#1 Threat

Katharine Mieszkowski,"Bear facts about John McCain". October 7

This should make for a riveting encounter.

--Kit Seelye, on tonight's debate

Didn't you hear me say "God Bless My Mother"? "God Bless George Washington"?  What kind of a' Indian would say a fool thing like that?

--Jack Crabbe

SO it turns out that John McCain--who I'm beginning to suspect is the first Presidential candidate in the history of the Republic not to reveal his history of electroshock therapy to himself--is running around mocking a $3 million government-funded study of grizzly DNA in Montana, despite having voted for it.

And despite the fact that it actually cost $5 million.

Or that it was Republican backed.

Or that it was funded in the hope that it might remove grizzlies from the Endangered list.

I've got a lot of other things I should be doing, so thank God this week, like every other in politics, is a good time to cultivate a talent for the obvious.

Look at how much information about the vertiginous decline of the United States of America under a generation of Republican control, from "Pitiful Helpless Giant" all the way to "Pitiful Helpless Giant Who's Messed Himself", resides in that single declarative sentence: 1) Self-styled Straight Talker--just the fact that that one flew as the 21st century dawned tells you something; 2) Ridiculing a bill he himself voted for; 3) Which was funded as a way to get around what tiny steps we take to preserve what's left of the natural world; 4) Because if there's anyone who has a right to chafe under the Federal chokehold it's the rugged individualist, freedom-lovin' High Plains libertarians of Montana, a state which in 2004 paid $4,807 per capita in total Federal tax burden, while receiving a mere $8,183 per capita in return; 4a) This being a matter which has not just elicited cheers from government-hating throngs of Republicans, but which was calculated to elicit them by professional campaign operatives; 5) Those budget-conscious crowds being the same ones who continue to cheer our blank-check disaster in Iraq, Where The Looting Never Stops™; 6) And where that $5 million would pay for, roughly, fifteen minutes of our stay, now rapidly speeding toward Year Number Six; 7) Meaning that if we'd just left one day later we could have funded ninety-six grizzly studies; 8) Which might make this a good time to point out that these are people making a math-based objection despite the fact that the salient feature of the "outrage" is their objection to funding science, however cheaply or how valuable, unless it leads to more efficient ways to kill people; 9) Which, we may as well point out while we're at it, none of the people in those cheering audiences is actually off doing themselves, despite the vital link to Preserving Freedom; 10) And the anti-science business does not translate into their making do with less technology or refusing to accept as an article of faith that Science will rescue future generations from the ravages they themselves are too lazy and/or self-centered to lift a finger to do anything about, it being a mere tic of their pervasive anti-intellectualism; 11) So pervasive, in fact, that her Jes' Folks butt-ignorance of simple reality has become the major selling point for Sarah Palin; 12) Who is the running mate chosen by John McCain; 13) Who's the guy griping about $5 million for what is by all accounts a successful field study; 14) Though it isn't going to change the status of the grizzly, which only an anti-intellectual would have hoped for in the first place; 15) Which is precisely the sort of person John McCain is banking on to win him the White House, so he can govern effectively in a time of crisis; 16) An argument which flies in the face of logic, though at this point I'm almost embarrassed to bring it up; 17) And though logic shouldn't be a problem to a man who's griping about a $5 million wildlife study instead of the $700 hammers and $1000 toilet seats the military buys by the truckload; 18) Which military is, of course, supposedly his area of expertise and particular High-Focus Double Maverick Oversight Powers.

By the way, that $5 million is roughly 1% of the cost of the Nowhere Bridge Councilwoman Palin once supported, and roughly 2% of the Federal money she kept anyway. USA! USA!  And at this point I'm for building the goddam thing, provided she and the rest of her party will agree to cross it.  Once.

The Strange Case Of The Post-Coital Pup

Peter Baker, "Tom Davis Gives Up". October 5

Martin, if dirt were trumps, what hands you'd hold!

--Charles Lamb

I'M worn out; if by some malfunction you looked in on this blog six or seven times this weekend you might've seen twelve or fourteen different layouts. I'd actually settled on one Friday night, tweaked it into the wee hours to get rid of the obligatory graphic tattooing and do what I could about the awful leading and just-off-desirable line length, added some of that patented Doghouse whimsy, and fell asleep reading a book. The next morning the remaining graphic elements had disappeared, the result, it turned out, of their linked pages exceeding bandwidth limitations. Repeated attempts to host them on my own, or manage some other workaround while remaining hopeless with Blogger's CSS were in vain, and I was reduced to actually trying to learn how to do what I was doing, which was only slightly more successful. I think the problem is more the scattergun fashion in which the producers of free Blogger templates write their code, and not the fact that dirt and I were born on the same day, but I remind you that I had finished matriculating before the first personal computer hit the market, and that prior to that time I had been given the choice of spending five credit hours per semester "learning" French, or spending five credit hours "learning" FORTRAN, but getting three credits for it, and that the former classes were filled with coeds, while the latter were filled with secret Star Trek admirers, since in those days no one with the slightest concern for being taken seriously would have openly admitted it. I ask you. And I remind you that the adolescents who chose the latter course, for reasons inexplicable beyond a soul-bending fear of the opposite sex, or, likely, any sex at all, now rule the world.

I eventually found the good people at Our Blogger Templates, whose stuff seems to come, so far as I could tell, mostly Tattooing Optional, and who've written clear code that takes advantage of New Blogger's tweakisms, for which I thank them sincerely. But it's still not something you do halfway, and I'm still tweaking away as I find things, though at least now it's tol'able and I didn't have to create a new blog just to test it.

So at some point early this AM I figured the thing was at least legible, exceeding my personal standards, and tried to go to bed, but my knees didn't want to. My current reading, Charles Van Doren (yes, that one)'s  A History of Knowledge, which had been missing between late 1996 and last week, when it was discovered on my Poor Wife's office shelves, marked in several places with her post-it note placemarkers (this despite the fact that I've mentioned to her my complete bewilderment over where the thing could possibly have gotten to at least four times in the intervening years; I suppose this suggests how she's managed to stay married to me) was far too heavy, physically heavy, for my weary bones to hold up properly. So I grabbed the Times, in an effort to see if any of their columnists had come up with something to say. Still no luck there, excepting Maureen Dowd, if for "something to say" you substitute "making gurgling sounds and blowing bubbles in the manner of an infant or someone recently shot in the throat". That done I picked up the Magazine, and found Baker's piece on Representative Davis, which saved me from Lisa Belkin's musings on Sarah Palin and parenting choices.

