Dick Cheney unrepentant in having destroyed America

Richard Cheney, the 46th vice-president of the USA, is about to release his memoirs next week titled, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. 

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted when Dick Cheney left office in January 2009 his approval ratings (13%) were less than that of George W. Bush's (22%).  At their departure both men received historic disapproval ratings and continue to be considered by the majority of Americans as having failed to improve America.  The Bush presidency is highlighted by some of the following:

• advancing the unconstitutional notion of a unitary presidency
• repeated and consistent withdrawal from international treaties and agreements
• pushing through the civil rights destroying PATRIOT act
• massive and illegal wiretapping and spying on American citizens
• using torture upon seized enemy combatants and prisoners of war
• the failure to prevent the 9-11 attack on New York City and the Pentagon
• failing to adequately neutralize Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's terrorist network
• pursuing the Iraq war under bogus pretenses and then failing to contain the regional civil war
• the abandonment of New Orleans and its citizens after Hurricane Katrina
• allowing the housing bubble to expand and eventually cause the financial collapse of 2008
• promoting corporate-written legislation that bolstered special interest profits
• promoting a laissez-faire regulatory framework that allowed corporate crime to exponentially grow throughout his two terms
• advancing the interests of oil and gas companies and rejecting sustainable and renewable forms of energy production
• denying climate change was occurring
• doubling the national public debt
• cut taxes for the richest Americans, while expanding the deficit
• cut national science and engineering budgets to pay for his wars and tax cuts
• limited scientific investigations on subjects deemed controversial for religious supporters, such as stem cell studies and environmental assessment studies
• preventing any international agreement that would prevent rises in global warming gases, which in the end may possibly be his greatest failure if even conservative predictions about climate change prove true

Cheney undoubtedly represented the very worst elements of the Bush administration.  Although Bush's approval didn't collapse until after Katrina, Cheney's approval amongst most Americans was in the gutter early into his first term.  His approval was constantly in the twenty-percent area and never improved.  He represented to his base an unapologetic statist who wanted to project American hegemony to its fullest level.  Cheney famously stated that "deficits don't matter!"  He was responsible for pursuing an energy policy that promoted America's addiction to foreign fossil fuels.  And as former Secretary of Defense, he was very familiar with the nature of the Pentagon machinery and sought to project America's military power domestically and across foreign shores.

To the rest of America, Cheney represented a Machiavellian operator.  With his over-the-top rhetoric, war making bravado, riddiculous claims that 3rd world nations with 2nd rate militaries were a threat to America, and his continuous scowl, the public turned on this crypto-fascist.

Reviews of Cheney's memoirs indicate a man who controlled both the president and policies of the Bush presidency in it early years. During the infamous 9-11 attack, Cheney states, despite clear lines of command set forth in the constitution, that it was him and neither Bush nor Rumsfeld who was in command of immediate operations.  At that moment in history, Cheney made it clear that the president of the United States had been unofficially deposed and that he had assumed all the controls of commander-in-chief.

The NY Times review of the book further highlights a man who is completely unrepentant of his actions.  The Times describes the book as being

often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues.

So it is clear that as Cheney's policy failures mounted, George W. Bush and others in the Bush administration became progressively unwilling to accept Cheney's worldview and provocations.  In the end, the rift was so great that Bush himself was unwilling to even grant full pardon to Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby for his acts of lying to prosecutors in order to protect Mr. Cheney.

What we know is Mr. Cheney is on his last legs and death is hunting him. This book is an attempt by a dying man to justify his evil by throwing sand in our collective faces. I'm sure Ozymandias would have done the same.

Ritholtz on the rise of the Corporatocracy

Over the past 30-years both Republican and Democratic parties have drifted from their traditional positions towards extreme stances. Throughout this period pro-corporate policies that catered to the balance sheets of multinationals and those with enough cash to pay-to-play, have defined the legislative agendas of both federal and state politicians. Left-wing political activists, like Ralph Nader, have been calling Washington D.C. "corporate occupied territory" for the past two decades. Consider the following:

