Rounder6

THE LAST AMERICAN CHRISTMAS

2007-12-10T14:08:00.000-08:00

Stock Market run-ups of recent seem suspiciously certain to garner much coveted year-end bonuses for the desperate soldiers of financial fraudulence as the Federal Reserve stands poised to ante-up a rate cut dispelling any real concern for Uncle Sam's greenback as the mangled credit-driven Last American Christmas waits with the ghost of Norman Rockwell in the darkness on the edge of town-- The dollar continues to lead with its chin absorbing the multiple punches world-wide disrespect delivers in such harshly unsentimental combinations while the unfeasible canards of the White House Plan to rescue the downtrodden victims of sub-prime mortgage finance-fraud give off the Clintonesque stench of just another artless photo-op--

Suspect numbers from government agencies, economic houses and statistical organizations paint a truly astounding picture of an economy firing on all cylinders except for the multiple millions of homeowners caught in the crossfire of home foreclosure and seriously ramped up costs of necessities like oil and food-- The multiple hundreds of thousands of construction workers no longer needed to over-build unwanted and unneeded houses-- Obviously minor glitches in the economic utopia Nafta was going to bestow upon the average american worker once the steel mills and textile mills were all outsourced-- Once the unions were devolved into the smoking ruins of an anachronistic labor movement-- Once Glass-Steagall was repealed by the good Clinton folks who after once being endorsed by the likes of Pete Seeger, sold out his own friends and family, his own party,the american worker, and the entire republic to international financiers with abhorrent criminal intent--

As the dollar staggers under the weight of unflinching insolvency and import costs rise for the lowly wage-earner, the numbers fantasia out of DC and Wall Street point to US exports as the new fictive engine that will drive us out of the potential grips of depression, recession, or retread stagflation-- Hollywood DVDs, dreamwork CD's and computer software will save the day and, voila!!, the US will regain its manufacturing and economic supremacy and the respect that engenders overnight-- The price of oil will fall of its own generosity and the discovery of mega-new supplies will segue into Ray Charles' version of 'Oh beautiful.....'-- Yeah, that'll work-- The collaborative media will make it work-- Build it with cyber-dollars and they will come--

BOMBSHELLs

2007-12-05T16:05:00.001-08:00

Whoa!!! The National Intelligence Estimate now claims Iran stopped working on atomic weapons programs in 2003-- Pardon me, but its almost 2008-- Did it actually take that long to discover??-- The UN today claims the US report actually vindicated Iran and Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs and everyone else with any skin in this game save Israel which, seemingly craving its addiction to the formation of extant existential enemies everywhere, denounced the estimate as somewhere between fraudulence and science fiction-- The Neocons, hyperbole aside, are aghast with the suddenness of the report's release and what the ramifications will do to the PNAC delusion of reclaiming the moral high ground by bombing Iran--

Is this actually Mr. Bush caving into the demoralization of obvious defeat in Iraq and signaling to the world that bombing Iran is no longer a non-criminal pre-emptive option??-- Last week the administration quietly acknowledged that passage of the much-delayed oil bill shrewdly quagmired in the intransigent Iraqi parliament by, unlike our astute and mega-competent legislators, inept and unskilled political rubes who could not see the private personal benefits to the abject selling out of its own people, would no longer be official US strategery nor would re-re-unification of the country and its seriously war weary denizens-- No new strategery was announced in the DC environs to take the place of these cast-off primary objectives--

What seems to be the latest US rationale for continuing its dynamically losing propositions there??-- Turkey continues to rattle its sabers at the increasingly independent and defiant Kurds who still claim squatters' rights to the oil reserves below its territorial imperatives-- Is Kurdistan a de facto state now that Iraqi unification merits such newly emblazoned disrespect of suddenly admissible real politik??-- Calming the Turks military probes of Kurdish PKK positions in order to prevent world oil prices from ratcheting further skyward appears to have been a very taxing effort on the part of the Bush administration-- Has it drained so much wind from the US foreign policy sails that the Neocon boys are absolutely bereft of any inventive rationale for remaining in Iraq??-- What is the primary objective......now!!???-- What is the raison detre????--

Another body blow-- OPEC just announced that it would NOT increase oil production thereby not allowing oil prices to fall further as the original rumor must have intended-- Most idiots could see that increasing production (if, and it is a big IF, OPEC is physically capable of increasing oil production at all) would only serve to devalue a commodity already suffering from the diminished dollar-- Oil prices dropped over the last two weeks anticipating the production increase which now won't happen-- Was it ever going to happen??-- Not much chagrin across the oil blogosphere at the OPEC announcement suggests few if any took the rumor seriously except for its manipulative value which quite obviously carries a heavy-sour magnitude-- Shorts made their profit and now its the longs turn-- T Boone Pickens' prediction of $100/barrel before year's end may still be validated--

If OPEC member states find hoarding their oil to be a more practical (and most certainly profitable)option, in deference to local politics, then oil prices cannot fail in their march upward-- US consumers can only lament the continued devaluation of their buying power-- A carton of 18 eggs has almost doubled in the last 6 months but that continues to be excluded from the eccentric calibrations used to conjure up phony CPI ratios thereby elevating the canard of no inflation to mythical proportions-- Reports abound of commuters putting anywhere from $30 to $60 worth of gasoline into their vehicles every other day--The housing sector sits immobilized as prices continue to drop but, hey, the administration readies a plan for a scenario it can't even comprehend much less abate-- Cheese sandwiches have devolved into Peanut Butter on day old bread-- No jam!!--

Onlyyyyyyy........20-more-water-logged-shopp..........ing days until Christmas but my wish remains unchanged-- A sunny day!!!!!

GRATITUDE

2007-11-27T13:27:00.000-08:00

Gratitude for their service apparently does not apply to dozens if not hundreds of seriously wounded Iraq war veterans whose life-threatening and disabling wounds effectively ended their tour of duty before they could fulfill the entire time requirement stated in their enlistment contract-- Now being strictly and magnanimously enforced by pentagon desk-jockey-warriors a world away from the heat and dust and the whir of zinging lead sizzling with the intense internecine murder, robbery and assault still so rampant in Iraq, wounded veterans are now required to pony-up pro-rata portions of their enlistment bonuses because their wounds prevent them from ongoing service-- Uncle Sam wants, in an unbelievably miserly manner, our crippled soldiers to pay .........way above and beyond--

A little story below the fold of the International Herald Tribune posits that the Bush boys are scrapping major political strategeries that once formed the basis of our post invasion rationale for staying in Iraq-- Curtailing hopes for passing and enacting the egalitarian oil bill ( where disparate Iraqi groups would divide 7% of the oil left after US oil firms co-opted 93% of the country's total oil reserves) that has meandered the quicksand corridors of the Green Zone Iraq Parliament for longer than anyone cares to total-- Gone also is the forlorn and faux hope of unifying or re-unifying, as the case may be, Iraq with its people-- Certainly, proceeds from the failed plan to secure oil resources under American ownership and command will not be used now to finance the long term debt incurred by this Neocon rush to the cakewalk of utter defeat nor will it honor its enlistment promises made to America's best and most idealistic, those crippled enlistees ....... it's heart and soul--

Megalomaniacal but inestimably shrewd Pakistani Prez Musharrif appears to be tamping down the more incendiary ramifications of his dictatorial emergency but the further potential for mega-unravelling in this most recalcitrant of regions stands as a paramount antidote to the more jaundiced but no less delusional piffle with which American punditry finds no lack of misplaced hubris or supine willingness to impregnate our faltering foreign policy-- Yeah, like we are in control of the world,.....dude!!-- One of our staunchest allies in the War on terror turns out to be an overt enemy of Freedom and Democracy but will feign support for the Neocon misadventure if the price is right-- Another deleterious side-effect of the falling dollar means various precariously empowered dictators can't be as readily nor as inexpensively purchased-- The world just keeps getting bigger while our influence like a locomotive losing its steam diminishes greatly--

GREENBACK BLUES:THE ROAD TO HOOVERVILLE

2007-11-14T13:12:00.000-08:00

The money is falling apart and everyone knows it-- Only the serial denial of professional optimism finds nerve enough to disavow the obvious-- Bernanke's own handwriting is on the wall-- He's expecting a serious slowdown but apparently not yet capable of seeing how seriously slow some current elements of the economy have already become-- Must be difficult for an official Fed Chairman tasked by reality into becoming point man for a incipient mega-recession-- Lowering interest rates continues to lacerate the crumbling greenback as millions of Americans expelled from their dreams by rampant foreclosure trudge this epoch's road to Hooverville-- Sub-prime credit card crises and sub-prime auto loans troublingly spectre the gloom riddled path-- Even stalwart economists of the faux positive school have begun to shed their ideological rosy scenarios-- Something is happening here and we all know what it is, don't we, Mr. Jones??--

The cautiously worried Saudis have shot down an Iranian and Venezuelan proposal to consider accepting world currencies that, unlike the US dollar, maintain a stable value in exchange for their perilously precious oil commodities-- The Saudi's reaction against the proposal clearly posits how dangerous but delicate the dollar's standing in the world economy has become-- The Saudi minister ward his OPEC cabalists that even considering a currency switch, should the extant world get so much as a wisp of rumor surrounding such consideration, might be enough to topple the dollar into complete collapse-- Open microphones accidentally carried the meeting live to a group of world journalists ensconced in another room essentially making the world privy to OPEC's paranoia as well as their rather sound, from a purely business point of view, and necessary discussion--

Oil has fallen recently but can't seem to stay put-- Saudi Arabia/OPEC have unfoolishly and categorically renounced production increases even as worldwide demand may intermittently slow--Being paid for product with diminishing currency obviously devalues profits as well as cheapens a sought after commodity-- There is less incentive to increase production if prices fall as the result-- The Kurds will probably not relinquish their oil reserves without a fight while the Turks are more than capable of destabilizing oil supply issues of the entire region should they deem military adventure-ism in their immediate interests-- Oil as a paramount world interest/vital necessity is never going away while production rates in oil sectors beyond the strife torn Middle East continue to lose production and export capability-- The most bizarre aspect of the current Oil Troubles is that those contending for the Oval Office don't seem overly interested in addressing the problem while concurrently displaying a lack of depth in even being aware of the problem's extant parameters-- What can any of them do???--

More of the same today as stocks plummet, oil rises and dollars die another death by a thousand cuts while mortgage giants Fannie and Freddie admit to stunning losses in the billion dollar plural range all but throwing in the towel of despair-- The red-ink nightmare devours the greedy banker in his own game and the finance/service economy dons an undeniably threadbare stance of febrile indecision followed by a fatuously optimistic pronouncement that only leads to more gloom and a seriously downgraded confidence in the leadership of the government and that of Wall Street on the part of the American people-- Self reliance??-- The US??-- Where......??-- Who.....??-- Bail-outs, yeah......now we're talking!!--

One week the Bush crew is ready to nuke Iran and the next holds high level security discussions on how Iran might rescue the failed mission in Iraq-- Who woulda thunk it??--American influence in the world holds about as much sway as our dollar and now our military capability of taking over (yeah, right! .....and Surgically, too) and providing effective security for any Middle East oil reserves is fraught with doubt and disbelief-- Any attack of Iran whether by the US or it's client-rogue-state Israel would unleash potentially debilitating attacks against Saudi oil installations as well as shipping lanes and platforms throughout the Persian Gulf not to mention upgraded missile technology Hezbollah would not shrink from launching into downtown Tel Aviv should such a stupid occasion warrant--

Western Europe despite having the strongest currency in the world appears not too comfortable with its ascendant position in the world-- Consumer confidence in Germany has not plunged as dramatically as their American counterparts but discontent does roil the surface-- Belgium cannot decide whether or what kind of government it could, should or would like to have as the ignorance of one esteemed pundit asked the world whether Belgium was even worth saving-- American pundits absolutely glued to the edge of their existential hubris waiting for the next absolutely crucial installment(third or fourth??) of gun-shy Hillary's difficulty in deciding whether illegals should earn driver's licenses or not and how it might play in Peoria, Iowa, (yes, hold that pedantic correction, the famous Peoria is not in Iowa, but it may as well be given the over micro management of calculatingly nuanced and vapidly chimerical real political stances have become these days) managed to miss Belgium's existential question altogether-- France is another case enmeshed in wanton self-destruction -- Sarkosy was obviously brought to power to destroy French unions, socialized agriculture, and liberal education but transportation workers struck the heart of France's industrial and economic output and have now been joined by several other unions--Into the valley of financial despair rode the French future with the ideologue Sarkosy shouting corporate defiance at his own people-- Rumors have it he might have told French workers to 'Bring it on!!!!--

Tomorrow a litany of more foreclosure, economic worry, football and obesity-- Let's be thankful to the credit card companies that enabled the gluttony for so long and now drives us up to the sign that reads--The Road To Hooverville-- From here though it is anyone's guess but most of us will be walking that old ribbon of highway-- Give thanks, indeed--

FIRE BITES

2007-10-25T12:29:00.001-07:00

Once again the expert economists failed to gauge the depth of how far and fast existing home sales fell in September-- No small discrepancy this doubling of negative numbers-- Originally reported August numbers were revised downward in a big way-- Wait until canceled contracts get figured into the mix-- What the experts are loathe to mention is that the losses surrounding the hissing leak of the real estate balloon are much graver and more far reaching than, say, recent stock market declines-- Aside from the headliner victims of this financial fiasco, the lenders, the bankers, the mega-builders and their immigrant laborers, the American family looks to be a major loser in this Faustian bargain but unable to muster an advertising account with conglomerate media concerns, their considerable struggle to stay solvent rarely merits attention--

Predictions vary from the lowball White House numbers of 500,000 predicted foreclosures on sub-prime mortgaged houses to a whopping 2,000,000 million indicated by a bi-partisan congressional group-- Estimates predict over a $100/billion in lost wealth from these sub-primers alone-- State and local governments, including fire-bitten California, Florida, Michigan and Ohio, will see their coffers deprived of estimated $900/million in lost property taxes as a result-- Pension funds find themselves suddenly in hock to zillions of worthless sub-prime backed securities-- There is no economic news around the bend sufficiently forceful enough to stem the falling prices of homes people can no longer afford-- Currently 2 million more home loans wait for interest rates to be reset....obviously, upward-- Gasoline onto an already raging fire-- The US dollar doomed!!!-- Pray for strength because no easy life awaits--

Meanwhile Mr. Bush continues his robust mumblings of World War III-- Slip of the tongue, no doubt!!!-- As if that were a solution-- His puppet-master Cheney intoning everywhere that Iran is the impediment to peace in the Middle East is a motion even seconded by the protean Surging General Petraeus-- Israel, back from practicing air routes through Syrian air-space for a potential joint-strike against Iranian nuclear facilities turns the electrical power off in Gaza to drive the population away from its only defenders, Hamas-- Yeah, that'll work-- If the White House and its most loyal of rogue state-allies need a canard to attack Iran, whose GDP is all of 2% of the current Defense budget, why do these cretins fail to see the obvious??--

The fictive WMD's Sadam supposedly had are simply hidden in Iran with all manner of chimeric mushroom clouds-- John McCain and ever-unctious Joe Lieberman will tout this ploy far and wide on the Sunday political shows and pocketed administration frontmen like Michael Gordon, now flying solo after his tandem operative, the useful-idiot Judith Miller, fell from grace due to her scorched but missing-in-action journalistic-integrity, all oxymorons not aside, will festoon the faux discoveries front page on the magisterial NY Times and away we'll go into the wild blue.........yonder!!-- Spineless and lost, the angst-riven demies will goose-step into oblivion and take off their clothes for little bits of AIPAC chocolate-- Whitman heard America singing but the song of manifest destiny embodied by the gargantuan freeway now has one eye on the traffic and the other on the needle resting precariously on the red line of the fuel gauge-- Running on empty...........running hard!!!!--

Immediate repercussions to an attack on Iran may include $300/barrel oil prices but glossy spin can attribute conservation value to such anomalies and assert toil-worn homilies about the Castor-oil of depression making all of us, especially those still capable of oxygen intake, better-off in the long run-- The media, of course, super-bored by the criminality of the mis-adventure in Iraq, mostly ignorant of economic ramifications surrounding the housing market collapse, and fraught with the calcifugous ennui induced by the current abjectly myopic '08 presidential campaign, will be disappointed by the sudden faux war-footing being foisted upon them just as the voyeurism attendant public bathroom sex involving a closet Republican senator with the 'wide-stance' proclivity for undercover cops was getting so interesting-- Despite California aflame and Atlanta athirst, big Winter is on the way--

THE BEN AND HENRY ACT II

2007-10-17T16:31:00.001-07:00

Today's news ain't much better--Bernanke and Paulson, the Ben and Henry roadshow, again projected more worsening scenarios with extant woes enduring indefinitely for the problematic Housing sector-- Another building gauge, the US Architects index, pegged in at a fifteen month low adding to the surrounding gloom while Houston reported that it, indeed, did have a problem as slumping home sales continued to spread-- US housing starts plunged to a low not seen since 1993 while consumer prices took a bigger bite out of the anorexic dollars or the extended lines of credit they now bring home from the workplace in lieu of real wages--

Crude oil knocked on the door of $89/barrel before slightly backtracking but overconfidence did not greet T Boone Pickens' prediction of a 'dicey' fourth quarter with oil benchmarks topping the old $100 per....-- Basic supply running roughly 3 million barrels/day shy of perpetually rising world demand-- Home heating oil taps a record high and stunted auto production wears its slumpy coveralls-- On the way down coasters pick up speed--

Desire satisfied only increases the voracity of appetite as the world continues in almost unremarkable fashion to devour its seed corn-- Quaffing the lifeblood of the 'system' as if 400 afternoon colas would not count as calories and would certainly never be missed from the company's pantry-- The Self-Reliance once embedded in the American character appears to belong to a lost order or a vanished epoch-- The automobile drives us acquiescently ever onward to a fate the parameters of which no inkling, as of yet, ignites a cogent response of collective will-- The gears begin to grind--

Certainly China and Japan have not yet lost the will to act as they pulled the plug on the most US debt in five years-- The lipstick adorned US Treasuries no longer entice Asian financiers with the fanaticism that once mirrored the frenetic lust for Cabbage Patch Dolls found in overweight moms roller-derby-ing each other over the rails in big-box toy stores for a chance at the X-mas big-time-- Debt driven Christmas Smiles aside for the time being and maybe even the entire season as sovereign wealth funds seek higher returns beyond the US Treasuries' anemic dollar-- It is as if the US isn't as major a player in the game as he once thought-- Our Go pieces are already surrounded by self-inflicted debt riddled hubris everyone else is glaringly aware of except us--Spectators are leaving through the side gates and the back door when the fourth quarter has barely begun--

Meanwhile Mr Bush, foxier than a blind fox or a lame one, invites the Dalai Lama into the Oval Office to buff his bona fides and kiss his ring which infuriates our Chinese creditors who do have way more clout than his fuming clueless demie opposition whose ineptitude invites such erratic Bush eccentricity and dereliction without the substance or power to ever hold his feet to the fire of accountability-- Tweaking our creditors at such a financially perilous moment is irresponsible at best from a spoiled frat-boy never tasked by life to clean up his own mess-- The beat goes on

GAME UP

2007-10-16T13:34:00.001-07:00

Treasury Secretary Paulson at the end of his tether opted not to continue his ongoing full-scale dispute with the obvious as he warned anyone still listening to his pronouncements that the housing market/industry's unchecked collapse continues to adversely impact the economy, the capital markets and, of course, those myriad millions facing the nightmare of foreclosure and job loss-- Future economic growth is directly threatened and DC, our proud but imperiled political echelon, is worried big-time despite the farcical spin of Paulson's ubiquitously 'strong economic fundamentals'-- Mr. Secretary, excuse me, but oil futures, unnerved by Turkey/Kurdish rebel dust-up, rocketed through the $88/barrel watermark overnight not exactly fortifying economic fundaments globally-- The Paulson assessment appears proverbially a day late and a weak dollar short--

The Homebuilder Index drops to a record low in October and big homebuilder DR Horton's near 40% quarterly decline in home orders does not, frankly, echo strongly any positive economic signals-- Euro central bankers, seeking to salvage easy export profits, are pleading for Paulson intervention to resuscitate the unabashedly ghostly dollar-- Shoring up the dollar to grease the palms of Euro competition (or is that collaboration) would crimp the budgets of those borderline-solvent Americans, though scarcer they become, still in absentia from the rosters of delinquency-- Fed Prez Ben also weighed in today with the solemnly sober outlook that Housing troubles create a 'significant drag' on the economy-- Another late-comer to the obvious, he has, at least and at last, ceased championing his 'containment' canard that the sub-prime morass would not spread beyond the low rent speed-bump employed to fleece the naively poor--

Neither man, however, has abandoned political reticence to inform, officially, the large swathes of the American middle class they no longer have the requisite bona fides to meet roster requirements for inclusion to the group-- Excessive commuting costs have seriously crimped the discretionary income stratas of suburbia and now the end of the month number crunch leaves the harried and the hassled with a damoclean dilemma-- Risk foreclosure for not meeting the mortgage bill or risk perpetually indentured servitude from the usurious late fees for failing to oblige their credit card blood-suckers-- Truth is that no matter how much cheap money gets funneled into the economy through the banking system, cash or credit, it is losing its power to pay the bills and succeeds only in ratcheting up the indebtedness of everyone involved-- The piper exacts his payment even of those who mis-dreamed they were so exceptional as to be above the laws of economic karma-- Capitalism's artful practitioners elsewhere have maneuvered the US, still believing that 'it can't happen here', into that proverbial spot between the rock and the hard place but did so not without our indulgent and fatuous acquiescence-- And for that, the feast of consequence is undergoing preparation-- Game up!!!

REALITY CHECK

2007-10-09T12:06:00.001-07:00

Not sobered in the least by their lack of efficacious success surrounding the mindless foray into imperial overreach, the final throes of the Bush faux juggernaut appear bent on absolute self-destruction, going out with the proverbial whimpering bang by offering a fancy-wrapped (or rapt) scheme to bomb Iran-- The wussy demies capitulating to Bush even before winning back control of congress last year now renounce all pretense of manhood and principle to meekly go along with the feeble dead-enders on their fear-induced march into the twilight's last gleaming-- An American epoch, like the dollar that represents it, is winding down to an inevitable confrontation with hard-nosed boots-on-the-ground-- Reality check, anyone?--

The demies.....an opposition party??-- Give us a break!!!-- Breathe and these milquetoasts wither and fade-- As Robinson Jeffers once penned "....Protest, a bubble in the molten mass pops and sighs out and the mass then hardens.....Shine, perishing republic."-- The weak-willed party of Roosevelt will not defend the Constitution.....that simple!!!-- The offices they so obsequiously sought, rich in perquisite attachments, sparkling in the adulation from media and staff and all manner of subservient underlings, house their soiled honor and dereliction of honest duty-- Big Sister Hillary bloated by lavish corporate conviviality and plain old power-hungry money-grubbing waits revenant-like in the wings of orchestrated campaign nothing-speak for her two-fisted turn to grab the cudgels of wire-tapping while the decrepit repo-men seem blissfully willing to ride the downward route of the Bushies hoping to dump a ruined Middle East, a ruined oil-supply, and a ruined economy into the lap of any demie supplicant megalomaniacal enough to grovel for it-- Shine, indeed!!--

Meanwhile the Big Fed Bernanke decided to decimate the dollar as a stop gap for the insolvency threatening not only the, once, big banks and brokerages of Wall Street but also millions of ordinary Americans losing homes and jobs and confidence across the nation-- No historical precedent has yet been cited as evidence that currency devaluation leads to prosperity even of the short-term temporary variety-- Even disparate countries like Vietnam, Asia's bell-weather economic mine canary, and Middle Eastern emirate Qatar, quandaried by the prospect that increases in oil production could diminish revenue, dumped devolving dollars-- Harried American consumers used credit cards in a gargantuan manner in September cheered on by mainstream media as if pathological indebtedness is now somehow a patriotic duty without the ramifications of the usurious kind-- Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Ben??--

General Petraeus, the man who waited so long to assume a high level command apparently does not want to confront the reality his Surge failed to muster much security for the Iraqi people, between four and five million of whom have become refugees, now deflects attention away from the Iraq debacle by ratcheting up more and more allegations against Iran-- Moving the goalpost appears to be DC's most sure-fire M.O. employed to hang on to the perks of that command-- Somehow widening the war into Iran doesn't appear to be the most efficacious method of securitizing Middle Eastern oil fields or enhancing the precarious position of the demented Israeli government but careers must be maintained and the steps of compulsively driven mistakes must be taken-- Congress has turned a deaf ear to the American people and there is no organized opposition strong enough or brave enough to prevent this possible conflagration-- With more than ample support from the manifest cowards in the political and corporate arenas, Bush readies himself to fulfill his destined downfall bringing America to her knees--

LIFETIME LOW

2007-10-02T14:11:00.001-07:00

Pending home sales fell nearly 7% in August, a very damaging drop (in fact, a record low) considering the elite economists from their manicured observatories had forecast a not less than serious but nowhere close to freefall number of negative 2%-- Such a widely disparate differential between projected and actual numbers is in recent time nothing new-- Bloomberg business news measures reality against prognostication in groups of housing economists, specialists and analysts on a bevy of issues it surveys and more often than not of late the hot shots have been found seriously disconnected from the boots on the ground-- Easy to do when the measuring perspective sits ensconced in the glass-towered-mahogany of denial while rapturing Mozart behind petite headphones and overdosing on double chubby-chuck lattes-- 'The Housing Market is too big to fail!!!!!!'--If one had the temerity to imbibe one of those lard-bomb coffees every time this glossy rubric spewed its self-deceptive hubris across the inattentive mega-complacent televised media-smear, the circus would certainly never want for fatmen-- Yo, Smiley Face, step right up!!--

Here's an amusing if unwittingly sardonic comment swallowed unchallengingly by a Reuters reporter named Heavens-- Citigroup, the nations largest Bank by market value announced recently that its third-quarter profit crumbled downward, off a whopping 60%-- Financial tremors aside the company's Top Dog averred a "return to a normal (mine) earnings environment in the fourth quarter" without stating how, mind you-- Reporter Heavens believed this optimistic blather helped drive the Dow Industrials to a record high on Monday-- Obviously an arcane coupling process eschewing nimbly elicited proof but, hey, in the era of faith-based build-it-they-will-come fantasia, facts, even the incontrovertible ones, as Mr.Reagan once avowed, are just 'stupid things'--

Never mind that the dollars, one would hope to accrue should the temptation to claim a profit from this stratospheric rally induce one to sell a position, would actually share the same purchasing power the still somewhat lean Canadian Looney, by world currency pegs, possessed last week-- Once again the hubris heavy commentators painted another reality amiss by claiming the Canadian Dollar had achieved parity with the US greenback-- In the US dollar-centered view of globalist economic supremacy the suddenness of such an astounding move might have merited some modicum of investigatory academics but no, not even the fact that it was our dollar that dis-achieved downward to parity with our northern neighbor's currency could escape the misplaced pride of journalism's obliviously inattentive stupor-- Facts, indeed, may be stupid but the US Dollar has fallen to a Lifetime Low signaling that a rise in one's stock holdings may not offer a commensurate rise in personal wealth and certainly not in buying power--Hardly, dismayingly so, a normal earnings environment--

For those born circa 1980-81 the onward surge of Gold prices to a Lifetime High clearly spelled out the disaffection held round the globe for the US dollar-- The inane gobbledygook about the worst of the credit crunch that "may be almost over' peddled by former Fed Prez Greenspan has merited some caustically unmuffled comment-- Ever the hedging master of doublespeak Greenspan may elicit more book sales with his omnipresent explanations and caveats designed to absolve himself of any complicity for the current crumbling financial and bond edifices he helped engineer and the book tour frenzy will certainly aid television's incessant chase for smiley-face infotainment space-filler in a comically buffoonish relief but the very predicaments that don't lend themselves to soundbite rectifications will continue to plague the global finance arenas with corporate borrowers increasingly a burdened focal point-- What would Big Al do if the rate cut that the arm-twisted Bernanke foisted upon the less than fully defined but definitely raging credit market turmoil fails to alter the fundamentals in any genuinely positive manner??--

Republicans for years argued that social problems could not be ameliorated simply by throwing money at them while the currently spineless demies of today are too timorously reticent to suggest that the radical disjuncture of real production economy in favor of the chicanery of a multitude of schematic variations on time tested ponzi themes will not lend themselves to any correction based on a senile dictum of more buck for the bang-- Short-sighted short-term bailouts for desperate banks on the perilous eve of insolvency only postpones the inevitable-- The dollar will continue to be the world's punching bag and consumer sentiment, even in good times a bit fickle, will have to find fight enough somewhere to prevent becoming accustomed to metastasizing demoralization-- Saviors will not be found in more credit cards--

LAME DUCKDOM

2007-08-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-23T12:44:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-09T14:33:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-07T09:28:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-01T19:34:00.000-07:00

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!!!!

