How do you know that the economy is in a real recession, not just an imaginary one, one that's all in your head, a "mental" recession? When a Republican is out of work.

A particular Republican is out of work, actually: lobbyist and former US Senator Phil Gramm, the guy who said that the recession was something entirely imagined by a "nation of whiners" -- until he was laid off himself. OK, I'm aware that the newspapers say that he quit "to end this distraction." But trust me, he's out of work, and I don't think there's any doubt that this was a "quit or be fired" moment. Okay, he's really more of an involuntary retiree than the victim of a lay off, and I'm sure he has some rich Republican friends who'll front him his rent and grocery money should it come to that. Still, the fact remains that at this point, the architect of one of the pillars of Reaganomics is radioactive to any potential employers.

Most of the news media have covered this from the inevitable "Presidential horse race" angle, wanting to know what it means to the "contest" between Obama and McCain that Gramm wrote pretty much the entire McCain campaign economic plan; how much of an embarrassment is this to John McCain? And the focus is on that because the top candidates firing, dismissing, cutting themselves off from, betraying, denouncing, renouncing, and/or accepting the only-semi-voluntary resignations of their closest friends, allies, advisers, and staff has been a recurring thread this year, to the point where most news editors and many journalists are begging the rest of the commentariat to throw the phrase "throw (someone) under the bus" under the bus.

But there's a bigger news story here than the wannabe horse-race handicappers trying to juggle the odds on which "horse" will cross the "finish line" ahead of the other, and I'd like to thank the Washington Post's columnist E.J. Dione for calling it to my attention last Friday on Countdown with (No, Really, This Time) Keith Olbermann. Because Dione came very close to predicting this news story, a week in advance, pretty much by accident, with his column for July 11th, 2008: "Capitalism's Reality Check" (registration required). Because in a very real way, the 2008 election isn't about Barack Obama or John McCain. In a weird sort of a way, it's an actual national referendum about Phil Gramm. Because before he was before he was UBS lobbyist Phil Gramm, before he was Senator Phil Gramm, before he was U.S. Representative Phil Gramm, he was Texas A&M University professor of economics Dr. Phil Gramm, whose entire life's work has been about laissez faire economics. He wasn't just the a contributor to the Republicans' "Contract on with America," he was one of the main intellectual architects of Reaganomics, and for him, its founding principle was this:

In the long term, Dr. Gramm argued, it is basically impossible for a business to stay in business by harming its customers, without some unfair form of help from the government. If all government help is withdrawn from businesses, and a free market prevails, then customers will flock to the business that doesn't harm its customers, that business will earn more money than the businesses that do harm their customers, and the bad businesses will either go broke and close their doors or get bought out by the good business. This means that in a free market, any form of government regulation aimed at preventing companies from harming their customers is unnecessary. What's more, the effort that the government spends on checking up on companies that it thinks could go bad costs money, so they have to raise taxes to pay for the compliance checkers, including taxes on those companies. What's more, companies that are having to look over their shoulders at hovering, hostile government regulators have to practice business defensively, have to divert resources that could go into making better, cheaper products into dealing with regulators, have to hire and pay the people who do nothing but placate the regulators, and those costs get passed on to the customer. So according to Phil Gramm (and most other hard-core laissez faire economists) any kind of government regulation of business at all achieves no good end, gives customers no better products or more products than they would have had under a laissez faire market, and does so at a higher cost. Therefore any kind of consumer or citizen or environmental protection by government is an inherently bad thing.

When he was doing his academic work back in the 1970s, American businesses' regulatory compliance costs were at their all-time maximum; from the 1890s to the early 1970s, fed-up American voters had demanded more and more protection from companies by government. And when Phil Gramm was doing his academic work, the US economy was in horrible shape. In hindsight, we can see that this had more to do with horrible budgetary mismanagement during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and the wreckage wrought on the federal budget by the ever-escalating costs of having just lost a major land war in Asia, than it had to do with corporate regulation. But voters, eager for a fast way to repair the wreckage of the Carter-era economy, were willing to listen to the many US businesses who were claiming that there wouldn't be so much inflation if they didn't have to spend so much money hiring people to protect them from unnecessary government regulators. And, in fact, by the end of President Reagan's first term, this academic and political argument had so thoroughly won the day that it not only became a permanent bedrock principle of the Republican Party (where it was no big surprise, as hands-off-big-business had been Republican party dogma since the robber-baron days of the 1880s and '90s), but it even became the majority position on economics in the Democratic Party, as well.

So we've spent the 28 years since Ronald Reagan won his first election to the US Presidency rolling back regulation after regulation, trusting more and more in "voluntary compliance" and "market-based solutions." And even where some regulations were too popular to repeal, businesses in formerly heavily regulated industries like banking, lending, real estate, and finance found ways to shift all of their actual money, all of the actual economic activity, into what had been niches too tiny to come to regulators' attention during the heyday of government regulation. We got exactly what Phil Gramm devoted his entire career to trying to persuade us to want, an almost completely unregulated economy. So it's not terribly surprising that Phil Gramm thinks that our current economy is really, really great; he just wants his side's politicians to make whatever bare-minimum entirely-symbolic gestures are necessary to placate the American voting public long enough for the "invisible hand of the market" to weed out the bad actors and turn the economy over to the good companies, still at a lower cost than government regulation.

But here's what E.J. Dione was writing about, a week ago last Friday: Phil Gramm, and his friend John McCain, and a few equally hide-bound ideologues with no actual business experience of their own, are practically the only people left on the planet who still think so. The same companies that spent the 1970s through the 1990s begging for less and less regulation are now begging for more and more regulation, and so are ever more of the Republican politicians that are beholden to those companies. Not just the American voters, but American companies, are standing up to Phil Gramm and saying en masse, "We tried it your way, and it turns out that it doesn't work." They don't want to hear from some pointed-headed economist turned politician turned lobbyist, who not only never managed a business but who never even worked a day of actual work in his life, how the economy "ought to work." They can see with their own eyes that it didn't turn out that way.

There is, actually, a reason why it doesn't work. It would not be entirely fair to penalize Professor Gramm, Ph.D., for not having foreseen this; much of the math didn't exist during his academic tenure. There have been an awful lot of advances in economics, especially coming out of the application of the school of mathematics known as "games theory," that couldn't have been made without fast and inexpensive computer simulations. But having done the math, and seen the results, there's a perfectly logical explanation in plain English that we can now give. When I do give it, it's going to sound so obvious that you're going to ask, well, sure, why didn't they see that coming? And all I can say to that is, you weren't there, it was a much more primitive world back then. Anyway, here's the reason why it doesn't work: all too frequently, the market doesn't have time to fix itself. Suppose that even just one company cheats by finding a way to make its products more profitable in a way that harms the buyers or that downstreams costs to its non-customers, imposes costs on them involuntarily, and manages to keep this at all secret for even a matter of months, or at most a couple of years. It can then drive prices down to the point where none of its competitors are making any money. They go bankrupt; this company then buys them out or monopolizes the market.

