News From A Parallel World

One question heard increasingly these days is: “Why didn’t we see this coming?” This is usually accompanied by hand-wringing and the furrowing of brows, and sometimes it is asked by people for whom the new Great Depression will provide business opportunities.

My question is: What if someone did?”

As we’ve seen, the response by politicians, whose susceptibility to being easily-duped by just about anybody was in recent years amply proven, e.g. the invasion of Iraq, another e.g. the adoption –– unread –– of the mis-named “Patriot Act”, was to hand a blank check to Henry Paulson, whereupon Paulson has given some of the biggest criminals in America hundreds of billions of dollars.

What if someone saw this coming and didn’t mind it at all?

Several Paulson beneficiaries include banks and insurance giants who are using the cash not to hire people or mitigate foreclosures but to buy their failing competitors and simultaneously pick up huge tax breaks.

Know who else didn’t mind?

Headline, page 8 of today’s Chronicle: “Bad economy is good for military recruiters.”

“There’s no way to sugarcoat it,” said the commander of Maryland’s National Guard recruiting batallion. “We’re a nation at war. But we offer a stability of income that a lot of employers can’t guarantee right now.”

The draft was abolished in 1973. It will not be reinstated. The Pentagon and its business agents figured that one out in Viet Nam: when it ain’t only volunteers being sent off to get blown to pieces for corporate profit, dissent can get pretty loud.

But America’s new war against “terror” has growing frontiers. Even with the twisted “stop-loss” policy –– which legalizes slavery, and even with increasing reliance on missiles and saturation bombing, the government doesn’t have enough bodies to stay in Iraq, vastly increase the forces in Afghanistan, and handle escalations into Pakistan, and now, perhaps, India. If you want to occupy the world, you need soldiers.

For at least ten years, implementation of punitive measures to “weed-out” students, creating a permanent underclass as a matter of policy, has failed to generate sufficient pressures to increase enlistment substantially. Guess it’s harder than ever to convince kids to learn to kill total strangers, plus maybe lose a limb, in ‘service’ to economic interests masquerading as one’s country.

The foregoing was not lost on people to whom manipulation of the nation’s economy for personal gain is an everyday reality. Their own billions, along with their sorry asses, are well-protected.

The people on the inside did indeed ‘see it coming’, but they kept it to themselves.

The new administration is not even sworn-in but its pronouncements appear to have pleased a lot of people already: investors, bankers, Henry Paulson, the leftovers from the Clinton administration, and various corporate big shots.

Barack Obama has now recanted on his pledge to roll-back the Bush tax giveaway to the wealthiest, saying that maybe those windfalls will be allowed instead to expire in 2011.

Promises on matters of foreign policy, too, are looking thinner every day. Withdrawal from Iraq will apparently not be as soon as possible but maybe sometime, we hope, it depends; meanwhile, there are no indications that U.S. air strikes into Pakistan –– which have instigated increasingly wild anti-American demonstrations –– will be curtailed, and Obama has suggested that an additional 20,000 troops will be sent to Afghanistan.

There is talk, probably floated by the transition team, that Bush’s Secretary of Defense Gates will be retained. The widely-acclaimed economic appointments are largely of people who themselves share responsibility for the calamity on Wall Street.

Today, Citibank, which blankets television with those scary “Citi never sleeps” commercials, picked up twenty billion dollars in bailout money. Presumably that will assist those clowns in making the forty –– or is it four hundred –– million-dollar purchase of the naming rights to the New York Mets’ baseball stadium.

My fellow Americans, we have now purchased naming rights for Citibank.

It also appears that the new administration plans not to pursue criminal charges against persons who have carried out illegal torture and kidnapping. Not going to happen, the usual ‘unnamed sources’ say, regardless of promises Obama made in the primaries when he was looking for progressive votes.

Tell me again, what was that landslide good for?

Yes, I hear the explanations. They sound forced and implausible. Pardons all around, for Joe Lieberman, crooked bankers and insurance executives, torturers and those who wrote the memos justifying it.

The theory is that the times are perilous and Obama needs broad support to get his great new programs enacted.

That’s a crock. He won that support already, from the millions of people who contributed their own hard-earned cash, who walked the precincts and made the phone calls. What he seems to be doing instead is signalling to every felon, every cheat, every idiot whose avarice has bankrupted the nation’s economy, and to every cruel, sick, twisted son of a bitch who has bankrupted our Bill of Rights and disgraced our moral character, that all is forgiven. You can undermine the country itself and nobody will punish you. That’s Obama’s message right now.

I am a believer in practical politics. I know you cannot move mountains without the proper equipment. But while the President-elect is pardoning everybody whose actions have imperiled the nation, I hope he will pardon me for upchucking at it. We do not need revenge, but we need consequences. We need to hold people responsible. If we don’t, it is possible that the great moral underpinnings of the Obama presidency will be shaken loose. And that is something which, once lost, can never be recovered.

I’m getting crazy ideas. That’s not new, I know, but these are crazier than what I’m used to, and what I’m used to has always had a safe home in my heart.

I’m sixty-two years old and I’m apparently applying for a job in Washington, D.C. This is almost certainly a mistake.

