forget that. i’d like to know how this woman even got elected as a mayor.
it’s hard for me not to feel a bit sorry for her. it’s clear at this point that she literally had no idea what she was getting into when she accepted — she doesn’t seem to have much of an idea about anything.
i bet she doesn’t do the debate on thursday. something is going to come up — an emergency with one of her kids, a broken ankle, a meeting with the czar of russia — something to conveniently prevent her from attending. and i honestly don’t blame her. the woman has become, in less than a month, a national laughingstock. as distasteful as i find her politics, i can still feel for her a bit when i think of the level of humiliation that she has already endured, and that will inevitably escalate after debating joe biden.
i read somewhere today that the alaskans are up in arms about the way the they’ve been bullied over troopergate. word is if she doesn’t win in november, she’s going to be impeached when she gets home.
they voted down yesterday’s bailout bill and that’s a good thing. so speaking as one who has been extremely outspoken in her criticism of the party I would like to say thanks for that.
less praiseworthy of course are the reasons they put the kibosh on this bill, and those are far from noble — a pattern that extends to the democrats as well, one that provides a a crystal clear example of just how cynical our entire governmental process has become.
looking at the roster of naysayers and yaysayers from yesterday’s vote reveals two very distinct camps not at all split along party lines but according to whether or not they are up for reelection in november. those that are voted almost unanimously against the bailout and those that aren’t voted in favor.
looked at one way, this can be viewed as a positive thing: our elected officials obeying the will of the people as expressed in hundreds of thousands of emails and calls.
but what about the rest of them, then? if short-termers were obeying the will of their constituents, does it mean the others ignored that same will. and if so. in favor of what?
oh. politics. that old ugly thing.
so political considerations outweighed the will of the people for those politicians who felt they had nothing at risk, and almost all of them went with the “politically correct” option.
in other words, if we’re not in the very shadow of an election, or if your representative is on his or her last term, what YOU want doesn’t matter. what the citizens of this country want is only important as a subsidiary concern in pursuing political success. nice.
yet there’s something even more important missing from this picture and it’s the one thing that we specifically elected these bozos to do: weigh all the aspects of the proposal and make a clear, unbiased recommendation of what you think the very best course of action is. in other words to use the brains god gave them, let their consciences be their guides, and then do the right fucking thing.
doing the right thing for the sake of the right thing has been entirely obliterated from our governing process.
standing up for a principle that you truly believe in is considered naive. foolhardy. it’s inexpedient. you can’t get things done that way.
and so we have made ourselves hostage to a congress of liars and fools who daily demonstrate the truth in the saying if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything.
it absolutely sickens me.
and you?
and what can we do about it? what happens here if the whole nation stands up and acknowledges that the emperor has been naked for quite some time?
i don’t cry over news stories very often, but i’m crying over this one. the DVD in question is being distributed by republican partisans. cause and effect? we can’t know unless and until the perpetrators have been identified. but as far as i remember nothing quite like this has happened here before. i see a connection.
here’s the first paragraph of the story:
On Friday, September 26, the end of a week in which thousands of copies of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West — the fear-mongering, anti-Muslim documentary being distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers and through the U.S. mail — were distributed by mail in Ohio, a “chemical irritant” was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers. This, apparently, is what the scare tactic political campaigning of John McCain’s supporters has led to — Americans perpetrating a terrorist attack against innocent children on American soil. [Daily Kos]
read the whole article. then, if you agree that there is likely a connection between the DVD and the attack, please send an email to the mccain campaign asking that they publicly denouce this DVD of hate.
what the hell is going on here? this sounds like something the nazis would do. hate and fear and attack are not going to keep anybody safe. from anything.
they want you to forget about the keating 5. after all, the savings & loan collapse “only” cost taxpayers 3.5 billion, and mccain was only the central politican involved in that scandal.
they want to hang barack obama (you know, like an old-school lynching), and have been practicing in oregon.
they want their leader, george bush, to disappear.
they want you to ignore the fact that lobbying group davis monfort remains on the mccain campaign payroll through a scheme involving a paper corporation that purports to do web design. does this look like a designer’s site to you?