NEOCON HILLARITY

2007-07-29T18:27:00.000-07:00

Hillary has finally made it!!!-- Badmouthing the cautious but sensible position of Obama that the US should be engaged with its enemies as somehow 'naive and irresponsible', has brought the pandering facho Queen of AIPAC into the hallowed realm of the Neocon version of Valhalla--Brooks, Krauthammer, Kristol, along with many more to come, have all jumped on Hillary's bandwagon offering sycophantic syrupy accolades to the seasoned and oh so shrewd perpetual politician--

That Obama's stance was so eminently sensible that even degenerate Neocons, suffering mightily from the heavy and intense glare echoing their defeat in Iraq, can recognize the stupidity inherent in Hillary's negative retort as an electoral liability even the 'pygmy' candidates (to borrow Newt's phrase) of the severely damaged repo-party may, perchance, have success against in next years' campaign combat-- It is not as if they have never before attempted to gallop toward ruin inside mega-deception only to find such success way beyond their stated intentions--

Didn't Hillary's own naivete as well as her own irresponsibility aid and abet the Neocon misadventure in Iraq by actually voting for it quite to the contrary of her persistent denial of any complicity-- The suddenly world-wise pose of Mrs. Clinton is disingenuous, to say the least, and exposes her disconnect from both the responsibility she isn't man enough to accept and the reality she consistently attempts to evade-- She is certainly not alone in this on either side of the aisle, for sure, and perhaps that is why such not so deft accusations of her opponent meets with such resplendent Neocon praise-- Hillary and the Neocons...... fellow travelers!!!--

Basking in their wildly appreciative glow, Hillary will probably and privately take their complimentary praise as an ego endorsement or perhaps one more chink in the armor of 'the biggest glass ceiling of them all' without realizing the Neocons are just doing what they have done so well all along as their pet project for a New American Century disintegrates before their very eyes and that is, erecting facile constructs that resemble missions accomplished but in truth are grasping at the proverbial straw-- Think about it, if the Neocon punditry, damning with excessive praise, actually believes Hillary is somehow and so suddenly the real deal, how could she be??--

BLOOD IN THE WATER

2007-07-27T18:15:00.000-07:00

Please forgive me for not shedding any tears for the bloated banker boys who missed their tee times at the summer links this week-- Unable to sell-off a stockpile of loans has many of these GQ types stuck at the office sifting worthless paper while the rumor mill challenges their sanity-- The LBO craze has suddenly and precipitously cratered and with it goes doomed banker fees while the year end bonus balloon gyrates wildly out of the stratus-sphere until the hissing air abates and its wilting dance touches down at ground zero-- Fear is the only darkness, Grasshopper!!!--

And on Wall Street, off over 700 points from last weeks' record high, there is plenty of Darkness to go around-- Financial Alchemy run amok and now, in the aftermath, for all, a volatile feast of consequence amidst developing doom-- The mergers and acquisitions as well as the ease of leveraged buyouts and the stock buyback boom that has provided the drive behind Wall Streets record breaking rally can no longer find the finance to support these mega-deals-- Panic and fear in abundance not to mention a little savage anger from those whose home-ownership bubble had its pipe-dream pulled out from under it-- Foreclosure does strange things to certain people-- Word on The Street is guillotines are being sharpened--

Many of the hundreds of thousands of people who sought the easy money of financial careers and the wonderful futures offered by the Service economy, now sound rather shocked and disconsolate with the Housing markets nationwide collapsing into ever deeper troughs-- New Home sales dropped nearly 7% in June to a five month low triply worse than those ubiquitous experts had predicted-- Expect the major lay-offs in the financial services sector to wonder where all the jobs have gone-- While sub-prime credit prey were gulled by Greenspan's ARM army before being stabbed in the back by predictable rises in mortgage rates, all the jobs which may have facilitated on-time mortgage payments were being exported to cheap labor venues beyond the American Dream-- If the Dollar is/was the glue holding our disparate America together, prepare for separation and its attendant trouble-- The power centers are weak, indulgent, complacent, and, yes, quite dumb-- Chaos is now emergent!!!--

THE SMELL OF VICTORY

2007-07-24T11:12:00.001-07:00

There was demi-captain Harry Reid sifting the sundered earth between his shriveled fingers, eyeing the backdrop of the deadly lectern for potential enemy movement while schooling a young demi-corporal about the arts of battle in the toil-worn aftermath of the Senatorial Slumber Party-- "I love the smell of pillow feathers in the morning, he groans, it smells like........" Well, you get the picture-- Is this the less artful demi-version of 'Mission Accomplished'??--The pathetic moribund political echelon in DC licks its newest wounds impatient for the same August recess it so sanctimoniously cudgels the Iraqi Parliament for indulging in at such a grave and perilous moment-- What it can't or simply refuses to see is its own indentured share attendant that grave peril-- This is not......... the smell of Victory--

America continues its deranged credit-card spending-spree stealing its children's future and suffering an abject loss of integrity without any responsible acknowledgement that its huge debt may have draconian ramifications in the immediate future-- That Bush who also plans to dump his Iraq mess on some oblivious successor is somehow an anomalous leader of his generation is really a disingenuous analysis-- What the Bush-haters cannot or simply refuse to see is that Bush like Clinton exemplifies the self indulgent indebted boomer crew to the maximum-- That whiskey and video games may be his addictions when white wine or marijuana or sex impale the more liberal boomers argues not against the underlying more-for-me drive fundamental to the generation that shows no actionable remorse for spoiling the legacy left by the preceding generation or for dumping their Karmic bill on the next-- The rest of the world is clearly beginning to doubt the once good faith ability of the US to repay its gargantuan appetite for foreign loans--If 'deficits don't matter' why are reserve banks and governments worldwide sweeping swiftly-depreciating dollars out their worried doors-- Borrowing over $1 trillion annually just to keep its consumptive hometown Hollywood fantasy operative as well the $12 billion per month sinkhole called Operation Provide Targets in Iraq to keep it from imploding into horrible defeat, The US Government cannot display any sound or principled plan, rough-draft or otherwise, to requite its world benefactors-- No wonder the world is worried about the deadbeat finances of the last remaining Superpower-- It is not a mirror into which the deceitful in DC wish to be seen peering-- This is not sign of ascension and, likewise, surely not the smell of Victory--

Currently there are enough stockpiles replete with enough trans-fat to fend off suggestions to all the hot-air ducts spewing empty odorless dioxide across the blathersphere that it is nobler in the mind not to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but to actually oppose that sea of troubles rising gloomily in river city and put something meaningful on the line-- If our nation were a balloon all the hot air risings from the blogosphere would not fill its sails--Houston, we do not have liftoff!!!-- Philadelphia, we have a city, the birthplace of the US Constitution and home to a treasury of early American history, that has become haven to a murder zone-- The worst problem is in the nations big cities but medium size cities also show up-ticks in their murder rates In San Diego, murders were up 33 percent; in Houston, 12.9 percent, and in New York 10.6 percent. In Philadelphia, murders were up 7.7 percent last year. Sadr city on a multiple scale is coming to an oil-diminished megalopolis near you-- The memorial Wall in North Philly honors or, should it be, laments the 406 people murdered in 2006 85% of whom were Black-- This year one murder a day occupies the demoralized Police who apologetically admit loss of control-- The nightmare streets belong to the armed and those not 'tooled up' simply cannot risk the outside world-- Little of this competes with the Iraq debacle, American Idol or the Obillary circus for space on the Nightly News-- This is not a more secure nation, nor a sign of ascension, nor, least of all, the smell of Victory--

ALL NIGHTERS

2007-07-19T17:24:00.001-07:00

A thousand more new wildfires roared to life since Monday as dry lightning strikes found fertile tinder across the sun-scorched dry-bone American West prompting besieged firefighting crews to seek reinforcements from international sources-- 68 large blazes charring the grasslands, the sage, and the timber as well as homesites across 12 western states--300 fire-threatened homeowners under-statedly would more than likely no longer moniker themselves kin to their home division's appellation in and about Happy Camp in the Klamath National Forest-- California's Peachtree Canyon denizens augur dread under an evacuation order as the Zaca fire with advancing potential of several miles per hour sights in on their endangered dreams with forecasts for continued high temperature and more winds--

The 6.8 earthquake that rocked Japan earlier this week inflicted considerably more serious damage to a nuclear power plant than the now profusely apologetic industry and government officials first reported resulting not only in a sizable up-tick in the anxiety quotient of ordinary Japanese citizens, understandably concerned for their immediate physical health and safety, but also added to the disquiet concerning the long term repercussions surrounding the less than energy-rich Japanese apprehension over future resource availability in an increasingly oil and gas hungry region of the world--

Havoc ran roughshod on Lexington Avenue at 41st street near Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan yesterday as an 83-year-old underground 24 inch diameter steam pipe exploded, geysering huge steam clouds, roiling, rumbling brown water 120 feet high into the busy city air-- Panic led evacuees from the Chrysler building to charge down 43 flights of stairs wildly presaging death-- Pedestrians some covered in ash, mud and street soot, some pelted by pebbles and dislodged concrete and some anxiously crying at the perceived terrorist attack sprinted for cover-- Memories of 9/11 vividly enveloped the scene as 200 firefighters and dozens of siren blaring fire-engines and ambulances converged on the area cratered with a 20 foot mud hole-- Rumors of building collapse, asbestos contaminated smoke, hurricanes, and bombs permeated the rush hour--

Wall Street may have avoided the panic in Mid-town but many there are expressing frayed nerves about the visible exposure of banks and lenders caught in the downward squeeze of the sub-prime market-- Fed Chairman Bernanke recently removed his pollyannish dome from a theoretically academic realm long enough to forewarn all those interested that the sub-prime crisis could lead to staggering losses somewhere in the 'contained' vicinity of $100 billion-- Bernanke also lowered the Fed growth forecast as well as testifying before Congress that the mortgage meltdown could spread to the healthy loan sector and could get worse before better-- Welcome to reality, Ben, where were you last month???-- Brent crude has danced around the $78/barrel level for the best part of July and Ben boy now surmises overextended consumers/debtors may be peering down the proverbial barrel of a cocked shooting iron-- Not to worry, Ben, consumers have employed your easy credit for quite some time now and for many of them a necessary purchase ingredient may have been, Ben, ....a semi-automatic weapon of choice-- Believe it, Ben, they are already locked and loaded and the object of their aim is what should keep you awake nights--

Foreclosures already at record highs continue to spike pummeling homeowners currently besieged by spiraling gasoline prices and an added upsurge in food costs--Bear Stearn's two troubled hedge funds found little salvation from their recent bail-outs, one now being touted as completely valueless and the second nearly moribund-- Scattered across the country lesser-named funds are closing their doors with destabilizing frequency-- Everyday there is a new headline featuring another state or another megalopolitan region suffering a major drop in home sales and/or home prices, this morning California weighed in/down with sales hitting a 12 year low while Las Vegas home sales fell 42%-- Meanwhile those who did manage to sell their house found the sinking value of the crumbling dollar cookie almost a hidden tax, if you will, eroding the purchasing stature of their profit-- A glass of Coke costs the lowly American tourista about four Euros on the continent-- Imagine, (and please don't ask 'why?', it's simply a mundane way of spelling out the immediacy of the oblivion our currency faces) paying 35 bucks for an egg MacMuffin breakfast and another seven-fifty for a coffee-- Our money,......... sucks!!!!

A few days ago 80 people in the city of Kirkuk were killed and several hundred more were wounded-- Scores of cars destroyed, buildings and apartments damaged beyond repair-- Suicide bombers assaulted the Red Mosque complex in the capital of Pakistan and tallied 37 dead including police and citizen bystanders while northwest and southern Pakistan played host to the metastisizing violence region-wide-- In Iraq the government sits in paralytic stupor and void of any urgency before their August recess while al-Sadr, the savvy hoodlum from the slums of Sadr city, strengthens his political prowess and wins the very hearts and minds the anti-insurgency tactics of General Petraeus were intended to secure-- Sadr's crew dispenses protection, social services and money to the ragged poor, and used the downtime produced by Bush's Surge into his poor Shiite-homeboy turf to extend the reach of their armed militias to areas the under-manned Surge couldn't possibly cover tactically-- Sadr repeatedly creates fresh tactical elements and simple strategic maneuvers that consistently confound the political leaders of both Iraq and the US-- The General Petraeus meanwhile is purported to be searching for yet another tide-turning tactic to replace the dismally stalemated Surge, while the White House spends its precious energy concocting faux rationales to defend defenseless tactics no longer capable of producing results large-scale enough to produce optimum leverage against the insurgency-- Whatever new strategy Petraeus advances demands an authentic criteria which, of course, either the on-time insurgents or both Cheney and Bush, weeks and miles behind current events, have the wherewithal to overrule--

Yes, the same Surge the President positively declared had 'surprised' the insurgents even after advertising the ballyhooed strategery for six months in every major media outlet in the world including Al Jazeera-- Now 16 agencies comprising the National Intelligence Estimate, which even esteemed presidential contenders find insufficient time to read, agree that Al-Qaeda as an organization is now stronger, broader and better organized than ever while the isolated president thinks he has these same Qaedas on the run-- Defense department deadwood prognosticate their increasing fear that spectacular attacks mirroring the '68 Tet Offensive in Vietnam are in the offing even imminent while seven Sunni insurgent organizations and their leaders begin formation of a public political alliance anticipating potential negotiations as the daunting scent of withdrawal permeates the frustrated killing grounds-- Sparking my curiosity and raising a question concerning coincidental intent, headlines acknowledged the US recently called for more face-to-face talks with Iran--

Be that as it may, this somewhat cursory perusal of a few pertinent news postings concerning prominent ongoing world events was dealt a savage blow, one the winds of rumor barreled up the boulevard bringing word the demies had left their feeble shame on the dugout bench and were actually going to step up to the plate-- That's right!!!-- The same demi-Party that couldn't possibly lose to Joe Lieberman and did, was now lugging the heavy lumber to the batter's box-- Repo-men weakened by high profile defections were said to be quaking in their guccis-- No sniveling little leveraged buyouts here-- No, this would be hammer-and-tong, hand-to-hand, face-to-face, knock-down, drag-out, fight-to-the-finish, last-man-left-standing but when former-boxer and demi-captain Harry Reid unveiled his strategic schema, it smelled a lot more like salad than demi-Surge--

Not even jack-rabbits and dead bucaroos in the parched deserts of Nevada could cotton something this lame-- Alcohol ravaged Joe McCarthy deserved less shame than this silly sham-- Al-maliki could never have proposed something this profoundly insipid-- Jerry Bremer?,.... maybe-- Winning elections may be heady and grand but failing to deliver the goods, especially when failing to ascertain the true nature of the goods in the first place means your credibility is in hock to trouble-- Shuffling back to the inane popularity of their office with an air of resignation, the demies, uncertain and chagrined are simply void of new workable ideas-- Even if more repo-men favored defection from further Bush idiocy, the demies offer nothing to which good-faith renegades might ally themselves-- This is not leadership-- The country is going nowhere--

A (bleeping!!) all-nighter????-- Un-(bleeping)-believable!!........ And then it flops............. 'Big Time'--

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HARPIES

2007-07-17T14:22:00.001-07:00

Mr. Bush desperately pleads a threadbare case for his Surge supported all around by Neocon sycophants extolling the moderate success achieved in Anbar Province temporarily utilizing Sunni Tribal groups tenuously allied to US troops in an effort to combat Al Qaeda in Iraq-- Still a lethally earnest number, attacks have dropped by nearly 50% to around 26/day in the largely homogeneous Sunni region but Neocon dream-tank pundits and poseurs around the blather-sphere extrapolate much too simplistically from this unique alliance a template of tide-turning success which will rescue the inefficacy of the under-manned Surge countrywide and lead to the wild possibility of miraculous Victory--

To issue such craven nostrums in vain attempt to secure phantom success only prolongs the agony of all those touched by the mad fire of this fiasco-- The positive side-effect to this inchoate spin is to ultimately dodge historical judgement and condemnation for their haughty role in the slaying and criminal dismemberment of Iraq and to do so for as long as possible-- Never mind that such fictive constructs shield only the frightened purveyor and his vanity from the commonly obvious-- It is quite understandable, to say the least, as who amongst the status-competitive elites actually craves going down in history as an irredeemable loser or a pre-meditative war criminal-- The most amiable tactic, and quite often the most futile, to usually surface from the commingling of such fear and perverse pride is the proverbial grasping for nearest available straw-- Desperate in the extreme and void of any honor the incapacity of facing up to and accepting the responsibility for the insensate damage and hellacious suffering they have inflicted upon thousands of innocent people escapes these innocuous ideologues and drives the most bogus of their alternatives..... Salvaging faux reputations-- Hail, Mary, full of grace.......--

In this time of patently visible political debility, Mr. Bush finds himself in the unfortunate and certainly unenviable position of now having to find fortitude enough to fend off the incredibly deranged overtures coming from the bloated and frustrated Vice President, Mr. Cheney, .............. to bomb Iran!!!!-- The urge to change the subject from the ongoing disintegration in Iraq to another venue offering last chance victory options for a moribund political echelon would be sorely tempting especially with the fanatical and omnipresent chortling of apple-polishing AIPAC toadies like Mr. Kristol, Mr. Krauthammer, the Kagan clan and, of course, the mealy mongering Mr. Lieberman all of whose delusional epistles, uttered wildly into the militant mix of despair like Hitchcock-ian mad harpies, only wind up grating hysterically on the exposed nerve of nearly everyone in the extant world--

Bombing Iran may appear like salvation to those whose political tenure, the ineffable lineage of sequentially incompetent failure, offers no legislative ransom but only sullen deadlock-- Bleakly it seeps away with clock-like inevitability while the parade of desertion from its officers offers absolutely no positive prospects for posterity in the tortuous time remaining-- Warned that an aerial attack on Iran may easily backfire on and, worst case scenario, destroy Western Civilization's economy and influence globally but, hey, one sardonic benefit to such a perilous side-effect would be to shut the traps of those idiot shrews mentioned above-- Does Mr. Bush bear backbone enough to buck Mr. Cheney??-- It doesn't appear to be the case attendant the Libby commutation-- Time will tell--

The multiplication of murder and the massive explosions in the northern city of Kirkuk yesterday offers stark antidote to the vague canards of success offered by the White House in recent days-- While 80% of remaining Iraqis lack access to sanitation facilities, insurgents there possess the ability to strike any and everywhere inside the disintegrating country and in the not too distant future insurgents in Pakistan may possess such redundant capability themselves-- The Turks not just idly rattling sabers are gathering good numbers of troops on the northern border-world of Iraq with, perhaps, an eye toward the oil fields, but in terms of real politik, The Turks really cannot afford homage to the Rosy Scenario whore being pimped by Neocon dream-tanks devoid of logistical reality and praying for time-- American aims, most acutely those critical to the survival of Iraq, continue to go unrealized and the Turks, who are not afraid to actually ascertain and act on such intel, exercise their courage in preparation--

Positing fairy tale as fact prevents alternative policy plans from being postulated and possibly implemented but beyond the dubious pretense of smiley-face optimism comes the Grim Reaper and his roster of freshly dead spent to sustain such fictional folly-- The specter of Tet raises a reminder to stew minds besieged by the rumors of catastrophe and the demoralization attendant DC's spin crews-- Reports now circulating suggest General Petraeus is seeking an immediate alternative policy direction away from the failed tactical strategy of Bush's Surge-- Wasting precious time until September is not a viable option on the killing grounds of Iraq-- The pro-Surge pundit-ocracy is apparently busy defending a position no longer applicable asking for time no longer available-- A step and a half behind events, reactive before pro-active, coming in on a wing and a prayer-- Hard landing awaits--

Alluding constantly to future chaos, rampant bloodletting and mindless vengeance that would attend withdrawal of American Troops allows the unconcerned to ignore the degree to which this insidious mayhem and collapse already exists as a direct result of the initial Occupation and an ongoing response to the vagaries of its unplanned operations-- That both the White House and the Congress either cannot perceive this or simply opt to ignore it through rhetorical charades and the omnipresent art of plausible deniability is testimony to the bankrupt venality and self-serving vacuity of posturing US leadership and it bodes ominously for the stability of our imminent future--

IRRELEVANCE

2007-07-12T14:01:00.001-07:00

Remember Don Rumsfeld beaming cocksure and invincible from his deadly lectern like a schoolboy at the head of his class oblivious to the real game awaiting him at recess on the hard asphalt play-gound where the talk as always had to be walked-- Rumpot, if you remember, had just finished telling all of Europe that they were old and irrelevant because they were so reluctant to join the Neocon juggernaut in the quick and obviously inevitable Middle Eastern ascension of The Project For A New American Century-- With ultimate Victory already ordained, European timidity (ultimately good sense) would certainly not be apportioned any share in the victors' spoils-- Seems like a long time ago, but where is Rummy these days??-- And who, steeped in oceans of unnecessary bloodshed and shunted to a stool on the back porch of history, wears the laurel of irrelevance today?--

Those credentialed enough to apply are too numerous to name but Mr. Bush certainly begs for ample consideration-- Acknowledging in a White House Report this moment is crucial, The President this morning also reiterated,"I believe (my italics) we can succeed" even as the official account predicted another increase to violent insurgent attacks and the resultant up-tick of sustained American casualties in the coming months-- Gone is the confident certitude of "We will prevail" that in the past so often punctuated his speeches to the American people-- From 'we' to 'I' and from 'will' to 'believe', we are now down to the bedrock of trembling faith and from the collective to the singular, it is the faith of an isolated individual spurning the life preserver hard-fact is offering--

On de-Ba'athification Reform, to cite one benchmark from the negative majority of 18 imperatives operating in theatre, the report euphemistically pronounces 'a lack of satisfactory progress'-- (Above all else, never call a spade a failure) This really is a bastard form of re-Ba'athification intended to give the former torturers and bureaucratic hacks of Saddam's malignant party apparatus enough political clout in the Iraqi parliament to induce it (also with promises of oil profit-sharing) to refrain from further violence against the occupation-- Concocted in some air-conditioned Neo-con dream-tank this proposal probably wore an ideal glow for those corpulently cushioned in their over-stuffed easy chairs mint- juleps ever at the ready, but for the Shiites now esconsced in authority, empty as it may be, in the Iraqi government the bald-faced fact is the Sunnis are The Enemy, have been and will continue to be and are not, cannot and must not ever be trusted-- This is real war--

Since the US, in all those years of supporting Saddam, never gave a real rat's eyelash about how poorly his henchmen roughed-up and ill-treated the Shia majority and how deep the residual debt of blood-payback runs in the Shia psyche, the current Administration is incapable of understanding the intensely bitter situation it intends to arbiter--The US position here is quite irrelevant from the militia/insurgent point of view and no matter how often the State Department still denounces the apt description of the ongoing fight between these two sectarian opponents as a civil war, no alternative semantic option will alter the continuing carnage-- Or get the Bushies off the chopping block----

Not every civil war unfolds within the tactical and/or philosophical parameters of the Blue versus the Gray-- Ours wasn't the only Civil War in the history books or the only manner a civil war is allowed to play itself out-- But to cite a positive benchmark from the report, praise went to the efficacy of the government's agile condemnation of major attacks referring to one in Samarra last month-- A verbal laceration.... a quick reaction..... clearly a bureaucratic hook from which to hang an irrelevant hope..... Quality tactics from a 21st Century Government.... maybe a new subscription to the Weekly Standard or an invitation to a bow from the besottedly blind AEI both of whom while away their own irrelevance by contriving to find self-exoneration for their own complicity in this worsening debacle--

By extrapolating from the moderate success (attacks down nearly 50% to a still rather high 26 per day) in largely Sunni Anbar Province, The Neocons posit a potential countrywide grassroots movement of dis-illusioned insurgents almost ready to join the coalition and drive the Qaedas from Iraq because a few tribal sheiks aided America against local Al Qaeda bad-boys holed up in Anbar-- With this miraculous surge-induced event almost tactile but still really visible only to true Neocon believers, Victory's bliss yet waits just round the corner-- Republican traitors in the Senate are the only ones now capable of gumming up the works-- Victory an inch away in the dream when it does give way to hard fact on the ground will still provide The Cabal their complicity-denying slogan-- Defeat snatched from the jaws of Victory---Stabbed in The Back!!

Mr. Bush casts a pathetic lonesome figure as Republicans begin to desert the sinking ship-- The Demies locked in the blatant irrelevance of ineffectual performance wait like coddled visionless buzzards to feast none too soon on the collapsing administration carcass, always striving for maximum election year advantage and media exposure uber alles-- That Mr. Bush had to wait for the 4th of July celebration to commute Scooter Libby's jail sentence, slipping it in under the radar via a press release in the wee hours of the hard-news cycle, marks how far the Decider in Chief has fallen and how much oomph there is left in the administration tank-- Sadly this is not now and never has been a strong leader at the helm of an ascendant nation but now a burnt out filling station attendant coming home from work with one too many under his belt...... running on empty--

EXTREMIS

2007-07-10T20:53:00.001-07:00

If The Surge was designed to provide increased security to the citizens of Iraq in hopes of winning their hearts and minds, political leaders of both sectarian stripes responsible for the lion's share of hideous mayhem, the Shiite and the Sunni, voted against the efficacy of that Surge by telling everyday Iraqi citizens to arm themselves because none of the competing military organizations in the killing zones are capable of defending or protecting the citizen non-combatants and the onus for their defense is now on them--

The level of explosive savagery over the weekend dwarfed the smiley face news American strategists had been hoping to spin in the administration's upcoming progress report mandated for July 15-- Various reports detail the effects Senior Republican Senators, defecting from Bush's tired old stay-the-course saw are having on the beleaguered White House crew--An atmosphere of panic appears to be setting-in around the oval office-- Spokesman Snow is frantically opting for complete categorical denial as his spin maneuver when asked about sharply ongoing debates concerning revised strategery and tactical alternatives to the continuing disintegration of the Iraqi state and the ever increasing proliferation of car bomb attacks-- Political operative Rove in a petulant huff refused to offer any apology for the war gone wrong-- No, he did not say he was 'out of the loop'--

When the Iraqis do take over security operations they will do so with an army and a police force rife with insurgent infiltrators-- Small militias have been absorbed into Iraqi forces and are never punished for their considerable atrocities-- American troops are in a severely thankless position/task of having to train groups of temporarily neutral insurgents who will never be loyal to America-- Sectarian violence and anti-occupation operations pandemic in Baghdad and central Iraq are missing from the British situation in Basra where after a dose of surge from the Royal British Imperial grunts the situation resumed itself featuring 'systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassination, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism,' all mixed together with mafioso criminals posing as arbiters of political action-- Should Baghdad's irate sectarian tempers ever becalm or dissipate would Basra's chaotic troubles be reproduced there in the extreme-- Non sectarians are not immune from exacting vows of vengeance amidst an everyday reality the paralytic White House refuses to perceive--

This is not wonderful-- General Petraeus is now talking decade length commitments to deal with the insurgency alone-- Those now serving are in danger of becoming indentured slave-warriors with death as the escape hatch-- How many more troops will the ten year tactic require and from where will they magically appear??-- How much of their grand-children's money and future will be drained away in this process-- Once the insurgency has been defeated out there somewhere beyond the tenth year will the Iraqis who are still standing and breathing even remember anything about governmental institutions and the necessary logistics to effect and engineer a functioning 21st Century nation??-- Redoubling efforts after having forgotten the aim is the uniform of the fanatic and Mr. Bush still revels in the calling--

Iraq is in disorder at its most radical zenith and ordinary moderate Iraqis must now prepare to use murder as a routine means of self-defense-- Every life is now improvidently endangered and they have all been warned-- This is not a situation where Rosy Scenario much less Victory is just around the corner, where two more weeks or months of surge can elicit anything proximate to civilization from a barbarian mad mega-slaughter-- Every milestone gained by Mr Bush's strategery has gained positive hype from most mainstream cheerleading media countrywide only to meet explosive disavowal from an insurgent resistance replete with many disparate guerrilla capabilities-- Expect more aggressive detonations should Bush and Petraeus portray progress from the cordite-scented facts on the ground come September--

Let's be adamantly clear and direct here-- Failure to stop extremism is extreme failure-- And failure to face up to failure has the potential to destroy our country-- Demand the Honor and the Courage missing in extremis from our leaders-- Only by facing our fall head-on can we then rise from its ashes--

SPIRAL DOWN

2007-07-10T13:22:00.001-07:00

Asked how he found a dollar the other day, a friend of mine replied, 'With a magnifying glass.'-- No wonder, as the dollar gets even smaller with each new passing day-- Today a new record low was reached against the Euro as the world continues to run away from the greenback-- The continuing up-tempo collapse of the Housing Sector bubble with its attendant waves of delinquent mortgage payments, increasing rates of foreclosure and devastating declines in property value wreak havoc in stock, bond, currency and commodity market psyches around the globe-- Refinancing a home that is now worth less on the market than the current owner paid for it is becoming next to impossible-- Downward goes the spiral--

Administration officials go about mouthing insincere damage-control platitudes about containment as hedge funds wilt wither and disappear on momentary notice and even the ebullient confidence once shown in the private equity takeover racket now offers a hint of wobble to its strut-- Previously greased by cheap and plentifully easy credit, the whole financial globalist economy is now endangered-- The decimated industrial manufacturing backbone of the nation flounders onward broken long ago by union busting ideologues armed with MBA's, caches of myopic mega-greed, quivers full of engineered slogans designed to expiate guilt engendered by the nasty rip-off of decent people by economic Darwinians-- Remember 'Win-Win' situations or the ubiquitous 'Rising tides lift all boats'--