For one thing, the last time I spent a winter in our nation’s capital it was a nightmare. It was the tail end of 1969, although strictly speaking it was in Silver Spring, Maryland, and I was staying up all night, every night, pounding out no doubt incoherent papers for George McGovern’s incipient candidacy on a rented electric typewriter and smoking an incredible amount of Panama Red.

For another thing, I don’t want a job in the Justice Department, even if I could snag one, which is no cinch given the army of young lawyers inspired by the great dream of getting Bush and his friends under oath to see what might get disgorged thereby. Lot of hungry people out here. What I’d like to do is work at the Education Department. I still dream of blowing up standardized testing and inciting students to riot over the deplorable conditions in their schools. But all I’ve got on my resumé is three years on a school board, and if anyone checked that out it wouldn’t help me any.

If I went, I’d be pretty much lost and wondering how to get my ass back out. I’d miss my friends and family, my home town, and San Geronimo Golf Course. I’d also probably get into trouble the first time I opened my mouth. I don’t think Obama really needs a lot of old farts looking for trouble. If he does, he knows where to find those already.

Still, it kind of gnaws at me, a chance to make a difference.

It’s Obama’s fault, naturally, just as everything else that happens over the next four years will be his fault. Just when my generation had pretty-much given up on the possiblity of unrigged elections, not to mention winning one, this guy comes out of nowhere.

I remember telling anyone who’d listen, as late as March of this year, that America was not going to elect a black man, and this one’s name rhymed with Osama. I am not the brightest bulb in the garden, as the universe frequently indicates. What a great, great thing to be wrong about.

It’s hard even now to believe. Obama’s been handed two wars and a new depression. The nation’s treasury has been looted by corporate criminals. The political left will be expecting things that can’t be done, not right away, and he’s dealing with a Democratic Senate whose incompetence is matched only by its irresponsibility. He’d better turn out to be the greatest since Lincoln, because anything less might not be enough.

I don’t want to be optimistic. It’s a strange feeling, and dangerous. I’d been optimistic before and look where it’d gotten me, one hope after another gone cold. I’m sixty-two, time to leave it to the kids; they’ve got the energy, and they’re not worn down from forty years of bouncing off stone walls.

In 1969, we’d flown to Washington and checked in at a downtown hotel, and when we tried going out the wind was so hard and cold it damn-near blew us down the street. So we’d leased an apartment in the suburbs, where my wife tried to pretend I wasn’t making her nervous and our year-old child tripped-out over seeing her first snow.

By the following summer, as McGovern was gearing-up to run for President, I had dropped out of politics for the first, but not the last, time.

I liked George a lot but I no longer liked politics. My real candidate was the one who’d been shot in the head in June of 1968, and you could smell the country going down.

I don’t have political heroes anymore. But I believe in reasons. And all the reasons for not doing something, for not saying okay, why not, you’re not dead yet, it’s not over, those are good reasons, but there’s another one we all know about, the one we all feel these days.

Forty-five years ago tomorrow, an American President was shot to death because he’d become a mortal enemy to the right people. If you haven’t yet seen Stone’s brilliant film, “JFK”, now’s a good time for it.

Probably I’m not going to Washington. But I’ve got to do something and keep on doing something until we take our country back or lose it forever. That’s what’s happened, a chance, after so many years of furious, impotent dissent, just a chance, we don’t know how small, but it’s real, oh, yes, sweet Jesus, it’s real. Probably it’s too late for me to go to Washington, but, amazingly, it might not be too late for America.

Talk about crazy ideas.

The early signs of Obama’s administration are both interesting and mildly alarming. I get the part about inclusion, the big tent, all of that crap because, first of all, the nation’s badly crippled and we’d better manage whatever unity we can and, secondly, the President-elect is a pragmatist. If he wasn’t one, he’d never have been nominated, let alone elected.

But the signs.

Clinton’s impending nomination as Secretary of State, for example. The story is that Obama read and was suitably impressed by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln book, which highlights Lincoln’s selection of Seward, his chief rival. In picking her, Obama is said to prove how self-confident he is in his ability to run his administration. Unlike George Bush, who always tried to pick people dumber than he is –– a tough proposition –– Obama wants the best and brightest.

But Clinton not only supported the invasion of Iraq, she’s maintained that position for the most part, as well as threatening to “obliterate Iran.” Unless I mis-heard him, Obama is not a crazy interventionist who wants to blow up entire countries. So how can he expect Hillary Clinton to represent his policies? Not to mention the problem of Bill, not only for his multi-layered lobbying on behalf of largely-concealed major donors, an invidious corruption it will be impossible to guard against, but for his self-absorption and loud mouth.

There are theories about this. One is that he wants Clinton out of the Senate and felt the need to boot her upstairs to the only job she would take. A corollary to this is the desire to place her in a position where he has some element of control. Maybe he was concerned that her Senate membership would enable her to screw-up whatever health plan he wants to get through congress.

None of these theories really convince me, but they are at least arguable.

What is not arguable is the bizarre sight of Barack Obama making plain his desire that Joe Lieberman should not be barred from the Democratic caucus. The caucus yesterday voted not to remove Lieberman from the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security/Governmental Operations, a position which he has used to block investigations of government malfeasance and worse under Bush.

