospitalizations by adults under 50. Losing a home disrupts social ties to neighbors, schools, jobs and health care providers — ties that under better circumstances promote good health. Neighborhoods suffer, not just homeowners.

(cont.)

This story is not one individual’s battle with depression and despair and poor health, for he is only a symbol of thousands if not millions of people who are suffering from lack of health care, shelter, and the associated problems that accompany them, problems that researchers have established are real. Studies that show disease, depression, suicide and death have increased across the board in America among those who lose their home to foreclosure, are unemployed or both.

I want to personally thank desertguy for having the courage to tell his story, for he is a symbol for millions of Americans just like him. People suffering stress, high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, other severe mental and emotional disorders including suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts because of their poor personal financial situation, one that was not of their own making. People are dying to keep the wealthy 1% from having to pay their fair share of taxes or, with respect to the senior executives of Wall Street firms and Biog bank’s escape punishment their continued fraud, deceit and other criminal activities. Is that shared sacrifice, my friends?

I highly doubt that all the “recognized” organized criminals (Mafia, Gangs, Hell’s Angels, etc.) in America have been responsible for 1% of the deaths for which Big Business and the Executives that run them (i.e., Wall Street, Insurance Companies that deny claims and coverage, Pharmaceutical companies that charge far more than most people can afford for life saving treatments, and the fossil fuel industry and other major polluters that continue make exorbitant profits from polluting the air we breath and the water we drink) have been responsible. How many people died horrible deaths because the tobacco companies were allowed to perpetrate a lie about the safety of their products? How many respiratory diseases and cancers are attributable to dirty air and dirty water and lax regulation? How many people suffer while Wall Street plans its next big scam to steal taxpayer and investor dollars?

And this is not news! Not in 2011. Experts have been describing the deleterious effects on the public health of Americans as a result of our economic crisis and lack of job creation in 2010 (“The unemployed commit suicide at a rate two or three times the national average, researchers estimate”) and in 2009. Hell, a 1985 study by the NIH demonstrated the connection between unemployment and poor mental and physical health–during the Reagan Presidency.

The business, media and political elites can’t claim ignorance of the consequences of their actions to foster economic policies that have led to this crisis. They knew what the results would be for those not fortunate enough to be counted among the privileged in their new “Ownership Society.” Knew and for the most part don’t care. Human life is cheap if it isn’t their lives in question. Remember how the people at the Republican debate laughed at the plight of people dying because they didn’t have health insurance? It was an example of the sheer atavistic, sadistic and misanthropic mindset of so many on the extreme right:

This is why Occupy Wall Street began, with a few people and no money, unlike the “Tea Party” which received millions from conservative funded astro-turf organizations like Freedom Works, and millions more in free publicity by our elite media organizations. This is the result in creating the largest income inequality in our nation;s history, massive unemployment triggered by unregulated Wall Street speculation, millions of illegal foreclosures and millions of Americans who do not have health care insurance. The result is misery, illness, depression and death for everyone who isn’t at the top of the wealth pyramid. The only surprise is that it took this long for somebody in this country to take action.

So again, thank-you desertguy. Your diary was vitally important, just as you are, for it reveals why we so desperately needed a grassroots movement such as Occupy Wall Street, and desperately need it to grow and succeed. Life and health and jobs are fundamental human rights, not commodities to be bought and sold by the plutocracy. If we want to insure those rights exist and are firmly established and protected for ourselves and future generations we need to recognize that working solely from within the corrupted American political system, as it currently constituted, is an incomplete and ineffective strategy. We will have to fight for our rights in the streets as well as at the ballot box. If we didn’t know that before, these last two years have shown us that much, at least.

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Anger in de UN Security Council

(Guardian) – The US ambassador, Susan Rice, said: “The courageous Palestinian people can now clearly see who on this council supports their yearning for liberty and human rights, and who does not.”

“Those who oppose this resolution and give cover to a brutal occupier will have to answer to the Palestinian people – and, indeed, to people across the region who are pursuing the same universal aspirations. The crisis in Judea and Samaria will stay before the security council and we will not rest until this council rises to meet its responsibilities.”

Rice accused the Empire of wanting to sell arms to the Jewish regime rather than stand with the Palestinian people – an accusation vehemently denied by President Obama.

Oops, was her anger pointed at Russia and China? My gaffe.