As one company cheats, therefore, there are morally crippling pressures on other companies to find ways to match the cheating company's prices; if anybody cheats, they all know within a matter of at most a few months that they have to cheat, too. Nor can they go public with their knowledge that the other company "must be" making deadly safety compromises with their product or dumping toxics onto an unsuspecting public. They know from their own business experience that that's the only way that the other company can be making that product, in the same market they are, with the same raw materials costs and vaguely similar wages and the same broadly-known business practices ... but they can't prove it in a court of law. It could take them years to find the evidence they'd need to protect themselves if they made that accusation and got sued for libel and slander. And they don't have years; they'll be out of business long before then, probably.

Nor does it help that we had a wave of shareholders' rights lawsuits back in the 1970s and 1980s, all with the same conclusion: company boards of directors have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder return in the short run, and since it is a fiduciary duty, they can be sued for not doing it. If there are investors out there (and there are) who think that the company should take insane risks with public safety because their competitors are doing so and thereby returning more value to their shareholders, it doesn't even help if the company that would rather do the right thing and wait for the market to catch up is still somehow minimally profitable, or if it has the cash reserves to wait until the evidence comes out: they'll still get sued, there'll still be a hostile takeover of that company, and new management will be put in that has no such optimistic faith in the goodness of markets.

And all of that makes Phil Gramm what he richly deserves to be: a retiree. At age 66, he's an academic economist who, through his success in politics, actually got to experiment with an entire nation's economy. As a "scientist" who still won't admit that the experiment didn't produce the results that his hypothesis said it would, even after all the evidence is in, he deserves to never work again; he's not just a bad person, he's a poor scientist. So he belongs where he is now, laid off, unemployed and unemployable, living off of Social Security and his US Senate pension, not anywhere near the reins of power; Gods help us, if he could, he'd repeat the experiment again, rather than admit that his model was flawed, in hopes it would turn out differently a second time.

Forgive me if my tone is a bit angry, but Senator Obama is jumping up and down on my last remaining nerve ending. I have long since lost all patience for upper middle class black men who get up in front of black audiences and tell them that the reason black Americans are disproportionately poor and disproportionately in jail is that there's something wrong with black Americans. This crap was getting old already before even Dr. Cosby went out on his national tour on the subject; after being hectored by Bill Cosby for years on this same, tired, old lie I long-since had no patience left for it by the time Barack Obama started in on it. And when he gives it twice in as many weeks, unless I lose track of time again?

Look. I'm told in the news stories about his NAACP convention speech that when he got to "the responsibility speech," the crowd started cheering louder and louder. What I sincerely hope that that crowd was cheering for is their (I think, mistaken) idea that since surely Senator Obama actually knows the truth, what this part of the speech means is, "and I know what lies to tell white America to trick them into voting for me." Whenever I bring up topics related to this, that's what some Obama volunteer from somewhere on the Internet rushes into my blog to reassure me ... as if the prospect of my candidate lying to me were somehow reassuring.

Anyway, I'm not surprised that the cheering was muted for the first 2/3rds of the speech. Skim it yourself, and you'll see it's the same old Democratic boilerplate. It really can almost be summarized as this: the Republicans told us they had a better idea than the New Deal, so we tried it, and found out that it sucks, so let's stop doing things the Republican way, and go back to what worked before. Good enough. And he's right about that, and it's why I'm still voting for him. Probably. That is, as long as I keep reminding myself, to paraphrase the legendary "wit" of Donald Rumsfeld, you go into the November elections with the candidate you have, not with the candidate you wish you had. That's the only way I can tolerate voting for a man who keeps giving this speech ...

"So yes, we have to demand more responsibility from Washington. And yes we have to demand more responsibility from Wall Street. But we also have to demand more from ourselves. Now, I know some say I've been too tough on folks about this responsibility stuff. But I'm not going to stop talking about it. Because I believe that in the end, it doesn't matter how much money we invest in our communities, or how many 10-point plans we propose, or how many government programs we launch – none of it will make any difference if we don't seize more responsibility in our own lives.

"That's how we'll truly honor those who came before us. Because I know that Thurgood Marshall did not argue Brown versus Board of Education so that some of us could stop doing our jobs as parents. And I know that nine little children did not walk through a schoolhouse door in Little Rock so that we could stand by and let our children drop out of school and turn to gangs for the support they are not getting elsewhere. That's not the freedom they fought so hard to achieve. That's not the America they gave so much to build. That's not the dream they had for our children.

"That's why if we're serious about reclaiming that dream, we have to do more in our own lives, our own families, and our own communities. That starts with providing the guidance our children need, turning off the TV, and putting away the video games; attending those parent-teacher conferences, helping our children with their homework, and setting a good example. It starts with teaching our daughters to never allow images on television to tell them what they are worth; and teaching our sons to treat women with respect, and to realize that responsibility does not end at conception; that what makes them men is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one. It starts by being good neighbors and good citizens who are willing to volunteer in our communities – and to help our synagogues and churches and community centers feed the hungry and care for the elderly. We all have to do our part to lift up this country."
-- Barack Obama, Speech to the 99th Annual Convention of the NAACP, 7/14/08

... instead of the speech I wish he'd given:

"But even after we do all of those things, I can not promise you that the American Dream will work for all black Americans. Still, I am here to tell you that if it doesn't work, neither will anything else. Everybody in this room knows, even if too few people in America know, that every 10 to 20 years, another batch of swindlers comes along with a new lie, steals everything that black Americans have saved, and gets away with it clean because so far, no court has ever convicted, no legislature has ever been outraged; as long as when any scam collapses, if it's black America that disproportionately gets the shaft, justice has never been served. And like everybody in this room, I know that that, not some dysfunction of our families, is why generation after generation of young black men, after watching their fathers and uncles and grandfathers get humiliated over and over again, want to think that they should try some alternative to the American Dream, like professional sports, or professional music, or organized crime. And we have got to make it clearer to them than we have ever done that the odds there are even worse. Not one black man in 100,000 who tries will ever make even a middle class living off being a celebrity or a gang banger; it just doesn't work.

"Nothing works reliably in America but the good old fashioned 17th-century American Dream, and we have got to keep reminding them, and each other, and every new immigrant, and every American of this amazing engine of personal and national wealth. Stay in school as long as you can. Get the best grades you can, and stay out of trouble. Get married and stay married. Take any job you can get, work hard and reliably at it, and go the extra mile. Spend as little as you can, save every penny you can, and invest it in only two things: not jewelry, or fancy cars, or expensive shoes and clothing, but your neighborhood, and your own kids' education. And if you do these things, you will get ahead, and your kids will get farther ahead than that. No other way of life you can try can offers you anything like the odds of the American dream.

"But you have also got to tell them, to make sure they know, what no school will tell them: every 10 to 20 years, another swarm of white people in ties will come along with a seductive new lie called 'the next big thing' or 'the new economy.' They will explain to you in words so sweet that the reason the white people are wealthier than you is because they knew to invest early in this 'new economy.' Friends, when that man darkens your door, that is Satan himself talking through him. Treat him accordingly, and then pray your hardest that none of your friends or family members listens to his lies. Because if they do, then only a couple of years from now, you're going to lose everything you saved bailing them out after he's long gone, and their money is gone, and this 'new economy' is revealed to be what it has been every 10 to 20 years since Emancipation: a pyramid scheme that is running out of suckers, or else they wouldn't be peddling it in the black neighborhoods.