Or maybe "saved" is too strong a word. The two-page opening spread, 70% of which is a view of Davis through his propped-up shoes (there's a good image for ya, Tom. I vaguely remember Adlai Stevenson, sir. And you sir, ain't.) carries the subhead in 96 pt. type:

He was a star
in the Republican Party.
Now, like dozens
of his G.O.P. colleagues,
he's quitting
Congress, fed up with
his party, his president and
the process.

Please don't get ahead of me; I was busy making sidebar color choices while you were snug in your beds, or someone else's. There's a big blank space above that type, and I'm all for good graphic design, but maybe someone could have worked in "quitting Congress two years after his promised Contract with America pledge to limit Congresspersons to twelve years of service." Or 'service'.

And maybe someone--I really don't expect it to be the same guy who writes the article, not in the Times Magazine, especially--could take more than a cursory glance at what Davis has been up to for the span of seven elections?

Well, for starters--almost literally--he voted for the Citizen Legislature Act, before ignoring its provisions when his own time came (he'd have been grandfathered out anyway. I know, shocking, ain't it?). Voted for the three articles of Impeachment which passed, then said that maybe Republicans had "overplayed their hand". This is the voice of moderation, folks, and a guy who's now leaving The People's House because things have grown so ugly an' partisan an' trivialized an' all. Bush tax cuts (do we need to ask?): yea; huge deficits and impending fiscal collapse: pooches were screwed! Iraq war? Well, it wasn't a vote for war, exactly, and besides, you stand behind the President when he demands that sort of thing. And you keep standing behind him as chairman of the House Government Reform Committee (Davis is the guy who removed "Oversight" both from the title and the body), where you resolutely refuse to allow any questions about where the blank checks you kept signing had been cashed. How'd that one work out, you ask?  Davis just ruefully directs the questioner's gaze in the direction of Poochy.

And thank you, Tom Davis, moderate Republican, for being the reliable party functionary when Tom DeLay needed someone to subpoena Terri Schiavo and her attendant medical apparatus! Run, Poochy, run! "There are costs to being a leader," Davis notes. "You're not an independent actor." I was merely issuing orders!

The party has taken such a beating because of Bush and Congressional scandals that Davis took it upon himself to sound the alarm last spring in a 20-page memo to the Republican leadership, calling the atmosphere “the worst since Watergate,” even worse than 2006. “Failure to fundamentally change the G.O.P. brand can lock us into a long period of minority status,” he warned. The memo became public, and some Republican colleagues were irked with Davis. But none, he says, disputed his analysis.

He sounded the alarm last spring. Musta come as quite a shock to the rest of them Congressional Republicans.  You belong as the permanent minority party, Tom.  If you belong at all.

For Davis, who is 59, the decision to leave came after a series of personal blows. The loss of the majority in 2006 cost him his chairman’s gavel. His wife, Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, lost re-election as a Virginia state senator in 2007. And he gave up his ambition to run for the United States Senate this year when his state party decided to choose its nominee by a convention dominated by conservatives rather than a primary open to Davis’s independent supporters.

I guess they didn't hear the alarm.

C'mon, really. I need a nap, badly, but there's a difference between low-hanging fruit and slimy crap rotting on the ground with worms crawling through it an' shit. Being a major cog in the Republican Radical Wealth Re-Distribution Upward Scheme precludes one from being called "moderate", no matter how many stem-cell restrictions one voted against and, especially, no matter what guilty appeals one makes to reality now that the collapsed beams of the house are crushing his vitals. Piss off, Davis. That's as moderately as I can put it. If you'll notice, we're in deep shit now because of you economic, American exceptionalist, laissez-faire boondoggery, international adventurist Republicans who took marching orders from George W. Bush and Tom Fucking DeLay because That's How It Works.  That Jebus faction whose votes you been collecting for thirty years, and which most everybody the other side of the Piedmont already knows as crazy?  Not so much.  

Cathago Delenda Est

OKAY, so in the end I watched as much of the debate as I could stand, which was something over a minute. For one thing, my Poor Wife was tired, and went to bed around 8:30, and, as I may've mentioned before, is such a light sleeper that she's awakened by the barometer falling. So even downstairs I can't turn the sound up on the teevee enough to hear it, and I might've used headphones if I'd felt the thing was required viewing, except Slightly Evil Larry, the Cat Who Eats Plastic, chewed through the good ones, and headphones have that shielded core wire that has, like, milkweed strands running down the center and you can't reconnect it. At least I've never been able to. The backup pair were some lightweight Sennheisers which, once pressed back into service began disintegrating much like when the mutated Andromedia strain started eating rubber. Then there's the ultra-lightweights with the maddening short, and the last-resort noise-canceling earbuds. I'm not sure how they even got in the house; probably down the chimney like a squirrel. They were apparently designed for use by people who've had MP3 players surgically implanted in their chests. The on/off housing dealie weighs something like thirty times what the buds do, so it has a natural tendency to pull them out of your ears if you do anything rash, like moving or breathing, and this has the effect, oddly enough, of canceling the noise cancelation. Still they might be made to work, assuming you were to lie on the couch and keep telling yourself you had just had surgery on your cervical vertebrae, and the slightest movement could be fatal, except that getting far enough away from the television requires, in my case, the linking of two coiled lines which add, by my calculations, about a hundred pounds of torque on the buds. So one can basically just forget it. I'm not planning on buying new headphones anytime soon, unless President Obama makes mescaline legal.  

(Drug legalization.  It's the Dom Com Boom of the Late Naughts, and just when we need one.  Just sayin', Barack.)

Debates are like eggnog. I suppose they have their attractions, and they're fine if you like that sort of thing, but there's no way in hell I'll ever trust the people who peddle the stuff. If you like eggnog, why aren't you drinking it in February? Why isn't it still in the stores? Don't say "because it's too rich to drink except as a holiday treat"; this was going on back when the standard breakfast was three eggs and a flitch of bacon. It's a goddam ritual is all, and its sole purpose, a vestigial organ surviving from the Nixon/Kennedy kickoff, is to engender gaffes. Consider that in all that time the one President who was said to have won the thing, rather than to have had his opponent lose it by glancing at his watch, forgetting where Poland was, or sporting a suit color some hack journalist said was gauche, was Ronald Fucking Reagan, and you don't have to share my opinion of what that got us to admit he's the only one we know of who swiped his opponent's briefs, before swiping the country's. For chrissakes, we wound up with George W. Bush, twice, after debate performances that resembled some high school thespian's assay of King Lear, and there was no shortage of pundits claiming he won, every time, including that first debate with Gore where he appeared to be drunk. If we want to reform the process, we...well, we could do anything; it can't get any worse, but if we really want to reform the process we can start with better coverage, and quit giving the upper hand to citizens who want to pay twenty-minutes attention to th' teevee before congratulating themselves for having penetrated to the heart of the process. 

