LAME DUCKDOM

Mr. Gonzalez has joined a bevy of Bush insiders opting for an early departure from the rigors of Lame Duckdom but the ever repressible demies, initially beside themselves in glee, are beginning to fret that their Long Year Project for 2008 may have been dealt a damaging blow-- After having capitulated time and again to the Bush Iraq Express, the feeble demies architectured a forlorn strategery based on extended congressional investigations of Bush culprits not with a goal of holding any of them actually accountable for their palpable transgressions versus the US Constitution and/or, heaven forbid, possible violations of International War Crime statutes but instead simply to camouflage their own incompetence at enacting a viable legislative agenda that would provide an enabling uplifting vision of renewal for a desperately divided and down-spirited nation--

Indeed the demi-captain Mr. Reid hurried to the mandatory podium to hurl specious invective and promise the demies' dwindling audience that the embarrassing pile-on investigations would continue with or without the laughing stock Mr. Gonzalez or the unmentioned early-out of Mr. Rove another target earmarked for demie retribution for having repeatedly exposed their steadfast lack of conviction and fealty to duty-- That Gonzalez's self-removal might lead to an improvement of overall morale and competence at the Justice Department was actually met with customary chagrin from the weasely demies who must now purchase a fresh think-tank option on how to occupy the coming electoral-year void with political canards designed to paint themselves as leaders without having to assume the real responsibilities demanded of the role or actually design real world real-time solutions-- You know, perks before performance-- Campaign finance uber alles--

Amidst the gloom gathering around a fictive economy bent on implosion, the one million construction jobs related to the free-falling Housing Sector in dismal danger of evaporation this year, the millions more home-foreclosures gumming up the counterfeit mortgage works and the quaking credit empyre risking near paralysis on a global scale, the political vacuum now gnashing its toothless distractions in the court politics of DC is offering the weakling demies the opportunity of a lifetime that they are either simply too oblivious to apprehend or certainly too cowardly to wrestle by the horns-- The center has not the will to hold back the negative tides of history currently assailing the American echelon-- That congress had the swinish nerve to opt for opulent recess at such a grave and perilous moment is telling testimony of the self-incriminating kind--

President Bush, continuing to dwell in the fantasy of his Iraq, last week brandished a peculiarly nescient view of Southeast Asian History post-American involvement as a muddled rationale for perennially staying the fruitless course-- Meanwhile the Pentagon has informed those interested that it will offer a non-consensual recommendation to the President in September's long awaited strategy assessment-- Top commanders, three generals , an admiral and the Def Sec, will be allowed to levy their own appraisals which will, after the dust settles, result in the karmic buck being firmly stopped at the Oval desk-- Aside from placing the onus where it truly belongs, the utter realization publicly conveyed by this presumable absence of command go-along-to -get-along is that our Decider has no unified command echelon behind the disconsolate decision now thrust upon him-- Every government body and every insurgent group in the Middle East cauldron and elsewhere is more than capable of discerning the tea leaves featuring the isolated and severely weakened position, the machinations of Fate if you will, to which Mr Bush now finds himself tethered--

The once heady vilification of Europe as somehow irrelevant in the run-up to the Shock and Awe perpetrated on Iraq might explain the reticence of 'old' Europe to risk any diplomatic effort to pull the Bush bacon from the Bring It On hellfire of his own self-immolating bravado-- Euro banks and investment houses are still smarting from the sting of the sub-prime inferno and how easy it was for American bankers to sucker their investment frenzy into purchasing small mountains of worthless securities once backed by the full faith and credit of Mr. Greenspan's traveling financial circus -- Al's Bubble of The Month Club, coming soon to a foreclosure near you, probably won't draw standing room only crowds this go-round-- The Euro boys may not lift a finger to aid the economic disaster befalling Bush nor likewise the fire-sale of diminishing support for another hare-brained ploy that Mr. Sarkozy so publicly warned against this week......... bombing Iran....... but The Euro boys will not be loathe to accept help in the form of fresh liquidity doled out from the Federal Reserve-- Such are our allies--