"And that's why, as your President, I will make absolutely sure that the Justice Department investigates those who peddled the last worthless dregs of the 'teaser rate' home loans on massively overvalued, essentially worthless homes, who sold you loans that they knew you'd never be able to refinance or pay off, because they didn't want your loan payments, or even your house after the 'gotcha' in that paperwork sucks all the savings you have out of the bank; they wrecked your life for one more loan origination fee. They were willing to destroy two million Americans' lives for a relative pittance, because they were that sure that the country would let them get away with it as long as so many of the victims were black. That has got to end. I can not promise you that I can get you back your money, although I promise you I will try. I don't even know if I can promise that I can save the houses you invested in, although with the help of Democrats in Congress, I will move heaven and earth to try. But while I'm trying to do those things, what I ask from you in return is that you learn to recognize a pyramid scheme, and you teach your children not to fall for them either, so that the American Dream can work as well for black Americans as it has always worked for all other Americans."

I can dream, can't I? This is the man who told me "there is nothing false about hope."

But I do know this: I will never again let pass the lie that it's black Americans' fault that they keep giving up on the American Dream until I start seeing racist scum "investment" peddlers serving hard felony time. Or as the authors of Get Your War On put it four years ago, before the latest round of outrages, when we still hadn't done anything yet to any of the scamsters behind so many completely worthless dot-com stocks, and Bush still thought he was going to get away with destroying Social Security:

I had a very introspective, mildly depressive Independence Day Weekend. That's not to say that alienne and her roommate didn't do a wonderful job of hosting a barbecue and evening of shooting off fireworks to celebrate my upcoming birthday, and I appreciate it, and I had a good time. I just wasn't really in the mood.

I noticed that this has been the biggest year since St. Louis County outlawed fireworks for illegal home displays in my neighborhood. No, really, the amount of illegal class-C ordinance that people in St. John fired off this year was absolutely unprecedented, easily three or more times as much stuff going off as in any of the previous seven years I've lived here. My first, bitterly satisfactory thought was that maybe they were doing what I was doing, namely celebrating the timely (if insufficiently unpleasant) death of one of the most bitter, vicious, hateful, murderous and destructive racist bigots in the history of American elective office, Jesse Helms. But that's probably wishful thinking on my part. My practical thought is that more people stayed home and spent $100 or $200 on fireworks because it was cheaper than the gas to drive to and from wherever they usually go for the Fourth, down to the lake or to some out of town relative's house or whatever. But along about 11pm on the 4th, a chill voice in the back of my head said in the sepulchral voice of a (faux) premonition, one so improbable that I hesitate to even write it down: "They're celebrating all-out because they, too, sense that this will have been The Last Fourth of July."

Other people have irrational fears of spiders, or of germs, or of knives. I have irrational fears about the end of the democracy. And I know that they're irrational fears. This nation has survived worse than George Bush and come back better than ever afterwards; cripes, if this country survived Calvin Coolidge, it can survive anything. I could give a hundred reasons to believe that my fear is irrational. The election will be held in November, George Bush will not win it, someone other than George Bush will be sworn in in 197 days, and no matter who wins, the country can begin to heal. I'm even reasonably optimistic that the margin will be so wide that even the Republicans can't steal it. But knowing all the reasons that my fear is irrational has not helped me shake this sense of impending doom, a dread so palpable I can only compare it to my early childhood years at the peak of the Cold War, when we came home after a week of duck-and-cover drills to set off fireworks wondering if we'd be able to spot Russian bombers through the fireworks smoke in time to make a futile dash for cover if we had to. This burning need to do something, anything, to somehow prepare for the day that the forces of tyranny move to end the democracy, to cancel all future elections, to cancel all future Fourths of July.

Crazy, huh? But having thought about it way too much this weekend, I think I know why I can't make this fear go entirely away. There is no doubt in my mind that the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were stolen. To quote the late George Carlin, "George W. Bush will always be Governor Bush, to me. Because that's the highest office to which he's ever been elected." But it takes more than a stolen election to rattle me, especially a stolen close election. After all, there's even less doubt that the 1960 election was stolen, that JFK was never actually elected President, either, that he was appointed president by Chicago mafiosi who had failed to notice how tightly his brother had converted over to the Reform (anti-mafia) Democrats. But here's the difference between 1960 and 2000, between 1960 and 2004: in nineteen sixty, there was outrage over it. And Bobby Kennedy wielded that outrage like a hammer to crack open the mafia in every city they ruled, to dig them out of their holes, and to crush them like itty bitty bugs. It took decades to finish the project. But still, to this day, people talk about the stolen election of 1960 and there's real anger, real outrage, at least among some of them.

Where's the outrage over Florida in 2000? Where's the outrage over Ohio in 2004? Why hasn't even one low-level person involved in any of the dozens of clearly documented voter suppression drives in both of those races been indicted? Remember, we don't require proof beyond a reasonable doubt to indict; why has no prosecutor even offered to look at the reams and reams of evidence that Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Greg Palast have accumulated? The 2000 "white collar riot" occurred on national television, with the faces of the paid professional Republican staffers who were assaulting police and besieging an election board clearly visible on video; why hasn't even one of them been charged with something, anything? Politics? Well, d'uh, of course. But why are the voters okay with this? Look at your polls, man; it sure as heck isn't out of love for George Bush or the Republican Party. So if no prosecutor will indict, and the people hate the party that stole the elections, then why can people like Antonin Scalia, Karl Rove, Kathleen Harris, Ken Strickland, and so forth walk our streets without a security cordon six blocks wide?

Why aren't they afraid?

If they were afraid, I'd be less afraid. If the people who conspired to steal the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were showing even the slightest nervousness about possible consequences of their past treasons, it'd be easier for me to calm my irrational fear, the little voice in my head that says, "Brad, if that was what they did to change the outcome of a close election, one that they could easily steal? What will they do if it turns out not to be close enough to steal inconspicuously? What will they do when they're desperate? And with so much of our Army and National Guard overseas, and with so much new power granted to the Department of Homeland Security, and with the American people showing so little outrage over the last two stolen elections in a row, if they do try something truly monstrous, who's going to stop them?" I don't quote a lot of song lyrics, but I feel a powerful urge to quote songwriter Stephen Stills, "For What It's Worth:" "Paranoia strikes deep: / Into your life it will creep. / It starts when you're always afraid. / You step out of line, the man come, and take you away." Which friend of mine was it who said that the thing she hates the most about the Bush administration is how much they make her feel like a paranoid, or something like that? But it's not the Bush administration that's got me feeling so nervous, so depressed, so paranoid; it's the voters themselves. I always thought that they valued their freedom, their franchise, enough to be outraged when both were taken away from them, and I'm ever so deeply nervous that they don't look nearly angry enough.

(Editorial note: Happy American Independence Day, or Fourth of July. In honor of the holiday, I wanted to interrupt this two-part series and insert a traditional, even for me, bit of patriotic glurge, because I really am like that. Fortunately, I came to my senses. There is nothing more patriotic, during a Presidential election year, than actually discussing with my fellow Americans what principles we want to be governed under for the next four years. So screw glurge; politics is my patriotism.)

