Rogue Columnist

It's a scandal

It's a scandal. It's an outrage.
On our manhood it's a blot!
Where is the leader who will save us
And be the first man to be shot?
— Rodgers and Hammerstein

The "scandals" of the past week — Benghazi and the IRS — have two purposes: To destroy Hillary Clinton, the presumptive/feared Democratic nominee in 2016 and "to break him," as the secesh former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint said of President Obama on another issue. Whether the tempests can rise out of their right-wing teapot remains to be seen. Ruining Hillary and seeking to impeach Mr. Obama will be the Republican enterprise for the next three-and-a-half years. It's a tired playbook, but it keeps working for the right.

Little of what the right claims about Benghazi is correct. And, as Rogue's Front Page Editor tells me (and he's a man who knows about such things), the truth will never be known because the CIA will never come clean about its part in the mess. It is interesting that we've been spending more on the military than during the Cold War and yet we couldn't get help to the consulate/CIA safe house during the attack. I know there's a Marine FAST unit (Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team) based right across the Med in Rota, Spain. FAST is specifically designed for these crises. Why has the press never raised the question about why it was not mobilized? The narrative has it that the nearest help was in the Balkans. But I don't blame Hillary for this tragedy. John Boehner's House ensured that funds for State Department security was cut back. 

Nowhere man

It's been less than three months since Barack Obama was sworn in for a second term, and yet it feels as if he's fading from the scene. About the best thing I can find in his proposed budget is $40 billion for passenger rail over the next five years. That would be about the same as the U.S. was, until recently, throwing away every four or five months in Afghanistan. And it's contingent on getting through a House of Representatives with the usual anti-rail Republican fetish. But it's something.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama wants to begin what will no doubt be a series of cutbacks to the social safety net. If Nixon can go to China, the Democratic heir to Franklin Delano Roosevelt can begin dismantling Social Security. As yet another attempt to prove reasonable and make the Republicans like him, this will fail, as Paul Krugman eloquently points out. Indeed, he is a Robert Rubin Democrat: He's been aiming at "entitlements" for a long time. Meanwhile, expenditures on the military are essentially unchanged.

I don't know if this is the power of the Military-Industrial Complex or a Democrat afraid of looking weak on "national security," but nobody seems willing to concede that a nation cannot be powerful without first and foremost a strong economy. The private sector is either poleaxed by the financialized economy and the powers of monopolies and cartels — or among the latter and sitting on record profits and cash but doing no hiring of Americans. So this would be the point where an energetic and sensible federal government would embark on a 21st century infrastructure project and "Project Apollo" to create the technologies to address climate change — but nothing from Mr. Obama. He seems content to see America becalmed for the next three years. The suffering unemployed and poor, after all, won't affect the chief executives he lunches with, or his fellow Ivy Leaguers, or the parents who send their children to Sidwell Friends.

Hair on fire

The conventional wisdom holds that North Korea is mostly bluster, the young dictator trying to solidify his power and distract his starving subjects, gaining negotiating leverage, and about the worst that might happen is the Crazy Aunt in the Asian Attic will have one of her periodic violent outbursts, deadly perhaps but contained. The "saber rattling" might be a sign of a troubled regime in Pyongyang. The United States will project a "show of force," along with a promise to deploy more missile interceptors (of dubious reliability) in the coming months and years. And the situation will cool down.

I'm not sure much of this is true.

David Kang and Victor Cha, writing in Foreign Affairs, are among the few to challenge the view that North Korea isn't that dangerous. A Stalinist state with one of the world's largest armies, and a capable one at that, attains nuclear weapons of a sort and launches a satellite — in other words, achieves at least the beginnings of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then its leaders make it repeatedly clear they intend to attack South Korea, Japan, Guam and the continental United States. Just the same old-same old, sixty years after the armistice that ended the Korean War? Prepare to be surprised.

Divide and rule

What is are these "entitlements" I keep reading about? Just today, Rupert's Wall Street Journal had a headline that stated, "White House targeting entitlement limits." This must be a good thing, because, really, feeling entitled is an unattractive trait. If applied to our tax dollars, a sense of entitlement is downright unpatriotic.

Are they the $1.8 trillion given to defense contractors since 2006, including $400-billion-and-counting for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, intended as as an "affordable" mass-production jet that is now 70 percent over budget? Are they the huge subsidies that the fossil fuel industries receive from American taxpayers? (Worldwide, burning up the planet is being subsidized at a rate of $2 trillion).

Speaking of entitlements, don't forget the $3.4 trillion in corporate profits that are allowed to be parked elsewhere. This allowed these companies to avoid paying taxes that maintain the commons which allowed them flourish in the first place. Public policy tilted to make the rich richer, rather than encouraging them to create companies and jobs? Don't forget carried interest for hedge-fund financiers. And it's not just the rich — our entire society is tilted to heavily subsidize sprawl and single-occupancy vehicles traveling on roads that do not pay for themselves in basic ciphering, much less their costs in climate change. Surely these and more are what is meant when we hear of "entitlements," "cutting entitlements" and "entitlement reform."

The debt chimera

By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue

I recently shared a table with a stranger.  He was mature, educated, and gets his news from a variety of sources including MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, and others.  We discussed a variety of topics ranging from the need to address climate change, to the development of alternative energy sources and campaign finance reform.  Yet, when it came to budget policy he could do no better than to repeat the common wisdom that in order to address the "$16 trillion debt" a mix of spending cuts and tax increases are necessary, and that tax increases could not target the wealthy exclusively because "even if you confiscated all of the income of the rich it wouldn't be enough to fix the problem."  Medicare would have to bear the brunt of the spending cuts, he said.  These claims are all elements of the meme promoted by "responsible" media organizations, but in many respects they happen to be wrong.

There is certainly room for spending cuts in the current budget, in particular the bloated Defense Department.  In 2011, "national defense" spending totaled 4.7 percent of the U.S. economy. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Clinton era "peace dividends" reached their peak, national defense spending was just 3.0 percent of GDP.  See Table 8.4 of this report.

The Cold War is over: The Soviet Union no longer exists, and China has irrevocably converted to gung-ho capitalism. There is simply no excuse for this level of "defense" spending. In 2011, U.S. GDP was $15 trillion dollars. If national defense spending had been at Clinton era levels as a percentage of GDP, the savings in that year alone would have been 1.7 percent of GDP or roughly $250 billion dollars. Extend this over 10 years and the savings would total $2.5 trillion, or slightly more than the $2.4 trillion total savings touted by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles in their new debt reduction plan. And because we're talking about defense spending as a percentage of GDP, and GDP is expected to grow, this actually underestimates the dollar savings by about a third. Sure, there is already supposed to be some savings in coming years from the military drawdown in Afghanistan, but Congress may not allow this: Already there is a bipartisan movement afoot to restore the much smaller $43 billion in military sequestration cuts due to take effect this year. 

While America slept

I knew a young woman in the early 1980s who was a Trotskyite, or so she said. Even then, at the dawn of the Age of Reagan, a real political spectrum existed in America. The remains of the New Left were there. Both parties had conservatives, centrists and liberals. Compromise and rationality still produced legislation that got the people's business done. The quiet coup of the oligarchy was in its infancy.

Where we stand today? I had finished my regular stint on the local public radio station and heard the NPR program To The Point begin. It was all about the budget deficit and federal debt. And not really about that, but concern over whether President Obama's "charm offensive" to reach out to Republicans would succeed. That the GOP has been captured entirely by extremists was never mentioned, nor that the House members in safe seats would never compromise no matter how much Mr. Obama tried to "meet them halfway," the holy grail of our opinion makers and elites. That the deficit and debt are far from our most pressing issues was never debated. Didn't we just have an election that supposedly settled this matter? And this is the intelligent media.

