“The Iranian programmes are proceeding apace and represent a strategic threat,” said the diplomat. “The aim is to have a big impact on the Iranian financial system, targeting the economic lifeline of the regime.”

Well, then.  The “diplomat,” who doesn’t sound particularly diplomatic to me, is Ivo Daalder, the US ambassador to the EU.  Earlier, in response to Iran’s hardly surprising threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to even stiffer sanctions, he said this:

“The strait of Hormuz needs to remain open and we need to maintain this as an international passageway,” he told the BBC. “We will do what needs to be done to ensure that is the case.”

Of course, Daalder justifies such acts of war against Iran because of its still-hypothetical nuclear program, and the force of the related “Killin’ Habibs for Jesus” foreign policy from George Bush and Fox News that Obama has eagerly adopted for his own.  No matter the vast majorities of Americans opposed to any more wars, the Hope and Change campaign is in an election year, which means, ironically, no Hope and no Change, when it comes to chicken-hawkery.

Since no other American media figure will do so, with the notable exception of Glenn Greenwald and a few others, let’s look at this, just for a moment, from Iran’s perspective, if only hypothetically:

CHNN: So, Abdul, why do all you dusky-hued sand niggers want nukes?

ABDUL: So you fat whiteys won’t bomb us and steal our oil.

CHNN:  That couldn’t possibly be the reason.  Isn’t it really because you hate our freedoms?

ABDUL:  What freedoms?

CHNN:  Never mind about that.  Next, we go to Pamela Geller….

It’s useless.  Now that “American Exceptionalism” has become our national religion, even the ostensibly “liberal” politician pretending to be president must beat the war drums until we as a nation are left limbless and caterwauling like the guy in the Monty Python movie.  Unlike politicians, ordinary people can see that we never “win” wars, we just have them, and pay for them with our futures.  And unlike media stars who “cover” our overlords, we actually care if their ballooning expenses are bankrupting us.  Sadly, wars, like every other major decision we as a country make, have been moved upstairs, and nobody has any say in the matter except those who profit from them.  Democrat, Republican, it doesn’t matter; the latter will loudly demand more wars and more money for them, while the former will do so too, only more, uh, diplomatically.

One dreadful consequence of the current Republican disarray, for ordinary people anyway, is that it leaves Obama free to pick useless, unwinnable fights hither and yon while everyone’s busy snickering at his opponents.  The worst is that nobody cares, and why would they?

Orwell must be rolling over in his grave.

It’s fairly easy to see how such astonishingly authoritarian, anti-democratic  thinking, worthy of any kleptocratic dictatorship, has become mainstream enough to be casually bandied about by serious presidential candidates.  This imperial disdain for the lower orders has been quite aggressively sold to us by a lazy, insecure, and compromised media owned by some of the world’s most ruthless and degenerate corporations.  Mrs. Alan Greenspan, an ol’ cocktailhag also known as Andrea Mitchell, marveled at how Mitt channeled the the beauty of the mythical Saint Reagan, when, to most observers, he churlishly sneered at an uppity 99%er, “America’s right and you’re wrong.”  Morning in America seems to have, in this case, awakened to a nasty hangover; Mitt may not drink, but releasing those hundred-page tax returns could cause a headache, too.  And it hardly needs mentioning that simultaneously fellating the rich while pissing on the poor (or dead Afghanis, as the case may be…) is the whole point of Fox News; they just throw in the racism and chest-thumping to bring in the rubes.  A good offense is always the best defense with that crowd, and South Carolina seems to have awakened that instinct in the usually robotic Mitt.

It’s a bit more difficult to understand why Americans, especially those on the right, for whom “freedom” and “liberty” are supposedly so sacrosanct, not only acquiesce, but actually cheer, when a few hundred obscenely wealthy people get together and tell their candidate to go out and inform Americans that whatever happened to all the money is simply none of their business.   For a person like Romney, who has lived his life blissfully free from the prying ears and eyes of the little people, it must be deeply annoying to suddenly have to hear the words of a non-underling; no wonder he got so crabby.  For a normal person, however, who has to endure the slings and arrows of everyday existence, I wouldn’t expect such a thing to sell.

