The Broad View

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Faithful readers:

We, your humble correspondents, have decided to put away politics — at least as a main focus — for now. We've been at it for a lifetime (or so it seems) and it is time to make room in our writing lives for reflection on the other adventures of mind, body and spirit that engage us, each and both.

As I write this we are but twelve hours from the inauguration of Barack Obama — and what we hope will be a new era of enlightenment for the country and for its bushwacked citizens. We are grateful to leave the deep thinking and keen analysis of political events to the likes of Digby, RJ Eskow and others in the liberal blogosphere whom we so admire.

Our new blog, The Followspot, is a work in progress — we intend a gallimaufry of observations about books, shorebirds, the kitchen, movies, mortality and...well, you get the idea.

We hope you will join us on our journey of exploration.

— Ellen and Chiaroscuro

Raising Kaine will call it a day

It will be a significant loss to the blogosphere: our esteemed honorary broad, Lowell Feld, and his co-bloggers at Raising Kaine are going to close up shop on December 31, 2008.

Read Lowell's announcement and explanation here. And if you haven't already, read Lowell's greatly admired book about the influence of the Internet on political campaigns, Netroots Rising.

Lowell, old friend: the new administration will be even better if you are somewhere in the mix, adding your expertise to a sane and progressive energy policy.

All hail!!

RJ is brilliant...again

This is a MUST READ!

An excerpt:

You probably remember Rumsfeld's line: "Democracy is messy." But you may not remember when he said it. It was in response to widespread looting of banks, offices, and museums. That says a lot. To this crowd, "democracy" is a violent mob. Representative government is an unpleasant necessity, not a value or an ideal. The rest of us think "war is too important to be left to the generals." They think self-government is too important to be left to the voters.

To some extent this is nothing more than greed and lust for power, the misuse of conservatism as a cover for naked self-interest. But it also reflects a difference in political philosophy that goes back to Locke and Hobbes. Their equation of democracy with mob rule, so clearly mirrored in Rumsfeld's comment, helps explain why they feel morally entitled to lie, cheat, and steal votes. To them, voters aren't reflections of a democratic ideal. They're suspects, threats, enemies. They're the Iraqi mob looting the Museum of Antiquities.

Whither blogging from the left?

Aside from some anxiety about what nasty surprises Republicans may have in store for us this week and on Election Day I am, overall, feeling hopeful about our electing Obama and lots of Democrats to the House and Senate.

But I am not so sanguine about this: with Democrats in control, what will happen to the liberal blogosphere?

We have analyzed and trumpeted, raised money and consciousness, and provided a new model for doing political business. But if the vitality that drives us stems largely from being the "out" party lo these many years, and if it's the red meat of outrage that has fed us -- what will we do after we've won?

We have learned to participate in a wide-ranging narrative of community and world. What do we bring next to the story?

That Buckley lad's a damn fine writer

Update 10/14: Ooops.

Christopher Buckley apologizes to his father's ghost, says why he's voting for Obama: here.

Blog brother Lowell Feld (reluctantly) says bill should pass

Honorary broad Lowell Feld, one of my best buds from the heady days of Wes Clark's presidential campaign, left behind his career at the Department of Energy to set up Raising Kaine, which has gone from being a site promoting Tim Kaine for Virginia governor to being the go-to site for all things political in Virginia.

In a piece today, lauding "soon to be Senator" Mark Warner's take on the rescue bill (calling for passage, Warner had said that the House was playing Russian Roulette with the economy), Lowell weighs in with this:

...Sure, I'd love to see a much better bill, maybe even a completely different bill. But as the saying goes, the process of legislation being made in Washington is like watching the making of sausage - not pretty, in other words.

