Everything Old Is New Again

And that makes it new in and of itself to those who, for whatever reason, missed it the last time around. To those who appreciated it in any previous cycle(s), it can be either a comforting or off-putting experience. As I mentioned earlier, there are few genuinely new ideas...
America Adam: Obama and the cult of the new.

-AF

(ht: Laura Rozen)

"Change We Can Xerox": The Pot Calls The Kettle Black

Last nite Hillary misfired going all super-stupid on us with a weak, poorly timed Obama "Xeroxed change" bash. She topped her gaffe liberally borrowing from John Edwards for her eloquent closing (see above vid). Obama wisely refrained from listing Hill's own obvious snatching of bits from John Edwards (health care well, hello?), her husband and others. This is what politicians do. People do it too.

In my perfect twisted little world Obama's response to Hillary's "Xerox" charge (with apologies to Mel Brooks) would be:

Obama: Come on, you do it. You love to do it. We all do it. You do it...
Hillary: No, I don't!
Obama: I do it, I love to do it. I just did it and I'm ready to do it again, don't tell me you don't do it!

But seriously folks...I like Hillary Clinton. With a few exceptions the Hillster has done an outstanding job representing the Empire State. She should have realized it's a far too late in the game to so lamely attack Obama's strongest point, public speaking. It's not as if Obama was lifting whole passages of Thomas Jefferson, René Descartes, The Dali Lama, Thomas More, mon héros absolu François-Marie Arouet, Frances Hutcheson or James Patterson without attribution.

Barack is a wordsmith (or wordsmythe in OE). He incorporates words into his speeches suggested by trusted advisors. Obama modifies others' tried and true phrases making them his own. No need to dial 911 -- This is what orators, musicians, painters, authors and other artists do. They have done so since the fucking dawn of language.

Let's use music as an example. One of these things is a lot like the other:

The VU's "Sweet Jane" lent its chords to The Who's "Baba O’Reilly"

The Chiffons' "He’s So Fine" begat George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord"

The Who's "I Can’t Explain" inspired "Clash City Rockers"

ELO's (and The Move's) "Do Ya" was lifted for It's Too Late by Bob Mould

Bob Marley copped the Banana Splits Theme "Tra La La" for "Buffalo Soldier"!

Without Iggy's "Lust For Life" there would be no "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" (Jet)

The Beatles' "Lady Madonna" imbues "What I Got"'s Sublime melody.

Oasis’ greatest songs are chock full o’ glorious melody & riff rip offs.

That's just off the top of my head on this mad snowy Friday. I'll try to slip some music links later. Other than George Harrison and Led Zep (who were repeatedly popped for their shameless plundering of the criminally under appreciated Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon, Hownlin’ Wolf, etc.) artists rarely confront other artists over it. This is what artists do. People do it too. It's human nature.

In Obama's case plagiarism is a serious unwarranted charge. Methinks this is the last we'll hear Hillary speak of Obama's "Xerox." But you can bet your bippy John McCain and the GOP are already taking notes.

-AF

My Own Personal Jesus

Christ was very punk rock -- a complete revolutionary out to smash the status quo. I dig J.C. (I love the Baby Jesus too). In typically strange fashion, I didn't relate to Jesus much at all until I read Mikhail Bulgakov's magnum opus The Master and Margarita and, much later, saw The Last Temptation of Christ. (The obvious corruption of Swaggart, Robertson as well as the St. E's priest who slept with my friend's sister didn't exactly encourage me breach the Jesus gap). The Jesi of these"heretical" works rang true to me in a far more vital, visceral and human manner than the King James version ever did.

I have reservations about Deepak Chopra. Part huckster, part spiritual advisor and part snake-oil saleman, Chopra is a very smart and persuasive fellow. He's out hawking his new book The Third Jesus. Here Deepak prods us to greet the new Jesus (same as the old Jesus?). This bit slamming the winger evangees grabbed my attention:

Many believers are satisfied with one or the other Jesus, and yet millions are not. They have witnessed their faith being hijacked by rigid fundamentalism. A teaching of love and peace has been perverted to justify war and bigotry.

Chopra may not have the ear of Dobson, Phelps, Perkins, Wilmon and the rest of the flock but his message will reach viewers of Oprah, The Today Show, The Daily Show, Steven Colbert, etc. He also counts Madonna, Demi Moore, Martin Sheen, Blythe Danner, Goldie Hawn, and Debra Winger among his show biz friends.