But sell it does, and I think the reason is as obvious as it is depressing.  Even in the heyday of the “liberal media,” when media ownership was much more diverse and competitive, both newspapers and TV networks could still often be stymied by powerful and corrupt interests, be they corporate or governmental.  But the governmental ones were, by definition, public, and therefore less completely opaque, so it was less arduous and dangerous to expose their misdeeds.  The corporate ones, on the other hand, are able eschew all accountability,  armed as they are with legions of expensive lawyers and, when that doesn’t work, somewhat less expensive hired thugs.  Sadly, the corporate model is now being adopted by what we used to think of as our democratic government, a bleak coda to an era when corporations became people and actual people became, well, the help.

The last vestige of flesh and blood people having any power great enough to tame gigantic and rapacious corporations, our federal government, has decided, quite recently, to just admit that it isn’t really ours, no matter how much it costs us.   In this sense, Romney is only ratifying what was a “bold” step by President Bush, a “pragmatic” one by President Obama, and by the time Romney came along, Reaganesque:  Corporations are right; we (the people) are wrong.  Glad that’s been cleared up.

Well, who could it have been?

President Obama, naturally.  If ever a politician deserved to lose an election (or had less reason to win one), it’s this guy, to whom the concept of rewarding one’s friends and punishing one’s enemies somehow got lost in the shuffle.  The right wing went nuts over Andrew Sullivan’s Newsweek cover story, “Why Are Obama’s Enemies So Stupid?”,  only because they correctly saw their slack-jawed faces in the mirror, but Sullivan actually wrote that Obama’s critics on the left were a bunch of dummies, too.  Really?  Sully trots out as unappreciated successes things Obama had nothing to do with, like ending the Iraq war, along with things he opposes, like more states adopting gay marriage and the growing movement to legalize marijuana.  He also touts the corporate-friendly and deeply unpopular health care reform as though it’s something liberals ought to be doing cartwheels over.

I’m left wondering why Obama’s supporters are so stupid, assuming they exist.  The right hates Obama regardless of what he does; yet he invariably chooses to appease them anyway.  The left hates Obama because of what he does or, just as often, what he doesn’t do, and on this score, he’s nothing if not consistent.  He’s as much of a hippie-puncher as, say, Spiro Agnew, but Village bloviators like Sullivan think hippies should love him anyway, perhaps because they smoke so much pot that they can’t remember what happened yesterday.  Another, wiser Nixonite, John Mitchell put it perfectly when he said to a disillusioned supporter, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

Obama is undoubtedly good at saying things liberals might like; unfortunately he’s also a master at doing things that disappoint when they don’t outright offend.  Worse, the pattern is so predictable at this point that when he does do something marginally good, like, say, postponing approval of the odious Keystone XL pipeline, everyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that as soon as he’s reelected, that thing will be built so fast it will make your head swim.  Remember when the telecoms were going to be refused immunity for their warrantless spying?  Remember when Gitmo was going to be closed?  For nearly every Bush-like policy he has eagerly embraced, there’s a matching speech about how awful that policy was, when it was someone else’s.

On the outside, Obama’s campaign (I hesitate to call it an administration) appears to think that its serial capitulations to its rabid enemies will make it seem reasonable and post-partisan to “Independents,” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  On the inside, I suspect that they are comfortable in the knowledge that Republicans are unelectable by reason of insanity.  As has been said before, Hope and Change is Obama-ese for We Suck Less.  That’s their strategy, and they’re sticking with it.

Of course, sucking up to business interests that are anathema to liberals is probably wise, given the out-and-out bribery unleashed by Citizens United, but I do think that so doing kisses goodbye to the millions of small donations for which Obama was rightly famous in 2008.  He thinks he can win without us, which may be true, but that doesn’t make it any less dispiriting.

The GOP has a knack for invoking desperate times, which invariably call for desperate measures, as a last-ditch effort to sell the unpopular and damaging policies they’ve espoused for more than a hundred years.  Of course, this approach is considerably more problematic when times are good: take the 2000 election, when George W. Bush was reduced to calling himself a “Compassionate Conservative,” and yet more absurdly, call for a “humble” foreign policy, but even with such blatant lying, he still had to steal the election to get in office.  You see, Americans are far less prone to turning upon one another when it appears that there is enough to go around; the last time we witnessed such a phenomenon they collectively vowed it would never happen again.