The vote of 42-13, which was backed by the party’s ‘leadership’ of Harry Reid and, perhaps reluctantly, Dick Durbin, essentially said that Lieberman, who won re-election only after losing the Democratic nomination in Connecticut and then running as an “independent” with Republican support, who endorsed and campaigned with McCain, and who called Obama’s candidacy “dangerous” for America, was not going to be disciplined.

Under the horseshit banner of “redemption”, when after all there has been nothing redeeming in anything Joe has said, even now, Happy Harry announced to the media: “I feel good about what we did today.”

The media droolers talk about the issue as though it was about revenge or foregiveness. They avoid other considerations. Such as public policies, real security, government oversight. The Democratic ‘leadership’ has cemented into place a man whose every utterance has been a slander of not only the qualifications of Barack Obama but his patriotism, as well.

This is no small matter. It is this committee which, due to Lieberman, has thwarted an investigation into Katrina and the federal screwing of New Orleans. It is this committee which will hear proposed changes in or, when heaven comes, abolition of the ludicrous and subversive “Patriot Act.” This is wiretapping and spying and secrets, and it is the whole range of domestic police operations.

Lieberman is not just a shill for the right-wing, he’s being permitted to retain power over critical matters.

Forget Reid’s bland claim that he could always be removed later on. It’s a lie, and Reid knows it’s a lie. If the party would not remove him for what he’s already done, it’s hard to imagine what would do the trick. Maybe sleeping with the Israeli ambassador.

Obama could have prevented this, no question. But he didn’t. In an interview with MSNBC, Ned Lamont, the man who beat Lieberman in the 2006 primary, suggested that Obama had “other fish to fry” and was looking at the bigger picture, that he didn’t need his transition to get bogged-down in a party fight. Maybe so. But this is one fight avoided that will certainly have consequences.

I am happy to give Obama the benefit of the doubt for a while. I know he’s not a left-wing President, not even secretly. But I believe he has great depth and intelligence, and that alone qualifies him for a break. I’m sure he and his people are twenty steps ahead of any anlysis I might produce.

Nonetheless, the Lieberman move has a bad smell, indications of a deep rot inside the party and among its leaders, that the election of a new President has not excised. This stench will only get worse until Obama addresses it. And one good first step is to get rid of Harry Reid.

You think this webLog has been the source for paranoid fantasies? Wait’ll you read this one.

I’ll begin with a fellow named Harry Reid. Harry is a Senator from Nevada, and you can make of that what you will. What I make of it is that Harry is on at least passable terms with the guys who took over the state fifty or so years ago in order to expand out of Cleveland.

Harry Reid is the Democrat’s Majority Leader now. Since he is a useless waste of human flesh, his ‘leadership’ of the party in the Senate has always seemed, well, faintly odiferous. His tenure during the Bush years has been marked by an inability to rally other Senators and a habit of genuflecting whenever the President glanced his way.

It is partly due to Reid that the Democrats in the Senate rolled over for the ludicrous Patriot Act, for Bush’s illegal wiretapping, for telecom immunity, for reactionary appointments to the nation’s courts, and for the immoral invasion of Iraq.

Now with a majority in the Senate, and with the constitution in shambles, the country bankrupt, and the best hope in decades about to take residence in the White House, it matters what kind of leadership we get in the upper chamber.

If Harry Reid is any indication, we are fucked. I offer as exhibit A: Reid’s support for Joe Lieberman as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.

"Joe Lieberman votes with me a lot more than a lot of my senators,” Reid actually said. “He didn't support us on military stuff, and he didn't support us on Iraq stuff. But you look at his record, it's pretty good."

Yeah, it’s pretty good. As a Democrat, he was beaten in his own party’s primary election by an anti-war insurgent named Ned Lamont. Undaunted, Lieberman ran anyway –– as an ‘independent’ –– and made a backroom deal with the Republicans to give only token support to their own nominee, insuring that he would capture enough GOP votes to beat Lamont. It worked.

In the Senate, Joe’s been consistent. He is in favor of every war you want to wage. He has backed every twisted Bush policy, from unprovoked attack on another nation to widespread kidnapping and torture of foreign nationals by U.S. agents. He voted to immunize the telecom industry and Bush officials for illegal wiretapping. He’s a peach, Joe is.

He backed John McCain against Barack Obama, speaking at the Republican Convention, went on the campaign trail calling an Obama presidency “dangerous” for America. He joined in the more inflammatory charges leveled at Obama by that paragon of truth, Sarah Palin.

Tomorrow, the Democratic caucus will vote, by secret ballot, on the matter of Joe Lieberman, specifically on whether he should be denied the chairmanship of the Committee on Homeland Security. It is widely expected that Joe will keep his gavel.

I admit that I am not always a nice person, but the fact is that I would rather vote to send the son of a bitch to Guantanamo for a little R&R before I’d let him chair anything. Maybe Harry Reid would like to accompany him.

Various “reasons” have been advanced for the prospect that the Democratic Party will kiss Joe’s ass at the base of the Washington Monument. It’s said that the party needs his vote on cloture, to stop a filibuster. It’s said that if he’s denied the chairmanship, he’ll bolt to the GOP, or simply resign –– and be replaced by appointment of a Republican by Connecticut’s governor.

