Military-industrial complexity

Fred Reed, the Sage of Chapala and one of the brighter people blogging, has some cogent remarks on the spreading power of the military in American life. The defense budget and military power just get bigger and bigger, and anyone who demurs is marked traitorous or cowardly. Reed writes, in part:

The country has no need of such a military, and especially not of the formidably costly weapons. Having no plausible enemy of any sophistication, the Pentagon exercises itself by attacking primitive nations in the Third World, and usually losing. For this you do not need an F22. You could lose as well with slingshots.

Read all of the piece, titled 'Military,' here. Maybe I just share a lot of his quirks and crotchets, but I think Reed is dead on about a lot of things many others dodge or don't get.

Cheer down

Guy named Jim Rogers, who messes about with big-time money, observes:

America is bankrupt. American government bonds are extremely overvalued. “The world’s last bubble.” America is in debt for over 13.000 billion (13 trillion) dollar and adds a 1.000 billion dollar debt each year. …

Read the whole post here
and pity Obama, who has to contend with this tangle. There won't be a lot of money lying around for jobs programs or comprehensive health-care reform or much else. Apparently there will be massive welfare coming up for the auto business, which has obdurately ignored the reality of oil while they pursued big bucks making oversized and impractical SUVs. Don't get too excited about the drop in gasoline prices; guaranteed, it won't last long. For our part, it's a lovely evening, we ate pasta with tuna and tomatoes and followed that with stinking cheese and ripe pear, so life continues at some pleasurable level no matter what.

Onward

The Obama crowd is moving quickly toward accession to office. I hear surmise that Larry Summers will get Treasury. I hope so … ever since he was ritually humiliated by academic feminists and driven from his job as president of Harvard, I've hoped he'd come back some way even stronger. His sin was speaking aloud a truth readily apparent and easily demonstrated about comparative high-end math abilities in males and females. Maureen Dowd had a hopeful piece in the NYT today about a return of dignity to the White House:

How could the White House be classy when the Clintons were turning it into Motel 1600 for fund-raising, when Bill Clinton was using it for trysts with an intern and when he plunked a seven-seat hot tub with two Moto-Massager jets on the lawn?
How could the White House be inspiring when W. and Cheney were inside making torture and domestic spying legal, fooling Americans by cooking up warped evidence for war and scheming how to further enrich their buddies in the oil and gas industry?

Read all of her piece here. What presidential candidate was on TV Tuesday evening calling for a repeal of the obnoxious Patriot Act? That would be Ron Paul. Who were you expecting?

It's over, finally

We walked over to City Hall this morning to vote. I always enjoyed the feeling that on election day people all over the country were doing the same thing I was doing. The early voting policy has sorta ended that, but there were still a lot of people out to vote today [though not here in **Adrift; we walked right in and voted with no wait], and they seemed to say pretty clearly that they'd had enough of Bush and the neo-cons, corporate hegemony and money-grabbing financiers.
Just watched Obama in Grant Park in Chicago, and it was a fine piece of political speaking. He's damn good at talking, he was gracious to McCain and didn't gloat, he talked about unity and American identity, and his tone is generally toward compromise and cooperation. We can only hope that his actions in office reflect that tone. Despite all the talk of his extreme leftist stances, I suspect that he will do something on the order of Clinton-style triangulation, a strategy that brought good administration of the federal government. We must wish him well because he has a miserable path to walk, given the state of the country now. Now W can go home and cut brush and give high-dollar speeches and feel aggrieved at the lack of appreciation.

Reviewing the last eight years

Tom Engelhardt, writing on his TomDispatch blog, sums up the catastrophe that W’s administration has been for this poor republic:

And what a debacle the Bush Doctrine proved to be. What a legacy the legacy President and his pals are leaving behind. A wrecked economy, deflated global stock markets, collapsing banks and financial institutions, soaring unemployment, a smashed Republican Party, a bloated Pentagon overseeing a strained, overstretched military, enmired in an incoherent set of still-expanding wars gone sour, a network of secret prisons, as well as Guantanamo, that "jewel in the crown" of Bush's Bermuda Triangle of injustice, and all the grim practices that went with those offshore prisons, including widespread torture and abuse, kidnapping, assassination, and the disappearing of prisoners (once associated only with South America dictatorships and military juntas).

Read it all here and breathe a sigh of relief that it will soon be over, one way or another … unless we get Sarah Palin as veep to an ailing John McCain. Maybe a real Republican party, a party like Eisenhower's – careful about spending, averse to foreign adventure, disinclined to meddle with the public, respectful of the Constitution – will come out of all this.

Prankin' Palin

Guy who sends me stuff sends me a funny thing about a couple of Canadian radio guys who pranked Sarah Palin, fooling her into believing that she was talking to the French president.

MONTREAL - In an over-the-top accent, one half of a notorious Quebec comedy duo claims to be the president of France as he describes sex with his famous wife, the joy of killing animals and Hustler magazine's latest Sarah Palin porno spoof.

Read it all here. Sarah Palin's overweening ambition is an unfortunate manifestation of the bogus idea that in America anyone who wants something badly enough is fit to have it. For half-bright 16-year-old kids, that would be sports fame or rock 'n' roll notoriety. [I blame TV for this pinhead sentiment loose in the land.] Palin may want very much to be president, but she is in no wise qualified for the job. If weird political winds should blow her into the White House and into the Oval Office, it would be as big a disaster for the republic as the odious W has proven to be. She should be back home in Wasilla selling real estate, maybe to the Russians that hang around the neighborhood. People need to learn to assess their capabilities in a way that reflects reality.

Matrimony & madness

We've just spent three days at Babylon-on-Colorado, marrying off a nephew of the wife. In September the daughter was married here in **Adrift ... the city judge read the ceremony on the banks of Cow Bayou and we came to our house for a reception. Honoring localism in food, we had San Antonio Bay shrimp, Woodsboro ham, and Yoakum smoked turkey along with lots of Portuguese white vinho. The Austin wedding was much bigger and more ornate. The bride is a bright, pretty, and funny girl who will be a decoration to the outfit.
Austin amazed, as it usually does. It's almost unrecognizable beyond the old central area, and that's much marred by progress; the doofus spirit of the place lives unaffected by change. While we were there, a woman threw her 4-year-old child into traffic. When the TV stations were doing interviews about the incident, people kept saying stuff like, "I didn't know she had issues," speaking of the mother. Nobody mentioned that perhaps pitching your kid out in front of a SUV is an at least arguably evil act. Just worry that the baby-tossing mommy was somehow in need of hugs or something like that. I ate Thai twice and Vietnamese once and bought curry paste and coconut milk. You can't get those things here, but I'm glad to be back on the banks of the bay.