So I was not a big fan of the U.S. bailout of the financial institutions to begin with. My objection is squarely based on two basic questions:

1) Is it cheaper in the long-run to allow major institutions to fail than it is to continually bail them out?

2) Where does it end?

I’ll leave number one up to those with far more experience than I have in understanding global financial markets and all the ancillary industries that go along with them. But question number two will become increasingly important and germane to our national conversation as time goes on. Already we have seen two rounds of bailout funding for the automotive industry, now we have the government pledging $5 billion to the auto parts industry, Larry Flint wants bailout funding for the porn industry, homebuilders want help, and list goes on and on and on.

Now comes news of the uproar created by AIG’s payment of bonuses to 70+ employees. Are we, the taxpayers, pissed? You bet. Are we, the taxpayers, calling our leaders in Congress to do something? You bet. But that does not mean Congress should act. Not now at least. We pay our leaders to lead. The minute we passed the first bailout package in October we sealed the fate of news programs like 60 minutes for the next 20 years — giving them tons of material to report related to misappropriation of bailout funds, corporate scandals, and government waste. It is the nature of the beast. Our leaders failed to give much thought to the bailout plan, which should have contained elements of control in the package, ahead of time. Mismanagement was bound to happen. But creating a 90% tax bracket for bonuses paid is absolutely ridiculous. The recent talks of tax brackets for those working for bailed out institutions is not conducive to fixing our problems.

Government never works well when it hastily crafts legislation for a specific and urgent cause. This feels a lot like the post 9/11 legislation that allowed our phones and emails to be tapped without cause, or the rush to judgement to go to war in Iraq, or the attempts to write laws to help a coma victim live or die in Florida. It’s not right and Congress should stop threatening legislation and do what it does best — make a public spectacle of AIG and allow the free market to punish the company as it will.

Which leads me back to question one. Aren’t our free markets capable of supporting those institutions that are vitally important to our economy? Is failure of portions of our Economic system not a natural process that we should allow to happen instead of interfering?

President Bush today told reporters that he is “the decision-maker” on the plan to increase the number of troops in Iraq, and that he urges Congress to seriously think about their opposition to a plan that hasn’t been put into practice yet.

It may very well be the most telling statement about the divide between W and reality that we have ever seen. Clearly Mr. Bush is the “decision-maker”, as it was he who decided to enter into this war. It was he who decided not to enter the war with sufficient numbers of troops to begin with, and it was he who decided to pay little attention to the infrastructure requirements in restoring order qucikly after entering the country. It was he who also decided on the six different “post-War” strategies that have all ultimately failed.

And so it is crystal clear that W is “the decision-maker”, and the truth is that had he made decent decisions to begin with, Congress would not be opposing his “decision” today. I almost felt sorry for the guy during his state of the union address Tuesday night. There he was, like a whipped puppy, looking as if he just woke up after a long binge and realizing all of the transgressions he had committed while under the influence. Had he finally reached the point of repent? Was he finally taking responsibility for all of his mistakes? Was he going to turn over a new leaf? At times it seemed like we just might see a new W.

But, alas, it was all for show. Today he is reminding us that the emperor truly has no clothes, and no sense for that matter. Instead of making a generous statement about acknowleding the conflict with Congress, or striking a conciliatory note that signals some understanding of the opposition to the plan, he puffs up his chest like a fighting cock and proclaims “I AM THE DECISION-MAKER”.

That’s the sort of talk that brings it all back to reality. This guy is an arrogant, out-of-control, spoiled rotten brat that is living in some fantasy world where he is the terminator, and ultimately we will do what he says, simply because he says to, and not based on any sound judgement. 

What a tangled web we weave…

Let me throw out a few numbers that help frame the current mood of the country and the disconnect with that mood known as George W. Bush…

According to the Washington Post reporting on the latest ABC News poll:
48% of Americans believe that Iraq is the single most important issue facing the nation
60% of Americans want Democrats in Congress to resolve the issue rather than W
65% oppose sending more troops (this is up from 62% following W’s announcement)
59% want to see Congress block Bush’s plan for more troops in Iraq
25% of Republicans want to see Congress block Bush’s plan for more troops in Iraq

We all know that Iraq is an albatross around Bush’s neck, but what about the direction of the nation and his leadership?