To which I would respond, so fucking what? What a loss it would be if Lieberman were to resign his seat! The mind boggles. Without Lieberman, who would whisper the answers into John McCain’s ear? Who would warn the nation of the perils of the Obama presidency from inside the President’s own party?

The plain truth is this: that if the Democratic Party cannot get away with removing this swine from a committee post, it can’t count on his support on anything; his threats will always be there, frightening Harry Reid and the other cowards. And if Lieberman can get away with it, so can anyone else. There goes marshalling the votes Obama will need to pass any number of critical programs.

We’ve finally gotten ourselves a real President. We’d better get used to the idea that that might not be enough. We’ve watched Reid and Pelosi and other party leaders dance around for years now, always with reasons why they couldn’t do the right thing. We’ve been abandoned as a people by those whose dissent was desperately needed during the Bush era, on any and every issue you can name.

If these people can be blackmailed by Joe Lieberman, what does that tell us about their collective backbone when the threats come from, say, the insurance industry or the oil industry or the arms industry?

For the Obama administration to have a chance, if WE are to have a chance, at reclaiming a nearly-lost country, its best impulses and its constitution, there will have to be congressional leadership with the integrity and patriotism to do what’s right instead of what’s expedient, to stand instead of grovel. And we clearly don’t have it now.

Six weeks ago, the Congress authorized the borrowing of seven hundred billion dollars by our government and its no-strings spending by the outgoing Secretary of the Treasury, whose prior employment had been with Bear Stearns, one of the criminal corporations whose predatory practices had triggered the present economic crisis.

As of today, the Treasury Department’s oversight agency says that in six weeks the Secretary, Paulson, had spent two hundred ninety billion –– that’s $290,000,000,000.00 –– but nobody exactly could account for who got it.

Congress is expressing indignant outrage that apparently the enormous giveaway is being used not for its intended purpose but for paying corporate bonuses, paying increased dividends to stockholders, and acquiring other corporations. Shocked Senators, including the clueless Christopher Dodd, can’t believe that these scumsucking greedheads, e.g. Bank of America, wouldn’t pass the money on to the rest of us in the loans this ‘bailout’ was supposed to generate.

That reminds me. Ought to watch “Casablanca” again. “I’m shocked, shocked to find gambling on these premises; please cash in my chips...”

This is your Congress. It is essentially the identical body which previously approved Bush’s invasion of a sovereign nation, enacted the anti-democratic ‘Patriot Act’ without reading it, retroactively approved wholesale illegal wiretapping of citizens, ignores clear evidence of the use of torture as an instrument of policy, and believes that there is no inconsistency in decrying lobbyists to the public while giving them head in the committee rooms.

Want to know what Obama’s up against? Think Christopher Dodd. Harry Reid. Joe Lieberman. The mind boggles.

At the time the massive payout was being urged on America by a frightened Paulson and Bush, lots of people were asking questions; the dissenters were ignored. Once again the nation’s leaders rushed into being a dangerous proposal whose dangers should have been manifest to anyone over the age of, say, eight.

Nobody can account for $290 billion dollars which was allocated over the past forty days?

Well, I can account for it, and not because it was discovered in Paulson’s trousers. It went to the very predators whose executives are getting huge bonuses at corporation gatherings costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. No word on Halliburton, but I suppose they’ll just tough it out like the rest of us.

There are a lot of folks in expensive suits pushing America over the edge of a cliff. We will know the government is serious about all the rhetoric when these slimeballs are in prison. Not before.

Where do you stand on blackmail and extortion?

I don’t want to sound unsophisticated, but I’m against them. As we all know, or ought to, once you cave in to that sort of thing it never fucking stops.

It looks as though Barack Obama, and the Democratic ‘leadership’, such as it is, have not managed to get their heads around that idea. Unless they do, there will be nothing but trouble.

Two fresh examples.

One is the great bank bailout currently ongoing. The Bush administration, and his crooked Treasury Secretary, having belatedly realized that their banker friends had leveraged the entire economy into the shithouse, warned us that unless a massive infusion of cash was handed to the very thieves who did this we’d all go under. There was the predictable ensuing panic.

Congress thereupon approved seven hundred billion –– with more on the way, it seems –– to be spent by Poulson pretty much as he wants, no oversight, no rules, no conditions, and –– get this –– IMMUNITY from civil suits. Nearly half of that has been parcelled-out. We don’t know to whom, specifically, and in what denominations, but some went to Bank of America, which in turn has used it to buy other banks. At the same time, in a little-noticed move, long-standing tax rules were altered so that Bank of America, and others who buy failing companies, can get a tax break.

No one could make this up.

Predictable: Washington is now flooded with high-priced lobbyists demanding pieces of the bailout money for their own companies. Today, American Express made its case. It’s open season and the money’s free!

Also predictable: the recipient banks thusfar have not done anything with the cash except invest it or salt it away; the loan market has not changed. The hundreds of millions have so far been wasted.

Also wasted: earlier bailout millions for the auto industry. Nancy Pelosi is urging that hundreds of millions more be spent there, as well. The President-elect has said that he wants a package for Detroit.

Aside: anyone remember how the “Patriot Act” was rushed through Congress without anyone actually reading it? Anyone remember how the Congress (and mass media) bought the war against Iraq, including the ludicrous claims which ‘justified’ it?