Arson in Galilee Mosque

(INN) – A fire was set Sunday night inside a mosque at the Bedouin-Arab village of Tuba in the Galileee, not far from Rosh Pina. Light damage was caused to carpets and walls. An initial inquiry at the site found some graffiti in Hebrew scrawled on the walls of the mosque. It said “revenge” and “price tag,” among other things.

Tuba is considered a relatively loyal village and its residents have served in the IDF since 1948. The strong clan in the village is called Al-Heib.

Netanyahu: Galilee mosque arson ‘horrifying’  

• Police slam ‘reckless’ clashes with Israeli Arabs after mosque arson attack  

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

I’ve noticed a conservative bent to Sam Youngman’s reporting for The Hill, but he’s definitely repeating the common wisdom. In his eyes, the president isn’t serious about passing a jobs bill, he’s just using it as a weapon to beat over the Republicans’ heads. Anyone can see that this bill, and pretty much any conceivable alternative bill, cannot get 60 votes in the Senate or pass through the Boehner-led House. The Republican Party doesn’t want to reduce unemployment. They want to increase it. They don’t want to demonstrate that Congress can work together to solve problems. They want to prove that Congress is broken and that the federal government is worthless.

This has been the Republican plan since November of 2008. And, so far, it has worked for them. It didn’t prevent an avalanche of progressive legislation in 2009-2010, but it made that legislation hard to digest on the left and downright toxic on the right. Since the 2010 midterms, the Republicans have effective veto power over everything, and they’re using that veto.

Yet, the president isn’t doing this all for show. He’s trying to put pressure on Congress to do something about joblessness. It’s only a political question because the opposition refuses to do anything to help people find jobs. How long are they going to persist in refusing to act?

Senior administration officials have warned reporters for the last month that Obama will be pushing the jobs bill long after the press has grown bored of hearing about it.

It will be at that point, the thinking goes, that Americans will have heard about it, embraced it and joined the president in calling for its passage.

The drumbeat is to pass the Jobs Bill. Everyone says it can’t pass. The president thinks Congress should pass the bill right now and put 2 million people back to work. He’s going to keep saying that and saying that, and, really, why shouldn’t he? People want action on jobs and the Republicans want a bad economy for political reasons. If enough people come to understand this, they’ll either force their representatives to act or replace them next November. If they don’t come to understand this, they’ll throw out the Democrats for being ineffective.

Where do you stand?

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Deterioration of individual’s rights, equality of opportunity no longer exists, the unlimited rise of capital and corporations, U.S. expansion to the west and the empire colonizing resources world-wide.  From the wealth theory by A. Berle, advisor to President Roosevelt, to a recent  article by Noam Chomsky, Is the world too big to fail?

Great reading.

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

So…ya say that Ron Paul is unelectable right wing flake, eh? And that my recent piece here (Ron Paul: Was the al-Awlaki assassination unconstitutional?) is somehow way off the mark?

Ok Bunkies and Bunkettes…how’s about someone who was an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, became famous as a co-founder of Reaganomics and was also an editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service?

Insider enough for ya?

Paul Craig Roberts in Counterpunch.

Assassinating Awlaki – The Day America Died

Read on.

I dare ya.

Assassinating Awlaki

The Day America Died

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

September 30, 2011 was the day America was assassinated.

Some of us have watched this day approach and have warned of its coming, only to be greeted with boos and hisses from “patriots” who have come to regard the US Constitution as a device that coddles criminals and terrorists and gets in the way of the President who needs to act to keep us safe.

In our book, “The Tyranny of Good Intentions,” Lawrence Stratton and I showed that long before 9/11 US law had ceased to be a shield of the people and had been turned into a weapon in the hands of the government. The event known as 9/11 was used to raise the executive branch above the law. As long as the President sanctions an illegal act, executive branch employees are no longer accountable to the law that prohibits the illegal act. On the president’s authority, the executive branch can violate US laws against spying on Americans without warrants, indefinite detention, and torture and suffer no consequences.

Many expected President Obama to re-establish the accountability of government to law.  Instead, he went further than Bush/Cheney and asserted the unconstitutional power not only to hold American citizens indefinitely in prison without bringing charges, but also to take their lives without convicting them in a court of law.  Obama asserts that the US Constitution notwithstanding, he has the authority to assassinate US citizens, who he deems to be a “threat,” without due process of law.