No mention whatsoever of 'ebbing tides' and their deleterious effects-- The Chinese oracle, I Ching, avers that all gathering is followed by dispersal-- Unexplained in the aphorism is the power of the force or the time-frame which expedites the scattering dissolution but keeping with the Nature-as-metaphor theme which imbues most of the tract, some kind of allegorical wind might be involved-- A wind inducing fire-storm or drought, perhaps, which pays no heed to the totemic symbolism of such 21st Century dinosaurs occupying anchor desks at financial 24-hour news channels nor the charades of retro-fantasy embodied by the recent rock-concert-as-planetary-salvation indulgence either-- The wind may quickly ignite fast traveling conflagration or slowly inevitably shrivel the delusion of easy abundance to dust-- Water mixed by and with the driving force of wind bears a destructive potential of high order magnitude as the memory of Katrina, especially for those afflicted directly, can attest-- The question of bangs or whimpers is somewhat irrelevant and matters less and less as credit continues to become too expensive and everywhere the waters of facile economic power dry up--

With so many homes being lost to foreclosure, job lay-offs, etc., and so many standing for sale in deteriorating markets countrywide(prognostications indicate current inventory will idle for 9 months even as prices are repeatedly lowered), coupled with the rising gasoline/oil prices and the consequentially devastating rise in commute costs, education costs, food costs, and health costs, one would rather safely assume a commensurate rise in the number of boats 'for sale' especially those purchased by recently laid-off officers in the Financial sectors of the paradigmatic Service Economy-- Old Clinton, El Nafta, once arrogantly crowed that under his administration the business cyle had been mastered and we had all entered a new business paradigm which had eliminated the possibility of recession forever-- So much for the best laid plans of mice and men, not to mention, of course, the propensity for sitting presidents to endear us all with their delirium-- 'Bring it on.....!!!!'--

Will ebbing tides sink all boats?-- How about all SUV's??-- Not to worry, system apology-niks will be there to offer another sweet sounding illogical cliche to foster false confidence easing the depression that attends consumer joe's experience when he realizes his pocket was picked by the good hands people of Wall Street-- The 29% usury charge for the privilege of indenturing his daughter with their gold/platinum credit cards has driven his American dream to its knees, to the street, and to the soup-line-- Let's all hail the efficacy of the outsourcing of American jobs ably facilitated by Clinton and his toadie Al Gore, the planetary guru now bringing rock-n-roll to a field of dreams near you--

"Mission Accomplished!!!"--

ABSENT QUORUM & THE OIL LAW

2007-07-05T14:08:00.001-07:00

Widely reported last week as another positive breakthrough in the ongoing Iraq debacle, the contested oil bill finally traversed its way from the al-Malicki cabinet to the Iraqi Parliament where the optimistic momentum, created by the less than ubiquitous true-believers still aboard the Neocon Iraq Express, immediately mired itself to the same reality-based morass that envelopes the entire country-- Lacking a complete quorum the Parliament cannot convene and therefore cannot even begin the debate-- This breakdown is not the result of blind chance or haphazard insignificance--

Mainstream media have never challenged the equitable tenets of this hastily and poorly conceived conundrum-- If equal distribution of less than moderate oil profits to the three disparate groups, the Sunni, the Shia and the Kurds, could accomplish its oft stated and supposedly only intention of enriching the Sunni group enough to encourage it to cease the sectarian mayhem and actually participate in the Iraqi Government as a full fledged partner to a common peaceable future, then the oil bill might already be a fait accompli--

But, as the bill has been written, nearly the entire oil industry of Iraq must be controlled and directed by US Oil companies to whom must go the lion's share of oil contracts and resultant profits-- Why are the Sunnis, the prime intended beneficiary of this wildly disproportionate bill, the most reluctant to even begin debate on it??-- Why are the Kurds so seemingly complacent for so long concerning the current state of affairs now grumbling their considerable discontent with a proposal promising less oil than they already claim for themselves in their own previously announced and then world-ignored independent Kurdistan??-- Even al-Sadr has given thumbs down to the oil draft--

Obviously something is amiss over the disparate expectations these groups once had and were once led to believe were etched in the stone of America's word and the extant proposals now being mandated by the same Coalition Authority that once patently denied oil was a raison detre for our occupation of Iraq in the first place-- All of which is congealing into serious resistance from the point of view of all involved participants--The Shites, the impoverished majority Shia, were oppressed by Sunnis empowered under Saddam and understandably, in terms of real politik, do not favor enforced enrichment of the Sunnis-- The Sunnis can't trust US proposals having experienced the duplicitous alliance of the US during the early years of Saddam's US-aided rule-- One example, the Sunnis have not forgotten US Ambassador April Glaspie's green light('The US takes no position on inter-Arab border disputes'--rough quote) Saddam then took to imply permission to invade Kuwait-- The Kurds remember Bush's Father endeavored them to overthrow Saddam, after the first Gulf War, promising overwhelming military support should they need it-- Well, need it they did and thousands of Kurd families lost love ones to Saddams' slaughter of the failed coup attempt while the elder Bush basking in the faux glow of short-lived victory lifted not a finger-- There are strong precedents for this glaring mistrust--Americans may have forgotten but the Kurds haven't and won't anytime soon-- Their 'Kurdistan', they believe, has tacit approval from an America that still owes them blood debt upon which America, the Kurds now fear, intends to renege-- There are consequences for not living up to your word--

Trouble belies the placid calm of Northern Iraq now as Turkey injected a couple of troop forays across the Iraq border ostensibly chasing Kurdish PKK rebels seeking sanctuary-- Turkey denied the incursions ever happened and the media chose to bury story but couldn't prevent Oil prices from catapulting into the $73/bl range-- Add to this jumbo-cluster of aggravation and false promises Australian Defense chief Brendon Nelson who publicly admitted 'resource security' otherwise known as oil supplies are defining component of Australian troop deployment in Iraq and was quickly downplayed by his Aussie boss PM John Howard-- Cat's, too late, out of the proverbial bag-- Ooooops!!!

The snarled oil bill reflects the internecine political complexities of everyday life and death in the Iraq killing zones as well as the particular life-pace of the people involved-- The US, without ever knowing much about the cultural habits and preferences of the Iraqi people except that, of course, narcissistic canard they absolutely craved liberation from such inherent restrictions-- Now the US wants its cake immediately and the tantrums, our self-serving politicians mouth-off in abject contagion across the full political spectrum, echo their sullen refusal to accept any responsibility for the rigors of both guerrilla stalemate and potential anarchic collapse alternatively struggling in the power vacuum region-wide--

Over 450 Baghdad corpses were found in various states of blindfolded bondage and lethal torture in June considerably outstripping pre-Surge number levels of last January-- One puzzling factoid to which the Media is so persistently reluctant to give much air is this: The Greed Zone receives incoming mortar fire every night and is now incapable of removing its own garbage from the zone-- Is this a self-induced siege or what??-- The bureaucratic denial of this lack of control cannot be maintained for a South Korean eternity of say 30 more years-- Each fictitious milepost of ever more complex success is almost immediately shot down by simple insurgent operations on ground they control only when they want to--

The Surge is having difficulty because it cannot win the people it once might have-- The US no longer has the wherewithal, even if debate-ably it ever did, to provide the necessary security to insure stability-- Too much precious time was lost flaccidly debating for over a year the existence of an extant insurgency that then and now never skips a beat-- Recouping trust lost by heavy-handed tactics designed by blind administrators far too distant from the the boots on the ground battlefield and hard facts they attend-- Lost time is not found again even by well intentioned and supremely intelligent generals and, less so even by electioneering politicians (Speaker Pelosi--'We(demies) have many arrows in our quiver and we are sharpening them') playing only for time and praying the voters don't hold them accountable for the entire mess--

Something must be rotten in the state of DC-- So, too, The Greed Zone-- Take a whiff!!!--

STRANGE BREWS

2007-07-03T15:38:00.001-07:00

A dangerous trend is brewing-- Beer prices are rising and not just locally-- Reports claim worldwide up-ticks-- Barley, beer's main ingredient, is now being planted in less acreage as farmers chase the increased profits from rising corn prices due to increased demand for corn from the ethanol/alternative energy equation-- As corn becomes more expensive cattle feeders search for other grains to fatten their bovine profits and, as demand for barley as cattle feed spikes upward, supply coming from fewer barley fields drives up prices further-- Couple that with the rising cost of transporting product, both barley and finished beer, due to ever rising oil prices, and the rising costs of aluminum, paper, labor, freight maintenance and many other commodities, and it becomes quite easy to ascertain that inflated beer prices won't come down any time soon nor will this inflation be factored into the CPIl-- All so dweeb economists at the DC level can maintain the fiction(as well as their mahogany foxhole) that inflation exists as a potential threat somewhere out beyond the edge of town and not as the snake slithering to the bottom of devoured wallets and maxed-out credit cards--

So, it comes as no surprise that US workers have had their confidence more than fractionally pummeled -- Job security is a major worry for more than many workers-- For the first time in nearly a year more workers are financially pessimistic than optimistic-- Factory orders fell in May as did pending home sales while gasoline prices continue to savage the individual budget-- Foreclosures at all time record highs and the slick predatory frauds attendant to such emergent angst continue to stalk the troubled sub-prime milieu--A nearly 9 month inventory of unsold homes nationwide indicates a market whose accelerator is stuck on idle at best-- Late payments for home equity, autos, boats, and home improvement loans show a sharp first quarter rise reflecting a stinging financial distress that is clobbering consumers-- Beer consumption, however, may not dramatically decline during this July 4 holiday period but psychologically the rise in beer prices represents one more penetrating chink in the armor of the working class-- Coming soon to the middle class, on an auction block near you--

Projected GM and Ford sales for June in both retail and fleet sectors came in south of the break even line(down 13% @ GM, 9% @ Ford), while leading Japanese auto companies will show up-shooting sales and continuing increase in market shares--Not good news for sure nor much surprising either-- The once proud backbone of American Manufacturing is in such serious trouble (raped by its own financiers) even master spinners find great difficulty putting any positive sheen to the ongoing downfall in Detroit-- Losing ground while running in place is not an optimum strategy but fewer options appear available from the bankrupt leadership across America's boardrooms-- Portfolios everywhere share a case of the nerves--

Insolvent leadership from the Federal level offers its own paralysis as collateral--Both action and money promised has neither arrived nor aided as promised ongoing struggles to rebuild New Orleans and other environs demolished by Katrina-- Let us not even mention the twin holes not filled in New York's wounded skyline in the nearly six year interim while erstwhile presidential campaigners evoke the towering absence as some perverted justification for the bona fides of their vision-limited candidacies-- Homage, let us all pay, to the Spin Machine

The life styles of America may be fancied by Vice-Presidents as non-negotiable, but while all the derelict non-negotiations are taking place, facts on the ground suggest those lifestyles are taking multiple hits from seriously damaging fire incoming from too many fronts at the same wrong time-- The canard of immigration reform blew up in the face of both the anemic demies and the running-scared repo-men-- The President merely added another impressive notch to a coup stick made mega-supple by a litany of repetitious failure-- American is being driven to its knees financially, stalemated militarily, out-maneuvered on diplomatic fronts, out manufactured worldwide, intoxicatingly stupified by entertainment fantasy, shipwrecked on a reef of dissolved civility and familial disorder, all the while oblivious to the coming credit crunch (only '$3bil of the $20bil junk bonds for offer last week actually sold') and the severe consequences demanded by the heretofore invisible creditors holding the mega-debt our collective soul--

IMMIGRATION FOLLY

2007-06-30T19:26:00.001-07:00

The contentious Immigration Bill fizzled to the floor once again with another proverbial whimper-- The mammoth Senate flounder failed to round up enough necessary votes as it bumbled its way to the disappointing ash heap it, once again, deserved-- Another crucially embarrassing performance, or lack thereof, by an impotent, ineffectual and as incompetent a group of statesmen leaders ever assembled in the US Senate-- Mr. Bush lines up votes in the Senate like he goes to war in the Middle East....off the cuff of some kind of fantasy!!!!--

If the votes are not there by a long shot, and everyone knows it in advance, why sully the process, the institution, and, ultimately, yourself by flailing at imaginary victory??-- The DC echelon appears ensnared in some desperate death wish-- Are they not saying in effect that if success is unattainable lets fail in the most pathetic way possible with maximum public exposure??-- Perhaps, we have exported our democracy to Baghdad minus, of course, the caveat of acute sectarian bloodshed that persistently beleaguers al-Malicki and his rather vain attempts to serve the people of Iraq in the face of military occupation and tribal war-- In his case, he has a genuine excuse!!--

It is both sadly telling and yet unsurprising that American confidence in their Congress ebbs in below even that of forlorn Mr. Bush and his dismal lack of positive eye-popping numbers-- To put an obviously dwindling prestige on the line in such haphazard haste for such an arcanely addled legislative charade riddled with bureaucratic complexities is to court a high order magnitude of doom-- Where did 'merit-based point formulas' ever gain credence as viable reform and who on earth could think they could sell it to the American citizen much less illegal immigrants themselves??--

It becomes even sadder to see this meltdown covered so theatrically by many in the mainstream as a major blow to Mr. Bush as if the weak-willed Harry Reid-led demies bear none of the brunt of this bruising public failure-- Once again Reid takes an issue to the Senate body without enough players or even the slim probability of passage-- Most football coaches , if not all, would rather be caught dead than voluntarily take the field with a offensive game plan featuring an absent quarterback and several defenders-- The gluttony of defeat this crew revels in is mind boggling--

The passionate expression surrounding this disputatious and explosive issue will now be allowed to fester in the teeth of economic hardship throughout the long hot summers of '07 and '08 until the elections ratchet up to an ugly intensity and riot becomes a possibility-- Let us all thank these candidate weasels for pimping this volatile issue to maximum political temperature and then leaving the room-- The bill failed because it was a terrible bill and because it sought, foremost for political advantage, to portray a possibility it knew it couldn't deliver-- Attempting to embarrass political opposition by smearing itself with the stink of failure is self defeating futility, if not insane, and irresponsible cynicism at its most visible-- Its failure earlier in the month did not ring a bell to reform advocates that troublesome elements in the prospective legislation needed to be altered in meaningful ways, not just cosmetically tweaked for public relations value-- Bush and his demie coalition did not lift the heavy timber far enough in advance to cobble real victory together and both now wallow like lame, if not dead, ducks in the humble pie of their own making--

SHARM EL-SHEIKH

2007-06-28T12:56:00.001-07:00

The resounding show of support for the evicted Fatah Leader Mahmoud Abbas at the recent 4-way summit at Sharm el-Sheik may reverberate faux optimism amongst the member participants but certainly few if any other responses to the most recent flash point of military defeat offered any legitimate forecasts of success-- The redoubtable quality of the actors in this emergency drama leave plenty to be desired and fresh confidence from favorable outcomes may find manifestation difficult if not impossible to attain --

Egypt internally appears so fearful of nervous breakdown and internecine chaos that its ability to act decisively beyond its borders must be considered suspect-- Jordan, considering the precipice it finds itself apprehensively facing due to the sizable number of Palestians as well as Iraqi refugees residing inside its territory, appears somewhat placid, perhaps calm before the storm may be more apropos a description of its current condition, but, at any rate, it must also be considered, somewhat generously, as less than vibrantly capable or strong at the moment-- Israel beyond doubt is a near basket-case as a country, being led by a embarrassingly incompetent war-loser renowned widely for his inability to make good on his promises now basking in 3% poll popularity, as a country extolling denial even in the brazen face of chronic out-migration from the most talented of its citizenry, as a country enduring the dangerously demoralizing issue from economic stagnation, and the fear of apoplexy induced by the near total depletion of faith in their entire political order-- The continuing dissolution of its authoritative credibility does not denote a position of strength in todays' roiled Middle East--

And now these Big Three intend to bank their money and arms as well as their no longer credible futures on Mr. Abbas, another bribery-diminished leader of a fractured organization, most every observer realizes, is no longer totally controlled or unified, if it ever was, by its nominal leader-- An air of panic permeates the sudden creation of this summit, so massively over-covered by mainstream media but conspicuously unattended by the Saudi players, that belies the buoyancy of this rather blind improvisation-- Abbas as an undeniably visible crony to Israeli fixers, a Vichy kind of fellow, will never have the support of street level Palestinians no matter how much force he uses in attempting to secure it-- The more force he desperately applies the quicker and wider Fatah falls apart--

And what kind of offerings does the once proudly, if you remember distinctly, and politically credible Mr. Bush bring to the rallying rings of this last ditch circus??-- In a nutshell not very much-- Ladies and Gentlemen, Middle Eastern Envoy, Lord Anthony Blair-- Yes, the same Mister Blair who helped architecture the fiasco in Iraq and who will now use his considerable expertise, assuming he survives his obligatory turf war with State Sec Condi Rice, to solve the most intransigent complexities in recent Middle Eastern history-- Yes, that same Mr. Blair who on the day after vacating the storied premises of #10 Downing Street became the first former Prime Minister of England to ever be interrogated (for a third time) by British Police, you know, the almost mythical Scotland Yard,(doesn't quite reverberate as it once did, but a reputation much less tarnished now than, say, 'The Bureau's) concerning cash payments received for dispensing purchased 'honours'--

Blair will almost certainly be 'honoured' by this Middle Eastern quartet in their time honored tradition-- In fact this looks to be his big payout, big stage remuneration of the Neocon gratitude for turning a blind eye to all their bullshit passing itself off as real world intel in the run-up to Eternal War and for prancing around like a banty rooster confidently reveling in the bygone days of Imperial Romance and for refusing to acknowledge the utter defeat this maladroit enterprise continues to inflict upon his country and its supreme ally-- If this tragedy of error multiplied were not so emblematic of a world order in acute disrepair on the perimeter of outright collapse, Blairs parody of world leadership might have even been theatrically comedic instead of so painfully laughable--

LORD BLAIR AND THE BOYS

2007-06-26T19:23:00.001-07:00

How is this for utter brilliance??-- The bloody Brits are proposing draft, or daft(?), sanctions to target Iran's shipping lanes--Cutting off the proverbial nose to spite their unapologetically imperial face, Lord Blair's boys seek to deny passage to any Iranian vessels in foreign waters as well as forbidding Iranian aircraft to "take off from, land in, or overfly" Royal British Empire territories-- Coming at a time concurrent with the apparent inability of the oil producing countries of the world to stanch their ongoing decrease of petroleum exports, these sanctions appear a prescription for imminent economic disaster worldwide but then again it could just be part and parcel of the peculiar genius empires with manifestly shrinking territory, resources, and influence so readily employ to waltz themselves into inevitable oblivion with the panache of an idiot's certitude--

The worlds great oil producing and oil exporting countries are seeing year over year declines in both capacities-- Everywhere in the industrially advanced world homeboy demand for oil (to both burn and hoard) is clearly rising while production is falling-- In Lord Blair's Kingdom of the Pomes, 'the UK portion of the North Sea oil fields may be showing a nine percent annual decline for the past couple of years. But it's export capacity has declined 60 percent.' or so says Jeffrey Brown an independent petroleum geologist out of Dallas, Texas-- One must assume that Texican oil geologists might know a thing or two about the 'ol bidness'--

Given that dramatic or, rather, drastic decline in oil exports in Lord Blair's Empire, thereby not upholding their full obligatory share of the responsibility for insuring the globalist delusion doesn't run shy of lifeblood, doesn't it seem a wee bit short sighted, not to mention self-destructive, to sever Iranian oil from the market allocation by which the world economy thrives-- Does it not appear hysterical to inflate an enemy whose entire GDP is around 2% of the US Defense budget into a monstrous bogeyman that so frightens us with dread and insecurity our only overture is the inefficacy of silence followed by the stupified think-tank bravado that drives us into sending other peoples children into a war that will never grant us the safety so craved by so many???-- Will we, out of that abject fear, the fear that attacks the soul, seek to preserve and protect our materially excessive way of life and economy by implementing a cursed stupidity easily more capable of destruction than salvation???-- Do these career compartmentalized bureaucrats ever connect the dots to anything beyond the walls of their cubicles??--

Lord Blair the proposed Middle East envoy to what purpose??-- Prolonging the inevitable until his war-crimes crony leaves office and the deluded twosome can ride off into the sunset of Churchillian fantasy and dump their doomed ludicrous debacle into the lap of the world oblivious to the carnage and destruction they have wrought????-- The American people are not proud of their leadership and they are not and cannot be proud of not only what Lord Blair and Bush have failed to accomplish in Iraq but also the mendacious tenacity they employ to deny their own culpability--

How will a chief perpetrator of the Iraqi calamity broker any peace between Israel and Hamas, or between Hamas and Fatah, or between Israel and Hezbollah or between Israel and Syria or Iran???-- For years Blair has been able to hang on to his PM position through a constantly repetitious self righteous rational for attacking a country not involved in 9/11 while completely ignoring in public the sour outcome the Iraqi people have had to endure as a direct result of his shared command policy-- Lord Blair not only helped engineer this fools errand but audaciously championed it with a faux moral rectitude that most of all fooled himself first and foremost-- Blair's baggage will not only encumber any peace initiative before it can attempt to fly but also serve as a constant reminder of late twentieth century history featuring corrupt ex-officials, political hacks and other imperial hangers-on no longer useful to homefront governments finding their ultimate rewards by putting their hands into Royal Saudi pockets, and toasting their own honor, none of which fools the Middle East--

A COMMON TASK

2007-06-26T13:38:00.001-07:00

The high hopes or, better yet, the hopeful hype prerequisite to Operation Arrowhead Ripper has come and gone without delivering the crushing blow to Al Qaeda proponents of The Surge had optimistically touted-- The scrapheap of met milestones, which did not provide a turning point to the ongoing disasters that began with Shock and Awe in Iraq, has just had one more impressive tombstone added to its pile--

General Petraeus is clearly a brilliant and very well educated commander who happens to be the right man for the right job at the wrong time and, in what has become incontrovertibly so, the wrong place--The bravery, courage, and skill of the US Troops is beyond question and first rate but rarely does valor alone, even of high order magnitude, or coupled to exceptional tactics save mistaken strategery either inept, or incompetent, or taken on a cavalier lark from the far side of history-- Taking ground and holding ground is a serious brutal process made more difficult by the beautiful abstractions and delusional prognostications emanating from naive think-tanks--

The Iraqis plain and simple do not want the Bush version of democracy or even the not so divergent Hillary version nor are the Iraqi troops, no matter how well trained, willing to immolate their desperate, hungry, and disrupted lives in order to implement it, no matter how brilliant its ideological glow appears to its propagators-- Nor do they want foreign oil companies to control their national oil-- A willingness to die to prevent the American Occupation from succeeding shows no real signs of abating--This is as basic and prevalent to the current situation as the omnipresent heat and dust of the Middle East that so many of our propagandists are so readily incapable of perceiving--

Refined technique at this stage of the game may have educational value for future conflicts that must be weighed against the ever upward climb of friendly casualties but current Victory will not be among its progeny-- Manhood inherently necessary to stand up in the face of this disastrous enterprise and take on the painfully bitter consequences that this, yes, humiliating folly and its acute failure engenders, appears seriously wanting in the aggregate leadership of America politically, industrially, militarily and, also, spiritually-- Before Redemption can accomplish its heavy lifting, the unadulterated need for repair must be fully recognized and shorn of all craven denial-- Until that manifests, the wounds of defeat will only fester against our common fabric-- The ties that bind can and will be loosened, or even torn asunder, should we fail this daunting demanding task-

MIRAGE

2007-06-21T16:22:00.001-07:00

Less than a week after Fatah's decisive defeat in Gaza at the hands of Hamas, the Israeli PM Ehud(3%) Olmert weasled his way to DC in a craven attempt to first burnish his gravely debilitated image as a world leader with a White House armchair photo-op, oleaginously pliant beside the ever smarmy and upbeat Lame Duck, and, second, to seriously brainstorm the remote possibility of some truly effective solution or, rather, salvation in the face of such an ignominiously repetitive and sinister dalliance among too many ostensibly irredeemable defeats with an American President nearly devoid of most real contact to events occurring daily in the intractable Middle East--

As for Fatah's diminished leader, joining Al Malicki and Al Musharrif as the leading candidates for the moniker of Dead Man Walking should proceed quite effortlessly for the old corrupt Arafat protege, Mahmoud Abbas-- Siphoning off his superbly banal luxury from the suffering of his own people, to a degree that would even make Saddam blush, (remember, the Palestinians have no oil wealth) guarantees him many angry enemies among even earnest members of his own (or is it, former?)Palestinian Authority, not to mention, of course,the lost confidence swimming behind the uproarious mirth of official spin being spewed from DC these days--

Last summer Mr. Bush pronounced Israel the winner of the war in Lebanon and nearly no one in the mainstream media challenged the cogency of this absurd reading of events-- The imaginary world community that now hoists sudden passionate toasts to support a third rate loser on life- supports so busy callously dissolving his peoples' government and establishing a new emergency coalition(?) devoted to his continuance of power on the West Bank as if he were the grand victor of a new era, appears outrightly delusional or simply a reflection of the DC belief that no good options to this futile situation exist-- More 'Birth Pangs' of a new Middle East??--

The so-called International Community has a world view that quite frankly is not being corroborated by ground level facts-- Mis-perception shared at the fundamental paradigmatic level can do serious disservice to any and all member nation-states but such disorientation coupled with acknowledged and deliberate prevarication for the purposes of unenlightened and unaccountable self-interest(political survival)only leads to the further decimation of Civilization-- The mirage that Abbas and his dysfunctional organization remain viable players in Mr. Bush and Mr. Olmert's Middle Eastern swan song cripples the chance for any positive outcomes-- Fatah is now fractured into groups and ministries bent on their own survival but as an aggregate entity for Palestinian advancement as a whole it is beyond repair-- An unsavory fact that no belated amount of weaponry and dollars from either worried Saudi slush funds or selfirighteous Israeli duplicity can alter--

That 'moderate' Abbas, the freshly deposed de facto warden of the prison Gaza has become, and his crony police cravenly reside in the pocket of the Bush/Olmert tandem is plainly not being misperceived across the Middle East and most of the world, while the clock continues to tick on the mis-begotten crusader State of Israel and the completely misguided occupation of Iraq by its Benefactor in DC-- History of a fatal nature at its own pace working against weak leaders and not exactly, for a country whose life-style fancies itself as non-negotiable, very pretty--

Mr. Bush is now hostage to a crisis sired by his first term hands-off neglect, a situation allowed to fester into acute gangrenous failure-- While Al Qaeda was capably answering his call to 'Bring it on' with gravely unpalatable audacity and actions indicating, regardless of the intensity of Shock and Awe, a raw heedlessness toward our deterrent capability, Mr. Bush was inclined to turn a blind eye to the Palestinian problems unleashing the full brunt and force of the vaunted Israeli Defense Forces to settle the score once and for all-- Like Iraq, it didn't quite work out so well and the desperation, frustration and murder visited upon millions of terrified middle eastern families and refugees will continue to both haunt and serve as an ongoing violent anti-dote to the criminal foreign policy of Mr. Bush and Mr. Olmert--

The Yahoo headline yesterday morning read Twelve US Soldiers Killed in Iraq but before the story could play itself out two more soldiers were added to the grim tally-- Today a top American commander states that Iraq forces will not be able to hold territory American troops have recently cleared of insurgents or Al Qaeda until next spring-- American troops are capable of holding their own and actually defeating insurgents, one assumes, as a result of training requirements, for arguments sake, lasting in the vicinity of a year-- It does not seem to this observer that lack of training or lack of will are the paramount reasons for the Iraqi troop failure-- They fail because the other side (those Mr. Bremer via Mr. Rumsfeld didn't want working for the coalition) is more committed to their cause, because they are more skillful and adept at their style of warfare, and because they are fighting for their lives and faith and not simply an American paycheck-- It is difficult to see this situation being altered by spring'08 or even '09-- The longer the battle-ready Iraq insurgents are able to inflict casuality and stalemate the American Occupation the more the most inhospitable elements of other Middle Eastern nations will increase the confidence necessary to challenge their own long in the tooth rulers and defy our troops--

The bitter pill this road leads to, at the end of all these unnecessary postponements and contrived delays and outrightly false pronouncements, is, ultimately, to an acknowledgement of defeat and, until this happens, there can never be a new beginning-- The manhood required to make such solemn and difficult decisions is currently, very much, missing in action in DC--

BITTER FRUIT

2007-06-14T14:23:00.001-07:00

After all the bold promises of military support from Mr. Bush and Mr. Olmert for the weak and now crumbling Mahmoud Abbas-led Fatah gang, the final buffer between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza arena, push led to shove and both the Israelis and the US reneged, allowing Fatah to suffer an abject and brutal rout-- Hamas wins a decisive victory and the tattered flag of US Foreign Policy flutters in an ominous wind, all spin aside, taking another one on the neocon chin-- The blowback results of having voided the democratic election results 18 months ago which swept Hamas into power are now quite visible even to the most ardent proponents of Denial as a cornerstone of US Strategery--

Fatah leaders and commanders in Gaza are running for their lives while their besieged and out-gunned foot soldiers, drained of ammunition, surrender in droves-- Fatah's upper caste senior politicos bemoaned the fate of their loyalists in Gaza from the splendor of Swiss Hotels or their mansions in Kuwait-- Abbas, once only an apprentice to Arafat style corruption, and his trembling coterie sat the battle out, cushioned in Ramallah far away-- Clearly the sad strategy of attempting to buy local sycophants and install them into positions of faux power and puppetry has not produced anything resembling optimum results-- Not even close!! The corrupt may be allowed wear the 'moderate' mantel but made weak by the very corruption that enriches them almost always leads to the bitter fruits of downfall and, in this case, extremely violent downfall-- No one should weep for Fatah or its benefactors--

The official Gaza Police force, 18,000 men strong and whose relatively fat paychecks have been signed by Abbas, failed to join the fray and did not defend the Abbas crew-- Half a hundred or more of Abbas' palace guard, The Elite, apparently dynamited an escape hatch into the Israeli Wall fleeing certain death for further political vagaries in the safety of Egypt-- None of this can be spun dishonestly away-- US foreign policy, now ragged and disheveled beyond credibility, sits dejected in stunned disbelief, its influence rapidly fading-- One more chink in the armor of American confidence in its flailing government--

The brilliantly incompetent Ehud Olmert, forever intent on keeping Abbas (in mirror-image-like fashion) strong enough to survive in lavish insecurity but weak enough not to win, refused US requests to rush fresh stocks of weapons to their besieged Partnership for Peace for fear the guns and ammo would ultimately fall into the hands of Hamas- Instead of warehoused weaponry Hamas appears to have gained the entire Gaza Strip while Olmert has to settle for a slap-on-the-wrist appointment back of the diplomatic woodshed in DC next week-- With allies like Olmert who needs enemies??--The losing streak continues--

Meanwhile the futile policy of the US now focuses on cutting massive aid to Gaza's civilian poor somewhere in the neighborhood of a million and a half people as if starvation will pimp them away from Hamas just as ancient persecution of the Christian poor and the strength they derived from their religious faith ultimately saved Rome-- "We are fighting for our faith," one Hamas spokesman explained to a radio interviewer, "and Fatah are fighting for their salaries. That is why we will win."-- History's lesson's repeated almost verbatim in the vacuum induced hubris--

Options, once more, have become quite limited, to understate the imagination- challenged State Department-- Bush, it appears, wants Abbas to play the Dictator card rendering the power-sharing agreement with victorious Hamas null and void coupled to a dismissal of the entire government-- Obviously an option open to consideration already in gloomy currency of the Bushies' present mental state should the DC echelon itself fall into remotely tantamount disrepair (caveat, being, of course, the spineless demies have capitulated so far so fast their opposition to such an overt power grab is pretty much moot already)-- But how many repeated defeats can the DC foreign policy establishment sustain without that disrepair happening??-- Events on the ground continue to, with alarming and pervasive frequency, controvert every new plan, project, proclamation and milestone coming out of the DC spin-machines--

The fear now is that if Hamas the de facto victor in Gaza fails in Governance 101 the only alternative open to the Palestinians' poor, their tired and huddled masses would be, not the Statue of Liberty, but Al Qaeda-- So much for punishing dis-affected Palestinian folk fed up with the forty year occupation as a cover-up for the blatant failure of Israel and its client, Mr. Abbas--

To the rescue, ala Michael Dukakis' ill-conceived tank sojourn down mainstreet attired in virile khaki and a hideous leather skullcap, comes the mealy apostle of positive progress everywhere in Iraq, the demie-traitor Senator Lieberman, clad in a kevlar vest and chin-strapped tight under a steel pot with another mindless canard to deflect from the ugly results on the ground in Iraq as well as Gaza proposing to ....... You guessed it ..... Bomb Iran!!