they want you to believe that sarah palin is ready for the vice-presidency and even, if it comes to that, the presidency. (though not even all of their own people believe that one.) and they want you to ignore all the inappropriate gifts she’s already accepted as governor.
they want you to be prevented from voting if you show up wearing an obama t-shirt. (oh, the ban is on all election t-shirts, but have you seen mccain’s decrepit self on anybody’s back yet? i didn’t think so.)
the carrying on that is done when unknown poets die unexpectedly in NYC is perhaps unmatched by anything but the extravagant grief of vivian gornick’s widowed mother. it’s almost a competition to see who can book the first memorial reading, build the first tribute website, send the most and teariest emails.
all this on behalf of someone who, often as not, got little more than a nod of recognition when encountered over the open mike sign-up list. someone about whom (tell the truth!) one had snickered.
by all means let’s give these poets their final fifteen minutes of stagetime, add a couple of entries to their google results and throw a party where all us other unsung poets can reminisce and swap quirky stories about the deceased. but spare us all the bogus bereavement, the hand-to-heart when speaking the dear departed’s name. and let’s not pretend we’re mourning the end of western letters either, for chrissake, because a lot of the writing simply wasn’t very good.
where does it come from, this apparently irresistible desire to idealize people after they’re gone? i don’t think it’s necessarily any more prevalent among poets than other social groups; it’s just that poets have more visible bully pulpits. the same type of thing happens in the workplace, where all the office harridan has to do for immediate conversion from scumbaggery to sainthood is keel over with a stroke, or where a brain tumor makes everybody a BFF of the mailroom guy they never even talked to before he got sick.
i suppose this is a strange way to start a remembrance of robert dunn, who passed away this weekend — but he liked strange, and with his deadpan and always-irreverent sense of humor i think he would appreciate a ball-busting post like this as my way of saying farewell. robert was a kind and generous curator, who organized readings at venues ranging from raunchy west village bars to a no-cursewords barnes & noble tucked far up the asscrack of queens. for some years he also co-edited the Medicinal Purposes literary journal with his crotchety friend thomas catterson. i don’t think he put an issue out after thomas died.
but what comes to my mind most clearly is the loving care that robert took of his mother. i met her at their apartment some years ago, in the middle of a blizzard, when i stopped by to help with a computer problem. stopped by is a nice way of saying that i took 2 trains and then a bus and then struggled several blocks through hip-dip (as i recall it) snow to reach their high-rise. i was surprised by the courtly woman in the wheelchair, as i’d taken it for granted that robert lived alone. we worked over his laptop in the kitchen while she watched tv, and when i stopped in the living room to wish her goodnight she very graciously thanked me for coming to rescue her son from the pc virus demons (which i hadn’t quite managed to do). i could have been — shit, i WAS — mightily annoyed at having undertaken such a shlep on such a night to fix a LAPTOP that could just as easily have made its way to me, but robert’s gentleness with her and his sotto-voce apology lest i detect the aroma of colostomy, softened me. i don’t soften easily, as you might guess. but i softened that night, and i stayed soft toward him, as it so happens, for the remainder of his life.
robert, i would be lying if i said i’m gonna miss you, because of course i’m not — lately we ran into each other only once or twice a year, and you just don’t miss someone you hardly ever see. but i must salute the irony of you bowing out in the selfsame gym where you lost a hundred-something pounds. you were looking better lately than you’d ever looked before; dapper, even, with that ubiquitous hat cocked sideways. i can almost imagine the poem you’d write, making fun of a guy who finally gets in shape only to drop dead on the health club floor. i can almost hear us laughing and applauding as you read it.
bravo for a life well-lived, mr. dunn. no sentiment, no schmaltz, no overhyped BS. just the way you liked it.
i live next door to Washington Mutual Bank, the first big-bank branch to have opened in my southern harlem neighborhood. i have a CD on deposit there, and this seemed — in light of the fact that you don’t get ongoing statements or an ATM card with a CD — a good time to ask for some kind of statement of accounts. i wasn’t sure if they’d be open, this being saturday morning and them being in trouble and all. i wasn’t positive there wouldn’t be lines of screaming depositors outside the bank, clamoring for their cash.
