Vacation

If you can’t already tell, I’m on vacation. Your regularly scheduled 3 times a week madness should return next week.

In the mean time, I have been following the health care debate and have thought about writing a rant or two, but this guy did it for me:

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_ten_dumbest_arguments_against_health_care_reform

Enjoy

Don’t Take Your Guns to Town

On Wednesday the Senate narrowly shot down (pun intended) a provision attached to the Military Authorization bill which would have allowed residents with permits for guns to carry them in other states.

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY)thinks that he is some kind of superhero for voting against the bill:

“Lives have been saved with the defeat of this amendment… The passage of this amendment would have done more to threaten the safety of New Yorkers than anything since the repeal of the assault weapons ban.“

Wrong.

There is a not-so-subtle difference; the assault weapons ban keeps AK-47s out of the hands of street gangs. This amendment makes it more difficult for responsible citizens to protect themselves from people who just want to bang bang bang and click click and take your money.

The goal of any legislation intended to protect the public good should be to change otherwise destructive behavior, and on that count this is a failure. If a citizen has a valid gun permit and they’re going to visit Gary, Indiana over the weekend, chances are they’re going to bring it, whether or a handful of Democratic Senators like it or not.

If this were really a cut-and-dry issue of public safety, then key party members like Harry Reid and Max Baucus wouldn’t have voted for it to pass.

Why would the senators from Nevada and Montana vote for such an amendment? Ponder that for a moment. Could it be because their constituents are from Nevada and Montana?

Here’s the thing: you can’t legislate social behavior. You can’t stop millions of people from getting high because you exaggerate the dangers of certian drugs, you can’t stop women who want an abortion from getting one, you can’t stop people from having gay sex, and you certainly can’t stop people from carrying concealed weapons that they have permits for, regardless of the state they’re in.

The Senate shouldn’t be wasting their time and our money debating these matters of personal choice. What people put into their bodies, carry on their person, or decide how or how not to raise a family should be an individual choice.

What would have been more productive would be aiming to stop the causes of gun violence in the first place, like say addressing poverty, lack of education, and poor career prospects.

Canada has far more guns per capita than we do in the United States, and yet their gun-related crimes are a mere fraction of ours. The problem isn’t that we need to do more to control guns. The problem is that we need to do more to control violence.

End of story.

The End of America?

Patrick Buchanan and other conservative thinkers are scared to death that the America as they know it is gone.

They’re right, but for the wrong reasons.

Buchanan lists and subsequently whines about every tax imaginable: income taxes that are too high (especially for the top 1 percent earners), state and local taxes that add another burden, payroll taxes, drug taxes, and sales taxes. He says that Americans are taxophobic, which is true. What Buchanan neglects to mention is that human beings in general don’t like taxes, but in most other civilized countries they stopped throwing hissy-fits about paying them a long time ago.

Ever hear of the saying render unto Cesar what’s his? The guy who said it wasn’t exactly a commie.

But no, today’s conservatives can’t be counted on to do anything but complain. Nevermind that this country needs to collect taxes in order to function and operate in the 21st century. They’re only interested in mindless dissent to please an ever-shrinking, increasingly isolated and paranoid base.

In the midst of these rants about high taxes and government intrusion, they include thinly veiled appeals to the racism of the far right:

Diana West:  “the consolidation of a new power structure derived from a government-dependent population and animated by the kind of identity politics exemplified by Sonya “wise Latina” Sotomayor, whose self-contradictory Senate testimony this week…”

Buchanan: “Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute by three to one. Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women…”

Let’s rewind the clocks back 150 years. My guess is that both Ms. West and Mr. Buchanan would be lamenting the power grabs of big government Abe Lincoln and warning about the dangerous influence of the dirty Irish immigrants coming ashore every day.

Furthermore, they would claim that the cheap slave labor provided by the negroes was the very engine that drives the economy, and that to free them we would be just surrendering profits to countries without our high moral standards and human rights guarantees.

Then in the same breath they would claim that all of these dramatic new developments would somehow equal the death of the American experiment.

Nothing really changes, especially for the rabid, racist right wing in this country that has been around since the Revolution and will be around until this all actually does come to an end.