Bitter fruit, indeed!!!!

OUT OF TOUCH

2007-06-12T15:13:00.001-07:00

With the sour after-taste of failure over the Immigration Reform Bill that crashed and burned last week in the US Senate, Mr. Bush, seemingly oblivious to the politically astute circles danced around him at last week's G8 jumbo cluster by the agile Mr. Putin, sought to deflect and counter the prevailing view that Iraq continues its relentless dis-integration apace (add to that the ominous brief armed incursion into Kurdish terrain in northern Iraq by more than saber rattling Turks) by avowing US troops would still be stationed, ala South Korea, somewhere in Iraq decades from now-- One is reminded of Klaus Kinski as Aguirre, The Wrath of God, who from his imperiled raft madly and loudly layed claim to thousands of square miles of Amazon forest as his fatigued and disillusioned soldiers suppinely incapable of even steering his errant boat off river refused to pay any heed--

Not exactly a good week for the Decider who sought a boost to his sagging morale by groveling a photo-op from The Pope whose Christian charity refused to allow him to suffer further embarrassment on the flagging leader of the free world by deservedly chastising him over the ongoing debacle in Iraq-- Nonetheless the lukewarm welcome at the Vatican signaled lame duck to insightful analysts of the long DC/ Vatican relationship while over in Albania Lame Duck seemed to morph into a rock-band fronted by a commander guy replete with uplifting ovations--How the world turns.....?--

Clearly the Surge is not having the intended effect of tamping down sectarian violence despite rampant optimistic pronouncements from US higher-ups regarding the risky new tactical overture of arming disaffected Sunni insurgents to battle elements of Al Qaeda in Iraq-- This might be the fourteenth tide-turning milestone to obligate itself to the ever indefinable victory note delusional think-tankers still cling to inside the bunkered air-conditioned fantasy-maelstrom of their mahogany foxholes-- More term-papers, so sorry to impugn, will not save the day--

Obviously, all this sudden metaphorical transference of model-like stability from South Korea to Iraq will require a devilish amount of preciously disappearing time, easily exceeding the September deadline the malodorous pundit-ocracy apprenticed to the complicitly feeble congress accorded the President and his generals as a temporal framework for adjudicating success or failure on behalf of the Surge-- The Iraqi Parliament decided to take the entire summer off, an obviously unearned vacation the visionary US Congress appears inclined to furtively emulate-- Call it leave without absence-- The leave of sense happened a long while ago--

The ineffectual paralysis engulfing the DC Beltway has driven the American people's confidence in its national legislature to a decade-low approval rating of 27%, a 9% fall in the last five months-- Speaker Pelosi's political capital continues its fall from grace as she merits a 36% approval nod, a mark 10% shy of Newtie's comparable ratings in 1994-- Harry Reid's number apparently wasn't worthy of publication-- The internecine disarray among the repo-men goes on invisibly unabated, but, at any rate, these demie numbers convey serious credibility deficits with the American people whose frustration and angst grow more palpable daily-- True anger, like $4/gal gasoline, cannot be too far away when 75% now say the American ship of state is completely off-track--

The intensity of the groundswell that spelled doom for the Immigration Bill may have surprised Mr. Bush who seems increasingly desperate, almost beyond measure, for some kind of magic rabbit he can pull out of his disheveled hat and call it victory but the defeats and failures ramping up on world scorecards everywhere only pick up more speed-- The War on Terror, de facto, does not include secure borders-- Where is the nuts-and-bolts efforts on shipping containers at ports around the country??-- Raging debate pro or con against the ill-defined 'Amnesty' of another poorly generated immigration bill will not alleviate the acute porosity on the borderlands or the ports-- Homeland Security has failed its own mission statement despite Hillary's cabalistic endorsement of an America now safer than pre-9/11--

Only those from the backseat of a perpetual limousine cruising away their careers could have such runic perspicacity-- Comic relief of the unintentional kind comes from the regally imperious banty-boy Blair, equally out of touch, who bellicosely, from his world stage exit, rants against the press as a 'feral beast'????-- Feral weasels, perhaps, but not....????--

Stay tuned and Keep it Light!!!!!

KIA

2007-06-05T15:32:00.001-07:00

The security crackdown came to Baghdad last February under the fabricated guise of 'Choosing Victory'-- A think tank policy paper devised at the American Enterprise Institute as a reality-challenged substitute for the 'defeatist' tenets believed by Neocon fantasists to be embodied in the now infamous Daddy Baker Group's proposal to the president acknowledging the complete inefficacy of military solution and the primary necessity for diplomatic discussions with Iraq's region-wide neighbors for the purposes of 'securitizing' what we managed to 'de-secure' by military invasion followed by under-manned and under-armored occupation, namely the now former State of Iraq--

Who anywhere thinks The Surge is effectively altering the disintegrating course of action in Iraq in a positive manner besides prevaricating lapdog careerists and over-exposed presidential campaigners?-- Once more the Ziocons run for the cover their air-conditioned mahogany bunkers as their lamentably out of touch plans explode in their face-- The Surge never had a chance in the real time dust and heat on the murdering ground of real, not think-tank, Iraq-- Certainly not without a full complement of troops and materiel necessary to fully staff and employ the logistical tactics of what a military surge is realistically deemed capable of fully achieving operationally--

Who isn't sick of being told by careering flaks there are plenty of opportunities and mega plenty of hopeful signs indicating a, caveat employed, cautious optimism??--Apparently, three or four months into Choosing Victory the embarrassing evidence delineates problems potentially fatal in their overall ramifications-- Enlisted Naval and Air Force personnel are now basically being emergency-conscripted into shake and bake training for ground combat roles to meet the serious shortfall of troops-- Into the Anbar valley go the six hundred-- Their deaths will buy time for an administration, too cowardly to face its own failure, intent on dumping their mess in the lap of the next administration--

How many double digit days of American KIA's does it take to tally up the true score??-- How many days between now and September can greet the restive American public with grim stats like 'Fourteen More US Dead Over Last Weekend--How is it the feeble demies living in abject fear of being accused of lack of troop support are too cowardly to point out how the administration actually sent, and did so repeatedly, our young sons and daughters into the shrieking bitch of mortal combat without that full complement of men and materiel??-- Both sides of the aisle have sent, and continue to send, American troops into the maelstrom of war without materiel support necessary to insure full combat protection and performance--

Parents of combatants had to buy, out of their own pockets, body armor for their own sons and daughters so cavalierly inserted into harm's way by DC's War Party and are only now informed the armor they were directed by the Defense Department to purchase is defective-- Only now being informed there isn't enough financial support from congress and the president to insure top flight medical care for their wounded sons and daughters at the nations military hospitals-- America is belatedly realizing 'They go to War with the leadership they have and not they would like to have'-- Hopefully, they are not overly thrilled about this-- Sooner or later they will be tasked by the rigors of history to actually do something about it--

DEBATES???

2007-06-05T13:07:00.001-07:00

Political debate as practiced by the current crew of fund-raiser elitists be they repo-men or demies is akin to participation in Special Olympics-- Whoever 'wins' at the end of the day is still 'athletically challenged' (retarded) never because sincere effort was found lacking but because the limitations of reality demand it be so-- Besides, winning at Special Olympics isn't the ultimate goal in the first place-- Getting out on the field with a heart and a dream and giving the old non-college try are the true rewards-- No matter the outcome no one ever mistakes the Special Olympians for high caliber athletes--

So too the debaters from both halves of the DC War Party, so far, will not be mistaken for World Class statesmen out to truly solve the extant problems, and they are manymany, facing the country they so un-nimbly profess their askew entitlement to lead-- The fakery of these media concoctions followed by smarmy round-table faux-analysis is revolting to most the country-- Fewer and fewer concerned reliable American citizens even bother to tune in to evermore sound-bites and vain segues into still more verbally disingenuous palaver replete with nod-and-wink insider jokes running absolutely amok-- That this overhyped faux spectacle no longer seems worthy enough to connect up with the field reality on which most people on this planet, special or not, still participate is beyond debate-- Studio reality is failing to convince the American people, beyond serving up the trite shallow escapism of Idol fare, that it can play a credible role in helping steer America back from the edge of the gaping abyss facing us at the confluence of so many simultaneously problematic fronts--

At the recent repo-men debate the obscure but principled Texas Rep. Ron Paul was asked a loaded question point blank about whether or not he trusted the mainstream media and his less than immediate response brought snickers and chuckles from the audience and smirks from other candidates as well, because nearly everyone there knew that when you cut through the show-biz bullshit of contemporary media and politics, trust is not a visible virtue on anyone's team-- At the end of the debate, like Special Olympics, it doesn't matter who 'won' but only who gained an edge in campaign funding via the agility of their sound-bite performance, a virtue which can only aid one's contrived poll rating--

None of the current posturing candidates wish to try-on the latest ABC poll figures, damning in their dismal depiction of a country 73% of whom believe to be seriously off-track-- A country hemorrhaging confidence over the diminishing influence abroad due to high-magnitude international failures, visible to all, in the middle east, the ongoing dis-integration of the dollar's value, the inflationary theft from skyward spiking oil prices and ubiquitously rising world demand, the collapsing housing bubble and the contagion of foreclosure it engenders-- Moreover, issues like health care that can't find space on the infotainment of nightly news continue to add demoralizing angst to the overall zeitgeist--Word will always spread--

Imagine this, a world super-power incapable of teaching its children how to read basic literature-- A world super-power selling out its manufacturing strength to the lowest bidder-- A world super-power allowing its infant mortality rate to lead the entire industrialized world-- A world super-power Presidential candidate who admittedly failed to read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq before voting on the resolution for going to war-- A disqualifying admission under any requisite standards of leadership if leadership is what the country most needs but, of course, a forgivable faux pas if fund-raising uber alles is the bona fides litmus test for media credibility-- As poet Robinson Jeffers once wrote, "Shine, perishing Republic"

BETRAYAL

2007-05-31T14:31:00.001-07:00

Betrayal's anguished hue and cry dots the disappointed political (even, astrological) blather-sphere-- Shorn of their delusions the demies would 'make the difference' or would 'make the tough choices' or would 'go the extra mile', opponents of the ongoing fiasco in Iraq find themselves a majority without a party-- Will they, like slapped and abused women forgiving and forgetting forever, find faux feelie-good reasons to rejoin the fray coming in '08, resurrecting unwarranted faith and support for those undeserving feckless fundraisers masquerading as statesmen and leaders??--

More than likely, the answer would normally be 'yes', barring extremely extenuating circumstances, but the current state of affairs in DC and the growlingly recalcitrant world's response to imperial hubris may not allow such defeatist acquiescence-- The demies simply yearn to arrive at the '08 elections baggage-less, without being offended by or blamed for anything negative in any connotation-- There's a baseball game in motion somewhere on the playing fields of life and the confidence-lacking practitioners of avoidance-therapy, the demies, don't want to leave the dugout-- Life was so much less-stressful in the derelict minority-- No virtual responsibility, no accountability, no legislative duty, with attendance way less than mandatory, only the lazy indulgence of senatorial K-street perks-- Going along to get along-- Summertime............... and the livin' was easy.......--

Gershwin may give way to Faulkner's Long Hot Summer -- One unforeseen problem, though, of the many-many these wilting demies choose not to face full-on, is the canard that the opponents of the bloody multi-faceted sectarian slaughter ensuing anew daily in what was once called Iraq are easily collated into a captured but raggedy subgroup they disdainfully dismiss, usually with the pejorative "rabid' attached, as the 'anti-war left'-- Weenie demies consider this group hostage to the larger party largely because no other group will give them hospitable succor, though, to be more PC, perhaps, nurture, would have been more apropos)-- Clearly the homeless political outcasts of the left do, indeed, have no where else to go and therefore, usually being long of principle and of finances concurrently short-......handed, warrant no indemnification from the damaging misnomering slurs that generally go with the bruising terrain of such chicken-hearted elitist politics--

Why did these crybabies ever cotton to the maladroit notion the professional careerist demies would ever deign to do the right thing even when the whole disparate world, except Israel, cried out for it??-- To calculatingly deflect, in so brazenly delusional and abjectly de-spiriting a manner, the position held by the majority, repeat,.... the majority!!.... of the American People (usually no small number who do actually vote!!) that position being the opposition to the Iraq War, as exclusively part and parcel of a notoriously cranky sub-specie, is a self-destructive expediency inviting the metaphorical guillotine into the entitlements of their political ambience-- Not exactly the least stupid outcome they could muster from their craven dust-up with, no stranger to political decrepitude himself and considerably less than chiefly, The Decider ....

MEMORIAL DAY

2007-05-27T18:05:00.001-07:00

The current state of the White House and the administration reflects a dysfunctional atmosphere replete with hesitant and clearly uncertain policy formulations being debated and leaked in various manners that border on unraveling-- The increasing mayhem in Iraq may no longer be denied and once cautiously confident statements extolling progress via The Surge are no longer bandied about DC except perhaps in the oddest of out-of-touch think-tanks and campaigns run by faux leaders fancying themselves presidential candidates-- The bold and critical objectives aimed at securing both Baghdad itself and Anbar Province are unfortunately being met by an indisputable lack of success-- Reconciliation between sectarian factions, as prescribed by in-effectual, blustery US statesmen and petulant pundits, appears to be fait non-accompli--

Into this violent wasteland strewn with not just a few discarded milestones hollowed of their promised 'cakewalk' to easy victory emerges the under-estimated Moqtada Sadr proposing after Friday prayers to forge a united Iraq pledging co-operation with Sunnis opposing the US occupation-- What may be empty prattle by the grudgingly skillful populist/nationalist/sermonist effectively sticks a political thumb into the administration's less than keen eye-- Clearly unable to predict Sadr's movements and much less his intentions which the White House attributes to radical instability, the Bush men,sooner or later, are going to have to realize the adept Sadr has won way more Hearts & Minds as a fiery crazy-fox than the ever behind-schedule General Petraeus has purchasing photo-op pastries at some secular bakery--

Petraeus' strategy would have echo-ed his intelligent skill and anti-insurgent savvy had the application of which occurred before Mr. Bremer's artless tenure as the combat-booted, cool-breeze, Coalition-Viceroy was more than allowed to screw-the-pooch from the Green Zone-- While Rumsfeld's narrow field of vision was completely occupied by micro-management and the stubborn two-year refusal to admit an insurgency even existed, 3 million Iraqi souls incarnated as refugees, two million of which fled the country-- Three million pilgrims whose Hearts and Minds poor frustrated Petraeus had fat chance of ever pimping over to the Project for a New American Century-- Always a day late and a dollar shy but still chucking good money after bad to the tune of $10 billion per month--

Mr. Bush, as reported on Time.com earlier in the week, was suddenly considering a dramatic 50% troop cut sometime in early '08, but forceful denial from the White House spin-crew nipped that unwelcome tidbit in the bud only to later re-re-adjust their message to refer to a possible operational substitution from combat personnel to troop-trainers for the woeful Iraqi Army which, also earlier in the week, confessed to actually planning, in conjunction with Iraqi political leaders, for worst case scenarios involving sudden immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq proper-- Is it safe to say mis-communication rules the day both in and out of the White House??-- Is the Iraqi Army privy to any of the plans??-- Rumors run amok mirroring the metastisizing vacuum--

Pushing PM Maliki for "tangible results quickly" on the Oil Bill may be the last card to play in Iraq and conceivably could end up as the last failed milestone but Bush still has a card or two up his sleeve-- Reports of a huge rift between good-cop Bush and bad-cop Cheney playing out over Iran contributed to the fevered angst enveloping the region as US Naval Forces exercised formidable battle formations in an awesome array off the coast of Iran, un-nerving most neighbors, particularly Afghanastan-- Hot conflict could be only a matter of days away should Cheney's National Security crew dominate or subvert the Pentagon/Intelligence crew advocating for Sec State Rice's team-- Bush the weakened Decider, fresh from bludgeoning the even weaker demie congress mid-week, sits inside the Crucible between these testy opponents--

Cheney, of course, has a card up his sleeve, the ever-present purchasing power of AIPAC and the VP's ever amiable proclivity to collude in criminal adventures with Ehud Olmert and the Israeli ADF-- Last week was Cheney's turn, on station in the Gulf, to strut and fret his hour upon the air-craft carrier certainly talking tough about not only the last but also the only mission remotely available for his wanting sense of accomplishment-- Add, also, to this roiled mix the Three-Star War Czar who is mandated to co-ordinate the disparate elements of this vivid jumbo-cluster coming to a live theater near you this Memorial Day--

BACKING DOWN

2007-05-22T17:45:00.001-07:00

Once more, the demies have have thrown in the towel on the Iraq funding bill-- Once more, the most weakened major political leader in the entire world subtracting Anthony (Poodle)Blair busy publicizing himself rock-star style with a farewell resignation-tour, and, of course, the ever irresponsible Ehud (3%) Olmert and possibly, according to recent open-source intel out of Pakistan, the popularity-challenged Pervez Musharrif, Mr. Bush has manage to cower the less than laughing-stock demies into abject surrender with a veto threat leaving no datelines for troop pullout in the immediate offing-- That a man incapable of whipping the Euro-liberals at the World Bank decimates these demies with such remarkable ease is strange testimony to the power vacuum enveloping the entire DC echelon--

Forty-seven Republicans, one independent and 19 Democrats voted with Jimmy Carter's favorite Prez, none of whom on the nominal demie's side were presidential candidates but chairman of the Armed Services Committee, the Israeli Senator from Michigan, Carl Levin kept the faith with his AIPAC handlers siding with the Lieberman ilk-- Harry Reid had the unmitigated temerity to denounce the Republican plan as weak and timid-- Non-binding demie cowardice hard at work-- No wonder positive congessional poll numbers of late have sunk like a stone--

Meanwhile fifteen more American troops had their young lives snuffed out over the weekend last-- The Sunni insurgents continue their Surge options more effectively than most American officials willingly admit-- Hundreds of bystanders have recently been slaughtered by insurgent car bomb attacks plied with increasingly sophisticated technique and for all intents and purposes a relative impunity that openly mocks the Bush security plans-- Iraqi security forces manning evermore checkpoints reportedly stop certain vehicles and beg for more bullets--

Market bombs which killed 140 people have an illustrious tendency to force reports detailing incessant mortar attacks against important targets such as The Green Zone or the Airport off the home pages of most news sites-- Few politicians see any hope of building a name for themselves invoking lines of cautious optimism once so prevalent at the Surge's initial foray into the slums of Baghdad-- How long can Moqtada Sadr order his militia to stand down while under-manned under-armored American forces fail to prevent ongoing Sunni butchery??-- The facts on the ground speak way beyond the charade of political dogma so rife in DC and they do not currently bode success much less chosen Victory-- How many months into the Surge so far??-- A Colonel struggles with the double-bladed logistics of faux optimism and reminds everyone the Surge is not yet 'fully-staffed'-- Well,........ Why not??--

The air of futility, the demies' maladroit skill engenders to display in broad daylight, reverberates across the dispirited country mirrored by the cloud of exhaustion and acute despair permeating the disintegration of Iraq-- Not just a country at singular civil war but one enduring multiple civil wars locally, regionally, and in some cases, inter-tribally-- The Iraqi government, strangely enough being supported by both Iran and the US, is increasingly irrelevant across much of its own terrain-- No government earns legitimacy by failing to deliver security and services-- The Iraqi government lacks real authority and it is incapable of serving its own people-- The canard that chaos will overrun the country should we pull-out belies the intense pervasive chaos and lack of structural, political and social cohesion manifesting already-- Accepting extant reality doesn't appear to be an option--

RESIGNATION

2007-05-17T19:49:00.001-07:00

The architect of the undermanned invasion of Iraq has fallen from his prestigious position at The World Bank-- The unsavory groveling he employed to extend his current directorial rein embarrassed his patrons in the White House and distracted their daily focus from the mega-exigencies wrought by the continued failure to tamp down the incessant violence countrywide in Iraq-- Wolfie's graceless exit ended a troubled tenure in such a wretched manner no one would be sorry to see the sullied little worm go-- One more sullen demoralizing episode illuminating the ongoing loss of American influence in the big global picture--

The White House crew under bigboys Rove and Cheney smelled a paranoid conspiracy of liberal bankers (how more oxymoronic can they be?) full bore intent on punishing The White House via Wolfie for the grandiosely misbegotten Neocon strategy of remaking the Middle East through coercive gunfire-- To effect such a scenario the financially important world institution would opt to subvert its own inner daily workings in order to provide the arrogant Wolfewitzie enough rope to hoist himself to the rafters-- Once this was so deftly achieved the world mission of the Bank would be benched in some strange limbo while the Bank's board would devote its primary energy to management of the attendant media circus Wolfie would attempt to orchestrate to his advantageous survival-- All that only if your viewpoint mirrors Dick and Karl-- Wolfie's final gambit a pathetic schoolboy delusion to save unrepentant face-- His integrity tattered and diminished beyond repair he pleads with The Board whimpering this sleazy calculus: If you just tell them I did nothing wrong I will leave--

The White House now closes ranks once again as the once powerfully inept inner circle of Shock and Awe diminishes even further-- Two architects of the efficacy of aggressive eternal war, two major players in this criminal enterprise, have thrown in the towel this week-- Tony Blair's farewell fantasy tour extended its nostalgic air of egregious unreality into the Bush White House to say Tally-ho while Wolfewitzie chose humiliation over grace for his demeaning manner of exit-- The mood in the administration can't be aglow as odds-makers now consider Attorney General Gonzalez, whose top three or four deputies have also resigned, fair game for the next to depart-- The odds on Wolfie now portend ...... you guessed it......mega book deal as payoff where one would fruitlessly hope he would address his famous Salon magazine quote stipulating WMD's to have been a canard in the first place, the purpose to which, forcibly allowing US troops access to Iraq and its oil fields-- One suspects a facile vain refusal to face up to his own complicity since neither direct nor implied mea culpas find any solace of honor or,indeed, even punishment in the coin of today's realm-- Ask George Tenet!!!!--

At the twilight of the Conservative Epoch a litany of casualties sours the once powerfully prophetic and political battlefield-- When a championship caliber team sees through the dream of victory and realizes its fortunes will not be favored in the Big Game's outcome, out comes the finger pointing and the blame sayers and retreating die hards plot sick revenge-- Across the blathersphere the cacophony of anger, denial, and retribution only spells out the impending collapse of the order-- The Pharasaic Fallen reads like a list of Who's Who? from the halcyon days of Reagan's Morning in America-- Bennett, the gambler; Limbaugh, the designer-drug addict; Powell, the liar; DeLay, the hammer; Abramoff the bribester; Cunningham, the bribed; Pastor Ted and Jimmy Swaggert, Congressmen Foley and Jefferson, Coach Hastert, Armey, Gingrich, Lieberman, Kissinger, Perle, Tenet, Wolfewitz, Rumsfeld, Blair, Bremer, Franks, Gonzalez, Clinton, Abrams, Libby, Adelman, Kerry, Olmert, Peretz, Halutz, Rice, Lott, Gore, Falwell........... The blade next waits on Bush and Cheney........