I can understand most Americans tuning out. The nation is asleep, being date-raped after imbibing a cocktail of plutocratic-engineered ignorance, reactionary dogma, economic hard times, media malpractice and electronic distractions. The "center" is far to the right. "Progressives" are largely trying to conserve the basic social compact from the 20th century, once embraced by the mainstream of both parties. Few of them are seeking real change. The Occupy "movement" — who? Totskyites are all gone, too, but reality is sneaking into our national Arizona Room carrying an ice axe much more potent than the one that did in Leon Davidovich.

Filibuster

Whatever his other "out there" political views, Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster was thrilling. It was thrilling merely as a civics lesson: This is how filibusters were done before the 1980s, where a senator had to take and hold the floor, maybe with the help of other senators, maybe alone. Sometimes it was in the service of an immoral cause, as with Strom Thurmond's epic 24 hour and 18 minute stand against the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Others acted in the interests of republican govenment, as with Bernie Sanders' filibuster opposing extension of the Bush tax cuts. Even if you think Paul's was a stunt, it showed how we should insist that senators actually take the floor and defend their position, rather than telling the Majority Leader they will deny him the 60 votes for cloture and calling it a filibuster.

It was thrilling because, if only for a few hours and largely on social media, it broke out national spell of stupid. President Obama, our constitutional-law professor, has taken as casual an approach to civil liberties as his predecessor, perhaps even more so. Paul wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him about the drone program and whether it could be used by the president, without due process, to kill American citizens on American soil. Instead of a simple "no," Holder, who has refused to extend the rule of law to the big banks, implied that the president indeed held this power. This is an outrage. It is fundamentally unconstitutional. Where the hell were the supposed "liberal Democrats"? It was left to the usually kooky Rand Paul to actually act like an American senator in the best tradition of the office.

Finally, it was interesting in the way it scrambled the usual hard partisan lines and momentarily forced open some minds, revealed character. Paul's support and criticism came from across the spectrum. Chief among his critics were wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III and his cocker spaniel Lindsey Graham. Why do these men have any standing on any topic, especially national security? Both remain unapologetic supporters of the war in Iraq, apparently still believing those "weapons of mass destruction" are still there, somewhere. John McCain is the best the Republican Party has as a senior statesman? It's a sick joke.

Sequester this

Jon Stewart has so degraded the usefulness of profanity with his unending use of partly bleeped F-words that I am forced to fall back on the oaths of my parents' generation: Let the goddamn sequester happen. I am so sick of the crazy fanatics called Republicans and their willingness to inflict great damage on the country, really do anything, only to hurt a man they see as an illegitimate president, a man who represents everything they loathe: Intellectual, cosmopolitan, urban, open-minded, tolerant, black and doesn't know his place. I am as sick of the president, who is squandering his mandate, doesn't know how to use it. He continues the Bush assault on our civil liberties, extends the drone war, won't tell the American people the truth and won't bring the banksters to justice. He named one to be Treasury Secretary. And is Chuck Hagel the only Republican he can find to be Defense Secretary? Let the goddamn sequester happen.

Speaking of the Defense Department, why don't we call it by its historic name: The War Department (and, yes, dear careful reader, I know there was also a Department of the Navy and where would the Air Force fit...hang with me)? This would at least be straightforward about its purpose, using serious language that might give us pause. Aside from the damage of the Great Recession, one reason we face the dreaded deficit and debt is two unfunded wars. Mr. Obama is prosecuting imperial ass-whippings around the globe even now, creating more new terrorists than we kill. We are "pivoting" to the Pacific, to pick a fight with our Chinese banker. We spend more on war than the next 13 powers combined. The F-35 fighter will cost at least $396 billion — that alone would expand our passenger rail system by 300 times — and the thing is still not airworthy. Our new $13.5-billion-a-pop Gerald R. Ford class carriers will be target practice for some Chinese kid guiding a missile. We have too many flag officers and too many mooching, corrupt contractors. Even if not a single blade of grass on an officers' golf course goes untended, let the goddamn sequester happen.

Let the sequester happen and keep it going. Ever since Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency, politicians have gotten ahead by claiming "government is the problem." And voters accept this as they accept their Social Security checks, Medicare benefits, safe food and drugs, freeways and roads to drive on, in vehicles powered by gasoline kept artificially cheap by federal subsidies, armies and fleets, live in a Sun Belt made habitable by federal initiatives from the TVA to the SRP, survive airplane flights thanks to government air traffic control...and they think government is the problem. A people this stupid and corrupt deserves the real-life experiment of seeing whether they really are rugged individualists who don't need no gub'ment. Bring it on. I especially look forward to letting the net-taker red states actually live the Ayn Rand fantasy they rave about. I can imagine how LBJ, whatever the statues say, would ensure that all the military cuts befell states that voted against him and especially the districts of members of Congress who defied him.

In our name

Do you ever wonder about the acts committed in our name and the blowback that will be inevitable? After all, Osama bin Laden didn't spring fully formed as a madman from the head of Jove, nor did the terrorist organizations that continue his work. While their roots are complex, one big cause is that America has spent decades meddling around the world in conflicts it ill understands and whose consequences we rarely think through. Bin Laden was one of "our S.O.B.s" in Afghanistan when we were trying to bleed the Soviets. So were Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran, Hosni Mubarak, Noriega of Panama and the House of Saud, the latter's extreme Islam helping radicalize the Middle East. What did we want? "Stability." Cheap oil. Anything Israel wants. No matter the long-term dangers or injustices inflicted on millions. When 9/11 happened, we were shocked, shocked. Aren't we always a force for good?

One feels compelled to quote John Quincy Adams at length about what America's role should be in the world: "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own...She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind."

Now our march is the worldwide drone war of Mr. Obama. We kill whom we want, where we want, without due process, in violation of international law. Maybe we get a terrorist. We certainly kill women and children, too. Just another day as global hegemon. We could be leading the global effort to stop the worst of climate change. Instead, we're just bumbling imperialists. Someday this will come back on us.

McCain of Arizona

The last time I saw John McCain in Phoenix he was stalking out of Arizona Center into the surface parking lot that used to stand behind the Arizona Republic building and I was on my way to see a movie at the AMC cinemas. He nodded. I said, "Senator." He stalked on. A good fifty feet behind were Cindy and a couple of his children. It was so shocking to see McCain in Arizona, much less downtown, that it made me momentarily take stock. Then I realized he was not supporting the central city — his local office, after all, is near 24th Street and Camelback. This was one of the few places where he could see a movie and not be bothered by constituents.

Wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III has been on my mind after his vicious attacks on his former colleague, Chuck Hagel,  during the latter's confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Defense. Juan Cole wrote the hearing "was painful to watch because it displayed the tomfoolery, pretense, self-righteous know-nothingism, and embarrassing lack of contact with reality that dominate the landscape of America’s broken democracy. It was like watching a Nebraska ordinary Joe set upon by circus freaks– a phalanx of moral midgets, stalking cat-men, vicious lobster boys and ethical werewolves." Foremost among them was McCain.

Much was written about how the two had been friends and were fellow Vietnam vets. In reality, I doubt McCain has any friends in the Senate, including his fawning pet Lindsey Graham. And Hagel was a mere ground-pounder, an Army sergeant. McCain was an admiral's son, an elite Naval Aviator.

Immigration dreamland

A cabal that includes Sens. McCain and Flake, nominally of Arizona, has proposed "sweeping bipartisan immigration reform" in the Senate. The move for Republicans is as obvious as it is cynical: After President Obama carried 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, party bosses suddenly want to make nice with brown people.

This is an easy pivot for wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III, who in political life has rarely let anything get in the way of his ambition. The aptly named Flake will do as told. But what about all the Anglos from the Midwest and true-red Kooks who actually believed all the heads-cut-off, reconquista Mexi-peril hysteria that has been firehosed across the Arizona public square for years? Tuning in on AzCentral, I read such comments as, "Pretty bad when our own government rewards people for breaking the law"; "Great, another amnesty for criminals"; "I'm really against them braking (sic) the laws of our country -then being rewarded"; "I fought for this great country and I am dismayed that the liberals are trying to run it into the ground with political correctness"; "if they can't work hear (sic) or get welfare they won't come here"; "Round up the people using said documents and deport them."