If the American century has truly ended, we should know who is responsible for it:

The very same far-right wing whackjobs who can’t bear the thought of a Latina justice on the Supreme Court deregulated the financial sector and destroyed American labor through union busting.

The very same neoconservative nutjobs who call any reductions in military spending tantamout to surrendering to the terrorists, all the while warning that our national deficit was getting far too large. If they hadn’t been so busy playing a game of global conquest, we might not have been wasting half of our tax base to begin with.

Yes, America is going to have a hard go at it for the next several years. Who knows? We might never recover. And it’s not activist judges, Mexican immigrants, big government liberals, or gay marriage that punched a giant whole in the U.S.S. USA.

If this recession does bring the ship down, then we’ll know who to blame.

We Never Endorsed Warrantless Wiretaps

In the World’s Most Important Propaganda magazine this week, John Yoo, former U.S. DoJ official and Berkely law professor makes a valiant effort to defend the illegal wiretapping that followed the 9/11 attacks.

Of course, instead of citing historical analysis or facts, he spun hypothetical fantasies in order to justify the taps:

“Suppose an al Qaeda cell in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles was planning a second attack using small arms, conventional explosives or even biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies faced a near impossible task locating them… And what president — of either political party — wouldn’t immediately order the NSA to start, so as to find and stop the attackers?”

He goes on to compare al Qaeda to Soviet-era spies, but insists that they are far more dangerous:

“Under FISA, to obtain a judicial wiretapping warrant the government is supposed to show probable cause that a specified target is a foreign agent. Unlike, say, Soviet spies working under diplomatic cover, terrorists are hard to identify. Yet they are vastly more dangerous. Monitoring their likely communications channels is the best way to track and stop them.“

Really? VASTLY more dangerous than Soviet espionage? A loose association of a few hundred Islamic terrorists represents a far greater threat to our national security than an imperial police state with thousands of weapons of mass destruction aimed at our shores ever did?

Boy am I glad that we were all nearly shitting ourselves with fear in the fall of 2001: it’s good to know that all that paranoia was legitimate. Nay, in fact it seems that if al Qaeda sleeper cells armed with box-cutters are more dangerous than Soviet spies intercepting vital military communications, then I say that we weren’t afraid enough!

The title of Yoo’s piece reads: “Why We Endorsed Warrantless Wiretaps.”

Funny, I don’t remember endorsing infringements of my right to privacy or blessing the castration of our constitution. In fact, I don’t even remember being asked whether I would have supported such a program. Did the NSA and CIA poll the American people and ask them if we would go along with having our phones tapped in order to catch the terrorists?

As far as I remember, they didn’t. If such a poll was taken at the time I would have voted against it. I’m certain that many Americans would have welcomed the trespassing on their private messages, so long as it was done with the assurance that it would actually prevent more 9/11s. I wouldn’t have blamed them if they did. Like I said, we were all very frightened at the time.

Al Qaeda is now far weaker than it was in 2001, despite the best efforts of the Cheney administration to let them off the hook while plundering Iraq for its oil and strategic locations. Yet cowards like John Yoo are still using the boogeyman threat in order to justify the police state that was built up around the greatly exaggerated threats.

John Yoo is nothing new. Throughout history there have been people in powerful positions who have exploited catastrophes, real or invented, in order to increase the power of the state. The North Korean regime’s legitimacy rests entirely on the fact that they’ve been able to convince the populace that an American invasion is imminent.

Strange that Yoo, being from South Korea, should so heartily take up this strategy in his adopted home. Stranger still that this kind of police-state fueling propaganda is coming from a law professor.

What isn’t strange is that the Wall Street Journal prints this complete nonsense. The paper actively has been promoting a fascist agenda in the United States since Rupert Murdoch took control in 2007.

But what really blows the mind is that people actually read this crap and take it for gospel.

La Famiglia Goldman

If you haven’t read Matt Taibbi’s bold expose on Goldmach Sachs, you need to. If you have read the piece and you haven’t felt a profound sense of outrage, then you should check your pulse to make sure that you still have a heartbeat.

