Barack Obama missed two great opportunities last night to pitchfork John McCain:

When McCain gimped around the debate stage warning “My Friends” that because of Wall Street’s  financial constipation and panic “we’re gonna hafta cut back on entitlements,” Obama failed to point out that McCain means cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare–the two biggest entitlement programs after those dosing bankers and generals with hundreds of billions of borrowed bucks.

McCain certainly does not mean putting the rich and military on dollar diets.  He is rich and he has been military.  He would not spit in the fountains from which both classes suck their elixirs of life.

No, he means putting fogies like me on food stamps by cutting back Social Security and into pine boxes early by cutting back on our medical care.

Obama let these pass.  Too bad. Many of McCain’s supporter are geezers living at or near poverty (one of the great American towns) and depending on government-paid docs to keep them walking and talking.

(McCain is still talking but his shuffling and the growing hump on his back makes one wonder about his arthritis.)

Obama missed another chance to pish McCain’s balloon when in the heat of Wall Street’s self-immolations McCain avoided intoning what has been Republican mantra until just the past couple of weeks: Change Social Security to cause each sweating for wages to plop her payments for Social Security into the dry palms of Wall Street stock jockeys.  These would have, for a fee, invested her financial future in such sure things as Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, AIG and other outfits that since Labor Day have gone bellybutton up.

Had McCain and Bush had their way on Social Security last year or the year before, most working Americans would have thrilled in the past week to see their Social Security deposits evaporate.

Obama missede these opportunities.  Like McCain he instead dropped worm-size tidbits from stump speeches into the maws of onlookers. Neither candidate had anything new to say.

Fortunately for Obama, McCain shambled around the stage, looking the old man he is, while Obama, still lithe and fit, appeared upright, calm and assured.

Presidential elections to date (all between white men) have shown that the candidate who appears taller will win.  If the candidates appear the same height, then the candidate who seems to have the most hair will win.

(A smart candidate, from the start of campaigning, will stand upright, wear elevator shoes, be trim and hide his pate under an excellent toupee.)

Obama seems taller, trimmer and more hirsute and upright than McCain.  But in this election there enters Obama’s skin.  In America, black trumps white.  If like Obama you’re half white and half black, you’re black–and subject to the white citizenry’s prejudices.

Prejudice against black as opposed to prejudice for height and hair may put McCain and his intellectual mentor, Sarah Palin–one in dotage and the other a dolt– in charge of the nation and the health of the world.  We would have the depressing in charge of  the depression.  That truly would be the holistic pits.

Sarah Palin may be as ignorant of foreign policy as a malamute pissing on a Wasilla  telephone pole, but she knows how to snarl and snap and lie–for which in Alaska she has earned a reputation as a first-class practitioner of prevarications and back stabbings.
Along with other Republican pit bulls with and without lipstick Palin Saturday accused Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”
She said it twice about Obama’s knowing a founder of the Weather Underground who led that organization when Obama was eight years old and living in Hawaii.  Obama, it seems, lives in the same Chicago neighborhood, served on a charity board with the alleged terrorist, now a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago who long before Obama was old enough to vote faded into an ordinary liberal.
So far Palin has lied to Americans with a wink-wink and leer about the Bridge to Nowhere, which she hustled for but now says she stopped. She never mentions that as Alaska’s governor she has the state now building the Road to Nowhere, which will stop where the Bridge to Nowhere would start.  It’s an old political ploy in Alaska, my home state, to build a road to where a bridge must be built and then say, see, we need a bridge or otherwise the road is a waste. She implied she sold a governmental jet on E-Bay; she didn’t, she gave it away to a campaign supporter.  She said she welcomed a legislative investigation into whether she canned the head of Alaska’s State Troopers for not firing her hated ex-brother-in-law; she refuses to testify in that investigation and has ordered her staff and  her husband, a yokel known in Alaska as “First Dude,” not to testify.  The list goes on.
Palin’s  Republican handlers, headed by one of Carl Rove’s chief henchmen, know that a giant smear campaign has started against Obama, thanks to the rich reactionaries who fuel the Republican Party’s private efforts to win and stay in office and damn the truth or anything like the truth.  Palin is their resident Barbie Doll to wrap around the big lie.  Soon she’ll be yowling that Obama is Beelzebub and Satan’s Mother.
Well, her handlers have finally found one thing she’s good at: Slander.
And what about that guy she’s allowing to run with her, John McBush, the self-anointed hero and self-baptized truth teller?  Will he snap her garters and tell her to stop fibbing about Obama?
Damned unlikely.  It’s plain he will do anything–anything at all–to be president of the United States and finally outrank his daddy, the admiral, including choosing a nincompoop like Palin to run for vice president on the Know Nothing ticket.
That choice alone and her obvious incompetence at anything except ruining reputations speaks to how we must overhaul the way we elect presidents and vice presidents.  McBush and Palin are beginning to make Caligula look like a statesman.