And boy howdy, did they ever succeed.  As the headline in the Onion so presciently put it when W was illegally installed, “Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over.”  Of course, the Onion could not have possibly have foreseen that in 2012, we would be sporting a palm-dotted gulag at Guantanamo, a substantial constituency cheering for torture, two lost wars, a growing police state at home and abroad, nearly a quarter of Americans in poverty, and a Democratic President cowed into accepting all this, but they were pretty close. They predicted, correctly, massive deficits, environmental degradation, foreign wars, an increase in inequality, and more. They didn’t predict, however, that there would by now be a bipartisan consensus on the necessity of getting rid of Medicare, Social Security, and public education; bombing and assassinating whomever we choose, and wiretapping Americans without warrants. Nor did they dare to predict that Republicans would now have moved on to preventing black people from voting, banning contraception, eliminating unions, and raising taxes on poor people; a rare failure of imagination from the kids in Madison which must make Karl Rove chuckle to this day.
The term “Disaster Capitalism” had not yet been coined back in 2000, but it was already in effect. Not satisfied that vulgar appeals to racism, homophobia, and what have you were softening Americans up sufficiently for a full-on putsch, the righties decided to take away the one thing that really matters, the American Dream. For decades, this amorphous and highly manipulated concept led the credulous to believe that massive inequities were the cost of doing business in a “free” market, and a little human suffering was worth it, since someday we might all be Donald Trump, albeit hopefully with less silly hair. While the dream was allowed to live, both in theory and practice, Americans would broadly support at least the slimmest of a social safety net and choose as wisely as they were allowed to between guns and butter.
Well, no self-respecting Republican could put up with that, so the only answer was to ruin the economy, once and for all. People who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, after all, are far less likely to care about civil liberties, polar bears, drinking water, edible food, safe drugs, or a boiling planet. If your political goal is to have a government like Somalia, you have to have a populace that lives like Somalians. Mission Accomplished, I’d say.
The only problem is that after your “success” in ruining the country, you might not be so popular, so further measures must be taken. Let corporations buy elections outright, rather than covertly as they did in the good old days. Concoct false crises, say the national debt or something called voter fraud, to drown out more practical concerns. Find new scapegoats, or simply drag out old ones, to focus the blame on whomever you never liked anyway. But most of all, continue to ruin the economy; why mess with success?
Until quite recently, the plan was working swimmingly, but as we move into 2012, more and more people are seeing that the emperor has no clothes. Unfortunately, the sorely compromised Democrats, led by President Obama, seem both unwilling and unable to capitalize on this, and preach the same austerity and belligerence that brought us down this path.
Good luck with that.

As the Clown Car heads for South Carolina, let’s not forget what they’re getting into; for all the talk of “Family Values” certain to be polluting the airwaves, the fact is that the whole state is teeming with drunken, trailer park idiots like the genius above.  Until, say, yesterday, Thad Viers was considered a “rising star,” in that murky firmament, and was favored to jump from state government to the US Congress as a Republican in the newly-created 7th district.

Now, in these parts, it makes no never mind if you’d, say, been arrested a time or two for harassing and threatening your ex-wife’s new boyfriend, been in a drunken brawl now and again, or even rumored to have slept with Governor Nikki Haley.  (Threats to sue over this slanderous charge were never pursued by either party….)  But it seems to cross some line if you get arrested right during election season, and ol’ Thad did decide to drop his run for congress today after a five-month stalk-o-rama of his latest ex-girlfriend that included unwanted visits to her work and home and unceasing texts and phone calls, came to light.

As the video above shows, the guy’s looks match his personality, and one must wonder how awful the rest of South Carolina men are that he is even able to find women to harass.  One did pour a drink on his head; maybe she was from out of town……    Perhaps the fact that he still has a full set of teeth set him apart, but a few more bar brawls ought to take care of that in a hurry.  But then there’s the brains; the guy who rails, proudly, for 40-odd painful seconds about “unmandated funds” and whatnot, then proudly posts the semi-coherent babble on his YouTube page, fancied himself Congressional timber until literally hours ago.

Sheesh.