The razor-sharp profile of this destructive behemoth is apparently all the talk on Wall Street. Former governor Eliot Spitzer was even asked about the article when he appeared on a financial news show recently.

In essense, the story shows Goldman Sachs to be nothing more than a glorified organized crime family, operating with impunity to both the rules of Wall Street, and the laws of Washington. But the fact is that GS’s influence is far more insidious and far-reaching than even the most ambitious mafia dons in their prime.

The bank has had former employees in high places in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations that ensure the interests of Goldman Sachs are well looked after, regardless of the consequences for the overall economy.

Taibbi details the bank’s long history of inflating market bubbles, reaping unfathomable profits, and then burning their investors and the general public once the crash takes place.

It seems to me that despite all the legal machinations of this financial enterprise, our government and economy have been hijacked by a malignant entity that engages in grand-scale espionage, fraud, and bribery all at the expense of the general public. The real question is: what are we going to do about it?

Far be it from me to suggest that we should murder rich bank executives, but I am not above suggesting that these blood-sucking sociopaths should be sent to maximum security prison, where they would be.

It is time for a dramatic recalibration of how we punish white-collar crime in this country. If the greatest punishment that Goldmach Sachs can hope to avoid is a multi-million dollar fine, then there is no incentive whatsoever for them to avoid illegal, or unethical behaviors.

Bernie Madoff will spend the next decade in a minimum security resort, where I’m certain that he won’t be a hero, but it’s a far cry from the sort of treatment that he would receive at Chino, Riker’s Island, or Statesville.

We don’t need another Guantanamo Bay just for Goldman Sachs power brokers. What we need is to guarantee that if they ever serve time for their crimes, that they spend it in the same cell-blocks as rapists, murderers, child molesters, and other armed and dangerous felons.

If that doesn’t make them think twice before they bilk the American public in their next enormous bubble scheme, nothing will. And in that case, we should probably just kill them.

We Need Another Stimulus

The President might as well be trying to pump up the stock market on CNBC by claiming that the economy is improving.

A few days ago, Obama said that the world has avoided an economic disaster.

I’m very glad for the citizens of whatever world Obama has been living on over the last year, but here on Earth, we are still very much in the midst of a cataclysmic economic meltdown.

The most worrisome indicator has been the rising unemployment levels. In June, we lost another 467,000 jobs, but because the actual percentage went from 9.4% to just 9.5%, more and more people will say that we have reached the bottom, and that things can only go up from here.

They’re either lying or have no real idea how the US government actually tabulates the unemployment numbers.

For some odd reason, the official tally does not include the number of Americans who have given up looking for work, or the number of Americans who stopped receiving unemployment benefits.

The reason that the overall percentage only bumped up a tenth of a percentage point is that hundreds of thousands of Americans have already used up all 32 allotted weeks of their benefits. This means that people who lost their jobs back in November (when the numbers really started to go south) can’t collect anymore, and chances are it’s not because they just found a great new job.

If only 9.5 percent of us were unemployed, we would have reason to rejoice. But the fact is that this number falls drastically short of reality.

The first step towards overcoming alcoholism is to admit that you have a problem. The way that we tabulate unemployment is meant to sweep the ugly truth under the rug; to hide the fact that we have a very serious labor problem in America.

What we need to do to address the skyrocketing unemployment numbers is to first acknowledge their existence. My guess is that the real figure is closer to 25 percent, and it will continue to rise, despite what the President or anybody else tells you, until we address it.

The problem is that unlike during the campaign, the Obama administration has tackled the financial crisis using a top-down approach. Instead of directly bailing out homeowners who fell behind on their mortgages, they chose to bail out Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and a host of other lenders. This may have saved some balance sheets but it did absolutely nothing to help the people who were going into foreclosure.

Instead of infusing cash-strapped Americans who have no choice but to go out and spend it on necessities, the Obama administration chose to hand out trillions of dollars to banks and corporations, who in turn have horded the money and refused to ease credit restrictions, which was supposedly the whole idea in the first place.

You know what the really sad thing is? One of the more progressive acts to combat this financial crisis was actually issued by one George W. Bush.