Look at how last night's exercise became a test of whether Sarah Palin could do better than abysmal. Who thinks this way in real life? No one who doesn't have money riding on the outcome, for starters. I saw somewhere in one of the endless breathless lead-ins to the thing where someone said the night would answer the question of whether Palin had the "capacity to grow". What? If you hired someone to deliver pizzas, and he has a minor fender-bender his first night, you might think, well, mistakes happen. If you hand him his first order and he sticks the ignition key up his ass, starts making "vrumm vrumm" noises, and then crashes through your picture window, you are not going to say, "Well, maybe next week he'll remember to wear pants."

Did you happen to catch Jon Stewart's interview with Peggy Noonan Wednesday (it's here ) ? Or maybe "interview", since he seemed to start talking to himself early on? He seemed to suggest that he feels personally betrayed by John McCain--or maybe he meant by Obama too--for the trivial tone of the campaign. Then he launched into a denunciation of political weasel words, singling out--this is to Noonan, remember--McCain's promise to the RNC that he'd "appoint strict constructivist judges" instead of saying he wouldn't let queers marry or women choose abortions. Noonan, when she replies at all, just blathers inanities, or, in other words, went into the default non-partisan mode she switches to when yet another of her political pronouncements loses a fight with reality. It was surreal; I couldn't believe he'd be saying this stuff to Noonan, whose entire career is based on weaseling, and whose party affiliation, if not her very political consciousness, is based on forty years of Roe v. Wade Kung-fu. This is why you trusted McCain even after he hugged George Bush, Jon. These people are liars. They wouldn't be Republicans otherwise. There's no sense in looking for common ground with Peggy Noonan when she's spent thirty years tilting or shifting the ground as required for the smallest temporal advantage. If you really think endless replays of "Nixon-McGovern" are the problem here (won't someone, please, swipe his bedside copy of Nixonland already?) then look at who perpetrates this stuff. I'm no fan of the Democratic party, but its sins are a handful of sand blown in your face by a stray breeze, where the GOP's is the Indiana Dunes dumped in your shorts. I may be old and feeble-minded, but if you want our politics to be about issues then for my money George McGovern was the last major party candidate who campaigned on them, and the "conservatives" who tagged him with "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion" were the template for everything that's followed and which you're complaining about now. It's not this country's problem to bring Peggy Noonan closer to sanity; our problem is that Noonan and her ilk are out there screwing things up for everyone just so they can snatch a few purses in the confusion. Plow 'em under and sow the ground with salt, or get used to it. They refused to even acknowledge setbacks; they've learned nothing from abject disaster (see Palin, Sarah Louise, Wild Popularity of).

Please Stand By

I'M not sure what exactly happened to the page layout here.  I was just trying out a floating width scheme, or whatever you call it, and then the browser crashed, and the file with what I imagined to be the old saved template--which I had been led to believe I hadn't changed yet anyway--turned out to be some sort of Blade Runner fanboy scheme, and when I went to get rid of that it turned out that the most recent New and Improved Blogger wouldn't return me to the old, original template--minus my carefully considered color combinations--unless I signed on to the New and Improved Blogger, which process wipes out the rest of what formatting had survived to that point.  So now I'm just glad the thing is not in Hindi.  I guess I'll find the time to fix it sometime soon; I was previously engaged in trying to find out where all my winter clothing has gone since last winter, which you might figure could wait, but then I realize that if I stop it might be six weeks before I start up again, and you don't.  Meanwhile, I don't complain about every little inconvenience with Blogger--it's fuckin' free, dude--but for the life of me I can't understand why every time they execute another suite of Improvements, which always turn out to be somewhat short of Earth shaking, usually more like earth piling, one is forced to sign on, figure out where they've hidden the HTML this time, and change it all back again.  I know, I know:  I was educated in a previous century.  Back then, all the telephones were black, didn't buzz incessantly while you were trying to carry on a conversation, and your fellow citizens couldn't carry them into bookstores where the half of the conversation they subjected total strangers to, at volumes approaching those formerly reserved for calling lost animals, raised the question of what a complete illiterate was doing in a bookstore, anyway.

Let Us Now Stop Considering Sarah Palin

THE other day the bookselling guest on Colbert was Nick Carr,  who frankly came off as a scold, and impatient with his host's humor injections, perhaps because he's just written the Why Johnny Can't Read of the Google era, and without pausing to consider who'd read it.  It's interesting that most works in the genre come from men entering the second half of middle age, when the memory of how literacy was doomed, doomed! because of their own supposed addiction to teevee, radio, the talkies, the flickers, the flivver, or the penny dreadful has faded, to be replaced by a recognition of the illiterate superficiality and sexual attractiveness of Today's Youts. And so on. And I say this as an unfashionable admirer of Marshall McLuhan, if no partner to his sunny disposition; yes yes yes, media shapes the way we relate to the world and our information about it. God and fiefdom shaped the 14th century serf. What are we to do about it? In the short term, given free access to free information, it seems there will always be people who realize that knowledge is complex, pluralistic, and seldom, if ever, easily unearthed, just as there will be those who read Ayn Rand. Perhaps it's a good idea to look up from this IT shit every now and again, and take a gander at the people who actually produce information, rather than just shuffle it around. Have a look at the biologists and paleontologists who give of their free time to combat religion-borne illiteracy.  We are not in danger of the whole wide world becoming wikipedia-mired morons with five-second attention spans; we may be in some slight danger of all our morons becoming Google addicts. I'm not sure where the real threat is there. That they'll get tired of Britney Spears that much quicker?