Anything that yanks the concept of Jesus back to the actual teachings of Jesus is just alright with me.

-AF

Another Sign of the Impending Economic Apocalypse

It's more popular than ever yet More Americans Are Giving Up Golf. 'Cuz when the average Joe is unemployed or underemployed and looking for work, it's not possible to come up with the scratch and find a stretch to shag some balls.

Concurrently, the income gap between the "haves" and the "trying to keep what we haves" has never been wider. As Economy Slips, Yacht Sales Skyrocket. The money quote:

It's not that significant to them whether we're in recession or not, because they're so wealthy," said Tork Buckley, editor of The Yacht Report, a trade magazine based in London. "The business appears to be recession proof."

The piggier they are the biggier their skiff.

-AF

(HT: Raw Story)

Mr. McCain Not So McSqueaky Clean: Close Links to 3 Telecom Lobbyists

Everyone's all a titter about this NY Times story alleging that Sen. John McCain has had an "inappropriate relationship" with lobbyist Vicki Iseman. Her un-scrubbed lobby firm bio is here. Per Raw Story, the Times had held this story for months publishing it only after The New Republic (sub. required) starting nosing around 229 W. 43rd St. for their own story. WaPo was treading water on this one too.

I personally could care less whether or not the self-confessed Senior Adulterer from Arizona and Iseman are romantically entangled (other than the mere thought of McCain entangling anything with anyone completely creeps me out). It will be enough to give some so-called "values voters" pause.

But as the Amazing Digby points out It's Not About The Sex...it's about the favors. McCain's unswerving support of Iseman's telecom clients included championing bills to end big time evangelical Bud Paxson's (Ion Television formerly Paxson Communications) and others' fight to force cable to run his broadcast stations or to provide minority ownership tax breaks for Cunningham Broadcasting (née Glencairn, LTD -- the shell corp. owned and operated by the evil John Kerry-swiftboating Sinclair empire to avoid FCC ownership regs). McCain not so coincidentally spearheaded a ton of broadcast industry deregulation that contributed to the MSM mess we now endure.

However, this goes deeper than McCain's favoritism and reciprocal of use of their corporate jets and other stuff. The aforementioned NY Times piece points out just how far Johnny Boy's super-cozyness with lobbyists goes:

Like other presidential candidates, he has relied on lobbyists to run his campaigns. Since a cash crunch last summer, several of them — including his campaign manager, Rick Davis, who represented companies before Mr. McCain’s Senate panel — have been working without pay, a gift that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has hired another lobbyist, Mark Buse, to run his Senate office. In his case, it was a round trip through the revolving door: Mr. Buse had directed Mr. McCain’s committee staff for seven years before leaving in 2001 to lobby for telecommunications companies.
(my emphasis)

Shee-it! As HuffPo noted last year John McCain's 2008 team is fucking riddled with lobbyists! Forget about a rumored romance with Iseman, even at work Johnny's in bed with lobbyists! Mark Buse is notorious as one of the two lobbyists secretly hired by former CPB Chair/Karl Rove amigo/Republican tool Ken Tomlinson to quash attempts to seat more actual broadcasters on the PBS board.

It turns out McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis is even more controversial. The WaPo hits Rick Davis for setting up a McCain meet with gangster-linked Putin-pal billionaire Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska. At the time Davis was still at his own lobby firm Davis Manafort where his biggest clients were telecom giants SBC Global AT&T and Verizon. According to Open Secrets between 1998-99 & 2003-05 Davis Manafort raked in at total of $670,000 SBC Global AT&T bucks. From 2003-2005 Verizon tossed him a cool $540,000.

While Iseman and Buse do not seem to have any vested interest in telecom immunity, his Campaign Manager Rick Davis sure does. "Straight Talk" McCain's recent vote to keep telecom immunity in Bush's wiretapping bill appears not like a vote to keep us safer but a vote for Davis' once and future clients. McCain's continued support of telecom immunity is a fait accompli or Davis wouldn't be working for him for free.

This raises the question: In what other ways would "Honest Johnny" McCain favor the special interests he used to rail against once he's President and at what cost to the average citizen?

Let's all agree right now to not find out. Please.