Remember those tax refund checks that we all got last fall? They didn’t go very far, did they? My 300 went out the door immediately to pay a cell phone bill, a medical bill, and a credit card bill, and I imagine many other Americans had to use it in a similar way.

Some economists, at least the ones that I respect, are suggesting that another stimulus bill is needed in order to avert further economic disaster.

I agree.

What we need is another enormous tax refund to put money directly into the hands of Americans who have lost their jobs, their medical insurance, and their unemployment benefits. And this one needs to be much, much, much, much, larger than the first.

Here’s my wildly implausible scenario:

Thus far we have staked around 12 Trillion dollars in propping up enormous financial institutions. I’m not going to ask for a 12 Trillion dollar stimulus check, because I’m just not that greedy. I’m going to ask for a mere pittance compared to what we handed out to Wall Street:

3 Trillion dollars in tax rebate checks, to be evenly distributed among every single American citizen.

That comes out to $10,000 dollars each.

What could you do with a check for ten thousand dollars in your pocket right now? My guess is that you could do a lot of things, and unlike handing out golden parachutes at an Aspen ski slope, it would actually do a lot to help revive the economy.

Many delinquent bills for health care, mortgages, credit cards, student loans, phone, cable and internet service would all be paid off. This would be an enormous boost for companies and insurance providers who have had to cut payroll.

The ailing auto industry would receive an overnight injection of adrenaline right to the heart- can you imagine how many Americans would go out and buy a new car if they were given 10 grand?

Engines would be filled with gasoline, Starbucks would have lines around the block, and a new generation of college students would already have a huge jump-start on financing their educations.

But it won’t happen, and here’s why: because we our priorities are more twisted than a crotch rocket wrapped around a telephone poll after a 90 mph collision.

What would it take to finance a 3 trillion dollar rebate check? (which, mind you, is only one quarter of what we have already invested in Wall Street over the last year.) Re-adjusting our priorities.

This means a combination of spending cuts and new taxes, such as:

- Pulling out 75,000 combat troops from Germany, because I’m pretty sure that Hitler isn’t coming back any time soon.

- Pulling out 40,000 combat troops from Japan, because they damn sure learned their lesson the last time they tried to mess with us.

- Closing dozens and dozens of the nearly 800 permanent military bases that we have all over the world, many of them in regions and countries of little or absolutely no strategic value.

- Initiating new capital gains taxes, estate taxes, and income taxes on the top 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans.

- A MFWOT- Massife Fucking Windfall Oil Tax

- Legalizing and taxing marijuana (this also turns Taco Bell and 7-11 into fortune 500 companies overnight.)

I have a few other cleverly titled tax ideas, but you get the point. Tomorrow you could have 10 grand in your pocket to spend on whatever you see fit, or to invest in your or your family’s future. It would do wonders for our economy at a fraction of the cost of bailing out Wall Street.

But if you were to suggest this to a prominent member of the Obama administration, they would laugh in your face.

Is it too much to ask the unlikeliest President in our history to go boldly where no President has gone before?

The New New Journalism

Is there anything more sad than listening to an older person reminisce about the golden age of newspapers?

They tell stories about how they watched their parents read the morning paper while drinking their coffee, and how they were absolutely not to be disturbed until they had read it from cover to cover.

The nostalgia is practically dripping from them like so many buckets of sweat as they claim that things just won’t be the same without that daily paper.

As you might have guessed, I am not one of these people. I grew up digesting my news on television or on the web and the paper holds no special place in my heart. I find them cumbersome, old-fashioned, quaint, and entirely too difficult to unfold. That being said, I am anxious about the future of our nation’s newspapers.

Why? Several reasons:

1. Somebody needs to hold them accountable

Newspapers are still the best place to hold the powers that be accountable for their actions, or lack-their-of. No self-respecting politician will quake in their boots if a scandal is reported on a blog with a daily readership of less than a hundred. However, that same scandal appearing on the front page of the New York Times is still something they don’t want to see.

