David Sedaris on Undecided Voters

“I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked."

The Global Electorate, Con't

The Economist, I remind you, has been compiling global polling data, asking the question "what if the world could vote?"

Well, it looks like McCain almost TRIPLED his global electoral college tally...by picking up 57 more electors from SUDAN. It's now McCain: 88, Obama: 8,954.

McCain is ahead by 10 in Sudan, 12 in Georgia and Macedonia, an astonishing 16 points in Cuba. The Congo is a tossup. Pretty much the rest of the world is overwhelmingly supportive of Obama.

I must point out that this is a highly unscientific poll. No doubt the results are terribly skewed for a couple of very good reasons: a) many McCain supporters eschew book-learnin', and certainly wouldn't be found reading The Economist, and b) many additional McCain supporters are too old to read the teeny, tiny print. Yeah, that's right: I just implied that McCain supporters are all either old, stupid, or both. So what?

Greenspan Admits the "Free" Market is F@cked

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, told a House panel that he “made a mistake” in trusting that free markets could regulate themselves.

Guess you weren't "too big to fail", eh Mr. Greenspan?

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said. Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

You don't know how significant it is? Have you been on vacation for the last few weeks or something?

Folks should really go easy on the guy, I guess. It's rare for a right-wing asshole to admit he was wrong. Somebody give the old fart a cookie.

Oh, it gets even better:

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

What "evidence" do you reckon he's talking about? The acceleration of the growing of the chasm between rich and poor during the last few decades? Please -- somebody explain to me what he's talking about here. I want to know what 'evidence' led him to conclude that his ideology was "working exceptionally well". I will tell you this: that evidence has nothing whatsoever to do with the buying power of the average American, nothing to do with our health care system, or education, or environmental degradation. Likely his evidence is that rich people got a whole lot richer while he was the Chairman. And that's all the evidence he ever needed.

I sincerely hope that more people come to understand 'the economy' in a way that compliments Jonathan Rowe's understanding of it in the very near future.

Every time you say that “the economy” is up, or that you want to “stimulate” it, you are urging more expenditure and motion without regard to what that expenditure is and what it might accomplish, and without regard to what it might crowd out or displace in the process.

Class War Rages On

And the same side keeps winning.

Don't you wish you could walk away from a job with a bonus (much less a $10M one) after failing miserably? This is the America that I hope is left behind when Barack Obama becomes President. The America that rewards failure, celebrates ignorance, promotes incompetence, and attacks education and science. The America that attacks fairness as 'socialism' while handing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars over to banks and executives and corporations.

John McCain Pals Around with Traitors

From the Harper's Weekly Review:

A House investigative committee presented evidence that military contractor Harry Sargeant III, a top McCain fund-raiser, overcharged by tens of millions of dollars for fuel deliveries to American bases in Iraq.

Rep. Henry Waxman, head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, contends a company co-owned by Harry Sargeant III overcharged the Pentagon over $180 million to deliver fuel to U.S. military bases in Iraq.

I realize that $180M is chump change compared to the $70 BILLION stolen from taxpayers' grandkids to give to the same already-rich fuckers who drove the global economy into a brick wall at 100mph, but treason is treason!

The Universal Health Care 'debate'

Chomsky makes a very interesting point in this interview. He points out that for decades, an overwhelming majority of Americans have believed that our health care system needs to be fixed, yet only in this election cycle has it become a major campaign issue. Given that Americans as a whole have been pretty unanimous about the need for change in that arena for so long, what prompted the campaign rhetoric about this topic? Chomsky's conclusion: companies like GM have finally started to figure out that our super crappy health care system is too expensive.

I think it's healthy to be reminded that when it comes to either "Obama is a Muslim terrorist" or "we need health care reform", neither message is coming from The People. One may be bullshit while the other may be perfectly true, but the simple fact that neither message bubbled up from the electorate is most certainly worth pondering.

The Climate Change Problem is...

...wait for it... (can you guess what comes next?)... WORSE THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT! Surprise!

As an example it says the first 'tipping point' may have already been reached in the Arctic, where sea ice is disappearing up to 30 years ahead of IPCC predictions and may be gone completely within five years - something that hasn't occurred for a million years.

When wingnut global warming deniers fall back on their line about 'natural cycles', do you point out to them that many of those cycles would have wiped out the human race, had it existed at the time? Aside from the overt stupidity of this so-called 'argument', these people don't seem to comprehend that we're more concerned about the Earth's capacity to sustain human life than we are about the health of the Earth in a pre- and post-humanity kind of long-term view.