What a confluence of events this week! A few hours after this column posts, Sarah Palin takes the stage for what might turn out to be her one unscripted, real-time appearance before the American electorate. Tomorrow – speaking of “real time” – Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous will open in theaters to poke fun at (and to poke holes in) religious-fundamentalist worldviews like Palin’s. Also at the movies tomorrow: An American Carol, the first-ever right-wing political farce.

The first-ever fictional right-wing farce, that is.

And just in case you hadn’t noticed, Sept. 29-Oct. 4 is Banned Books Week – the week when the nation’s librarians hope you’ll give at least a moment’s thought to the continuing threat censorship poses to our free society. It is entirely fitting that Palin’s debate with Joe Biden should fall during Banned Books Week, since her resume includes a contemptible brush with book-banning during her term as Wasilla mayor in the mid-1990s.

Since Palin became John McCain’s running mate a month ago, I have been frustrated with the mainstream media’s refusal to pay much attention to her censorial tendencies. There have been a few back-of-the-section newspaper articles and brief mentions in Palin biographies, but few words of real outrage concerning an issue that directly reflects upon the Republican ticket’s attitude toward free expression. Even last weekend, when actor and Creative Coalition member Tim Daly mentioned it on Real Time, the panel failed to discuss it at length – perhaps because the subject didn’t offer fellow guest Ralph Nader yet another opportunity to rail incoherently against the major-party candidates’ “corporate masters.”

Nevertheless, Daly was on target when he identified the censorship incident as a disqualifying offense. Indeed, I consider it not only a firing offense for Palin, but for McCain as well, for tolerating (much less choosin as a running mate) someone who would so blatantly undermine the Constitution that the president swears on a Bible to uphold. (more…)

Close of the market, 9/29/08

My political/economic socialization came during the heady days of free market zealotry.  1984 was a year when it seemed like many of my friends — who never cared for politics or economics in high school — found a new religion at college: free market economics.  Fueled by the Reagan-era drumbeat that the free market can take care of itself, I had to suffer through endless panegyrics about how government regulation was snuffing the life out of a potentially vibrant economy that, if left to its own devices, would shower down the goodies of jobs, better pay, more products, and better services to the masses. The joy with which they talked about this new utopia had the conviction of an Amway convert in search of willing salespeople to join in on the pyramid scheme.

In the political realm, deregulation and lower taxation take the form of a V, where those at the top of the income bracket paid the least amount in taxes, creating favorable conditions for a surge in economic growth.  It all seemed to be going as planned — even through recessions, and um, Bill Clinton’s tax increase (Shhhh!).  The prescription for a good economy was to continually reward those at the top with a “less is more” approach.  In good times, lower taxes.  In bad times, lower taxes — and if you do, we’ll all get more in terms of a vibrant economy. One problem is that while people love the sound of lower taxes, they don’t really like it when their government benefits get cut — unless those benefits are framed in such a way as to evoke a negative response.  Case in point, the term “Welfare.” I once explained to friend who was enjoying his free market high that I was on welfare (I’m such a buzzkill sometimes).

“Huh? What? Are you on food stamps?”  He said.

“Nope,” I said, “I go to a state university and the good people of California pay taxes to maintain that system so I can get an education at a very discounted rate.”

“Well, that’s not welfare,” he snorted.

“Really? What would you call it, then? The free market?” I asked.

“Um no. I would call that an investment into the education of the citizenry,” He opined.

“Investment for what?” I asked. (more…)

This past Sunday, in a coordinated effort to flout a federal law banning political endorsements from the pulpit, 33 evangelical and fundamentalist pastors in 22 states used their sermons either to endorse John McCain or to attack Barack Obama. Organized by the Alliance Defense Fund, the campaign of law-breaking was designed to test the IRS’ willingness to enforce – and, they hope, to overturn in the courts – a 1954 amendment to the tax code that prohibits churches from “participat[ing] in, or interven[ing] in … any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.”

Sunday’s efforts were only the most blatant in a long series of conservative-Christian efforts to undermine the Constitution’s separation of church and state. For 30 years now, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, and similar groups have been encouraging pastors to push the envelope of partisan politics, and have been blanketing churches with “voter guides” designed to go right to the edge of illegality without crossing the line.

