That said, I’d like to run through a quick list of reality checks regarding the current state of the economy:

The BAIL-OUT and the STIMULUS are two completely different things, but they were likely both necessary evils.  I will explain why:

The Bail-Out

• The Bail-out is money that is being directed towards banks.  The way a bank works is this:  They have to have assets (which is made up of money owed to them and money that it currently possesses as reserves) and they have debts, which is money they owe to people who have invested in their bank.  These two numbers must always be at least even, though they can have more in assets than in debts.  If they have more debt than asset, they can’t loan anything out, and are considered insolvent.
• A lot of banks assets are in homes, which they technically own in the form of mortgages that homeowners are paying off on.  This works most of the time, but homes don’t have a fixed value.  The value fluctuates with the Market.  So when the housing bubble burst, the value of houses plummeted, and as such, many of the banks became insolvent.
• The Bail-out was an alternative to nationalizing the banks.  If the banks had gone out of business, America would be in a Depression right now.
• The effect of the bail-out was to buy up a lot of their bad (called “toxic”) assets.  That’s what we did.  Keep in mind that Americans still own a lot of these assets, in theory, so if the value goes back up, we make that money back.  It’s not necessarily money lost.  However, because the government is so scared of being called “socialist,” they aren’t flexing their muscles like a usual business stock-holder would.

The Stimulus

• The concept behind the stimulus is still debated.  It’s called Keynesian economics.  John Maynard Keynes, a renowned economist, suggested that during a recession or a depression, private investors naturally became protectionist and stopped lending or investing, which crippled the economy.  It would be unreasonable to ask them to lend, so instead, the government should start spending to try and stimulate the economy.
• Technically, it’s all pork-barrel.  That’s the point.  The point is to spend on select programs so that jobs and work are created, and so that people regain their ability to make money and spend.  So calling the stimulus “loaded with pork” is absolutely moronic.
• Theoretically speaking, the money spent on the stimulus isn’t all “lost” money.  It’s not like we bought a car, didn’t insure it, and then crashed it.  If the money was invested properly, (big “if”) we would see returns on some of our investments.

Definitions of Pretty Basic Political Terms

All Definitions taken verbatim from Dictionary.com

• Socialism – a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.
• Anarchism – a doctrine urging the abolition of government or governmental restraint as the indispensable condition for full social and political liberty.
• Fascism – a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

As you can see, none of these really have anything at all in common.  I’ve mentioned this here before, but the Obama-as-the-Joker (who is an anarchist) with the label “socialism” at the bottom, is stunningly moronic.

So, tea-partiers, the point is that you really need to abide by the credo, “know thine enemy.”   We on the other side understand you:  you just have no clue what you’re actually talking about.

So there’s a shortage of guns and ammo in the U.S. right now, prices are rising, and gun shop owners know that business is a-booming.  Barack Obama was one of the best things to ever happen to gun sales.

The NRA still despises him, and they hired Sarah Palin to be the headliner of their annual convention.  This choice should highlight what I think of the NRA.  I am all for the right to bear arms – this is full disclosure here – but it should be strictly controlled in my opinion.  I think handguns make sense.  Why shouldn’t you be allowed to own one to protect yourself?  But you don’t need a flamethrower or a machine gun.  I also am not a huge fan of sport hunting.  I go by the Edward Abbey saying about the moral and aesthetic superiority of the dead animal over the man standing over it.

This is frequently a rallying point for Republicans, but Obama hasn’t done anything about it yet. Obama’s priorities are so caught up in foreign policy and health care right now that he’s not even thinking about taking on the Second Amendment.  Which, all of the killings stemming from the current gun laws aside, will probably be a boon to Obama.  If it’s a non-issue in his first four years, then the Republicans won’t be able to say much about his policies.  Not that much of the gun crowd is going to vote for Obama anyway, but it’s one less thing to be enraged about, and it will ironically help him in an election that will be seen as an endorsement of his current policies and will allow him to take steps towards gun control in his second term.  Boom.