We have a crisis, that’s all you’ve got to tell these people. Or else.

We’ve been screwed just about every way there is by the Bush administration with the active complicity of the cowards in the Democratic Party.

That leads me to number two.

His name is Joe Lieberman.

Joe is a Senator from Connecticut who, while ostensibly Independent, campaigned with John McCain and against the Democratic Party and its candidate, from Obama down. He engaged in vicious name-calling, and wondered aloud whether Obama was prepared or qualified to keep the country safe.

In the 2006 primary in Connecticut, Lieberman lost the Democratic nomination to a fellow named Ned Lamont, largely because Democrats couldn’t stand Joe’s incessant saber-rattling nor his support of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. That didn’t stop Joe; he simply ran as a third candidate, an ‘independent’ against Lamont and the Republican nominee, who put up no campaign.

Lieberman’s been caucusing with the Democrats, but he’s been a strong backer of Bush on most issues.

After his disgraceful suck-up to McCain, Joe looked to be toast. While the party might want his vote on some issues, there surely was a limit. Or was there? Reportedly, Barack Obama had a lengthy phone conversation with Majority Leader Harry Reid, after which Reid met with Lieberman and said they weren’t kicking him out; hell, they might not even remove him from the chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee.

I saw that numbskull Evan Bayh of Indiana on the Rachel Maddow Show tonight ‘explaining’ why Lieberman should keep his chairmanship, and saying that the party leaders would keep an eye on him and not let him get out of control. Bayh is joined in this view by at least four other Senators, including Christopher Dodd, who evidently makes it a matched pair of nitwits from Connecticut.

Does anyone think this shit through?

Bayh kept bleating about how nobody wanted to extract any “revenge” here. Memo to Evan, and to Chris Dodd, and to Barack, for God’s sake, Obama: it’s not about revenge. It’s about who’s running the asylum. And you are about to hand the keys to a crazy, useless hack.

Lieberman, just like the executives at AIG, understands what the American public does not yet understand, not yet, but brother when we finally do... that you can blackmail the government.

Whose advice is Obama listening to on this? It can’t be Harry Reid. Because if you let McCain keep the chairmanship after what he’s done, two things are for sure: first, he knows he can keep on going and you will never stop him, and second, everybody else will figure that they can blackmail you, too.

That’s how legislation typically works, albeit in a more dignified fashion. Senators trade votes. Okay, we know that. But when you indicate to these people, and to all of those lobbyists you have correctly identified with the corruption of the system, that you can be pushed around on something like the Lieberman deal, good luck on getting anything resembling decent legislation through. No offense, Barack, but wake the fuck up.

The ‘thinking’ of the Obama staff, apparently, if you believe what Bayh implied, was that if Lieberman was denied his chairmanship he would resign the Senate seat, leaving the Republican governor of Connecticut the opportunity to appoint a Republican.

To which a sane person would reply, “Go ahead Hot Lips, resign your G*d d*mned commission!”

What if Joe tells you guys next month that he’ll quit unless he gets invited to the White House for dinner every Thursday? Unless Obama agrees to bail out the entire state of Connecticut?

We’ve got a lot of smart people in politics, right? And in the media, too. And this is where we’re at. Tonight I actually saw Chris Matthews fawningly ask Thomas Friedman of the –– (choir voices in deep rapture) –– New York Times his opinion of a prospective auto industry bailout. I didn’t hear the answer, having shut off the sound to preserve the tenuous remains of my sanity, but I saw Friedman’s face, watched his eyes, These are the eyes of a prominent journalist who argued vociferously in favor of Bush’s war even as it has collapsed, who believed the WMD junk. He’d spent a lot of time in the Middle East, and he’d written a best-seller about that, and therefore he knew all of these things the rest of us mortals didn’t, only it turns out he doesn’t.

The government is so corrupt and the mass media so complaisant that it’s hard to see how Barack Obama can change it in any fundamental way. He’s the best candidate we’ve had for forty years and the first one in forty who threatened the ruling class. But can he make it against these odds?

Joe Lieberman should be removed from the chairmanship of the Homeland Security committee because he’s unfit to handle the job, because his views on domestic security include support for widespread and illegal wiretapping of American citizens. If the Democrats are serious about change, and if Obama wants to succeed, they ought to throw his ass out the window.

Arnold Schwartzenegger, the California governor whose childhood heroes included Adolph Hitler, was back in Ohio last weekend, campaigning for the McCain/Palin ticket and telling jokes about Barack Obama. Example: he prescribes some gym work so that Obama can “beef up those scrawny little arms.” Oh ho ho... what a card, that Arnie is.

Four years ago, Schwartzenegger was pimping for Bush in Ohio and taking cheap shots at John Kerry. As you may know, the results in Ohio in 2004 were announced only after the machine data was routed through a server in Tennessee controlled by Bush cronies; the Bush ‘victory’ was a stark contradiction to exit polls in the Buckeye State, but this glaring theft was explained away by moronic media types as some sort of ‘sampling error’ and a flawed methodology.

Nobody wanted to face up to what America had turned into: a nation whose elections were now routinely subverted by electronic means. Nobody wanted to think about how the ‘flawed methodology’ was the same as used throughout the country, where 44 states produced vote totals identical with the exit polls, nor that the ‘skewed’ results in Ohio and five other states all tilted heavily toward Bush.