Such activities were dealt a major setback in 1998, when the Christian Coalition lost its tax-exempt status and subsequently lost much of its influence. However, apart from that the one moment of Clintonian ballsiness, the federal government – dominated over the last three decades by Reaganites, Bushies and the occasional Democrat too fearful of offending churchgoers – has generally looked the other way as thousands of churches have abused their tax-exempt status and violated bedrock principles established by the Founding Fathers.

The traditional bargain between the government and the nation’s churches is simple enough for Sarah Palin to understand: In exchange for the beneficent granting of tax-exempt status that saves each congregation many thousands of dollars a year (or even millions, depending on how mega the church is), the religious community must avoid directly advocating the election or defeat of individual candidates on Sunday morning. That’s not to say that pastors can’t advocate the tenets of their morality in pointed ways during election season – they have an enormous amount of freedom to rail against abortion or gay marriage or (ahem) witchcraft all they like. (By the way, pastors also have the freedom – usually in completely different churches – to rail against hatred or bigotry or war or narrow-mindedness, or imposing one’s supposedly “moral” beliefs on the rest of the citizenry.) (more…)

Ted Asregadoo

This is the first time Barack Obama and John McCain have faced each other as competitors rather than Senate colleagues, and it’s clear that the chumminess of that institution cast a long shadow over the early part of the debate. Both were cordial, often agreed with one another, and had trouble defining themselves as candidates with different ideas on addressing the problems of the country.

It wasn’t until moderator Jim Lehrer pushed the two of them to articulate their differences that we saw that chumminess start to evaporate.  One of the overarching themes of Friday night’s debate was about resources and how best to allocate them. Money, jobs, energy, and even troops were the resources in question, and the politics centered on how much for whom. Tax breaks for oil companies and businesses, or tax breaks for families making $250,000 or less? Which was going to do its economic magic and help the economy recover? Trickle down or bottom up?

On energy, the two candidates were pretty much on the same page, and only differed on details of how much and when. What shocks me the most is Obama’s support for nuclear energy. Why, if he’s so keen on preventing nuclear “suitcase bombs” from going off in American cities, does he not see the danger of nuclear reactors as terrorist targets? Also, almost no attention is being paid to the huge costs to taxpayers in setting up nuclear reactors, and once they are set up, how do you deal with the nuclear waste? Yucca Mountain can’t hold it all. His pragmatism on oil drilling is understandable, but it overshadows his commitment to alternative energy — which, when McCain chimes in, makes it sound like both men don’t mean it.

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We’ve been fairly professional about this up ’til now. However, after this week, my objectivity is gone. Hitch up your sports cup, rant fans: here I go.

President George W. Bush recently visited Monmouth County, NJ to press the flesh for the local candidates. There were several protests to commemorate the event, but one piece of dissension that quietly slipped by was a sign lovingly placed on Laird Road, home to an extensive apple orchard owned by Laird’s Apple Jack Company. The sign read “Mister Bush, do not come here. You are the worst president in history.”

This week, the government is betting the farm on a bailout for Wall Street. Companies allowed to run rampant and wild, trampling business ethics and common sense, are being given a huge financial do-over because, if they don’t get the money, they could run us straight into a depression. If you look at the numbers — the real ones, not the fudged figures our elected officials have been slipping us — you’ll find we’re already in a recession. We were lied to, essentially, because it’s an election year, and if the truth is kept in the darkness long enough, it ceases to be an issue. It ceases to exist. Right? It won’t harm the party, right?

Peer behind the truth-speak. They’ve been saying they want to “avoid recession,” but they really mean “avoid depression” — as in Great Depression. Because Bush allowed his rich cronies free reign, his trickle-down theory has finally short-circuited the works, and guess who gets the golden shower? You the taxpayer, or should I say your kids. You remember all of Bush’s tax cuts and that flaccid, impotent Economic Stimulus Package? You, the next generation and maybe the one after that are going to have to repay it back for many, many years to come. Because George told his white-collared criminal cohorts to go nuts, unrestricted and unencumbered, they have flipped the ultimate gambit on us, blackmailing us to pay up or else the whole  economy gets it.