In other words, any American citizen who is moved into the threat category has no rights and can be executed without trial or evidence.

On September 30 Obama used this asserted new power of the president and had two American citizens, Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan murdered.  Khan was a wacky character associated with Inspire Magazine and does not readily come to mind as a serious threat.

Awlaki was a moderate American Muslim cleric who served as an advisor to the US government after 9/11 on ways to counter Muslim extremism.  Awlaki was gradually radicalized by Washington’s use of lies to justify military attacks on Muslim countries. He became a critic of the US government and told Muslims that they did not have to passively accept American aggression and had the right to resist and to fight back. As a result Awlaki was demonized and became a threat.

All we know that Awlaki did was to give sermons critical of Washington’s indiscriminate assaults on Muslim peoples. Washington’s argument is that his sermons might have had an influence on some who are accused of attempting terrorist acts, thus making Awlaki responsible for the attempts.

Obama’s assertion that Awlaki was some kind of high-level Al Qaeda operative is merely an assertion.  Jason Ditz on antiwar.com  concluded that the reason Awlaki was murdered rather than brought to trial is that the US government had no real evidence that Awlaki was an Al Qaeda operative.

Having murdered its critic, the Obama Regime is working hard to posthumously promote Awlaki to a leadership position in Al Qaeda.  The presstitutes and the worshippers  of America’s First Black President have fallen in line and regurgitated the assertions that Awlaki was a high-level dangerous Al Qaeda terrorist. If Al Qaeda sees value in Awlaki as a martyr, the organization will give credence to these claims. However, so far no one has provided any evidence. Keep in mind that all we know about Awlaki is what Washington claims and that the US has been at war for a decade based on false claims.

—snip—

It is possible that Awlaki was assassinated because he was an effective critic of the US government.  Police states do not originate fully fledged. Initially, they justify their illegal acts by demonizing their targets and in this way create the precedents for unaccountable power. Once the government equates critics with giving “aid and comfort” to terrorists, as they are doing with antiwar activists and Assange, or with terrorism itself, as Obama did with Awlaki, it will only be a short step to bringing accusations against Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU.

The Obama Regime, like the Bush/Cheney Regime, is a regime that does not want to be constrained by law.  And neither will its successor. Those fighting to uphold the rule of law, humanity’s greatest achievement, will find themselves lumped together with the regime’s opponents and be treated as such.

This great danger that hovers over America is unrecognized by the majority of the people. When Obama announced before a military gathering his success in assassinating an American citizen, cheers erupted.  The Obama regime and the media played the event as a repeat of the (claimed) killing of Osama bin Laden.  Two “enemies of the people” have been triumphantly dispatched. That the President of the United States was proudly proclaiming to a cheering audience sworn to defend the Constitution that he was a murderer and that he had also assassinated the US Constitution is extraordinary evidence that Americans are incapable of recognizing the threat to their liberty.

Emotionally, the people have accepted the new powers of the president.  If the president can have American citizens assassinated, there is no big deal about torturing them.  Amnesty International has sent out an alert that the US Senate is poised to pass legislation that would keep Guantanamo Prison open indefinitely and that Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) might introduce a provision that would legalize “enhanced interrogation techniques,” an euphemism for torture.

Instead of seeing the danger, most Americans will merely conclude that the government is getting tough on terrorists, and it will meet with their approval. Smiling with satisfaction over the demise of their enemies, Americans are being led down the garden path to rule by government unrestrained by law and armed with the weapons of the medieval dungeon.

—snip—

A brutal disposition now infects the US military. The leaked video of US soldiers delighting, as their words and actions reveal, in their murder from the air of civilians and news service camera men walking innocently along a city street shows soldiers and officers devoid of humanity and military discipline.  Excited by the thrill of murder, our troops repeated their crime when a father with two small children stopped to give aid to the wounded and were machine-gunned.

So many instances: the rape of a young girl and murder of her entire family; innocent civilians murdered and AK-47s placed by their side as “evidence” of insurgency; the enjoyment experienced not only by high school dropouts from torturing they-knew-not- who in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but also by educated CIA operatives and Ph.D. psychologists.  And no one held accountable for these crimes except two lowly soldiers prominently featured in some of the torture photographs.