This is an issue that I see as a bit of a distraction, honestly.  It’s kind of like abortion.  Anger over it swells at election time and abates when the politicians have nothing to get angry over.  Except Sam Brownback, who likes to draw pictures of sad, dead fetuses in public hearings.  But it’s a peripheral issue that nothing really gets done on because it just degenerates into a shouting match and gets switched back and forth as the congresses change parties.  So yeah the entire point is, don’t expect anyone but the Gun Freaks to get upset about this issue in 2012, unless there are more campus shootings, in which case the gun freaks will argue more guns will fix the problem.  Woo.

Scratch Off:

-Dick Cheney – Dick is done.  His time as a policy maker is over, and it doesn’t look like he even wants to run.  You can’t blame him, he’s more popular now that he’s not in office than when he was.  But he’s getting up there in years, he was where McCain was at this time in his last run, and just the other day he suffered his fifth heart attack.  Not a chance.

-Bobby Jindal – Jindal would be a great name on the ticket in a few more years, but right now, he would look like a cynical response to Obama being a person of color (granted, the Republicans are fine with cynical responses).  He also seems to want to stick with Louisiana and keep building it out of Katrina.  And good for him.

-Jeb Bush – Where’s he been?  He’d need to be more public now.  And no one really wants another Bush.  Well, some people might, but not many Republicans.  They want a Reagan, not a Nixon.

-General David Petraeus – He’s so good with these wars that I don’t see him leaving Afghanistan.  It would be a horrible political move (and, for the Army, a pretty unprofessional move) to run against ones own Commander in Chief.

Add On:

-Newt Gingrich – I didn’t mention him before, I don’t think, or if I did, I did peripherally, but if there’s a split in the Republican Party, I see him leading the Reagan conservatives away from Sarah Palin.

-Scott Brown – I actually like him for a pick.  He seems fresh and is a bit of an outsider, and beat out the Democrats for one of the most entrenched Democrat seats in the Country.  I mean, Teddy Kennedy’s seat?  He’s impressive.  Put him high on your list.  He might be too inexperienced to try in 2012 though.

Still Likely:

-Mitt Romney – He’s still my number 1 pick.  He’s lying low, he has the funding, and he’s an economic wizard.  He’d be an easy pick for the economy if Obama’s policies don’t work like they should.  He might not be able beat Obama, and he still has the Mormon thing working against him, but he has broad appeal.

-Mike Huckabee – I see him as running but getting overshadowed by Sarah Palin.  Which is a shame, because she’s a moron, and while I disagree with a lot of what he says, I don’t think he’s a complete idiot.  He could actually peel away votes from Palin.  He’ll get the Religious Right, and she’ll get the populist Tea Party votes, and if the Tea Partiers can put together a coherent platform, I will literally poop from surprise.

-Sarah Palin – I went over her more thoroughly in a recent article.  She’ll run.  She doesn’t have a chance.  But she’ll run.  I’m not saying she doesn’t have a solid voting bloc, she could certainly do major damage to a viable Republican candidate, but a win?  No chance in hell.

-Ron Paul – Yet another split!  Paul has the ear of the libertarians still.  He has no chance of winning, but he could have a Ross Perot effect.

Basically, this can be seen as the first major move in what will be the Afghan equivalent of a surge.  Technically, it’s a good idea on Obama’s part.  Bush’s only decent Iraq legacy was the surge, and now Obama’s taking that relatively popular move and transferring it to Afghanistan.

The good news?  They’ve already caught the number 2 leader in the Afghanistan, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who’s second only to Mullah Omar, the infamous one-eyed leader of the Taliban.  It’s a rather large blow for the Taliban, but nothing they can’t recover from.  They’ve shown themselves to be quite a versatile force, but crushing them apparently isn’t the Obama strategy (nor is it that of Hamid Karzai).  The idea is to defeat them militarily and then negotiate with them (a move that Baradar is said to favor), to at least try and bring stability into Afghanistan so that the American military can pull out and Karzai can try and fix the country.