This is another journal entry, like yesterday's, where in order to verify that I understood the facts of the matter, I had to wade through a ton of absolutely garbage journalism. Yesterday, I wrote about Democratic presidential nominee-presumptive Senator Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to vote for the current version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewal, the one that gives legal immunity to the telecom companies that spied on American's phone calls (whether or not anybody actually listened to the calls so tapped, it's technically still spying, technically) without the niceties of even the shallow fig-leaf of a FISA warrant application. Journalists all over the world have "knowingly" (cynically) assured people that Barack Obama doesn't "really" mean it, that he can't "really" mean to eliminate the penalties whenever the NSA taps Americans' phone calls without a warrant, that he's just pandering to the crowd who are afraid the Democrats will be "soft on terrorism." I spent yesterday's journal entry documenting the reasons why that theory is almost certainly false; it is much more likely that Senator Obama really does intend for America's spies to keep violating the law, and even the Constitution, and relying on in-agency and telco whistle-blowers to protect us from actual harm, just like every US President since Lincoln.

The case against the supposed political motivation of Obama's "tack to the right" in his speech outlining his plan to expand government funding to faith-based charities (PDF) is an even easier slam dunk. It annoys me what it says about how little the almost entirely white journalism establishment understands about black Americans that they think that the first credible black Presidential candidate would only shovel money to churches for political reasons. This is one area where black history and white history are diametrically opposed. First, the relevant white history: even the most religious white colonists who first came to America, the Puritans who made up over 80% of all the non-natives in America by 1640, came here fleeing from a church. From two of them, actually: the Catholic Church, and the Church of England. They had fought a war in England against the imposition of state-sponsored Catholicism. They took one look at what state-sponsorship was doing to their own Protestant faith and its ministers, and came here opposed, at least initially, to that, too. Stamped in the DNA of white America is a deep and abiding suspicion of organized religion. Even the most pious fundamentalist assures himself (delusionally, in many cases) that he, not some clergyman, let alone some government-supported clergyman, is his own highest moral authority after God and the Bible. For crying out loud, white American Catholics believe that, and that's 100% opposed to stated Catholic doctrine.

And in fact, even the limited extent to which the Southern Baptists have gone along with the current administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives has startled me. When I was being trained in Christian theology and Republican politics by Independent Baptist and Southern Baptist teachers back in the 1970s, they were entirely opposed to this kind of thing, for two solid practical reasons. First of all, they explained to me as a kid, just because your church is on the approved list for government funding this year, doesn't mean that it will be next year, not if the voters get any say in it, and we do elect a new administration every 4 to 8 years. And secondly, their own limited experience with accepting even the most indirect of government funding, through grants to private schools, left them with a sour taste in their mouths. They told me that every time, the politicians and government bureaucrats had waited until the churches' organizations were dependent on that money coming in, and then made intolerable demands in order to keep it. After one particularly horrific experience nearly bankrupted St. Louis's second-largest Protestant school back in the 1970s, the Missouri Union of Christian Schools passed a resolution forbidding any of their member schools from taking any government money. The state legislature had allocated funds "to promote physical education" by making grant money available to any school that wanted to build a gym, public or private. But then didn't allocate enough money to pay for one in one year. St. Louis Christian Academy had 2/3rds of the money they needed, paid the architect, got the permits, dug the foundation for their new gym. Then their legislator came in and said, in so many words, that the legislature was thinking of cutting off the funding to any school that didn't use the state-approved textbooks, including pro-evolution science textbooks. So SLCA said, fine, and tried to drop out of the program. The next day, a building inspector came by, asked them how they were going to finish that gym, and when he found out that no construction was ongoing, he condemned the building. It took fund-raising all across the state to raise the money in time and to pay the legal bills to fight that condemnation. So tell me why, with stories like that in circulation, churches want to let legislators and bureaucrats in Washington get their hooks into the churches' budgets? Can their greed have so thoroughly overruled their own knowledge and common sense?

What's more, at least two Christian legal organizations have already spotted one potential trap-door in Barack Obama's proposal, too, that's making them nervous. Obama gives what seems to him to be the reasonable requirement that if the taxpayers are funding someone's salary, then hiring for that job can't discriminate against applicants on religious grounds, or any other protected status like race, ethnicity, or Vietnam veteran status. He's on solid constitutional ground, there, in theory; I recall working indirectly on the case of a Wiccan clerical worker for the Salvation Army who won her case on the grounds that her duties were not in any way religious, so Sally's couldn't claim that sharing their Christian faith was a bona fide occupational qualification, a BFOQ. But as both the Center for Law and Religious Freedom and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations have pointed out, this gets problematic fast given Obama's commitment to roll these grants out to smaller and smaller churches, because those churches have hardly any paid employees, maybe even only one. Commingling of funds becomes automatic, impossible to avoid. And a commenter at the Center for Religious Freedom's blog pointed out an even bigger trojan horse in this proposal: the same law that Obama refers to covering discrimination in hiring, Title VII, is one that he's already promised gay and lesbian groups that he intends to amend to protect sexual orientation. So under Obama's proposal, any church that takes dollar one of federal funding and allows one thin dime of that money to commingle with church general revenue can no longer fire the pastor, or any other employee, if they find out he or she is gay.

But Senator Obama's proposal is neither proof that he's a right-wing Democrat in disguise, nor a dishonest attempt to portray himself as more moderate than he is, nor a liberal plot to advance the homosexual agenda. How do I know this? Occam's Razor. It is far, far simpler to believe that he is just that much of a believer in the black church, like nearly every educated black man in America. Remember that different black-versus-white historical experience I mentioned earlier? Let me finish that thought. Because, you see, black Americans' ancestors didn't come here fleeing any kind of church; they were captured by enemy tribes back in Africa and sold to white plantation owners as slaves. Those plantation owners lived in constant fear of organized revolt by their slaves; the term "monomania" was originally coined by southern plantation owners, for whom this "obsession" that black slaves had with getting free, their unwillingness to accept their fate, was seen as a mental sickness. But the one organization that black slaves were allowed, the one time they were allowed to gather under their own authority without white overseers, was in church on Sunday morning. At the time of emancipation, all black leaders in America were ministers, except for a tiny handful up north. And under the Jim Crow laws that were enacted to keep "freed" slaves enslaved in practice, and in the face of substantial barriers of institutionalized racism in education and hiring, it stayed true for another hundred years. Virtually the only black college graduates were seminary graduates in the American Methodist Episcopal and American Baptist churches; until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, practically the only good-paying job for black Americans was pastor of an AME or a Baptist church. As a result, up through 1964, the pastorate was a highly coveted job, one that without almost any exceptions attracted the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest. There have even been some black intellectuals who've complained about one of the unwanted side effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act being that the black church lost its monopoly on intellectual and moral authority, and a few of them blame that at least as much as they blame racist economics for the high rates of single parenthood in black America.

So given that difference in how white Americans and black Americans feel about their churches, if you thought that America's first black President wasn't going to funnel money any which way he can to the African Methodist Episcopal church, and probably the American Baptist Church, and conceivably even smaller black denominations like the Nation of Islam, by any means possible, whether you or I or any white person likes it or not? If you think you have to make up some implausible conspiracy theory to explain why he'd suggest he wants to do so? If you think that your conspiracy theory is more likely than that he just plain likes and respects the black churches that much and wants them to be richer whatever it takes? Then I think you just plain don't know what you're talking about.