What do Americans think will be their fate now that the “war on terror” has destroyed the protection once afforded them by the US Constitution?  If Awlaki really needed to be assassinated, why did not President Obama protect American citizens from the precedent that their deaths can be ordered without due process of law by first stripping Awlaki of his US citizenship?  If the government can strip Awlaki of his life, it certainly can strip him of citizenship.  The implication is hard to avoid that the executive branch desires the power to terminate citizens without due process of law.

Governments escape the accountability of law in stages.  Washington understands that its justifications for its wars are contrived and indefensible. President Obama even went so far as to declare that the military assault that he authorized on Libya without consulting Congress was not a war, and, therefore, he could ignore the War Powers Resolution of 1973, a federal law intended to check the power of the President to commit the US to an armed conflict without the consent of Congress.

—snip—

War critics are beginning to have an audience.  The government cannot begin its silencing of critics by bringing charges against US Representatives Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.  It begins with antiwar protestors, who are elevated into “antiwar activists,” perhaps a step below “domestic extremists.”  Washington begins with citizens who are demonized Muslim clerics radicalized by Washington’s wars on Muslims. In this way, Washington establishes the precedent that war protestors give encouragement and, thus, aid, to terrorists.  It establishes the precedent that those Americans deemed a threat are not protected by law. This is the slippery slope on which we now find ourselves.

—snip—

Voting has no effect. President “Change” is worse than Bush/Cheney. As Jonathan Turley suggests, Obama is “the most disastrous president in our history.” Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate who stands up for the Constitution, but the majority of Americans are too unconcerned with the Constitution to appreciate him.

To expect salvation from an election is delusional. All you can do, if you are young enough, is to leave the country. The only future for Americans is a nightmare.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, and professor of economics in six universities. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, was published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Yup.

Wake the fuck up.

AG

I finally finished reading Michael Lewis’s long piece in Vanity Fair. It’s good writing, with fascinating information, and quite a bit of style. It’s definitely worth the half-hour it takes to read. I learned, among other things, that the two most common causes of death for firefighters are heart attacks and truck crashes. I thought it would have been collapsing buildings or smoke inhalation or burns. Here’s another interesting bit. The author conducted at least part of his interview with former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger while riding bikes at breakneck speed around Venice Beach.

If there had not been a popular movement to remove sitting governor Gray Davis and the chance to run for governor without having to endure a party primary, he never would have bothered. “The recall happens and people are asking me, ‘What are you going to do?’ ” he says, dodging vagrants and joggers along the beach bike path. “I thought about it but decided I wasn’t going to do it. I told Maria I wasn’t running. I told everyone I wasn’t running. I wasn’t running.” Then, in the middle of the recall madness, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines opened. As the movie’s leading machine, he was expected to appear on The Tonight Show to promote it. En route he experienced a familiar impulse—the impulse to do something out of the ordinary. “I just thought, This will freak everyone out,” he says. “It’ll be so funny. I’ll announce that I am running. I told Leno I was running. And two months later I was governor.” He looks over at me, pedaling as fast as I can to keep up with him, and laughs. “What the fuck is that? ”

Yes. What the fuck is that? What kind of country are we living in where this is how the biggest state in the union selects its governor?

I have one more part I want to share because it pertains to the current governor of California and to our president.

A compelling book called Cal­ifornia Crackup describes this problem more generally. It was written by a pair of journalists and nonpartisan think-tank scholars, Joe Mathews and Mark Paul, and they explain, among other things, why Arnold Schwarze­neg­ger’s experience as governor was going to be unlike any other experience in his career: he was never going to win. California had organized itself, not accidentally, into highly partisan legislative districts. It elected highly partisan people to office and then required these people to reach a two-thirds majority to enact any new tax or meddle with big spending decisions. On the off chance that they found some common ground, it could be pulled out from under them by voters through the initiative process. Throw in term limits—no elected official now serves in California government long enough to fully understand it—and you have a recipe for generating maximum contempt for elected officials. Politicians are elected to get things done and are prevented by the system from doing it, leading the people to grow even more disgusted with them. “The vicious cycle of contempt,” as Mark Paul calls it. California state government was designed mainly to maximize the likelihood that voters will continue to despise the people they elect.

Again, absent the term limits and initiative problems, and with the two-thirds problem replaced by the filibuster, doesn’t this sound like what’s happening to the federal government?

I have determined that my boy will not allow me a moment to write this afternoon, so here’s a thread. Talk about something interesting. Share some links. I’ll be back after dinner.