And there's no doubt that this bill, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, is a (messy, flawed) hunk of sausage. In other words, it's a compromise on an extremely complex, intricate, important subject - keeping our economy from melting down as credit markets freeze up and stock markets plummet. Reluctantly, I must say that it is also probably the best (I can see a few tweaks getting incorporated) option that can be accomplishment [sic] at this point given the alignment of political forces in Washington, DC - Shrub in the White House, a closely divided Congress, an election looming, etc. Again, I'm not talking what's IDEAL, I'm talking about what's PRACTICAL...

Lowell's got a great mind and a cool head. Give him lots of bloggy love.

Comply, or else

I've been meaning to write something about this post from Glenn Greenwald on the surreal news that Army troops will be deployed here in the U.S. for, among other things, crowd control in what seems to be a direct violation of Posse Comitatus. An Army Times article has some of the details. This is when the water gets hot enough to truly boil us frogs.

However, I couldn't do better than to direct you to Digby's extraordinary addition to the discussion:

So men who've been fighting in Iraq will now be armed with tasers on the streets of the United States. You can be fairly sure that after what they've been trained for they'll believe that tasering someone is completely benign. After all, you get up again.

But as bad as putting more tasers on the streets, there's an even worse possibility.

The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

I think you have to wonder if this is what they might be talking about:

The US military has given the first public display of what it says is a revolutionary heat-ray weapon to repel enemies or disperse hostile crowds.

Called the Active Denial System, it projects an invisible high energy beam that produces a sudden burning feeling. [...]

It can penetrate clothes, suddenly heating up the skin of anyone in its path to 50C.

But it penetrates the skin only to a tiny depth - enough to cause discomfort but no lasting harm, according to the military.

A Reuters journalist who volunteered to be shot with the beam described the sensation as similar to a blast from a very hot oven - too painful to bear without diving for cover.

But that's not all! Raytheon is also developing a "non-lethal" weapon for the Army -- "Silent Guardian." Here's a description Digby found on Silent Guardian's effectiveness:

When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation - similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker - that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings.

It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile.

Because the beam penetrates skin only to a depth of 1/64th of an inch, it cannot, says Raytheon, cause visible, permanent injury.

But anyone in the beam's path will feel, over their entire body, the agonising sensation I've just felt on my fingertip. The prospect doesn't bear thinking about. [...]

Silent Guardian is supposed to be the 21st century equivalent of tear gas or water cannon - a way of getting crowds to disperse quickly and with minimum harm. Its potential is obvious. [...]

This machine has the ability to inflict limitless, unbearable pain.

What makes it OK, says Raytheon, is that the pain stops as soon as you are out of the beam or the machine is turned off.

And still that's not all. Read about the Pulsed Energy Projectile weapon, designed to raise bubbles of superhot gas on the skin of people up to a mile and a half away. This is the stuff of conspiracy thrillers and bad sci-fi movies of authoritarian dystopias run amok.

There has never been a weapon invented (outside of some WMD) that hasn't been used. And the supposed "non-lethality" of these weapons assures that they'll be used in "crowd control," i.e., dispersing political protesters. "Free speech zones" aren't nearly as satisfactory as zapping the fucking hippy traitor bastards.

And if you get trampled to death in the stampede, or your eyes get permanently burned by superheated contact lenses, or your pacemaker goes haywire -- well, that just serves you right for hating America. That'll teach all you malcontents to stay at home and STFU.

This is America in the 21st Century. Paid for by our tax dollars. Who will stop this madness and how?

First Class vs. Steerage

Meteor Blades asks in "Bailing Out the Yachts":

There are more choices than the one-and-a-half we’ve been presented since last week. Why isn’t Congress looking at them? Instead of tweaking Henry Paulson's proposal, why didn't they eviscerate it, toss it out onto the pavement, and start with a blank sheet of paper? Why are they so determined to fork over taxpayers' cash for a pig 'n poke?

Read about the different proposals he's found from, among others, Robert Reich, Dean Baker and James K. Galbraith. Kos also posts some interesting alternative ideas.