Actually, the comments are way tamer than I expected, but the site is more difficult for trolls to take over than it once was. You get the point. "WHAT PART OF ILLEGAL DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?!?!?!"

Dreams and nightmares

A reader writes, "I'd like your take on the enduring value of MLK's contributions because I don't think they're fully understood or appreciated. Falling on inauguration day is (to me) poetic."

Yes, the second inauguration of our first African-American president is falling on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Most Americans, even black Americans, know little of King or the civil rights era. A better understanding can be gained by reading all three volumes of Taylor Branch's magisterial examination of America in the King years. And reading King's collected speeches and writings. Otherwise, this holiday remains a proxy for feel-good idiocy based on a few lines of the "dream speech," a magnificent piece of rhetoric but one that barely grazes the surface of the man and his message.

King was not alone in killing Jim Crow and achieving basic rights for all Americans in the 1960s. Students and sharecroppers seeking to register blacks or integrate buses and lunch counters were bludgeoned and sometimes killed by racist Southern cops and white mobs. Among the survivors is Rep. John Lewis, who was a young organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and one of the Freedom Riders. Every American should know the names of such giants as Thurgood Marshall, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Fred Shuttlesworth, A. Phillip Randolph, Ralph Abernathy and Whitney Young. The little girls who died in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Lyndon Johnson, willing to lose the South to the Democratic Party (for a generation, he thought) in order to push through civil-rights legislation. All of these and more are the shoulders on which President Obama stands. But King, probably rightly, looms largest in the collective memory. Or at least a version of King.

How far will they go?

Humans are cooking the planet into a nightmare out of a science-fiction movie. Nearly four years after the end of the Great Recession, America faces a permanent unemployment crisis, declining middle class, backward infrastructure and the prospect of years of anemic growth. The rich are more powerful than ever, with a historic share of national wealth; the same is true for the multinational corporations — but the wealth is not trickling down. Amidst these self-inflicted troubles, the Republican-controlled House is refusing to pay bills it has already approved. This is the essence of the debt-ceiling standoff. The House appears willing to flirt with, or even bring on default to get its way.

That way would be major steps to repeal the New Deal, Great Society and the domestic programs of the "Commie Dick" Nixon administration. Especially in their NRA-approved gun sights are Social Security and Medicare.

Such is the hostage-taking before which President Obama always bends. This time he claims he won't...blah, blah, blah. But a powerful block of Congress even discussing default is serious; this political dysfunction helped bring on the credit downgrades in 2011. Enjoy this relative stock rally while you've got it. As the debt-ceiling date draws closer, in February, markets will be turbulent. An actual default, which by its very nature would be disorderly, means worldwide chaos and potential depression. It would take the world's leading economy, and a government whose currency and Treasury bonds are the safest in the world, and flush it down the toilet.

The new center

Have you taken the Pew Research Center's "political typology" quiz? It's fascinating and frightening.

Among the twenty questions, I answered in the affirmative such ones as "Government regulation of business is necessary to protect the public interest"; "The growing number of newcomers from other countries strengthens American society"; "Relying too much on military force to defeat terrorism creates hatred that leads to more terrorism," and "Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people."

In answering yes to questions about too much power being concentrated in in the hands of a few large companies and corporations making too much profit, I am simply responding to well-known facts about consolidation, concentration and record profits as a percent of GDP while per-capita GDP remains below pre-crash levels. How else should one respond? A few of the questions are too simplistic, forcing answers about highly complex issues. Faced with one, I picked a strong military as the best way to ensure peace. Religion is a very important part of my life; I said so.

My results: I'm a "solid liberal" — along with 14 percent of the public.

The continuing crisis

I have been hesitant to write about the so-called fiscal cliff for many reasons. It's an over-covered topic, leaving readers in a zombie trance, even if most of the stories shed little real light. I subscribe to the Abba Eban doctrine: "When all else fails, men turn to reason." And the less elegant: Surely, they couldn't be this stupid. But it looks as if one of two things will happen: Either we're going off the cliff/curb/ramp, or President Obama will sell out the middle class safety net to get a deal.

The Bush tax cuts on the rich need to expire. In that word, "expire," we have the answer. They were sold with an expiration date, once already extended. The cuts did not perform as advertised. The Bush years, even at their best, produced the worst job creation and growth in modern American history. Inequality grew as the rich, following the rentier model, used their money to gamble in the $600 trillion derivatives market and other casinos, rather than investing in productive, job creating enterprises. Frankly, taxes elsewhere need to go up. Americans are the least-taxed among advanced nations. And we need carbon taxes and taxes on transactions, i.e. gambling by the Wall Street Boyz.

The sequester part of the cliff/curb/ramp is an artificial creation that grew out of the 2011 budget standoff, to put a gun to negotiators to reach a debt/deficit reduction deal. It could be repealed by Congress in a day. But it won't, so serious, "automatic" reductions will start on January 1. The Congressional Budget Office has warned this will cause a recession

Republicans in retreat?

Since the election, the meme has been that a defeated Republican Party must change or face becoming a permanent minority, a regional party in a changed America. But that's not how it looks in real life. The most substantive legislative victory since November has been the passage of legislation making Michigan a "right to work" state, a staggering Republican victory in a state where the modern labor movement was born.

Meanwhile, the "fiscal cliff" negotiations go on without end, with President Obama almost pleading that he has gone "at least halfway" to give House Republicans "a fair deal." That doesn't sound like the victorious leader of a party of the future. If the election was about anything substantive, it repudiated efforts to roll back Social Security and Medicare, endorsed "nation building at home" and affirmed that taxes on the rich must go up. Why should Mr. Obama go anywhere near halfway, for in doing so he once again betrays the values of those who elected him.

The Republican position on maintaining the Military-Industrial Complex at all costs perseveres unless we are fortunate enough to go off the fiscal cliff. Meanwhile, the president left Susan Rice twisting in the wind amid the despicable character assassination by wealthy Republican Sen. John Sidney McCain III, R-Fox News. McCain, who lost the 2008 presidential election badly, will apparently determine who serves in Mr. Obama's cabinet.

Empire of violence

The eqrsessential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D.H. Lawrence

I was raised in Western gun culture. From an early age, I was taught gun safety, including an NRA safe hunter course in the eighth grade at Kenilworth School. My friends and I would go target shooting in such places as the then-empty desert around Pinnacle Peak. My scoutmaster showed me how to fire my first semi-automatic rifle. As important as the shooting was always checking to make sure a gun was unloaded, knowing that if you dropped the magazine (not a "clip," unless it was an M-1 Garand rifle), a round might still be in the chamber. Where was the barrel pointing? How to cross a fence safely. How to carry a shotgun (breach open).

"Don't point a gun at someone unless you intend to shoot them," my mother said. In addition to being a concert pianist, she was an expert shot and would not have hesitated had we been at risk. She did not like handguns. To her mind, a handgun could be too accessible while one was still angry. Through all this ran a thread of deep seriousness: A firearm was deadly, must be treated with respect and care, and its watchful possession was a sign of adult maturity. Needless to say, this culture existed in a West with many fewer people than live there today. Still, I own guns. I like them. If I had the money, I would buy more. I'm not a hunter like my uncle and grandfather. But I do like target shooting.

In the 1960s, liberal sociologists explained rising crime as the outgrowth of "the sick society." Then it included racism and lack of economic opportunity for minorities and many lower-class Americans. But that society was healthy compared with today's. These endless cavalcades of mass shootings — taking place while overall violent crime is falling — are telling us something important. I don't claim to know all the answers, but I have some suspicions.