It’s a long shot, frankly, Karzai’s regime is plagued by corruption, and a quick American exit seems unlikely from a practical standpoint, but a necessity from a political standpoint.  The Afghan war is getting more and more unpopular in the U.S. right now, and Afghanistan knows it.  It’s why people are still cooperating with the Taliban.  They don’t really like the Taliban, but the Taliban has made it abundantly clear that if anyone cooperates with the U.S. they will be destroyed as soon as our troops leave, and the Afghans remember enough of America’s abandonment after the Soviet pull-out to believe them.  So what will happen?

Probably, we’ll pull out too soon.  We’ve been doing things wrong for too long to just start doing right now.  And maybe that’s cynical.  But let’s look at a place we might have better luck:

IRAN

Okay, so I realize things aren’t necessarily going well with Iran right now, but America is finally seeing a more sympathetic world.  Lately, both China and Russia have been chastising Iran for it’s vacillating on nuclear policy, which is pretty clearly a ploy to distract the eyes of the world from the regimes own domestic issues.

The problem here is the possibility of a nuclear Iran and an arms strike.  Most nuclear experts agree that while Iran has the know-how to produce a nuclear bomb, they are a long way away from actually being able to enrich uranium to the point of being weapons-grade.  And before they get there, honestly, I think we can count on an Israeli airstrike.  Which would be bad.

But America is starting to regain some of its long lost credibility in the region simply because the US has chastised Israel over the settlement issues and over heavy-handedness in last year’s Gaza war.  They have reached out to Iran, but Iran hasn’t done anything about it, so they look better there, and the fact that they have at least tried diplomacy makes us look reasonable and makes Ahmadinejad look like a douche.  And the thing to realize is that Ahmadinejad doesn’t have the widespread support that a lot of Americans seem to think he has in the Middle East.

Keep in mind that Iran is Shi’ite, whereas more of the Middle East is Sunni.  The Jordanians are mostly Sunni, as are the Syrians.  The Lebanese are more of a mixed bag, with a Shi’a and Sunni tie in terms of demographic, and the entire Arabian Peninsula is majority Sunni.  These two groups don’t get along very well, and since Shi’ites are in the minority, and since Iran represents the Shi’ites (and funds a lot of their rebel/terrorist groups), Iran isn’t seen as the greatest influence in the region.

Which isn’t to say their preferred to the Americans.  But while the Americans are gaining ground, the Iranians are losing it, and I guess that’s the only good news we have in the Middle East.  While Obama’s policy is certainly an improvement on Bush’s, I don’t think we’ll be able to say whether the policy is a success until 2012 runs around.  To put it lightly:  things are meh right now, and they could go horribly, horribly wrong.

Sarah Palin is a moron.

So how comes the Sarah Palin juggernaut?  Is she still a force in the 2012 election? I haven’t touched on the Republican candidates for a while now, because I think most of them realize that it is unwise to overexpose themselves this early.  Most of the major potential candidates have a decent amount of experience behind them, have excellent resumes, and realize that coming out right now just gives them a greater chance for slip-ups.  Romney has been almost nonexistent from the headlines, Huckabee is doing a mostly-innocuous show for Fox and deftly sidestepped the murder of the four Seattle police officers by a criminal whom he himself paroled (which, to be fair, wasn’t really his fault in the first place), and Bobby Jindal has apparently ruled out running.

Naturally, Sarah Palin is staying in the spotlight.  Which she kind of has to.  The anti-Obama movement needs populist leaders at the moment, and it seems the two heroes of the movement are legendary moron Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.  And hey, Palin’s nothing if not a populist leader.

I think I’ve stated this on the blog before, if not somewhere else:  Palin is picking up steam among her constituency, but there is not a chance of her winning the 2012 election.  Note:  I do think there is at least a decent chance that a Republican could win the election, given a few circumstances over 2 years remaining until things start to pick up again, but I do not think Sarah Palin has a choice.  Why?  Because the amount of support for her in the United States is not as wide as people tend to think they are.