MALICKI'S TIGHTROPE

Surprised?-- Not in the least!-- The ardent AIPAC Senator Levin from Michigan has demanded that Prime Minister Malicki be removed from office by the Iraqi parliament and replaced by someone more attuned to American interests-- Never mind that the serious state of disrepair to which the crumbling Iraqi cabinet finds itself moored is more than acutely capable of withstanding the puerile onslaught of the senator's inane predilection for substituting asinine lecture for real world tactical expertise-- Who would the posturing Levin supplant Malicki with....... the duplicitous Ahmad Chalabi????-- Who competent enough is willing to risk the moniker of collaborator and the karma to which the perception of such treason accrues will step up to and face down the internecine murder rampant in the House of Baghdad???--

Never mind that Mr. Malicki today finds himself still on the top side of the soil primarily because his shrewd political dexterity maintains a necessary integrity in sufficient quantity to ward off assassination that would certainly occur were he to openly and servilely collaborate with the foreign occupation above and beyond the interests and needs of his own tribe and sect-- Over on the West Bank Mr. Abbas will soon wish he had the same skill and courage-- That Malicki's tightrope maneuvering could certainly cease at the drop of a hat is practically lost on the immature logic of Levin's inopportune and myopic m. o. which seems to imply in a klutzy nutshell that the louder he shouts at the Iraqis the greater the obedience he will exact in kind-- Malicki has demonstrated a dauntless fortitude, missing most assuredly from both the Neocon architects and senatorial critics, to engage with Iraq's Sunni and Shiite neighbors to attempt to rectify the insanely incendiary situation, doing so even in the constant face of an acute danger even Mr. Bush may not wish to terminate by offering this week's kiss-of-death public support-- Most of America's demanding silly-ass senators never venture beyond the Green Zone for their pre-packaged misinformation--

Adding her disingenuous voice to the coattails of Levin's jig in a furtive ploy to appear ahead of the curve (while trailing events in real time) Hillary has joined the feint by impulsively demanding, imagine this, 'a less divisive and more unifying figure', one who can ostensibly and single-handedly, of course, heal or bridge the hideous rifts violently separating these sectarian and tribal enemies-- Hillary's naive reading of the situation conjures up a wicked distortion that marks her not so much frustrated as delusional-- Does a single person wait somewhere in the shadows in or out of the Iraqi government readying himself to jump into the hostile fray with enough power and prestige, at Hillary's behest, to produce a Hollywood ending to a grave and perilous condition the side-effect of which would pave her ascension to the American Throne???-- Not, in the least, very likely-- Let everyone also hope she is not seriously prescribing for today's Iraq a pleadingly Rodney King type of moment followed by a Kumbaya reconciliation-- Wake up, Senators, neither of you are in charge of either the Iraqi government or events on the ground and injecting yourselves negatively into the mix adds nothing but sour fodder to our declining influence in the world-- This insurgency no matter how bastardized we paint it, will not kowtow to your demonstrably ignorant cajolery-- Screechy petulance is not a solution--

What has Malicki actually done that has fired this divisive disunity???-- The American presence demands he seek permission for nearly every act he performs in official capacity and every time he turns around the Neocon strategery has re-concocted a fresh gimmick designed to compel an increasingly fictional victory that will play well in the political-media sphere, absolve them of criminal complicity and intellectual malfeasance, and reward them by miraculously tying up all the loose ends of the greatest foreign policy debacle in American history just in time, you guessed it, for the fall election-- However, aside from the more practical and truly important tasks currently filling his overburdened plate, not to mention the ever present cross-hairs he subjects himself to, were Malicki himself to implore the US Congress to elevate a 'less divisive more unifying figure' to lead the American endeavor, odds are Hillary's candidacy would be hard pressed to survive the first cut--

Glaringly this also reveals these senators' inability to process the explicitly intense opposition even moderate Iraqis hold for the occupation as well as the Shiite majority's desire to hold on to power against the Sunni minority that so recently abused their rule over the now ascendant Shias--The four or five million refugees dislodged from their lives hold the US blameworthy and do not look upon their disheveled predicament as democratic liberation--Lacking this important perception yields an incoherence thwarting any reasonable chance for an efficacious outcome-- All else is tilting at political windmills-- Unwilling to cop to the deplorable facts that the occupation itself, for which compliant Hillary willingly cast an affirmative vote, infects the sectarian divide and further festers Iraq with a never-ending open-wound--