For the last couple of days, the news has become increasingly unwatchable to me, because it drives me stark raving nuts when everybody, and I mean everybody, who's speaking up on a news story has it wrong. Or, in this case, two news stories: Barack Obama's announced support for telecom immunity, and Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to reform and expand the Bush Administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, elevating it even higher in importance in his administration than it was in this one. And all week long, almost every single reporter and analyst, regardless of their politics, has read these two stories the same way. Senator Obama, they have concluded, is "tacking towards the center," announcing policy positions that he doesn't believe or doesn't care about, in order to distance himself from the (presumably unpopular) Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, to make himself appear to be more "moderate" and therefore less "radical" or "liberal" to the (presumed to be anti-liberal) American voting public. Analyst after analyst has quoted the axiom that all Democratic nominees change their positions to appear more liberal while they're campaigning for their party's primary and then, once they have the delegate lead sewed up, change their positions again to be more "centrist;" that supposedly the Republicans do the same thing, tacking right in the primaries and tacking center-ward after the primaries.

Because obviously Barack Obama can't possibly mean what he says when he says he supports the warrantless wiretapping program that allows the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on any phone call, as long as what they at least say that they're trying to do is only pay attention to the calls that are between (actual or suspected) enemy agents and (actual or possible) enemy contacts overseas, he can't possibly really accept the argument, implicit in this bill, that if the NSA secretly tells a telecom company that the President approved this tap, the company should secretly and immediately comply, right? It's got to be just election-year posturing, right? Keith Olbermann and John Dean have both been going on all week about how they're just 100% sure that it must be a secretive conspiracy on Barack Obama's part to lull the Bush administration and the telcos into a false sense of security, then spring the trap on them with criminal, not civil, prosecutions next January. Right?

Wrong.

I think he actually means it.

And I'm a little bit disappointed, but not terribly surprised. And I'd rather he didn't, but I don't care enough to base my vote on it, not least of which because on this issue, there's no meaningful difference between him and John McCain. But that's not the point that I want to, that I feel that I need to, explain. Let me explain why I think he means it. (Again. I explained most of this, in part at least, when the warrantless wiretapping program first leaked to the public, I'm pretty sure.)

The fact of the matter is that going all the way back to the deployment of the telegraph, all the way back to the Civil War, in every war the US has ever fought, our spy services have spied on Americans in total violation of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. But rather than detail it war by war, let me point out to you the history of the NSA's original warrantless wiretapping program: Operation Ivy Bells, 1957 to 1975.

The National Security Agency as we now know it was founded by President Truman in 1947, to collect most of our WWII signals-intercept capabilities into a single agency and retool it from spying on our German and Japanese enemies on behalf of our Russian allies (and ourselves), to spying on our Russian (and Chinese, but mostly Russian) enemies on behalf of our German and Japanese allies (and ourselves). You can't entirely keep a secret that big, certainly not once a department gets big enough to get its own huge headquarters building, but for the first roughly 18 years of its life, the long-standing joke was that the acronym NSA stood for "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything." Rumors got out, but officially the very existence of the NSA was classified Top Secret. During the Cold War they mostly specialized in intercepting and decoding radio signals, but they did have one very, very ambitious phone-tapping program. It used customized Navy submarines to "tap" the trans-Pacific phone cables. Originally they only tapped a local underwater cable, but it expanded to tap all deep water telephone cables going into the Soviet Union. Yes, all calls from anyone, including any innocent civilians, who called anybody in Russia, including ones they had no 4th Amendment right to hear, were recorded, brought back, skimmed for useful intelligence, translated, and if any was found, it was put to use; then the tapes were erased and reused. The program only ended in 1975 when one of the NSA's own people sold the secret of the program to the KGB for cash. But even then, the American public didn't hear about it.

Why do we know anything at all about the NSA, officially, now? Because in 1971, President Nixon ordered the NSA to eavesdrop on all anti-Vietnam-War groups, too, also without a warrant, on the shallow excuse that some of them might secretly be controlled by Soviet spies. This so offended someone, and we're still not even sure who, that they blew the whistle, eventually leading to Congressional hearings in October, 1975: the famous Church Committee. It was in the Church Committee hearings that the government was grudgingly forced to admit that the NSA even existed, and that it had been used to spy on Nixon's political opponents. Even then, Ivy Bell never came up, not until long after the statute of limitations had run out. But no further attempts to set up any program even vaguely like it were set up until 1978 or later. Why 1978? Because having abused the privilege of spying on Americans for political reasons, the NSA was put under a figleaf of court oversight, and I do mean a figleaf, their own captive and pretty much entirely complaisant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. At which point the NSA went back into the business of spying on Americans, in total secrecy, without ever being turned down once, despite never having to turn in anything resembling enough evidence for a real search warrant, for a bit more than a decade. And that whole time, there were people mounting legal challenges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, arguing (quite correctly) that it was a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. And they got nowhere. You know why they got nowhere? Because the American government, including the courts, are run by grownups. And their attitude was, "who cares?"

They allowed FISA and the FISC/NSA to go forward, spying on Americans, because they knew that the real safeguard on Americans' actual liberty wasn't the FISC. It was the teleco employees themselves who'd have to install and maintain the taps, or who would inevitably discover them in the course of their work. It was the NSA's own employees, its own culture, who were trusted because the one and only time any White House ever abused the NSA for political reasons, somebody blew the whistle. And when they did, Nixon didn't have the guts to even try to make up a plausible national security reason for why he'd tapped Democratic Party offices and anti-war activists. I remember my Dad, and other adults I knew at the time, disgustedly arguing that if Nixon'd had the guts to say, "Yeah, I did it. I had evidence that wasn't good enough to get a warrant or to make a public accusation, but too good to completely ignore, that there was a Soviet spy in there somewhere, and I had to find out if it was true. So I had spies break into that party's offices. It turned out it wasn't true, so I didn't tell anybody because that would have unfairly tarred them with a false accusation, and we didn't use the information we got improperly. Would you rather I had ignored rumors of Soviet spies inside a major political party?", then he might have successfully finished his second term.

But anyway, afterwards, as far as everybody in any kind of a position of authority in Washington was concerned, the Watergate impeachment hearings and the Church Commission hearings proved that the FISC was a pointless exercise; that the real precaution was the guaranteed certainty that so many people would know if the White House was abusing its spying capabilities, one of the people who knew would have a conscience attack. And that's what's so uncomfortable about the whole Terrorist Surveillance Program at AT&T and other telecos, the warrantless wiretaps that let the NSA skim the entire Internet backbone and all long-distance phone lines for evidence of al Qaeda plots: nobody, and I mean nobody, has come up with even a suggestion that anybody in the NSA used those taps for anything but legitimate purposes, or even a hint that any information that they weren't supposed to be looking for was passed to the White House, or even a single clue that any actual American's privacy or political rights were impaired in even the tiniest way ... but somebody blew the whistle anyway. And that's not actually supposed to happen. Implicit in the relationship between America's spy agencies and America's telecom companies that goes all the way back to the original American Telegraph system in the 1860s is an agreement that everybody would keep their mouths shut unless something went wrong, and that agreement was breached.