Which brings us to Sarah Palin. The Hunter's Moon is still two weeks away, and she's already all but disappeared; her brief pre-debate return as Slate obsession--she'd been kicked below the electronic fold not only by the financial crises but also the difficulties in selecting the proper household paper shredder and the cultural imperative of buying a Blu-Ray player so you can see The Godfather like you've never seen it before! or, rather, like you haven't seen it twenty times before--has the unmistakable air of seasonal change, or the forced conviviality of a divorced couple at their child's piano recital. 

You can't blame this on short attention spans; if anything, coverage of the Palin candidacy has demonstrated the argument for cultivating one in the modern age. Consider that the only time the national debate even touched on the real issue of her candidacy was when Chuck Todd, Mike Murphy, and Peggy Noonan thought they were off-mike. It's not Repetitive Google Disease that makes people anticipate Tiny Fey's appearance on SNL. It's the truncated and trivialized nature of the "real" coverage. It's Maureen Dowd, asking a critic of her public buffoonery whether he thought she should stoop to writing about the tax code. It's the Times and the Post reducing national elections to horse racing tout sheets. It's people who only tell the truth when they think no one's listening. 

Okay, so it was partly ill-luck; Palin had become a tabloid story within hours of her nomination. But the problem there is that tabloid coverage itself then became a story, which it assuredly is not. We can talk about whether Bristol Palin's pregnancy is an issue, whether it reflects on her parents, says anything about the hypocrisy of the aggressively pious. We can laugh or scowl or believe every word the tabloids print, but we cannot exercise prior censorship and we cannot proclaim Bristol Palin exempt from Sullivan by virtue (pardon) of dewy whiteness and acute embarrassment, unless we'd like to admit the State of Alabama had a right to attempt to bankrupt the Civil Rights Movement via lawsuit. And, assuming we're all so goddam sensitive about it, maybe back when the President of the United States was being hamstrung over a blowjob would have been a good time to speak up.

But this was not the worst of it, nor the end of it; such things never are. It was followed, closely, by the fact that Palin's palid teleprompter reading to a roomful of GOP conventioneers was cheered wildly. This was news, I suppose, for a night, but it wound up being treated as a coup, and as something of an answer to the criticism she'd received. A group of people who had gathered, not simply because they shared an identification with a political party which faced a serious uphill climb to November's election, but because they were devoted enough to work for it, even volunteer to work for it, cheered a speech which had been professionally crafted to push their (remarkably accessible) buttons, and this was treated as though the issue was in doubt until all the whoopin' and hollerin' commenced. Like we were holding our collective breath waiting to see if they'd stone the vile strumpet or something.

But tell me I'm wrong. Can anyone point to a non-Lefty-blogosphere source which was still questioning the vetting of a backwoods councilwoman and religious crackpot by the following Friday? If so I missed it. By that weekend there was talk of the ticket's real identity being Palin/McCain. (And the people who said this still have jobs.)  She was traveling around on McCain's flying supertanker, delivering her red-meat Republican collection of Bart Simpsonesque catch phrases. Convention bounce! Moose carcass! GILF! 

Democrats sweating bullets! (Which they were, and which tells you too much about Democrats.) But then, as it sometimes does, the old pre-Google "reality" of rocks and air and plants and ideas came up and smacked what had been such a promising product rollout. The McCain campaign realized she'd need to speak in public at some point. I suppose it's heartening to consider that they still, in 2008, thought this might be something of a problem, seeing as how inarticulate dunderhead had been testing well with Republican focus groups until recently. They tried to take her off the market just when T-shirt sales were really cranking, and when they brought her back she was no better, and some of her savvier fanboys noticed she appeared to be lip-syncing. 

Look, inarticulacy is not a crime; lots of people are petrified at the mere thought of public speaking, though few if any of them have degrees in communications from Nearly Random Series of Exit Ramps Community College ("Home of the Lodgers"). But vetting someone who makes George W. Bush look scholarly is. How'd we lose track of that for three weeks, and why did it take not one but two national interviews so utterly embarrassing that the birth of Bristol Palin's first or second child won't make the papers unless the head in the middle is black? * Lack of public speaking acumen is unfortunate in a political candidate when politics presumably still selects for it, but are we supposed to be surprised that Palin turns out to be incurious, ill-informed, and, by all appearances, convinced by a half-lifetime's experience and God's Special Providence that she can simply bull her way through either? Because maybe we should have taken a little closer look at Ronald Reagan's MO, huh? Even though it was hard to see through all the confetti. It's the soft bigotry of Jesus Praisin', Gun Totin', and Tax Cuttin'. Look at the people they've nominated to lead their tickets over the past thirty years. The smartest guy was the one who used to be a football player, and he turned out to be the only man in America who didn't get the Supply Side Economics joke. Fer chrissakes, John McCain had to shed 10 IQ points just to get the nomination. Doesn't anybody in the national Press read The Corner?

The lovely and talented s.z. brings us Palin's recent "interview" with Hugh Hewitt, in which the erstwhile pitbull with cosmetics rebrands herself as the candidate of all Unthinking Americans, not only aligning herself with Joe Six-Pack, but doing so twice in consecutive sentences, in case Joe's train of thought was derailed in a collision with the intervening predicate. There's not even any pretense anymore that she's running for an office serving all Americans. I remind you, Good Reader, that the Democratic candidate for President was roundly criticized for having attended the sort of church where an African-American preacher spoke like an African-American preacher, while Palin is yet celebrated for the seeming congruence of her mental landscape and the surrounding tundra, which few "normal" Americans will ever see, six-pack or no.

So forgive me for not liveblogging the Veep debate, or even watching it. The AP tells me that Palin has an opportunity to "restore her luster" tonight. If reporters are still being paid to say stupid shit like that short-term memory loss doesn't seem half bad, and transient memory eradication by intoxicant seems like a damn fine programming alternative.

_________

* My friend Gary's joke.

So, We're A Blind, Pitiful Giant Hamstrung By Religious Zealots And An Illiterate Peasantry? And This Is News?

David Brooks, "Revolt of the Nihilists". September 29

What we need in this situation is authority. Not heavy-handed government regulation, but the steady and powerful hand of some public institutions that can guard against the corrupting influences of sloppy money and then prevent destructive contagions when the credit dries up.

--David Brooks, September 29, 2008

[W]hy oh why can't we have a decent overclass in this country — a group of highly attractive dimwits who spread bland but worthy stability over our political scene.