The frightened weak-willed demies may be way more than willing to forgive their own ignominious emasculation at the hands of Bush, Rove & Company because, after all, the lucrative radiant perks availing themselves upon even the minority continue to keep the demies in the bloated excess of splendor but on the difficult ground inside Iraq enflamed blood feuds will continue to exact their diabolical revenge until the spirit fully plays itself out not withstanding the prevalence of the dog and pony chart-briefings emanating from the air-conditioned Green Zone, the prolific positional term-papers dreamed up in think-tanks a thousand miles away from the dusty battlegrounds being contested, the tactical tweaking of amateur-hour strategists fill White House vacuums or the pervasive sound-bite posturing of a senatorial paradigmatic obliviousness-- Our leaders refuse to actually see what is really occurring on the ground in Iraq and most have no idea who the Iraqis really are-- The Hubris of our blindly exceptional-ist ideology prevents us from reacting in our own best interests-- How may these Senators rectify Iraq when their in-cohesive incompetence on the floor of our own Congress meets with mere 14% approval fooling not the other 86% of the American people??--

WRECKAGES

As the sub-prime mortgage chicanery persistently devolves into unbounded defiance of pedantic official containment, the internecine carnage strewn among the smoldering ruins of any number of moribund wreckages littering the broken finance and credit markets is beginning to resemble the early days of insurgency in Baghdad-- Containment failed nearly everywhere in Iraq despite the demonstrative official denial on a daily basis that an insurrection even existed, due in large measure to the largely unimpeded mobility of daring mercurial insurgents coupled with the unrestrained, (liquid, if you will), ease of acquiring large and lethal amounts of explosive ordinance and ubiquitous thousands of AK-47s and other small but deadly arms (misplaced or black-marketeered or both?)-- The Good Guys had argued for twice as many troops as the war's salesmen and profiteers endorsed but were shouted down, vilified, smeared and in at least one gruesomely ironic case ultimately fired--

The fundamentals, there in Iraq, were also apparently very sound as an unquestioning cavalcade of shallow promoters and obsequious opportunists relentlessly toured the deadly lecterns across the complicity-driven media sphere with optimistic bandwagon jargon extolling the hubris of our exceptionalism that sadly proved to contain not one authentic whit of real world veracity-- Others would have to walk their talk-- Like the chosen marks from the sub-prime credit classes, our troops stepped up under-manned, under-missioned, callously under-armored and certainly under-appreciated by their corporately-tied officers ensconced in their mahogany foxholes-- While cavorting their regal militance among the elitist cocktail echelons of DC, yes, our young troops bore the brunt of the dying-- An adjustable rate mortgaged to a flag-draped casket the callow administration, lacking simple common decency and courage, would refuse to honor those fallen by denying media access to their fatefully solemn return-- Young life and the truest..... foreclosed upon by real bullets...... not good enough for the Nightly News!!!!!

Iraq has been back-burner-ed of late-- Intermission, apparently, from its ongoing disintegration while its petulant self-appointed handlers in The US Senate, themselves in various states of opulent hiatus and disrepair from their own ineffectual performances in the sweltering DC capitol-- Senator Levin, in particular today, shouts for a new Iraqi cabinet and cajoles the Prime Minister largely for what his and dozens of his colleagues votes have wrought upon the people of Iraq, the exhausted US Army itself and the demoralized spirit of the American people-- Why the hell not?-- Since the maniacal tantrum bestowed upon live television by Mad Money's histrionic Jim Cramer worked its ultimate magic seemingly adding to the hysterical mix in the paralytic credit markets that induced Fed Chairman Ben into a panic-ridden about-face to lower the discount rate-- As if that would mystifyingly produce copious amounts of demand for deadbeat sub-prime issues or the endangered paper emanating from commercial ledgers backed by what else?--sub-prime insolvency-- The country's July foreclosure rate was up 93%!!!!--

'Repricing of risk' has replaced 'containment' and now vies with 'The fundamentals are sound' as the latest euphemism for the decline and hard fall of the credit, mortgage, housing, and construction complex which endangers the entire world banking system and all of its member national economies-- It threatens the border-integrity of a very shaky world-order propped up by suddenly skittish banks and leveraged by decrepit political leadership in weakly unsound states everywhere-- No Surge of rate-cuts or intravenous Fed infusions will turn the current sow's ear into a silk parachute-- Bailing out the addled ponzi excesses of Wall Street's Bulls will bury the dollar hastening it's demise as the world's currency possibly even its viability as a vital national currency-- World investors once ran blindly when push came to crunch for the safety of T-Bills but in this crumbling credit paradigm the frantics might not gain the security for which they bid-- Indeed today's yield on the 3-month t-bill rose dramatically-- At the end of last week Japan's condition was explained to The Fed as......... 'dire'--