When last night the debate between Barack Obama and John McCain piddled to its soporific end, I shuddered with dread–dread for pronunciation of English among the ruling classes in the United States.

“Gonna.”  “Gotta.” “Hafta.”  “Tuh.”

Two U.S. senators, one with a law degree from Harvard and the other with a degree from Annapolis, speaking with the commonplace accents of high-school sophomores after a few drags on a joint.

“Tuh” for “to” of course now slogs the tongues of those who don’t wish their speech to stand out from those changing tires or tossing hotdogs at stock-car races.  “Tuh” hallmarks the speech of the present grease monkey in the White House, who despite his East Coast private-school and Yale educations now drools a quaky hick-Texas accent for the rest of us to try to translate.

“Tuh” also flops from the lips on TV of the richly suited former sports jocks gabbling forth endless details on the differences between crotch pieces for hockey and for volleyball and professional badminton.

How long will it take before American dictionaries offer “tuh” as an alternative for “to?” Just as long as it takes for lexicographers to recognize that most of the population cannot look up that preposition without first hunting for “tuh,” the only pronunciation they know.

“Gonna” for “going to” has even passed into newspaper writing and headlines.  It won’t be long before “going” in the conjugation charts and dictionaries simply will show as “gon’.”

“Gotta” for “got to” (whatever happened to “must” and “should?”) peppered last night’s first head-to-head between Obama and McCain.

So did, lord help us, “hafta” for “have to.”  None of these pronunciations will show spelled out in the transcripts, of course.  Transcribers have a way of cleaning up sloppiness.

Is that all horrified ears could mark in what was supposed to a universe-shaking event, the clash of two political gladiators in the great arena of the American mind as conveyed by TV?

No, one could also hear no original ideas, no witty utterances, no humor, no epigrams, no semblances to oratory or formal rhetoric.  The two senators to me sounded like two TV sports jocks hustling each other over luge statistics without the benefit of beers.

Yes, I know supporters on both sides swooned as one or the other senators dribbled forth bits cut, steamed and canned for and from former speeches.

I didn’t.  I found both boring, commonplace and neither showing the slightest signs of rising out of the treacly trench of presidential campaigning.

Did last night show me one is more equipped than the other to preside over the government of the U.S.?  No.  Alas.  I will vote for Obama because I cannot abide McCain and other Republicans, but I will vote without much hope for inspired leadership or good pronunciation.

This morning, after watching  Sarah Palin being protected against witchcraft as she stood before a Wasilla preacher from Kenya, her back turned, holy texts in her hands, with two adept gents laying their hands upon her gently, I felt mightily relieved:

One more problem of American government solved, this time two years ago before she ran for the governorship of Alaska and won–not just because the witches bounced off her but because the incumbent governor then, Frank Murkowski, a fellow Republican and supremely stupid and arrogant, was despised most Alaskans, including those still wanting to secede from the Union.

As I savored feeling narcotized by this Pentecostal Church spectacle of getting anti-witch insurance in advance, imagine my delight when I chanced on an Associated Press piece–http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008201741_apabsentpalin.html– detailing how the governorship of Alaska is now being run by John McCain campaign staffers.