Reporting on protests is notorious for misrepresenting actual numbers.  You take the anti-Vietnam and anti-Iraq war protests that dominated news in their respective eras, and they made it look like the entire country was at arms, when in reality, while a majority of the country may have been against the war, most of them weren’t doing much about it.  And being against certain policies does not translate into votes for the other side, necessarily.

Here’s the fact, and I will give you that this study I am citing is a few years old, but 15% of the electorate is part of the Religious Right.  Most of these will vote for Sarah Palin, probably.  Of the U.S. electorate, 34% of the population considers itself “conservative,” whereas 21% considers itself “liberal.”  Now, of that remaining 45%, a large chunk of it is middle-of-the-road, and that is who really matters.  Sarah Palin doesn’t have much appeal even in the center of the right.  In situations where she ran for president in 2012 against Obama, with her being the only other major candidate, she would not have a chance.  15% of the electorate won’t do it, and there are a lot of Reagan Republicans who would absolutely not vote for her.  I mean, even Peggy Noonan called her an idiot.

There has to be a growing unease in the Republican party about this.  While a lot of them like Sarah Palin personally, it can’t be comforting to see her as a frontrunner in 2012.  She could take serious votes away from a more viable candidate like Romney, and she has the gonads to split off and run as a separate candidate in 2012, honestly.  I don’t think she will, but she might have no choice but to go with the tides on that one.

Basically, here’s what I expect:

-The Republicans are going to see Romney and Huckabee battling it out.  Maybe Boehner, but that guy’s an ass, he doesn’t have much of a chance.  Palin will take votes from Huckabee.  Not enough to beat Huckabee, but enough to give Romney a leg up on the both of them.  Romney will come through, unless in the next year or so we see a phenom who has a chance at beating Obama.

-Even with Obama’s shaky record right now, it’s going to take a serious juggernaut to beat him, barring any massive catastrophes.  We’ll just see how it turns out.

-As long as Palin keeps making hypocritical, moronic comments about how Rush Limbaugh is allowed to say “retard” but Rahm Emanuel can’t, she’s shooting herself in the foot.  Bye-bye Sarah.

It’s hard not to look into the past and compare the current administration with other major Democratic administrations, and there seem to be four camps that people are falling into with their Obama comparisons:  there are the Carter comparisons, the Clinton comparisons, the Johnson Comparisons and the Roosevelt comparisons.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the camps:

-Carter came into office after a disastrous Republican-presided 8 years as a Washington outsider with big plans for reform and humanitarianism.  He was portrayed as a do-nothing idealist and was basically sunk in foreign policy by the Middle East peace process and a resurgent Iran.

-Clinton came into office after a solid stomping against Bush 41, and immediately found trouble in Washington.  His health care bill was sunk and congress turned Republican in 1994, but he rallied in 1996 to annihilate Bob Dole and bring economic prosperity to the country.

-Johnson came into office pushing social reforms, focusing on welfare, poverty, and civil rights, but was bogged down in an unpopular war that he pushed to look tough on communism.  He was so disillusioned that he dropped out of the ‘68 race, essentially handing it to the Republicans, and died a few years later.

-Roosevelt came in on the heels of the depression, rallied the country with massive social reform using limited Keynesian economics, and then brought the country through a just war and into a new era.

Honestly, there are strikingly similar situations in all of these comparisons, with the Carter comparison being on the pessimistic side, and the Roosevelt being on the wildly optimistic side, but the main characteristic of what we’re seeing with Obama right now is that he’s having a bit of a rough first year – something that Bush didn’t have riding on the wake of 9/11 – and that he’s been attacked from all sides.

The populist movement that he started on the left has resulted in a populist movement on the right, and his foreign policy, though more or less successful in most areas so far, has come under criticism for being “do-nothing,” which I guess is what we call foreign policy that doesn’t involve shouting down our enemies in disastrous “Axis of Evil” speeches.  But I digress.