--David Brooks, January 4, 2007 [punctuation in original]

BEFORE we begin today's thoughts on the search for human happiness and revenge, I was taken to task yesterday (privately) for saying we were spending $1 trillion a year in Iraq, on the highly sensible grounds that the Bush administration was quite awful enough without exaggeration. Well, sadly, the exaggeration was intentional, and the fault not in my lack of familiarity with the sort of numbers bandied about by people who don't know, but who know more than I do, but, rather, in my assumption that no one would ever take anything reported in this blog as factual, or as mattering one way or the other. But point taken, with thanks. In my defense, not that I'm mounting one, it felt good typing it, and Ben Stein, et. al., would have gladly spent $1 trillion/year in Iraq, or five times that, to appease the bloodroar in their own ears. It's a blank-check war. It's still being funded by emergency suppliments, where now "emergency" is clearly understood as denoting the distinction between the Iraq war and sensible, responsible, legal action.

Well now. If  Stein was given a guest slot on the Times Op-Ed pages last weekend to rail at the brigands who'd demonstrated that brigandage was not a reductio ad absurdum of Reaganfriedmanomics, but rather an essential and ineluctable component, Brooks cranks open the awning of his punditological kiosk to moan about leadership. If we chide Stein for showing up late to the banquet, then grousing loudly because the waiters cut off liquor service to the fallingdown drunks on his side of the table, what do we say when Brooks decides to crawl under the table? Leadership? Now you want leadership?

House leaders of both parties got wrapped up in their own negotiations, but did it occur to any of them that it might be hard to pass a bill fairly described as a bailout to Wall Street? Was the media darling Barney Frank too busy to notice the 95 Democrats who opposed his bill? Pelosi’s fiery speech at the crucial moment didn’t actually kill this bill, but did she have to act like a Democratic fund-raiser at the most important moment of her career?

OMG Exclamation Point. Nancy Pelosi, the Human Fucking Torch. Barney Frank, Media Darling (and, I guess coincidentally, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, which apparently is not sufficient reason for anyone to stick a microphone in his face during a crisis in financial services). I doubt it's Frank's job to personally count votes in his own committee, let alone the entire House. He crafted compromise legislation--twice, thanks to John McCain--that many people thought was the best we were going to get given the requirement of bipartisan passage a month before national elections. There's a huge seething anger in the country over this, and rightly so. That was reflected in the vote. And rightly so. I'm not sure what Barney Frank or Nancy Pelosi were supposed to do about that, but a) not speak to the Press or b) not criticize the people and the party responsible for this mess, lest David Brooks' feelings get hurt, are not two good options.

Leave us note the sort of bonhomie offered Democrats in the pages of the Weekly Standard after they stood behind an unelected moron-in-chief post-9/11. Did it last two weeks? What sort of honesty have the last three Democratic Presidential nominees received from Brooks? Democrats sought bipartisan support for a bill which was a vast improvement over the Acting President's demand for a blank check and a Get Out Of Jail Free card. Why shouldn't they? They're not going to get any cover from David Brooks. Suppose at this point they decided to pass a bill with only Democratic support. Suppose they decided to try what appears to be the most sensible solution--temporary nationalization on the Swedish model. How much support do they get from David Brooks? How long before he uses the word "Socialism" in a column?

I’ve spoken with several House Republicans over the past few days and most admirably believe in free-market principles. What’s sad is that they still think it’s 1984. They still think the biggest threat comes from socialism and Walter Mondale liberalism. They seem not to have noticed how global capital flows have transformed our political economy.

Yeah, thank god we narrowly averted that socialist takeover in 1984. Too bad "free-market principles" turned out to be a much greater threat. How, exactly, do you call them "admirable" at this point?

For that matter, how does one come to term the opponents of yesterday's bailout measure "nihilists"? It's long been clear that something was amiss in Brooks' cerebral cortex, or in his moral code; the histrionic appeals to Burke and Hayek were either further evidence, where none was needed, of his willingness to say anything that furthered his party's intentions, or of a massive intellectual bald spot of the sort most people his age have learned to throw a rug over. He answered the question for all time recently, when he quoted Meganjane McArdle-Galt as an authority on something other than the drink preferences of the rest of her Atlantic daycare companions. Fer chrissakes, Nihilism not only has two very specific meanings, one philosophical and one political, but the Latin derivation couldn't be fucking plainer, could it? We're fond of noting that words make poor cudgels, but is it necessary to add that undiscriminating spitball petulance makes an even sorrier defense? Republicans were principled free-marketeers when they, heavy-hearted and copiously tearful, voted to keep healthcare unaffordable for 40% of the public, but they're bomb-hurling anarchists when they refuse to rescue Brooks' portfolio.  By dint of an unfortunate geographical choice I made years ago, yesterday  I had to listen to Rep. Mike "Choir Boy" Pence on all three local newscasts, as though his position as GOP mouthpiece meant he must have something worthwhile to say. And twice I listened to him "explain" that we needed to "unleash the entrepreneurial spirit" of the US of A, as though the problem with the financial sector was there wasn't enough profit in it, as though if we'd just eliminate whatever regulations are still on the books, however much they'd been ignored, people across the country would open financial institutions in their garages, breezeways, and unused attic spaces; as though Mike Pence hadn't been in Congress all the while this shit was going on. (I heard him twice because the third time he turned up I grabbed the remote from my Poor Wife, who is more and more subject to periodic fits of stunning while the "news" is on.) And still, and all: at least Mike Pence is an honest tool, not like the hypocrites whose Road to Damascus moment took place at a Milton Friedman lecture, and whose sudden reconversion to Big Government Liberal they think accords them first place in the bread line.

Where's Ben Stein's Money?

Ben Stein, "In Financial Food Chains, Little Guys Can't Win". September 27

I GOTTA tell ya, I kept waiting for the other shoe to fall here, and it never did. Stein savages Paulson. Okay, fine, easy enough to blame Paulson when he's there to take the heat from your man anyway, this one:

By a great providence, we were sent George Bush.

--Ben Stein, August 18, 2005

surely he'll be getting to why the Democrats are twenty times worse in a couple paragraphs here, how it was actually Jimmy Carter who started this deregulation madness, and...what? 

First, I am furious at what the traders, speculators, hedge funds and the government have done to everyone who is saving and investing for retirement and future security.

Really. It's like Eldridge Cleaver turning into a born-again Christian, or a Republican or something. Oh, wait.

Anyway, this goes on until he starts back in on Paulson again. The other shoe hung in the air for 1200 words. All the more remarkable if you recall Stein as one of the economic Republicans who championed his party's response to Schiavo, instead of pretending he'd never seen a religious nut in party uniform before. 