71% of those polled say the nation is “way off track”, while only 26% believe it is headed in the right direction.

65% disapprove of Bush’s performance on the job; while 33% approve (undoubtedly reflecting the GOP base)

And remember Bush’s soaring approval ratings of his handling of the “War on Terror” after 9/11 and the forward momentum he had going into the 2004 election cycle? Well, 52% now say that his handling of the “War on Terror” is not working.

Trust is another problem for Bush now. Following the botched handling of Katrina, 47% of Americans said Bush was a “strong leader”, a low point for his regime. Now, 45% of Americans refer to him as a “strong leader”, setting a new record for this president. But even if Bush is not a strong leader, a good leader always maintains a level of trust with his followers, right? A leader, for good or bad, can maintain a level of stewardship, a guiding hand if you will, to lead when times are hard, right? Well, apparently not. Only 42% of Americans say they trust Bush to lead the nation during a crisis.

I do not wish to point fingers and say “I told you so”, but it is comforting to know that most American’s have not lost their minds, and that a level of confidence in our overall national intelligence has been restored. Is there hope? Yes, at least some. But more importantly, there is a light at the end of this deep, dark tunnel Bush has led us into. And that light is perhaps the most encouraging number of them all:

729, the number of days until a new President can lead us out of this nightmare.

2006 proved to be quite an exciting year as we saw that the average American voter just might “get it” after all. I am cautiously optimistic about 2007 as we anxiously await the changing of the guard in the House and Senate in Washington.

Rest assured that our work here is not done, and that we can always do more to help those that cannot help themselves, and to ensure that the basic civil rights of ALL of our citizens are protected under the Constitution created by our founders. This means that watching all of our lawmakers, Republican and Democrat, is a priority and that we should call BS when we see it no matter the party affiliation.

Over the course of the last several months I have heard numerous antidotes about “conservative” voters turning their backs on the GOP in the upcoming mid-term elections. NBC Nightly News did a story back in August about a registered Republican voter who said she was voting Democrat in the next election because she did not think the current party and leadership was doing enough for her daughter’s generation. She was particularly alarmed by the rising level of spending and little attention to the budget deficits accumulated since 9/11. Then there are the growing numbers of Iraq war veterans returning home and running as Democrats in various state and federal elections.

But the comments posted on the Washington Monthly blog site “Showdown ’06″ by one self-described “conservative” really gives reason to hope that this year may be the year to turn the tide:

If the Democrats take the disgusting moral hypocrisy of a Republican Party that aids child predators, and use the awareness of that hypocrisy to bring credibility in the public’s eyes to the true concept that the Republican elite are hypocrites on all sorts of issues, than the Democrats can be the majority Party that Rove wishes his Coalition of Hypocrites could be.

And my favorite part:

I’m not a Democrat, and I am a conservative. But because I am a conservative, I will vote Democrat in the coming mid term election and hope that the Republican Hypocrites lose this election in a landslide.

Do you remember what you were doing in the summer of 2001? More importantly, do you remember what your President and his Congress were doing in the summer of 2001? I do.

Just a few short weeks before 9/11 our President was perched at his Crawford, Texas ranch enjoying a very long vacation (5 weeks if I remember correctly). His attention was focused on the moral dilemma of stem cell research and how he could use the Christian cloth he had wrapped himself in to suppress promising research for curing diseases. This topic was so important that he took time away from chopping wood and barbecuing to address the nation in primetime.

If the Bush administration was so focused on terrorists (namely al Qaeda) why did he never once speak to the American people about the problem? After all, Bush knew that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole in the Fall of 2000. Why did he not go on national television to the tell the American people that he knew who attacked our service men and women? Why did the President not speak directly and openly to the American people and our enemies alike and say that the United States was not going to take it and that he would develop a master plan for eliminating terror from the face of the Earth? Why was Bush and Company not more proactive in their approach to the war on terror?