Congress has a moral choice to make in this financial crisis: Are they allocating the lifeboats to the first class passengers while the rest of us in steerage are left to sink or swim on our own? Democrats in Congress must act responsibly, of course, but they also have to remember who -- as Democrats -- they historically represent.

Why do we perennially return to that choice? The little guy always takes the hit and the enormity of the injury prompts anew the same vows to change things. And nothing changes for long. The rich are jealous of their perks and prerogatives and scheme endlessly to tilt the playing field back their way.

It's time for Democrats to declare honestly: Yes, this is class warfare. The rich have the weapons but we have the numbers.

I'd like to add that, IMO, Meteor Blades is one of the finest writers in Left Blogistan or any 'stan and the unabashed champion of the downtrodden everywhere. He's the guy that keeps me going back to DKos.

Happy Entrails to You, Until We Meet Again

I can't pretend to know more than the barest basics about the workings of Wall St. finance. Like millions of middle class economic simpletons, I have a 401K that is the backbone of my retirement savings. It's in very risk-averse money market funds with a chunk in international equities. My timing is always lousy, so I just gave up trying to figure when to get in or out of domestic equities. I missed plenty of upside action and settled for piddly returns in exchange for being able to sleep at night. I have been afraid to look at it since the start of our trip down this 1930s Memory Lane. Thank God I have no debt and live in an established (300+ years) town, not a sprawl development.

Can anyone question why economics has been dubbed "The Dismal Science"? I've been reading news and opinion, on blogs and newspapers, and listening to political and economic pundits on cable news. I'm now quite sure that nobody knows what's going to happen, how to handle it, or where or when we'll reach bottom.

If these guys were reading chicken entrails or throwing bones in magic circles, they'd make as much or more sense. To confound us further, each pinstriped shaman divines a different message from the same scattered entrails of the American economy.

Paulson is running around (if he had any hair, it would be on fire) crying that something big must be done, and done quickly. But what? Consensus seems to be building around buying "trash for cash," as Krugman describes it, but how much cash, at what asset valuations and with what -- if any -- oversight? And really, just exactly how bad are things? What is the evidence? Why won't an interim measure suffice until a new administration is in office? 

These aren't easy questions to answer but as usual, the administration has allowed a situation to go critical and tried to use the opportunity to make another irrevocable power grab. Paulson and Bernanke have dug in their heels and made dire predictions of ruination if their entire plan -- including total discretion with no oversight or legal recourse and swollen asset valuations -- isn't immediately adopted. It's another rape of the middle class to shovel our money at the undeserving and incompetent rich.

Added to this writhing mess are some truly disgusting politics. As Digby explains, McCain and the Republicans are maneuvering to cast themselves as guardians of the taxpayers' wallets and populist mavericks against a Bush-sponsored Wall St. bailout.

McCain announced today that he's suspending his campaign to rush back to Washington to address the financial crisis. He's calling on Obama to do the same, as well as postpone Friday's debate. Pure theatrics. Please spare us the bromides about "Country First."

It's all too clear that "Country First" is the cruelest bit of irony to come from any Republican's mouth. Again, from Digby:

Marci Wheeler catches an interesting little aside in today's Roll Call article about the latest White house meddling... er management, of King Henry's snow job:

Hidden in an article reporting that Cheney's going to go hunt up some support for the $700,000,000,000 bailout is this admission that the Bush Administration has been sitting on it for some time:

Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. He acknowledged lawmakers were getting only days to peruse it, but he said this should be enough. [my emphasis]

If the Bush administration has been formulating this plan for months and never breathing a word to lawmakers about it, then there is a much bigger story here than we know. This is being presented as a response to an unpredictable crisis. If that's not the case then perhaps some of the conspiracy theories that are floating around are actually true.