I guess every man has his breaking point; I guess you know Ben Stein's has been reached when he starts babbling about farmers. It's not our intention to mock, really; for once we're willing to accept a political mea culpa, offered by someone trapped by the collapse of his own unregulated roof, at something close to face value, even if it is a little short on the mea, and to regard a post-coital apology to the pooch as reasonably sincere. We'll gladly accept any Reaganaut admission that the great god Deregulation and his handmaidens, Cupidity, Venality, and Graft, plus the Old Boy Network Chorus, are to blame, however tepid, however couched.

But...however belated? I don't think so. Those honest little people Stein now lionizes have been taking it in the shorts for thirty years now, thanks mostly to the sort of laissez-faire, Social Darwinist capitalism he and his party have been urging on us. So now unregulated credit-default swaps and other derivatives are just a big crap shoot? Was it farmers and school teachers and factory workers who were snapping them up? This sort of thing only becomes serious enough to publicly criticize when it threatens to take down the honest wealthy--those, that is, who merely benefited from the system being gamed in their favor for three decades.

So, fine, fine, Ben Stein, but here's the deal: you and your ilk stay out of it now and let other people try to clean it up. Stop donating money to anti-Socialist crankpots [more typing serendipity, Reader] and Professional Hoosier Choir Boys who'd rather risk their districts being plunged into severe depression than admit the tiniest flaw in their Divinely-inspired economic beliefs. The bill's come due for all this shit, and it comes on top of $1 trillion a year wasted in Iraq, for five years and counting. You urged it on us; your people were in charge. Yes, honest people are going to take the hit, but then a goodly percent of them are culpable for having bought into this shit, for having sold their birthright in the "election" of 2000, having bought the same batch of snake oil all over again in 2004, and having stood by as government officials and corporate war profiteers--often one and the same--baldly stole what was left. Belated outrage is welcome; feigned shock is not. Be thankful there aren't gibbets being erected outside every financial institution in the country, and don't count that out just yet. There's a bill coming due beyond what's happened to your portfolio, or mine. If it does not yet single out the people who've benefitted from this massive Ponzi scheme, whatever their degree of guilt, then it will be followed by another, larger one, and the Republicans will envy the dead.

I Believe We've Been Over This Once Before

Bill Bishop "Why No One Trusts the Government to Fix Things Anymore". September 25

JON Stewart, god bless and keep 'im, did it the other day, talking with Bill Clinton, echoing one of Colbert's "The Word" bits from a week before: "does it surprise you that, with everything at stake, this campaign takes us back to 1968 and Nixonian versus McGovern [sic] culture divide--it's once again the Left demonizing the Right for narrow-mindedness, and the Right demonizing the Left for elitism, and it almost seems like a repeat of this same movie that we keep seeing..."

Was that just a slip, or a telling one? Obviously, Jon Stewart knows George McGovern ran in 1972. But the metaphorical George McGovern=Woodstock Nation=Culture War, and now=Nixonland, among the cognoscenti who didn't live through him, apparently. I do understand the frustration. I came close to throwing my vote away on John Anderson in 1980, before throwing it away on Barry Commoner. Anderson's all but forgotten now (in the same way Carter is now viewed as a Liberal), but he was the post-partisanship, change-the-tone-in-Washington candidate when that meant accepting the realities of Vietnam instead of re-writing them, acknowledging energy dependence and beginning the process of developing new technologies to reduce it, and fiscal conservatism coupled with social liberalism. He polled as high as 25% as an independent, but his 50¢/gal Federal gas tax proposal went over like Chuck D. at a Klan rally, and he wound up with less than 10% of the vote.

Maybe it's just me, but where I understood post-partisanship in those days, in the need to recognize new social realities as well as new economic and global ones, I'm not sure what Stewart's after today. A more respectful tone in our campaigning? His friend John McCain certainly has done his level best to prevent that. If we want campaigns to be about issues, we need to get the money out of them, shorten the process to the point where there's no time to talk about anything else (I'm not saying this would work, mind you), and dismantle the Electoral College. Then it wouldn't hurt to do away with faux-balance news, restore the Fairness Doctrine, and maybe find a citizenry less enamored of hidden larceny. In the end, would we have a politics much removed from today's? Or would it just be, mercifully, somewhat quieter? It's like Voltaire's Prayer; everybody thinks the key to reforming our politics lies in his opponents getting smarter.

And still I don't get the McGovern thing. How does that come to be "one side" of the Cultural War? Y'know, Jon Stewart gets a lot of milage out of saying f[bleeeeeep]k on teevee, and I'm sure he realizes that a generation ago he'd have been sharing a cell with Lenny Bruce. And if he ever finds himself trying to take a shit while perched two inches above a metal rim, it's going to be the American Right that put him there. I'm not saying that's likely to happen; the modern GOP allegiance is to Mammon, but they're still the ones grubbing for the extreme end of the Bronze Age Superstition vote. Why shouldn't I take them seriously? Paganism is the fastest-growing religion in the country, but my Indiana tax dollars don't go to producing In The Goddess We Trust license plates, and no one's been trying to erect a pentagram on the courthouse lawn hereabouts--except, maybe, as a response to Christianists doing so first. There aren't any organized gangs trying to harass pregnant teenagers into getting abortions. I don't see anybody handing out flaming American flags on a downtown corner. There wasn't a giant card on display at Lowe's back in 2003, urging the citizenry to announce We Don't Support the Troops. Yeah, I'm a partisan, because I believe these people are wrong, wrong factually and wrong about America, and because I believe this country was hijacked at the end of the Second World War by, for want of a better term, the military-industrial complex, later joined by Big Bidness in general, aided and abetted, as always, by organized religion, and that this has had the effect of perverting what few chances a highly-flawed species has been given, by technology, by the hard-won lessons of two world wars and a history of oppression and genocide, to live up to its better nature. Maybe Slate can explain where I've gone wrong:

In the late 1950s, eight out of 10 Americans said they could trust government to do the right thing most of the time. That level of faith in government remained high through 1964 and provided the foundation for LBJ's Great Society. In 1965, Johnson was able to pass the Voting Rights Act and Medicare (with the support of half the Republicans in the Senate). He created the Appalachian Regional Commission and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. The first class of children enrolled in Head Start.

That's what a president and Congress could do when voters trusted government.

