Rudy has failed

Boy’s got no stomach for a fight. Remember how he bailed out of battling Clinton for the US Senate seat? A gutless wonder, buoyed by the shouts of the mob, hoping to be put on the balcony by acclaim. But the mob is fickle… after all, who was the last Catholic Italian American nominated for President by the GOP? Or even broader, the last white ethnic? Um, have they ever? But don’t cry for Rudy, he'll go back to exploiting the dead of 9/11 with his whorish consulting firm, enriching himself and his cronies by bilking the gullible. Tonight, he's said to begin licking McCain's ass, building those bridges to suck up those national security contracts. Soon after, he'll trade in his latest wife for a new model.

In reviewing 4 Monthes, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the new film about a woman trying to get an illegal abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania, Hoberman nails Waitress, Knocked Up, & Juno as movies which present women as being without agency, as being fated to give birth after unwanted pregnancies. Acts of “God,” you might say, or “nature,” or in Waitress, brutal spouses. The endless drumming from America’s Taliban, who use the Orwellian phrase “pro-life” to describe their fundamentalist/misogynistic/anti-sex/anti-contraception agenda, has mostly drowned out the reasons why reproductive freedom is such a touchstone for women’s liberation. But not all of us have forgotten, and as cute as Ellen Page is, I’m not buying the sugarcoated fantasies of the patriarchs, fascists, fetus-fetishists, and priest-mullahs. The dictatorship of "God/nature/men" looks like this: half a million Romanian women are estimated to have died from botched abortions between 1966-89, and the infamous orphanages were overflowing hellholes.

Go-go

Wooo-wee! The hysterics running the markets, that o-so-rational beast, are frothing at the mouth after a bomb run of a Monday in the international gambling pits. “Wall Street” is yo-yoing after a Fed rescue mission; must be those damn unflattering smocks they are forced to wear on the floor.

This traitor-to-his-class has a great piece in Harper’s on our bubble economy. Others call it casino economy, gambling nation, or lottery fantasyland, but whatever you want to call it, it’s all about speculation and the hysteria of mobs. That is our only growth mechanism. Janszen breaks down the internet bubble (glory days!), the bursting-as-we-type housing bubble, and wonders what’s next. The alternative energy market!

Cloned fecal-meat product, yum!

The industry-friendly (if not industry-enslaved) FDA claims cloned animals are the same eatin’ as natural animals. In way, they’re right: the stuff is as tasteless, poisoned, and nasty as the shit that already comes from the industrial food complex. It’s not meat anymore and hasn’t been for ages; it’s meat-like product.

Cloning is a form of in-breeding; it defeats of the genetic point of reproduction, which is to mix genes and throw a new toss of the dice into the evolutionary gamble. Cloning thus reproduces the errors, breakdowns, and corruptions of the past. Of course, it’s inevitable that h. sapiens will be cloned. All is vanity, after all. People are going to be surprised how different these clones turn out to be from their models, though. “From fairest creatures we desire increase,/That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,/But as the riper should by time decrease,/His tender heir might bear his memory;" (W. Shakespeare, Sonnet 1)

Michigan

Man, isn’t the economy talk from the GOPpers in Michigan sickening? This is the party that has led (and make the mistake, the Democrats have followed) the assault on the working class and the undermining of the middle class; this is the party of oligarchy, of heredity elites, of channeling money to the top. This is the party that has looted the commonwealth and gutted our health, welfare, and environmental safe-guards. Sure, the GOP’s numbers come from cannon fodder among the proletariat and the white ethnic working class, but that’s because they’ve been suckered by the god-talk and the covert race talk. God-damned fools keep voting against their interests; perhaps one day they will realize you can’t eat culture or the Bible.

And what's up with the Democrats in Michigan? The national party got pissy (and suicidal) because the state wanted to move up their primary and "threaten" the nonsense of Iowa and New Hampshire; so the bosses stripped the state of its delegates. Only Clinton and Kucinich are on the ballot (and there's no write-in). God-damned losers, those Democrats.

Tom Engelhardt’s one of the best commentators on our appalling times that I know. Here he reminds us that the US has been long been using waterboarding (since at least the long war to colonize the Philippines a century ago), that torture has been standard operating procedure for the national security state (either directly or through trained surrogates), that projects like the CIA’s Operation Phoenix kidnapped, tortured, and murdered tens of thousands of Vietnamese. But most of these things were far away, marginal to the general run of the American fantasy, and, of course, officially deniable. No longer. Now the kidnapping, torture, and imprisonment of enemies (or as Abu Ghraib and our own domestic criminal justice system reveal, alleged enemies), is right out in the open, acceptable and official. Concentration camps, torture centers, and extrajudicial execution are a given. Politicians lobby for it. It’s permeated our culture, our politics and of course our entertainment. GOP candidates, to show how “tough” they are, boast that they’ll be the ones to expand the camps, torture more people, and make habeas corpus but a dream of pussy fifth-columnist liberals. Even third party dreamboats like Mike Bloomberg have accepted it; his instant prison camp during the GOP convention was a squalid containment of legitimate and vital dissent.

