Rogue Columnist

The gas tax 'holiday' and magical thinking

How can we explain the latest Wall Street Journal/MSNBC poll that shows only 27 percent of respondents have a positive view of the Republican Party yet the Democratic presidential contenders are, at best, tied with President-elect McCain? Is it the inanity of the corporate media? Is it is ignorance of the American voter, who has been brainwashed to believe the right-wing tool McCain is a "maverick"? The next several months will tell.

It's surely not a good sign that the nation sits paralyzed before multiple crises while people distract themselves with an evil pervert in Austria and some celebutard girl posing semi-nude in Vanity Fair. The corporate media would not cover this stuff if Americans didn't tune in, in huge, denial-soaked, distraction-addicted numbers.

Obama must show he is "an average guy" -- how'd that work out for us with W? We need a president who is average with Washington, Lincoln and FDR -- our crises are that dire. And Jeremiah Wright -- must keep that front-and-center. Did Obama do enough? Was he too late? Is he damaged? Has the cow jumped over the moon?

Nor is it a good sign that the "gas tax holiday" of President-elect McCain and Sen. Clinton (perhaps running as his vice president?) has not been laughed off stage. How many ways is this a ridiculous idea? And Yet Obama is the "elitist...out of touch with average Americans" who is the party pooper by refusing to endorse it.

Housing prices drop at stunning rate

Housing prices dropped last month at their fastest rate ever. The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index of 20 cities declined 12.7 percent in February. Here are some of the details: Phoenix year-to-year prices down nearly 21 percent (am waiting for the "say something good about the community" Azcentral to pick this up); Seattle off 2.7 percent; Charlotte up 1.5 percent.

Jeremiah Wright refuses to be silent

Barack Obama partisans must be wishing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright had chosen to lay low, so maybe the "preacher issue" would go away, so maybe Obama wouldn't have to deal with white anxiety over an angry black man. But Wright will not go quietly. He is defending himself and making his case, most recently before the National Press Club. If you don't watch the entire speech on C-SPAN or a video replay, we don't have much to talk about.

Wright is as formidable an intellect as he is a "controversial" preacher. He is a preacher of the Gospel, coming from the prophetic tradition...his name is Jeremiah, for goodness sake. If the Gospel doesn't sometimes make you uncomfortable, you haven't really read it. If the election is decided on a sound byte of "God damn America" vs. the nuanced and complex message this Jeremiah delivers, then...

Or, as Obama put it in his magisterial address, we could say "not this time." Unfortunately, I increasingly fear that won't happen. Old habits die hard. Old prejudices. So we will march forward to the McCain presidency. If so, then let Jeremiah say all the things that make the comfortable feel uncomfortable -- so it is in the Bible.

It doesn't matter now. God's will be done. That's what Christians pray every Sunday in church, "the most segregated hour in America," many without even realizing what they're affirming.

Does this Jeremiah have anything to teach us?

In search of McCain conservatism

President-elect McCain, his worshipful media coterie in tow, visited New Orleans and declared that the response to Hurricane Katrina had been "disgraceful and terrible," and, according to the doting New York Times, "pledged it would never happen again." The corporate media seemed especially relieved that the "senator from Arizona" had distanced himself from the toxic Texan currently residing in the McCain's next mansion.

Yet the federal response to Katrina was the natural outgrowth of "conservatism" as it has come to be practiced by the mainstream of the party of Lincoln. The calamity was not an aberration. It was pretty much what would be expected from the combination of ideology, policy and practice from today's "conservatives."

Maybe the "senator from Arizona" will redefine conservatism. The media desperately want him to be Barry Goldwater (I hear from excellent sources that the elderly Barry, a real senator from Arizona, was dismissive of the carpetbagger McCain). But even Goldwater never ran the government, never contended with the issues facing a 21st century, continental, diverse empire/nation. My experience is that McCain is not much of a hard-core ideologue, except for being a tightwad, a naysayer and, oddly for a combat veteran, trigger happy with the armed forces and eager for foreign adventures.

So what will McCain Conservatism be?

The only way out for Democrats is 1960 redux

Smoke-filled rooms have a bad reputation. Yes, they gave us Warren Harding, but they also gave us Harry Truman. The only way out now for Democrats is to light up the cigars, close the door and force a Kennedy-Johnson ticket.