The question isn’t so much whether or not the Democrats are going to do well in the 2010 midterm elections – they’re not – as it is whether Obama can rally, like Clinton, or bomb, like Carter.  Frankly, I don’t know what my opinion is here.  I think the similarities between administrations lies closer to Clinton, but Carter’s an easy one to go after as well.  I just can’t decide which I want 8 years of less after Obama’s one or two terms:  another Reagan or another Bush?

I don’t need to do a recap of the Haitian earthquake here, you’ve all seen the images and read the stories, but I do want to focus on the quick response and the aid that Obama gave.

It is truly staggering to me that aid is such a controversial topic in this country.  It seems like it should be clear from all sides that aid is a good idea.  If it is done properly (and I will admit that sometimes, it is absolutely not, no doubt), it can help contribute to the stability of countries that otherwise could be a real national security risk.  And Haiti is one of them, simply because of the sheer amount of illegal immigrants that were already pouring into our country before the quake.

But of course there are the complete fools who I refer to occasionally in this blog – typically, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh – who are decrying Obama’s quick response as pandering to the masses and trying to consolidate power among the African-Americans who elected him.

And here’s the thing:  it’s undoubtedly in some part true.  Obama knew that there had to be a quick response to any natural disaster after Hurricane Katrina’s ridiculous botched response.  Pretty much everything a first-term president does is for political reasons.  But you know that if Bush did the same thing, they’d be talking about what a good guy he is, a hero, really.  When in reality, it would be the same thing:  partially motivated out of politics, partially motivated out of philanthropy.

Regardless, this will likely be a move that Obama will be able to count as a win in the Foreign Policy problems that are constantly facing his administration.  A welcome distraction from Afghanistan.  But in the end?  Nah, it probably won’t do much.

For those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, his State of the Union was a return to the form that we all knew him in during the election.  The Obama of promises!  Of hope!  And so on.  The problem for those whose support he had a year ago, though, is that we’ve realize that he can’t do everything he says he’s going to do.  Obama has been really good at promising things, but not as good as following through.

Now, if you’re looking at him in terms of policy, you might say that rather than Obama not following through, the problem has been simply that reality has set in and that the Obamites have realized that he can’t reasonably follow through on all of the promises he’s made.  He just doesn’t have enough political power or legal authority to push a lot of these things through.

And really, a lot of what’s going wrong is Obama’s fault.  Not in the sense that he deserves the idiotic rage directed at him by first-class assholes like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but in the sense that he’s being swallowed by the populism that he rode into office, much like the Republicans were nearly swallowed by the Religious Right wave they rode into office 9 years ago.

Fareed Zakaria perhaps put it best:

“The unfortunate part [with the economy] is that Obama’s policies have been, broadly speaking, correct, and the public’s perception is, broadly speaking, wrong.”

Which is true.  The bailout sucked, as Obama said in different words, but it was necessary.  The reasons for it being necessary should be examined, obviously, but under the current system, there was no other way around that.  We’ll see if he’s right about the recession being almost over.

I think Obama’s State of the Union was a return to form, he admitted mistakes and held himself responsible, but he still made a LOT of promises.  If he wants to get his credibility back, he needs to start following through on them

The Republican response was more or less the same old, same old, cut taxes, kill terrorists, etc.  Obama defeated the “cut taxes” part with a single line of reminder:

“The problem is, that’s what we did for eight years.”

Which people seem to have forgotten.

Republicans are nothing if not excellent at being underdogs, however, and they are able to get away with statements that are totally untrue about America having the “best healthcare system in the world,” and their usual failing to recognize the difference between protecting terrorists and prosecuting them legally in a court of law.

The verdict:  Obama’s State of the Union will give him about a three day boost, until he stops following through again.  And the populist waves will continue to bash him against his own ship.

So what’s the deal here?

The issue is a number of things.  First is campaign finance.  This ruling is essentially a major step on the road to taking away limits for what corporations can spend on campaigns.  Essentially, this ruling has just given corporations an unbelievable amount of clout in elections – if they didn’t have them already.  Additionally, this will probably cause a massive increase in the influence of lobbyists on Capitol Hill.  Which is why the Democrats are against it.