So if you think that no matter what he was told or how famously fair-minded a man he is, Barack Obama can't possibly be really okay with a bill that forgives every telco for participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program if they claim that they at least thought that the President had ordered it? That he must only be claiming to be okay with it for political advantage, for fear of being called soft on terror, or to reassure swing voters, or to establish the appearance of some distance between himself and the left-wing blogosphere? I'm pretty sure that you're wrong.

(And an irrelevant aside: my Bush Countdown Clock from NationalNightmare.com reminds me that there are now only 200 days left in the Bush Administration. And for much of that time, Congress is going to be in recess. Rejoice that there's really not much harm that the man can do in that little time, with no more resources or authority than he has left.)

Ever since John McCain locked down the Republican nomination, I've been outlining and collecting notes for a 3-part series intended to explain to my younger readers where this guy John McCain came from ("The Making of McCain"), how such a right-wing Reagan Republican became such a darling of so much of the liberal media ("The Myth of McCain"), and finally, how that guy turned into the 180° opposite that we see in front of us this last year and a half or so ("The Mind of McCain"). And frankly, the last one, the most important one, has been giving me fits. I started out with one theory as to what's going on, that it was pure political expediency and desperation, only to find strongly suggestive evidence that it wasn't that, or if it was, it wasn't just that. That lead me to the mental deterioration theory, which I still haven't entirely let go of, but it's not entirely satisfactory. McCain's few remaining friends insist that the sea change came not 18 months ago, but 7 years ago, that John McCain really is one of those guys for whom 9/11 changes everything. But that's not an entirely satisfactory answer, either, because I follow this guy, I used to be a big fan, and no, really, these last 18 months have been different from the 5 and a half years before them. I'm developing a theory that relates it to something that happened to him early in life that he's flashing back to, but that feels like arm-chair psychology. (I will tackle all of these themes in more depth when I finally do get "The Mind of McCain" written, I assure you. Should be no later than another 2 months, could be any day now.)

But after a month or so of wrestling with this, I coincidentally happened to be (as I mentioned yesterday) reading the first chapter on The Future from Neil Howe and William Strauss 1989 best-seller, Generations, aloud to a couple of friends of mine. And after boggling over the opening paragraphs' spot-on prediction to how America would react to a major terrorist attack on New York City if it happened right after the year 2000, I moved along to the sections where they tackled how each generation was likely to live out the next couple of decades, starting with the Silent Generation, born 10 years too young to be war heroes, 10 years too old to be hippies. And then I freaked out all over again at what must have seemed to me like an irrelevant and unlikely trivia item when I last read the book years and years ago: a near perfect forecast of John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.

I wish I could quote it to you verbatim, but my copy's not here at the apartment. To summarize and paraphrase, they were dealing with the question that's inherently interesting to members of that generation, namely, would they ever get a President of the United States of their own? Comparing them to similar generations who had themselves been too young to be national heroes and too old for spiritual crusades during one of America's chronic Great Awakenings, the authors reminded us that such "adaptive" generations tend to have very short tenure in the White House, and to get what few presidents they do get early in life. They rattled off a long list of might-have-beens, like Jesse Jackson and Geraldine Ferarro and Michael Dukakis, concentrating especially on the Silent Generation's best chance, the murdered Bobbie Kennedy. They predicted that since no Silent Generation nominee had made it into the White House by 1989, it was pretty unlikely that there would ever be one, that control of the White House would end up passing directly from the GIs to the Boomers.

But they did suggest that there would be one last chance, and here's how they predicted it would happen if it did: late in life, some prominent Silent Generation politician might have a major change of heart, abandoning his generations' instinct towards compromise, negotiation, and bipartisanship, and attaching himself to one side or the other of the Boom Generation's great intra-generational ongoing faction fight so thoroughly that he gets accepted by the public as a member of their cause. They predicted that it probably wouldn't work. They didn't say so in that chapter, but the reasons why not are clear enough. It would mean that politician flip-flopping on an entire career's worth of political positions, renouncing everything he or she ever stood for, and who'd ever trust a politician after they'd did that? Also, in their chapter detailing the consensus life history of the Silent Generation, they pointed out just how many of them had deeply disgusting and creepy personal lives in their 30s, more or less, as they tried so hard to shift their generational allegiance from trying to live up to the G.I. Generation to trying to catch up to the Boom Generation.

And again, coincidentally, the same week I was reading this in Generations, Sharon Churcher of the UK Globe and Mail broke the story of "The wife John McCain callously left behind," as profoundly creepy a story as anything you've ever heard about the Kennedies and, sad to say, all too typical of a disgustingly large number of upper-middle-class and above Silent Generation men in particular. Trust me, the constant public sexual desperation of drunken and/or drugged-out middle aged heterosexuals made the Disco Years a living hell for the rest of us, one long series of gross-outs. Anyway, it made it fresh in my mind again that oh, yeah, John McCain really is a member of his generation, in all of the best and the worst ways together.

And now one last politician of the Silent Generation, John McCain, has abandoned his childhood allegiance to Reagan's generation, and the bipartisan instincts of his own generation, in hopes that he can suck up to the cowboy fundamentalist right wing of the Boom Generation leadership of his party thoroughly enough that they'll overlook how he spent the 1970s, and overlook his bipartisan record and frequent vocal contempt for the Boomers on both sides during the 1980s and 1990s, in desperate hope that one member of his generation will be accepted enough as an honorary leading-edge Boomer long enough to get at least one term in the White House for his generation. Holy freaking cats, Strauss & Howe nailed it again.

OK. I don't get it. I admit that right up front. Even after asking people all over the Internet to explain it to me, even after reviewing the appropriate law, even after hearing the emotional justifications, I just can not make this make sense. Will somebody please explain this to me?

As early as last Tuesday, talking heads were saying that if she couldn't be VP, Hillary's last remaining non-negotiable demand, in exchange for not continuing her rules committee fights all the way to the Denver convention, was that the Obama campaign officially or unofficially help her pay off her campaign's debt. I dismissed this idea as silliness. Then Friday afternoon, Senator Clinton, who could after all talk to Senator Obama any time she wants (they do work together) insisted that they covertly sneak away to meet in an undisclosed location for an hour. At the end of the hour, both campaigns admitted, off the record, that there was a deal. And sure as heck, on Saturday (44 minutes late, and as ungraciously as ever) she did give what could, if you're broad-minded enough, be argued to be called a concession speech that endorsed Barack Obama. You had to listen carefully for it, because it was sandwiched in between a whole heck of a lot of talk about Hillary's campaign, and Hillary's causes, and how important Hillary Clinton is ... you know, her favorite topic. But she did say to her people, "vote for Barack Obama." And what do you know ... in less than an hour, surrogates for the Obama campaign were all over the Internet, including the obama_2008 LiveJournal community, begging for people to donate money to Hillary Clinton's 2008 Presidential campaign.

When pressed, they clarify (quietly) that what they're really hoping is that only the people who legally can't give any more money to the Obama campaign donate to her; they quietly admit that they don't exactly want people to max themselves out helping her rather than doing the smart thing, funding the campaign that could, you know, actually still win. But that's not the appeal that went out; the appeal that went out was for anybody who supports Barack Obama to send whatever they can afford to Hillary Clinton 2008 in order to help them pay off their estimated $30.4 million debt.