-AF

**Update: Firedoglake has more dirt on Davis.

**Update #2: TPM's Josh Marshall harks back to his days at TAP for a Paxson-led mega billion dollar tax payer boondoggle.

**Update #3: Stroke Girl waxes philosophic on the rise & fall of the heroic John McCain.

"Accuracy In Media" Turns Its Racist Sights On Obama

Via Crooks and Liars The Corner's Lisa Schiffren carries AIM's water. Obama **gasp** possibly knows somebody who may have once known somebody who accidentally brushed up against a Communist in 1952. Why is this true? "Cuz Barack Obama was born to a white mother and a black father in 1961. In those days, the only way that could have happened is if one or both parents were Jesus-hating-baby-eating-Communist-
Muslims from Antartica.

Ms. Schiffren has proof:

Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.
***
Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family’s background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.

Schiffren kicks off her ham-fisted attempt at political assassination with this laughable opener:

Until I came across this article by Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, which I regard as factual — with all that that implies — the questions about Obama's background that should have come naturally never quite rose to the surface of my mind.

AIM's "Accuracy In Media" is about as accurate as Fox News is "Fair and Balanced." And anything they write Ms. Schiffren regards as "factual." That tells us all we need to know about Schriffren's biases. AIM is another group folks funded in part by Richard Mellon Scaife. AIM still claims Bill Clinton’s Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster was murdered. FYI Lisa, even uber-partisan Special Prosecutor Ken Starr ruled Foster's death a suicide.

-AF

**Check it: ASIAF fave blog The Edge of The American West's strikes back at the First Black Communist President meme.

More Bad News About The US Economy

Economist Jared Bernstein has this post up at TPM Cafe. It's well worth reading. Here's the first few paragraphs:

Based on inflation data released this morning, a combination of slower wage growth and faster price growth has led to falling real hourly and weekly earnings for most workers.

The Figure shows the yearly change in real earnings for the approximately 80% of the workforce that are non-managers in services or blue-collar factory workers. After handily beating inflation last year, wage growth began to slow as the economy lost speed in the last quarter of 2007. A year ago, annual hourly wage growth before inflation was 4.3%; this year—Jan07-Jan08—it was 3.7%.

Inflation, conversely, driven up by higher energy prices, is growing about twice as fast as was the case one year ago.

Bernstein is the very same economist quoted by McClatchy News in Monday's story about chronic unemployment that I referenced in A Closer Look At Bush's BS Job Stats... yesterday.

-AF

I Can't Quit You

Last night on Countdown...













Bush's Brain author Jim Moore:

McCain wants his help, he wants his money, but he doesn‘t want his stink. And this president has political stink on him and he is going to have to be kept at a distance.

Not unlike pheromones it's the "political stink" that keeps bringing these two together despite their tempestuous relationship.

-AF

A Closer Look At Bush's BS Job Stats & The Economy

Whenever he issues denials of our country's economic troubles, President Bush invariably points to the latest unemployment and/or job creation figures as proof of his policies' efficacy. McClatchy's Kevin G.Hall crunches the numbers and uncovers what blue collar and middle class America has known for a couple of years now, the low unemployment rate hides rise in long-term jobless. (All emphasis is mine):

The latest employment figures, released in late January, showed a 52-month streak of job creation ending with a loss of 17,000 jobs in January. The Bush administration acknowledged the contraction, but pointed to the national unemployment rate of 4.9 percent to say that the labor market wasn't a harbinger of recession.

Right. No recession to see here, people. Look straight ahead and keep on truckin'.

A closer look at unemployment data by McClatchy, however, found that jobless Americans are spending more time looking for work and that those who can't find work now make up a greater share of the unemployed.

Several measures of unemployment, in fact, show that the workforce is under the kind of stress not seen since March 2001, when the U.S. economy entered a nine-month recession, followed by a so-called jobless recovery.

The White House hauled out its biggest gun, Ed Lazear, to rebut this analysis. Lazear is notable as one of the fathers of personnel economics -- a field Lazear and others seek to explain (I prefer justify), among other things, wage gaps due to gender, sociological and other differences. Predictably, Mr. Lazear has a different read on the numbers:

The Bush administration points out that the percentage of workers unable to find work for 27 weeks or longer was only 0.9 percent of the overall workforce in January.