The question becomes, who gets to be Kennedy? Surely Barack Obama, who has inspired so many, including, poignantly, JFK's daughter Caroline, with the similarity. And Hillary, with her sharp elbows, my-way-or-the-highway style and even ham-handed speaking, resembles LBJ. Maybe she even has some of the better angels of his nature, although we would pray she didn't reach the Oval Office through the same tragic circumstances.

But ah, my foes and oh, my friends, that won't work. Obama must play the role of the outsized senator from Texas.

Phoenix does something right

The city denied the request to turn the iconic road on Camelback Mountain into a private drive for the swells.

The race goes on, toward the edge of the cliff

Hillary Clinton's campaign of late has been all about creating doubt. She's succeeded, but not in ways she intended.

Obama can't put her down, can't win big states. Fair enough. It's also true that she can't put him down, despite starting with seemingly insurmountable "inevitability." She won despite his money advantage. But despite all her negative attacks he cut her projected margin of victory in half or more. The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne Jr. makes the interesting point that Obama's personality -- which Obama will voters see, Stevenson or Kennedy -- is now a central part of the race. But Clinton's base in Ohio and Pennsylvania make it clear that many white Americans won't vote for a black man. I think that would have held even without the hyped Rev. Wright and "bitter" stuff. Many Clinton voters say they will vote for McCain instead of Obama if Hillary doesn't prevail.

I think they'll vote for McCain anyway. Hillary downed shots, talked of her fondness for firearms and threatened Iran with nuclear annihilation. She relentlessly portrayed Obama as an "elitist." With $100 million made since Bill left office, the Clintons are "just like us." But, as Harry Truman said, "If you give someone a choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, they'll choose the Republican every time."

So I doubt Obama can win a general election. I doubt Hillary can. With the baggage of Bill and his squandered presidency, with her daughter working in the hedge-fund industry that destroys American jobs, I doubt her investment in real change. The only question is what will be left of the America I grew up in after four years of John McCain.

The stack: Tempered, lost Camelback, the med school joke

Peggy Noonan, always a formidable writer and sometimes a formidable thinker, makes this point about a Barack Obama weakness:

His youth, his relative untriedness, the fact that he has not suffered, been seasoned, been beat about the head by life and left struggling back, as happens to most adults by a certain time. This is what I hear from older people, who vote in great numbers. They are not hostile to his race, they are skeptical of his inexperience.

I'm not sure I buy the second part. Many white Americans won't vote for a black man. It's that simple. Her first point is well-made, and frankly is a problem for most at the top echelons of American society now that meritocracy is dead. A Harry Truman couldn't become president now. And the days are largely gone when a son of the elite, such as Jack Kennedy, served in combat alongside his fellow citizens of all walks.

Which brings us to John McCain. Noonan says slyly he should promise to be a one-term president. "For many in the middle it would be a twofer," she writes. "You get a good man, for only four years, and Mr. Obama gets to grow and deepen. He'll be better older." This is her partisan side clouding judgment. McCain is seasoned and has suffered. But to what end? To promise a continuation of the disastrous policies of his callow successor, and the general ideological tilt by the elite untested theorists on the right? To burnish a temper that is legendary and unsettling? I've been beaten around the head by life enough to be not merely skeptical, but scared of this man.

There's more in the stack. Read on.

The real elite and what they don't want discussed

ABC deserves every hit it has taken for the "debate" that focused on swift-boating Barack Obama, including a question fed to former Clinton intimate George Stephanopoulos by right-wing thug Sean Hannity. A couple of other points deserve our attention -- indeed, they are the real story.

First, most television "news" stopped being journalism years ago. This has been aggravated by the elimination of the fairness doctrine and deregulation that allowed consolidation in the media. Now the owners of the public airwaves have no requirement to support the public trust by providing balanced news. They have a powerful interest in supporting the corporate tilt of Washington, which even manifests itself in Charlie Gibson's flat-wrong assertions about the capital gains tax. Talk about elitists. The corporate electronic media are part of the elite (Charlie wants his tax breaks and completely understands man-of-the-people McCain with his eight houses and millions).

With silliness such as the taped "questions" by "average" uninformed (God help us) voters, such as the poor woman who asked about the flag pin, it's obvious this elite has an agenda. They have chosen sides. Note McCain never gets questioned about his genuinely questionable ties. They want us stupid. The public schools have been destroyed. Even the conservative Economist says meritocracy is dead in America. Endless hours of television and cheap electronic distractions add to the mindness suckling at the Matrix. Just to be sure, we have "debates" such as the one in Philadelphia.

