The presidential primary scam: Why the game is rigged, and why true democracy is only a secondary factor in the nation's rush to nominate the next president. ,
WASHINGTON -- It's far worse than you think -- worse than hanging chads, faulty Diebold machines, and billionaires who bankroll last-minute attack ads. The American system for nominating a presidential candidate has about as much in common with actual democracy as Donald Duck has with a lake mallard. It's not just that this year's primaries have been further front-loaded, or that the early primary states aren't representative of the nation at large. There is only passing fairness. There is only the semblance of order. There is nothing like equal representation under the law.
The whole stinking process was designed by dead men in smoky parlors and refined by faceless bureaucrats in hotel conference rooms. It is a nasty brew born of those caldrons of self-interest known as political parties. At every stage, advantage is parceled out like so much magic potion. "The national interest is not considered in any form," says University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. "Everything is left up to an ad hoc decision. It's chaotic."
That is not an exaggeration. Consider this: If you are a Republican, your vote for the presidential nominee will be worth more in Tennessee than in New York. If you are a Democrat, your vote in the primary will not count in Florida and is unlikely to count in Michigan. If you are a Republican in Wyoming, you probably won't get to vote at all, since only party officials have a say.
And it gets worse. This election cycle, a top Democratic candidate shaking someone's hand in Miami before the end of January is breaking the rules, unless that someone is handing the candidate a check at the same time. To put it another way, Democrats' communicating with voters has been barred in Florida, but taking money from voters is OK. To put it a third way, the system is not only irrational but offensive to the nation's most basic values. "The only way that you can hear a candidate campaign is if you are willing to pay a campaign contribution," explains Steven Geller, Florida's exasperated state Senate Democratic leader. "It is astounding."
They don't teach all of this in school, because even a fourth-grader would get up from his desk and walk out of the classroom in protest. And where would that leave the nation, if all the 10-year-olds knew their political system was built on a lie, that empty hooey about all Americans being entitled to a single, equal vote? What would it mean if they knew every time President Bush and President Clinton and President Reagan had bragged about bringing democracy to the world, they were hiding the fact that pure representative democracy has never come to the United States?
At root, the problem is that primaries are considered by law and tradition to be the internal affairs of political parties. For the most part, the people who designed this calamity have never been elected to anything. They are operatives, organizers, functionaries, a smart set of soldiers who move like marionettes. They lead state parties and sit on committees with names like "Rules and Bylaws." You have never seen their names in the newspaper, because reporters rarely attend the meetings. And there are dozens of them, so you can't blame any single person.
The system they produce is justified in the press, partly because reporters enjoy its results. We like traveling to the early voting states, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, where candidates have to shake a lot of hands. Voters in these states are unrepresentative of the nation as a whole, but they tend to take presidential politics more seriously. They go to candidate town halls in large numbers and ask smart questions, allowing poorly funded candidates to compete with wealthy candidates on a more level playing field.
By most estimates, about 190,000 people will participate in the Iowa caucuses, with another 1.2 million or so marking ballots in New Hampshire and South Carolina. That's about 1.4 million people in a nation of 301 million, or one-half of 1 percent.
When these early states start voting in January, the rest of the nation will begin to pay attention. If tradition holds, the candidates who win the early contests will have a huge advantage. With some luck, both parties will unite behind a single consensus nominee within a month, all but making the ballots in the later states irrelevant. Each party's leadership prays for this to happen, because if it does not, if for some reason the Democratic or Republican grass roots remains split on a preference after February, then the American people will be forced to see how ugly the whole game really is. more
Friday, October 05, 2007
Bush Watch Exclusive: The Wacky World of William Smith , by William Smith
“I’m telling you—we don’t torture people!” Slap-slap… Glug… “We don’t torture people!” Gah-glug… Slap. “We don’t torture people!” 118˚… 126˚ Slap, glug, slap. “We don’t torture people!” 134˚… 141˚ Gah! “We don’t torture people!” Michael Bolton… 29˚ “We don’t torture people!” Slap, slap, slap… “We don’t torture people!” 20˚…Kenny G. Glug. “We don’t torture people!” Glug, gah, slug, slap, slap. Sorry Mohammed, are those straps too tight? “We don’t torture people!” 16˚…Slap. Biff! Pow! Where are your clothes? “We don’t torture people!” Glug, glug… Yanni.
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Take this prediction to the vault, Jimmy! Some great terrorist incident on our soil within days, weeks, or even months of the Election, whether carried out or “foiled” in the planning stages, shall be more than enough to make the cowed, toe-picking populace between the Appalachians and the Rockies storm the polls and push another idiot, chickenhawk bomb jockey over the top. Repulsed, darkly I see it now: Rudy removes his nightgown and dons a Weimar helmet.