Holiday books

I spend all day in front of a computer screen. The last thing I want to do for pleasure is read on a Kindle or Nook. Joe Queenan nicely encapsulates the love of books in a Wall Street Journal article: "No matter what they may tell themselves, book lovers do not read primarily to obtain information or to while away the time. They read to escape to a more exciting, more rewarding world. A world where they do not hate their jobs, their spouses, their governments, their lives. A world where women do not constantly say things like 'Have a good one!' and 'Sounds like a plan!' A world where men do not wear belted shorts..." But however you enjoy reading, here's a relatively short list of books to buy for friends or ask Santa for.

One fad in historiography is that the Red Army primarily won World War II. Rick Atkinson is having none of it in his majestic Liberation Trilogy about the U.S. Army in Europe. An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle are the two completed works and they are the finest military history I've read in recent years. This is the way history should be written, the way that has been beaten our of three generations of professional historians. To give the Red Army its due, check out Thunder in the East by Evan Mawdsley and Ivan's War by Catherine Merridale. A terrific read about World War II in the Pacific is Evan Thomas' Sea of Thunder, about the greatest naval battle in history.

We're coming up on the centennial of the conflict that changed everything, World War I. The must-read here is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, a World War II American combat infantryman, focuses on the British troops in the trenches of the Western Front and the things they carried, especially the literary influences that reached into the lowest ranks. This is one book every educated person should read: Deeply learned, highly moving, surprising and written with the attitude, as Fussell said, of "a pissed-off infantryman." Two others are both seminal and thrilling: Dreadnought and Castles of Steel by Robert Massie, about the battleship arms race and war.

Permanent war

When Osama bin Laden launched the 9/11 attacks, he hoped to provoke an American overreaction that would bleed us to death with unending, futile military adventures and alienate the Muslim world from the thrashing giant. He dreamed of bringing out our worst.

Mission accomplished.

One of the fascinating aspects of the so-called fiscal cliff "negotiations" — as well as the presidential campaign — is the hysteria surrounding reduced or even stable military spending. We have become such a garrison state, and an economy so dependent on war, that we can't even imagine another reality. Or at least our elites and a large number in the media can't.

What now?

America didn't commit national suicide in the presidential election. Rogue readers are well aware of my frustrations with President Obama. But there was no choice but to support him against a crazy Republican Party. Wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney may have been the most dangerous candidate fielded by a major party in modern American history. Never before would we have had to wait until after the election to find out what he really stood for, besides his own ambition. He couldn't even be forthcoming about his faith, the most important thing in his life. The refusal to release tax returns was only the tip of a Titanic-sinking iceberg. What was clear: He had spent recent years wooing the Tea Party extremists, theocrats, Randians, racists and homophobes. And unlike with Reagan, they would bring their "revolution" to "take their country back," and with Paul Ryan and others had a very specific agenda. As I say, it would have been suicide.

Now we will see if the president can finally steel himself to the battles that face us. The "fiscal cliff" will be an early marker. He was elected by people who want to see tax rates on the rich revert to Clinton-era levels, if not higher. They do not want to see the safety net further shredded to fix the dreaded deficit — not when we've been spending about a trillion a year on all the facets of the national security state and big companies pay no taxes even as they ship jobs overseas. If Obama caves to a "compromise" framed by the right, this will be another four years of weakness and slow erosion of the commons, the middle class, and American competitiveness.

Watch also to see whom he names as Treasury Secretary to replace Tim Geithner. If he chooses the odious Erskine Bowles, he of the sell-out Bowles-Simpson Commission, we will see more power flow to the oligarchs. Bowles is a corporate shill and member in good standing of the Rubin wing of the Democratic Party, which has been panting to "reform entitlements." Translation: Betray Social Security and Medicare for the middle class. Also, watch out for Peter Orszag, former Obama budget director and now at, natch, Citigroup.

Election open thread

As we head into Election Day, I call your attention to Rogue's Campaign 2012 one-stop shop with some of the best articles on the presidential race. It's tempting to say this is the most consequential election of recent years, but so was 2000, 2004 and 2008. I'll check in as I can, semi-live-blogging, while also trying to finish up a novel.

I leave the comments fields to you.

UPDATE 10:30 a.m. 11/5: My Seattle Times blog post on businessmen as presidents. The record isn't what you might think.

11 a.m. 11/5: The Kookocracy is busy with election stealing in Arizona, with Flake robocalls telling Democrats to vote at the wrong polling locations. Meanwhile, a right-wing Arizona group sent $11 million in secretive "dark money" to meddle in California politics. It's a creepy story.

 9:30 a.m. 11/6: Atlas Shrugged vs. the Fire Next Time.

Read on for more. I'll be live-blogging starting at 6 p.m. Pacific Time

Storm warnings

Days ahead of the general election, the New York Times tells me that the "Ohio working class may offer key to Obama's re-election." According to a poll, "nearly half of all white voters without college degrees here say the economy is improving, and most give Mr. Obama some credit." In "post racial America," the president's overall white support is in the thirties nationally. Having spent nearly nine years in Ohio, let me try to drill something home. Guys like wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney bought, stripped, ripped and bankrupted your hometown headquarters companies in leveraged deals. They closed your factories, busted your unions and sent jobs to China. They drove down your wages to redistribute incomes ever upward. They fired you. They looted the wealth that it took Ohioans more than a century to build. Not blacks. Not Barack Hussein Obama. Guys like Romney — and in some cases Romney and Bain Capital specifically. I understand your trauma and bitterness. But get a clue.

• • •

Arizona is even more deranged. So not much to say. Change won't happen as long as turnout is low and voting dominated by the old Anglos and the LDS. Over cocktails in Phoenix a few days ago, some genuinely smart people assured me that Arizona was changing: Moderate Anglos would shake off their apathy and Hispanics would change the state's politics. I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, the odious "Nickle-Bag Joe" Arpaio will win, despite a challenge from Paul Penzone who would restore competence and decency to the Sheriff's Office. Richard Carmona might pull it out for the Senate; if not, Jeff Flake will be even less helpful to the state than Jon Kyl. The overarching political problem remains an ineffective Democratic Party. And, as with the nation, a progressive movement that can't match the narrative of the right.

 

The price of admiralty

The Nimitz-class carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and strike group.

Exactly sixty-eight years ago, American warships obliterated the remaining combat fleets of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the greatest sea battle in history. It was the last stand of the battleship and the first use of kamikaze, a foreshadowing of asymmetrical warfare to come. In the aftermath, the United States Navy has ruled the oceans, and helped ensure Pax America, with a dominance only exceeded by the Royal Navy in the century of Pax Britannica after Trafalgar.

Maintaining this is not a matter of mere numbers, however, as President Obama hinted at in his devastating bayonets-and-horses rejoinder to wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney. Building more ships will further the corporate welfare for the defense contractors and has personally enriched Romney's top naval adviser. Beyond this, the strategy is murky — particularly considering the cuts the nation is expected to endure while also further spending on the military.

For the record, the Navy had 285 active ships last year. Contrary to Romney's claim that, "our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917," the Navy was even smaller under George W. Bush. And numbers of ships are meaningless era to era. A modern Arleigh Burke class destroyer is far more lethal than a World War II battleship. A single Nimitz-class carrier strike group is more potent than all the fleets assembled at Leyte. Total firepower controlled by U.S. fleets is overwhelming. Obama made the point without going too deep into the weeds. (I hope; never underestimate the ignorance of the average voter and the coveted GOP demographic of white males and size issues).

President Romney? Part II

Much has changed since I wrote the first post on this topic. The biggest being that wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney may well be the next president. Between the hard-core right, the duhs-and-ignos, and the whites who hate that black man in the White House more than anything, it could well happen. And don't forget the huge post-Citizens United money and vote suppression favoring the GOP. Disappointment in the incumbent is substantive — but enough to turn the country over to this man and this bunch? Possibly.