116th St. WAMU before opening 2 years ago
yes to being open and no to the bankrupt hordes: it was business as usual at WAMU this rainy morning, and the young man at the convenience desk was more than happy to print me a copy of my CD’s You Are Here summary (unfortunately without troubling to ask me for ID, but i guess you can’t expect too much when the whole economy is in the toilet and banks are folding in the middle of the night). in fact, the two customers on line ahead of me were actually making deposits. so much for my updated 1929 fantasies of doom.
if evidence of doom is what i wanted, though, there sure are enough hints of it in this statement. i opened this CD in october 2006, and added more funds in november of that year. since that time, the amount on deposit (roughly $35k) has remained constant. interest was deposited, like clockwork, the middle of every month.
and there the symmetry ends. at the beginning of last year the interest payments averaged around $150/month, culminating in a high of $156.70 in june 2007. it was all downhill from there, with payments hovering around ninety-something bucks until this summer when they plunged — PLUNGED, i tell you! — to $48. all this, mind you, while the capital amount (initial deposits plus interest earned) had grown by more than $2,000.
and the financial meltdown is only just getting started.
well, i’m grateful. i’m grateful that i have money in a CD that i am able to leave alone, and i’m grateful that it hasn’t (yet) been wiped out by the shenanigans of wall street. i’m grateful that ordinary citizens understand enough about the way that finance works not to have started a run on this (or any other, so far) bank. i’m grateful that WAMU has been bailed out and that there is still money in the FDIC.
i’m grateful but not complacent. i’m worried, and wondering what i should (or even can) do to protect myself in the event the country slides further down the tubes into bankruptcy. there is no doubt in my mind that if the absolute worst comes to pass and john mccain wins the coming election, that we are all well and completely fucked. on the other hand, despite the trust and respect i hold for barack obama, i’m not convinced that anybody can repair the wreckage that the republicans and their high-rolling buddies have wreaked on our economy, at least not in my lifetime (and i ain’t all that old).
i had the opportunity to meet arianna yesterday (and i very embarrassingly did NOT have a card to give her when she asked me for one! note to self, get this DONE). she was keynote speaker at a conference for media buyers.
note about the beginning of this talk: just before arianna took the stage, yahoo played a very entertaining video about the internet that featured several children, one of whom said she want to be a “mermaid fairy” when she grew up. arianna incorporated several mermaid fairy references into her talk.
she pulled no punches, speaking about everything from sarah palin to 9/11 to arthur schlesinger (who, she says, with his accent “made incomprehensibility acceptable” — she’s very funny, and her accent is not THAT bad).
i love what she says about accountability in journalism. if something is said that isn’t true, we are obligated to mention that when writing about it. if two people are debating, for example, whether or not the earth is flat, it is incumbent on the writer to note that the earth is not, in fact, flat. she incorporates this thinking into debates over such things as creationism and global warming.
the talk is about thirty minutes long; i posted it in four separate videos on youtube. you can find them individually on my channel if you prefer. if you’d like to listen to the talk straight through, you can watch the playlist below.
would love to hear what all of you think about this talk. as for me, i liked and respected arianna quite a bit before — i think i’m in love with her now!
no doubt you’ve heard the news about an unrestricted $700,000,000,000 “bailout” for the banking industry. the proposed solution is a blank check for the bankers that does nothing for people who are losing their homes.
that’s unacceptable to me, and should be unacceptable to every taxpaying american. it includes provisions for bailing out foreign banks — FOREIGN BANKS! — while allowing families to lose their homes and…what, exactly? with the republicans having virtually destroyed our already-fragile social safety net over the past eight years, people in foreclosure will likely not even have the “luxury” of ending up in a shelter, because the shelters are already full. meanwhile, the financiers who actively participated in this collapse (some might even say who caused the collapse, because the were the ones handing out bad loans the way dentists used to hand out lollipops) keep their million dollar bonuses and, even worse, are allowed to continue running the institutions that they have already run into the ground.
