Month: March 2008 (Page 2 of 2)

Yesterday the news swirled like an indestructible plastic grocery bag pirouetting down a street in Anytown, USA. It seems only a couple weeks ago, Barack Obama was being portrayed as a Muslim, and being criticized for having only “a speech from 2002” as his sole presidential credential. Now he is being attacked for going to a Christian church. Yeah, his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright has exercised “the audacity of speech” and Sen. Obama is paying a price. In an interview last night on the Nazi network, the tone of the “interview” was that of a legal deposition… FauxNews was performing their due diligence for the fall swift-boating of Sen. Obama.

Rev. Wright is a pastor of a Black church in the city of Chicago. His sermons are directed at an audience of primarily African-Americans who have experienced a different American experience than your typical Faux viewer. However, as Bill Maher learned after 9/11, criticism of the US of A is not tolerated. You see, we are infallible and only stand for things like “democracy,” “human rights,” and “truth.” The spin of September 11th was that “they” attached us because of “our freedom.” Maybe “they” are upset because we’ve been interfering with their freedom and the sovereignty of their nations for years. Mr. Maher lost his job for implying it took more courage to fly a plane into a building than it does to lob a cruise missile from six miles offshore. He was right, but the action taken against him was that of a corporation carrying the water of the Bush administration to make it clear that no dissent by the citizenry would be tolerated. Just flags and chants of “USA.” Democracy and Human Rights? Oh, is that what they have in Saudi Arabia? No, they have oil. Truth? Like the fairy tale about WMD’s in Iraq or Saddam’s connection to Al Qaeda?

The controversial statements of Rev. Wright that are now the substance of attacks on Sen. Obama include his perspective on the use of nuclear weapons, foreign interventions, and the treatment of blacks for over 300 years:

1. “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
2. “The government gives them (blacks) the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
3. “Barack knows what it means to be a black man to be living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger.”

I certainly can see how many white people in this country, particularly the undereducated, mostly rural red-state voters, would be scared by the statements above, but doesn’t the first amendment grant the Reverend the right to make them? Scared is key word here… The Fox-led spin this fall is going to be that Barack “Hussein” Obama is a black wolf in Muslim clothing who’s an anti-American and a black-separatist. If he’s elected, he’ll let Willie Horton and thousands of other scary black men out of prison to rape your white women and steal your children in the night…

Here’s a preview:

I’m going to try a new fifteenkey feature to help me write when I’m uninspired… like lately. I’ll grab a book from my shelf and open it to a random page. Wherever my left thumb lands, I’ll copy the passage here and rant about it. Okay? Ready? Here we go… Tonight’s random passage is from Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity:”

“He must be terrible to work with the morning after a wine-tasting session: not because of the reek of stale booze, or the bloodshot eyes, or the crabby behavior, but because of all the facts he has swallowed. He’d spend half the day telling people things they didn’t want to know.”

I regurgitate a lot of facts and I wonder if people just turn me off when I think I’m so fascinating. Leaving the office tonight I chatted for a few minutes with my boss Joyce. In hindsight I wonder what she was thinking when I laid my latest “sky is falling” story on her. This one was a marketwatch.com article called, “Derivatives the new ‘ticking bomb‘.”

It’s the uplifting story of “derivatives,” described by legendary investor Warren Buffett in 2003 as “financial weapons of mass destruction” that could harm the whole economic system. At that time, the derivatives market was $75 Trillion Dollars. Today it’s $516 with a capital “T,” or 34 ½ times the US annual gross domestic product of $15T.

Today’s other news is that the Federal Reserve and other Central Banks are pumping $200B of “liquidity” into big banks like Bear Stearns and accepting teetering mortgages from the sub-prime mess as collateral… I’m feeling like the US/world economy is a giant leveraged house of cards and if one falls, we’ll all fall so the rich money traders who obscenely profit get bailed out when they fuck up, but for the rest of us:

“As life closes in on someone who has borrowed far too much money on the strength of far too little income, there are no fire escapes.”
–John Kenneth Galbraith

I haven’t been blogging because I’m counting all the cells in my body to confirm whether I have 10 trillion, 50 trillion or 100 trillion… Think about that though… You are just a Naturalamb water balloon of trillions of interconnected cells, some of which you occasionally scratch and others that participate in more advanced aspects of the neuron doctrine.

Bill Maher questions the intelligence of our fellow Americans and I concur. Mr. Maher is catching a little flack for stating, “politicians must stop saying the American people are smarter than that. No they aren’t!” He’s right. All the candidates kiss our asses to get our vote, but they’re not doing us any favors pandering to us about our collective intelligence then underfunding education while individuals and countries in Europe and Asia are working smarter and harder than we as they pass us by.

Her Ohio victory assured, Hillary Clinton thanked her erupting supporters tonight as “Land of Hopes and Dreams” began cranking through the PA. As I now listen dispassionately to essentially a concession speech by Barack Obama, I think he should also close with a song made famous by Bruce Springsteen oratory, but penned in the background by Elvis Costello: “Brilliant Disguise.”

In the past few days in different discussions about today’s tilt, I expressed my dismay over the Obama controversy involving a meeting between Canadian officials and Austan D. Goolsbee, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and Mr. Obama’s senior economic policy adviser. At first the campaign denied the meeting took place, then had to uh, baraktrack after a memo documenting the meeting surfaced.

According to the memo by a Canadian attendee, Professor Goolsbee assured the Canadians that Mr. Obama’s anti-NAFTA stance, primarily in job-strapped Ohio, was “more reflective of political maneuvering than policy,” and “should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”

That meeting in Canada has been largely dismissed in the Obama worshiping press, but I think it cost him Ohio tonight. “Just words” about NAFTA may have been only political posturing to Mr. Obama, but it is perceived by those seeing their unemployment benefits end as the reason their lives are unraveling.

I and many others have supported Mr. Obama because he was different. He was not just another pol. Now I wonder, “Is that you, baby, or just a brilliant disguise?”