This is the kind of questioning that conspiracy theorists love to hear, because it is so easy to say that the President wanted to be attacked. Personally, I just think the President was distracted with giving tax breaks to the most wealthy and in becoming our moral leader on deeply personal issues and that he simply could not be bothered with the big picture.

Five plus years is a long time ago for some of us. Perhaps our memories have been clouded over with more recent events. So I ask then, what were the Republicans (Bush and Company) concerned with in the Spring of 2005? Was it the war in Iraq? Was it Afghanistan? Osama bin Laden? Was it on protecting our borders? Was it beefing up security on freight shipments and cargo ships that enter our ports everyday? The answer is no. The Republicans were worried about the obviously brain-dead Terri Schiavo and having her feeding tube removed. They [Republicans] simply could not stand to have a moral and personal decision go with intervening by creating bogus laws for one specific case. Once again the GOP decided to wrap itself in the Christian cloth of morality in hopes of undermining the personal freedoms and personal relationship between an individual choice and their belief system.

How is that related to the war on terror? Does this demonstrate that the Republicans are the party of protecting the American people? Again, no. But as long as the “war on terror” is being fought, the Republicans know that they have a banner to wave that proclaims them as the gladiators that are going to save us all.

In 2004 the GOP pulled out all of the stops and forced the same-sex marriage debate front and center for the general election. The plan was to stir fear that the American family was somehow threatened by two loving people sharing in the same rights (not privileges, but rights) as everyone else. The summer of 2006 started out the same way. The GOP was down in the polls and it needed a boost, so twice the House of Representatives passed bills to amend the Constitution to ensure that same-sex couples never receive any rights at all, and twice the Senate rejected the same initiative. When that didn’t work, the GOP turned to protecting our borders. The President even went before the nation on primetime (something he likes to do for political reasons and seldom out of the collective interest of the citizenry) to spell out his plan for protecting the border with Mexico and to lay out his plans for immigration. But in the spirit of true Republicanism, the House has spent the entire summer touring the country talking about the issue but doing little else. Now there isn’t enough time to act on any legislation, so Congress has delayed the vote until after the election.

How is any of this serving the needs of this country in the war on terror? The Republicans are not about protecting anyone but themselves and their financial supporters. Good people with good common sense and the ability to think critically should remember all of this as they head to the polls in November.

In a speech delivered on Friday to the gathering of Christian political operatives at the “Values Voter Summit”, Jerry Falwell said that he hoped Hillary Clinton is the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. According to the L.A. Times, Falwell says that no other candidate could mobilize the GOP “base” (the neo-conservative religious base) like Clinton. Falwell went on to say that Clinton has a “war chest” of $300 million (a complete exageration, she has $47 million according to recent filings), and that Republicans should be prepared to give until it hurts.

“I certainly hope that Hillary is the candidate,” Falwell said, according to the recording. “She has $300 million so far. But I hope she’s the candidate. Because nothing will energize my [constituency] like Hillary Clinton.”

Cheers and laughter filled the room as Falwell continued: “If Lucifer ran, he wouldn’t.”

At that moment in the recording, Falwell’s voice is drowned out by hoots of approval. But two in attendance, including a Falwell staff member, confirmed that Falwell said that even Lucifer, the fallen angel synonymous with Satan in Christian theology, would not mobilize his followers as much as the New York senator and former first lady would.

And there it is — the GOP strategy for 2008 and beyond. It is a very simple plan, one that has been in the works for decades — Christians vs. non-Christians (perceived or real). Drawing the connection between someone who has diligently served others to the devil.

And what does Falwell say about the 2006 mid-term elections and the challenges facing Republicans across the country?

Falwell predicted that this year’s midterm elections would go in the GOP’s favor, despite polls showing Democrats in position to make gains.

“I think we’re going to keep the House and the Senate,” he said. “I think the Lord will take care of that.”

I am so sick and tired of hearing someone say that the Lord will do this or that, or has done this or that to punish anyone not aligning themselves with the neo-conservative Kool-Aid brigade. Do people really believe this stuff? I mean, doesn’t the Lord have more important things to worry about than who wins a congressional election?