The Republicans are for it because a) it takes away campaign restrictions, which they view as big government, and b) corporations have taken another step towards having the same freedom of speech rights as regular people.  Corporations, incidentally, tend to be pro-Republican.

This is the central issue. The personhood of corporations.  Corporations, under U.S. law, are granted a tremendous amount of leniency in the way of speech.  They have long been granted “person” status, meaning they are subjected to the same bill of rights as we are, and that they are technically allowed to lie, under certain conditions – namely, as long as they are not under oath, and as long as it doesn’t constitute certain types of fraud.

Basically, this extends their free speech rights to elections.

I’m not going to try and remain balanced here.  This is a truly awful idea.  By giving corporations the right to free speech during elections, you are also allowing them to spend as much money as they want during an election.  I know that the theory is Coolidge’s belief that what’s good for business is good for America, but those policies led to the collapse in 1929 and the Great Depression, and I think this recent economic collapse has proven that the interest of the American people and the interests of Wall Street and the corporations is in no way aligned.

So essentially, this gives lobbyists the power to continue funding candidates who endorse views that serve their financial interests rather than the interest of the American people, which is what the philosophy of democracy is supposed to be built around.  The New York Times put it well:  “The Supreme Court has handed lobbyists a new weapon.  A lobbyist can now tell any elected official:  if you vote wrong, my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.”

We’ll be seeing an increased number of ads funded by oil companies in favor of the fanatical anti-environment moron Jim Inhofe, and we’ll see the spread of massive swift boating.

I get why a lot of Republicans are celebrating.  Any removal of regulations is seen as small government.  But when it comes to our elections, they need to be tightly regulated so we have the best, most democratic possible outcome.  This may benefit the Republicans in the 2010 election (and what isn’t benefiting them nowadays?) but it will ultimately take away from the voice of the millions of voting American persons, and giving them to the money driven corporate “persons.”  Fail, Supreme Court.  Epic, epic fail.

Which is iffy.  Granted, there’s a certain amount of realistic commentary to this point, as, like it or not, Obama probably would not have been as palatable to the white American mainstream if he’d spoken in more ebonics, or whatever the racially sensitive term is for African-American speech patterns is, but there’s no doubt that his choice of words was just awful.  It’s like the older white men in Congress don’t really get how to speak when they’re in a political position.  Or maybe scrutiny has just stepped up a lot more.

Point being, it was a stupid thing to say, and it will cost him some political capital.  He apologized to Obama, Obama accepted it, ta-da.

So the fuss that the Republicans are making right now has to do with Trent Lott, who in 2002 was the Senate Minority Leader, and said that he was proud of having voted for Strom Thurmond, and that the country would have been better off if Thurmond had won.  Thurmond based his platform off of a largely segregationist viewpoint.

Short Story:  Big uproar, Lott resigned his post as minority leader in the Senate.  Which I think is equally ridiculous.  First of all, the comments that Lott made were at Strom Thurmond’s 100th Birthday.  So they should’ve been written off as Lott kissing Thurmond’s wrinkly white ass.

The thing is, stupid comments are constantly made by congresspeople, and, depending on the severity of the comment, it’s usually not the best idea for them to resign based off of it.  Lyndon B. Johnson famously said that Gerald Ford couldn’t “fart and chew gum at the same time,” Obama dropped the F-bomb a few times on the campaign trail and called Kanye West a “jackass,” Cheney told God knows how many people to go F themselves, and so on.  Then there’s the stupid comments they make on a daily basis.

It’s usually not a reason for them to resign.  It wasn’t a reason for Trent Lott to resign (it would’ve been a reason for him not to get elected again, sure, but that’s up to the voters) from the Minority leader, and Reid making a stupid but true comment is not a reason for him to quit as the Senate Majority Leader.

Regardless, it’s an incredibly hypocritical move by the Republican Party, who have been beating Democrats over the heads with allegations of exploiting race.  It’s stupid, it’s politicking, and it’s irrelevant to the issues at all.  Ad hominem is the tool of the day, and it really doesn’t serve any of us.  At all.