2. Bloggers NEED newspapers

There are a few websites that do their own reporting, but they are very few and far between. By and large, bloggers rely on traditional media outlets to report the facts, then we provide our own spin. Because bloggers are generally unpaid for their work they aren’t going to go out and develop relationships with sources that provide the news that our democracy so desperately needs to function.

3. The Dumb-Down Effect

Without print media, many Americans will turn to alternative sources for their news and opinions, and while I like what that will mean for bloggers and internet news outlets, it also means more people will get their news from television and radio.

If you can actually manage to sit through a full hour of a political talk show on any of the 3 major cable networks (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News,) then you either have an iron stomach or you have very low standards for your political discourse. The traditional print columnist will be largely replaced by the blithering, partisan pundit until 2.0 outlets can find a healthy economic model. That does not bode well both for my heart burn and for our country.

So, what is to be done?

David Simon, former reporter from The Baltimore Sun and creator of the acclaimed HBO series, The Wire, has a good idea. In an article for In These Times, Simon suggests a non-profit model for newspapers:

“…a non-profit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally-based ownership and control of news organizations. The government should pursue making a nonprofit status for newspapers and creating financial or tax-based incentives to facilitate the transfer of ailing newspaper chains to local nonprofits.…”

Simon also recognizes that the newspapers are also primarily responsible for their own downfall by cutting staff reporters in pursuit of short-term profits. It’s an excellent read and it addresses the issues inherent to this changing of the guard in a very fair way.

There are a number of problems with the non-profit model, but thus far it’s the best suggestion that I’ve heard regarding how to deal with this.

The only method of action that we absolutely cannot afford to pursue is no action at all.

The free market fundamentalists will cry bloody murder if the government starts bailing out newspapers, and I can understand that frustration, but once again, it’s the lesser of two evils. If traditional journalism is allowed to fail before a 2.0 model becomes really viable, then we might as well throw in the towel on this American experiment.

The old gray ladies of reporting have done an awful job of maintaining the third estate, especially over the last decade. While somebody should have been asking tough questions, these papers enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq and the bogus story to justify it. When we should have been in the streets demanding a re-count in 2000, these papers were too busy following the exploits of pop music superstars.

Over the next four years they will probably do an equally wretched job of keeping their idol candidate in check.

Yes, they have done a horrendous job of holding the government and other powerful institutions accountable, but the sad fact is, they’re the only bullet that we have right now.

A non-profit model for newspapers makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. What do you think?

It’s the Rich People, Stupid.

Carlos Watson of the Stimulist has come up with an idea so brilliant, so novel, that he should be given a Nobel Prize in Economics and appointed as some sort of CBO advisor.

What is it?

GASP! Raise taxes on the wealthy!

I’m going to throw Carlos my full support considering the fact that Real Clear Politics put his idea out on their front page and he’s already deluged with comments from the lunatic free market fundamentalists.

From moron Vadim Lozko:

“Tax the rich” has been a pretty popular mantra since Obama took office but it is a logically stupid move. Try doing some research on Hauser’s Law. You’ll discover the only way to increase revenue is by increasing the GDP. Heavily taxing the rich does the opposite of that as it takes away from potential investments, i.e. stunting growth.”

From jackass Stephanie Johnson:

“So why exactly do you libs want to punish prosperity? Why don’t all you rich Democrats fork over every cent you earn since you want to do that to the rest of us. Taxing “the rich” has NEVER worked to fix anything. I’m sure you weren’t aware that “the rich” paid more taxes under Bush than they did under Clinton. The way you stimuluate growth is the exact same way that Reagan did: cut taxes and decrease spending.”

From numbskull John II:

“By the way, why are you so concerned with people who own four houses? Those homes were built by blue-collar workers. Do you think those workers want you to punish people who want to own multiple homes? Obama is a Marxist and you are just one of his childish followers.”

Of course RCP knows what they’re doing by putting this article on their front page. They know their base will go absolutely ape-shit over its contents and flood the poor author’s mailbox with enough hate mail and Reaganesque nonsense to last a year.

This is how absolutely, incredibly stupid the conversation over taxes in this country has become. Even if someone proposes a modest tax increase on the wealthiest Americans, the very people who would benefit from it scream that it’s a crime against nature.