What on earth might we realize if we didn't have our minds on flag pins and Obama's pastor?

What to expect in the McCain administration (my friends)

I hope you noticed the different receptions given to John McCain and Barack Obama at  the Associated Press earlier this week. The supposed liberal, Obama-loving media offered McCain a love-fest, complete with his favorite donut with sprinkles and no follow-ups to some of his bizarre or controversial answers to questions. When Obama appeared, AP director Billy Dean Singleton, who has destroyed some of America's best newspapers, asked the Illinois senator if he would favor shifting troops to Afghanistan to fight "Obama bin Laden." I am not making this up.

One of the biggest challenges to Democrats this year is that the mainstream media simply won't report fairly on McCain, much less go after him the way it did when Obama made the "bitter" comment. Combined with Democrat self-destruction, the ignorance of much of the electorate, and the way Republicans steal close elections, I think McCain has a very good chance of winning the White House.

So based on McCain's record in Arizona, his policy statements and temperment, let's imagine the next four years.

The stack: Air madness, fake green, the Kookocracy keeps on keeping on

We start out with news of Delta Air Lines and Northwest intensifying their merger talks. We won't hear how the mergers of the past have only worsened the mess at the airlines. Why? They take away competition, leave the remaining carriers in a group-think mode that discourages innovations (hello, newspaper industry), and are paid for partly by laying off the experienced employees and cutting the service that make for a great airline.

The combined carrier will be two drunks holding each other up -- most mergers fail to deliver their promised "benefits." If either carrier is too weak to stand, let it liquidate (it wouldn't) and make room for new competition, Doing the same disastrous thing over and over while expecting a different outcome is a definition of insanity. Ah, but every time the crazy top execs and investment bankers get richer. Meanwhile, we do nothing to improve our transportation system, such as building high-speed rail.

There's also a stack of Arizona funnies..

Is it already over for Obama, III?

Hillary Clinton and her admired partner, John McCain, are attacking Barack Obama for supposedly being "an elitist." I know from the newspaper industry that an "elitist" is anyone who reads, thinks and won't pander. Obama said:

"...you go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they feel through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not...And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

He's right, of course, and he might have added they have been brain-washed to believe all their problems are because of taxes and "liberals," rather than the corporations, fat cats and Republicans who have used government to assist the hollowing out of the American economy, society and sense of national purpose.

Now, under attack, Obama is on the defensive. As the Washington Post reported:

He acknowledged this morning, his mistake was to suggest that many small-town values are formed by cynicism. "You know the truth. It is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That's what sustains us," he told the Muncie audience.

But he added, "what is absolutely true is that people don't feel like they are being listened to. And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention. Government that is fighting for working people day in and day out making sure that we are trying to allow them to live out the American dream."

Of course, both Clinton and McCain are serial liars, but they speak to the American people the way one speaks to slow children, pander to their prejudices and rarely try to make them think about the real challenges the nation faces.

It's not merely that a black man can't be elected president in America. It's that a smart, honest person who treats citizens as adults and challenges them to think can't be elected. That would be too "elitist." My advice for all Dems is to leave guns alone, and be careful about religion. But that's not what this is really about. Obama threatens not only corporate power, but the two big industries that make their living through perpetual stalemate: right-wing ideologues and Clintonites. He has to be taken out. Enjoy President McCain.

(Read previous Obama posts here and here).

Addendum: Josh Marshall has a couple of interesting updates: Hillary now talking about what a gun nut she is, and a fascinating 2004 Charlie Rose interview with Obama where he thoughtfully fleshes out his "bitter" comments. He's right on point. Meanwhile, HuffPost reminds us of Bill Clinton's comments on "insecure white people."

The deeper issues behind the airline crisis

Thousands of flights have been canceled for safety reasons, and as usual the corporate media are missing the larger issues.

One is that that FAA was so cozy with the airline industry that warnings from inspectors were being dismissed. This is a lethal echo of what happened in the economy, where lax regulation was the biggest cause of the subprime mortgage meltdown and wider credit crisis. The IMF calls it the worst shock to the world economy since the Great Depression. Not only did regulators look the other way, they enabled the crisis by pumping up a credit bubble. Regulators were told what to do by the industry.

The most radical reading of Milton Friedman and other conservative economists would say a company has no other responsibility than to make money for its shareholders. Everything else, to the extent that it is a good at all, will be taken care of by the market. There is no public good -- that is a socialist construct. Presumably this means when poorly maintained airliners start dropping out of the sky, the surviving customers will chose other carriers.