The mathematical chance that the six renegade states’ announced totals were so wildly divergent from exit polls, with each producing an enormous swing for Bush, has been expressed by statisticians as about a gazillion-to-one. Nobody wanted to deal with that, either.

This morning, a Gallup representative calmly explained to an MSNBC anchorwoman, Catherine Wittless, that there was essentially no way that McCain could close the gap with Obama over the next two days. The margin is now running at about eight percent nationally, with solid leads in ‘battleground states’ such as Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Wittless was undeterred, opining that since a 4-point lead could be regarded as ‘within the margin of error’ many of these states were effectively ‘toss-ups’.

The rationales are beginning to pile up. Talk about the mythical “Bradley Effect,” about McCain ‘closing the gap’, about ‘margins of error’ fills the airwaves.

If Tuesday produces an announced upset for John McCain, there will be only one possible explanation for it: that the election has been rigged. It will not be due to the “Bradley Effect,” of which more later if I’ve got the energy for it.

I am not talking about garden variety cheating, the kind we’re already seeing at alarming levels, especially in critical states such as Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, Florida, and Pennsylvania. There is a massive effort to mis-inform voters that: (a) Democrats will be voting on Wednesday due to the unusually high turnout; (b) out-of-state college students who vote in the state of their school residence will be breaking the law, and/or their parents will not be able to claim them as dependents; (c) anyone with outstanding parking tickets will be arrested if they attempt to vote; (d) voters with Spanish surnames will be investigated by immigration authorities. All of these are false. In addition, there are the usual paucity of voting machines and locations such that voters will have to wait in line as long as eight hours to cast ballots; the Conyers Committee established that as many as 200,000 votes were lost in 2004 in Ohio alone due to this clearly purposeful method if reducing the vote, more than the announced differential between Bush and Kerry. The same situation has already developed in Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, all fiercely-contested states.

In Florida, the governor ordered polls to remain open an additional four hours in early voting, which should ameliorate that situation there; one G.O.P. operative was quoted as saying that Charlie Crist, the governor, had thereby handed the state to Obama. We shall see.

What is far scarier is the prospect of electronic rigging.

Problems with voting machines, especially the touch-screen variety manufactured by ES&S and Diebold, are showing up already in the form of “vote flipping,” a process by which a vote for Obama registers as a vote for McCain. Reports of this taking place in early voting in several states mirrors what happened on a massive scale in 2004, where votes for Kerry were registered as votes for George Bush. While some voters caught the error, it is predictable that many others will not; how many of these there are, and the electoral effect of this ‘flipping’ is unknown, but it is striking that ALL such reports are of votes being changed from Obama to McCain and none the other way around.

You’d have to be daft to ascribe this phenomenon to accident or errors in calibration. In fact, some experts believe that the ‘flipping’ is being done not just to skew the vote but, when noticed, as of course it is, it will justify bringing in a ‘technician’ to ‘re-calibrate’ the machines. There is an opinion that electronic rigging may take place during the ‘re-calibration.’

But the biggest problem, the one which opens the door to the prospect of wholesale election theft, is the possibility that the vote totals themselves are changed by electronic hacking into the central computers. This is done by people who have access to the source codes and to ‘backdoor’ entries hidden by programmers. I have seen actual demonstrations of this process by experts on more than one occasion and have read the technical explanations elsewhere. While I can’t recall the details, they are available at a number of websites, including blackboxvoting.

I remember election night, 2004, very well. I recall driving home in the late afternoon, listening to the reports of turnout in Ohio and other important states and knowing with an old pol’s certainty what the numbers meant. Massive turnouts were always the key for Democrats, and the numbers coming out of these states suggested a strong boost for Kerry, who had been ahead in most polls.

My companion and I then went to a dinner at the home of friends in Mill Valley, where a group of people ate and watched the early returns. First came the exit polls.

Please understand this and accept it as true: politicians know what exit polls are and what they mean in the same way that farmers know what rainfall means to crop production. It’s sort of political science 1A. You cannot practice politics in any serious way without this knowledge.

Exit polls have been refined over the years, but the methodology is not complicated and the meaning of the numbers is consistent, reliable, and obvious. Essentially, voters are asked as they leave the polls who they voted for. The samples are generated by careful study of applicable demographics, much as with other polls, such as the tracking polls we’ve seen over the past couple of months. The basic differences between tracking polls and exit polls are that tracking polls sample opinion of persons who may or may not vote, or are ‘likely’ voters, while exit polls sample real voters; and that tracking polls capture opinions in time while exit polls get real numbers as they are registered.

Exit polls are not ‘flawed’ or ‘untrustworthy’. In fact, they are the principal means of guarding against election theft everywhere in the world –– except, evidently, in the United States.

Of course, there is always the possibility that a defect in design or execution will throw the numbers off, however, historically, the difference this can make is no greater than one and one-half percent. Usually, historically, the exit polls mirror the announced voting totals exactly.

What made 2004 so blatant, and what caught my attention that night, was that the vote differential was enormous. Swings were reported of between seven and eight percent in six states. In each case, the swings went from Kerry to Bush. In five of those states, the swings took the states from Kerry to Bush and, of course, changed the outcome of the election.