As the Era of Globalist Finance undoes itself and the unwinding becomes acutely visible to most all, the question to ask is..... What, at the end of the day, did we get for both our work and our money?-- Where are the new or upgraded manufacturing and textile plants, the new mass transit industry, the rebuilt railroads, the repaired bridges, the replanted forests, the restored fisheries, the repaired electrical grid, the replenished oil stocks, the improved living skills of our youth, our ability to toil for necessities, the health of our people, our sobriety, our missing joy for simple things, our misplaced happiness, our un-indebtedness, our thriving family, our Independence, our responsible citizenship?????-- Go Home!!!!!........... Think on these things.......... We need your help--

THE JUSTICE OF ROUGH MUSIC

The litany of negative news streaming out of the economic sector devours market confidence across the globe-- Victory is daily defined now as the Dow losing 30 points instead of 380 and this only after a week of intravenous Federal Reserve infusions to the repetitious tune of multiple billions of dollars which ill-monikered investors today apparently met with a effete shrug-- Never mind that the Fed accepted as collateral for their loans to these distressed and, yes, desperate investment banks, the very troublesomely valued sub-prime securities that so precipitated this anxiety driven sojourn toward insolvency-- Oiling the pistons on the cars nobody but a few will borrow money to drive-- At least one run on an actual bank owned by Countrywide was reported in SoCal-- The Justice of rough music for the fictive genius of financial alchemy gone awry while guillotines are being secretly sharpened--

Rumors from the unleashed integrity of craven insider journalist Woodward hint that his pet subject he once fawningly knighted as 'The Maestro', an incoherent mumbling conductor who from the politically protected podium of his imbecilic wisdom once baton-ed the odiously orchestrated touting of these sub-prime ARMs, interest only mortgages and various other counterfeit financial experiments including venal ponzi mutations that have ultimately siphoned the American Dream out from under millions of soon to be if not already dispossessed dreamers, seems to have quietly disappeared from the collapsing milieu perhaps fearing the verbal abuse accorded the conundrum of his past 'achievements' or, more certainly, being fleeced by the karmic retribution he is owed for bequeathing such a devolving sour morass to his successor Chairman Ben--

Be that as any of it may, the prevalent fear currently gripping the globe will not dissipate soon and one day's numbers, up or down on The Dow, will not a blithe trend fashion-- The ubiquitous Headlines read like a funeral parade with caskets numbering so high as to be formidably prohibitive of ascertaining where the mourning should begin, if indeed we should grieve the passing of such predatory sharks in the first place-- Federal officials and private economists alike have yet to grapple down a meaningful survey as to the full scope and gravity of the problem while the market itself is forced by undefined events to perform triage on faltering lenders and moribund hedgers to the best of its suddenly exigent but clearly shaken abilities-- Those struggling officials may need no reminder but the faith-tested casualties of this metastasizing ordeal do in fact know who they are and these officials side by side their pretty-boy studio-entrenched enablers should assume beyond the faux sound-bite of errant doubt that the wounded are none too happy with their suddenly shrunken status and the negative confines of surly predicament--

The millions of those souls foreclosed upon and the hundreds of thousands of imminent lay-offs dispatched beyond anchoring ground must chart by example the difficult course change in life-style this emergent chaos will wreak upon the larger social group as a whole while this globalist epoch diligently unravels in arduous unmanageable dissonance-- There is nothing so far that the President or any of DC's upper echelon officials and midget statesmen as well as the exquisitely moneyed CEO's of floundering financial corporations has said or can believably intone in the near future to abate the extant dread and mounting demoralization wrought by the collapse of this international house of financial cards-- Not even the multitude of pandering Presidential rivals prancing about the American outback in solicitous splendor can stem the menacing tide of insolvency to which they are exceedingly oblivious to in the first place--

MANDATORY OBITUARY

The dreaded Karl Rove has left the White House-- My guess is that the demies, will remain in hiding until the dust has settled before they next attempt to gauge what improvement if any will accrue their meager political standing in the eyes of American voters-- Recent polls rank US Congressional positives at the 14th percentile, error probability of +/-3 means it could be as low as 11% or as glowingly high as 17%-- Embunkered in the shamelessness of their opulent recess/vacation/junkets at such a critical moment of great danger and peril in the world extant court politics, demie Captain Reid and his flimsy crew cast a wary eye about the political charade-scape distraughtly expecting the possibility of a Rovean trick intended to out maneuver the unguarded flank of their paralytic stupor--