In the real world, capitalism works for all when it is balanced by effective regulation, especially to ensure safety, competition, lawfulness and to prevent the formation of monopolies and cartels. It also thrives because of public works, projects that the market itself can't achieve but nevertheless enhance productivity and quality of life.

Another shadow issue is how these airlines have spent years cutting staff and outsourcing maintenance, pushing out their most experienced -- and most "expensive" -- employees. Salaries for pilots (they're not important, right?) and other workers have been slashed. Unions have been busted. The savings have gone to huge compensation for senior executives, and to a plutocracy on Wall Street. Even average shareholders have not benefited.

But the biggest problem -- the one we dare not even talk about -- is how the crisis at the airlines shows that the American transportation system is outmoded and broken. No presidential candidate is even mentioning this.

Poor little rich Scottsdale

Some readers have asked me to comment on the latest dysfunction in Scottsdale, including the forced departure of City Manager Jan Dolan. I will, but with more than mixed feelings.

First, I went to high school in Scottsdale when it was a sweet small city and hadn't been completely changed by money, transience, political extremism and the urban problems (without urban solutions) that plague all of Phoenix. Among its virtues was a small-town merchant class that was genuinely invested in a place of manageable size (Roosevelt to McDonald). My Scottsdale is gone forever, but the small city that it was in the 1970s nurtured much good in my young life.

Second, Scottsdale's future is already baked in the cake. The thugs that want to recall the mayor for allegedly even thinking about light rail need not worry. They have "won." What you've got is what you've got, and the world will intrude. Of course their agenda is always more power and intimidation than accomplishing anything.

The 'liberal' New York Times is baffled, baffled...

Today the Times finally reports on the February endorsement of John McCain by preacher John Hagee, who, among other things, said New Orleans deserved Hurricane Katrina because of its "level of sin." He considers the Roman Catholic Church "the great whore of Babylon." It was an endorsement sought by McCain, who also considers Rev. Rod Parsley his "spiritual adviser." Parsley argues American has a divine mission to eradicate Islam. Anyway, the Times headline is: "For McCain, Little Talk of a Controversial Endorsement."

The story appears in page A-18. This from a newspaper that reported extensively, and on page one, about Sen. Obama's "preacher problem."

Maybe there's "little talk" because the corporate media won't report on the real John McCain.

Alan Greenspan: He did it his way

Alan Greenspan is worried about his reputation and is trying to set the record straight in an interview with Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. I was prepared to be sympathetic after reading this quote:

"I was praised for things I didn't do," Mr. Greenspan said during one of three interviews at his sun-drenched office in downtown Washington, D.C. "I am now being blamed for things that I didn't do."

But then the reporter tells us that the former Federal Reserve chairman "doesn't regret a single decision." This makes my bullshit detector go off. How could any thinking person live a full life, especially one at the pinnacle of international leadership, and say with a straight face they have no regrets. Even Frank Sinatra had a few.

Greenspan wants us to draw the correct lessons from his tenure and the current market disaster, so that we don't implement the wrong policies. But what if the wrong policies are the very ones implemented on Mr. Greenspan's watch?

A war against truth in the Iraq hearings

I wonder why news organizations are even covering, much less hyping, the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus before Congress this week. We know nothing will change. President Bush will do as he pleases. He has shown the president to be above the law on torture, eavesdropping of American citizens, environmental policy, etc. Why should the president be above common sense?

All three presidential candidates will be among the members of Congress questioning Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. This, too, will be entirely predictable. McCain, why is slyly trying to conflate Sunni and Shia extremists for a gullible public, will proclaim that the escalation ("surge") is a success. Obama and Clinton will try to look presidential and tough without alienating the anti-war elements of their party.

Nothing will change until we have a new president and more Democrats in Congress. The only question is whether anyone has the guts to level with the American people about what the change will be.

The center of the, er, recession

Many days the Arizona Republic reads like a bad real-estate supplement to the National Lampoon, but today is especially priceless. The editorial proclaims Glendale as "center of the Valley."

Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. And Glendale has quite a group gathering. It includes far more than ever-loyal football fans drawn to University of Phoenix Stadium to watch the Arizona Cardinals fight for a win. It's more than hockey fans or screaming concert-goers drawn to Jobing.com Arena. It's more than the baseball fans who will certainly flock to Glendale's spring-training complex near Loop 101 and Camelback Road next spring.