First of all, it was clear last night that Newt Gingrich, who was unaccountably surprised at his loss, will now dedicate the rest of his life and non-Tiffany’s budget to clobbering Mitt Romney, presumably starting today.  Most deliciously, his tactics will include calling him a “moderate,” and a lying flip-flopper about it, to boot.  That ought to go over big with the “Live Free or Die” crowd up in New Hampshire, not to mention the God-botherers of the old Confederacy, without whom no Republican could hope to win.  Up till yesterday, the Frothy Mixture had no reason or inclination to attack Romney, but as his victory speech made clear, Santorum plans to attack Romney as the pampered, out-of-touch 1%er he is, which will resonate with pretty much everybody in the country with the possible exception of, say, Jamie Dimon.  Of course, Ron Paul has been leveling similar attacks, with some justification, at all the Republican wannabes, but to little effect outside his own base; things are clearly different now.

Best of all, this utter crackup on the right emboldened President Obama to finally go ahead and pick a fight with Senate Republicans, something that somehow never crossed his mind before.  He overrode Mitch McConnell’s phony “pro forma” non-recess and appointed Richard Cordray as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  The spittle-flecked response from Grandma McConnell was as tone-deaf as it was predictable; so much so that even former nude model and soon-to-be-ex Senator Scott Brown had to side with Obama against his own party.  Turns out that fighting the good fight for the banksters is about as popular as Santorum, the man or the stuff, in a whorehouse.  Nobody told the Republicans, evidently.

In sum, the Republicans’ stupidity, mendacity, and all around repulsiveness are not only being loudly promoted by the Republicans themselves, but the resulting hubbub is actually creating room for the President to belatedly try to differentiate himself from them.  Just imagine what the reaction will be to Romney et al relentlessly calling Obama a socialist, while Republican voters are just as relentlessly being told by members of  their own party that the candidates saying this are the scum of the earth….  it won’t just help Obama, it might make socialism not look that bad, either.  Especially when Romney becomes the bloodied nominee and is finally forced to release his tax returns.

In this scenario, Obama may end up being forced to become more liberal, since the Republicans are not only writing all his campaign commercials for him, but they are also, one by one, discrediting each others’ lame-brained sloganeering that passes for a platform at the same time.

Let the Bum Fights begin; they couldn’t hurt, and they might just help.

Last week the New York Times bothered to run a two-page foldout on the preposterous “policy positions” of the candidates, which are, except for Ron Paul, exactly the same.  None believe in Climate Change, and all fall over each other endorsing policies that will radically exacerbate it.  All would further cut the absurdly low taxes on the rich while cutting programs for everyone else.  None would produce anything that approximates a balanced federal budget, though they all risibly claim to be fanatically opposed to  runaway “spending.”  All are opposed to Obama’s mild and incremental health care reform and see socialism lurking in the pathetically weak Dodd-Frank banking law.  All are opposed to environmental protection of any kind, and on social issues, all are somewhere to the right of the Taliban.  All, except Paul, are in favor of war with Iran and increasing our destructive support of an increasingly belligerent Israel.  All, except Paul again, think torture is the greatest thing since high-fructose corn syrup, of which they naturally are all in favor, too.

In short, every one of these “candidates” is nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake, and yet the media treats them as though they are, well, fit to run for office.  Paging David Gregory…..  They’re not.   Romney, presumed to be the “electable” one, is thought of as such for no reason other than that he is blessed with the backing of the Republican Money Machine; no American has ever admitted to actually liking the guy.  It must be dispiriting to be a Fox-addled bible-thumper and come to the dawning realization that your party doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your opinion; vote for Romney or be saddled with the Kenyan commie for four more years.

No wonder they flocked to such buffoons and cretins as Cain, Perry, Bachmann, Trump (!), and on and on.  When you’re both frothingly angry and willfully stupid, poor decision making comes with the territory.  The latest flavor (heh) is Santorum, the most universally despised and pathetically hopeless of them all.  Nonetheless, today the media is treating as worthy of discussion his momentary bounce into third place, as though his 18 point loss, kooky obsession with sex, and creepy stillborn fetus story aren’t inherently disqualifying.