Rove earned his genius label due not to the arcane subterfuges of his political craft but mainly to the nose-to-grindstone and dedicated nuts-and-bolts hard work of serious political organization-- That the nonplus but arrogantly cool demies opted for ditsy bewilderment and Hollywood cliche concurrent to Karl's hour upon the stage merely elevated his hard work to superlative praise by comparison-- While Rove and his political corps completely ran circles around the opposition on those exceedingly rare occasions when it displayed gumption enough to actually feign some challenge, the frightened demies repeatedly cowered to and then whined about his not so nice tactics-- Completely buffaloed by faux intelligence on Iraq and irresolutely scarified by their own dis-organization the demies mustered puny courage to thwart what has become the most seriously ruinous foreign policy debacle in American history--

Karl Rove does leave the impression of the proverbial rodent escaping a sinking ship by resigning his post little more than a year before the next Presidential election, but after witnessing the clandestine-like desertion of the Constitution by affording their favorite whipping boy AG Gonzalez more illicit surveillance power than even he requested, and the dismaying scene of self-angry demie pols, embarrassed by yet another show of daunting incompetence, scurrying for the DC exits last week, perhaps Rove is merely seeking some critical slack or just thumbing his nose at the political chicken poop he once reveled in--

The feast of consequence the Bush circle dines on from here on out would only ensnarl Karl before congressional committees seeking political advantage for the upcoming elections by providing free face time on camera for those obsequiously aspiring office hunters interested not one whit in bringing to true accountability those guilty of anything from constitutionally proscribed malfeasance all the way up to and including International War Crimes or anything in between-- Fair game neither way, sadly some demie assassins will not be able to Bjork Rover in a hearings room before he leaves but History will more than likely not treat him very kindly-- Most if not all presidential political strategists wind up in an obscure tome lightly referenced anyway--

Karl Rove has done his strut and fret and even once graced the stage with his grotesque self parody through his telling alter-ego, Rapmaster K-Pac, (Just another rhythm-less republican white-boy not cool enough for the Blues and obviously bothered by it) but his rise to power is over and the vacuum created inside the Bush support team does allow The Big Veep more ground to occupy and rampage around in for the short term and reports out last week do attest that Mr. Cheney has not gone soft on Iran arguing that bombing, at least, a few camps inside their border might be seen in the region as some re-establishment of Kissinger-ian credibility that might deflect from the ongoing disintegration and failure inside Iraq, the panic and paralysis of the mortgage credit and financial markets globe-wide, the utter collapse of the Housing and construction industry, the continuing problems of declining oil production attendant rising world demand and the not often iterated raging epidemic of rampant murder poisoning our inner cities with hideous toxicity-- All of which find lesser interest in the minds of those slinging the daggers of slander under the delusion that this passes for a workable political agenda--

Say 'Goodbye' to Mr. Rove-- Events of higher magnitude and fraught with more peril and more blood will soon obliterate his tenure and by then he will be 'heard no more'--

STARK FEAR

President Bush stepped up to the plate again today staring at the increasing potential of utter collapse in the credit markets and pretty much punted-- Telling the markets there is enough liquidity(even the incessantly devalued kind, such as the weakening Dollar) in the system to facilitate the soft landing everyone seeks but fewer and fewer favor faith enough to really count on-- This here's Texas and down here we're on your own--

The shrunken president mustered enough faux confidence to inject a mite of minor calm into the market's hysterical volatility and feed a less than reassuring soundbite to the breathless media as the air of disconnect clearly added to the unreality surrounding the stark fear motivating investors-- Enough liquidity??-- You don't suppose he ran that by Wall Street's resident idiot-savant Jim Cramer, do you??-- Never mind the other reports of European Central Banks, in real fear of a potential cash crunch, peeling 94.8 billion euros ($130 billion) off the top of their stash for an immediate loan out to the evermore nervous banks--