I compressed the dodo short paragraphs and will cut the reminder for the sake of your gag reflex, but you get the idea. It talks about the developers and real estate ventures and concludes, "Wow." I am sure the Pulitzer judges are already taking note.

The crime against children in Arizona

As far as I can tell, the Arizona Republic devoted a mere four paragraphs to the latest evidence of the state's dismal school system. Here they are:

Arizona spends less on educating its kids than almost any state in the union, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released Wednesday.

In 2006, the state spent $6,472 per student, or $2,666 less than the national average. Only Idaho and Utah spent less. The report has ranked Arizona second or third from the bottom in per-student spending dating to 2000.

The state Legislature caps the amount of money schools can receive from the general fund and in property taxes, said Chuck Essigs of the Arizona Association of School Business Officials. That formula is more restrictive than the majority of states', he said.

Arizona also ranks in the bottom three when tallying money spent on instruction, including teacher pay and benefits. Administrative costs can't be blamed for eating up the money, either. Arizona ranked second from the bottom on money spent on administration of individual schools.

So that's that. We can go back to the ever-desperate "everything's fine!" Of course, it's not.

American foreign policy, shackled

In the ever-desperate effort to keep you distracted, the corporate media are forced to scrape quite deep today, telling you that the husband of an obscure senator had sex with a prostitute in a Troy, Mich, motel. What on earth don't they want you to know?

Things like the erosion of American latitude in foreign policy -- some might even call it sovereignty. And it's all our doing, whether through our thoughtless votes at the ballot box or our votes in what we buy and how we live.

We're supposedly committed to a war on terror, or a struggle against "Islamic fascism," to use the "conservative" phrase. But who is the biggest sponsor of terror? Our friends, the Saudis. This news comes not from some conspiracy site but from the Bush Treasury department, which reported quietly that Saudi Arabia remains the largest funder of al Qaeda and other extremists.

Meanwhile, nations are talking about boycotting the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics to protest China's horrendous human rights record. Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel apparently will not be there. You can bet President Bush, the leader of the Free World and a man who pledged to support democracy across the globe, will attend.

A new home page unveiled at azcentral.com

The Arizona Republic has unveiled a redesign of its Web site, azcentral.com. I'm sure there's some explanation somewhere, but when you click on the story titled "A new look for Arizona's home page," it takes you to a 404 page saying "the page you are looking for could not be found." Technology.

It's cleaner than the old home page. My big complaint as a newspaper reader is that it's much more difficult to find the Republic (on the old site, it was one click to that day's newspaper). This is especially bothersome because one can't easily find the opinions section. While it's tedious and predictable at the Republic, the editorial/opinions section is still critical to a newspaper/Web site's ability to analyze the news and have some influence.

There are some contemporary tech doo-dads, but much of the page looks very, er, 1999. For example, the news stories lack the hypertext links that can refer you to other stories on the topic, etc. My other impression is that there is even less journalism than before. Celebutard "news" is prominent. People are invited to submit their own "stories," etc. That's a fatal misreading of the Web today, where sophisticated, exclusive and breaking content -- backed by the depth of techy doo-dads -- is the gold standard.

For years, the AZR "information center" has largely rewritten press releases or regurgitated the pronouncements of local pols, as skeptical, sophisticated enterprise reporting has become less and less frequent or encouraged. That's too bad because enterprise is what brings eyeballs. And Arizona is so corrupt and screwed up, it's a target-rich environment for such work. "Citizen journalists" and the bored housewife in Desert Ridge aren't going to do this work. Nor are the unmentored, uncoached, largely unedited young people increasing on the payroll.

Oh, well.

Congress and big oil: junkies blaming the pusher man

Maybe it was inevitable, with the closing of the frontier and the amassing of so much wealth, with the death of history teaching in schools and the idiocy inducing drug of television. Maybe it was inevitable with all this and more that America would become a nation of whining children.

Fresh evidence comes today with the theater of oil executives being called before "outraged" members of Congress to defend their obscene profits at a time when gasoline profits are so high. As the Washington Post reports:

Lawmakers seeking a way to deal with rising concern among motorists took aim at the oil companies and the record profits they registered last year amid record oil prices "I believe the laws of supply and demand when it comes to oil and gas are broken and completely malfunctioning," said Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.).

I hate to break it to the distinguished gentleman from the Constitution State, but the laws of supply and demand are functioning perfectly well.