Beginning in the mid-'60s, however, there was a "virtual explosion in anti-government feelings," wrote Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider. (Yep, CNN's Bill Schneider began life as a top-notch academic.) The decline in trust was "among the largest ever recorded in opinion surveys," one scholar wrote, and within a few years only one out of four Americans trusted government to do the right thing. Democrats lost the 1966 midterm elections, the Great Society was kaput, and Congress' dormant period had begun.

Hold up here a moment; I believe we've been over this before. The "Fifties" do not represent the last stroll down the Permanent Elm Street of American political consciousness before it was ripped up by the Evil Sixties Planning Commission and rerouted through colored neighborhoods. In the Fifties two generations of Americans who had either lived through, or had their lives profoundly influenced by the unspeakable horrors of two global wars, sandwiched around probably the largest economic downturn in our history (we can't really be sure about the size or effect of the various "Panics" of the 19th century) had a strong desire to return to "normalcy" and, assuming they were mostly white, and mostly Protestant, they mostly got it. Eight of ten may have told pollsters they trusted the government to do right; no doubt nearly as many believed the International Communist Conspiracy was about to take over Hollywood, that Science was just about to harness the Atom for Peaceful Purposes, that the US wanted to explore Space for the good of mankind, that the Weaker Sex couldn't drive a car or pick out a hat that didn't look ridiculous, that Negroes weren't very bright, that homosexuals were the Commies of sexuality, and that Milton Berle was funny. They were wrong.

And--we've said this before, too--the Fifties gave birth to Feminism, to environmentalism, to a Civil Rights movement that rejected quietism. It struck the first blows at censorship of film and printed material. It launched a crusade against the Tobacco industry, rejected the old stigmas about divorce, and, for that matter, saw the birth of modern Movement "Conservatism", which now, somehow, is allowed to portray itself as the defender and political heir of that monolithic and economically rewarding era. 

There are plenty of reasons why distrust of institutions became a more prevalent mindset in the 1960s: Silent Spring, Thalidomide, Minamata, the professional abuse of the mentally ill, destroying villages in order to save them. If governments lost the trust of the people in the 1960s it's not because people suddenly changed; it's because the powers that be got caught up in their lies. Hell, Chaucer considered that old hat.

So, we've muddled along, putting off problems (health care, immigration, whatever).

Yeah, whatevs, dude. Y'know, if you really mean to equate the concerted effort on the part of the Republican party, the health-care industry, and the insurance companies to make your health care the most expensive in the world, and maybe the forty-ninth most effective, with an argument over immigration maybe those square-framed glasses and bed head won't get you into Heaven anymore.

Christ, look, the reason why you can't get a new Head Start program, or a massive influx of money  into the public schools to match the rhetoric we already spend by the tankerload, isn't that people imagine government can do no good.  It's that there's a concerted effort to prevent social spending, read: on poor people, read: on the coloreds.  That's not a debate; it's the result of one side controlling the issue.  Even when it gained control of the issue, and decided to make hay by using, instead of trying to dismantle, the Department of Education, the GOP refused to cough up any money to go along with it.

Now we need government again. We can't do without it. But we've forgotten what it was like to trust government to take on exactly the kind of big job it was created to do.

If you're all so goddam convinced that we "need" to trust government again--where you been up to now, by the way?--then work to throw the lyin' bums out. But you're not exempt from the responsibility of saying exactly what you intend to replace them with. "Restoring the Fifties, except with bigger teevees"* ain't it. 

___________

*Yes, indeedy, Bishop talks about our papering over our problems with Game Boys and HDTVs, as opposed to facing them. Chin music. It's an easy target; trust me, I shoot at 'em all the time. The Fifties were every bit as escapist as the Naughts are. If we seem to be in perpetual legislative gridlock (which is, in fact, partly the design of the system) it has a helluva lot more to do with the massive application of money to the process by financially interested parties than it does the attention span of the American voter. Take that on, Trust boy.

No, Just Spots.

(Via  Kevin Drum, who's doing a good job at Mother Jones.)

BY the way, I don't suppose I'm the first to note this recently, but since the takeover of the GOP by the Goldwaterites, every Republican administration has ended in recession, and connected to a major bailout.

GOP Realizes Long-Term Goal Of Reversing Roosevelt Administration: Loses War, Creates Depression

Hey, look! Oktoberfest!

(essence of Oktoberfest from farbfilm)

I BEEN busy. I been the kind of busy that's already busy when it has two big projects dumped on it with less than twelve-hours' notice, resulting in yesterday's first-ever un-proofread (no, it's true!) posting, and, mostly, leaving out my central thesis, which was that if you wanna talk about Irrational Bush Hatred, start talking about the millions of Extrapolated Americans who used to cheer for this guy and now think he's a bum. If a Foolish Consistency really is the hobgoblin of little minds America can rest easy on the Hobgoblin Problem, and maybe go straight to work on the microencephally thing.

I did find the time to watch all of Chimpy McDisaster's Address to the Chumps last night--a first for me since 9/11, or 9/12, or whenever it was he actually poked his head above the desk he was hiding under and smirked at the adoring throngs. In fact, I was hoping he'd reach for that bullhorn again, but no such luck; the first casualty in these sorts of things is always the phony iconography that used to wow 'em in the Sticks.

And now I'm sorry that I didn't have the constitution (sorry) to endure any of his other speeches, since there was a definite Zen quality I'll forever wonder if I missed all along: I didn't know anything about economics before his speech, and now that it's all been explained to me, I don't know anything about economics. For instance, I'm a little unclear about how the people who applied for the loans they later defaulted on helped create the problem when, y'know, the lender wound up with the property, plus everything that had been paid on it to that point. Seems to me there was something, I dunno, missing in the middle there.

We have a mortgage. Back when it was formulated, I'm pretty sure whoever did it understood a) compound interest and b) return on investment. And even though we used a mortgage broker, and thus had a professional working to get us the best deal, my distinct impression at the time was that the Lender had the Upper Hand. I'm pretty sure they didn't single us out to pay off substantial chunks of interest first, before they applied any payments to the principle. And yet our mortgage was sold twice in its early days. That is, they made a deal for what was, ostensibly anyway, a reasonable rate of return, and then they decided they wanted their money back. And this is not Pete down the Street selling to Joe from Kokomo; it's major banks and lending institutions, and presumably they were not caught short by child support payments or laid up with a bad back.