Right out of the morning chute the Dow ran south to a negative 240, swam against the choppy current all day before being crushed into the cold sand in the final hour finishing 400 points to the downside-- All 18 markets across Wester Europe joined the rout-- All 10 industry components of the S&P 500 fell more than 2% today-- On the NYSE volume reached nearly 3billion shares, the most in over five years-- Swiftly moving conjecture about the litany of more banks and brokerage houses preparing to come clean over the declining real value of credit investments lit the unsheathed nerve of Wall Street like a welder's rod and cover-seeking prospectors dumped all over the brokerage/bank-stocks--

Citigroup, the largest U.S. bank, JPMorgan, GoldmanSachs, MorganStanley,Merrill, Lehman, most all fell in the vicinity of 5% or more and finely searched annals unveiled nary a worse day in nearly five years for many- Multiple observers were clearly reticent but ultimately compelled to describe the action as panic, not quite yet full-fledged as in..... PANIC!!!-- Retreat should be orderly and dignified if not a strategic affectation, but try explaining that to exposed Euro bankers caught by their knickers in the sub-prime vise while grasping madly for T-bills and suddenly risk averse security-- Is it too late for America to alter its over-extended life style??-- In Europe or down here in Texas reaping the whirlwind sure ain't gonna be no piece of cake!!--

NO QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

There is no quiet on the western front even though most of the players have departed the front lines for their vacation/recess/junket...... earned or not!!-- Heading for any available exits to leave town as quickly as possible, the cowardly demi-majority party in bitter cahoots with the rubber-stamp repo-minority party were only too happy to sell out The Constitution with nary a blink of the eye--Yes, that one, the same venerable Constitution for which our forefathers and mothers, those to whom Liberty meant more than expediency and self-enrichment, bled and died-- Doing so under the guise of National Security may avail a moral soporific for the under-taxed conscience but no amount of manipulative spin can truly contradict the inconceivably ugly spectacle of angry scampering rodent-like politicians running for cover in DC over the weekend--

Following the leadenly dispiriting lead of the imperiled Iraq Parliament many of whose cabinet level membership, particularly on the Sunni side, combined the idea of an opulent vacation with outright desertion, perhaps defection, the US Congress, in displaying distinctly less than puny mettle here, opted to actually earn their 75% dis-approval rating in American polls and confidently pretended immunity to any consequences resulting from the demeaning episode-- 'Sticks and Stones may break my Bones but being called names by Mr. Meanie Karl Rove may prevent my re-election-- Fall on my sword............... for the Constitution???!-- You're joking............. right??'--

Well now that the spineless demies have made America safe again by giving none other than the oft vilified, deservedly so, truth-challenged AG Gonzales surveillance power way above and beyond his wildest expectations, we can all sleep better for the malignant elitist effort-- AIPAC champion and Chairboy of the demi-Caucus, Rum Emanuel, expects lower-case congress to revisit its seditiously convenient decision inside of 6 months, but displayed no real ethical reservations whatsoever about prioritizing the importance of vacation perks over something as trivial as honoring The Constitution-- Such is the belittled quality of Statesmanship swirling around the drains of DC these days-- George Bush has been rumored to have referred to the Constitution as a 'god-damned piece of paper' but it more than appears now as if Congress in its self-indulgent summer regress echoes such sentiment as well while it cravenly sought in feigned anger and histrionically received political cover from its despised opposition in the dog and pony finale to the summer session--

The venality of grovelingly delusional politicians has never lately been so blatantly displayed as that of the peevish Senator Lindsay Graham in his prissy defense of the imaginary victory still possible in the botched occupation of Iraq on Meet The Press in late July-- Never mind the indisputable inefficacy of The Surge, the sudden shuffling of the entire blame for everything that has gone wrong in theater to Al Qaeda in Iraq, a non-existent terrorist gang prior to the Iraq occupation, has clearly become the most recent of the many ever changing goal posts this administration employs for its political cover whenever its previous strategy so visibly comes a cropper--With aid from a few renegade vigilante tribal sheiks of the Sunni sect, driving this ad hoc Qaeda crew from Anbar province will somehow provide a surreal operational template that will lead to victory countrywide sometime in the not too distant future, the roiled nervous Senator theatrically implied--