Nancy Pelosi is only now calling for the administration to be held accountable for conduct surrounding the Iraq debacle-- Since this cannot possibly be true might it, at least, be factual??-- Yahoo quoted her as saying "Nothing is off the table."-- Does this mean......?-- No, of course, not!!!-- The demies still lack cajones enough to pass the minimum wage bill-- But clearly visible to most any cognizant observer is the utter implosive atmosphere surrounding this administration and the entire infected echelon-- The air of resignation hangs oppressively over DC and the ineffectual demies cannot muster enough force to fill the vacuum much less prevent themselves from being sucked down into the swirling morass themselves-- Even Bush weakened returns their flimsy serve in a match neither can save themselves from losing-- As much as they petulantly dislike to be reminded of the harsh discomforting fact, they, too, voted....... For the War!!--

No one seems sorry to see him go

THE PROGRESS OF SURGE

2007-05-15T15:06:00.001-07:00

Iraq, April 2007, the increasing casualty count, absent the multiplication of deflective canards designed to deliver tactical delay for the many politicians fearful of facing the magnified facts of this foreign policy failure, simply does not bode very well for any indications of progress-- The highest monthly totals of the year, 104 American troops etched their obits into the eternal dust and scorching heat of the disintegrating country they were deployed, under false pretexts, to 'Liberate'-- Back in DC the finger-to-the-wind poseurs, we once called statesmen, don camouflage to divert the demand for immediate decisive action and the political repercussions such action tends to inflict, hiding behind Washington's latest amorphous verbal subterfuge-- The pathetic search for a less than myopic but calculatingly definable vector to the operative word of the day.... 'Progress'--

Ostensibly, once the behemoth-like nature of this semantic task is rendered neuter enough through focus-group-think, and not withstanding the internecine intra-mural bloodsport of the Re-election First-ers, the perennial candidate class, now busy un-busying their legislative schedules with the preeminent domain of mega-fund-raising and the sharpening of campaign brochure bona fides, will rise to the exigencies of the tremulous occasion and faithfully execute the incumbent responsibility they once so clamorously sought without postponement of the inevitable, but, again, almost no one in the blather-sphere is confidently raising any such hopeful expectations-- Deadlining, more than likely though speciously unspecified, the end of September as a sufficient enough time frame to deduce the practical parameters of this noun/verb, its descriptive veracity applicable to The Surge in Iraq and how it then plays in both Baghdad and Peoria, this August Body and its once esteemed reputation will supposedly, point blank, be on the line leading to responsible moral action-- Recent pollsters, though, have delineated a sharp downward plunge American confidence in their government has lately taken, lamentably spelling out an almost equal lack of faith with regard to both Congress and the President...... a benchmark few media members want to mention and certainly one no phony Surge appears capable of eclipsing--

The relentless insurgency in Iraq (record high car-bombs in March and April) still controls tempo and terrain of its own choosing and continues to demonstrate tactical adaptability that wins grudging but surprising respect from American Troops and their Commanders on the ground-- The one benchmark assiduously proposed by Bush and American pols as a barometer to the efficacy of the elected Iraqi government now looks dead in the water-- The most relatively contented or seemingly pacific element of all the disparate raging Iraqi groups, The Kurds, have vowed to kill the Oil Bill languishing in parliament-- DC-time Cheney and Baghdad-time Al Malicki seem paradigmatically incapable of resolving any of their important differences--If the slogan 'Iraqi Oil for Iraqi People' catches fire among the disparate groups and general population, look out!!!!--- Already $10 billion(US) a month down the drain, we know whose time is getting shorter--

Sooner or later the worthless demies have to see that two of their probabilities have similar potential for the effective smearing of of their own demie self-esteem-- Living in abject fear they will be forced by meanie smear-man Rove to take the false blame for "losing" Iraq either now or in 2008 after the White House dribbles out the time clock and shuffles off into the Churchillian sunset, the demies appear as paralytic as the imploding White House-- If the demies even with the attendant difficulties manage to summon enough courage(and this is no doubt a major major 'if') to end the war presently, all of next year remains available to change the terms of debate for 2008 elections-- Wait until 'o8 and the repo-men can slander the demies with losing a war bequeathed to them a fraction shy of the victory the Repo architects of this tragedy sought-- So, demies, sometimes practical political advantages are bound into courageous stands but the stands, the outcomes of which are forever beyond our control, must be taken-- Damned if you do or damned if you don't, why not opt for the right thing????-- Now!!!!!--

METASTISIS

2007-05-10T12:56:00.001-07:00

Grim headlines greet the business world today as the numbers indicate ordinary Americans, already up to the eyeballs in the black-water of gnarly old debt, have begun to rein in some of that profligate consumption-- Retailers certainly felt the penny pincher's wrath in April blaming the slowdown on rotten weather and the Easter calendar (give us a break!!) with only a few proud brave merchants unafraid of facing the obvious link between skyrocketing gasoline prices and the dissipation of disposable income-- Credit cards were still not enough to add sparkle to wallets almost totally devoid of cash as gasping retail wizards endured a ghastly record decline--

Bugaboo Wal-Mart's decline (3.5%) down-roared at a clip three times analysts' prognostications (1.1%), not, to say the least, a small-time discrepancy, and was met with all manner of arcane excuses including weak merchandising techniques as if window-dressing and rack placement failed to trick enough consumptives into the store-- J C Penney's same store sales sailed into negative territory (2.7%) more than tripling analyst expectations(0.8%)-- Gap gave the old heave-ho to its Ceo to stanch its acute hemorrhaging but found its trite blame-the-quarterback strategy unremittingly ineffective with southward sales torching bottom lines down 16%-- Abercrombie & Fitch's sales pitched their penny into the gathering gloom posting 15% declines over projected estimates of a hefty, in its own mistaken right, 7.4% -- Amazingly Wall Street's blind-leading-the-blind analysts failed to proximate even remote ballpark figures finishing dead-on the Mendoza line, correct on only two of every ten calls-- No wonder people are throwing their diminishing money at the Market, especially given data-glows too good to be true-- Facts are such trifling obstacles to the Dream and besides Goldilocks said the porridge would be OK!! but admitted a less than sanguine short-term caveat concerning pet food from China--

Well, stocks met this morning's less-than-stellar news with a considerably leaden slump-- The grandiose canard of recent record highs not so mysteriously driven by corporate stock buy-back programs in the Market must be disconnected from the real economy, where-ever that may be, as the import price trend up-surged, trade deficit gaps sharply and broadly expanded, and both gasoline and oil prices jumped due to worries over insufficient fuel inventories at the outset of the summer driving season-- Housing troubles continued to the drumbeat of sub-prime metastasis, spreading more foreclosures and less sales across the monopoly board--Analysts and Housing Ceo's were confident the hissing collapse of the housing bubble had bottomed last November-- Now the rich burbs of New York are feeling the relative squeeze-- Do not cross Go!-- Do not collect $200!!!--

At the all-time record Market top in 2000 a stock transaction that put $100 dollars in your pocketbook also put around 75 gallons of gasoline in the tank of your Firebird while a stock transaction at today's all time record high that puts $100 in your pocket only dribbles 38.5 gallons into the tank of your Yukon Deniali-- Somewhere the bang for the buck has gone MIA with the current chimerical run-up rally on Wall Street; Bubbleville, USA-- Feeble job creation numbers last month betray the happy-face economists and their professional optimissimo-- Running on empty..... Running scared!!!--

The long awaited oil bill idling away in the Iraqi Parliament seems to have less and less support as precious time ticks away on the Surge-- For several years Kurdish claims to sovereignty over the oil fields in the north have gone unchallenged largely because the undermanned forces of occupation had their hands busy in more violent sectors-- Suddenly un-enamored by reports American oil companies stand to reap most of the benefits of the oil bill, Kurdish tribal chieftains have opted for defiant stands-- Saudi King Abdullah has not rescinded his remarks tar-and-feathering the American occupation as 'illegal'-- Oil prices will not descend anytime soon--

On the political front the unabashed moral charade of the Organ Grinder's monkey, it was announced today, is coming to its exhausted and deflated end-- Prime Minister Tony Blair accepted his unapologetic fall from faux rectitude offering a tardy resignation to his many grateful subjects-- Unrepentant finality will not occur for a few months as the banty rooster of Downing Street decides to go out on a self aggrandizing note....oblivious to the world's dis-illusionment with his strident efforts to enable aggressive eternal war everywhere-- Unbelievably detached, quintessentially Hollywood-esque, nothing shy of a farewell world tour can suffice as a staged exit-- Dancing to the distant trumpet of a soured imperialism doomed by new world chaos, the vanity of victory will never envelope his efforts nor will it rescue his brokeback buddy--

Mr. Bush on the home-front fends off his own party's blunt-spoken analysis that the Iraq War is having a seriously deleterious effect on the Grand Old Party, not to mention those in the heat and dust of the Iraqi inferno itself-- Playing for time is now the most important game in DC and it does, well, help pass the time as ennui and downfall engulf the entire cast of characters-- Generals Petraeus and Odierno appear to be on different pages each seemingly extending surge deadlines off the cuff while Def-Sec Gates senses an urgency about Iraq that pressures the time-lines bobbing and weaving with every shift in the political winds-- The Decider is not The Coordinator and thus the War Czar job goes unfilled and hence unperformed-- Bush political fortunes risk a numbing paralysis devoted to incessant rear guard battles with the struggling hedging demies enmired by weak leadership in positions of authority and the snipers inside the politically endangered elements of his own party-- Plagued by a host of gnats while the economy, unrecognized and almost an afterthought, sinks--

WINOGRAD

2007-05-03T19:33:00.000-07:00

Israelis of all political stripes, some vehemently, some disgustedly, continue to demand the resignation of their Prime Minister who was mercilessly pummeled by a scathing denouncement in the long awaited report from the special Winograd Commission juried to examine the dismal performance of Ehud Olmert, his government and his military staff in the disastrous Israeli War last summer on Lebanon-- Shorn of all possible denial, the commission nailed ignominious defeat in no uncertain terms to Ehud's quickly closing door--

Bearing the unassailable earmarks of dead man walking, Olmert stands disconnected like a disheveled scarecrow in winter begging for a second chance to rewrite his embarrassing ineptitude and incompetence as a military leader-- Lost wars never go away and they never grant the defeated those sought after second chances-- The long road of Defeat eats all participants and it runs forever-- Olmert's succor currently roused from sycophantic loyalists who fall when his regime falls will fade as more calls for resignation pierce his oblivious denial-- The longer he desperately hangs on, off-key and out of tune, the longer Israel suffers--

Israel clearly lost on strategic, operational and tactical grounds and the commission, didn't flinch in spelling out the damage done and it's potential repercussions-- It did, however, refuse consideration of the moral aspects of Olmert's improvisational martial gambit in the first place that ultimately wrought condemnation from the entire region and most of the world-- Millions of cluster bomblets and their maiming potential left scattered across farmlands and playgrounds and demolished neighborhoods won neither moral kudos or simple tokens of friendship from anyone anywhere-- This, after which the cease fire agreement was, for all intents and purposes, acknowledged as fait accompli by all parties--

The Israeli psyche has been fractured by the loss of their once invincible hubris and deteriorating economy(frothy run-up in stock prices a mirage of exception) and a critical lack of true leadership(as opposed to posturing professional dandies and opportunists which the general population appears now to loathe) currently prevents her from coming to grips with the depressingly dangerous predicament-- While 150,000 Israelis fill Rabine Square protesting Ehud (of 3% poll support)Olmert's decision to resist resignation, the chaotic disconsolate condition of the country precludes any overt and legal action to remove the man too incapable of discerning his misguided train not only left the station long ago but also departed on rails heading in the wrong direction--

The country might just be too chagrined to care enough to lop off the political head this sorry excuse for a real leader-- Not unlike its last remaining ally, America, the whole political echelon is suspect-- Leaders who knew better, or should have known better, failed to summon courage enough to act-- Israel's existential threat ain't coming from straw man Ahmadinejad or Iran, it is roiling up from the shame within and the outward contortions that rabid denial of such exhibits-- There may appear to be temporary respite from the storm in simply wishing the whole sordid mess would just vanish on its own accord, but the ultimate problem of Olmert's incompetence and the open extant highly-visible corruption of a large swath of the current political class will continue to fester until the Israeli people's strength of will, until now painfully lacking, ends this regime-- Fat Chance in the current climate--

The weakest most abjectly damaged political leaders in the world today are those who lent their moral and political integrity(such that they bore) leveraging their soul as well to the faux glory embodied by the Project For A New American Century now hemorrhaging disillusionment and self-destruction in Iraq-- The project, concocted by a group calling themselves 'The Cabal' later monikered as Neocons', consisted of think-tank zealots, some bearing dual passports, who fervently calibrated Israeli interests to be absolutely synonymous with American interests in the Middle East and who first won praise for their project from Israeli hawk Mr. Netanyahu-- Cheney arrived on board without being cudgeled toting Scooter Boy and with magical help from charismatic Ariel Sharon quickly swiveled Mr.Bush into position-- Richard Perle ascended to Rumsfield's right-hand man whenever Paul Wolfewitz could not avail himself for duty-- Tough talking milquetoast Brit PM Tony Blair found martial seduction facilely to his liking as well as the newly found tone of belligerence charading through his imperially pompous but out-of-touch speech-making-- George Tenet the erstwhile enabler now sudden convert to the aggrandizing nature of self-pity whining for or to likes of Oprah-- The list could go on........ Powell, Rice, Rove, Libby, Lieberman, Feith(of faith-based intel),Bolton,............. No longer strutting but most definitely fretting their remaining hour upon the world stage and with history's unwelcome judgement still to come, these ghostlike figures shattered of credence, crippled of and by the power invested in careerism, world political influence, once strident, now nebulous at best, almost fanciful ........ Dead Men Walking........ All of them, now, like Ehud Olmert-- Losers in the tarnished limelight of history--

The degree of security Israel absolutely professes to need is simply unattainable-- And if the illusions possessed by this desire convince the many or even the few that such security has, currently or in the mythic past, been once attained it is simply incapable of being maintained-- Israel sees enemies everywhere and where those enemies are real they are all strengthened greatly by last summer's defeat as well as by upgraded guerilla tactics and military hardware-- Invincibility no longer feared and deterrence no longer beyond doubt, serious trouble now awaits this crusader state-- Hezbollah leader Nasrallah praised the Winograd Commission for looking defeat squarely in the eye and studying hard earned lessons for the future-- He will not take Israeli desires for revenge lightly--For Bush, Blair and the rest of the neocon boys, there is no future to rebuild-- The future is a football full of fear and failure and an horribly acute mess they created to be handed off to a successor they hope shoulders the blame they richly deserve-- A veritable wasteland devoid of Honor---

Lost time and opportunity is the bitter pill not found again, Ehud-- Just ask John Kerry and Al Gore about second chances-- Better yet, why not ask.......... Mr. Kissinger??--

SLAM DRUNK

2007-04-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

There were at most a handful of administration players in the room-- George Tenet prefers to feign ignorance and a lack of concern about who leaked his celebrated 'Slam Drunk comment to consummate DC insider Bob Woodward (who was only too happy to curry favor from the Bushie crowd facilitating a deflection of public opinion by implicating the inept Tenet as a scapegoat for failure to find WMD's in Iraq) but was quick to peddle his abused integrity playing the victim card, "the most despicable thing that ever happened" to him.-- Since the promotional copy coming from the recent 60 Minutes interview with Medal of Freedom recipient and former CIA Director Tenet did not identify any of the potential leakers, it would appear Tenet is seeking Justice for his outraged bureaucratic sensibilities a whole lot less than drumming up potential book sales--

The 'woe is me' Tenet whines, "And the hardest part of all this has been just listening to this for almost three years, listening to the vice president go on Meet the Press on the fifth year [anniversary] of 9/11 and say, 'Well, George Tenet said slam dunk' as if he needed me to say 'slam dunk' to go to war with Iraq"........-- Never mind that 3500 American troops have had their young lives snuffed-out and tens of thousands more have met grievous wounds and psychological maiming-- Never mind 3 million Iraq refugees have lost their homes and jobs and family roots and a half million more have lost the breath of their life to boot-- The 'hardest part of all this' for the self-pitying Director of the Central Intelligence Agency ensconced in the air-conditioned comfort of his mahogany foxhole was not watching the the administration's incompetent war efforts implode in the insurgent dust of murderous Iraq and the subsequent devolution of American influence and stature worldwide but the VP Cheney's Machiavellian mis-characterization of a superficial cavalier soundbite to help sell a bogus threat as a rationale for pre-emptive eternal war--

"........And you listen to that and they never let it go. I mean, I became campaign talk. I was a talking point. 'Look at the idiot [who] told us and we decided to go to war.' -- What narcissistic pap!!!-- Beaming in the presence of the Decider in Chief, Mr. Tenet accepted his Medal of Freedom proud of his contribution enabling the Neocons' Project for a New American Century even as earmarks began to appear signaling an emergent insurgency quite capable of inflicting serious damage up to and including stalemate to occupation troops while the evidence of security problems countrywide became more and more visible-- Intel concerns had shifted from making a phony case for pre-emptive attack to administrative denial of Iraq's burgeoning insurgency but by then Tenet was gone--

For three years Mr. Tenet, incredibly, endured this malignant affront to his dignity and professional integrity in absolute silence-- 'Slam Dunk' now gets bandied about in mockery and verbal parody of any effort that overstates any case with faux and facile certitude-- Mr. Tenet's intellectual and professional reputation is now nil-- His ridiculous denials of torture strain credibility but the success of the "alternative techniques" he, now, endorses as being more intel-productive than anything his CIA effort was able to achieve over the years-- Why not challenge Cheney's misrepresentation immediately??-- Why wait three years to defend yourself??-- Why accept the medal??-- You went along to get along, crybaby!!--

That Cheney or Rummy or Rover or even Bush would seek to shift blame for the Iraq disaster to Tenet is not beyond the realm of possibility but entirely feasible and quite probable-- Imagine boss Cheney nodding as Bush nervously looking for a fall guy asks 'Hell,..... I mean,..... Why not stick Tenet's head in the meat-grinder?'-- The question suspended from a momentary eternity until......... "After all,...... he..... is...... a Clinton holdover"......... breaks the overwhelmingly unbearable silence-- The voice behind the White House curtain belongs to Woodward to which the grinning smirking Decider replies, "Slam Drunk"--

BLEAK HOUSE

2007-04-24T15:03:00.000-07:00

It will now require nearly 8 months to whittle down the outstanding inventory of houses currently for sale nationwide, a 30% rise from a year ago-- Extant headlines everywhere seem to echo the gloom as existing home sales plummeted downward at the quickest rate (three times faster than expectations) in 18.........yes, eighteen....... years while home prices came in second in the downshifting race plunging at the steepest rate in 13 years-- Crumbling Consumer Confidence, a notoriously fickle number usually based on sentiment and/or exuberant moods induced by the prospects of another credit-binge, finished a distant third pegged at numbers not witnessed since last August-- The Conference Board said its Consumer Confidence Index drooped below their own economists' already negative expectations for the 6 month outlook while its Present Situation Index also declined for the first time in 6 months-- Optimism looks to be running on empty--

Fed Chairman Bernanke looks pinioned between the proverbial rock and the hard place-- Does he raise interest rates to protect the crumbling dollar cookie, recently reaching twenty year lows against the Brit Pound and on the lower rungs on the Euro ladder nearly an all-time record, risking a death blow to the local economy (recently fueled to faux euphoria by fading dollars) or does he lower rates deploying into hyper-inflationary terrain in a vain attempt at salvaging the seriously slowing domestic economy(being hammered by the humbled Housing bubble's puncture) while risking the collapse of the entire globalist system-- Double trouble on the home-front as well as worldwide considering large stakeholders in the weak American currency may seek greener returns elsewhere-- The threat that foreign capital may take flight is both real and serious-- Are the brood of elitist vipers locked in paralytic stupor at the Federal Reserve's arcane temple soliloquizing, 'To fish or cut bait??--

Protectionist volleys have been fired across the bow of the Chinese media-piracy ship by wounded Hollywood hotheads unconcerned in their myopic hubris that our slowing economic and political system might be inescapably held captive by Chinese financial credit-- While Confucious may have once allowed it wisdom for a dog to bite the hand that feeds it poison, the dog must actually be in position to deliver his fangs to its intended target and it must reasonably assume it can depart the premises without incurring damaging wrath from the other hand-- Wisdom Washington clearly failed to apply when it unleashed Shock and Awe quagmiring itself into oil rich Iraq between two religious sects bent on murdering and torturing each other non-stop as well as young American troops whenever the opportunity avails itself-- A penny borrowed is not synonymous with a penny earned!!!!!--

The Decider rattles his veto threat and the demies demand deadlines for troop withdrawal in a strange absurdist dance being played out in slow motion as the only game in DC but US currency reserves larded Chinese coffers last quarter to a tune of $1.2 trillion...... no small amount of power even calculating their globally diminishing value-- The Chinese Government now holds trump but appears at least temporarily content to continue the increasingly costlier subsidizing of the nightmarish misadventure in Iraq as well as the ongoing American consumer's feeding frenzy at the credit trough-- Opting for craven indebtedness alleviates most directorial options on the control panel in the boardrooms of Manifest Destiny--

Gasoline for May delivery surged 3.3% in New York, more than 7 cents, to $2.2826/gal., an 8 month high and the summer driving season only beginning to kick in-- Over the past month alone, gasoline prices skyrocketed 11%-- Inventories are at 18 month lows-- Operational capacity at refineries came in down nearly 3 full percentage points when experts had forecast an increase-- These earmarks bode serious trouble for those whose manifest difficulty in meeting monthly house payments continue to swell the mounting rolls of foreclosure, default and delinquency-- Commuters have no options but to drive themselves ever onward toward insolvency-- Everywhere the ghost of Tom Joad wonders how to escape the crushing load of magnum debt and the liability chains of negative equity at ground zero--

One winces sharply when the largest US home builder, D R Horton reveals an income loss of 85% for the first quarter-- New home orders down 37% for the quarter took nearly a $2 billion tumble in dollar value while cancellations of prospective buyers hit 32%-- No matter how much they try, these are numbers upon which the advertising/public relations world of economic forecasters cannot paste ubiquitous smiley faces--

This collapse of the Housing sector is occurring against the backdrop of a hollowed-out manufacturing base, a diminishing supply of oil based energy production worldwide, a wobbly dollar losing favor and face worldwide, an agriculture bent on speculative fantasy before common sense, our national army on the verge of breakdown in the increasing likelihood of abject failure in Iraq, an endangered unpopular administration coupled to a paralytic Congress clearly out of touch with world reality and the will of its American voters-- Living beyond our means enriched the money/mortgage lenders and bloated financiers while pulling the rug out from under the real economy-- Bloated consumers still spend money not yet earned hoping oblivion catches them before foreclosure punctures their obese bubble-- Sooner or Later sees Big Trouble waiting Right Around the Corner--

WELCOME TO BAGHDAD, VIRGINIA

2007-04-18T20:28:00.000-07:00

The pervasive ongoing anti-Imus rant miring so many indulgent webblogs in an embarrassing overkill (no pun intended) of very disconcerting holier-than-thou pontification, may finally relegate itself to the backseat as the hand-wringing futility of another gun-debate begins to emerge from the tragic mass murder at the Virginia Tech University on some early accounts by an isolated green-card Korean student bringing his variation of Shock and Awe to the degenerate schoolyard--

Civility in this culture has been falling down for a great long time now but, while Imus wasn't the most artful practitioner of Rude speech nor the most humorous, nor the first, nor the only, his firing, based more on monetary concerns over the loss of commercial sponsorship than any good faith attempt to raise cultural standards, will not restore what we have lost-- For lack of a better term............. Civilization--

His sin here was not even close to pre-meditated murder yet the media-sphere elevated it into a crescendo of malignant judgementalism and narcissistic self-purification-- The fast and furious fall of Imus obliterated most coverage of the bomb that exploded inside the Iraqi Parliament-- The scale of perspective that deviates these two events in importance in our media culture purely and simply repudiates HOPE-- The complicit media who cheer-led the Cheerleader in Chief's maniacal excursion into a country we knew nothing about, now wallow in the lament for a crusty celebrity down-famed-- He was one of their own.....'but he just crossed over the line'--

The rampant rude vulgarity that sullenly permeates our lack of living culture is symptomatic and emblematic of our present and coming downfall-- 300 million isolated automatons linked only to other automatons through the ulterior motives and the material venality (of the now fading power) of the dollar-- The incivility of the so-called 'Culture Wars' as practiced so witlessly and crudely by the lowest common denominator of every social class, every gender, every skin color and every metaphysical and political creed across the full spectrum of America and its media, is indicative of self-loathing-- America has come to dislike what it has become..... very much so!!!--

Aristocratic matrons liberated by reveling in the venomous curses of the gutter-- Eight year-olds in the mall whose foul language makes old salt sailors blanch--Legions of emasculated suburban white boys 'talkin shit' as if emulating the devil-may-care tough-talk of the angry ghetto will somehow redeem their young manhood from the spiritual desertification imposed on it by the material splendor of monetary success and the anti-male tenets of Feminist theology-- Debates across the full spectrum substituting catty invective and outright insults for respectful thought......the list could go on and on!!--

Crotchety Imus and his pitiful surly crew found strange solace insulting any and everything from studio microphones hiding behind padlocked doors-- And that's the Imus problem, in a nutshell-- From the studio fortress there's no danger of someone's insulted reputation fashioning a fist to re-arrange the noses of the phony studio toughs spouting acidic contempt for everything in every direction--Those lady roundballers from Rutgers would probably kick Imus butt in a real street fight-- Nobody kicked Jihadi butt like the studio toughs wielding swordlike telestrators taking out regimes here and re-arranging entire geographies elsewhere in the run-up to eternal war-- All so effortlessly achieved from the santuary of the unreal studio-- On the real ground inside the real Iraq things turned out to be considerably more difficult-- And the price this exacts will be astronomical--

Accumulating all those falling dollars with a madly single minded focus has rendered our culture exhausted and miserable(from the root word MISER) not happy or joyful-- The repetitious vulgarity we are cudgeled into 'tolerating' in the public square has a spirit killing effect on its partisans as well as their audience-- More and more people every day answer 'yes' to the pollsters who ask if America is on the wrong track-- We have lost our way in Iraq and here at home our faith in everything is being shattered-- We do not control our own destiny but we still long for and pray for........... the fiction we do--

Ask the students who witnessed the hideous massacre of their unfortunate classmates in Virginia how ugly real violence is, compared to the sanitized versions Hollywood foists upon the collective consciousness of America and the world-- Whatever demons (purported to be an antipathy toward rich kids and open debauchery on campus but who really knows??) drove Mr. Cho to his heinous deed may never be unveiled but that won't stop psychobabble everywhere from attempting to prop-up a rational sounding explanation or maudlin motive or clinical subterfuge to his madness and wring their hands over the futility of preventing such willfull attacks in advance-- Mr. Cho's sullen bloody rage rubs the American nose in the acute violence we so cavalierly ignore in Iraq or vicariously feast upon inside darkened theaters-- Accusing all of us, he wrote, .........."You made me do it" !!!!!--

The people of Iraq have endured this type of real violence from way more explosive ordinance than a 9mm Glock on a daily basis for numerous years-- More than 3 million Iraqis have become refugees from this mayhem (over a half million killed) while those still fixed inside the country expect death any minute-- The Killing Chant of Mr. Cho-- Coming Soon!!....... to a slaughterhouse near you-- Welcome to Baghdad, Virginia.......Keep you heads down!!--

THE NEW WAR CZAR

2007-04-14T13:10:00.000-07:00

One by one the chips fall-- Paul Wolfewitz, the architect of the new Middle East, the world banker who eliminated world poverty and the corruption-fighter who brought a new regime of Honesty to the World Bank itself, is too baffled by his own consummate self-held virtue to even begin comprehending why World Bank staffers in unison-ed chanting demanded his resignation-- In response to the discovery of no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by occupation forces, Wolfie once had the cavalier verve to publicly admit in arrogant candor that the WMD's were a canard designed simply to get the US into Iraq--

There is obviously no dishonor inherent in well-intentioned political lies from his self-deluded perspective while virtually no mainstream media call him to account for his bravado posing and specious intellectualizing that led to the resultant murder of an entire country, hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, millions of refugees ripped away from roots, families, homes and employment, the utter destruction of civilized amenities like electrical power, indoor plumbing and home security-- No Wolfie has earned a free pass from his cheerleader friends in the incapacitated American media for his part in America's coming Downfall--

Wolfie just does not comprehend why an architect of the most magnitudinous foreign policy disaster in American History should have to answer for nepotistic cronyism involving his romantic interest-- God, how rich!!!!.... of all the oxymoronic faiths rampant in the world she has been purported to be an Islamic Feminist--Should Wolfie be interrogated for trysting with terrorist cells??--Obviously an absurd posit that the scandal mongering demies would have to have invented to destroy troop morale in Iraq as the duplicitous Bush, on his most recent radio address from Bunker City, would inveigh against almost everything else the whispering demies have attempted to accomplish which really isn't all that much-- Like the mainstream media the demies can't bear to face their complicity for the Iraq debacle either-- Hence, their whispering approach to governing----

Why not promote Wolfie's girl to War Czar since her lucrative position at the State Department out earned State Sec Rice and tasked her with the hazards of answering to one Lynn Cheney???-- The first four Retired Generals Mr. Bush approached for the job declined the opportunity and who can blame them??-- Who wants to 'lose Iraq' charting an incoherent course with no direction known as a final installment to one's careerist resume??-- Hell, offer the job to Wolfie, didn't he help design the initial mess??-- How about Chertoff, didn't he leave DC while Katrina disemboweled New Orleans??-- Is Brownie still drawing unemployment??-- McCain, does he not still believe in elective victory by additional but phantom troops??--

The bomb inside the Iraq Parliament exploded all pretense of cautious optimism for the Bush/AEI Surge plan as a vehicle for triumph-- The War Cronies have lost all credibility-- Epic failure and all its attendant demoralization awaits and who commandeers the lion's share of the narcissistic media spotlight circling round the drain this week-- Not the vainglorious scandalized Wolfewitz-- Not the embunkered decider hiding from Baseball's Opening Day, Mr.Bush-- Tempest in a most hideous teapot-- Ladies and Gentlemen, read it and weep,........the new War Czar,........ Don Imus!!!!!!--

MADAME SPEAKER

2007-04-10T15:36:00.000-07:00

Nancy Pelosi's recent sojourn to Syria ostensibly in search of furthering peace efforts in the Middle East fizzled into frustration as the venal cynic who sent her into this grieving vortex with an encouraging message that Israel wanted to renew peace talks denounced her efforts on her return-- As a token of his sincerity presenting her with a captive Israeli soldier's dog-tags as an amulet for her safety and success, the corrupt and duplicitous Ehud Olmert, groveling in lapdog homage to the paralytic Bush/Cheney's lack of efficacious strategy, proceeded to stab her in the back by disavowing the veracity of her offer-- That Pelosi ventured to the inflamed region in the first place, no matter how significantly so her naivete, is searing testament to the insolvent rationale and acute weakness of America's flailing failing foreign policy-- Utterly transparent for the whole world to glimpse is the glaring bald-faced answer to the question of who really wants peace in the Middle East--

No matter how hard Madame Pelosi tries or how rational and articulate her personal efforts apply, the bottom line is that violent madness and coercive greed combined do not lend themselves to moral suasion-- In such an explosive cauldron feeling one's way to peace is fore-defeated but Pelosi's impulse to right the listing ship of American influence is similar to Senator McCain's market stroll into misbegotten self-delusion or political suicide-- Both sought to save a seriously deteriorating situation incognizant of it's deepening futility while their weakened astigmatic leaders hide among royal sycophants in deafening denial--

Bush, embedded and embunkered in mega-fantasy no cogency of fact will ever dislodge, decided, in an unmistakable metaphor of signatory retreat, not to renew a Rite of Spring by refusing to throw out the ceremonious first pitch on Baseball's Opening Day-- Mr. Olmert, the wavering loser, cornered by financial scandals and the luster of incompetent military defeat, will say or do anything to maintain his tattered grip on his waning authority--

Arial Sharon once bragged that he had America in his pocket, perhaps not too long after the ashen-faced Mr. Bush emerged from their meeting to proclaim Sharon, a Man Of Peace to a big wide world that knew quite better-- Olmert obviously had the inexperienced, AIPAC-bought Pelosi in his and has certainly showed her the bottom side of his Coin of Honor-- Nearly 60 years in the region and Israel has no friends to show for her endeavours except those she buys and the proof of Olmert's shameful treatment of Pelosi echoes why-- As Israel bears the earmarks of failed statehood, American gets ever closer to recognizing exit from the Iraq disaster is her last best option-- Thanks for the effort, Madame Speaker--