The facts show very clearly that this country has done magnificently when it has had a high tax rate on the rich. From World War 2 to Reagan, we were able to finance social security, infrastructure, the grandest imperial military machine in the history of the planet, and thousands of public works projects.

Now because we’re so excited about letting the rich trickle down their golden love all over our faces, we can’t even meet basic needs and services.

Fact: since the state of California passed a bill that made raising taxes virtually politically impossible, it has become a failed state. California started issuing IOUs recently. Of course the very one-celled-organisms who pushed for that tax amendment are going to find a way to blame it on all of California’s previous social service responsibilities.

The choice we face is real simple, people.

We either raise taxes on the top 5 percent of us, or the other 95% are going to go down with the ship.

Que Sera, Sarah?

Sarah Palin is resigning as governor of Alaska, effective near the end of the month.

As of this time, she is keeping her plans under wraps. But that didn’t stop the mainstream media’s punditsphere from spending the entire day running around in circles and speculating like an 1849 California gold miner on speed.

The main question that they threw around was is Sarah Palin gearing up to run for President in 2012?

My guess is that she will, regardless of whether she’s qualified, or how many people try to convince her otherwise, or how much damage she could do to her Republican party before it’s all said and done.

Even still, it’s a little bit early to start campaigning for President, so there’s certainly more to her decision than just looking forward to her next big thing. I think that Palin is tired of dealing with the mounting legal pressures on her, her family issues, as well as the media scrutiny that she’s faced since last summer.

Quite frankly I don’t think she can handle the pressure of being a national figure. But that’s not going to stop her from running for the most intense and stressful job in the entire world! Atta girl, Sarah! Show those media fatcats and liberal whitewashers that you don’t need to know all the countries in North America to be President.

Seriously, it will be very intriguing to see how the GOP reacts when the day comes that Palin announces her candidacy for the highest office in the land.

Some will be enthusiastic, even orgiastic, in response.

I’m sure that there will be others who will hang their heads and wonder how the once mighty Grand Old Republican party could sink so low.

And there will be others still who become registered Democrats and Independents for the first times in their political lives.

I really don’t know all that much about the internal workings of the Republican Party or of the people who bear their colors with pride. I don’t know exactly how many Evangelicals there are in the party or if they constitute a majority. Perhaps there aren’t enough of them to nominate Palin; perhaps there are more than enough. Time will tell on that.

While I don’t know what will happen in the 2012 Republican primaries, I do know what will happen if Sarah Palin faces off with an incumbent President Obama during the general election debates.

Here’s a hint: it rhymes with landslide.

Obama Actually Listens

I have a very strong aversion to posting videos on my blog for a number of reasons. Namely, one of the things I like most about getting my news and opinion online is that it’s dominated by text. It’s harder to be manipulated by words than by images. Hopefully this trend of Americans getting most of their news online will also contribute to higher literacy rates, but we’ll just have to wait and see on that one.

Despite my misgivings about the medium, I’m going to share this video I found today with you. It’s footage from a town-hall style meeting in Virginia with President Obama addressing a woman’s personal health care crisis:

Before you lament that this is another crazy, ranting post about the need for single-payer health care in America, just take a chillax supplement. I don’t want to talk about health care, for once. Quite frankly I’m sick of writing about it.

What I want to talk about is Presidential style.

There are many things that I dislike about President Obama’s policies. I think he’s far more moderate than he led many of us to believe during the primaries and he runs the risk of becoming a mediocre President because he’s unwilling to play hardball with the far right wing. The legislation that will come out of the Obama years will more than likely be watered-down and won’t help ordinary Americans nearly as much as we hoped.

However, there is one thing that I certainly do like about this President: I get the distinct impression that he actually LISTENS to what people are telling him.

I found this video on a blog from the American Conservative, which included a cynical suggestion that the woman might have had to sign a waiver before being able to hug Obama. It’s entirely possible that the whole thing was an elaborate photo op, but I doubt it.