Since The Surge is no longer valid in strategic and operational terms the September deadline for demonstrable benchmark progress on the part of Iraq parliamentarians is simply no longer a valid qualification for success-- Therefore there is no need to withdraw or re-deploy troops because victory is still possible being just around a different corner than the one 6 months prior-- Lapdog Graham verbally espouses that the Al Qaeda group that General Petraeus himself ranks fifth from the top of the most violently capable groups in Iraq(actually finishing lower than the criminal gang category) is on the run in Anbar and hence in a truly bizarre extrapolation on the run all across the entire country as if the Iraqi Qaedas are somehow the entire insurgency-- Therefore the leap to a faith-based mirage of victory, well,...... it just cain't be too far behind-- Just gotta be there someplace--

Grasping at straws while vilifying its opposition represents the order or, should we acknowledge, the disorder of the day-- Inveighing fictive demagoguery against its meekly timid opposition(excluding Senator Webb) works appallingly well-- The weak-willed demies as a whole clearly running on fumes themselves with such an embarrassingly little amount of fight left in them at all allow Graham and his ilk the comfort of never having to face the facts of their multitudinous failure-- Neocon apologists can turn the abysmal fact that coalition forces somehow lost 100,000 AK-47's earmarked for Iraqi security forces into a fantasy victory canard with impunity-- Failing to account for the missing rifles was compounded by an inability to locate the 80,000 pistols earmarked for Iraqi police in the same package-- That these weapons wound up in the hands of all those insurgents so 'on the run' everywhere across Iraq meets with the flimsiest of denials--

This is classic ineptitude and it permeates the Neocon charade while the darling demies equally out of touch with reality mime an unsightly diffident but tangential pipe-dream...... the strange desire for political authority without any of its responsibility-- Facing a Wall Street festooned with fraud and deceit and a festering housing bubble lanced but leaking its usurious poison across the the world's financial order; Faced with the ongoing disintegration of Iraq, the tremors of instability region-wide and the criminal abuse and exhaustion of American Armed Forces.... Her truest sons and daughters ....... in this misguided and incompetent occupation; Faced also with an acute willingness on the part of uninformed leadership to deceive itself and the nation about the dangerous and extant ramifications of falling oil-production coupled with ever rising demand worldwide and to act as if the absence of any plans to confront the coming energy shortfalls is somehow excusable; Facing a population so clinically obese and so inclined to the indulgent escapist fantasy of Idol-fare and the unreality of reality-TV as to be virtually incapable of defending itself against the rigors of a sudden downturn or the slow collapsing of the economy; Facing a plethora of cities where killing zones have arisen and the police are at a total loss of how to stop the rampant murder; And now facing a backlog litany of dangerously unattended and un-repaired infrastructure built in the era of cheap oil and readily available material resources, a growing amount of which is simply too costly to maintain-- Instead of preparing Our People for the incumbent life-style alterations events will demand, our leaders devolve into court politics replete with the gossip, innuendo, incessant myopic analysis and the dirty money redundantly endemic to perpetual campaign fantasia and the accordant image it can buy-- Hologramatic and decadent.......!!!

NOTOWN BLUES

As the dreads continue to rain down in Detroit for the seventh month in a row, the pedal just ain't anywhere close to hittin' the metal-- Motown is on the way to becoming Notown-- July auto sales took a major nosedive and for the first time in history Asian autos out-performed, meaning out-sold, American companies for market share in America itself-- Sour news made more bitter with this kicker, they did so with falling sales themselves-- GM hit the skids with a 22.3% drop in light vehicle sales, followed by a 19.1% flop from Ford and Daimler-Chrysler dipped 9.1% all three exceeding expert expectations by a long shot-- No wonder Michigan is in the top five states in the upward spiking foreclosure arena--

If people can't make their mortgage payments on overpriced houses, they damn sure can't afford to buy a brand new pick-up truck no matter how Ford Tough it advertises itself-- People are choosing between home and hearth and energy using suddenly non-cheap credit to do so-- Legions of economists are spouting unadulterated horse-hooey when they say the sub-prime debt market's collapsing milieu can be contained-- Debt world wide is interwoven with mutual dependency and liability and if it defaults, the reverberation, depending on the magnitude, can be felt every-where world-wide-- Banks and investors across the speculative gamut laid their money down on some pretty poor paper and it should not make them less nervous to hear that alt-A loans as well as prime loans are now hitting the redundant wall of delinquency-- Did they not also choose to buy beyond their real afford-ability range??--