I've heard this explained as a gesture for "party unity." And was it a gesture of "party unity" when she took out those loans in order to pay for attack ads on the (by the time she was taking out those loans, already statistically inevitable) party candidate? Nobody made her take out those loans, nor is it as if she used that money for anything that was in any way good for the Democratic Party, or like anybody in the Democratic Party was even asking her to do so.

What's more, who exactly is this gesture supposed to impress? She's already asked the people who were as committed to the Democratic Party as they were to her to vote for Obama in November and to campaign as hard for him as they would have for her. Yes, I know that a lot of bitter (and so far as I can tell from seeing them on YouTube, virulently racist) old Boomer and Silent generation white women don't want to do that, but are they going to magically learn to love Obama just because his followers gave Hillary some money? I don't think so. A ridiculously expensive $30+ million "display of party unity" is wasted on them; they don't want money, they don't want gestures of respect, they want a bullet through that "inadequate black male" head.

We're also told that Clinton's own donors are tapped-out, at the federal donation limit, and that if she can't raise the $30.4 million by the time of the Democratic National Convention, she becomes responsible for the loan and the whole amount becomes a donation to her own campaign. To which I reply, so? That's as legal as church on Sunday. There is no federal campaign spending limit on what you can spend of your own money. And here's the real kicker for me: so what if she has to pay her vendors out of pocket? The Clintons are rich. They've averaged $13,502,364 a year in income since Bill Clinton left office, and have an estimated net worth of roughly $35 million dollars. How much of a tragedy would it really be to ask them to get by on "only" five million dollars until one of them gets another book contract or Bill Clinton gives another speaking tour?

For crying out loud. What could possibly justify asking guys like me who make less than $20,000 per year, living on fixed income in a Section 8 housing complex, to donate money so that a multi-millionairess doesn't have to get by on "only" her last five million dollars? Please, somebody, for the love of all that's holy and good, explain this to me?

There are a lot of anti-Barack-Obama slurs that rattle around the net, and I just let most of them go right by. Especially since a lot of them come from people I suspect aren't going to be anywhere near a polling place on November 4th; as I said to one particularly retarded-sounding group a month or so ago, I'd be more worried about their mistaken opinions if I thought that even half of them were registered to vote. But there's one particular slur that gets under my skin, or at least it's meant as a slur. I've been banging my head against the desk for months now over the fact that so many Americans, including apparently even some who voted for him, just simply take it for granted that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. Just how big a problem this is got brought to light when Dallas Morning News Washington bureau chief Carl Leubsdorf reported on a focus group of 12 independent voters studied by Peter Hart at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, in which 7 of them, including one who leans Democrat, were in agreement that the American people are going to have to decide how much it matters that Barack Obama is a Muslim. (See Leubsdorf, "Independents split on choice," DMN, 5/14/08; see also Kenneth Walsh, "Obama's Independents Problem," US News & World Report, 5/22/08.) And yes, much head-desking was occurring in news rooms and campaign offices all over the country because this focus group was done right at the peak of both the Obama campaign's appearances in Virginia, and at the height of the controversy in the news over Barack Obama's United Church of Christ pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

And, well, I sort of have my own focus group: the public, out-of-character chat channel for the City of Heroes server I play on. At least, I keep telling myself to think of them as a focus group; it's the only way I keep succumbing to the overwhelming internal pressure to make a big hairy deal out of the fact that Someone Is Wrong on the Internet. (I swear I'm going to get that machine-embroidered on a vest sooner or later.) These people are so insanely misinformed and underinformed that if I let myself, I could do almost nothing all day but correct their idiocies, at the cost of my blood pressure, my last remaining sanity, and the pleasure I still get out of playing a villain in City of Heroes. So instead, I just try (hard, and not always successfully) to discipline myself to just listen to what they're saying, just take it in and think about what they believe to be true, what seems most plausible to them, and what that means for the campaign, without trying to argue with them or even direct the conversation. (It's maddening. I don't know how real focus-group professionals do this all day without going nuts.) Almost all of the ones who argue about politics in that chat channel (nearly incessantly) insist when I ask that they're registered voters where they'll be in November, and over half insist that they've voted in one or more of the November 2000, 2002, 2004, or 2006 elections. And yet the vast majority of them raise the same two concerns: is it smart to vote for a Muslim while we're in a War on Terror? Or, contradictorily, is it wise to vote for a President who'll be under permanent threat of assassination from all the Muslims in the world because he's an apostate, an ex-Muslim?

Of course, those who know me well can guess the real reason why this drives me to distraction. I have, as I've commented before, a bad case of Engineer's Disease: I can't stand to see anything done badly. So I've been wanting to find the person or group that's at the heart of this BS rumor and shake them, not for the all-too political crime of slander, but for the sheer idiocy of making up a lie when the real truth about Barack Obama's religious background would be just as toxic, or maybe even more so. Barack Obama wasn't raised Muslim; his middle name is only Hussein because that's an extraordinarily common family name where his father came from. You can no more assume that someone with Hussein in his name is (or was) Muslim than you can assume that someone named Michael or Patrick or Mary or Catherine is a Catholic. No, all it proves is that somewhere in the distant past, they probably had at least one Catholic ancestor; so it is with Barack Obama. His Kenya father moved to the US specifically because he was the apostate; living through Africa's ongoing religious strife between Muslims and Christians caused him to convert to atheism. When he came to the US, he (briefly) married and had sons by an almost equally atheist, or at least secular humanist, American woman. No, really; if the American people knew that Barack Obama was raised as an atheist secular humanist and only converted to Christianity fairly recently as an adult, they'd probably be even more worried about him than if they thought he was raised Muslim. Atheists are, famously and in poll after poll, the only religious group more universally hated in America than Muslims.

But when I dug and dug and dug, what I kept finding was that the sources that spoke about this and wrote about this the farthest back cited no sources, but still wrote about it as if it were obvious, as if it were something that just everybody knew without being told. And that fascinated me ... until it hit me exactly why they think Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim or ex-Muslim. And the give-away clue was when I remembered a brief interview, many months ago, with some (supposedly self-identified as politically active) black rapper in which he was asked about Barack Obama, only for the interviewer to find out that this rapper had never heard of him. The rapper asked for the name again, and then asked, "No, really, what's his real name?" The interviewer said that no, really, the Senator's real name is Barack Hussein Obama. And here's the telling clue, once I understood what it meant. The interviewer reported that the rapper looked at him scornfully, as if he were some kind of a fool, and said derisively, "Nobody's real name is Barack Hussein Obama." Why would he think that? Then it hit me.

Think about how first impressions work. Not just in politics, think about how they work in real life, when you're introduced to someone for the first time. All you know about the person is their name, how they look, what they're wearing, and a rough estimate of their age and where they're from. But you don't stop there, do you? As soon as you're told all of those things, you construct an approximation in your head of what the rest of the facts about them are likely to be, based on your experience in life with people of roughly the same age, appearance, dress, and name. So let's assume that your average American of voting age and with voting experience has been around the track a couple of times, but hasn't put any real effort into researching this year's candidates. He gets introduced, figuratively, by the news to a candidate and here's all he knows: he's an early-middle-aged (well, no, but he looks it) light-skinned and expensively dressed skinny black man from Chicago, a long-time political activist with a flair for religious-sounding language, and he gives his name as Barack Hussein Obama. What story does that person make up (rather than look up) to explain these facts?

Meet "Barry Johnson."