• The revolving door between corporate officers and government employees has become the norm.
• A study conducted in 2005 by Public Citizen found that from 1998, "43 percent of the 198 members of Congress who left government to join private life have registered to lobby."
• Politicians have become indentured servants to special interest groups and major lobbyists in the financial/insurance industries, the military-industrial complex, the energy/ chemicals sector, big-pharma, corporate agricultural, and the communications/ electronics industries.
• Legislation is often written directly by lobbyists and submitted to congressmen and state legislators for direct approval.  Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, told The Atlantic magazine, "The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists... It's shocking how the system actually works."
• "Corruption, in its institutional sense, denotes the degeneration of republican forms of government into despotism, and typically comes about when the private ends of a narrow faction of citizens succeed in capturing the engines of government." (Harper's, Speak, Money, Oct. 2010)
• The Brookings Institute calls "The 5-4 conservative majority decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission that struck many decades of law and precedent [to] likely go down in history as one of the Supreme Court's most egregious exercises of judicial activism."  The Roberts court, "dismissed the legitimacy of laws... equated the free speech protections of individuals and corporations in spite of countless laws and precedents that insisted on meaningful differences."
• A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Dec. 16-18, 2005 found that 49% of American adults say they believe "most members of Congress are corrupt."
• The Republicans K-street project, was a project by now convicted former congressman Tom Delay to coerce lobbying firms to "hire Republicans in top positions, and to reward loyal GOP lobbyists with access to influential officials."
• Super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, was sentenced in 2006 for conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion related to his lobbying efforts

Barry Ritholtz, CEO of FusionIQ (an investment firm) and primary blogger at The Big Picture tells his readers that:

In 2009 and 2010, I learned that Corporate America took over the political process via their exhaustive lobbying efforts. What was once a Democracy is now a Corporatocracy... Politicians do the bidding not for the people, but for the corporate establishment. Those people who want to blame the barking, snarling government for all the woes of the world do not want you to look further up the leash to see who is giving the commands. These corporate apologists pretend to be philosophers, but in reality they are mere Fellatrix, bought and paid for by their lords and masters.

We've reached a turning point.  When growth was evident, jobs were available, and cheap accessible credit abounded, everyone was happy and willing to keep dancing to the same tune. Now that the bill is past due and we're looking at decade of low growth or worst, investors and everyday persons on both the right and the left are seeing the system for what it is.  Ritholtz acknowledges that we were warned by the founding fathers, Eisenhower on the military-industrial complex, and countless other critics about the perils of what philosopher Sheldon Wolin has described as inverted totalitarianism.

The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation.

The viciousness and lawlessness of the corporatocracy knows no bounds. Like Orwell's 1984, those in control have no interest in the betterment of mankind or pursuing nationalistic agendas, they are solely interested in power for power's sake. And in the polluted materialistic cesspool that is modern existence, that power is obtained through the collection and amassment of wealth and money.

Flow Chart of human hookups, first-dates, and relationships

I'm not sure how accurate any of this data actually is, but it's interesting just to think about in the idle spaces of own existence.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e2013489aeda81970c-popup

(h/t to Andrew Sullivan's the Daily Dish)

Things I found interesting:

1. 5.4% of people die without ever getting married.
2. 56% of people claim to be unhappy with their sex lives (Forget viagra and other boner drugs!  I see an opening here for subscription based tantric sex lessons offered at the local Learning Annex!)
3. Largest reason for breakups is a loss of interest (that seems accurate based on my own experiences)
4. 22% of people worldwide have engaged in infidelity (again, based on hereditary disease profiles I've reviewed that seemed entirely correct)

American Idiots: Deep South Edition

One of the great paradoxes of America is that although more Americans have won Nobel prizes in the fields of science and medicine than any other nationality, and given the fact that the nation has the best universities and some of the greatest research and development centers in the world, Americans as a whole remain woefully ignorant, if not completely hostile, to basic scientific knowledge and rationality.

Over the past twenty years repeated surveys have found that as much as 95% of the American population is scientifically illiterate.  A recent study conducted by the California Academy of Sciences found that 47% of Americans did not know how long it takes Earth to revolve around the sun, and 41% believed that dinosaurs and early humans coexisted.  Another recent poll done by the Pew Research Foundation, found that only 52% of Americans understood the basis of stem cells in relation to normal differentiated cells and a mere 46% knew that atoms are larger than electrons.  As described in the Boston Globe, "On a highly contentious issue like global warming, meanwhile, the gap between scientists and the public was vast: 84 percent of scientists, but just 49 percent of Americans, think human emissions are causing global warming."

So it should come as no shock to discover that only a mere third of the population "believe" in the theory of biological evolution.  Worst, more than 50% of the population "believe" in literal creationism.  It is this latter group of simians that I wish to highlight.  In the state of Alabama, a state that is ranked as having the largest percentage of obese citizens and least educated persons in the country, the local Republicans managed to achieve a new intellectual low through a primary election campaign commercial.  According the online political news-blog TPM,

[An Alabama] state PAC recently went on the air with an ad attacking one of the Republican gubernatorial candidates for supporting the teaching of evolution in schools and for saying that parts of the Bible aren't true.

The candidate, Bradley Byrne, responded with a lengthy press release vehemently defending his belief in creationism and the infallible truth of the Bible.