PRETENSE NO LONGER SERVES TO FURTHER

2007-04-03T12:39:00.001-07:00

John McCain's stroll through one of Baghdad's successfully surged neighborhood markets wearing a visible bullet proof vest and a look of focused concern is either a disingenuous campaign promotional photo-op designed to burnish his pro-surge bona-fides or a feeble exercise in self-delusional idiocy or more than likely some of both-- To the right of the command coterie in the news photograph are a group of Iraqi men watching the US officials on parade two of whom exhibit countenances closer to pure hatred than Chamber of Commerce welcome wagons--

Locals later claimed the area was teeming with dozens of armed US soldiers who arrived in heavily armored Humvees while numerous gunship helicopters hovered and circled overhead-- Locals later disputed a statement from McCain's group that the stroll was no different than a Sunday trip to an outdoor market somewhere in Indiana citing the constant threats of possible insurgent attacks at any time-- People may now wear bullet proof vests to Sunday markets in New Orleans but.........Indiana????-- Not yet, by a long shot!!!!--

The Surge may have shifted execution style killings away from Sadr City and other violent Baghdad neighborhoods but the number of killings country-wide have not diminished and lethal car bomb explosions everywhere have multiplied to record highs in both February and March-- The Sadr Shiites are not going to battle US soldiers toe to toe in a decisive formation they know in advance would fail-- The Shia have more than a healthy fear of the desperate Sunnis and if the US is unwittingly willing to take the fight to those Sunni insurgents on their behalf, the Sadr Militia is more than willing to allow it-- Hence, it is certainly not surprising the Shia, knowing full well Father Time is still currently on their side, would lie low and not openly challenge the US surge into their territory-- If McCain and his ilk read this superior position as a sign of weakness on the part of the Shia or as a sign of imminent full scale success on the part of the Surge chances for a sane conclusion to this fatal mis-adventure offer absolutely no hope--

Never say Die!!! is most often a commendable attitude but if it burnishes the sagging morale of abject congressional dimwits and oblivious has-been Neocon tank-thinkers while executing the destruction of an entire Army through imperial dissipation, bankrupt sloganeering and willful politcal refusal to cogitate harsh facts on the ground, what will it ultimately have wrought??-- Myopic security concerns of a piecemeal nature this late in the game have counterproductivity written all over it--Is Baghdad security so important that other areas are allowed such negligent security support they become cauldrons of everything the surge attempts to prevent in Sadr City-- Bloodletting mestastasizes as Baghdad becomes an island of temporary restive calm surrounded by an ocean of seething shrieking violence elsewhere??-- Who but posturing politicians could label this success??-- Wake up, Mr. McCain!!!!!--

Had the skillful intelligent Petreaus been in charge of the CPA at the beginning instead of Bremer his asymmetrical expertise may have been used to optimum effect but at this late stage he still obviously doesn't have the manpower to police the entire country all at once, nor are there troops enough here at home or around the world to fill this aching bleeding void-- The hearts and minds lost at the outset and during the ongoing torturous years Rummy and Company devoted to denial first of insurgency and later of outright civil/sectarian conflict won't give Petraeus the full scale second chance his plan would need-- Over a million, some say two, talented Iraqi civilians have opted for refugeedom and have left the arena-- Lost time is not found again-- Even as the Sadr militia melts away rampaging Sunni car bombers fearlessly ply their deadly attacks in the vacuum-- Wherever American Officials pronounce even minor success insurgent attacks pounce to dispel it as false and the Middle Eastern media are there in force to disseminate the continuing flaming chaos and its ugly truth-- The tempo and terrain belong to the natives everywhere but the Greed Zone--At the precipice of defeat pretense no longer serves to further---

KING ABDULLAH: SLEEPLESS IN RIYADH

2007-03-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

Oil prices, driven by ratcheting tension over the Iranian seizure of fifteen British sailors, bored through $66/barrel today closing at a 6 month high-- Adding to the upsurge in regional anxiety, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia chastised the American occupation as illegal imploring other Arab leaders to patch up political animosities or continue being dictated to by foreign powers like the US-- Are these comments just designed for Arab Leaguers and will tomorrow then beget business as usual or is there a rift developing between the Sunni Saudi Royalty and Lame Duck Bush??--

State Sec Condi Rice on Monday called on Arab Governments to"begin reaching out to Israel,"-- Not exactly the warmest of rejoinders from the Saudi King to the posturing Secretary but lest his pointed remarks missed their target he added point blank "It has become necessary to end the unjust blockade imposed on the Palestinian people as soon as possible so that the peace process can move in an atmosphere far from oppression and force."-- This sounds like the attempted 'Redirection' the Bush crew sought by swinging toward the Sunni side of the mayhem ledger in Iraq in order to lessen the Iranian influence among the Iraqi Shia, is not progressing as smoothly as planned--

Ann Coulter and Robert Kagan, mahogany-foxholed at the AEI, proclaim, as do many in mainstream media, undeniable success so far for Bush's Surge but Iraq's unceasing plethora of record setting car bombs last month proclaim something else entirely-- Now March's rate is on track and tempo to surpass February's record high bloodmark and the adaptability and persistence of these sectarian antagonists to continue expansion of their mayhem in the face of The Surge may be one reason the Saudi King feels confident enough to challenge Bush so publicly on the legality of his occupation-- Bush is not winning and cannot win and King Abdullah knows it-- Is Abdullah's plea for Arab unity a call to arms against the dictates of foreign occupation??-- Has Abdullah lost faith in the Bush's war policy??-- Does Abdullah think the Surge is succeeding??-- Reports from the Washington Post indicate Abdullah will cut and run from the state dinner the White House had planned in the King's honor sometime in April-- Lame Duck, anyone??--

That the Saudis themselves give aid and comfort to the Sunni insurgents is a given subject neither the administration nor the hometown media wish to breach to the general public or to the mal-informed demie majority in congress, but more Americans, by a long shot(no pun intended), have been killed in Iraq by the Saudi-aided Sunni insurgents than by the Iranian-aided Shiite killers-- A fact not too likely to be bandied about on 'Hardball' and certainly one not conducive to a fresh Sunni-American alliance, restoration of Baathist participation or victorious strategy-- 'There are no good options' has been the omnipresent shibboleth to the Realist realm of America's failing Foreign Policy but the word 'no' has not gained penetration into the inner sanctum of DC's omnipresent denial--

Seymour Hersh's article , 'The Redirection', paints the Saudi Kingdom as scared to death of Iran's sudden influential ascendancy into the great Middle Eastern Void created by the Neocon Shock and Awe and the utterly stupid dissolution of the Iraqi Army by Rummy's Boy Wonder Paul Bremer-- Iraq, as a country, has been murdered and Pandora herself must be keeping Abdullah sleepless in Riyadh-- Hersh described a Saudi/ American/ Israeli consort aiming at taking down Iran with massive aerial bombardment-- Uncertainty over who would fly the mission and pull its deadly trigger, considering the lack of political coin nabob Bush and slithery Olmert merit from low polls and lack of trust on each's home-front, might have gummed up the best laid plans of desperate men but the US Aircraft Carriers still continue to practice and maneuver in or near the Persian Gulf with one more carrier recently dispatched to join the others--

Fifteen sailors from Lame Duck Tony Blair's Royal British Empire managed to get themselves captured in disputed waters further roiling the region-- Blair upped the volume button on his professional outrage yesterday which only accentuated his ministerial weakness before replicating The Rose Garden and setting up camp-- One million dollars apiece and a covert state-of-the-art arms-for-hostages deal facilitated by clandestine repo campaign operators conjunct then wondrous ally Israel was the Ayatollah's ransom, yet Senor Reagan disavowed his own ban on negotiating with terrorists and then not so reluctantly paid it-- The hostages came home on Inauguration day and then it was Morning in America, again-- Five Iranians considered some kind of embassy personnel by Iran and captured inside Iraq and held still by the US merit potential bargaining chip status-- Latest word from Britain comes in concialtory tones seeking quick resolution to the problem a gambit Ahmadinejad did not immediately embrace--

The downward manipulation of oil prices last fall in vain effort to derail the demies from their electoral victory-by-default cost Ahmadinejad and his oil coffers a thinned out profit or two-- So expect this tempest to linger for a while barring, of course, a botched raid by Brit Commandos-- Turnabout may be fair play except that the immediate health of the American economy finds itself jeopardized by surging oil prices, surging corn prices, surging foreclosures, delinquencies and defaults plus downward spiraling housing sales, housing prices, housing starts and new housing permits to mention a just a handful of many convergent threats-- Waiting.......

GOLDILOCKS

2007-03-27T11:05:00.000-07:00

Throughout most of 2006 as oil prices fluctuated wildly and gasoline prices rose steadily until manipulated downward at the ingress of Autumn in a vain bid to aid repo-men and their bid for re-election, vast majorities in the economic/financial punditry professed a flatulent notion that no matter how high the oil vector went the larger economy would be immune to damaging effects basically of any kind-- Apparently oblivious to the ridiculous canard that simply removing the volatile energy sector (and food) from CPI statistics in a dishonest effort would make the true inflationary impact of high energy prices seem.....well, less inflationary, economists from vaunted Academia and Wall Street sold out to the rosy scenario and began courting Goldilocks-- 'Let us pretend the negative repercussions of such simply don't apply' went the delusional credo-- Innocuous paeans extolling the mindless resilience of spendthrift consumers, who armed with cheap and easy credit continued to reserve space in the debtors dungeon for their own children, peppered the financial blather-sphere with phony optimism and forced denial--

However as 2006 approached its finality the delinquencies of sub-prime mortgage debt began like termites to make their presence felt-- Their numbers were too large to ignore but that didn't stop the Goldilockians from trying-- Chipping away at Wall Street's false paradigm until even the Fed had to finally acknowledge the problems in the sub-prime sectors-- How could so many sub-primers come a cropper at the same time??-- How could so many hit the default button at once??-- Certainly, since energy prices and their integral function in the economic life of nearly everyone on the planet had been surreptitiously extracted from the fundamentals of CPI measurements due to their 'volatility', the rising cost of fuel and heating oil couldn't be the culprits-- An extra $30 to $50 a week in added commuting costs shouldn't have any major effects on the ability of sub-primers to meet their monthly payments even in those areas where mortgage interest rates were reset and monthly payments nearly doubled, say the professionally addled optimists...... proponents of just another Big Lie--

Now as the sub-prime fiasco becomes evident to nearly all, the Denialists diligently create new fictions to obviate concern that the collapsing netherworld of lying deadbeat mortgage holders, who were used by crooked financier sharpies to enrich themselves ultimately at the expense of the entire financial system, will spread to the second tier of mortgage chicanery and thereby further infectious foreclosure eventually leading to a full blown insurgency of contagious bankruptcy-- Mortgage company insiders everywhere have been and continue to dump their own stocks onto a delirious market whose frightened minions continue to be greased by rising oil prices and military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf--

Each new tank of gas diminishes the dollars of every mortgage holder...... even the primers-- It is not as if even the A+ rated credit risks were not counseled by smooth-talking real-estate sweeties into buying bigger castle-taffy than they could actually afford even with their high salaried jobs-- Many millions more may have overbought, after all, rising home prices no sky could ever limit were bound to continue ad infinitum -- pure common sense to herd mentality at every class level-- The Banks were going to make you rich if only you would reach for the sky!!!!!!-- Who could resist such spiel frothing from the mouths of boomer salesmen-- Hell, even dime a dozen Biff Loman bought it--

Rampant foreclosures damage more than just the person losing his, perhaps, misguided dream of home ownership-- If all the foreclosures were congregated in the same neighborhoods perhaps the damage might be palliated or confined-- However lower-middle and average middle class neighborhoods are speckled with houses the troubled 'owners' were driven from by a foreclosure lenders knew would eventually arrive en masse-- These houses deteriorate in upkeep, lawns go to seed and weeds take over-- Graffitti may begin to appear--The unkempt look adds to neighborhood devaluation and prospective house buyers even of foreclosed properties begin to look elsewhere-- Prices fall and so too assessed valuation--

Property taxes on foreclosed units go uncollected and municipal coffers feel the effect immediately-- Education budgets suffer shortfalls as well as street repair crews and every other kind of city maintenance services-- Priority emergency services feel the same pinch and are forced to triage the area in support of those neighborhoods who pay the higher property taxes-- Squatters and even crackheads begin to occupy the foreclosures and before too long the area is enveloped in major blight-- In fact the speed at which this deterioration can take effect would surprise most observers-- Not to worry it can't spread upward goes Wall Street's pablum-- Business investment as well as big ticket orders grew much less than experts expected in February and Fed chief Bernanke feigns the inability to see any connection to the sub-prime troubles, the oil price crises, the vain hope of dumbing down the dollar and faltering consumer demand for credit-- There are no consequences for cheating!!!-- There are no consequences for lying!!--The down cycle has been abolished!!-- We are in a new business paradigm!!!!! ......... hardly!!-- Who said that??__

The CPI fiction will obviously continue as the DC Government literally cannot afford to acknowledge the real cost of living-- The phantasmal solution to foreign oil addiction in the minds of those incapable of reading the true scale of the problem is now for bettor and worse corn-based ethanol-- Speculators have grabbed this tail of sudsidies by the dog and it now seems almost certain the remaining topsoil across the our once vaunted Breadbasket in the midwest will be burned in the gas tanks of suburban SUVs--

The price of corn rockets skyward never mind that it is one of, if not, the most expensive of all grains to raise with regard to energy/oil inputs-- Voracious water and nitrogen feeder as well as a highly skilled soil depleter-- The race is on for new acreage to grow corn and take advantage of the rising in price, now double that of two years past-- Food costs can only follow the upward price trend but not to worry there either, since the CPI doesn't include food in its fictional measurement so the inflationary effect will be minimal.....in faux theory only!!-- The cost of raising the energy-intensive corn, defending it against pests, harvesting it, transporting it to market, then to the ethanol plants and then back to the ethanol stations to be pumped into your SUV tanks guarantee way beyond reasonable doubt that the ethanol outcome to this meandering mega-energy process will be anything but inexpensive-- Corn could become too expensive to process-- As food prices and energy prices rise and housing payment resets rise into falling house prices only an idiot, or maybe a ringleader from a Federal Reserve Circus that considers as part of GDP all the treasure(almost $10billion/month) being pumped down the rathole, Shock and Awe fashioned out of Iraq, would suggest that the 'larger economy', whatever that is, could avoid the hostility of such destructive side-effects--

There is a convergence of negative forces merging toward a financial storm of a magnitude higher than any of DC's leaders can summon the courage to face-- Denial is currently the coin of the realm--Throw the gigantic debt/deficit/trade-imbalance, the extreme paucity of American Savings, and the defeat in Iraq into this mix of rising food and oil prices and falling housing prices and it becomes a rather drastic firestorm-- Who knows what the demies are currently hoping to accomplish by their transparent charades while the repos seem intent on mere political survival(Live to be bribed another day!)-- Neither side has the best interests of our country at heart-- Foreclosures will number in the millions, and living arrangements for most all of us are about to confront a very new paradigm-- Not one major world oil producer increased its oil production while country after country, some with gigantic populations increased their demand for oil-- This formula does NOT compute !!!--

The inexpensive oil that fueled indulgent affluence for almost a century and bred such dreams that single individuals could or even should attain ownership of an entire house, with multiple cars, boats and whatnot is clearly gone-- Can we maintain our mobility and eat it too???--Can you spell trainwreck!!!!?-- ....... G.... O.... L.... D.... I.... L.... O.... C.... K.... S.......... NOT!!!!

THE CONVERSATION: 1984 & BIG SISTER NIXON

2007-03-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

The new "1984" rendition portrays Hillary cunningly morphed into a less than telegenic, baby-boomers' Big Sister Nixon, droning cold empty platitudes about 'ideas' and 'conversations' to row upon row of her bench-seated, moronic, addled subjects all clothed in monotonous penal grey listening in various states of open-mouthed stupefaction until a sledgehammer-wielding female jogger being chased by giant gestapo-like super-Gothic-goons liberates the dust-coated drudges by smashing the over-sized iconic image with the heroine-hurled peen-- White light intense and mystical fills the screen until fade-out ends the political ad with a small leaf attached to a colorful capital O obviously supporting Obama while evoking the original Apple computer logo--

The blatherworld was agog with buzz from the phony to the ecliptic as inveterate detectives of every stripe sought solution to the mega-mystery-- Would the culprit be a has-been-esque Joe Klein or viperish repo-men in less than swift boats??-- Pundits proud of their tech-savvy pounced all over each other to be first in line to pronounce the old, stale, staid broadcast media ad formats DOA-- This revolutionary parody instantaneously altered campaign tactics everywhere for all time went the prattle and who knows maybe it has-- Vested interests in the corporate media echelons comfortably office-ed atop the wide world's skyscrapers cringe at the thought of important ground breaking political ads launched into the cyber-sphere free of charge!!!-- A world may be leaving them behind kind of fear that ripples up the spine sending wild fury to frolic like pin-balls inside atrophied over-comfortable brains-- Free radicals, almost,.......... sort of---

Most of the campaign funds raised by the grasping political candidates, who grovel over and over the rubber-chicken circuits, the boring stifling money-hunts called 'teas' or the perpetual glad-handing $1000 photo-op ordeals of modern campaigns, not to mention puckering up to the extended palm of ever-present AIPAC, enriches coporporate media coffers venue-ed by television advertising-- The candidates' payoff comes once they have established their fund-raiser, cash-cow bona fides to the satisfaction of corporate parameters, whose time-tested techniques enable these obsequious office hunters with state of the art Madison Avenue truth-stretching, bio-buffing, digital enhancing no-questions-asked blarney-- No one practiced this ambitious degeneration more skillfully, more smilingly or more ruthlessly than Big Sister Nixon's, of late, sometimes husband, Bill--

If this propagandistic juggernaut attempting to substitute perpetual campaign corruption for democracy and actual governing, the sorry current state of which is so damningly obvious, gets needled by freedom's practitioners at YouTube, so expletively-deleted what????-- Whine on!!!!--If the concerned citizen bloggers, pejoratively categorized as profane, vitriolic, acidic and even idealistic in the extreme at every opportunity by softened and nervous Broder-like insiders, continue to pilfer readership from the dwindling circulation of failing long-established print media, so expletively- deleted what???-- Whine on!!!!!-- The Baby Boomers' "old road is rapidly fading", to borrow from a once cherished boomer anthem-- Something is happening here and they don't know what it is, or, fearful of the admission, do they??-- The kindling of revolution may not be televised but the match may be cyber-struck by those still-decent American citizens--

Ariana Huffington has ferreted out the 'Hillary 1984' conjurer-- Not a repo-boater nor an al Qaeda symp nor an anonymous Rodham machine insider with ulterior motives-- Phillip de Vellis admitted to the dastardly deed done without Obama bin's input or anyone else's in a self penned blog at the Huff. Post today-- Incidentally, though, he did reportedly resign his position at Blue State Digital, a company created by members of............... Howard Dean's Internet Team????-- Oooooh!! The plot thickens.....-- Mr. deVellis did aver, "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed." Maybe it has but expectations kept to a minimum are those best managed when challenged by extant reality--

The 1984 Ad is damaging to the Mrs. Clinton machine not because Hillary kind of does her best to sometimes embody the ambitious power-hungry iconography of the top-down crypto-fascist but the whole episode shows her tech-savvy not just slightly behind the curve...... not at all unlike her coldly-scheming event-lagging plan for Iraq-- In fact, her so-called tech-savvy platitudes at campaign hustings come across as matronizing attempts to co-opt geekish voters through pandering insincerity-- She was beaten to the punch by '1984' and immediate attempts to reply at YouTube appeared, with barely concealed anger, amateurish and hackneyed if not completely self absorbed--

The more face-time Hillary receives on YouTube whether by her own megalomaniacal devices or by Obama bin surrogates or by independent politicos or the not so swift repo-boaters, the more her candidacy looks like the Spotted Owl-- Over-exposure lends itself to mockery and if the mockery reveals a thin-skinned or an imperious response behind the political facade, if the smiles betray even a hint of dis-ingenuousness, if an unwillingness to admit mistakes surfaces publicly, or if genuine humor fails them, credibility issues trouble their endeavors and they may seem doggedly incessant--

While the flesh-pressing fund-raising shake-downs last week in El A were especially fruitful for her old-hat status-quo bid, her campaign flaks and hacks find themselves in the unenviable position of having to constantly react to new events which seem to catch them by surprise-- Supporters from the demie-wing of Washington's War Party once believed to be firmly in her pocket are suddenly defecting, some with unmitigated invective--

Mortified by Maureen Dowd's publication of Media Mogul David Geffen's financial support for Obama which took second stage to his searing castigation of co-presidents Hillary and Bill's facile and repetitious penchant for outright lying-- This from the magisterial New York Times' columnist whose readership's organ endorsed Hillary's senatorial bid seemingly without reservation knowing full well she would opt to go AWOL from those senatorial obligations and seek the presidency full-time........... a full two years in advance of 08's election day--

Thirty years of active and, to a large extent, successful feminism is riding on Hillary and her long-in-the-tooth sojourn through the political arena-- Her ascension to the status of presidential candidate is plainly not enough-- In order to validate the multilateral efforts of millions of women to advance feminist theology over the last thirty years, the iconographic Hillary must win!!............ even if those voting hold little affection if any for her real self-- Chinks, though, have begun to appear in her political armor-- Watch her 'evil-men' speech again.....and then again-- Victory, even though more and more improbable, will not, however, assuage her pain nor vindicate her means-- She is not the beginning but the culmination of the feminist era--

Re-doubling efforts after forgetting the aim is common to all fanatics which is one reason the 1984 ad resonated so Hillary, ......as it would have Bush-- The insider tales of ruthless shakedowns along the fundraising, phony photo-op-ing thirty-year climb are legion-- Masters of the 24-hour commitment, in this they are far from being alone, nor are they the first, but they are certainly among the best even if bragging rights are off limits-- Ambitious above all else, Theodore Dreiser could have penned her final act--

NEW WORLD ORDER: ALMOST, SORT OF

2007-03-16T00:08:00.000-07:00

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi kowtowed to Israeli wishes and stripped any attempt to limit George Bush's authority to bomb Iran from a major military spending bill-- Bugling her retreat as if it would enhance bungling demie efforts to confront the administration on Iraq-- Fundraising demie presidential candidates feted recently by Aipac on special visits signaled to the whole party that they were going to hitch their political star to the Israeli ship and ride it right down to the bottom if necessary-- If the Israelis want Iran carpet bombed, so be it went the groveling!!-- There would be no challenges to the obviously failing orthodox in America's Foreign Policy even if utter and acute disaster be the outcome of the US' unholy alliance with this middle eastern pariah-- House demies buckled to the Aipac pressure and this bitter glaring failure will mark their souls--

What are we up to now, about 17 attempts for non-binding resolution opposing a Surge that actually began weeks ago-- If the tragedy in Iraq, millions of ordinary people thrust into an hellacious refugee nightmare consequential to the US invasion, were it not so sorrowful, the Abbot and Costello demie circus now passing itself off as a political party would be laughingly hysterical-- This feeble ineffectuality is not being lost on the American people-- In the coffee shops across the country an atmosphere of anxiety deepens denial's contagion-- Americans see the proliferation of prosthetic devices coming home to roost right there on main street-- Americans see that the Government can't take care of its own wounded soldiers and that resonates disgust everywhere-- Americans see the signs of foreclosures widely peppering their neighborhoods up and down both coasts and spreading tentacles into the Midwest and the South-- Americans see the government's engineers admittedly and knowingly sending defective pumps to aid New Orleans in shoring up endangered levees-- Americans see the value of the dollar diminishing rapidly with each new tank of gas-- Triumph is not the order of the day--

And triumph today the demies once again....... did not-- Repo leader McConnell once again bested the hapless Harry Reed-- Repetition of failure ala Bush/Cheney......is there something in water in DC??-- The continuing saga of non-binding non resolute charades is the broken record on the eternal turntable of denial-- Iraq is beyond their control and Iran is off limits now as an issue with the veto threat of Bush and the campaign financial threat of AIPAC hanging over the demies like the proverbial sword of Damocles-- This leaves the frustrated demies rather threadbare on issues worthy of pursuit-- Oh now it appears they have a new word.........not resolution but resignation......not their own, but someone else's, anybody's-- Not just resignation but the call for resignation and the political possibilities the amplification of such call might engender in terms of sympathy-- Hey, even Harry gets it!!!--

Now the Hillary Clinton front page plan for Iraq in today's magisterial New York Times offered a couple of interesting quotes detailing why exhausted, overstretched American Troops would be staying in Iraq even after she ends the war-- Currently, that Iraq is fait accompli a failing state appears not to have gained any traction in her middle eastern paradigm-- If parts of Iraq turn into a failed state "that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and AlQaeda," she says, oblivious to the simple fact that Al Qaeda is not in Iraq because Iraq is failing but because American Troops are there and as for the insurgents, there weren't any....... before Shock and Awe showed up--

Now to the heart of the matter of why she would keep the troops there--" It is right in the heart of the oil region," she said, "It is directly in opposition to our interests, to the interests of regimes, to Israel's interests." Oil and Israel, there it is!!-- That Hillary is and has been a lapdog for Israeli interests is inarguable, and certainly there is no reason to dispute the obvious that oil is unquestionably of vital interest to the US-- So much so that in the aftermath of Shock and Awe that outside of the airport, the oil ministry held the singular honor of being the only building defended by US arms-- During Israel's insane aerial war against Lebanon last summer Hillary claimed the soldier sons of Israel are all sons of America now-- Israeli and American interests are now synonomous in Hillary's mind..... a position identical to George Bush-- Such an overt alliance forfeits the ability to act as an honest broker for peace and stability in the region--

Hillary wants the troops out of the urban warfare but indeed not out of Iraq yet here the viceroy hedges a bit, “But what we can do (italics mine) is to almost take a line sort of north of — between Baghdad and Kirkuk, and basically put our troops into that region,"-- Almost???......... Sort of????-- Is this not just a little on the side of half-baked??-- Up near Kirkuk is where the Kurds live-- They call it Kurdistan even when no one else does and they have been rather quiet during the largely Sunni insurgency against American troops-- They quickly cleansed their territory of non-desirables while the US pulled down Saddam's statue in front of 300 Baghdad bystanders-- Now they wait for the inevitable challenge to their proclaimed autonomy--

In this northern region there are large fields of oil to which the Kurds, in payback for Saddam's sins against them, have virtually laid deed claim-- Recently the general tribes of this Kurdistan got wind of some oil bill, stalled, again, in the Iraqi Parliament, that would divest their oil reserves of Kurdish ownership and give its title to foreign oil companies making those Kurdish tribals none too pleased by this upsetting revelation--Now the strategists of real politik would likely wager dollars to dimes the Kurds would contest violently not to mention skillfully and asymmetrically anyone attempting such a hostile takeover-- The main reason, in the first place, the Kurds have been so placid during the mayhem in central Iraq has been their unchallenged claim to this oil-- The map lined borders of the old Iraq are no longer agreed upon by all parties but Hillary's new line would send exhausted American young men and women into this waiting cauldron still within reach of Al Qaeda-- almost............ sort of!!!

As to the ongoing sectarian slaughter Hillary would delegate Americans to bystander status while the Sunni and the Shia continue to hammer and tong each other in the arts of murder-- “That may be inevitable,” she said. “And it certainly may be (if it may be, it cannot certainly be...mine) the only way to concentrate the attention of the parties.” American neglect of the situation, turning a blind eye to continuing sectarian cleansing has been boots on the ground fact for years, would somehow, at least in Hillary's mind, induce the Shia and Sunni warring zealots' obedience to the US??-- The Iraqi Security Forces are the most prolific death squads and ordinary Iraqis have given testament to this for years to anybody willing to listen-- Hillary may be leading in the demie primary polls but she still trails the real time events in Iraq-- Does this presidential contender believe the attention of these warring sects is lacking concentration-- Religious blood feuds for the unitiated have a way of excelling their focal points-- Wake Up, Mrs. Clinton!!!

