Yeah—I ran onto it while getting my hair done day before yesterday and was totally engaged with his premise—the change Obama represents to the exercise of authority and power… it was pretty Wow to me…

Now, I have to think about how to apply it for those of us interested in getting things done during the era of the orks and Mordor. ;-)

“This racial anxiety found its sweet spot in the continued refusal of the lunatic fringe to accept the fact that Obama is American born, and is continually reinforced by Palin, Rush Limbaugh and the mainstream GOP by the constant contrast of “real Americans” (scared white people) and their real American common sense Main Street Christian values vs the Marxist soci a list elitist secret Muslim un American policies of Obama and the Democrats. Even when Obama says or does exactly the same thing that Dubya said or did in a similar circumstance, it gets filtered by conservatives into something sinister.”

Its not rational—yes, its partially racial but I think its more, I am going to scream and cry and yell crazy shit because I am angry and scared and facts don’t matter—the only reality that matters is my fear and anxiety and what you are really hearing when I scream about Marxists (what are those by the way) or anything else is that someone just gave me some labels to throw around in my rant. You cannot rationalize with them—they are on a pre-conscious level and it does no good. Manage their rage somehow, we must find a way, but talk them into good sense, no, I dont think so. They must always be handled however with as little emotion as possible—almost blandly. They NEED the emotion to fuel their engine and without it, they have to sustain on their own—its a lot of work over time and that is our hope—letting them run it out. Maybe.

What would happen if some guy named Uncle Sam were to walk into a casino and guarantee that all of the gamblers would be reimbursed for their losses while getting to keep their winnings? The rational course of action would be to keep betting until you win big. If you lost then you would just have to wait for reimbursement at which point you would get to do it all over again. If you couldn’t wait then you could sell your losses (which now have value due to crazy Uncle’s guarantee) at some percentage of loss and start all over again. These bills coming due is in a nutshell what caused the recent crash. The chits that were sold are better known as mortgage backed securities or derivatives and the bets were loans to low income individuals.

All of this was foreseeable to anyone with even a basic understanding of economics. The government in effect tried to make debt an asset instead of a liability and the results were perfectly predictable. The architects of this plan created a market for risky loans out of whole cloth. They made no bones about this and stated explicitly that this was their intention. Even Clinton to his credit admits as much. The government pushed banks and lending agencies to make bad bets that they wouldn’t have made otherwise and insulated them from the consequences. If they didn’t make enough bad bets or if the bets weren’t high risk enough then they would be threatened and punished. In fact a certain percentage of bad bets were required and this percentage increased over time. At the same time interest rates were forced down to make it possible for the bubble to inflate even further and to put off the day of reckoning until the maiximum damage would be done when it burst.

This had nothing to do with the free market since such conditions never exist in a free market. Risk is tied to reward in a free and therefore rational market. It had nothing to do with the principles of limited government that the country is based upon and it had nothing to do with Bush. But it had everything to do with socialism and social engineering of the sort that always ends in tragedy.

Bush, the idiot, saw this coming and warned Congress of it repeatedly. The geniuses in Congress responded by saying that they were willing to roll the dice that no private citizen would have rolled if left to their own devices. We see how that worked out. This is always what happens when you allow the government to gamble with other people’s money.

So now Obama is asking us to double down on stupid by putting the government in charge of other essential areas of the economy and by allowing it to further de-link incentives from results in additional markets such as health care, auto manufacturing and energy production. All of this while Fannie and Freddie are still allowed to exist and all of this while the government funds another round of mortgage roulette by attempting to re-inflate the housing bubble.

Rational people are of course livid. In fact we are almost to the point of open rebellion. We have strayed far enough from what is allowed under our Constitution that the ruling class is on the verge of losing the consent of the governed.

George Washington did not believe the Constitution even allowed a pension to be provided to the Continental Army. And now we have come to the point where the government thinks it is allowed to confiscate the wealth of one generation to give it to another as with the grand ponzi scheme that is Social Security, or to make one man pay for another’s mortgage, or health care, or any other damned thing needed to buy a vote from the economically illiterate.

It is of course madness and can only end as we have recently seen. We are staring into the abyss and the Tea Party is just one of the forces trying to drag us back from the edge. For Christ’s sake even Lech Walensa has come to our country to warn us off the path of tyranny and self-destruction we are pursuing and the Chinese are openly laughing at the naivete of our president’s economic advisers. How bad must things be when even communists think you have gone too far left?

I don’t expect Obama to understand any of this. Not only because he is intellectually incapable of it but because he is wholly ignorant of anything to do with the US or its foundational principles. He is American by birth only. His understanding of the country is shallow. He has an almost cargo cult like understanding of America and of economics. He is familiar with the forms but not the function of the country because he has surrounded himself with anti-Americans and Marxists during his formative years and he has never done an honest day’s work in his life. He does not understand the value of it. He does not believe in any of the things that make America distinct and great. In fact he and his wife are ashamed of those things.

So the American people are left to take matters into their own hands. States are inoculating themselves by passing preemptive laws to void provisions in the proposed health care bill before it is even passed and people are peacefully assembling in the streets. In the advent of continued intransigence on the part of our representatives secession is being openly discussed as an alternative to civil disobedience, or even civil war as people decide whether to fight, or flee, or protest… and everyone just hopes we survive without too much damage being done until the next election cycle.