Even Alaska’s lieutenant-governor, in theory in charge of the state while Palin gallivants about the U.N. inhaling  foreign policy, has to vet with McCain staffers whether he can turn off the office lights at 5 p.m. and trot down the street in Juneau for a quick shot with other politicos in the Baranof Hotel’s saloon.

Only in America can one gaze on such a spectacle of what a free people can do when they undergo cultural lobotomies.

Palin, in case you missed her latest, opines that the nation will dive into Depression if Congress does not give George Bush his way in wanting to rescue his Republican owners by handing them $700 billion that our descendants yet unborn have still to earn.

Imagine a Depression, during which all those Wall Street high rollers would have to stand on street corners peddling Red Delicious apples at five bucks each while on the radio rappers yapped  “Brother, Can You Spare A Ten Spot?”

Palin, of course, knows as much about economics as a poodle peeing on a fire plug. Even so that over qualifies her to serve in Congress and makes her more than equal to that guy running with her, McCain, who admits he knows nothing at all about economics and that’s why he should be president.

McCain hastens with his ignorance back to the Senate to solve the upcoming Depression problem, and Barack Obama plans to join him there for the same thing, the usual American political solution: If you don’t know what you’re doing, smother it in money–other people’s money, your money and mine.

The best investment one can make right now is in green ink, the green ink the government printing presses will be sucking as they run day and night rolling out more and more $1,000 bills worth less and less for the Wall Street bravos to pocket.

Maybe a decent contribution will bring that godly Pentecostal chap back from Kenya to preach by the presses, to beg God to save them from breakdown while outside in the newspapers and on TV witches gibber and in Iceland Palin compares snow machines and bones up on energy policy.

For the 50 years of my adult life I have heard, jaws agape, that Capitalism creates democracy, girds personal freedoms, demonstrates the unwavering effects of something called The Market, which corrects itself and solves all human problems except, well, maybe,  poverty.  (After all, doesn’t God ordain who shall surfeit and who starve for their sins?)

I kenned that like Religion, Capitalism is an excuse peddled by ruling classes to justify what they must do to remain in power.  Put another way, Capitalism and the Market are abstractions to cloak greed.  They are not the only such–Communism is another, Socialism is still another.  In human hands, as opposed to the hands of the angels, all such systems grind away, under a cloud of lies, to distribute wealth in such a way that it ends up mainly in the pokes of a small number who use it to control the rest of us.

Yes, to keep the peasants from sharpening their sickles before they take to the streets, some shekels  must trickle down to keep us underlings in bread and amusements, nowhere more so now than the United States where, until lately, Mammon provided his skilled devotees with wealth never before dreamt of.

But, alas, the golf-club regulars who run Wall Street and related gambling dens have so lied and cheated not only the lower orders but, inevitably, each other that now, thanks to a Republican regime representing the rich, they howl that to avoid disaster they must loot the Treasury to pay for their mistakes.

The President and his Secretary of the Treasury, himself until recently one of Wall Street’s most successful three-card monte dealers, have jettisoned all the conservative  crap about the Market Correcting Itself and have sashayed forward in panic, crying the world will end unless the taxpayers give to Wall Street the biggest hunk of boodle ever grabbed  in history with permission.

If the nation survives this monetary blooding, we and our offspring unto untold generations enjoy the pleasure of paying off this “legal” debt.

In an world where now and then justice occurs, such rapine of the public’s future might stir a decent public uprising, to decorate light poles with tarred and feathered bankers.

But no, the mainstream press and the Congress have prostrated themselves to the untested notion that if we let Wall Street banks fail the world will end.   Neither reporters and editors nor members of Congress truly understand what’s going on and think we all must bow to the cries of anguish emanating from a White House that has showed unerring talent for lying, ignorance and error.