They are just not listening to George, Hillary or the ineptitude of the demies-- And therein lies the frustration of the US and its unrecognized hubris-- People that should have kowtowed haven't-- While Hillary is lost in her potential power and messianic fantasia, "So it will be up to me to try to figure out how to protect those national security interests", Poor George put his..... hubris, that is, not national security interests,..... unwittingly on display across Latin America this week--Only the complicit media could spin positive this embarrassing sojourn not only through unquantifiably large anti-Washington DC protests but into an almost.....well, sort of,..... venture into irrelevancy as the newly elected rightist President of Mexico Senor Calderon felt compelled to mention the Lame Duck status of Mister Bush for all the world to hear and then compounded Bush's political weakness by pointedly refusing to jump on some faux bandwagon(coalition-of-the-mythic-willing) Bush trotted out to gain vague support against the rapid ascendance of the left throughout Latin America-- Talk about your Daddy's New World Order!!!!--Living on borrowed time and money, this American president has ......no!! ..........Foreign Policy-- ...........................Good Day!!!--

THE SURGE: MORTGAGE DEFAULT

2007-03-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

Who is going to buy the houses being vacated by current record breaking rates of foreclosure??-- A blizzard of headlines delineating the rising crisis in the sub-prime mortgage market cast a wide net of massive anxiety across the media-sphere's morning editions and the weekend editions as well-- Waking up to the distinct if not tangible possibility of major cataclysm not only in the sub-prime arena but the larger economy as well is not a pleasant prospect but the smell of acute fear emanating from mainstream investors, lenders and ubiquitous Wall Street Bankers and Housing Market insiders in the form of hedged/camouflaged optimism spells unmistakable trouble-- Tuesday's Dow dropped nearly 250 points-- The reason given....sub-prime default --

What will a rising tide of default-- a surge, if you will-- do to all boats??-- Sorry, mocking the canard of a shallow and pandering cliche overused by toadying economic and financial pundits everywhere to defend the moral vagaries of reckless greed is probably cold comfort for those forced to watch their dreams run aground-- Entire neighborhoods in some regions are caving in to foreclosure-- The Mortgage Bankers Association sound more alarms when delinquency rate in the top prime-loan category reached its highest level in four years running at a clip of 2.5% for payments at least 30 days late-- Gasoline, technically not categorized as a flammable but rather as an explosive, suddenly priced at $3/gal adds fuel(pun intended) to the downward spiral--Retail sales in February barely climbed off the schneid to rise1/10th of a percent with sales of gasoline and autos included-- Even with volatile oil prices tumbling back into the $58/barrel region gasoline prices continue their upward surge--Whose monthly commuting expenses just dropped low enough to consider buying a new shirt much less a new housing upgrade??--

Once so cavalierly unnecessary in the irrational exuberance of alternative/experimental sub-prime loans and their relative ilk the virtues of which were once extolled by none other than Mr. Greenspan from his astute table at the helm of the Federal Reserve, income verification like closing the barn after the horse turns up missing, is now suddenly in spellbinding vogue-- If the sub-prime homeowner defaults he cannot get another loan-- not even if he claims monthly income of fifteen grand from his job as a parking valet-- to buy a second tier home-- Nooses as well as belts are tightening across the board -- Goldman Sachs the worlds largest mortgage securities firm by market value lost stock value Tuesday even after reporting 34% uptick in profits

Bubble speculators who profited quite handsomely during the housing price escalation-- surge if you will-- dump thousands of deposits as well as the multiple luxury houses they intended to purchase onto a market already leadening under the weight of rampant foreclosure -- The inventory of available houses has been defined as having a half-life of anywhere from 6 to 9 months-- Sub-primers cannot qualify for new purchase thereby preventing the second tier house-owner from selling his house in order to buy an available upgrade which then deprives a third tier house-owner of a buyer that would allow him to upgrade and so on up the food chain-- This is not a sellers' market, neither is it a buyers' market --A rising tide of default can indeed lift all boats into the shallows of despair-- It could easily become a squatters' market-- The potential economic impact (The market for mortgage backed securities is larger than the US Bond market) of this unraveling is as absolutely dramatic as the surprising shock accorded observers overwhelmed by the apparent speed of it--

How to instantaneously re-flate falling prices in time for Spring home sale season baffles with false hope even the best of all the major players-- Warnings unheeded for too long reap the proverbial feast of consequences-- Downgraded mortgage securities could lead a stampede for the exits on Wall Street while failure to downgrade deserving mortgages opens the possibilities of fraud-- Disintegration, it hardly needs to be mentioned, always occurs when integrity is loosed of its moorings-- In between damned if you do and damned if you don't; and in between a rock and a hard place is a fleeting moment of paralytic splendor and mental peace-- a stop-frame that cannot last-- Decisions will have to be made despite their difficulty-- Faking it is not an option-- Miraculous intercession will not avail itself--As D.R. Horton CEO Don Tomnitz bluntly stated to a Citigroup conference eager to hear his assessment of the luxury home business, “2007 is going to suck.”

Still IED's from angry home owners foreclosed upon have yet to surge in San Diego-- It could easily be worse-- It could be Iraq, but before that....The Dollar............

NO BALLS; TWO STRIKES: FALL GUYS

2007-03-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

The frank admission that The FBI broke the law by violating the Patriot Act brought damage control flacks out of their slumber-- Outrage?-- Who really cares???-- Lawbreaker in Chief has made it more than habit to sign new legislation into law only to absolve himself from the jurisdiction of those laws while the outraged and aghast demie lawmakers mutter impotently-- Mister Bush had the feigned audacity to pledge swift action to clean up the new mess at the beleaguered agency insistently giving a vote of confidence to Hooverian Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Alberto Butch Gonzales who promised the mistake makers a tolerance free zone and "ordered the FBI and the department to restore accountability."--To whom????--Duck and Cover!!!!-- Obviously that means more US Attorneys will be summarily fired as well as a few more wounded Platoon Sergeants over at Walter Reed-- The echoes of this Saturday Morning Massacre muster little but spin in DC but reverberate through the pre-revolutionary political climate beginning to stir in the heartland--

Here comes demie Harry Bulldog Reid stepping back into the batter's box with a count of 'no balls! and two strikes' and the bases empty-- He whispers at the umpire, "It's about time someone in the Bush Administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics," but when the Umpire inquires of Reed his vote on the war Harry requests another time-out pleading for a lighter bat-- As if the dual US/Israeli citizen Scooter Boy Libby's recent conviction on perjury and obstruction of justice charges somehow exonerates the votes of those demies in the War Party-- The Umpire suggests the resin bag or some pine tar might help him get a grip--

Prosecutor Fitzgerald's reticence to indict either Big Boy Darth Cheney or little boy George Decider is an explicit challenge to the US Congress to perform its responsibilities, something not even within earshot of nor amenable to either party-- The courageous Fitzgerald stepped up long ago allowing both Bush and Cheney to go oathless, testifying without the legal burden of raising their right hand and swearing on the Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but...... Obviously, the President needed a coach's help that day but NOW Reed can't find the resin bag and the big lumber intimidates him into further delay while culprit Rove, having mysteriously bulked-up in the off-season, it seems, and having miraculously escaped an earlier indictment for his role in the Plame Affair now attempts to regain his once formidable grip in the White House-- It is quite likely the truth about the Plame Affair will never come to light but at least we know where the demies' pine-tar is hidden--

All of which, of course, begs the question as to why a reported (Jason Leopold truthout.org) sealed indictment never made it all the way to Rove's office and why Scooter Boy complained to his Overlord that Rove's smear-men were trying to set him, Libby, up, to make him take the fall, a complaint that triggered The Prez quote later lined-through in Cheney's evidentiary notes-- Rove himself garnered at least some aspect of grace from Fitzgerald who allowed Rove a self-initiated second and third attempt at testifying before the grand jury within the same time frame as the mysterious disappearance of the reported sealed-indictment-- No wonder the Vice-president explodes so vehemently and so frustratedly at the press of late-- Iraq and his once impassioned drive toward world triumph is coming apart and from his bunker of denial he now witnesses his Boy Friday Scooter cornered by fate into taking the fall for Mr Cheney, himself, and Mr Bush and Mr Rove and the ragged remnants of moral clarity-- Obviously, an indictment of Rove, whom Bush has trouble functioning without, would have brought the entire White House down, further aggravating the undoing of Shock and Awe as well as markets and alliances across the full face of the globe--

Cheer up, Scooter!!!-- Your Waterloo occurred inside the mahogany foxholes of marbled air-conditioned DC and not in the blinding dust and searing heat of an Iraq gone rabid-- A shrieking mayhem your lies enabled, facilitated and promoted where so far 3500 American men and women in life's prime have already taken their ultimate fall-- More tens of thousands of servicemen and service women wounded in this hideous nightmare, many of whom maimed for life are shuffled into and out of derelict Hospital facilities plagued with cockroach infestations and free roaming vermin--Certainly actions on your part succeeded in silencing and marginalizing patriotic opponents whose valiant integrity challenged the fraudulent intel of your Project for A New American Century which centered on violent upheaval in the Middle East-- Those actions deserve to be pondered and reflected upon from your room (it can't be referred to as a cell) located inside the dormitory not a cell-block) of your Federal Prison should your conviction and sentencing be carried out before the speculative Pardon allows your escape-- Look on the bright side-- You can practice your backhand on the Michael Milken Memorial tennis courts or play backgammon over a mint-julep with Duke Cunningham and Black Jack Abramoff-- We are supposed to pity you????

HONOR: WALTER REED???

2007-03-07T12:47:00.000-08:00

So the United States Army is now scrambling to clean up Walter Reed Hospital and hide the blemish to its marred honor-- Bush is angry, so too is Gates and the entire US Congress professes momentary political outrage but it all seems to stem more from the besmirched public relations aspect of the sordid mess than the acute moral and mission failure of this wrenching ....... and tenured!!........disorder--

Make no mistake, this medical miscarriage belongs to both the White House and the US Congress-- The entire Government reeks of ignoble dereliction-- The decay of this institution(The Hospital) and its downward spiral into decrepitude happened on everybody's watch-- The majority of demies voted in favor of this Iraq War travesty now playing out at the once hallowed Army Hospital in shadows proximate Capital Hill and the White House-- Not once have the demies okay-ed Bush's huge requests for more war dough with specific prerequisites to pump up medical benefits for the wounded and the maimed-- Why???-- Too busy fundraising??-- Ubiquitous photo-op hopping politicians visiting the hospital to attend to 'the wounded', thereby buffing their bona fides and polishing campaign images, came and went for years without so much as a whimper of protest about the cock-roach infestations or the vermin running roughshod in the urine scented halls--

Tales of sordid conditions at the nation's Veteran Hospitals have circulated for an agony of years as benefits to the Hospitals and the Veterans themselves have been continuously scissored with nary any effective protest-- Money($2mil) was appropriated and set aside for a fictional victory parade should some miraculous intercession alter the course of the faltering war while veteran benefits, victim to fecund ingratitude, lost their political loyalty and urgency-- The magisterial New York Times who once fawningly lionized the gallant and gleaming Def Sec Rumsfeld at his deadly lectern now venomously excoriates him and a wider shade of blameworthy de-functionaries-- Excepting, of course, their own complicity in cheerleading the run-up to this mega-failed war and the Times ignores the fact that its own intrepid reporters and stalwart editors failed to ferret out the shameful multi-year run of the Walter Reed story and other beggared veteran hospitals on their own-- The Times also gives a pass to the pathetic ineptitude of the MIA-demies sidelined by paralytic fear, minority status and their unwillingness to endure the taunts of Bully Rove-- Rove's accusations that the demies didn't support the troops sent shudders and tremors through demie aspirations for re-election and cowed them into........well,..... not speaking up in favor of the volunteer troops-- Extremely few if any of the anti-Iraq War demies made this an issue in their campaigns-- The information was open-source and available--

The mere fact of volunteering for the most dangerous thankless job there is, for some disreputably insensitive reason, severs them from the benefits and concern accorded regular American citizens by both congressional stipulation and cultural ethos-- Nearly nobody went to bat for these young men and women from the inception of this hideously stupid and criminally naive attempt to........ 'rule the world'-- Ordered into battle under-armored, under-manned, under-missioned and under-trained for the tasks they inherited after the occupation cost Rumsfeld and his neocon architects some political status in the media but our volunteer soldiers bore the brunt of the real carnage and continue to do so-- For the most part, the only people in the corner of these kids has been the larger non-commissioned military family of those who have gone before and their immediate families whom the media treats for the most part as invisible non-entities from some vagabond culture not suburban-rooted enough to be real Americans--

The flag draped caskets of their voluntary sacrifices met with the abject disdain of media censorship on their return homeward--The television media caved in completely to the DoD Rumsfeld request/order not to televise returning coffins--The American volunteer soldiers wasted on the battlefront were never honored by the nightly news-- Many courageous and gutsy reporters volunteered for the most dangerous of front line duty and some met the ultimate fate but their deaths received meritorious obituaries across the full gamut of mediasphere-- Those wounded or maimed did not get shuffled out to Building 18 in mold riddled squalor--

No wonder Neocon youth made a pointed effort NOT to put any of their skin in this game, 'The most decisive Ideological Struggle of Our Century'-- The greatest Conflict in the History of Civilization, the grandiose canard of Neocon hubris, merited little if any real patriotism from the privileged sector in our society-- Yeah sure, they might have pricked themselves on occasion sticking the flag pins into their lapels-- Not exactly the terrain on which purple hearts multiply but it is highly doubtful they received their tetanus shots at Walter Reed-- The US Government failed to live up to its promises in reconstructing Iraq and now its failure to live up to its promises made to the all-volunteer Army reverberates across the political spectrum-- As usual everyone is looking for someone else to blame-- A day late and a three dollar bill shy, are the indulgent congressional investigations looking for real solutions or just more limelight???--

ACCIDENTAL VICTORY?

2007-02-28T14:04:00.000-08:00

Strange week on the current affairs block-- Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Malicki who has publicly stated he is never allowed to move his own troops around Baghdad or even set up a checkpoint without first securing American permission, initiated invitations to all the major players in the middle east to join him at an early March round-table where the United States will come face to face with Iran and Syria and guess what....talk to each other-- Reconciliation???-- Too much to hope for given the extent of this incendiary conflagration???-- How deeply the toxicity of sectarian hatred has progressed???__ How many independent groups including intelligence agencies from outside countries are involved and the ease with which their unique agendas can derail even well-intentioned efforts??-- France agreed to attend but their I-told-you-so presence alone might be enough to scuttle the wounded pride of US options-- Bottom line, though....it's only the last place left to start--

Change of heart??-- Suddenly weak in the knees??-- The Decider in a grand stand-down??-- After failure upon failure upon setback upon setback in Iraq as well as Afghanistan did the improbable North Korean deal soften up the administration??-- His Feb. 15 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, the neocon think tank which supplied his rationale for initial Shock and Awe all the way up to the Surge which is more a reinforcement rather than a Surge in the classical sense, indicates that much of this failure has failed to penetrate his particular ideological paradigm-- At any rate, did what seems like an accidental/unintentional victory (or kow-tow?)by the diplomatic corps on the Korean Front and the ensuing praise it engendered world wide convince Bush to attempt another new way forward from the losing end of Iraq??--

A win is a win is a....... but meaningful tide-turning victories have been so few and far between during his Iraq war tenure--Having Malicki back-door the invitations is obviously designed to make it appear that the administration is only another interested party and not the desperado politico groveling for any way out of a disintegrating violent morass of his own making but the whole world knows better-- Bush doesn't really need to save face to ameliorate the world anyway-- What he needs is a Nixonian canard like Peace with Honor which allows the visage in his own mirror to appear less judgementally threatening to George himself-- He's the man he has to live with but that's really neither here nor there in the fluidity of this week's cascading events--

Interesting allegation last week that refuses to go away and hide, claims Karl Rove in receipt of an offer four years ago from Iran proffering to negotiate the whole nine yards... Nuclear options, Israel Palestinian peace ramifications, Hezbollah, Hamas and the compromises open to their government which the short sighted administration immediately dismissed out of hand in what.....a fear their hegemonic dreams might yield to some kind of contamination-- Sec State Condi Rice recently disavowed ever having seen the document ( but didn't disavow ever hearing about it)-- Such unnecessary dissembling which she shows no reticence in practicing with aplomb-- Iran as well as Syria have offered to start talks for years and the State Department, The DoD, The NSA, and the White House are all well aware of it--

Redundant reports all week concerning the inadequate training supplied our troops as they prepare to execute the Surge in another rush, the deterioration of our National Guard , and Joint Chief of Staff Peter Pace's unflinching public statements concerning the degraded condition of our overstretched under-manned under-armored troops in Iraq and the spent capacity to react to other trouble-spots around the globe should the need arise-- Apparently two full Army combat brigades were ordered to skip premier training for the shake and bake variety and just when the repo-men seemed to have turned the corner on portraying the lemming demies as a sniveling mealy-mouth crew who wouldn't support the troops out comes another scathing report illuminating the callous squalid treatment of wounded soldiers....our wounded soldiers... at the cockroach vermin-infested Walter Reed Hospital-- One top general has been axed while the Secretary of the Army tendered his demanded resignation-- Would that the mainstream media gets wind of the sordid treatment our volunteer soldiers receive from the careering Military (In)Justice System--

A disturbing question comes to the fore-- Are we needlessly sending thousands of ill-trained troops into the shrieking insurgent buzz saw while our diplomats cop to a surrender/cease fire/ withdrawal agreement in order to spin a canard that we were not defeated????-- Our Surge brought the enemy to the table and negotitiated a surrender on their part????-- Olmert attempted to similarly spin the Israeli debacle in Lebanon in such light last summer but was clearly and publicly rebuked by his own troops and their officers-- Dozens of Israeli reserve troops ill-trained and poorly fed were sacrificed on the final weekend even with the cease fire agreement already secured and in the pipeline-- Let us not even mention the material decimation including a relatively high number of tanks and personnel carriers or the damage to IDF's once vaunted reputation--

In Iraq General Petraeus reaped disconcerting news from his core team of PhD lauded insurgency specialists (serious academic achievers with critically impressive ground combat experience)-- Gen Petraeus' team reported after a country-wide survey of intel-gathering first-hand that the US lacks the troop count to credibly fight the insurgency-- British troops are cutting out in southern Iraq leaving massive potential for more violence in their wake-- Blair's Royal Empire has tasted its fill while less self-enamored Denmark opts to follow suit-- The coalition under-weighted as it once was appears now to be in full-fledged dis-repair before the real battle for Baghdad even begins --

Britain's troops are not going home to victory parades and Blair affirmed publicly his opposition to a Bush attack or, for that matter, anybody else's attack on Iran--No more monkey to the US organ-grinder, Blair's piecemeal troop pull-out is a vote of no-confidence and diminishes overall strength as it thins defenses in the simmering Shiite territory of oil-rich southern Iraq-- A chink in this armor strains relative insecurity everywhere else leading Petraeus himself to warn of a surge in American casualties in the months ahead-- Destination Walter Reed is not confidence-inspiring, to say the least, and in Petraeus own words, 'The stakes couldn't be higher.'--

Petraeus cannot stop the suicide martyrs, the car bombs or the roadside IED's anymore than Malicki can and his PhD crew warns of problematic morale issues emanating from the Green Zone-- There are less than a few remaining who believe in the efficacy of miracles-- Without ruling out a potential Vietnam-type endgame collapse in the not too distant future, perhaps in the not too distant present, the knell of each new car bomb punctuates the gloom with augury-- Perhaps the hapless Malicki's overture for talks signals DC's grim realization that imminent strategic defeat might be rearing its ugly head..........a leadening depressive possibility--

Referencing once again Seymour Hersh's The Redirection because it brings to light Bush's ace up the sleeve if the talks fail, or in a perverse and irrationally maddening light if they look like they might succeed-- Having asked the Pentagon for a battle plan to attack Iran with a massive aerial bombardment that could be ordered into execution within 24 hours, the word from Hersh's highly placed sources is the Pentagon has complied-- Not Gates, not Pace, not Blair, not Chalabi, not Daddy Baker, not Greenspan, not Woodward, not Giuliani, not Pelosi, not Reed, not Hagel, not Obama, not McCain, not Sheehan, not Cronkite, not Rodham, not McConnell, not Lott, and probably not even Rove at this juncture can stop it-- The Decider still holds trump unless........

THE PUTZ

2007-02-26T18:44:00.001-08:00

"Iraq is going to be there — it's just a question of when we get back to it," said Harry 'The Putz' Reed the incapacitated demie leader backing down once more in a shrivelling show of abject disarray-- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined the retreat levelling Jack Murtha's plan at the knees-- Serious divisions inside the party have crippled whatever momentum last fall's elections had bestowed upon these demies-- Now they opt to cut and run from the American people whose flagging confidence in the ability of their government to act in their best interests increasingly demoralizes their natural optimism-- There will be no action to limit or repeal the Iraq war authorization or narrow the mission in Iraq-- The mission itself is now beyond Iraq and out of control, completely out of bounds, off the books and being run by rogue elements and private dual citizenry with whom the demies are too shy to tangle--

Indeed, reading Seymour Hersh's article "The Redirection" depicts a middle east in such pandemic corruption and complex rogue political intrigue involving such disparate energies as funding jihadist islamic Al Quaeda operatives with black money to oppose Hezbollah in Lebanon unbeknowst to the US Congress-- Correct, according to Hersh, the US via Saudi Royalty paying blood money to 9/11's Al Quaeda brotherhood to fight Hezbollah in Lebanon-- Or try this, Hezbolla's leader Nazrallah claiming in a personal interview with Hersh that Bush's real plan is a tri-partite divided state in Iraq and civil war followed by partite state in Lebanon-- The new Axis of Evil hideously playing with the desperate fires of doom.....The Bush Neocons, The Israeli Zionists and the Royal Saudi family -- The demies sadly evince no competence remotely capable of comprehending the internecine historical compulsion into which Bush and the Neocons have unwittingly coerced the American people and their government-- Aipac is working overtime behind the scenes in the once 'hallowed' halls of Congress-- Bush himself embodies pandemic confusion opting for darts launched at ever receding buzzwords--

Saudi Arabia pointed out to Bush and his war cabinet somewhere along the strange and twisted way this colossal mis-adventure unfolded that 90% of all Muslims worldwide are Sunni implying that our efforts in Iraq had aroused the enmity of Sunnis everywhere including their Kingdom-- An arousal of popular anger at such a level may be difficult to control to say the least and there's the lucrative importance of the oil business that might merit some of that more serious anger should the infidel bully in what's left of Iraq cross the wrong Rubicon-- Remember in the run-up to the war a week before D-day Bush inquired of his war cabinet what the difference was between the Shia and the Sunni-- The enemy as an afterthought, a clear admission he couldn't quite conceive into what kind of danger he was ordering America and her soldiers to march--

Not quite suddenly but so it might have seemed, the Bushies, having gambled and lost on transforming moderate shiite suits in Iraq into insurgency world-beaters, and running on empty to avoid the ignominious defeat described as imminent by the Daddy Baker group and all but assented to in acclamation by the world's scholarly foreign affairs punditry, underwent an epiphany of sorts and accepted the Sunni lifeline(replete with affiliations to the Muslim Brotherhood and the dreaded Salafis) that Saudi Prince Bandar offered in nebulous consort with Israel-- Choosing Victory, the idea which led to or at a minimum supported the Surge phenomenon, didn't have as its priority mission the decimation of the feeble self-imploding demies or their illusionary victory at last year's polls, but, point blank, did require the United States Forces to switch to the Sunni side of the mayhem adorned equation.....the sunny 90% side-- Not so cavalier a choice, mind you, considering that same Sunni side was and is still responsible for more than 90% of all American soldier casualties in Iraq-- This is a major defection impossible to understate but probably not the first time a major world leader of Decider status has taken his Navy and his Air Force and gone over to the other side-- Few Americans have any idea it has happened-- Probably even fewer in Congress-- Oh what tangled desperate webs we weave...

The Rubicon Bush now waits to cross is a full-scale aerial bombardment of Iran-- His Israeli and now Saudi handlers have convinced him that Iran is the new Dragon definitely in big urgent bold-faced need of slaying-- Iran's roughly half a million man standing army dwarfs the Saudi 75,000 and now that Iraq's army was virtually decimated by oblivion's Rumsfeld and his lackey Bremer, one can understand threadbare Saudi security hanging its bleep out in the breeze-- Hersh writes that the Saudis want Iran attacked but not by the US-- The duplicitous, or is it 'realist', Saudis want Israel to do the dirty deed because if the US does it the entire region will blame the Saudi Royals whereas if Israel wipes Iran off the face of earth the corrupt and degenerate Saudis can blame the degenerate and corrupt Zionists-- So if the vaunted Israeli Air Force wipes Ahmadinejad and his Shiite Mullahs off the proverbial map "vanishing from the pages of time" and if the Mahdi Army of Shia upstart Moqtada al-Sadr is 'taken out' by the Surge and the now US allied Sunnis capture Iranian oil fields and those in Iraq all financed by the Saudi oil revenue ....Voila!! .... Victory!! .... The New Middle East!!!.......Bush equals Churchill and the 3500 American Soldiers didn't die for nought-- Baby, you can drive my car, into the infinitude of cheap oil-- Such is fantasy............

Where Russian interests and where Chinese interests configure in all this should be a worrisome anti-dote but Reason is currently not coin-of-the-realm in this imbroglio-- Now that Bush has allied with the Sunni insurgency what happens if the alliance isn't returned??-- What if the insurgency decides to overthrow the unpopular Royalty and exile them to ill-repute in Las Vegas???-- And amidst all the questions surrounding this craven change of strategery, where do the hapless demies fit-- They are not even in the game-- They don't know what's going on-- They don't want to know-- Aipac is dealing their cards and doesn't want them to know-- All they've got left is Willy Loman's shoeshine and a smile--They may as well be watching American Idol-- They may very well be--- Hell's bells, ...........they may even apply to audition--

BLOOD IN THE WATER

2007-02-22T11:48:00.000-08:00

Sectarian warfare in Iraq continues unabated .....pandemic car bombs, obliterated marketplaces, a series of shot down choppers and the paralytic Iraqi government shut down by a bizarre rape case the US command will now bafflingly investigate-- On the home front the pecking order of demi presidential candidates is becoming a scene of internecine verbal sniping bare tooth and talons-- The hissing Red Queen of the former co-presidency is losing her head rather frequently these days now angered and chagrined as Obama bin surreptitiously slipped into Hollywood pilfering campaign cash from her former mogul-donors.... major player in the past not at all reticent in his critique of her notorious consuming ambition, cavalier untruthfulness and the ruthlessly stale and boring team surrounding her-- The very kind of invective the gossipy media loves elevating to a feastly frenzy at the expense of real issue coverage--

With this self defeating narcissism and self-absorbed candidate myopia engulfing the frenetic blathersphere few of The Worst Generation's ill-esteemed leaders have the wherewithal to confront the savage dismemberment occurring up and down the food chain in the swiftly debilitating housing market-- Sub-prime lenders issued risky loans to broad schools of economic minnows some of whom began defaulting the day the first monthly payment arrived due--NovaStar Financial, one such company confessed to a surprise loss of $14.4 million for the final quarter of '06 and stood slackjawed as their stock price plunged almost 43 percent capping off the optimism by warning investors not to expect a dividend payout for at least a quadrennium-- Deadends can be reached from the middle of the road but No politician wants to do a photo-op here!!!--

Knowing that many subprime lenders were not mandated by the tougher regulations covering commercial banks doesn't make the gloomy statistics of rampant default and upwardly spiking foreclosure rates any less appalling-- Significantly serious warnings about the precarious nature of the sub-prime market have dappled the Internet for months and have met with little or no change in the behavior of those throwing their excess liquidity at the dartboards of excessive risk-- Tribal hallucination???-- Does a rising tide lift all boats if the tide becomes tsunami by default??--

As housing prices spiral downward those still solvent enough to make their next payment were slapped in the face today as oil prices barreled through the technical support ceiling of $62/barrel due to, on one front, fears that George Bush's only hope of a rosy glow to the outcome of the US invasion of Iraq is radical bombardment of Iran who ratcheted up the tension by refusing to back down on their nuclear programs-- World Politics for $500, please, Alex-- The answer is...the only country in the world possessing nuclear weapons to ever be militarily invaded--..........The question is 'Who is Nobody?.....Correct, proceed!-- Thanks, Alex-- With this kind of guarantee, Israeli paranoia aside, who wouldn't pursue Nuclear???-- Saudi Arabia???? Egypt???? Louisiana????