The aggrieved Republican pol went on to further dismiss every piece of scientific analysis in the past 4,000 years -from the ancient Babylonians who studied astronomy to 19th C. scholars who developed theories of electromagnetism and nuclear chemistry to modern 21st C. molecular biologists- by making the ludicrous claim of "I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true ..."

All these dunces and like-minded inbred yahoos south of the Mason-Dixon line are a burden to the rest of humanity.  They are idiots, who are morally debased, scientifically illiterate, and lacking in any common sense.  Just watch the following clip as evidence.

Republicans and Idiot America

Above are the results of a poll conducted by Research 2000 on behalf of the liberal blog DailyKos. It outlines the current opinions of those who are self-described Republicans. For those who have been paying attention to the nearly pornographic display of self-assured stupidity that accounts for political discourse from the so-called real Americans, the above results are expected.

The Economist magazine attempts to decompress the numbers as it relates to the American population at large.  While Bruce Bartlett, former George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan official, charges that "between 20% and 50% of the party is either insane or mind-numbingly stupid."  He further notes, that he does not consider himself to be a standing member of the lunatic fringe party.  A position that he expounded in his 2006 book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."

What should be noted, is that affiliation to the Republican party is at historic lows, with recent polls placing popular support between 21-24%.   With moderate conservatives fleeing the party in the aftermath of the disastrous Bush years and the proliferation of anti-establishment factions, like the tea baggers and right-wing militia movements, the Republican base has been reduced to the cultists and Southerners.  It is not surprising then that these people, being not the most educated, socially mobile, or economically viable, would have regressive and anti-modernist views.  However, to believe that Obama is a socialist, Caribou Barbie (aka Sarah Palin) is more competent to run the nation, and that homosexuals should be purged from public schools, takes a level of ignorance that one would typically find amongst the illiterate citizens of third world banana republics.

Why do you make them so stupid, God?

Every time I review a poll done assessing the average American's grasp of economics, public policy, or science I cringe. The latest is a doozy!

According to the a Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey no less than 44% of Americans polled wish that Dubya was still in the White House managing affairs. As a quick recap, lets look at Mr. Bush's greatest accomplishments and legacy:

• Failed to prevent terrorists from attacking America on 11-Sept. 2001
• Invaded Afghanistan, but failed to capture and prosecute Bin Laden
• Assisted members of the Bin Laden family and assorted Saudi nationals to leave America eight days after 9-11
• Illegally invaded Iraq to the opposition of nearly the entire planet
• Mismanaged the entire Iraq War and let terrorism exponentially grow across the world
• Allowed nuclear weapons proliferation to rogue nations like North Korea and Iran
• Ignored New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck and let the city nearly be destroyed by his administration's incompetence and neglect
• Tried to scuttle and then block corporate crime prevention legislation, after the first wave of corporate criminality (i.e. Enron, WorldCom,...etc.)
• Produced virtually no jobs during his eight years in office, that is capped by two recessions
• Caused the greatest economic meltdown in the history of the world (in terms of absolute size) through his deregulatory and laissez-faire policies
• Increased the US National Debt by 86% (i.e. $4.9 Trillion)
• Eliminated the 800 year rule of habeas corpus in common law
• Instituted torture, extraordinary rendition, and indefinite imprisonment as common tools against enemies of the state and created concentration camps and CIA controlled "black-sites" for torturing/executing prisioners overseas
• Conducted a series of wide reaching and illegal searches of Americans personal email, phone calls, physical mail, purchasing habits, library and book borrowing habits, and monitored public speech
• Criminalized public protest of Republicans during his election convention in 2004
• Stole or rigged three elections (2000, 2002, and 2004) through well documented forms of fraud, voter intimidation, destruction of ballots, and suppression of Democratic voters
• Attempted to create a unitary Presidency in violation of the US Constitution
• Politicized every office and branch of the US government to serve his dogmatic Christianist and pro-business agendas.
• Denied man-made Climate Change was occurring for years, then when he said that it did exist, stated that there was nothing anyone could do about it.... etc.

What type of world are these people living in that they think George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, Donald Rumsfeld, Condollezza Rice, and rest of the criminal junta that ran America off the cliff and made it the most loathed nation in the world, should be allowed back into the White House?

Well, it is most likely the same world inhabited by Americans, who in another Pew survey, think that the world's leading economic power is China. An incomprehensible 44% of Americans polled thought that China, a country with an economy one-sixth as large as the US and where the majority of people have no indoor plumbing and are agrarian farmers, has the world's largest economy. They are also equally likely to be amongst the, "19% of the public [that] says the use of torture is often justified to gain important information from terrorist suspects... [or the] 35% [that] say the use of torture in these circumstances is at least sometimes justified."

There you have it! A large percentage of Americans believe that Bush should have remained as president, that torture is an excellent and ethically sound policy, and that China is economically more significant than America. FUCKING RETARDS!