I want to attempt to get beyond the horse race or debate analysis to contemplate a Romney presidency. So, a few thoughts:

The man is frighteningly opaque. We've been conditioned to believe "all politicians lie." Maybe so. But I can't think of a presidential candidate in my lifetime who has held so many different and conflicting positions. Not evolving or changing one's mind when the facts change, but cynical shape-shifting to close the deal. Anything to win. Even if this doesn't reveal a dangerous sociopath, we must ask: Who is this man? The hard right doesn't care; it has given him a pass to play "Moderate Mitt" just to defeat Obama. But does "Moderate Mitt" really exist? Or was that merely the calculus of a man who won one term as governor in blue Massachusetts ("my state" as he always says in debates, creepily avoiding saying the state's name). Is it the lazy fantasy of the mainstream media that also had a misplaced crush on the "maverick," wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III.

Town hall of fools

UPDATED

One of the treasures of my home in exile is Town Hall Seattle, a setting that consistently holds intelligent and searching events featuring top authors, artists, scientists and other intellectuals. The audience is always smart, never boorish or full of thugs and trolls. The vital issues of the day are on the menu, the setting a restored majestic church downtown. That such a place not only exists outside of New York but is highly popular is almost enough to give one hope. But this is a very blue city that consistently ranks at or near the top in the nation for literacy.

A very different town hall will take place Tuesday night: The second presidential debate. As the New York Times reports, the format "is designed to be a little less stiff — a free-flowing question-and-answer session between the candidates and a studio audience." Get it: Studio audience. Not only is this "debate" actually highly scripted, it is intended to mimic the great god of Moronistan, the television. Please, let us trivialize what should the solemn obligation of learning real issues and acting as real citizens. Far better Donahue/Oprah/The View with pretend issues and a premium on treating Americans as stupid children. Wasn't it the first such "town hall debate" in 1992 when George H.W. Bush checked his watch? I felt his pain.

In the Obama/Romney version, we will see 80 participants "culled by Gallup...from a sample of uncommitted voters." Right there is what cops and crime-writers call "a tell." Uncommitted? Seriously? How could anyone be uncommitted or undecided in this election. Only people who are imbeciles. People who should not vote. I hearken back to Gore Vidal's famous line about 50 percent of Americans don't vote and 50 percent don't read a daily newspaper — and he hoped it was the same 50 percent. Today the number of actual readers is far lower. But we will have Messrs. Romney and Obama pandering to the duhs and the ignos, consumers not citizens.

Backs against the wall

Remember when progressives were told not to worry, that President Obama was playing chess while everyone else was playing checkers. Unfortunately checker-players ended up winning most of the matches. And then there was Obama as "zen master." No Drama Obama. And he was peacefully stoic as the Republican right captured nearly every agenda and framed nearly every debate. We are left with one last chestnut: That the president is at his best when his back is against the wall.

Based on the results of the respected Pew poll, we're about to find out if this is the case. Calling the poll findings "devastating, just devastating," Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast wrote:

I've never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week - throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement? And after Romney's convincing Etch-A-Sketch, convincing because Obama was incapable of exposing it, Romney is now the centrist candidate, even as he is running to head up the most radical party in the modern era.

Who are the Whigs?

Daniel McCarthy of The American Conservative writes a thoughtful article asking, "Is the GOP still a national party?" He points out the increasing popular vote dominance of Democrats in presidential elections, contrasting this with the GOP landslides of earlier years. Yet the map that goes with it is arresting: County by county, this is a very red nation (admittedly this was from 2004; the Obama "high tide" results are shown, I believe by congressional district, above). But, with a few exceptions such as Phoenix and metros in Texas, the biggest population lives in blue counties. "Republicans," he writes, "are actually closer than Democrats to being the real 47 percent party. (Though it’s more accurate to say the GOP is the 48-49 percent party and the Democrats are the 49-50 percent party.)"

McCarthy points to the dichotomy: GOP ideological purity, discipline and grassroots strength have given it big advantages over Democrats in state legislatures and Congress. But that same base, and the need for Republican presidential candidates to please it, becomes a liability every four years. McCarthy is a conservative in the Russell Kirk mold and is rightly concerned about what passes for conservatism today.

The long knives are already out in the campaign of wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney and one reads about the bloodbath to come in the GOP if Romney goes down. (It ain't over!). But bloodbath to where? The Eisenhower, Ford, Nixon and even Reagan and Bush I Republicans have been read out of the party as RINOS. All militant passion resides with the extreme reactionaries that, when most Americans really grasp what they're about, further marginalize the party.

Stealing distance

UPDATED (2)

President Obama got a bounce. Wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney got none. Key swing states are slipping his reach. Many in the progressive blogosphere are a bit too confident for my comfort 50 days out. The richest men and most powerful industries in America are not prepared to see their hundreds of millions of dollars contributed to Romney and Citizens United-enabled GOP super PACs flushed down the toilet. Voter suppression efforts are in full gear, especially critical in Ohio.

No question the Romney campaign is in such disarray that, as Politico reports, the long knives are already out. The Republican Convention ended in calamity, from Chris Christie's Tony Soprano 2016 acceptance speech to Clint Eastwood's performance art with an empty chair — and little memorable about the nominee. Then last week, Mitt's "Lehman moment" on Libya, that moment, as with McCain in 2008, when the man shows himself profoundly unqualified for the presidency.

And why would he be? He's not "Mr. Fix-It" the businessman. He's Mr. Break-It, the kind of finance capitalist that has spent decades weakening the nation by looting the productive wealth it took a century to create. He was a failed one-term governor of a mid-sized state. If Mr. Obama lacked executive experience, he at least has a first-rate temperament, to use Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous assessment of FDR. Unlike Roosevelt, he also has a first-rate intellect, although my discontents with the president are well known.

Charlotte

The first thing Americans, and especially the national media, need to know about the location of the Democratic National Convention is that it is being held in Charlotte, N.C., not Charleston, S.C. In historic and genteel Charleston, as Fritz Hollings said, there are two kinds of people: The ones who don't wear shoes, and the ones who look at you like you don't wear shoes. Nor are Monticello and the University of Virginia located in Charlotte. Those are in and near Charlottesville. Such is the confusion that has long maddened local chamber of commerce bots. Charlotte is banks and NASCAR and churches. Lots and lots of churches. Billy Graham was born here. It's not in the mountains, like Asheville, or near the ocean, like Wilmington, but on the flat, boring Piedmont in between.

I come by my Charlotte knowledge having served as executive business editor of the Charlotte Observer, from 1996 through 2000, in its Knight-Ridder glory days, and have visited many times since. When I reluctantly left big-city Cincinnati for the job in Charlotte, I thought I had landed in Hooterville with a skyline, specifically one gigantic tower, the NationsBank Corporate Center, and a tiny little office core beside it. In the years since, downtown Charlotte has grown substantially and can boast an impressive, if totally modernistic, skyline.

The main reason is the banks, and specifically two bankers. But more about them later.

'Hard truths'

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie likes it hard. As in, "to lead as my mother insisted I live, not by avoiding truths, especially the hard ones, but by facing up to them and being the better for it." Also in his 2016 acceptance speech in Tampa on Tuesday night, he said, "With $5 trillion in debt added over the last four years, we have no other option but to make the hard choices, cut federal spending and fundamentally reduce the size of government." A few lines later, there it was again: "Hard choices..." When he finally got around to mentioning the nominee of the Party That Wrecked America, wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney, he promised, "Mitt Romney will tell us the hard truths we need to hear..."

Really? In a contest already remarkable for Republican deceit, including the outright lie that President Obama loosened welfare work requirements, this is the bunch that is not only going to tell us the truth, but "hard truths"? And remember, the Romney camp has put us on notice that "we're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." Apparently the "hard truths" will also be heavily camouflaged in the racist dog whistles to the old, white party base. Did you know that the president is a Negro? Not even an American. Even Bill Clinton didn't face this from the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy.