Again, they didn't single us out; they were churning this shit. Maybe it's economically defensible to have these sorts of secondary markets in play, but does it make $1 trillion worth of sense? The value of the loan didn't change, while, if anything, our credit rating went up. The only thing the game was taking notice of was macroeconomic trends. Supposing this was actually guarding against something, other than boredom on the part of financial industry brigands, it doesn't seem to have done a very good job.

Now, all I know about economics is what Simian McPretzelchoker taught me last night, but, again, my wife and I need to pony up $5500, with no security, in order to assure somebody'll loan us money for a new car? Thanks, I'd just as soon walk. Seems like Lowe's is still taking my credit card; when they stop I'll start watching paint peel. I'll live on ketchup soup and iodine-flavored creek water. It seems to me it's the wealthy fuckers who are running scared (since when does the G notice anyone else?).  So why do they get to dictate the terms of the surrender? So small businesses won't be able to borrow money to expand. Maybe they shouldn't be expanding if they can't finance it themselves. Thing is, this business of holding jobs and economic expansion over the heads of the American people ought to have been laughed off the screen before the man finished a sentence. (Well, in truth, we should have lined him up against a wall in 2004 sometime--that's allowing for consensus, not my personal opinion--but laughing it off seems the next best thing.) What th' fuck has economic development done for the average American over the past thirty years? Sure, an economic downturn is painful--it's already been, since this current bunch took office. Just as it was throughout the 70s, and when the bill came due for Reaganomics.   It's also painful getting fucked over by the money interests when Times are Good.  It's painful to pay my health insurance every month.  So at this point I'm willing to bet they blink first.  $2500 apiece--for this deal, not counting the rest of it--or else they're gonna do what? Delay the next iPhone? Close a Wal*Mart?  Fuck it--let's go all in. Show the fuckin' cards, dicks, or eat your loss.  This is what the Republican party has had us dancing on the brink of for three decades, and now Mike Fuckin' Pence gets to go on FAUX and say Wait, we need to be intellectually pure. Where was the fucking concern while all this was going on? Nobody sold this shit as a devotion to intellectual purity; it was the Cure-All, the Shining Light on the Hill, Fuckin' Daybreak in Fuckin' America. And it turned out to be a cover for the most massive criminal operation in history. Wow, nobody saw that comin', huh?

Really, in a country dominated politically by people who claim a 2000-year-old reanimated carpenter watches them go to the bathroom, wouldn't you think superstition alone would be enough to make people run from anything that George W. Bush proposed, at this point?

My favorite moment in the whole Pooches Were Screwed routine was the bit about the poor 21st century being regulated by the outmoded regulatory systems of the 20th. George W. Fucking Buck Rogers Bush. It's what's left of the sensible first-half of the 20th century regulatory structure that saved us, to whatever extent it did, from the rapine of the late-20th-century deregulators.

I was driving home from one of my enforced errands yesterday afternoon when I happened to yank the Wailin' Jennys CD and turn on NPR, just in time to hear Urban Bäckström, the former governor of the Swedish Central Bank in the 1990s, when they recovered from a banking crisis brought on by intemperate deregulation. Asked how they'd solved the problem, Bäckström said they'd looked, above all, to 1933 for inspiration. (He had to explain to the host, whose name escapes me, that yes, while the Wall Street crash was in 1929, it was left to the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which occurred in 1933, to begin the solution. Perhaps it's too much, expecting Americans to solve their current problems when it takes Scandinavians to explain their history to them.  Pass the ketchup.)

Irrational Bush Hatred Watch

HE'S at 19%, and 17% on the economy. He has to look up to to see Nixon's ass.

My Poor Wife has to listen to this every night, though it's her fault for turning on the local "news": ever since the teleprompter readers, and, especially, their bosses, started getting a little pinched when they filled up the family Panzer, which translated into their deciding that "regular" people, the ones not located on the police blotter, might be feeling the pinch, too, in their own, regular little way, which means sending "field" "reporters" around the region to stick microphones in the faces of Hoosiers for the purpose of getting the Real Poop. And I always say the same thing (well, "say" is a bit mild there):

Who th' fuck'd you vote for?

Really.

What did you think you were ("re-")electing?

Look at the graph. Bush's approval ratings plunged in September 2004, and then rose just enough to put him back in charge.

Who are you people? Does it ever occur to you that your real civic duty is to avoid voting?

Mayor Gomer got his first budget passed Monday night. The street hairdos on whatever channel my wife had temporarily lighted upon couldn't find a single person who'd admit to knowing anything whatsoever about it. This is, presumably, the same group that was so outraged about the budget last year they threw out a popular Demopublican mayor in favor of a guy whose name they didn't know. And the 6% option tax they were irate about last year--proposed, and enacted, in order to recruit more police--remains, but now without the police part.

And yet, people can still breed without a license. It seems to me our one great hope, currently, the one shining light, is that they're all avoiding routine immunization on the basis of something someone else told them they read somewhere.

Economics Blegging

I'M thinking of writing a book. After reading the Amity Shlaes Rapid Response Team's reply to Roy I decided it was irresponsible not to.

And, as I've said, I know nothing about the subject, but I figure you must. So, a few questions:

1. I notice this is all still Jimmy Carter's fault. Does Economics time limit to such things? Is it measured in generations, or the movement of tectonic plates? Does it stop once Modern English has become what Chaucer is today, when "Jimmy Carter" looks like "Scyld Scefing "?

2. Wasn't Social Security in crisis just a few months ago? 

3. Similarly, that drawer with a piece of paper in it, the one which was the actual Holy of Holies of Social Security? If the Bush administration had managed to "privatize" the system, how long before it would turn up on eBay? Would the paper still be inside, or listed separately?

4. Does Jonah Goldberg save his really stupid shit for Fridays? Like the government does?

4a. Nobody should go to jail? Didn't countless accountants, CFOs, and CEOs sign off on information which was quite possibly fraudulent? Or do they keep that stuff in condoms, under their tongues, and ready to swallow? Whatever happened to that good ol' Right Wing Lawn Order stuff? File some RICO charges and we get to confiscate everything, right? We'll be Budget Surplussin' like it's 1999.

5. The one piece of economic advice I ever listened to in my life was the idea of husbanding wealth, erring on the side of conservatism, without the quotation marks, managing risk wisely, and never trusting the big, flashy score. Is that properly spelled "Sucker" or "Sucka"?