Short subjects

Cruz

Don't worry about Ted Cruz ever becoming your president.  Just look at him.  He was the kind of kid who got jammed into his locker over and over, and was voted "biggest brown-noser" in his high school yearbook.  Yesterday and today, he was brown-nosing the Tea Party idiots with his idiotically long speech that was not a "Mr. Smith" filibuster.

Personally, I'm not really sure the ACA will work.  The probable premiums released by the exec today seem kind of high to me.  Really, we need single payer — and Obama, as we've observed, is not on board.

Dilma

How happy I am with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff!  She basically ripped Our President a new asshole.

I recently finished Mark Leibovich's "This Town," a book that helps you understand how it doesn't much matter who allegedly is "in control," but how the "Club" remains in control no matter what you think.

I guess the NSA will have to find ways to invade our privacy without leaving tracks.  Fuck them all.  Fuck the NSA, fuck Obama, and viva Dilma!

Iran

As you know, I couldn't care less whether or not Iran gets the bomb.  Being of a certain age, I tend to believe in MAD (mutually assured destruction).  If the Iranians are willing to limit their nuclear enrichment programs to ease the US led sanctions that are destroying their economy and their currency, that's fine too, of course.

US officials like to say that "humanitarian" goods like medicines are not blocked, but that's actually not true.  Since Iran has little or no access to foreign currencies now, it is unable to buy such goods abroad.

The "Train Wreck"

John Boehner really, really, really wants to keep his job as Speaker.  He's not stupid, and I'm sure he doesn't want to shut down the government, but he had to go along with the radical crazies in his caucus for fear of losing his job.  That's why he supported the House bill to defund Obamacare, referring to the ACA as a "train wreck."

The real train wreck will come at the end of the month, when government shuts down.  Unlike the catastrophic Congress Clinton had to deal with back in the nineties, which had enacted a fair number of appropriations bills before digging in its heels, the current Congress had not passed any appropriations bills at all.

Not long after, of course, we come up against the debt ceiling.  Will the crazies carry through on their threat to let the USofA default on its debts?  Are they really that crazy?

I guess all we can do is wait and see.

Summers drops out! Hooray!

Just this morning, I sent a message to Chuck Schumer, reminding him that Larry Summers bore significant responsibility for the crisis of 2008.  Summers was one of the great champions of bank deregulation during the Clinton administration, and we all know where that got us.

Thanks to a few Democratic senators not attached by an umbilicus to Wall Street (Schumer not among them), it seems Larry got a little nervous.  He's not accustomed to rejection, and doesn't handle it well.  Anyway, I'm especially glad the next Fed chair is likely to be Janet Yellen.  According to Larry, girls don't do math.

If Barack picks that other "potential," whose name I can't remember now, I hope Michelle gets Barack alone in some remote room in the White House (the Fillmore room?) and beats his ass.  I don't support Yellen because she's a woman, but because she will provide the kind of continuity we need to get out of our current mess.  I hope she will lead in establishing some regulations Bernanke thought were out of reach, without throwing everything out of kilter.

Can the Fed address income inequality?  Really, I don't see how.  That's Congress's job, and the "People's House," like the people, are mostly assholes.  (By the way, the three most assaholic members of the House were in Egypt last week, blaming the Muslim Brotherhood for 9/11.  The people who vote for Louie Gohmert, Michelle Bachman, and Steven King, in my opinion, are excellent arguments against representative democracy.)

The Putin Editorial

I don't have a clue who wrote the Putin editorial in today's Times, but whoever it was did a great job.  The editorial stresses the importance of the UN Security Council — because that is where Russia still enjoys real (veto) power — but that is easy enough to get past.

True, as "Putin" said, a USofA attack on Syria would violate international law.  That, of course, never stopped us before, at least since the Reagan invasion of Grenada.  Well, we can forget most of it.  Let's just get on to the good part.

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.  There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy.  Their policies differ too.

(I left out the part about "the Lord's blessings," and how "God created us equal."  Coming from the alleged Putin, you know that's pure bullshit.)

Anyway, we're not "exceptional," except, if by "exceptional," you mean exceptionally under the thumbs of the military-industrial and finance industries.  Americans should just stop feeling so goddamned "exceptional," because we're just the same stupid grunts who live everywhere else.

Stuff

Latest NSA revelations

Today's Times article, published despite NSA objections, confirms many more of our "paranoia is heightened awareness" suspicions.  I think it was especially interesting that Our Government coerced some companies into installing backdoors in their privacy software.  I'm pretty sure that GnuPG encryption still is safe, though, and it's not as hard to use as some would have you believe.  Anyway, if you want to discuss your secret terrorist plans without NSA interference, try it — but remember to do your composition and encryption offline, and to securely delete your original before you go back online.  Your hardware might be hacked.

Obama and Syria

It seems Our President did not have much success lining up support for his proposed attack on Syria at the G-20, and he's having even less success at home.  Americans, you see, are just not into it, and the ones against it for reasons more substantial than just hating Obama have some questions to ask, like, what if you bomb them now and they do it again later?  What if you make it easier for Al Nusra to come out on top?  What makes you think that sending missiles against Syria will have any impact at all on Iran, except to make nuclear negotiations more difficult for Hassan Rowhani?  Let's hope Congress, for whatever stupid reasons, says no.

Jobs

The unemployment rate is down to 7.3%, almost entirely because the labor-force participation rate is so low.  The new jobs being "created" by the "job creators" are nearly all "McJobs," and median family income remains roughly $4000 less than it was in 2008.  Sadly, the government we have is not going to do anything about it.  Some people just have too much goddamned money, and much too much of it goes to 501(c)(4)s, and from there to our "representatives" in Congress.