Conventional Republicans

As the Republicans prepare for their national convention, a tropical storm with the ironic name of Isaac might visit a biblical comeuppance on the party of theocracy. Now wouldn't that be "spaycial," as they say in the South. Wouldn't that be in-ter-est-ing. The Grand Old Party couldn't have picked a more appropriate place to gather, Tampa, a "city" that makes Phoenix look like Paris by comparison, a poster child for Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere, and a deep-red suburban bastion of ignorant and retrograde Republicanism. Back in the day, a convention would have defeated wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney on the first ballot, and then the old hands would have gathered in a smoke-filled room to choose a better candidate.

Tom Friedman opines that "America today desperately needs a serious, thoughtful, credible 21st-century 'conservative' opposition to President Obama, and we don’t have that, even though the voices are out there." Deconstructing Friedman is always a fun party game, but let me be brief. The sentence presumes that Mr. Obama is a liberal. And this is based on, what? Even Obamacare is a massive giveaway to big business, specifically the insurance companies and for-profit health oligarchy. The banksters got away with it. Wars go on. The national security state is bigger. Civil liberties more at risk. Tell me something liberal in the president's record. He's about as liberal as Jerry Ford. And the "voices are out there." Really? Tom Coburn? The world ain't the only thing that's flat.

The compelling question looms larger than Friedman's clueless search for the mythical center: Why is this election even close?

Debt reefer madness

When did we become a nation of deranged accountants? These United States face many critical tests, from the perilous (climate change) and exceptional (the lesser depression and the destruction of the rule of law by the plutocrats) to the merely important (rising inequality and declining opportunity). But look around and listen. What is the Most Important Issue? Federal fiscal policy. The federal debt! The federal deficit! Oh, Jerusalem!

Americans who would otherwise have difficulty balancing their checkbooks live in terror of this menace. The Very Serious People (hat-tip to Paul Krugman) in government and media have made it the true north to which every other national need must bend. It has been a gift to demagogues on the right. But your neighbor and granny are lying awake over what is actually a bunch of macroeconomic hypotheticals they do not even understand. But, but, we're deeply in debt, facing bankruptcy — look at Greece! — families have to tighten their belts, so the government should, too, and if this isn't fixed now, we'll, we'll.. (head explodes). I suppose the consequences are of the operatic kind of payback facing a high-school kid who takes just one toke of pot in the 1936 classic Reefer Madness.

It would be laughable if the damage looming from attempts to "fix" or exploit the fiscal situation was not so real.

The party's over

America can accomplish a great deal when the most reactionary states pick up their marbles and leave Washington. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Pacific Railroad Act, which authorized government bonds and land grants to build the transcontinental railroad. The legislation had languished until the Southern states seceded. Then it sailed through the Republican-controlled Congress and was signed by President Lincoln on July 1, 1862. Other major pieces of the new party's agenda that never would have passed the filibuster of Southern Democratic senators also became law: Land-grant colleges and the Homestead Act. All three would prove decisive in the nation's development.

It's also worth noting that in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which broke the back of de jure segregation, 80 percent of Republicans voted for the legislation, a higher percentage than among Democrats. The Democratic majority included a solid segregationist Southern bloc, including most powerful committee chairmen and the wily Sen. Richard Russell. As Robert Caro majestically narrates in The Passage of Power, Lyndon Johnson knew how to "get" people — and as the new president, he got essential GOP support by relentlessly reminding foot-dragging Republican lawmakers that they were "the Party of Lincoln."

In the same year, Barry Goldwater won his party's presidential nomination. His opposition to federal civil-rights legislation ensured support in the South (before his assassination, President Kennedy's polling was showing him losing the South in a Kennedy-Goldwater matchup). But, still, there were Nelson Rockefeller, Kenneth Keating, Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott and George Romney, liberal Republicans all. Richard Nixon funded the Great Society, established the Environmental Protection Agency and proposed far-reaching improvement to health-care coverage. Ronald Reagan, demigod of today's Republicans, was more often pragmatic than ideological in his governing. And we don't even have to get into Poppy Bush.

Issues in the closet

This is the most important presidential and congressional election in my lifetime. The trouble is, none of the major candidates is talking about the big issues. Or is it just me? President Obama and wealthy Republican challenger Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney are outdoing each other to please the Israel lobby. There's a fierce debate over alleged ill-treatment of the super-wealthy. Romney promises to increase defense spending; Obama cut it a little, maybe. What will get the economy going again: tax cuts and other Bush redux policies, or, as Obama seems to be saying, merely not electing the other guy. The gaffe watch is on high, of course. Are these the big issues upon which the fate of the republic hangs? The political press complains that it's a boring election. No wonder. The real issues, the serious matters screaming for intelligent responses, are kept hidden away:

1. Climate change. Despite a consensus among the scientists that actually specialize in this field that climate change is real, human caused, getting worse faster than anticipated and will produce far greater cost and harm than good, we're doing next to nothing about it. Try to write about it, as I did last Sunday in the Seattle Times, and you'll be marked on reactionary Web sites to be deluged with emails, all with the same wording and alleged research that climate change is a hoax, or at best unproven. The goal is to intimidate and confuse. I don't give a damn. I'll write about it every chance I get. But our leaders won't tell us the truth, won't campaign on policies that would address it and at least prevent the worse outcome. No issue is more important.

2. The (real) economy. Mass unemployment, stagnant wages, historic inequality, slow or no growth, the end of meritocracy. These things should be unthinkable in America, but neither candidate and few members of Congress will really lay out the policies to address them. The Romney solution, tax cuts and more deregulation, is a big reason why we're in this mess. We need a major stimulus focused entirely on creating jobs, especially by building large-scale 21st century infrastructure (not "roads and bridges"). And with interest rates and Treasury yields so low, there's never been a better time to borrow. Then we need to raise taxes, go after tax shelters and tax gambling in the capital markets that doesn't create productive enterprises and good jobs. Forget beating up China over currency manipulation; we need to play China's game in trade.

Building nihilism

I produced a Seattle Times blog post on the "You didn't build that" manufactured controversy. The comments are as instructive as anything I wrote. We're going to see a summer and fall of silliness before the elections. But beneath many of the trivialities are profound truths — such as the refusal of wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney to release his tax returns, as his father did when he ran for presidency. And this seeming kerfuffle.

The Republicans and "independents" (who really lean Republican) are embracing a philosophy that can only be described as nihilism. As I pointed out in my post, only in a nation that became wealthy and safe thanks to the delicate balance between government and the private sector could we even have the luxury of this discussion.

It's easy to think that, once in power, the Republicans will continue their own brand of big government: Heavy subsidies for arms merchants and polluters and all members of the oligarchy that have gained control of our politics. The government will grow just as it did under Reagan and both Bushes.

Strange awaiting

Surely I'm not the only one who feels as if we're in a spooky interlude, an intermission between bad and, perhaps not worse, but much of the same bad for a very long time. Or, something... A zone of circumstance lying somewhere between an asteroid strike and the widespread sense of peace and prosperity, however misplaced, of the 1990s.

Consider that wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney stands a very good chance of becoming president. Despite all the damage that should have been done by the ongoing revelations of his destructive work at Bain Capital, duplicity about his tenure at same, and refusal to release his tax returns — a potential chief executive with accounts in the Caymans and a Swiss bank account — despite all this, he barely trails in the popular vote and cannot be counted out in the Electoral College. How can this be? Is it simply because Obama has lost so much of the white vote? That the right has so rewritten the narrative of the past 12 years that millions don't actually know what the hell happened?

If you thought they were The Party That Wrecked America the first time around, just wait for the first Citizens United presidential election.

Supremes SB1070 open thread

Here's my quick take on the Supreme Court's ruling on SB 1070 today: First, the law was never primarily aimed at stopping illegal immigration. Without illegal immigrants, Arizona's economy would collapse, and it would have done so by orders of magnitude had the '00s "boom" continued. The intent was to 1) Mobilize the aging Anglo right-wing base. 2) Push Latinos deeper into the shadows and reinforce their standing as second-class citizens/non-citizens. 3) Aid in voter suppression through its intimidation, wide net and climate of fear and Anglo supremacy.