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Ten vain warrior chimps took the stage in Reagan’s library last night. No, nine. The Libertarian doesn’t qualify. Frail, sunken-eyed Nancy sat rapt next to Arnold in the first row. Poor thing, after having Chris Matthews relay her question on embryonic stem-cell research, she couldn’t have heard much of anything to her liking in the crude base-catering responses. And though not one of the post-debate spinners I tuned to touched on this particularly outrageous moment, I wondered, mouth agape, if any of the other high-school graduates watching happened to notice how many of these candidates for the presidency raised their hands to dispel the thought of teaching Darwinism in our completely fucked-up school systems?
I counted four Creationists flapping their paws in the group when asked who among them didn’t believe in evolution. In that brief display, I heard the leaders of our supposed European allies sniggering. “How appropriate,” they all sighed derisively. “We may well have to deal with another giant U.S. Asshole too dense to contemplate the concept of natural selection because an avenging Angel named Jethro is always whispering that he’ll never have to.” Praise be, we’ll know in 20 months. Meanwhile the Crusades against “Islamo-Fascism” and humanism, and the poor, and the uninsured, and blacks, and women, and Mexicans, and gays, and breathable air will continue apace in each one of these fifty red-and-blue states.
Energy Bulletin: Peak Universe , James Howard Kunstler
The big Peak Oil conference of the year took place in Houston last week - but before we get to the substance of that, a few words about where we were. It is hard to imagine a more horrifying urban construct than this anti-city in the malarial swamps just off the Gulf of Mexico. And it is hard to conceive of a more desolate and depressing urban district, even of such an anti-city, than the utter wasteland around Houston's convention center.
Luckily, we didn't have to enter the convention center itself across the street - a baleful megastructure the size of three aircraft carriers, adorned with massive air-conditioning ducts to counter Houston's gym-sock-like climate. And when I say "street" you understand we are talking about four or six-laners, with no curbside parking, which is the norm for this town. The effect is that every street behaves like an extension of the freeway at the expense of pedestrians - but pedestrians have been eliminated anyway because in ninety percent of Houston's so-called downtown of glass towers there are no shops or restaurants at the ground-floor level, only blank walls, air-conditioning vents, parking ramps, and landscaping fantasias. We were informed that in parts of downtown there existed a network of air-conditioned underground corridors with shopping, but that everything in it closed at 7 p.m. when the last office workers straggled home. Anyway, none of it extended as far as the convention center. The rest of district was devoted to surface parking.
It has often been stated that Houston's ghastly development pattern comes from having no official zoning laws. But all it really proves is that you can achieve the same miserable results of typical American boneheaded zoning with no zoning - as long as your don't give a shit how people feel in their daily environments.
The convention center itself, though, demonstrated something beyond even that degree of thoughtlessness. Its pharaonic hugeness was a metaphor for the fatal grandiosity at the heart of contemporary life in American today, the utter disregard for a scale of human activity consistent with what the planet has to offer within its ecological limits - and of course the oil issue was at the center of that story.
Oh, one final thing about Houston life per se. Judging by the local items in the daily newspaper, the so-called city enjoys a level of mayhem that makes Baghdad look like a Sussex garden party. Sample headlines: "10 Charged in Burglary Spree," "Pit Bull Shot Dead After Pony Attack," "Jury Gives Man Life in Carjacking Death," "Two Killed in Home Invasion." One particularly insane story told of a man who shot and stabbed a visiting friend who "dissed" his dog. We didn't see any of that action around the convention center's Hilton Americas, where the ASPO conference actually took place, but the news didn't exactly make you want to venture out beyond the lobby. Anyway, you couldn't buy a stick of gum within a mile walk of the place, and the thought of traipsing past all those surface parking lots in 90- degree heat was like an invitation to reenact the Bataan Death March.
It was a sublime coincidence of fate and history that throughout the ASPO conference, the price of a barrel of oil surged up through the high eighty-dollars range and briefly touched $90-a-barrel on Friday (just as the stock market was tanking by 360-odd points). It was also interesting that as all this action was unfolding, MSNBC was running an interview with Senator Larry Craig (R. Idaho), lately accused of soliciting sex from a policeman in an airport toilet. Apparently what the nation really wants to know about is the Senator's self-described "wide stance" in bathroom technique. Perhaps when Craig is finally forced from his senate seat, he can get a job as a "personal toilet coach," and become the pioneer in a whole new realm of self-improvement science, teaching others how to assume the manly "wide stance" and become more effective leaders.
So, while the price of oil ratcheted up hour by hour, the ASPO conference members heard from an impressive range of experts who have been leading the public conversation on the Peak Oil story - with no help from the mainstream media or the political sector. Among them were Robert Hirsch, co-author of the now-famous 2005 Hirsch Report, commissioned by the US Department of Energy, which, much to the consternation of its sponsor, first told the nation in no uncertain terms that it was heading for a catastrophic set of disruptions in "normal" American life if we heedlessly continued energy business- as-usual. Hirsch went a little further now, two years on, than he had in his famous report, predicting a future of "oil export withholding," panicked markets, and allocation disturbances that would make the 1973 OPEC embargo look like a golden age.
Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil industry, who has worked tirelessly to lift public awareness of Peak Oil, also raised the specter of shortages, telling the audience that market allocation problems in the near future would almost certainly induce "hoarding behavior" among the public that would cripple the economy, lead to enforced rationing, and shock the nation. Simmons compared the current public mood over energy issues to a "fog of war." He also repeated his oft-stated opinion that the drilling rigs and other equipment used around the world to pump oil out of the ground are so uniformly old and decrepit that they pose a problem every bit as dire as peak oil itself. In the meantime, he said, to offset climbing prices, the developed nations have lately dipped so deeply into their accumulated stocks of crude and "refined product" that some countries may breach what is called their "minimum operating levels." Offstage, he told me, "We're too preoccupied trying to figure out the exact date of the peak. Meanwhile, we'll drain the gasoline pool and it will be gone forever."
The other most significant contribution came from Texas geologist Jeffrey Brown who presented a full-blown version of his theory that world export rates from the countries with oil to sell are liable to decline so much more sharply than their actual production decline rates that the world would be thrust into an oil export crisis within the next five years - and that this export crisis would turn out to be the defining condition of the Peak Oil story.
There were plenty of other fruitful contributions on subjects ranging from the future of the airline industry to reviving passenger rail service, to the question of nuclear power. And there was one real clunker presentation by a shill from the Toyota corporation, designed to blow green smoke up the audience's ass about the future of happy motoring (Toyota's products will save it from Peak Oil).
For coverage of the particulars, visit TheOilDrum.com, the nation's best energy discussion website.
If there were reporters from the mainstream media present at this event, I didn't run into of them. They are apparently uninterested in the fate of industrial economies, at least as long as Senator Larry Craig is out there on the frontiers of toilet coaching science, and Britney Spears is still sparring with K-Fed, and Diddy is beating people up in nightclubs, and people are murdering their friends for dissing their dogs.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Stark Truth: U.S. Rep. (CAL) Tells It Like It Is , Pete Stark
...First of all, I'm just amazed that the Republicans are worried that we can't pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don't care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you going to get that money? You are going to tell us lies like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the war?
You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement....
"The truth is, Bush just likes to blow things up in Iraq, in the United States and in Congress....more
Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., cried as he apologized today for a controversial speech in which he said Americans were getting their heads blown off in Iraq for the president's amusement. “I want to apologize to my colleagues — many of whom I have offended — to the president and his family and to the troops,” Stark said on the House floor, according to The Hill. "I hope that with this apology, I return to being as insignificant as I should be," he said, according to MSNBC. --On Deadline
Comment: I wonder just what kind of pressure was used to get Stark back in line as we destroy our economy, fatten the war corporations, have our troops killed, and continue to weaken our country. Many believe we have gotten to the point of no return, that we will never recover the moral and financial strength that has made us the envy of the world. And for what? The majority of the people do not want this war, are willing to share the nation's dwindling riches more equitably, and know that the corporations are running this country through its selected representatives. While the Republicans do the most damage to the nation, the Democrats are nearly as bad and are not a viable alternative, and the third parties have been emasculated and will remain that way.
Musings on today's “The Republicans, the Economy & You” airing: Having proclaimed this past week that he wasn’t familiar with the name Terry Schiavo or the controversy over drilling for oil in the Everglades, and never explaining why he thinks Russia is still the Soviet Union, and though still in The Race after once experiencing the unmitigated embarrassment of reduced circumstances when pleading for a smattering of applause at the end of one of his sluggish homespun speeches, the GOP’s fumbling late-comer, first-timer Fred Thompson, is due to get his hooves a bit muddy and be-shat today as he and the other Republican goat-boys assemble this afternoon, from 4 to 6, for another big bleating competition, this time in a Dearborn, Michigan shed in which two free-market wranglers —-breathless Maria "Money Slut" Bartiroma of CNBC and smarmy Chris Matthews, “The Cackling Catholic,” of MSNBC—- have stocked with enough fresh grass for the curried combatants to chew over and no doubt quickly regurgitate, each of them having turned those sweet green blades into a disgusting cud that reeks to high heaven of Reaganomics redux—stale, devalued corporate bonbons which within a few short years (once and for all when the next responsible, no-new-taxes-pledging, Great Obsolescence Party President has mucked out the farm’s long-neglected entitlement pigpens) will be reconstituted, zippily revitalized by Madison Avenue, and made entirely scrumptious again with multiple infusions of hedge-fund fructose and private-equity caffeine—to create of our tired commonwealth a vital, flag-flush “Godiva” nirvana again, once more venturing on to Mars and Venus and the Takei Belt and the ice-free, oil-rich poles as the god-chosen, pie-eyed envy we still suppose the rest of the “they don’t get it” world won’t ever in our lifetimes come to understand (not like deToqueville did), just as long as we keep on running in the garish glow of the rockets’ red glare…
Labels: scandle, vote, voting