OK, maybe Johnson isn't his real last name, it could just easily be Smith or Wilson. But it's "obvious" to anybody who's been around a while who this "Barack Hussein Obama" guy must be. He was probably raised African Methodist Episcopalian in Chicago, went away to college, had some crisis over not feeling black enough and/or fell in with left-wing Afrocentrist political activists in college, and did what so many guys like him did: joined the "black Muslim" Nation of Islam and made up a pseudo-African, pseudo-Muslim version of his own name. Why else would he look like he does, talk like he does, dress like he does, and have such a weird sounding name if that isn't what he went through? All that remains is the question of whether he's joined the United Church of Christ in sincerity, because he's embarrassed that he was a Black Muslim in college, or for political expediency; why else do you think that every other or every third interviewer thinks it's so important to keep asking Barack Obama what his opinion is of (anti-Semitic hate-mongering Nation of Islam spokesman) Louis Farrakhan?

If I'm right about this (and I might not be), then one of the big challenges for the campaign will be to get the uninformed to actually listen to his biography in more detail, for them to understand that the "religion" he abandoned for Christianity was not the Nation of Islam or any other kind of Islam, but no particular religion at all; that he has his name not because his parents raised him Muslim or because he changed it in college (in fact, he experimented in college with renaming himself with a pseudo-Catholic name, "Barry O'Bama"), but because his dad's an immigrant who fled from Islamic violence who gave his son a traditional African name, and that he really did sincerely become born again because the example of good Christians engaged in charity convinced him of the power of the Christian message of redemption. It's not going to be an easy story to get people to believe, not because it's so inherently unbelievable, but because it contradicts their uninformed first impression. It's also going to almost certainly a task that's going to fall to surrogates and subordinates, because Barack Obama (unlike his recently defeated rival) hates talking about himself; his favorite word is "we," not "I." But if I'm right and this doesn't get done, the voters are going to be choosing between John McCain and the fictitious candidate they've made up in their own minds, Barry Johnson the ex-Black-Muslim from Chicago, not between John McCain and the real Barack Hussein Obama.

We're into one of the major "driving" holidays in the US, the traditional unofficial start of summer. And that's not to mention a day that a lot of Americans need to travel, because officially, it's Memorial Day, a day of special annual funeral services for our war-veteran dead, and this year (as with the last four Memorial Days), there are a lot of families with new reasons to gather from all over the country, with especial urgency to gather, at military cemetaries. It's also (for those reasons) a traditional weekend for gasoline prices to fluctuate upwards, because of the rising demand from the "summer driving season" and the need for refineries and resellers to swap out their stock of winter-grade gasoline for (also more expensive to make) lower-smog summer-grade gasoline. So even if oil weren't trading about the previously unthinkable price of $135 a barrel (up from $45 a barrel 4 years ago, from $15 a barrel during the Reagan administration) this would be a weekend when gas prices would be going up. Just not as high as they are, breaking $4/gallon for regular unleaded in places scattered all over the country, and averaging only a little less than that. And not a few voters have been saying for weeks now that their vote in November will be determined almost entirely by their opinion of which candidate will do the most to lower the price of gasoline. (Europeans who are going to give us hell over that: save it. Nobody here needs or wants to hear it. No, really, don't bother opening your mouth.)

Vote for Barack Obama for President in November.

First, let me start you off with a fairly good primer, compiled by two Associated Press business reporters for the driving weekend: John Porretto and John Wilen, "AP Impact: What Makes Up the Price of Gas?," Associated Press, 5/24/08. It'll walk you through where the money is going, and why, step by step, penny by penny. Short answer: oil prices are vulnerable to speculation, like anything traded on a commodities market. Demand is up and supply is steady, but not enough to explain the hike. The price is taking an especial hammering when measured in US dollars, because the US dollar is dropping in value like a rock against almost every other currency in the world. There's also a risk premium, that is to say, prices go up when oil dealers get nervous about whether or not there'll be a supply disruption next month, a "hedge" against next month there being, say, civil war in Nigeria, or a US bombing of Iran, or Iraq's Sunni Arabs returning to sabotage of Iraqi oil facilities, or chaos in Russia, or civil war or coup d'etat in Venezuela, or any problem in any country that could lead to it temporarily dropping out of the oil-selling business. Then come the various taxes, but they haven't gone up in the last four years; the cost of refining, which has gone down over the last four years; and the profits to the gas stations, which have basically vanished over the last four years, which is why they're all remaking themselves as grocery stores and fast-food places that just happen to sell gasoline (at a loss). So no, really, the price hike is almost entirely due to the falling US dollar and the oil traders' increasing fears that US foreign policy is going to wreck yet another oil producing country.

This article doesn't say, but I've heard the "risk premium" estimated in other articles about oil trading, lately, as $25 to $30 a barrel just from the Iraq occupation alone. Furthermore, history strongly suggests that the Iraq War is also the reason for the other major factor, the reason why the US dollar is going down the toilet. Or rather, not the war itself, nor even its ruinous cost, but something more fundamental than that: the way we're (not) paying for it. When the US goes to war, there are only two ways to pay for it. All Americans, especially the wealthy but really no, all Americans, can make shared sacrifices, accepting rationing, accepting higher taxes, to pay the cost of the war. Or we can just print the money. In this case, we're just printing the money, specifically, we're issuing another almost 20% of the budgeted debt in government bonds (debt) for off-budget "war supplemental" funding, and unlike in some previous wars, we're not selling War Bonds at deeply discounted rates to the public out of patriotism, we're selling them at sharply rising rates on the open market, especially to China and Saudi Arabia. And whenever the US runs the printing presses to pay for a major war, the currency plummets in value; there's a reason why the phrase "not worth a Continental Dollar" was slang for "worthless, not worth the paper it's printed on" for a hundred years after the Revolutionary War. And that's why this graph (taken from GasBuddy.com via stlouisgasprices.com) shows that the steep rise in prices corresponds exactly to the war in Iraq, and not just to the war in Iraq (or else the price would have jumped at the beginning and plateaued) but, more importantly, to our total accumulated war debt:



So if you don't want to see runaway inflation get worse and runaway unemployment set in with it, like we had the last time, back in the 1970s when two presidents in a row (then one Democrat, Johnson, and one Republican, Nixon) both decided to fund a major land war in Asia without raising taxes or selling discounted War Bonds to the American public, your first priority should be to elect the person you trust the most to end the war in Iraq, to not just stop the pointless dying and the war crimes and the war profiteering and the endless series of blows to our reputation and the reputation of secular democratic free market capitalism and the easy recruiting bonanza for Islamists but to also stop the endless and unaffordable money hemorrhage, as fast as possible. And if you're at all honest with yourself, you know that that man is Barack Obama.

This link's been sitting on my desktop for almost two weeks now, constantly reminding me that I wanted to bring it to your attention and say a thing or two about it: Eric Eckholm, "Reports Find Racial Gap in Drug Arrests," New York Times, May 6th, 2008. It's based largely on a newly updated report from Human Rights Watch, Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States, and its main conclusion, as reported by the Times, is that "large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates" (emphasis added by me).

I emphasize the end of that sentence because most Americans who get their news from television take it for granted that this is not true, but you can look up the numbers yourself in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's recurring reports. This paragraph in the Times was