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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, January 30, 2009

How We Know That Clinton Derangement Syndrome Is Alive And Well 

...and so it turns out that Judicial Watch, a conservative "watchdog" group that make its bones by going all pitbull on Bill Clinton back in the day, has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the eligibility of Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State because of the Emoluments Clause. As this piece from December shows, Judicial Watch has been pushing this issue since her nomination and rejects the idea that it has been addressed by Congress in the past...

It would be a great argument, and Judicial Watch could probably get away with arguing that its concern was all about respect for Article One, Section Six of the U.S. Constitution were it not for one simple fact: the lawsuit, which was filed yesterday (Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009), does not appear to also challenge the appointment of former United States Senator Ken Salazar to the position of Secretary of Interior...

Salazar, like Clinton, resigned from a current term that included the period of time during which the vote was held to increase Cabinet salaries. Curiously, his confirmation and assumption of a Cabinet position that benefits from a congressionally-mandated pay raise during his current term doesn't appear from the media reports to be an issue for Judicial Watch. Good thing for him his last name isn't Clinton; otherwise he might just get swept up in the powerful tides of Judicial Watch's Clinton Derangement Syndrome...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:03 PM 0 comments

Claire McCaskill's Forgotten Idiot 

...the bigger news today was that Senator Claire McCaskill positively unloaded on Wall Street in the face of the news that a gaggle of Wall Street firms getting billions of taxpayer dollars were awarding billions of dollars in bonuses to some of their employees. The more fascinating news, somewhat buried in that lede, was that Rudy Giuliani was more than happy to step into the breech and defend the continuance of these bonuses...

In Rudy's world, the awarding of bonuses is important, if not vital, to the economic well-being of the Greater New York Metropolitan Area. These Bonus Babies get taxed on this money; they SPEND this money in restaurants and department stores all across the metro area, bringing jobs and economic stimulus in a way that only Wall Street bonuses can. The very economic welfare of the Big Apple, in Rudy's world, rests on the sagging weary shoulders of these big-spending Bonus Babies...

I want to live in Rudy's world. I don't at the moment; in the world in which I live, the very best you can hope for is to keep the job that you have even if you are performing above and beyond the call of duty. Out here in the not-Rudy's world, people are desperately trying to cling to the crumbling basic foundations of their lives, and those who are lucky enough to still have their jobs or have rounded up one or two or three part-time positions to avoid living in the in-laws' basement or in their own cars (assuming the repo man hasn't come calling) are having federal taxes cut right off the top to pay for the bailout that will save these Wall Street firms. Out here in the non-Rudy world, taxpayers are struggling to provide food and shelter for their families; they aren't much focused in or probably even sympathetic to the sort of pain that Wall Street Bonus Babies could be suffering at the loss of their bonuses...

How often do these Wall Street people eat out and go shopping, for crying out loud? Don't they own kitchen appliances? Cookbooks? Do they not have access to laundry facilities, requiring them to buy new clothes on a weekly basis? How many wall treatments are necessary to make their lives fully actualized? There's a bigger point here, though: why should we suddenly care just about them? There are food service workers and restaurant owners and mall employees and mall business owners who are losing their livelihoods all over the country because of layoffs by and failures of nearby companies that have done everything right! An untold number of companies lie in smoking ruins and their former employees are facing stark choices light-years away from any reasonable understanding of 'The American Dream', and all of that can be traced in sharply jagged lines of varying lengths straight back to a point of origin centered in the Wall Street firms now looking for a government handout and the reckless decisions they made, along with Bonus Baby employees who may well have taken part in those decisions...

Out here in non-Rudy's world, bonuses come from superior performance, when they come at all. Most people out here in the non-Rudy world understand that your chance of getting a bonus is inversely proportional to the amount of bailout money your company is receiving from the Federal government. The former and soon-to-be former employees of Caterpillar and Boeing and Home Depot and Pepsico and Starbuck's won't understand how people who work for companies that were complicit in the root cause of this economic disaster should be eligible for a bonus. As Senator McCaskill said today, there is a band of idiots out there who just don't get it when it comes to the issue of bonuses in these dire economic times. The response by Rudy Giuliani seems to suggest that she missed one...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:18 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

If You Believe In Peanut Butter, You Gotta Refuse To Believe In Peanut Corp 

...OK, so the title is a bastardization of a Peter Pan Peanut Butter ad jingle from 1972, and the breathtaking irony is that this brand of peanut butter got caught up in a product recall two years ago for what was called at the time the first such recall in response to a salmonella outbreak. In any case, let's cut to the chase...

Turns out that the Peanut Corporation hasn't been exactly forthcoming over the last couple of years about the quality and safety of their industrial peanut butter and peanut past product. Their cavalier attitude about all those mundane health/safety requirements that exist to ensure that the American food supply can be considered safe is - if news reports are to be trusted - so outrageous as to rise to the level of rank criminality. By all appearances, they apparently decided to press on with distribution of potentially tainted products in the face of evidence that there may be a problem and it certainly shouldn't come as any surprise that there are calls for criminal investigations...