Elie in post #123 is purblind enough to think all of this is just a problem with adjusting to the 21st century as if people now have some special wisdom that eluded past generations or as if any set of principles would have sufficed to have made America that it once was and can be again. No Elie what you are seeing is the desire not to return to the serfdom of the middle ages where you are only allowed to keep what little the king does not demand of you, or the slavery of the 1860’s where some guy in a big white house on the hill makes decisions for everyone else on the plantation. The US Constitution was a great leap forward for mankind and its framers were infinitely wiser than our leaders today. It was intended to protect us from people like Obama and the current Congress… and Elie. Those of you who want to give away the liberties it grants in return for being bribed with your own money are fools and are not worthy of the sacrifices made by those who have built the Republic whose freedoms and prosperity you enjoy.

The less educated and culturally isolated whites have been the most egregiously manipulated by the conservatives.

Unfortunately, they have been so conditioned to think a certain way that they attack the people who might help them while siding with the people who have exploited them.

The Repigs will gin up some new cultural distraction shiny object and they’ll go back to being easily-led sheep, happily voting to economically roger themselves again and again.

Shorter teabaggers:
“Now that there’s a black man in the White House, I’m suddenly outraged by all the things I supported or didn’t care about when Bush was in office.”

A segment of our country—largely white, but mostly old paradigm economically and culturally, are having a huge adjustment disorder to the 21st century.
...
They are angry, terrified and acting out—they may not actually know what they are doing and the severe mental distress has detached them from rationality, cause and effect. They hunger for power and control and need to believe that they can exert both again no matter how outrageous the context for those demands…

Very interesting. The thing is, Bush/Cheney promised them endless power and control, but couldn’t deliver. The entire appeal of the GOP is based on the empty promise of power and control.

But on top of this is the absolute inability of tea baggers and their sympathizers to accept a black president. By the way, a variation of this would have erupted had Hillary Clinton been elected the first female president.

This racial anxiety found its sweet spot in the continued refusal of the lunatic fringe to accept the fact that Obama is American born, and is continually reinforced by Palin, Rush Limbaugh and the mainstream GOP by the constant contrast of “real Americans” (scared white people) and their real American common sense Main Street Christian values vs the Marxist soci a list elitist secret Muslim un American policies of Obama and the Democrats. Even when Obama says or does exactly the same thing that Dubya said or did in a similar circumstance, it gets filtered by conservatives into something sinister.

For hard core tea baggers and wingnuts, their fear is all they have. They will not give it up, even if Obama brought permanent peace and prosperity. And the GOP will continue to exploit this fear and anxiety because it is their only path to regaining power.

Worse, too many Democrats refuse to deal directly with this fear and anxiety, wanting to be polite, or spiritual, or analytical, or something.

this might be politically incorrect, and a little rough, but if white America for whatever reason votes for Sarah Palin (or any other teabagger candidate) in 2012,

But should we worry? Chances are she’ll quit halfway thru her term, when even she realizes she’s in open water and no ships in sight. So what we really need to be concerned about is who her Vice will be.

Oh, and re: Palmgate. You know Sarah would have tattooed her speech on the foreheads of the front row attendees, rather than be seen using a teleprompter.

I think that our economy and political system has been failing for a while and the people most impacted by the rate of fall—the less educated and culturally isolated whites, have been the most egregiously manipulated by the conservatives. Perhaps their increasing hysteria is because before, they could always pull off running things by beating the fear and hate card loudly enough to motivate their masses to “take over” at election time. Clearly, they are doing that now because they can see that the demographics in the US are not working in their favor anymore and culturally and educationally, they can’t jump in the thick of what they have rebuffed… when they could have gone along with inclusiveness and making the US a big diverse community, they went along with divide and conquer. If you are always the conquerer, that feels fine, even if paranthetically you are an undereducated person with little job prospects—which is why Palin and so many of the Republicans are so attractive to them—why W was too—- see they are stupid just like us and they run things, so we can too! They detach the reality that they don’t run things well and they might explode the country’s economy and political system, but their hunger for control exceeds the need for competence and even stability.

I believe if we get into a power struggle with them, we just reinforce the same old game—. That said, I too lust for feeling some sense of stability and control of our side over events—though I realize its just not going to happen.

Obama is going to continue to have a tough Presidency, as I think kay actually commented a few days ago. This period of change will be longer than his Presidency I believe, whether one or two terms.

Great article if you are interested in Esquire which really made me think long and deep about this presidency and our country right now by Tom Junot.

http://www.esquire.com/feature.....ather-0210

That’s the part that kills me. And yet, she’s on the front page of the NYT, and NPR gave her the lead three-four minutes of their Sunday morning hour.

600 insane people spouting insane shit is sexier than 40 41 assholes demonstrating on a daily basis that one chamber of congress can no longer function as an institution. Ask most people what they think about cloture rules and their eyes will glaze over.

Palin gets a response. That’s all that matters.

I think this was in response to Senator Collins, who had to be told that the FBI are part of counter-terrorism intelligence gathering.

I was not aware Collins was stupid, but now I am.

“This was like a three- or four-minute phone call,” Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) told POLITICO on Sunday. Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said, “At no point did he ever talk to me about legal strategies.”

“For this guy to get out there and start saying things like this is irresponsible,” Hoekstra said.

Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, told NBC’s David Gregory: “I explained to them that he was in FBI custody. That Mr. Abdulmutallab was in fact talking, that he was cooperating at that point. They knew that ‘in FBI custody’ means that there’s a process then you follow as far as Mirandizing and presenting him in front of the magistrate.”

Is there something, be it genetic strain or residue of childrearing practices, that winds up creating people who cannot handle Today? Maybe they were fine as serfs, being told what to do and breaking out with rowdy parties on the quarters of the year, but simply cannot grasp anything more complex?

Because that’s what some of them remind me of.