After all, the major selling point the shoeshine-and-a-smile hucksters employed on the sub-prime deadbeat prey was identical to the one used on middle and upper-middle class up-traders... Home prices would rise ad infinitum-- Why not buy a house with your own private bowling alley in the basement if you can pilfer a 50% profit from some common sense-challenged sucker five years down the road??-- Put a couple of French doors into that garage studio and increase the value of the property by a $100,000, dude, sky is the limit--Go for it, dude, even Alan Greenspan and his buddy Gordon Gecko think it's a good deal-- What?!!!..... are you waiting for??-- You......... can't ......... lose!!!!--

Then one fine morning the newspaper he never really reads as he cruises down that proverbial Easy Street displays a headline that slams like a bad medicine ball into his softened solar plexus-- MORTGAGE FALLOUT WIDENS and suddenly he sees home foreclosures having popped-up out of the blue up and down his Easy Street-- Nerves begin to fray-- Nerves that denial can no longer calm nor buffer from the impending gloom-- Those same economists and experts nowhere near overloaded by the fatigue of their previous failure on the prognostication front, hedge nothing by rushing to shore up the flagging morale with even more exotic disconnected rationale--

On the way to the demoralized office he pulls the blubber of his whale sized SUV into a Starbucks lot and finds the price of his triple fat latte has risen not a whole lot but enough to make him slow down and notice a slight psychological sting that at that very moment is being felt in the corpulent edifice over at the DuPont Corporation-- Sales for the coffee giant rose considerably last month but the fast rising cost of milk, that's right.........Milk!!.... ( pardon the unintentional pun) diluted profits knocking a roughly 20% uptick down to a mere 12%, certainly plenty enough profit to fend off the boo-hoo of bankruptcy but in a game where maximize is the operative buzz on the public relations battlefield, no one jumped overboard with joy-- The cost of Milk the man from Easy Street was finally informed is due to the rising cost of corn but this aberrant iota from out of the blue clearly baffles the boy--

A disheveled oldster drifts in wearing a rather clean pair of painter's overalls, finds a used newspaper in the trash container and fills Mr. Suburbia in on the secret-- Corn is higher because alternative energy speculators believe corn in the form of Ethanol can fuel our automobile fantasia into the next millennium while making themselves a handsome profit in the process and therefore the higher cost of corn drives up the cost of feeding cattle which milk producers then slough off onto consumers like Mr. Suburbia and producers of lattes like the groovy corporate titans over at Starbucks-- Tangentially the cost of beef rises also not only from the expensive feed corn but also the high price of oil used not only to harvest the corn but also transport the milk, the corn and the beef to various markets, almost neglecting to mention the cost of delivering diesel to the cattle and the corn farms themselves-- Containment!!!!?????

The high, nearly record high, price of oil has many bastard fathers though none of course find their lineage in the ubiquitous SUV Mr. Suburbia feels entitled to drive three blocks for his Easy Street triple-fat Latte--The old man's clean painter pants are due to the fact that the high cost of maintenance and upkeep inside the collapsing housing bubble means fewer folks are painting their houses which can only diminish home prices as well as the look of the neighborhoods-- Furthermore since automobile production is being trimmed less paint is being used on old Henry Ford's manufacturing floor-- New construction in homes has also turned down, indicating even less utilization of paint pigments Mr. DuPont would be normally called on to supply-- Not to mention of course the deleterious effect on all the outlets where contractors and construction men purchased those pigments-- Now employees in the pigment sector of the behemoth DuPont Corp. can look forward to layoffs and lower income resulting in fewer home purchases, F-Series pickups, cheeseburgers, and long distance road trips to a double chubby-chuck theme park four hundred miles down a Highway 61 his children will never be able to revisit-- Did someone say contagion??--

THE ECONOMY IS SOUND, the new headline from the Federal Reserve Chairman blares across the blather-sphere-- Such and Such a CEO from Such&Such Company 90% of whose workers toil in third world ambience reports record profits/sales/earnings (take your pick) most of which adds more wealth to the already bloated embarrassment of riches suffered by the company's few top dogs in the upper echelon and while all of that does indicate a statistical rise in fudgy GDP reports (an infotainment canard that no sub-primer can take real nourishment from) it also fails to translate into advancement for the harried over-worked yet over-fed middle class of America-- The economy is solid at the top, so the experts say, but the foundation beneath it is trembling with an anxiety of viral proportion no one wishes to announce-- Collapse!!!............. like that freeway bridge to Easy Street, Minnesota-- Metaphor, USA!!!!