Republicans in Congress of course feed off the rich and support anything that resuscitates  their patrons.  Democrats, alas, know that if they do not go along with the Republican skin game and the economy coughs and wheezes, Republicans will blame them in these final days of endless presidential and congressional politics.  So Democrats drop their pants to pleasure their conservative colleagues.

Our two presidential candidates have lashed themselves to the panic rocket.  Obama agrees to the bailout, even though, if he becomes president, he won’t find a pfennig to spend for the social and economic reforms the country cries for.

As for McCain, my God, when he is not sounding like a high-school sophomore babbling about Americanism to the American Legion, he mutters like the village idiot.   Yep, bail out the banks with all the money we can beg, borrow, steal or, worse, print; cut taxes on the rich and expand our wars against the infidels.

(War, finally, is cheaper than something else in American government.  The bank bailout will cost more in a few seconds than wars have cost since the dunderhead now in the White House ordered our troops to attack Iraq five years ago.  Of course, like the ancient Romans, we may find that we’re broke and we can’t afford to lift a sword anywhere against anybody.)

Yes, the politician mutter: Don’t let the bank boys pay themselves big salaries while they haul all those sacks of bucks out of the Treasury.  Don’t pay any more to each than to support four or five families while in return they hand us all the failed mortgages they dreamed up or bought in hopes they could peddle them off to  greater fools.

Well, the Greater Fools now are us, powerless citizens, who can only watch and groan while the mighty plunder our country.

The New Yorker prides itself on being the journalistic voice of the most literate and liberal population in the United States.  Long time readers and admirers appreciate that “New Yorker” in the title does not refer to the state, not even to the entirety of New York City for that matter, but to Manhattan and particularly the Upper West Side thereof, where any pigeon poop dropped from on high is likely to hit the tonsure of a self-certified super sophisticate lately arrived from Pocatello with manuscripts of childhood novels clutched under each armpit.
So it surprises when The New Yorker’s editors join hands to take simultaneous pratfalls in public, as they do with the cover of their most recent issue–the cover notoriously showing Barrack Obama in the White House dressed in an Al Queda outfit, his wife lugging an assault gun and dressed as a terrorist, all while Bin Laden gazes down from a picture near a fireplace where the American flag burns.
Satire, says David Remnick, the eminent editor of The New Yorker, satire of commonplace beliefs about the Obamas.  Strange all you pressies working for The New York Times and other crudities misunderstand it and think it’s a caricature instead of the Obamas.
But of course Remnick, who gave final approval of the cover and made the decision to run it, is one of the few who see the drawing as satire on the mistaken beliefs of the Great American Unwashed (i.e., those who don’t live in Manhattan).
The mob, alas, sees the cover as, for The New Yorker, a surprising attack on the new liberal savior and his beloved.  The Republican Hate Machine is grinding out copies on the net and elsewhere as fast as it can, figuring journalism from the left can’t get any better than this.  National Review and Wall Street Journal boys and girls are snorting with joy: Obama and Missus pegged, and by the haughtiest of the haught!
As for the rest of us disheveled in the hinterlands, we can laugh too, but with tears in our eyes, at a joke, a satire that doesn’t work.  It was flat in the first place and only worked in The New Yorker’s digs where fresh air is in short supply.  What was supposed to be a piece of savage wit, turned out to only half that: Savage.  No wit.
At least Remnick should say: Shot the poor booger by mistake. Sorry. Deep regrets, and all that.