The result: Mission accomplished. It really doesn't matter what the Supreme Court withheld or struck down. To use but one example, Terry Goddard, the best qualified candidate for governor in the state's history, lost to Jan Brewer. With this, any hope that the state's trajectory into madness could even be checked was lost. Nationally, the "papers, please" (and they don't say "please) has been a boon for the right.

Secondly, the great Hispanic backlash/political sea change that the East Coast media keep predicting ain't gonna happen. At least not for a generation or more. It's not happening in Texas. It's sure not going to happen in Arizona. "Mexicans don't vote." Hispanic turnout is miserably low. So the Supreme Court ruling is irrelevant, especially compared with this Montana case.

What do you think?

The new hard times

By now you know the news that Americans' wealth dropped nearly 40 percent from 2007 to 2010. This is nearly all a function of the housing collapse, combined with the fact that the wages of average people have been stagnant or dropping for 30 years. And the data, being median wealth, probably understate the real damage. For all this, there's a very good chance that 50.1 percent of the voters will return the Party That Wrecked America to the White House, the last check on a federal government taken over by the extreme right. So if most of us are poorer now, just wait.

We're lectured that too many people have been living beyond their means, leeching off the public dole, racking up unsustainable debt. This is never you and me, mind you. It's someone else, but there are a lot of them and something drastic has got to give. David Brooks is one of the chief public scolds who also laments a loss of morality and dignity, even if he has spent his career supporting the jungle capitalism that has brought us low. Another is Thomas Friedman, prophet of world flatness. The government has spent decades giving and now it's going to have to spend the future taking back (but never from his pet projects, of course).

With Rep. Paul Ryan, lionized for his seriousness, we have federal budgets that put this wish into legislation. Never mind that they don't fix the deficit or debt, they do cut programs to the poor and lower middle-class. Social Security? Privatize it. Medicare? Give people vouchers worth a couple of thousand dollars (good for a low-end trip to the emergency room, if that). Military spending is "off the table," as are subsidies to big GOP donors such as the fossil fuels industry. So I hope you get a sense of this future barring a major course correction.

All fall down

We're at a very dangerous moment. The May unemployment report showed only 69,000 jobs created, all part-time, and only half of what's needed just to keep up with the natural growth of the labor force. The eurozone is headed for collapse and much of Europe is in recession. China, expected to lead world recovery, is slowing, as is India. We may never have escaped the Great Recession, but if we did we're on the edge of another downturn. Put another way: The Great Depression went on for more than a decade and had recessions embedded in it, like tornadoes in a hurricane.

Faced with this, the institutions and practices that were built up carefully to mitigate just such an event are either gone — Glass-Steagall — or in a free-fall of legitimacy. The European Union. A peaceful, strong Germany. A global system of free trade. An economy where the pursuit of profit, monopoly and plutocracy is offset by checks and balances that serve the common good. The paralyzed and compromised Federal Reserve. The "fixed" and hamstrung-by-extremists Congress. And, I am sorry to rub salt in your hopes, President Obama. Economic conditions are not as bad as they were in the Depression. Yet. Leadership is worse, at least among American politicians. Hardly any will even tell us the truth about our actual circumstances.

History offers a valuable "fund," as George F. Kennan put it, upon which we can draw to understand our present circumstances and perhaps plot prudent responses.

Memorial Day

The origin of Memorial Day was the commemoration of Union deaths after the Civil War, a conflict that cost between 618,000 and 700,000 lives in a nation with a population of less than 32 million. The South had its Confederate Memorial Day, still marked in some states of the old CSA. As this warrior republic, crusader nation has racked up more wars, Memorial Day has added these deaths to the holiday.

Newspapers will again run photos of small flags planted in front of the tooth-like marble gravestones of the war dead. But if ever there was an argument for a "sunset provision" to holidays, Memorial Day is it. Even the deaths of ordinary civilians are observed. Commercialized, trivialized and a venue for cheap patriotism, Memorial Day has been drained of its somber meaning. For most Americans, it is just another day off, another long weekend, the start of summer.

The disconnect is worse than ever. We've been through a decade of war and everybody "supports the troops." But our wars are fought by a professional military whose values are, in both good and dangerous ways, cut off from the mainstream of the country. The ideal of the citizen soldier is gone. This way went Rome.

The fight of our lives

We miss the core issue: liberalism itself isn't strong enough to force them to our side and interests. Where are our armies? Where? We're in the fight of our lives with a well-meaning if irresolute leader in Obama... But he is, for better or worse, the only leader we have. — Soleri

What is this election about? Government that is not broken but "fixed" by moneyed interests to their benefit and the destruction of the public good? Shocking income inequality with average Americans left ever further behind? The American promise of a good job and economic mobility for those who, in Bill Clinton's words, "work hard and play by the rules"? Arresting the continuous expansion of the Military-Industrial Complex and stopping America's endless wars, and with them the huge opportunity costs to the nation?

It is about all those things and much more. At its core, this election actually is about what kind of nation we will be. This is often a phrase tossed out by candidates between whom, as George Wallace would say, "there's not a dime's worth of difference." Or used in times of relative peace and prosperity when the stakes are less. Not this time. So, no, we didn't pick this fight, especially not baby boomers of a certain age who can remember another America, flawed and troubled but on the right path. But we're in it. We're in the fight of our lives.

What we won't discuss

I was tied up Thursday with my Sunday column for the Seattle Times. It was a good thing; otherwise, my head might have exploded. All the oxygen in the mediasphere was taken up by a "Democratic strategist" named Hilary Rosen, who said of Ann Romney on CNN, "Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we — why do we worry about their future?" Vast condemnation ensued, ending with Rosen apologising. This wasn't just taking up space on Twitter or new-media sites, but the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, among others. A blogger for The Nation argued why Rosen was correct. I can't even imagine the wall-to-wall coverage on the boob tube.

As Evan McMorris-Santaro blogged at Talking Points Memo, "Welcome to the next seven months."

So if it wasn't already obvious, there are certain things that won't be discussed in Campaign 2012. The perhaps-failed launch of a proto-ICBM by nuclear-armed North Korea got short shrift Thursday. It may eventually be used as a cudgel against President Obama, but not today. Look over there — it's Hilary Rosen! Iran is pursuing both nuclear arms and long-range delivery systems, or not. Will we dig deep on this issue in the public square, including how Israel is driving American foreign policy not to our best interests? Don't count on it.

His Waterloo

"If we're able to stop Obama on this (health care), it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." — Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina

You didn't think the best Supreme Court that money can buy was going to let Obamacare go into law, did you? From the questions asked of lawyers and the dismal performance of President Hoover's Solicitor General, it doesn't seem likely. Now the question is not merely whether the court will strike down the individual mandate but also use this as a springboard to go after more, beginning with Medicaid. Roberts, Scalia, Alito and Thomas have waited their careers for this moment. Anthony Kennedy is a Reagan appointee. The Federalist Society and the entire right-wing infrastructure have built themselves for it. Now we will get another lesson in why it has been a calamity to have 30 years of mostly Republican presidents packing the federal judiciary. Activist judges? You ain't seen nothing yet.

The so-called Affordable Care Act has been a trainwreck from the beginning. Mr. Obama didn't make it a centerpiece of his campaign, so he had no mandate to do it. Most Americans don't understand it. Like the Dodd-Frank financial "re-regulation" legislation, it is compromised to appease the plutocrats, in this case the insurance industry. About the only clear benefit I can parse is the prohibition against denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

Worse, he wasted a precious year on "health care reform" that should have been spent in very obvious and effective measures to save an economy in free fall (and loudly claim credit). To address the worst domestic crisis since the Great Depression and reset the economy for a prosperous, sustainable future. "Never let a crisis go to waste," my ass. Instead, Mr. Obama chose health care. Here his constant template was revealed, alternately passive and ineffective, helped along by a spineless Democratic majority in Congress. The result: The triumph of the Tea Party in the 2010 election shellacking. He would rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-termer? Were he not running against Willard Romney, he would be consigned to the Jimmy Carter dustbin — and he might yet be, for the Republican, whose health-care program in Massachusetts became Obamacare, has unlimited money.