Of course, it is nothing more than the deep conflicts of interests that plague our corporate media that force them to pretend to believe this is some sort of contest; they’re going to be buried in billions of dollars of advertising revenue even as they get to avoid tedious, expensive reporting on anything that actually matters.  Romney will, of course, be the nominee, and despite the fact that Obama is a lousy President, he’ll still lose.  But he’ll do so by a disturbingly small margin, owing to lazy reporting and the shallow, idiotic “balance” that favors the biggest liar in every race.

Despite the fact that Romney, in the eyes of the media, anyway, is seen as “moderate,” the positions he’s been forced to take in order to appeal to the looney “base” of the Republican party are indistinguishable from any other denizen of the Clown Car, but that is probably not why he’ll lose, unfortunately.  Nor will he lose because his tax returns will reveal that he pays less tax than a WalMart greeter, although in a just world, that too would be a deal-breaker.  Sadly, Romney will lose because A) He’s a Mormon, and B) He’s a Massachusetts “liberal.”  Rush Limbaugh said so.

That’s the bed Republicans, with a healthy assist from a brain-dead media, have made for themselves, and Romney is destined to lie in it.  The rest of us will just have to put up with ten months of unadulterated horseshit to get there.  Happy New Year.

As we approach the 2012 elections, I have to admit grudgingly sympathizing with the poor Republican contenders on  some level; everywhere you look, one (hilarious) presidential aspirant after another has to deal with the fact that large blocs of their party hates them, for one reason or another.  The reasons, to a sane person at least, often seem a bit unfair:  the party of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay “hate” Newt Gingrich for being a corrupt Washington Insider with a tenuous connection to reality?  The party of David Vitter and Rudy Giuliani “hate” Mitt Romney for (barely) straying from Christianist orthodoxy, fully clothed?  What the hell?

Well, let’s call it what it is, an embarrassment of riches.  Long ago, before Fox News (!) and 24/7 hate radio, conservatives realized that the only reason, given their relative wealth, that they didn’t bestride the world like a Colossus was that their ideas were both dumb and detrimental to most Americans, let alone other humans on earth.  In his infamous 1970 Memo, which led a bonkers, elitist ideologue to a Nixon lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell spoke for fellow plutocrats in saying that, essentially, the far-too-comfortable rabble has caught on to our scams.  We’d better have a Plan B, but fast.

That plan, of course, was to flood the public discourse with propaganda from think tanks, media outlets, and newly endowed “professors” to spout the plutocrat line, which, as you might expect, wouldn’t be too successful if other opinions were heard.  Thus, the strategy’s practitioners, chief among them Nixon himself, decided that rather than bothering wih refuting liberal ideas, still a somewhat tall order to this day, they would focus on refuting liberal people, whom, duly discredited, would finally shut up once and for all.  The Hate Campaign was born.

This wasn’t the easiest proposition, understandably, given that the poorer and less educated group they were attempting to persuade would undoubtedly be harmed by their ultimate goals.  They had to go for hate, and go big, before anybody wised up.  To this end, taxes, which largely went, than as now, to support the military and (then, anyway) beloved entitlement programs for white people, had to be re-branded as extravagant cash transfers to shiftless Darkies; wars had to be sold as rare opportunities for vicarious triumph to an increasingly marginalized and powerless populace, and respecting foundational civil liberties had to be portrayed as dangerous capitulation to treacherous hordes abroad and at home.

It’s a neat trick, really….  Convincing the dumbest and most resentful in any society that everything, and I mean everything, they don’t like is somehow connected. Once you’ve done that, you’re off to the races.  You see, most people, particularly in the hard times Republican policies invariably create, are left looking around for solutions to what ails them; the key to eliminating such dangerous receptivity is to have the most reasonable, but unwanted, solutions pre-tainted by painstakingly encouraged cultural biases.

With Nixon, this meant a whole lot of industrial-grade hippie punching, and it worked so well at he time that it’s still in wide use despite its often tinny, anachronistic feel.  It may be both dumb and insultingly cheesy to lots of people, but the fact that the hippie’s modern-day equivalents want to, say, protect the environment, reliably creates a massive call amongst rank-and-file righties for more pollution has become, for polluters, anyway, the gift that keeps on giving.  That the (now proven correct) resistance to our retarded, failed adventure in Iraq was advanced by  our younger and less conservatively attired Americans means that Fox News “culture warriors”  will dutifully scream for more wars until kingdom come, sooner rather than later.  And on and on.