Ominous rumors out of the Royal Saudi Kingdom indicate oil shortages are imminent for a bevy of reasons with industry gloomslayers mining every innuendo for its silver lining to fend off mounting evidence of trouble's unquenchable drumbeat-- Some oil experts not on per diem to Aramco's Kingdom believe Saudi oil reserves incapable of increased production-- Saudi oil production is apparently down neighborhood of a million barrels a day from about 9.5 million barrels a day in 2005. and the quality of the production has deteriorated-- Saudi cutbacks began when oil prices were relatively high and their drilling efforts described as frantic and frenzied-- The Kingdom has publicly admitted its underground interest in nuclear capability-- Oil revenues have kept the simmering Wahhabi dissent kingdom-wide to a minimum but once that hush money diminishes far enough in value..... look out!!!--

Couple this with considerable depletion at Mexico's Cantarell field (production down 14% in '06 a larger downdraft than '05) and troublesome guerrilla activity in Nigeria(20% of production halted) and the ongoing periodical interruptions of Russian gas and oil destined for Euroville and the nationalization of Hugo Chavez' ego along with Venezuela's oil resources, it becomes quite easy to see how middle income home buyers in the US now fret and despair about the availability and the cost of oil to heat the now excessive square footage of their castles and the rising cost of gasoline to fuel their excessive suburban commutes to and fro' all the while staying one step ahead of default and foreclosure themselves-- Economic despair permeates wide swathes of our country and it never makes the evening news-- The government's numbers are not telling or facing the truth--

US production glitches and refining infrastructure breakdowns and fires have leveled several hits against US supplies that survived extreme cold weather in the mid-west and the northeast-- Many Peak Oil experts have warned for years of Saudi oil fields reaching decline but not with enough credibility apparently to warrant any action from the ongoing congressional stupor much less common sense type life-style changes of the voluntary kind from the degrading middle class-- Flimsy promotional canards about ethanol solutions by an American president in search of polling boosts have not only furthered consumerist illusions about singular motorized mobility ad infinitum but also ramped up the price of corn to inflationary levels Fed Chairman Bernanke and his number-fudgers sit in apoplectic fear of ever being forced to mesh the volatile food and energy sectors into their fictional CPI-- Remember, the Feds have a vested interest in denying any inflationary pressures ever exist!!!!!--

Corn prices have almost doubled since August as the US, king of the world’s corn growers, lowered its crop estimates following a dry summer--Rumors are swirling in last year's dust another dry one's on the way-- On the Chicago Board of Trade corn for March delivery rose more than 10 cents on the day......... to a 10-year high of $4.26 a bushel-- Stockpile inventories of US corn are at 12 year lows in absolute terms and relative lows at the quarter century milepost-- There doesn't seem any way for beef prices to compete with gasoline prices for the consumers diminishing dollar unless credit card interest rates make their cup of tea-- Raising cattle and finishing them on feed-lot corn coupled with the ever increasing costs of shipping them to and from those lots to market is double jeopardy threatening the entire livestock industry and certainly acting as a drag on the suffering trucking industry-- Corn being a heavy nitrogen feeder has already had its fertilizer input costs skyrocket with the upward ride of oil prices-- The silver lining here might be a decline in American obesity--

The surge for corn profits bodes ill for beer drinkers-- Barley and hops plantings will most likely give way to more corn plantings driving up their prices due to planned shortages thereby driving up the cost of beer-- Vegan tofu aficionados and barbecued soyburger buffs won't dodge the cost increases either as soybean futures contacted $7.81 a bushel on the CBOT, their highest level since July 2004..... up almost 50% since September. CBOT soymeal futures also hit $232 a tonne the highest tally since July 2004 and soybean acreage will also fall this spring as farmers make way for more lucrative corn plantings-- Wheat also kicked up the price charts which is not so troubling for those with wheat allergies but whole wheat toast won't get any cheaper-- Burning topsoil in our internal combustion engines sounds like desperation--Two more commodities jumped big-time as Nickel notched another record high at $40,300 a ton on the London Metal Exchange, before receding later in the day and tin followed suit with its record-breaking run topping out at $13,900 a ton--

The automotive industry collapses in steady freefall shedding tens of thousands of jobs with Chrysler hoping for some Big Brother's help-- The specter of war in Iran following the fiasco in Iraq has unnerved the markets and destabilized the future hopes of America-- Attacks on oil facilities in Iran or Saudi Arabia or Iraq or all three will decimate globalization and usher in a leadening depression-- The great emergency is nearly upon us--

The demi-led US Senators fresh from the second failure to pass a non-binding resolution against the Bush's trojan horse surge into Baghdad have vowed a flurry of relentless "resolution after resolutuion, amendment after amendment...just like in the days of Vietnam"-- So said New York's Senator Schumer-- Right, Schoomer, just like 40 years ago heavy on the nostalgia minus the intestinal fortitude--America's foreign policy lies in tatters-- Our position in the world has hit bottom-- Your team has less of a plan than the Bush team had in Iraq and more and more people are dying as a result while all your self-enamored 'charismatics' grovel and whore for more excessive funding --

While your team ineffectually blusters, the war coming to Iran proceeds apace on your watch right under your noses-- You can't see it and you can't smell it and you can't hear it and you can't run from it and you can't hide from it--Twice irresolutely drubbed on the Senate floor (not counting the minimum wage debacle) tired demie leader Harry Reed sounds the defeatist charge "We're going to move on to other things"-- To what other things, Mr. Reed, irrelevance or retirement?????-- Helluva job, so far, Harry!!--

THE DAY OF REBUKE

2007-02-16T14:18:00.000-08:00

The day of rebuke that failed to happen....AGAIN!!!!-- Another flame-out for the demie-captain Harry 'hardball' Reed-- Senate demies, stymied once more by meanie Karl Rove's repo-men and the ragged retro-remnants of the vast right-wing-conspiracy, had the unmitigated gall to inconvenience their darling and precious presidential candidates dislodging them from the outland hustings of the perennial campaign's money-hustle and requiring their senatorial attendance to vote on a nonbinding dog-and-pony resolution-- Imagine that, asking the mega fundraisers to interrupt their hyperlific media swings and canned photo-ops to actually perform a required political duty...... Imagine that, asking the Obillary Frenzy amidst the campaign whirlwind to take, okay, a non-binding irresolute paper thin stand whose ultimate goal was an embarrassing paper rebuke of George Bush via the ever-sharp marshmallow-taloned floor debate when they knowingly didn't have the votes..... on a holiday weekend no less-- Talk about ratcheting up real pressure on a quaking lame-duck president-- Oh,boy,..... do these demies really mean business??!!!!!

Mark Twain once opined, "When in doubt, tell the truth. There's a lot less to remember." Such luxury so far avails itself somewhat to demie senator Obama who was against the war then and is now still against the war today though how much is open to political speculation but his record still categorically shows no votes for the war although there is one vote wishing to remain camouflaged from the light of day--Remember the Patriot Act???....legislation huge numbers (98 if recalled correctly) of senators assented to many if not a majority admittedly without even reading beforehand-- Smooth sailing though on the war-vote issue for the near term campaign future with one more caveat-- He's still chained to an inept wilting crew of senatorial cowards so incapable of resolute meaningful action as to refrain from even the attempt--The inspirational statesmanship of the moistened finger uplifted into the cyclone the imminent failure in Iraq bears menacingly down upon the said mis-shapen representation the Ship of the American State is now burdened with/by--

The campaign state of the inveterate ambition-driven demie Hillary Clinton continues charting rough waters as long time Democrat party stalwarts and activists repeatedly demand, and rightfully so, of Mrs. Rodham an accounting for her lack of courage in voting to enable Prez Bush's mad-neocon embarkation into the colossally mega-incendiary cauldron in what was formerly referred to as Iraq-- Her recalcitrant refusal to cop to her mistake here is reminiscent of her stumbling truth-challenged defense over her sudden dollar enrichment to the tune of a hundred grand one afternoon playing cattle futures with a bunch of Arkansan good ol'boys when it suddenly came to light-- An obliviously tin-eared defense even her strident femi-nazi supporters felt guiltily obligated to sweep under the rug of once 'right on!' sisterhood-- Parenthetically the same sisterhood from whom, hubcap Bill Clinton's bombing of civilian targets in the Kosovo squabble without United Nation's authorized consent, merited not so much as a protest's peep-- Oh well..........moving on back to the present stop-frame--

So the calculated adoption of the ridiculous canard of standing by her Iraq War vote because little Bush fibbed the intel she was so injudiciously gullible enough to gobble up hook, line and sinker is slowly sinking her credibility litmus card-- If the mendaciously felonious Ahmad Chalabi suckered Cheney and Cheney suckered Bush and Bush suckered Hillary just think what a field day cunning better-practiced masters of the duplicitous arts like say Bibi 'hollywood' Netanyahoo or the Pakistani Impervez Musherriff would have......with New York's 'original' Yankee-fan--

The boopsy demie twins Carvile and Beguila and other dissolute repo-lite regressives of the DLC seem sufficiently concerned about red-faced Hillary's self-inflicted boxed-in dilemma to flood the cancerous weekend media venues with a lack of professional spin feeble-full of obsecrated confetti-- Here it comes to the fore in the form of a lateral shift, if you will, a flip not yet a full flop but borderline obsequious enough to potentially open another battle line on the bona fides front and this one obviously derelict enough to have not been run through a stellar political focus group from either the left coast or the right but here it is anyway: 9/11's rendingly emotional aftermath clouded her normal political acuity, confusing her political antennae-- The families of 9/11 victims forced her do it ( but not before instigators led by a red-ass group of Irish firefighters boo-ed her off stage at a 9/11 memorial rally--.......Oooooops!!)

Trotting out this ludicrous 9/11 bridge to mountingly derisive feedback belies her basic credence-- Denial of her own responsibility for her vote on Iraq once again blaming the evil men in her life of which Geo Bush and (coming soon) Obama bin are merely the latest, and playing the petulant I'm-not-a-flip-flop card in such a rigidly stubborn manner only evokes, minus the legendary bookkeeper spectacles at the deadly lectern of course, the late Rumsfeldian certitude and its unvenerated recalcitrance--

An upright willingness to admit her mistake might for a New York minute cause her to appear a little swishy-washy but to emulate and echo Bush's refusal to own-up becomes a self-inflicted cudgel even minor enemies wield with enraptured glee-- Bush never had a plan to win the war and poor Hillary doesn't really have a plan either (even though she's promising like crazy to end it)-- Obama is asking her to put it on the table-- He wants the American people privy to its existence, not in 2009 but today-- One more assinine term-paper solution to the Iraqi inferno-- Oh, the humanity,......... oh, the infuriation-- But both Obama and Hillary lacking resolute conviction alike on a wide array of issues continue their search for a fresh traction-producing posture that has at a minimum Hillary's Campaign Central unnerved and tinged with a slightly desperate air of panic-- Hemorrhaging this much capital this early does not, long run, augur well.......for her, that is--

After all, Hillary (and Obama Edwards Richardson Dodd Biden Romney McCain Giuliani) it isn't about the posture of the initial mistake, its about how it actually affects America and its people, then and now, and what affects it will have on America's homeland and its place in the world-- Why we are going to have great serious difficulty simply paying for all of this and even more difficulty, if possible, resuscitating our national nerve to face the coming emergency when the spineless leadership refuse to even consider it fodder for debate-- So unaware is the current DC echelon, their flailing clout, this very day, engendered tragic laughter and sarcastic disbelief from real American people......once moderate American people........ and until Hillary or any of these non-binding chicken-spit demie downstarts learn this simple fact, not only are they unfit to lead they manifestly cannot-- They deserve the abject embarrassment of being witness to their own non-resolute Day of Rebuke once again going down in flames --

SPINNING DEFEAT

2007-02-13T10:57:00.000-08:00

"We can afford a strategic defeat in Iraq, and a diplomatic reversal, but what we can't afford is a perception of a military defeat," Former Army intelligence specialist Ralph Peters says, "Given how our security is intertwined with the region, we must at a minimum make it clear that our military has not been defeated." That others in the region have long seen the inefficacy of applied military force in establishing democracy in Iraq as a serious strategic defeat incapable of being divorced from the military tactic or lack thereof employed in service to that strategy, it might only now be news to Mr. Peters-- How do we "make it clear our military has not been defeated"....annihilate the Sadr City slums??-- Emulate the Israeli thrust into southern Lebanon in the final hours of last summer's IDF defeat??-- Striking Iran with aerial bombardment seems more like petulant confirmation of the very defeat, perception cannot afford--Tasked to execute the Bush Neocon strategy of bringing ringing democracy to Iraq and thereby transforming the entire middle east has become impossible to achieve-- Maybe not a classic definition but defeat nonetheless and the whole region trepidatiously knows it--

Worrying about perceptions and appearances of military defeat instead of the actual defeat itself and what can be done to repair the real damage is a vain intellectual expedition to no good but a self-deceptive end-- The military defeat that Mr. Peters feigns acknowledging in no way reflects on troop performance-- They were committed to a situation they were untrained for and to a mission whose goalposts were constantly shifted for political reasons until the mission itself fell to irrelevance in the face of the sectarian war none of our esteemed leaders could ever figure out whose side if any they would join-- The camouflage of denial hides as well the blow our confidence must unavoidably suffer when a factual admission of technological under-performance couples itself to the military setback-- The strategery itself was built on using military coercion once it became clear the Sunni elements of Iraq especially after losing their military livelihoods and self respect were not keen to welcome our troops as the newsreel liberators American war salesmen had trumpeted them to be-- Unfriendly as well as friendly governments, tribal leaders and sectarian allies in the region would not kowtow in abject fear of the unmatched US firepower unleashed in the savage crescendo of Shock and Awe opening this Eternal War and would not cede control to the under-armored, under-equipped and under-manned US troops but would aid and abet the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite militias not to mention oddball psychotics like al-Zarquawi who seemed to appear suddenly and without warning proliferating mayhem everywhere like a violently a contagious fungus--

Every Iraqi with a grievance and there were manymany, legitimate or not, watched the blustery American President on worldwide television from the hubris laden security of the White House incite them and instigate them to vicious action and random murder-- "Well Bring It On!!!!"-- And On they have brought it but not at the tempo our amply skilled troops trained for-- and not on terrain our courageous troops expected and certainly not with any lack of courage and fight the cloistered Neocons once reserved only for those anachronistic Rumsfeldian 'deadenders' who couldn't quite get with the surrender program-- In fact there was never any surrender-- Just a rooster strut down an aircraft carrier in glowing hollywood twilight and a declaration of combat cessation before the war really began--The insurgency metastasized like cancer-- The Sunnis began to fight for their lives-- Without oil profits they are dead-- Why wouldn't they fight ferociously--

Mr. Peters, templates exist from the last half of the last century right up to the present day delineating how weak little insurgent guerrillas may stalemate powerful armies of rich and more techno-advanced states and in some cases expel them from their bases of occupation-- The deadender outcasts of the world know now as before lining up toe-to-toe with world power armies out in the open is a prescription for failure--Sometimes merely staying alive to fight another day acts as a military defeat for the Occupation even if a super knockout blow never arrives as in Afghanistan-- Sometimes the sophisticated media savvy these so-called anti-modern fifth-century fanatics employ inestimably out-performs a vaunted Abrams tank--Cunningly the insurgency frustrates the Occupier because the aggressor has to win quickly as the costs of continuing operations in men and material climb at least somewhat exponentially-- Two billion dollars a week now in Iraq nearly ten billion a month including Afghanistan--Sometimes it is better to bleed the enemy than kill him-- The first maxim of Guerrilla warfare is Never Be In A Hurry--

The aggressor/occupier must knock out the opponent as quickly as possible and in the case of Iraq the inability to arrive at the second stage of occupation where job creation and infrastructure repairs would give the iraqi undecideds an alternative to insurgency can't happen because lack of security won't logistically allow it-- Security crackdowns by foreign doorbusters that inevitably lead to revenge and basic physical hunger drive the decisions of those who climb off the fence starved of neutrality and join the mayhem--The inability to restore pre-war electrical capability alienated the relatively cushy Sunni middle class who awoke the next day to discover their employment in the Iraqi state-run industries had been dissolved-- With friends like Bremer why they would refuse to climb aboard the American Liberation train is inescapably obvious, little if any common sense needs PhD credentials to figure this out--

Not only did the Sunnis lose their jobs and their oil, they lost their government in tainted elections to their historical enemies, the Shiites-- That the Iraqi Shiites might be mutually receptive to help as in arms and money and intel and training from Iranian Shia somehow seemed lost on the Bush warcons-- An obviously de-stabilized Iraq not recently under a pro-Iranian rule but from the purple finger get-go of the elections Bremer and Bush forced on the Sunni and it seems Mr. Bush is only now becoming cognizant of the fact that our invasion and occupation actually elevated Iran into a position of huge regional influence-- Surprisingly now only to those neocons still not fully aroused from the slumber of their truculent illusions but the subsequent politically charged demonization of Amadinejhad only increased the Iranian power and middle eastern resistance to the US-- The best laid plans of mice and men...............

The deterioration of the oil infrastructure and failure to secure the pipelines eliminated a once lucrative source-potential to defray the redoubling cost of the entire mistaken enterprise-- All the while the Def Sec, the State Sec and the White House espoused a ham-fisted recalcitrant denial that an insurgency even existed-- Even amidst charges the Def Sec was excessively micro-managerial this almost paralytic refusal to acknowledge the insurgency enveloped the war cabinet in an air of acute denial from which it couldn't act (Even Mr. Rogers can say 'civil war'--)How can they alter failing tactics if they refuse to see basic problems in realistic light??-- Is this a strategic or a tactical failure??--Does it matter, if those tactically experienced boots on the ground tasked to implement a successful occupation, to "impose our will on Iraq"(Bremer) have to submit to inexperienced supervision from civilian hacks employed only because they correctly answered the "Roe Versus Wade" litmus test??-- How out of touch with reality is this??--The canard that we just didn't use our massive firepower in a brutal enough way or that our rules of engagement hamstrung our soldiers doesn't explain why the Russians with all their brutality and weaponry at their disposal and a willingness to use them freely (with the exception of nukes) have failed to thwart the Chechnyan resistance--

The fact is, Mr Peters, if the world perceives us as weak, it is not mis-perception because we are weak-- Explosive capability isn't the only measure of strength nor in many cases is it the most effective-- The Neocon architects and the Big Money behind their indulgent mahogany think-tanks and sycophantic cheer-leading media and all the professional go-along-to-get-along politicians and their elitist health-insured fund-raising staffs and the double-dipping palm-greasing defense industry moguls and the money grubbing lobbyists sitting this one out sipping wine in some stylish and richly gated community in a suburban enclave somewhere sunny did not see fit to engage any of their offspring in the quintessential Battle of Civilization in the most decisive ideological struggle in our history-- (The one honorable exception to my knowledge is Senator James Webb and I'm sure quite a number of others unbeknownst to me echo the risk of such sacrifice to which I salute)-- But when the only voices raised to protest the ugly treatment our individual soldiers experience at the careering hands of the military court martial system are the young men's families and the vigilant heroic work being done at http://jaghunters.blogspot.com/ something is seriously off-kilter here-- This is more than an affordable "diplomatic reversal".....way more--

Mr. Peters, by any other definition this inability to accept the idea of defeat still denotes weakness-- The urge to 'spin' defeat into something else is not strength in eyes of those you seek to fool-- The facts circulating even now worldwide concerning White House ineptitude coupled with similar readings about the DOD and State Dept. are open source for the world to see-- The current DC echelon (Congress or lack of it, included) can run from those facts but they can't hide-- The world knows we are not economically strong enough to finance this hysterical mis-adventure ourselves--US consumers haven't saved so much as a nickle over the course of the last two years and as a result foreign lenders have gained a much larger measure of influential power over our ability to act independently-- Veterans benefits and Veterans hospitals are being scissored and this isn't a defeat???-- Our culture is too weak, too decadent and too self-absorbed be attentive to world affairs or to fight for itself or its spoils-- While the lower class young men and women bleed out the primes of their lives defending the American exceptionalism and irresponsibility that allows middle and upper class kids to dis-engage from duty and struggle and self-defense through the hideous manufactured alienation of the likes of Ipods, ecstacy and heroin to name only a few-- Who wants to die for an IPOD of American Idol fantasy for Christ's sakes??-- Bread and circus has made us soft, indulgent and abjectly tuned-out if not autistically dis-connected-- Peril impending??...... Defeat???........ Call it.........??....... whatever!!--

PETULANT BENCHMARKS

2007-02-09T21:18:00.000-08:00

Every benchmark achieved so far in Iraq whether it be toppling of Saddam Hussein and his statue and then for all the world to see allowing the new Iraqi Government's hooded henchmen to lynch him or whether it be the impositioning of a hurriedly constructed constitution or the purple-fingered elections adamantly demanded by Bush or the killing of the renegade Al Qaeda be-header al-Zarquawi or the destruction of Falluja or the rescue of Jessica Lynch or whatever other positive note momentarily struck for optimum public relations value, they have all failed to stem the sectarian violence, have failed win the hearts of Iraqis, have failed to secure the country, have failed to stop the increase of attacks against our troops, have failed to return Iraq to pre-war levels of electrical and oil production and have failed to stanch the hemorrhaging moral trust and confidence once accorded the US regionwide and worldwide-- Surging into Baghdad though will somehow achieve the success of repeatedly undefined victory even as it continues to slip through Bush's fingers???--

Even those who championed the Surge for postural and political reasons don't believe it can succeed especially after recently learning that the operations will be conducted under two separate sets of command-- A strategic blunder that will jumbo cluster every tactical decision, slow tactical agility to a snail's pace as well as fubar-ing its decrepit aftermath-- The goalposts have been shifted too many times in vain attempts to posit after the fact any success as DC's original goal-- The lackluster results so haunt the Neocons that outright desperation and fear of the pointed finger of accusatory blame initiates new plans daily more devoid of reality than the last-- America's political landscape will continue to be haunted by it for years to come if not decades-- This failure will not because it cannot be swept under the rug-- The consequences are beyond enormous --The rug itself may be repo-ed by the creditors who financed this doomed debacle-- Richard Nixon could deflect attention from the failure in Vietnam by opening a brave new diplomatic front with the dreaded Red Chinese but no such option avails itself to the diplomatic corps in DC today--

The deflection open to Bush, while his senatorial opposition dallies and dithers its political capital away in a dis-spiritedly obscene game of poorly played charades, is ever more war, this time in the form of aerial bombardment of Iran-- Bush is not sending a third carrier group to the region for a show of force-- A more robust redux of Shock and Awe in joint force aerial attacks featuring the freshly down-vaunted Israeli Air Force in the lead-- An understatement to say the least neither country or its leader being burnished by confidence from large sectors of their populations-- Too many reporters now publicizing leaked information from military and intelligence sources depicting ongoing operative war plans being put into place like a massive jig-saw puzzle only the more recent intel suggests the latest plan of attack may be of magnitude higher in caliber and larger in scale than earlier reports projected--

The frustration load the Iraq failure continues to burden the Bush psyche with demands a higher payload of retribution and destruction for these radical Mullahs and their hot-head prime minister who have added insult to injury by so audaciously sticking their middle fingers smack into the face of a politically-weakened strategically-challenged Bush and simply defying him time and again-- No American president has ever been so openly dissed worldwide as this struggling flailing man--Every avenue open to Bush leads to metaphorical and/or moral suicide-- He can't quit and he can't win-- Fate has him by the gonkers-- There are no miracles here--

To capitulate now and ask for dialogue with Iran is to lose face big-time in a much too craven retreat from the stupid tough talk that backed him into fate's corner in the first place-- To bomb Iran's suspect nuclear sites as well as all military sites and major industrial zones to debilitate Iranian regional influence and potential economic power far enough into the future to satisfy Israeli paranoia and save Prime Minister Ehud (14%) Olmert's questionable political future, severely and immediately jeopardizes the oil-addicted heavily over-indebted American economy and tangential business interests of Western Civ worldwide and unquestionably and profoundly endangers the overstretched under-armored under-appreciated American troops now operating in Iraq under Operation Provide More Targets-- Should the numerically superior Shia Militias with their jihad fortified morale join the insurgent violence in a big way by overtly increasing the tempo and caliber of attacks against American troops Bush could conceivably be the only President in our short history to preside over not only such a grave and excruciatingly demoralizing defeat but perhaps the complete destruction of that army-- Dire ain't a strong enough word here-- America, you should be worried!!!!--

Each new (actually recycled) think-tank theorem or strategy exits the starting gates tabula rasa blindly optimistic and promising success where the others have crashed and burned or simply failed to gain any relevant posi-traction-- The insurgency and the ongoing sectarian carnage control the terrain and the time upon which they battle-- The militias are capable of going to ground, disappearing from the arena, blending into the general population for rest, recuperation and re-arming and then emerging again to fight when conditions favor them-- New theorem and strict timelines can't alter this-- So far unable to wrest this tempo away from the insurgents the ensuing frustration wells-up correlative to the mounting casualties and financial costs and the diminishing support on the home-front and abroad--

Every idiot candidate who once supported this doomed misadventure now has an exit plan being bandied about the blathersphere-- Every imbecilic editorial board who cheer-led the opening assault of Shock and Awe and hailed the prospects of a five-day war as if it were a sporting event or a fox-hunt now has an exit plan and a blame-thrower aimed at someone else-- Every prize-winning pro-war bandwagon pundit who has jumped the Bush career-ship now has an exit strategery and has quietly removed the flag pin from his lapel-- Gone the glorius rapture of jingoism that now finds every mahogany-foxholed Neocon with imperceptibly accurate ground level intel still in the final throes of a grandiose ideological prescription for Victory-- Success so far still incapable of being defined in terms even extraordinary people can understand--

All of these plans from the wild-eyed optimistic to the heavily saturnian realistic to the bamboozled, the confused and frightened to those well intentioned and of good but flawed faith have thrown down the gauntlet of still more petulant benchmarks-- The way out of facing their own complicity for this tragic mega-blunder is quite easy.... simply blame the Iraqis!!!-- Their government isn't cutting the mustard-- It can't even buy a quorum with stacks of doubled-down shrink-wrapped dollars-- Give Malicki a binding deadline he can't possibly meet and if he fails to do what our Government has been manifestly incapable of achieving, give him the noose of a coup or threaten him with the loss of his American Cash Daddy-- Volunteers countrywide to succeed him in office number somewhere between the robustly slim and none-- Demand that he attack his own family, his own tribe and then his own militia in a vain act of suicidal sacrifice because the real responsibility for the (fait accompli) outcome of this ugly tragedy engendered by the blind hubris of exceptionalism and cool, won't exactly gleam from the pages of careerist resumes or polish Arlington's gardens of stone--

The narcissistic odor of this ultimatum frenzy alone will obviously guarantee painlessly successful action and rescue our leaders from there own camouflaged pap-- This from those who unabashedly witnessed the pathetic display of ineffectuality in the non-binding resolution flame-out on the Senate floor midweek last-- The heavyweight statesmen inside the Senate chamber sure know how to get things done-- Maybe John Warner who actually voted against his own resolution and Harry 'chicken' Reed should offer to train Malicki (the only one of the three actually facing real live bullets) in the delicate art of real fakery--

Perhaps we should give the US Congress a list of petulant spoiled impractical demands ala Shirley in a Templesque tantrum including an exit date for American troops, fully binding resolutions of real statesmen, stop the campaign fundraising while our country attempts to survive the imminent emergency, and see how focused these lazy slackers toe the line on such an obviously sure-fire road to victory-- Warn them should they fail the deadline of their mission a visit to Malicki's henchmen could be in the offing-- The weight of History is on the table-- Rough Music on the way--

DISSOLUTE RESOLUTION

2007-02-05T14:48:00.001-08:00

What a pathetic feckless display of non-binding resolve in the Senate-- Demi leader Harry Reed shrewdly outfoxed into unpalatably down-toning the language of resolution his own party devised to cavortingly capitulate to a few repo 'moderates' in order to ostensibly gain the all important 60 votes needed to actually begin floor debate on this never-ending war in Iraq--Crushingly demoralizing their un-spined but practical strategy embarrassingly explodes in their craven faces falling to the senate floor shredded by a crew of canard carrying procedural tricksters oblivious to tomorrow's negative headlines -- The repo boys may have potentially lost long-term by winning this round but the demies still squandered big-time credibility by failing at such soft toss charades-- Blown completely out of the water--

Not only is there no debate there is no non-binding resolution...not even a toothless moderate reprimand--Contrary to their own contemptible self-estimation the inability to control the frame of the debate exposes the obvious demie deficit of practical media savvy but the truth is the wilting demies and the unearned momentum they garnered from the American voters last fall are simply imploding-- Rational articulation no matter how finely window-dressed doesn't lend the repo bullies susceptibility to moral suasion-- Few brains and most of those testosterone-challenged-- Dissolved resolve-- God Almighty if it ain't so goddamned ugly as to make even those truly stout-hearted genuinely concerned and reliable American citizens despair--

Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., opposed the idea of a resolution at a recent Foreign Relations Committee hearing and warned any debate would give comfort to the enemy and "confirm to our friends and allies that we are divided and in disarray."-- Lugar helped kill the debate and in doing so effectively confirmed that division and that disarray as well as the cowardly inability of our convictionless leaders to face up to and perform their now ever graver responsibility-- Does Lugar actually believe our friends and allies, those who haven't yet jumped ship, are somehow incapable of perceiving this division and disarray???-- Hell, even the insurgency in Iraq were it not so dangerous would probably laugh at this semi-conscious Senate's ineptitude and unwittingly vainglorious attempts to mimic their own ineffective Iraqi government-- How about a another senatorial junket to the Greedzone in Baghdad for Imperial Lobsterfest, mint-juleps and more Aipac sponsored re-education??-- Pelosi publicly craves a larger plane-- Unbelievable!!!!--

If the demies really expected bi-partisan comity it only underscores their naivete and accentuates their lack of fitness to serve as leaders of the American people-- Meanwhile out on the campaign hustings the professional campaigneers neglect their senatorial duties to sloganeer their faux promise across the daily blathersphere-- If the war ain't over by 2009 then Hillary will end it??-- Fat chance facho overreach??-- More than likely, but it fills bandwidth with another disposable dream cookie-- But two too-long years of this incessant soundbite babble and the seriously wearying possibly(by-then) recession-buffetted American people will contemplate revolution of the non-academic kind-- The disheveled end to this non-bi-partisan non-binding jumbo-cluster underscores the moral economic and intellectual bankruptcy spreading its tentacles every elsewhere-- Can our government do anything anymore??--

Why the disingenuous palaver about bi-partisanship anyway??--As Andrew Bacevich writes, "The true purpose of bipartisanship is to protect the interests of the Washington Party, the conglomeration of politicians, hustlers, and bureaucrats who benefit from the concentration of wealth and power in the federal city. A “bipartisan” solution to any problem is one that produces marginal change while preserving or restoring the underlying status quo." Try as wimpily as the demies might the school superintendent is just not going to allow 3.2 beer in the drinking fountains but making the initial promise sure made them feel good-- Power definitely has its limits but reaching those limits so early in the game can be utterly deflating-- Class, get out your drawing boards---