Our appetites

A reader has demanded that I write about The Hunger Games. I had never heard of the young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins or the new movie until this. I doubt I will see the film; a few years ago, Hollywood stopped making much that appeals to my "demographic." The old entertainment writer in me will simply say that Jennifer Lawrence, the lead, is a remarkable young actress. Her self-assured, perfect-pitch performance in Winter's Bone makes her one to watch.

Of course this isn't that the reader was asking. He's convinced that America is on the brink of mass starvation brought on by a lack of jobs. Here's the deal: Until Paul Ryan and the GOP Boyz defund them, 15 federal food and nutrition programs, including Food Stamps, are offered to those in dire straits. It would be obscene to compare the plight of Americans, however heartbreaking, with people in the developing world who are genuinely starving to death. That said, the Agriculture Department tracks "food insecurity," defined as "at times during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food." Nearly 49 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2010, 6.4 million in the most serious circumstances.

A future with lethal, televised gladiatorial games — that I can believe. It wouldn't require the "destruction of North America," only a little slippage in the ratings and a few more miles down the road of national decadence. A situation where the starving unemployed — which is where I think the reader was going — rise up in revolution against the plutocrats and their lackeys in D.C.? Nope.

State of extremism

Arizona may not be competitive in much — cheap housing and hot weather come to mind. But it seems determined to "out-crazy" other states in its rock-ribbed, doubled-down reactionary politics. Almost every day comes a story that speaks to the core concerns of today's right wing. For example, Joe Arpaio, High Sheriff for Life, is "investigating" the "fraud" of President Obama's birth certificate, claiming it is a cover-up "ten times worse than Watergate." Can Arizonans hear America laughing?

Other issues are not so funny. The assassination attempt on Rep, Gabrielle Giffords, inspired by the climate of hate, remains a huge stain. The Legislature long ago went from, let us say, liberalizing the laws affecting firearms to encouraging situations where firearm violence is inevitable. Salon, internationally read, has begun an entire archive devoted to Arizona and the entries are not sunny! Scottsdale! or championship golf! Among the headlines: "How Breitbart and Arizona seized on 'critical race theory' " and  "Arizona's vicious war on workers." The New York Times specifically established a Phoenix bureau to cover Arizona crazy when the anti-immigrant, Jim Crow, voter-suppression SB 1070 debate was emerging. From Daily Kos : "Arizona out-crazies other contraception bills. Use birth control, get fired." Talking Points Memo reports on the violent neo-Nazi groups congregating in the state.

This is not an image problem. It is a reality problem, no matter the many Arizonans who are not crazy or extreme. In a state that already ranks so low on virtually any measure of social or economic well-being, it is a bright red "DO NOT COME HERE" alert, whether to companies deciding where to make quality investments or talented, educated people choosing their home.

Killer nation

The surprise is not that an American soldier walked off his base and murdered 16 Afghan villagers, including nine children, but that it hasn't happened more often, including in the United States. This is what happens when we keep our armed forces at war for an astounding 10 years. No wonder Gen. George Marshall was so eager to finish the Second World War, fearing that a democracy couldn't survive a war that went past five years. And no wonder Americans who now "support the troops" have historically been wary of a standing army and unimpressed by a chest-full of medals.

This is what happens when our wars have no front lines and no conventional armies as enemies. The war is everywhere and nowhere. Combatants are hidden in a civilian population already tired of our occupation, our disrespect for their customs and religion, and willing to supply information to the enemy. Soldiers in these circumstances learn to despise and dehumanize the ungrateful civilians they are supposed to be protecting. Even conventional wars coarsen nations, destroy young people, encourage atrocities.

This happens when Americans have slipped norms of decency, abandoned books in favor of homicidal video games, dress (and act) like adolescents, joined the military because the union blue-collar jobs they once could count on have moved to Asia, and found themselves defrauded and lied to by every institution in our national life. And guns, guns, guns everywhere.

The asterisk presidency

Now is the time when all good progressives and people with brains are supposed to line up behind President Hoover. After all, where else can we go? The Republican theocrats and plutocrats have made their dangerous irrelevance clear through an endless series of "debates," and Willard Romney still can't close the deal with his own party. Washington Monthly tries to rehabilitate Mr. Obama in an article that contains this paragraph:

Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in wilderness protection in fifteen years. A revolutionary reform to student aid. Signing the New START treaty with Russia. The ending of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

And if you missed it, "he shifted counterterrorism strategies to target Osama bin Laden and then ordered the risky raid that killed him." Another Washington Monthly piece lists the president's top 50 accomplishments. Yet each one requires an asterisk.

The GOP's last stand?

"The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a ­natural-majority coalition for Democrats."

So writes Jonathan Chait in New York magazine, as good a barometer of elite progressive opinion as one will find. His article looks at the fear driving the Republican Party this election season, specifically that the nation is getting less white, more diverse and the GOP is betting everything on a "Hail Mary" pass this year to defeat President Obama — or face being on the losing end of a long-term realignment.

Somehow this piece came to be twined in my mind with a recent New York Times article about how illegal immigration has lost its power as an issue in Arizona. It begins, "The angry protests over Arizona’s tough policies focused on illegal immigrants are mostly gone. The sponsor of the state’s touchstone immigration bill has been recalled, while two sheriffs who championed the crackdown are enmeshed in legal difficulties..." So the state's more interested in, say, real-life economic issues. It's also conventional wisdom in the political press that Arizona could be in play come November.

But is any of this real?

Revolution 2.0

It is starting to dawn on America's press corps that the Arab Spring is not going to usher in Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East. The upheaval in Egypt, for example, has not led to rule by educated young Arabs, secularism, women's rights and peaceful pluralism. We find the same military control that has marked the country for decades along with the danger of an Islamic state inimical to Western values, as well as to stability in the region. Nineteen Americans face murky criminal charges. And so it goes. A world with way too many unemployed young men, a world facing scarcity, will fall back on the tribal, brutal and nationalistic.

In America, we await breathlessly the next phase of Occupy. Meanwhile, the super PACs and plutocrats continue to have their way. I return to a periodic theme: What happens here? What happens next? Jim Kunstler thinks we are ripe for a "John Brown moment." Some very smart Rogue readers expect big trouble at the Democratic and Republican conventions this year. And there is endless faith placed in Facebook and Twitter as tools to empower the powerless to overthrow the plutocracy.

I am skeptical but persuadable.

The 50.1 percent

Some readers have accused me of not paying proper homage to the Occupy "movement." I risk being seen as "a grumpy old man." What — and not getting The Google and The Twitter while telling stories about the old days of taking the ferry over to Shelbyville and wearing an onion on my belt...which was the style at the time? Okay, I suppose Occupy raised consciousness of the 1 percent of the super-rich and the 99 percent of "the rest of us." Good intentions abound. We know more about pepper spray.

Meanwhile, in the real world where real policy is made, the right marches on. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure pulled its funding to Planned Parenthood for breast-cancer screening. The reason given is that Planned Parenthood is "under investigation." Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Florida, chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations is auditing Planned Parenthood to see if any public funds were used to pay for abortions. The Komen money, about $680,000, was used exclusively by Planned Parenthood to provide breast screening for the poor and under-insured (and most of the organization's activities are not about abortion). On top of this, Komen recently hired an anti-abortion Georgia Republican politician as a vice president. This is not just about the abortion debate: Many "conservatives" now are opposed to birth control.

The result: A nice bank shot that hurts an organization reviled by the right, makes a loud statement against women's freedom of choice and accessibility to health care, and hurts the poor! Nicely played.