As I’ve said many times before, this is a project that has become a victim of its own success.  Hopelessly saddled with a befuddled band of followers whose hate, like a 1960′s Alabama firehose, must constantly be turned  on something, the Republicans are finding that even their own bespoke suits might get unseemly wet spots.  Just mention without utter disdain an idea that at some point a “liberal” might have ever endorsed, no matter how mundane, and the fury is unleashed.  George Bush found this out when he tried to hand his anti-labor supporters an immigration bill, John McCain was similarly chastened when he said, from experience, that torture wasn’t okay, and Ron Paul, who is momentarily leading the polls in Iowa, was nonetheless almost booed off the stage for the impermissible effrontery of talking about pointless, costly wars like they were a bad thing.

In their relentless pursuit of hate-driven infallibility, Republicans have painted themselves into an interesting corner when it comes to sewing up a presidential election….  Their people have been taught, carefully, you might say, to hate so much that they can no longer love.  Even their own candidates.

It couldn’t have happened to nicer guys.

There was this annoyingly triumphant song we used to sing in school about what a keen place Oregon was back in 1915 or so, and even as a kid I thought it was weird.  The chorus ended with, “Forward on and on…  Hail to thee, land of heroes, my O-re-gon.”

Never mind that the lyricist pronounced the final syllable the way clueless New Yorkers do, rhyming with “on,” as though my state were some hostile planet on Star Trek, they also, until recently anyway, missed the point. You see, as a more perceptive ad campaign a dozen or so years ago put it, “things look different here.”  We aren’t into this forward on and on thing.   What Oregon is rightfully famous for is limits.  Limits on suburban sprawl, embodied in our iron-clad Urban Growth Boundary.  Limits on waste, embodied in our first-in-the-nation Bottle Bill.  Heck, until the recent real estate boom, we had a cap on parking spaces downtown, based on the correct assumption that too many parking places turns, well, paradise into a parking lot.

At least since the 1960′s, even our Republicans were considerably to the left of, say, Barack Obama, as fervent advocates of the environment, women’s rights, and what have you.  As Republicans went progressively more down the rabbit hole of righty insanity in recent years, we’ve become one of the bluest of blue states; no Republican has won the governorship since 1984 and we got rid of our last Republican Senator in 2008.  In that race,  bland and moderate-seeming corporatist Gordon Smith was handed his smarmy Mormon ass by liberal hero Jeff Merkley, and it seemed all was right with the world.  For a minute, anyway.

Unfortunately, we have this other  Democratic (!) Senator, Ron Wyden, who yesterday revealed he’s sort of a taller and ganglier, but equally homely Joe Lieberman, at least as Democrats go.  He teamed up with that rising (in the Village, anyway..) star, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin to offer a “bipartisan” plan to achieve the Republican’s 40 year old goal: getting rid of Medicare.  His plan, which I don’t need to tell you was hailed as “bold” by the MSM, was so much like Ryan’s utterly toxic concoction from last year that even President Obama fled the room in terror.  That’s bad.  What few other Democrats still worthy of the name there are in the House and Senate were at least as unenthusiastic.  Predictably, Republicans were smugly silent; getting their way by not doing anything is just how they, quite understandably, roll these days.

A lot of Oregonians who remember the old Wyden, before he hopped on the 1% Senatorial gravy train, may have been surprised; he ostentatiously allied himself in his early career with the “Gray Panthers,”  a feisty group of hags and geezers vehemently opposed to anything that would harm seniors.  At the time, I thought it was a wise move, at least politically; in a room full of eighty-somethings, Wyden managed to look both handsome and dynamic, at least comparatively.

Unfortunately, as he’s aged, he has, improbably, gotten a little dynamic,  particularly when it comes to defending our murderous Health Care Industry.   Although no one noticed at the time, he loudly introduced a “compromise” proposal just as Obama was crafting his then-promising Health Care Reform, which coincidentally contained all the unpopular and ineffective BS that turned the eventual bill into a millstone around every Democratic neck, including the President’s.  No doubt fortified by a lot of campaign money that must have resulted, Wyden cleverly decided not to take credit, but rather move on to the next thing, and the dollars that would come from that.