Don't you love Torture Guy extoling his hollow version of democracy amidst the kleptocratic/theocratic/feudal bandit kinglets of the Oil Kingdoms?

Ron Paul's Freakshow

So there’s an internet stirring of support for this strange Texas Republican named Ron Paul because his libertarian stance just seems so darn cool. Curiously, Paul’s resolutely not libertarian when it comes to women: like the rest of the American Taliban, he thinks they should be the wards of the state(s), the sum of their reproductive parts, biological devices to foster surrogate GOP-voter fetuses. Paul’s main thing is that he believes in the fantasy of the free market to solve all our problems and make everybody rich. That’s some serious crack. There is no such thing as a free market; markets are almost instantly captured by those with power, either old elites or the new ones which often rise with the market. History shows us the results: monopoly and oligarchy. Unfettered capitalism leads to stunted lives, poisoned land, food, water, and… children’s toys. China’s the perfect model: an utterly corrupt military/party dictatorship, rampant befouling of the land and the products in a race to the bottom.

Paul’s recent comments on ending slavery are another clue to his disturbing thinking. He said the American Civil War was unnecessary, that slavery would end like it did in the UK and all those other places. What astonishing ignorance (or is it just cracker justification?) of the circumstances of 19th century America. The first half of that century was dominated by the struggle over slavery, with crisis after crisis and compromise after compromise as Southern elites tried to expand their filthy institution into the emerging Midwest and Western territories and states in order to maintain their wealth and power, both in the south and nationally. They showed the distance they would go to maintain their command of property (capitalism’s grail, no matter that it was made of human beings); they seceded and they started the war.

Because Reconstruction was drowned like a unwanted baby by whites in the North and South alike, the “unfinished revolution” never really got to dismantle the Slave Power’s hold on the South; American apartheid lasted another century, and the Southern barons largely ruled the nation with their hammerlock on the Senate, making, for instance, sure that the New Deal would barely touch southern blacks. More recently, the GOP replaced the Democrats as the ruling party of the “Solid South,” anchoring their national dominance, but things haven’t changed all that much; the Bourbon barons are still in charge. And the white underclass, whose ancestors were canon fodder during the civil war, are still firmly loyal to their masters, like the true house slaves they are.

Suharto: straight to hell

The former dictator of Indonesia, one of the late 20th century’s genocide-masters, is on his deathbed. Pity he’ll die in a hospital surround by friends and family, but at least the mass murderer will be dead and gone. Half a million were killed after he took power; thousands of the names were provided by the U.S., although even the CIA ultimately considered the results one of the great mass murders of the century. Many thousands more were killed over the decades of his rule. Some estimates reach upwards of a million dead, but no one will ever know the extant of it. Under the rubric of fighting communism, Suharto enriched himself, his family, and cronies like the gangster he was. Plenty of western companies got fat contracts to destroy the local environment and profit off of brutalized work forces. It was a filthy mix indeed.

Don't cry for me, Argentina

Change, change, change… this campaign’s empty word. Clinton talks about the ones she made, but doesn’t actually mention any of them. For obvious reasons. Yesterday’s teary performance, in which she said she didn’t want to go back, blew me away. What is she talking about? The timid retreat of her centrist Democtrats against the rampage of the Right? Bill’s record of softening up the nation for the GOP? I know many Democrats have very warm feelings for Bill, but his record was shit: “triangulating” to emasculate progressives and give into the Right, again and again and again: welfare “reform,” the reprehensible Defense of Marriage Act, the odious Communications Decency Act, “free” trade for the rich, and the continued gutting of habeas corpus. Not to mention his silence and do-nothingism on genocide in Rwanda. First “black president”? Latest genocide president, more likely.

For my politics, Edwards is the best of the top three Democrats, Clinton the worst. Obama’s “change” message/brand is, like all such advertising, hollow. It’s the epitome of the surface and celebrity that passes for politics. Because change doesn’t come from wishful thinking or hope; it comes from struggle. Edwards knows that and expresses it; unfortunately, he’s been storied by the media as a case of noblesse oblige. Obama is still a cowardly Democrat, refusing to take the plunge into the populism that will win. The forces arrayed against us are mighty: the financial services industry; the insurance and drug companies; the oil industry and the car manufacturers; and of course that great cancer long eating away at the Constitution: the national security state. Coming together in a big ol’ multiracial group hug is sweet, but isn’t what will to take on these monsters. It could be a first step, though, if we put the pressure on Obama and force him to represent.