I was not the only one who noticed this. While I went crazy at the dinner party, telling everyone who would listen that we were witnessing the theft of the election, the networks began ‘scrubbing’ their reports. Several actually changed their exit poll reports to conform to the announced vote totals. Of course, this is the age of the internet; many people photographed their screens and preserved the original exit poll results, and these were then posted and sent around the world.

By the next day, my worst fears were validated. While six states saw an unprecedented and inexplicable shifting of huge numbers of votes to Bush, the other forty-four didn’t. In fact, the other forty-four states –– in which the identical methodology was employed –– showed NO divergence between exit polls and announced totals.

Other people inside politics subsequently confirmed my conclusions. And it is not possible that large numbers of political figures in both parties didn’t know full well what had occurred. But nobody would stand up. Nobody had the guts, and the implications scared the shit out of them, although John Edwards is said to have confronted Kerry and angrily demanded that they fight it.

Look, it’s not fun to think about but there are other instances in American political history of enormous crimes committed to seize or retain power. It’s very human to shy away from these things. Nobody gets any joy out of it. But that doesn’t make these things any less real.

I do not know whether a similar crime is in the works for tomorrow. The pieces for it are in place. The source codes are still kept from public view as ‘trade secrets’ such that our own government is, theoretically at least, prevented from examining them. There are states where, despite the obvious, voting continues on machines where there is no paper trail and thus no way to avert fraud. Why no paper trails? The same companies manage to produce ATM machines at which you get a printed record of any transaction. I guess we don’t want them to screw us out of ten bucks, but an election or two is okay.

I have reason to believe that the Obama campaign is aware of what happened in 2004, but I don’t know what plans exist, if any, to prevent it this time. My guess, however, is this: that Obama realized from the beginning that he would have to seriously contest as many states as possible, including ‘Republican’ states where at least the totals would be hard to mess with. This approach, as commentators have pointed out, gave him a number of possible routes to collecting 270 electoral votes. This would also give him some level of protection.

For McCain to “win”, he will need to carry Pennsylvania, as well as Virginia, Ohio, and Florida. In contesting some other states –– surprising the experts in doing so –– such as Montana, North Dakota, North Carolina, Indiana, and even Arizona, Obama has made it very, very tough for those who would wish to steal the election. He’s built leads in so many of these states, or pulled even, that the level of electronic rigging needed to defeat him is almost daunting.

As my brother mentioned a couple of weeks ago, these are dangerous people with their backs against the wall. So it may be that they’ll do it even if they have to be blatant about it. After all, nobody stopped them in 2004.

For more information, you may want to check out these websites:

http://www.nomorestolenelections.org/

http://www.libertytreefdr.org/

One last word about the “Bradley Effect.” This is actually a theory, named after Tom Bradley, an L.A. mayor who lost for governor in California more than twenty years ago after leading in the polls right up to election day. Bradley was black. The theory is that many voters lied to pollsters in saying they’d vote for Bradley because they didn’t want anyone to think they were racists.

The theory is horseshit.

There was no hidden anti-Bradley vote; what happened in California was that the Democrats lost ground badly as the campaign came to an end. In the same polls that had Bradley winning the governship, Jerry Brown was leading for the Senate seat. Brown also lost.

People who want to conceal their racist disinclination to vote for a black candidate need not lie about their votes, only their reasons for them. While there is always anecdotal mention of people who enjoy lying to pollsters, the field is aware of them and is able to account for it.

The poll results we have been seeing are, of course, not identical. But one thing is very obvious: the lead Barack Obama has built in the campaign has not diminished over the past three weeks; it has grown. As reflected in polls by NBC/New York Times, Gallup, Newsweek/CNN, and other heavyweights, the lead among “likely” voters is between nine and twelve percent tonight. It is flatly impossible that these polls are wrong enough to account for any shift which would overcome that.

On MSNBC yesterday morning, one of the idiot anchors tried to get the top guy at Gallup to concede that (a) the race was ‘tightening’ and that (b) McCain could catch up to Obama. He was having none of that. The change between an 11% lead and a 9% lead was insignificant, he said, and there was no way, given what they were seeing, that McCain could possibly win.

That’s the truth. God help us if somebody fixes this one.

The alarm was set for 7:20 yesterday morning, early enough to get me almost functioning by the time Travis and Bill and I expected to tee off out at San Geronimo Golf Club. I knew it would be cold out there –– not as cold as Sarah Palin’s heart, I grant you, but cold nonetheless –– and rainy, and I wanted the time to loosen-up gradually. At my age, these are important considerations.

But I woke up long before the alarm went off, closer to 6, and I punched up the remote to MSNBC and was staring at Sarah Palin, rallying the forces of evil in Pennyslvania, I think, it’s hard to remember anymore. There were four days left. Now it’s three.

It’s okay to be nervous, that’s what I tell myself. I’ve been nervous before, although there have been long electoral stretches when by all accounts there was no chance of anything decent coming out of it, and there have been election nights where I’d buoy my spirits with anything –– a surprise congressional victory somewhere; a creep tossed from office.

This time it really is different. This time it’s for all the marbles.