Yes, this health care bill will probably fall woefully short of what it needs to accomplish, but can you even imagine President Bush talking to Americans about their needs in a setting like that? Can you conjure up an image of W. embracing Debbie? I can’t. Maybe my conservative readers have a much more active imagination so it wouldn’t be a problem for them. In fact, I’m certain that they do, but that’s besides the point.

The point is that Barack Obama does an excellent job of making it seem like he actually cares what we think and feel. Could it all be an act? Entirely possible. But even a disingenuous performance by President Obama is far more reassuring than the stuttering, scripted remarks about competition in the market place being the best option that we would be subjected to by George W. Bush.

Is Barack Obama just a fantastic guy who cares about everybody and would get your cat down out of a tree if only he had time in his schedule? Not necessarily. What is clear however, is that Obama actually cares about his legacy.

Unlike President Bush, Barack Obama actually wants to be remembered as a man who did something for the American people, who listened to us and dealt with our problems as best as he reasonably could.

Stylistically, these town-halls are the modern day fireside chat. Like Roosevelt before him, President Obama is making a great effort to communicate to Americans the problems that we face, and he’s interacting with us on a regular basis to help address them.

What a change!

Compare that with Bush’s despicable responses to crises across the nation, not the least of which was Hurricane Katrina. It is just so thoroughly refreshing to have a President who seems capable of empathy.

In his most recent HBO special, Chris Rock gave a very punctilious description of President Bush’s attitude about his legacy:

“…If you was hangin’ from a cliff, gettin’ ready to fall to your death–that’s right–and Bush was at the top of the cliff, and all you needed was a fuck to save your life, and Bush had a pocket full of fucks…he wouldn’t give you one. ‘Hey, Bush, I need a fuck!’ ‘Ohh, you know I don’t give a fuck…“

Say what you will about President Obama’s unfortunate half-hearted measures towards getting us out of Iraq.

Say what you will about his dont-ask dont-tell policy.

Say whatever comes into your mind about his bailing out gigantic corporations while leaving the middle class to be crushed beneath their weight.

But at the end of the day, we can still say that President Obama at least gives a fuck.

Kenneth Chilton did 9/11.

“Global warming expert” Kenneth Chilton is the true mastermind behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He also is responsible for the death of Michael Jackson, and I’m pretty sure he had something to do with that Lindbergh baby thing.

Ok, so Kenneth Chilton probably didn’t do any of those things, but he deserves to be treated as if he just confessed to all three crimes.

Why?

In a column in the Detroit News, Chilton claims that the energy tax included in the Waxman- Markey climate bill hurts the impoverished, and therefore it would make Jesus angry.

And that’s not even the dumbest thing he wrote. Check out these gold-star winners from the post:

“Congress appears to be convinced that predictions from computer models of high levels of global warming 50 to 100 years in the future are unquestionably accurate. But the latest Gallup poll on global warming finds that 41 percent of Americans now believe that global warming is “generally exaggerated.“

As if that makes everything ok? Scientists say that we’re a generation away from catastrophic climate change, but because 41 percent of Americans don’t buy into all that hooey and malarkey, it’ll just go away. But wait! There’s more!

“On the cost side, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that any cap-and-trade bill that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 15 percent could cost the average household roughly $1,600 (in 2006 dollars).“

Really? 1600 dollars? That’s quite a number. I wonder where he got it from. Furthermore, I wonder what the time-frame is for that increase, considering he failed to mention one in his article? Maybe he just forgot. But Chilton isn’t done there. After running down the costs of the bill that he yanked from his own rectum, he transitions out of nowhere into this fine piece of freshly plucked fertilizer:

“As an elder in a 300-member evangelical church, I am aware of efforts to recruit church leaders to push for climate change legislation… But efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions necessarily result in higher energy costs that impact “the least among us” most harshly. The Biblical command to care for the poor and deal with them justly should give us pause as we consider policies with almost no benefit and great cost to the least of these.“

As a member of planet Earth, I’d like to start a petition here for Kenneth Chilton to get a vasectomy, because nobody this stupid should be allowed to procreate. (Direct your requests here.)

If you’re a militant atheist, you might also want to thank him for driving away as many intelligent people from Christianity as possible.