"So in terms of proportion of individuals who are facing long-term unemployment, it's about the same as it was in the mid-1990s and actually lower than throughout most of the past few years," said Edward Lazear, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

There's a reason why the White House studiously avoids counting people still looking for work 26 weeks after they cash that first unemployment check. If you know anyone who's lost a job in the past coupla years, 4 1/2 months is not a very long time to be unemployed. Lazear uncovered an equation where "Clinton" numbers are "about the same" as these current "Bush" numbers. Too bad it's a crap equation:

But when Americans unemployed for 27 weeks or longer are measured as a share of the total number of unemployed, the story is very different.

The long-term unemployed amounted to 18.3 percent of all the unemployed in January. That means that while overall unemployment is low, almost one in five unemployed workers has been jobless for six months or more.

It's no small wonder that Bush, Lazear and friends want to bury this trend. Chronic unemployment stats contradict everything they've been selling us about American jobs:

"Long-term unemployment is really very interesting and in some ways a more telling indicator," said Jared Bernstein, a labor economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "It basically says that given the particularly low level of unemployment, you'd expect a much lower share (of long-term unemployed) on the jobless rolls. Job creation has been anything but robust."

Here's how the stats compare to other periods in Bush's reign two terms:

When the U.S. economy last went into recession, in March 2001, the unemployment rate was 5.7 percent and the long-term unemployed made up 11.1 percent of all unemployed. That number reached the 18 percent range 14 months later and peaked at 23.4 percent during a single month in both 2004 and 2005.

These statistics suggest that if the United States is in a recession — still a subject of debate among economists — the nation is entering an economic contraction with a much higher rate of chronically unemployed than it did during the nine-month recession in 2001.

In other words, we're fucked. Really, really fucked. In the grand scheme of things the labor market affects the economy thusly:

It's a critically important linchpin because, although we get excited about every bip and bop in the stock market, it's the labor market that matters most to most people. They're depending on their paycheck, not their stock portfolios," Bernstein said. "If the labor market is not producing enough jobs or hours of work, that's going to show up as diminished income growth and less consumption."

This chronic unemployment (and underemployment) combined with the sub-prime crisis, inflation, higher gas & heating oil prices, the real estate crash et al. Without bankruptcy protection and with property values plummeting, people default on their mortgages to pay their credit cards. Consumer confidence erodes. While the average citizen was suffering, Bush and his Lazear-led bean-counters couldn't have cared less. It took Corporate America to feel the pinch and start screaming for Bush to ask Lazear to dial up his new "stimulus package."

Hell, we'll be lucky if Bush's package doesn't make things even worse. You know it's a bad plan when libertarian think tank the Cato Institute can rip it as "a disappointing re-run of the misguided policies of Jimmy Carter." Ouch!

Add our fucked up economy to the long list of Bush Administration legacy land mines left for the next up to negotiate.

-AF

(h/t Think Progress)

If The Army Ain't Broken...

Then why are we buying houses to fix it? US taxpayers are laying out $40,000 for a down payment on new recruits houses or to fronting them with seed money to set up their own gig. From August 2004 to April 2005, Army bonuses doubled maxing out at around $20,000. This and other incentives coupled with declining re-enlistment couldn't keep pace with the Army's needs. Especially when the DOD kept lowering quotas to avoid the public embarrassment that comes with consistently missing recruitment goals.

The solution? The Army Advantage Fund^TMnow being test marketed in Albany, Montgomery (AL), Cleveland, Seattle and San Antonio. (Bad news for residents of these five towns as they are clearly well ahead of the recession curve, no?). The Boston Globe has the deets on the DOD's sales pitch :

Lt. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, who was in Albany Wednesday promoting the pilot program, said it will help the Army compete for high school graduates and recognize soldiers in a time of conflict.

"The Army Advantage Fund will ensure that the quality of life of our soldiers and their families equals the substantial quality of service that they give to the nation," said Freakley, who is responsible for recruiting.

Note to prospective recruits: If an officer named "Freakley" ever comes a calling...RUN! Run until you cannot run no more.

Listen, I'm all for giving active duty soldiers the best this country has to offer: the best health care, the best education options, the best future. I'm also all about not talking advantage of people and needlessly putting them in harm's way.

I can't help but wonder how many of these "newbies" will make it back in enough of one piece to enjoy the hard won fruits of their labor.

-AF

**Update: Bush gives with one hand and takes away with the other: No Funds in Bush Budget For Troop-Benefits Plan?