Okay, that’s politics in the new century, but really,  a nominal Democrat teaming up with Ryan?  Even in his home state and among Republicans, Ryan is about as popular as crabs in a whorehouse, and the least lucid teabaggers emphatically want government’s filthy hands off “their” Medicare.  Aside from, say, Citizens United, there’s simply no way to explain such behavior.   But no other explanation is needed, is it?

Wyden needs to have a primary opponent, but fast.  Here in the “land of heroes,” we’ve been willing to vote for him for his personality, not his looks, for way too long.  Now, like in the final scene of “The Picture of Dorian Grey,” they’ve become the same thing, and Oregon Democrats deserve better.  He isn’t up for reelection until 2014, by which time he’ll probably have bought a Florida compound next to Rush Limbaugh’s, but I’ll be waiting.  Forward on and on.

To arrest one foreign car-making executive under Alabama‘s new tough immigration laws may be regarded as a misfortune; to arrest a second looks like carelessness.

A judge has acted to put a Japanese employee of Honda Motor Company out of his misery by dismissing immigration charges against him, three days after he was booked under Alabama’s new immigration laws that have been billed as the most swingeing (sic) in America. Ichiro Yada is one of about 100 Japanese managers of the company on assignment in (the) southern state.

Aside from the mystifying Anglicisms and sloppy editing, the Guardian’s rather easy reporting shows that the American media is, as usual, making utter asses of themselves by ignoring such a significant story.  Oh, we’ve heard here and there about crops rotting in the fields, children fleeing schools, and families escaping this racist hellhole under a cover 0f darkness, but any indication that the whole law, and the politicians profiting from it, are another depressing example of how contemptible bigots are cynically used for political advantage by those with nothing better to sell, is striking in its absence.

In a more enlightened era, it was said that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels, but after the excesses of the Bush era, patriotism as an excuse for every domineering outrage is pretty much played out.  So racism has inevitably become the new patriotism, since its practitioners are even more dumb and desperate than the flag-wavers, and are thus that much more unquestioningly  loyal to their overlords.  In the grinding, dire, and endless recession they’ve deliberately created, and aren’t through exploiting, the 1% and their concubines must plunge ever deeper into untapped sociopathology to find, well, Dittoheads.  Why not blame the Darkies and Mexicans for all of your growing problems, when you’re the sort of dumb redneck predisposed to watch (and worse, believe) Fox News?  It isn’t a strategy so far tainted by failure, after all.

It’s a neat trick, really, with the caveat of its lack of relationship to reality.  Like other southern states, famous for their appalling schools and lack of rudimentary government services, Alabama unwittingly embraced the Global Economy by luring international manufacturers with the promise of docile, dumb, workers who would work for shit and thank you for it.  Naturally, Galtian CEO’s from socialist dystopias like Japan and Germany knew a good thing when they saw it; their countries had wantonly abandoned slavery a century or so before Alabama went to war to preserve it; indeed, they want to bring it back.  There’s money to be made from people that stupid.

Of course, both Germany and Japan are rightly infamous for their past (and current) xenophobia, and like all perpetrators of racist authoritarianism, they’re not so keen on being subject to it.  Given that, it’s too bad they picked Alabama.  What they didn’t realize was that in a place rife with cousin breeding, you only need an accent and a slight shift in pigment to be seen an a “furriner.”  The Germans found, much to their chagrin, that being white wasn’t enough; the Japanese found that being relentlessly industrious wasn’t enough, either.  Alabamans, or at least their police, evidently only recognize the legitimate citizenship of those to whom they’re directly related.

Doesn’t matter if you’re an executive; doesn’t matter if you’ve fired a lot of uppity people.  If you’re not a drawling, tooth-shy piece of white trash, then it’s off to the hoosegow with you, fancy-schmancy boss or not. This isn’t exactly going over.   When Jessica Mitford wrote about how Deep South places like Alabama in the 1060′s, by closing public amenities to avoid integrating them, were cutting off noses to spite faces, she didn’t know the half of it.  The Germans and Japanese are now finding out about the other half.