I watch Palin occasionally, always now with the sound off because my brain doesn’t need further rattling, but MSNBC runs little captions to tell people who can no longer stand the screechy, trailer park hooker voice, and she was telling America that John McCain had a (presumably secret) plan to fix the economy, that he would cut everyone’s taxes while simultaneously winning two wars, handing everyone a health care subsidy (for his friends in the insurance racket), and getting rid of the deficit. We’re all getting ponies, too.

I watched Palin prattling, husband Todd wearing an ‘Indy500’ jacket, and the trophy special needs kid being handed around like a sack of flour, and I realized that homicidal anger is no way to awaken, not with autumn settling in and the sky dark and America on the verge of... something.

Then, finally, she was gone and McCain was speaking, a different rally with a different theme, somewhere else, probably also Pennsylvania, flanked by wife Cindy and former coach Mike Ditka of the Bears, and he was doing that weird, spastic thing with his arms, as though he was trying to lift something slippery. I decided not to hear his voice, either, with its sickening imitation sincerity.

Palin was a bad mistake, and McCain certainly knows it. All of these smart guys sitting around making this kind of decision, or McCain himself, alone, and still mentally erect from the half hour he’d actually spent with his future nominee, it doesn’t matter. These are not people you want near the controls of a number 29 bus out of San Rafael, let alone an entire nation.

The ‘thinking’ included the ludicrous idea that Palin would bring in a lot of disaffected Hillary Clinton voters, and there were 18,000,000 of them. What apparently didn’t register was this: Clinton earned those votes; they were not conferred on her because of her gender. Probably the notion that women are not interchangeable comes as news to McCain.

There are national polls showing Obama’s lead holding up, as much as 13% in the NBC survey, but the national polls don’t matter much right now; it’s Colorado where it matters, and Virginia, Ohio and Florida, Nevada and even Indiana, and of course the aforementioned Pennsylvania where, if Ed Rendell can keep his trap zipped for three more days, Obama should win.

I see the same electoral maps you see, and I listen to comments by journalists and pols and the horseshit talking heads, and I understand the math. Against any odds you might’ve named, Barack Obama had no chance of being elected President, yet we’re three days out and there is no legitimate chance he can be stopped.

Of course, there are two extra-legal obstacles to get past. One of these is assassination. So far, so good. The other is massive electronic vote fraud, such as occurred in 2004.

It is unclear to me what the Obama strategy is to handle that prospect, but I know they are aware of it (see previous posts). Two things offer some protection. One is the change in the machinery being used in some states, where the touch-screen monitors have been replaced by opti-scans; these may still be hacked, however the process is more difficult. A second is the enormous lead Obama has built. The discovery of ten million previously non-existent evangelical votes for McCain, all of them living in the sticks in Pennsylvania and Ohio, might be greeted with skepticism, not to mention there’d be twenty million people in the streets. Barack Obama is no John Kerry.

Absent the most egregious fraud in American electoral history, Obama will win on Tuesday by a landslide.

Last night I went out to dinner with an old friend, and afterward we walked around our old high school in the dark, remembering those days, the hopes we’d once had for America and the personal dreams we’d shared of political power and the roles we might play in a much larger drama.

Our roads had taken us to other places, although we’d each remained political and often engaged in one struggle or another. We’d carried on, but over forty years the hopes and dreams of idealistic kids had been kicked around pretty good.

And so for us, and maybe for a few million others of our generation and our time, Barack Obama has come out of nowhere, a possibility we’d given up on, that our country might reverse its self-destructive collapse into neo-fascism.

We’ve seen the madness in the Palin rallies, the screams of blood-curdling pseudo-patriotism, the cold, ignorant appeal to the worst fears and ugliest instincts of our people. We know that the vast majority of Americans supported George Bush’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq, and that the mainstream media went along for the ride. And this guy Obama, a black guy, an intellectual, for God’s sake, with cab door ears and the worst middle name an American candidate could have, not even a full term in the United States Senate, and he’s going to win.

Everyone I know can recall a moment when Obama really got to them. My friend Brad was talking about him as a future President after the convention speech in 2004; I thought Brad was crazy. Even after Iowa, and the speech he gave that night, and the realization that this man was so clear, so deep, that he might actually find a way, I knew the road was close to impossible. A black man whose last name rhymes with Osama. Give me a break.

Then there was Reverend Wright, a genuine electoral calamity if I ever saw one, and Barack Obama spoke to America about race. Watching him that night I just wept for the joy of it, a truth-teller, finally, at last.

Still, I’ve been afraid to believe it. All of my own failed hopes, barely twenty-two on California primary night, 1968, and after that, looking for ways to change things, and the elections falling one after another. My generation was going to save the world, but we hadn’t.

Well, there’s a new generation rising, and most of them, connected now with the world via the internet and instant communications, a true McLuhan generation, do not buy xenophobia and racism quite so readily as have their precursors. It is turning out to be very difficult to teach them to hate.

Three days left and there are millions of people dreaming of a better world. Tens of thousands are making phone calls, walking precincts, answering the call to go to Ohio, or Colorado, or Nevada.

So maybe, against odds so bad you can’t even make book, we will be allowed to dream once more, to gather ourselves and move forward, to hope for our country and our world. The work doesn’t end on Tuesday night. It’s just beginning.