It warms the soul to read laments about the our nation’s wickedness for abandoning  the “traditional Christian values, in which this country was founded upon,” to quote a recent letter to my local daily, which prints every signed missive that arrives and that a phone call might verify.
One traditional 18th Century Christian value was slavery.  Through silence the Constitution ratified by the 13 states not only sanctioned slavery but also, for apportioning taxes and congressional representation, graciously counted each slave as three-fifths of a human. This was not just a sop for the South but also for parts of the North, where many such 60-percent persons toiled in bondage.
In the slave colonies fervent divines of most Christian stripes (but not Quaker) preached that God had willed some people to be slaves and others to be slave owners and both should be thankful for it.
The nation’s largest Protestant domination, the Southern Baptists, did not formally give up finding Biblical justification for slavery until 1995.
(They still find Biblical justification for subjugating wives to husbands.  It’s no wonder they oppose homosexual marriages, for in those jointures which partner would subjugate the other?)
Indeed, another founding traditional Christian value denied women the right to vote or hold legislative or other high office and in many jurisdictions the right to own property in their own names.  Today’s semi-emancipation of women has helped lead us to where we are, ethically speaking.
Yet another 18th Century value was forcing children, often as young as five, to labor in coal and other mines, in factories, on farms, and as indentured servants leased out to strangers, for five and ten-year terms.
When the nation formed, few religious took umbrage at hanging six and seven year olds for picking pockets or stealing bread or at giving them a good skin-stripping flogging before tossing them into prisons to amuse sexually deprived adult felons.
No doubt the reinstitution of all these spiritually salubrious practices would improve our country’s morals.
Certainly Republican candidates and office holders see that.  They call frequently for larding the federal and state judiciaries with judges who will uphold the morals of the Founding Fathers (not of no-account Founding Mothers, of course): Slavery, child labor, female bondage and like virtues.
Eight will get you five, when the Republican convention opens, before 15 minutes is up, the keynote speaker will be pounding the podium about the values of the nation in 1787 and how we must go back them; and across the land the heads of the millions of constitutional experts who people this country (most have never read the Constitution and therefore keep a pure mind about it) will bob up and down in agreement before their TV sets.
Bring back the past.  Make it our future.

It surprises not that archaeologists now think Stonehenge marks a burial ground for cremated notables of three millennia ago.
The place the only time I viewed it reminded me of several marble orchards I had visited here and there on the West Coast save, perhaps, for a handful of shabbily dressed middle-aged white folks performing incensed Druid rituals in and among the sightseers enduring the rain and wind that sweep Stonehenge.
The archaeologists say they’ve figured out the place was used by worthies with clout because a few objects signifying power have shown up in the holes containing ashes, bones, teeth.
George W. Bush intends to be buried there, not cremated but whole, clutching a symbol of his presidential days, a copy of Mad Magazine.
This news about Stonehenge broke along with reports of White House counterattacks upon the sanity and sense of Scott McClellan, Bush’s former press secretary, whose new book reports that Dr. Goebbels could have profited by taking propaganda lessons from the President, VP Cheney, Carl Rove and other liars.
McClellan offers such tidbits as that Bush told a friend that the parties he used to attend were so wild he couldn’t remember whether he had snorted cocaine and that Bush admitted in private that he had authorized leaking the name of Valerie Wilson, an undercover CIA agent, to the press, as a way of getting back her husband.
Such leaking is a felony under federal law.  No one took a direct fall for the leak.  But Bush and Cheney generously let I. Lewis Libby Jr., Cheney’s right hand, go to prison for lying to FBI agents and a grand jury investigating the crime.  Betting’s strong that Bush will pardon Libby, the good soldier but bad liar, before Bush leaves the White House next January.
Naturally these worthies and their flunkies now attack McClellan as a nut case for speaking of these family matters best left unvoiced, at least in polite Republican circles, where rich white folks dream up ways for poor whites, blacks, Asiatics  and Hispanics to get themselves killed in Army uniforms.
They dare not attack McClellan, of course, of having been loony when he fronted for Bush, Cheney and Rove before the whining White House press corps. That would imply that Bush et. al. were lunatics too.  So they do the obvious: Go tch-tch that McClellan’s  lost his way and is lying about them now to make a few bucks, or worse, to get belly rubs from liberal elitist New York book editors.
Oh, the horror of it!  The truth, that is.