The Board of Directors and senior management should consider themselves lucky that today's revelation and recall are probably perfect examples of the fortuitous circumstance that being part of the American industrial complex affords. As recent examples of jurisprudence in the face of egregious corporate behavior in the People's Republic of China have shown, these peanut people will at least escape with their lives for what PRC officials would deem to be death penalty offenses. There is, however, another group of folks that have some 'splainin' to do...
FDA officials declined to say how agency investigators missed warning signs at the plant, such as mold, dripping water and other problems that indicated the plant may have been susceptible to contamination.

I'm not ready to point fingers at individual FDA inspectors because - as a decades-long Fedborg insider - I know how things work. But this is a prime finger-pointing opportunity as far as the George W. Bush version of the FDA is concerned, because this looks exactly like a manifestation of every other stinking cozy business-friendly decision that has controlled the actions of the Federal government over the last eight grim, dark years. The failure of the Food and Drug Administration to properly protect the people whose tax dollars fund its operations is just another example of why the mutant love child resulting from the unholy Bushco-backed philosophical consumation between Adam Smith and Ayn Rand should simply be left to die on some dark cold street corner...

Several people have died who didn't need to and hundreds of people have been rendered seriously ill who didn't need to be, and all of it is because a corporate entity didn't operate in the best interests if its customers and a federal agency tasked with the responsibility of making sure that corporations perform in the best interests of the American people failed - and I'm talkin' failed UTTERLY - to redeem its legally-mandated responsibility. Criminality may well exist here also, but the least thing that we know is that it is going to take some time to work all the kinks out of the system that Gee Dub's minions and the late and unlamented Republican Congressional majority twisted into it on purpose. In an otherwise perfect world, raw political stupidity shouldn't result in a body count, but real life informs us differently. Whether or not you believe in peanut butter, God help us if you can't get to a place where you can't eventually believe in the people who make some of that peanut butter...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:41 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Winning At A Losing Game 

...this Politico report about the outcome of President Obama's meeting with the House Republican caucus regarding the stimulus package is instructive in a sort of twisted "Notes From The Underground" fashion. The vast array of transparently self-serving quotes in the article serve as a roadmap to that special secret place where Republican strategy now hides...

The now-revealed strategy is simple: opposition, intransigence, and direct monkeywrenching of the legislative process. It's a derivative of the strategy Republicans employed during Bill Clinton's first term to finally capture majorities in Congress, with the primary difference being the uncomfortable reality of having to deal with a president who is garnering impressive approval ratings even among Republican voters. House Republicans have decided to finesse that grim fact by directing their ire against the Congressional Democratic leadership for having shut the Republicans out of the legislative process...

Now, in the first place, I'm as compassionate as the next dimwitted faux ranch-owning brush cutter, so it is probably understandable that I should compassionately say to those offended Members of Congress, "Suck On THIS, Minority Kid!" If one even accepts the wounded mewling of these offended parties, the fact remains that they are being treated to far better treatment than they accorded Democrats between January, 2001, and January 2007, during which time they - in concert with the Bush White House - treated Democrats in a manner that, in most polite societies, would explain a sudden rash of Important People being run over in parking lots. Given the starkly dramatic voter repudiation of all things Republican over the last two election cycles, any sane group of battered survivors would be far more gracious in their understanding of the honor being paid by the mere fact of leader of the majority party actually granting them relevance by meeting with them. These are Republicans, however, and their misguided sense of entitlement is still strong...

In the second place, all they have to peddle are the same tired policies that did nothing to prevent the current economic crisis and which serve only to benefit the best well-off amongst us while offering peanuts to the middle class and abandoning the least well-off amongst us. The tattered remnants of the Republican party still desperately cling to a mutant version of Ronald Reagan's insistence that government is the problem rather than a solution, which itself is a holdover of a 70-year-old objection to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. As a result, Republicans insist on an economically useless array of tax cuts that are meaningless in terms of actually fixing the current economic problems because those traditional waypoints of conservative economic theology genetically imprinted. As Paul Krugman so precisely deconstructed the situation a couple of days ago, the most powerful motivation for Republicans is the urge to see government fail...

That's a scary bottom line to contemplate. In essence, both the quotes offered by Republican House members in the Politico story and the larger understanding of their strategy demonstrate that the Republican Caucus feels that it is better to try to extend and expand the building misery of American citizens in order to retain the support of their base and to hope that they can convince voters in Congressional districts held by Democrats that the failure of stimulus efforts are a result of ideological failures by Democrats rather than intentional interference by Republicans. That's all part of a losing game that Republicans have been playing for over a decade and paying for over the last couple of elections; the way things are looking right now, they are setting themselves up to continue to win at that losing game...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:46 PM 0 comments

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