initially, i was not in favor of any kind of a bailout. a lot of people used the mortgage frenzy to finance and flip any number of properties, and did quite well for themselves. if they were left holding some kind of outrageous paper when the music stopped and couldn’t pay the interest, let alone the loan itself, i call it just deserts. but that’s not the whole story. plenty of low- and middle-income families looked at the mortgage givewaway and saw it not for the scam that it was (scam is the right word because the bankers KNEW that it wasn’t sustainable; responsible economists have predicted this collapse for years) but as a way to finally own the home that had, until then, been out of their reach. not to mention GWB harping on and on about the great new ownership society.
it’s those families, ones that were doing okay for themselves in their rented apartments and houses but who yearned for something more and couldn’t make heads or tails out of the fine print on those oh-so-easy-to-get subprime mortgages, that are being destroyed in this crisis. and paulson has the massive balls to propose a huge taxpayer funded bailout that protects the fucking bankers but not the people who got burned?
no. i say, NO! and the democrats are also saying no — thank you for finally growing a pair, nancy pelosi — and we need to join our voices to theirs. paulson is insisting that this is the only way when it is NOT the only way — check out this alternative (and much less expensive) plan from ian welsh and some good ideas from the nation on how we could finance all these rescue missions. you know, a billion here a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money. the government is already in debt, so where’s all that money gonna come from. yeah. you guessed right.
our homework for today is to contact our representatives and TELL THEM THAT WE SAY NO TO THIS PROPOSAL.
after all, it’s our money they’re spending. think about that. it’s equivalent to a couple grand for every man, woman and child in this country. i’m sure you can think of better things the government can do with a couple grand than hand it to wall street.
please also CALL THEM, and while you’re at it call your senators, and do it today — phone numbers and street addresses for all are here. if you’ve got an extra stamp handy, send them a snailmail as well. it can be as simple as printing out your email and putting it in an envelope.
you can get all this done in about ten minutes. that’s not a lot of time. the future of this country is, quite literally, at stake. if paulson gets the bailout that he’s asking for, it is equivalent to handing the whole treasury to wall street.
and you know how wall street works. they get a $20,000,000 bonus while the town sheriff is throwing your aunt tilly’s furniture into the street.
thought i’d leave you with something incredibly sweet, after all this bile & bad news. thanks to crooks & liars for letting me know about this gorgeous performance by alison crowe.
just a quickie this morning — i have been laughing for ten minutes and i can’t seem to stop. even if you like mccain, this message from Heart to mccain about his use of their music is simply brilliant. i love those ballsy ladies.
Meanwhile, back at the most fantastic financial crisis of our time (maybe all time) it seems that the government is saving the day. Now all money market funds will be backed just like savings accounts because there was a worldwide run on money market accounts. Yesterday was the best day for the market in 6 years (all in the last hour) and today may be even better. This is a great play on the political will to survive versus the market forces to punish bad businesses and investments. Who will win……?
Whoever wins, you have to be impressed with the Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson. He is clearly in the role the JP Morgan took in the panic of 1907. Just like Bloomberg using his business acumen to save NY, Paulson (former CEO of Goldman Sachs) has actually taken control of this situation. There might be something to this Wall Street millionaire turned public servant career path. Bob Rubin did it for Clinton, doing a great job during the financial crises of the 90s. Before you say down with all the money mongers in government take a look at our MBA president. Unfortunately his business career produced nothing but losses and bankruptcies. He took that track record and did the same thing for the country and now we look for a former investment banker to save his/our ass.
Projecting out to the upcoming election we get another clear reason to pick Obama. Who is McCain’s economic adviser exactly? Carly Fiorina? She did a great job at HP basically running the company and the stock down in to the ground before getting ousted by the board that had lost all confidence. Obama amassed a who’s-who of great minds in business led by Warren Buffet to advise on his economic plan. The one thing we can take away from history is that those who generate wealth continue to do so and those who destroy wealth continue on that path. Since the country is broke for generations farther than the eye can see the choice is crystal clear. Let’s bring in the people who actually create wealth and prosperity and not the old club that has mastered the rhetoric of market speak but created nothing