This is all truly horrible. Horrible. I can only look at the tv, slack-jawed and aghast. I see my life savings melting away, the value of my home dwindling, and the cost of everything inflating obscenely. Now we're poised to indenture generations of Americans for debts that boggle the mind. One thing is sure: If those who are in power and those who lined their pockets all this time aren't made to pay -- and pay dearly -- the rage of the people will not be contained. There won't be an offshore haven anywhere on earth that's far enough away. No gated community will protect these human locusts. They'd best be making plans to decamp to Pluto.

Some of the stuff I've been reading:

• Why Congress Should Oppose the Bail-out Package, from Bonddad on DKos;
• Andrew Leonard's posts in "How the World Works" on Salon.com;
• Paul Krugman's columns and blog;
• Three Times is Enemy Action, an accounting of how we got here, by Devilstower on DKos;
• A profile of Dr. Nouriel Roubini -- "Dr. Doom" -- in the Aug. 17 issue of The New York Times Magazine;
• The Way Forward, a typically runic post on DKos by Stirling Newberry;
• and a special treat (so to speak): Things Become More Serious, a post by Billmon (!) on DKos. Yes, he's ba-a-ack....

 

It's the end of the world as we know it...

... and I don't feel fine. I feel queasy.

If anyone was wondering what issue would galvanize the electorate this time around, today's events erase all doubt. Is there any middle class person with a 401K or stock investments or a house who isn't nearing panic as he watches a lifetime of asset building get torn down dollar by dollar, day by day.

Wall Street is melting down today, and Main Street knows it can't avoid the storm. "Big Shitpile" (© Atrios) will not be contained and the toxic cloud it's spawned has wiped out Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch. The Dow Jones opened 300 points lower and the European exchanges are even worse.

This isn't academic. It's visceral. And it's now Obama's job to tie this disaster directly to Bush-onomics and its biggest fan, John McCain. McCain's camp is already out there with this ad:

"Our economy is in crisis," the narrator says before declaring: "Only proven reformers John McCain and Sarah Palin can fix it. Tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings. No special-interest giveaways. Lower taxes to create new jobs. Offshore drilling to reduce gas prices. McCain-Palin. Leadership, experience, for the change we need."

The Republicans, who in large part created this crisis, will hammer the public repeatedly with these lies until the average idiot 'Murican believes every word.

There's more to the story of what we're seeing, though. Truth be told, greed and tunnel vision aren't wholly-owned by the Republicans. The dismantling of the regulatory regime that allowed a shadow banking system to arise -- a system that operated for decades with scant oversight to check its lunatic excesses -- was endorsed by Democrats too.

Why? Because the Democrats were afraid of being tarred with all the usual right-wing labels. Because the rapacious Republicans tirelessly sold their ideology of unfettered capitalism and the pipedream that any slob can get rich if he votes Republican. But ultimately, we're here because Democrats forgot how to be Democrats.

The Times' Floyd Norris is liveblogging today's action. Before dawn he had this to say:

Those who were complaining, only months ago, that excessive regulation was making American markets uncompetitive, had it exactly wrong. It was a lack of regulation of the shadow financial system and its players that allowed this to happen. The regulators might not have gotten it right if they had tried to put limits on leverage, or assure that it was clear what risks were being taken, in the world of derivatives and securitizations. But deciding not to even try, and assuming that risks traded secretly would somehow end up in the hands of those most able to bear them, reflected ideology, not analysis.

Andrew Leonard, who writes Salon's "How the World Works" column, was equally blunt:

Tracking Monday's developments alone will be a full-time job for the entire global financial press. But as we wait for Monday's opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, let us remind ourselves, once again, of the most important lesson that economists, investors and voters should be taking from this carnage.

Over the past three decades Wall Street sought, and received, a climate of deregulation and minimal oversight that allowed it to create new markets at will, permitted investment banks and commercial banks to commingle their activities, and exempted critical new innovative financial products from any meaningful government restraint.

Now, we are staring at the kind of mess you get when you give 2-year-olds a few buckets of paint and tell the baby-sitter to take the day off. Cleanup is going to be a bitch.