Air Screwum today announced new fares and fees for its nationwide services– prices bound, its officials said, to be copied by the rest of the nation’s domestic airlines.
“We learned from the oil companies that the best way to make money in the airline business is to conspire,” said Jocko Jacks, founder, president, CEO, CFO and CUB (Chief Union Buster) of Air Screwum.
“And the easiest way for airlines to do that, without talking about it other than at cocktail parties, is to rotate being first to raise fares and fees, thus avoiding the possibility of federal price-fixing indictments.  Of course so long a Republican sits in the White House there’s no chance of that happening anyway, but it’s better to keep up the practice than lose your skills.”
Jacks said the only way to view the new Air Screwum fares is to go to Screwum.com, where daily fare changes post each morning beginning at 6 a.m. EST.
“Mainly, thanks to the excuse of rising oil prices, we intend to double our fares by the end of summer.”
He also had flunkies at the press conference handout a sheet of new boarding and onboard fees for all tourist-class passengers:
–To check one bag: $50.
–To check on bag with a bomb: $500.
–Each carry-on bag (no bigger than a shaving kit under new rules): $25.
–Each use of flight attendant to cram a carry-on bag into a space too small: $25.
–Each seat with leg room: $50.
–Each aisle seat: $50, no matter with leg room or not.
–Each seat without a fat person sitting next to it: $100.
–Each use of a toilet: $10.
–Each pee in a toilet: $5.
–Each crap in a toilet: $10.
–Each sheet of toilet paper: $1.
–Each use of soap: $1.
–Each towel: $1.
–Each fart, whether in toilet or in seat, as measured by computerized Fart-O-Meters: $2.
–Each cup of water: $5.
–Each cup of coffee: $7.
–Each peanut (individually packaged): $1.
–Each 100-calorie meal: $10.
–Each heart attack: $1,000.
–Each resuscitation by electric shocker : $5,000 (paid in advance by cash or credit card).
–Each resuscitation by mouth-to-mouth: $10,000, in advance.
–Each hijacking: $1 million, paid before boarding, cash only, Euros only or Saudi oil futures.
–Each last will and testament: $10,000 if on standard flight-deck forms.
–Each in-flight prayer: $50, if Christian; $1 million if Moslem or other.
–Each drink of hard liquor: (Please ask attendants for daily price, minimum $15).
“There are other fees we’ve had to raise to keep ourselves solvent and to keep fuel tanks full enough to get each flight to an airport, even if it’s not the one you want,” Jacks said.
He said there will no cost for sitting for hours on a delayed flight.  “We looked at that,” he said, “but couldn’t come up with a good figure for each breath of stale air.   We will be charging in the future, though, for each rage by passengers crazed by claustrophobia, high temperatures, lack of air, water and toilets.”
“People make a lot out of little things,” Jack said, “an each attendant they beat up costs us money.  So we’re going to have to charge for that.”
Air Screwum’s stock price advanced 40 percent today on Wall Street upon Jacks’ announcement.

John McBush McCain with a prescience unknown in the histories of statesmanship predicts the U.S. war in Iraq will end with victory in 2013–implicity, at the beginning of his second term as president, after a first term impressing the Iraqi rebels with how tough he is and by extension how tough the U.S. Army can become.
McBush’s snorting from the of the bottom of his cup of Orange Pekoe refreshes. Most actual or would-be leaders–witness the man McBush wishes to become–predict wars, at their beginnings, to be over in a few days or months, with their side victorious. All of the leading brains of Europe knew in August 1914 the little spat between the Austrians and Germans and the Serbs, French and English and Russians would see the their troops staging victory parades just as Santa Claus or Father Christmas made his next appearance.
But McBush fought his war in Vietnam, where it took the Vietnamese six years to kick our asses out of their country. On no evidence whatever except the successful stubbornness of several of the sides in the Iraqi religious civil war, McBush hunches that this little dustup ruining his nation’s military forces and treasury and currency and economy may last a little longer–four more years than our defeat in Vietnam.
So far none of the press I’ve read has bothered to see what other sages say about McBush’s reading of the omens. After all, he is either a soothsayer or a fool and either eminently prepares him to lead this great nation where 70 percent of the population routinely report to strangers polling on the phone that they expect Satan to tapdance on the street corners and pitchfork passing souls into the eternal fires.