George W. Bush went after Iraq like a size queen at a stud farm, diverting necessary funds and troops from Afghanistan. Now the Taliban are back and pushing hard to destabilize what little stability there was. Why did he do it? Was it the Iraq oil? Was it a sick vendetta that put his personal grudge against the welfare of the country he runs? Was it a twisted Oedipal foul to show up his father who couldn’t get Saddam Hussein, or was it an in-your-face to brother Jeb who the family, supposedly, had infinitely more confidence in? Does it matter now? The dead are dead. The hands are slicked with blood and oil, and the mastermind of one of America’s darkest days was allowed to slip away because of you, Mr. Bush. I blame you. (more…)

Once again John McCain has chosen chaos over constancy as his presidential campaign …

Oops, I forgot: McCain currently doesn’t have a presidential campaign. It’s been “suspended,” even as he swoops down on Washington to preen around and pretend to inject his “leadership” in the struggle to save our floundering economy. For months Republicans have been blowing smoke up our asses, claiming that Barack Obama is “presumptuous” for drawing huge crowds, holding substantive meetings with foreign leaders, driving around in motorcades … and for requesting briefings from Treasury secretary Hank Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. But what could be more presumptuous than McCain’s gambit to blow up the debate schedule so he can turn Congress’ bailout negotiations into a personal photo-op?

Let’s be brutally honest here: McCain has nothing to contribute to the actual negotiations between Congressional leaders and the current White House. Neither does Obama. Neither man sits on the relevant Senate committees, nor would either man be invited to sit on the Conference Committee that will attempt to reconcile differences between the House and Senate bills that eventually emerge. Today’s sit-down at the White House, for which McCain and George Bush conspired to pull Obama away from his scheduled activities, is mostly a dog-and-pony show; the real negotiations, if they’re not already wrapped up, will continue behind the scenes among staffers from Congress and the Treasury.

You’ve got to give McCain credit, though – he certainly knows how to make a splash. His grandiose display of “statesmanship” yesterday was a P.R. move, pure and simple, but it will probably work like a Pavlovian whistle among the small sliver of the electorate that sends poll numbers careening back and forth. What this says about those folks is another question. Why must the leadership of the free world hinge on a bunch of ninnies who are so easily distracted by shiny objects of no value (Sarah Palin) or offers of free (bi-partisan) joints from a guy who so clearly plans to get us strung out on the usual GOP heroin?

But I digress. There actually is one service McCain can provide in the current negotiations – that of pulling the wackiest of wacko conservatives back from the ledge, and convincing them to sign on to whatever compromise legislation emerges over the next few days. Unbelievably, there remains a core of House Republicans who would rather watch our banking system collapse than betray their conservative “principles” by allowing the government (horrors!) to do something about it. The Democratic leadership wisely has insisted that no bailout plan will come up for a vote without a critical mass of Republican support; McCain probably recognizes that unless such support coalesces, he and his party are likely to suffer such extraordinary losses in November that the party may never recover. (more…)

Between the Devil and the deep blue sea. Those are our options in dealing with this financial mess — or so it seems if you’ve been following events since the initial government bailout of Freddie and Fannie. Our, ahem, esteemed leaders in the Bush Administration have acted in a way that’s all too familiar when there are warning signs in the air: do nothing until critical mass has been reached, then make an unprecedented power grab in the name of security. We’ve seen this before: Bush ignores a report about Bin Laden hell bent on attacking the U.S. - and one method is using hijacking airplanes and flying them into icons of western power. 9/11 happens, and what’s the response? How were we to know that terrorists would use airplanes as missiles?

The run-up to the Iraq war: a case study in scaring the hell out of Americans. You remember, right? That “New Hitler” named Saddam Hussein was this close to getting The Bomb, and if we didn’t act, well, let’s just say mushroom clouds going off in American cities would have been in our immediate future. If that wasn’t enough, just throw in a few references to 9/11, Bin Laden, terrorism and one, two, three, we have a compliant populace ready to surrender those pesky things called rights to the government — all in the name of security and overthrowing the New Hitler.

This, my friends, is crisis politics in a nutshell, and it all comes at a price. How much, you say? Well get this: we’re spending over $300 million a day in Iraq, the cost of creating our newest bureaucracy (The Department of Homeland Security) is roughly $37-40 billion a year, and now with the current financial crisis, Congress is supposed to roll over and play dead while they hand over $700 billion (perhaps $1.8 trillion) to the Treasury Secretary to bail out failing or failed financial institutions. You start to add that up, and you’ll see we’re talking about real money here. Might I add that all of this money is being allocated and spent as both candidates for president are talking about tax cuts. If it all seems a bit unreal, that’s because it is. The debt that the government is incurring won’t be paid by us here and now (because, you know, taxes are evil). Rather, it’s being pushed farther and farther into the future where our profligate debt will be some other generation’s problem. (more…)

I’m not a politics junkie, really. I know that might be hard to believe based on some of my columns over the last year. You’d find support in your disbelief from my family members as they recount the agony I go through while running through the Sunday morning roundtable tortures.

This Sunday, much like last Sunday and the one before it, the buzz was about how John McCain has co-opted Barack Obama’s tentpole strategy of change. Some argue that he is only flipping his deck of cards around, that he utters change while he shuffles out constancy. Others are saying that he actually has presented change, but only one, yet that single one has all but assured him a close run to the White House - Sarah Palin. The other big topic for the talking heads was the collapse and eventual sale of Lehman Bros. Investments and the rapidly plummeting stock prices for Washington Mutual (WaMu) and other notable lenders.

It all started me to thinking about the notion of change beyond the rhetorical slings and arrows. What changes are we actually looking for in this country? Who among us are secure? Who are hanging in, and who have given up? Despite optimistic numbers all summer long, unemployment is at a five year record high, so pervasive that those once rose-tinted figures had to be retro-actively adjusted to gel with the facts. I posed the question to some of my fellow Popdose writers: how are you doing? We’re presenting the responses here as an invitation to you, the readers. Feel free to share your situation with us in the comments section.

A point worth mentioning: this article has been several months in the making and while individual circumstances may have changed from person to person, the viewpoints are still valid, the message still has merit and is presented in that respect.

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If journalism is the first draft of history, and history is argument without end, then Matt Taibbi has fired the opening salvo of a new argument about the current political and religious culture in the United States. I can just see grad school papers 20 years from now with titles like, “The Deranged Decade: The Hegemony of Myth in Political Manipulation, 2000-2008.”

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire is laced with gallows humor but also some sharp observations about certain sectors of American culture. What Taibbi is concerned with is the way in which Americans construct protective bubbles around themselves with narratives about the big bad world — which are more often than not delusional, deranged, and flat-out wrong. He arrives at this conclusion while reporting on the Iraq war as a “embedded” journalist for Rolling Stone magazine. While stationed at “Camp Liberty”– where 30-foot walls are constructed to protect the soldiers inside from attack (even though bombs are randomly being set off by Iraq insurgents) — Taibbi reasons:

Over time I started to feel in my bones that this weird walled-off archipelago was itself a profound metaphor of American domestic reality … the more I looked at them, the more they reminded me of the freaky-tall bulwarks on King Kong’s Skull Island: masterpieces of architectural overkill, the panic visible in each extra foot of protection, walls designed to keep something in, not out. In America we live in a bubble and the rest of the world is a dangerous mystery, about which many legends may be spread by those cunning and unscrupulous enough to bother. The outside world has become scary enough that most of our people have decided not even to bother trying to figure it out — which is how you end up with such lunacies like They hate us for our freedom and 9/11 was an inside job.

Taibbi takes one for the team (and that would be Team America) by not only embedding himself with U.S. troops in Iraq, but also in the Bible Belt as a convert to Cornerstone Church. He also takes us inside the U.S. government and confirms in one chapter what the likes of Ron Paul and Ralph Nader have been telling us for years: When it comes to the day-to-day business of the government, there is very little that differentiates the Republicans from the Democrats.

He has the unenviable task of faking his way through indoctrination and baptism as a born-again Christian. He often feels terrible about his fake identity, is appalled by the rampant hatred that permeates sermons that are supposed to “lift the spirits” but are often reminiscent of the “Two Minutes Hate” in Orwell’s 1984, and flummoxed by the lack of understanding of not only world geography but a basic understanding of the geography of the United States (one of his fellow converts had no idea where New England was, even after he rattled off the names of the states that comprise the region. Only when he mentioned the New England Patriots did she have a slight understanding of what he was talking about). (more…)

John McCain and Sarah Palin enjoy a light moment on the campaign trail, between feedings.

From yesterday’s New York Times: “Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin’s first run for mayor in 1996, recalled the night the two women chatted about her ambitions. ‘I said, ‘You know, Sarah, within 10 years you could be governor,’ Ms. Chase recalled. ‘She replied, ‘I want to be president.’”

Discuss.