Ed Note: These first reactions, pro and con, have been elaborated with photos, some ideas and supporting links. Perhaps worth a second look.
Comments here below.
Ed Note: This was first posted on Halloween. I bump it up because the Terror-watch drumbeat is getting so very loud. (See comments below.)
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Little Jimmy Grimaldi is out with his Halloween Message.
Tonight’s topic: Creeping Fascism.
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Well, as always, the experience of voting here in leafy, historic Brooklyn Heights was rather moving.
One feels the heady funnelling effect, as people come together along the sidewalks heading for the polling place. Why does going to the grocery store not feel at all the same?
Like the locusts. Every four years the members of the Community emerge from their burrows to engage in strictly programmed reproductive rites, behind curtains.
After glancing at the GOP column for familiar local names (none there), I pulled the pure Democrat line.
There was also a Proposition on the NY ballot making it easier for war veterans to claim benefits — an attempt to overcome roadblocks thrown up by Bush-Cheney. Hell yes.
(I recall the letter my father — a Korea COMBAT veteran — received from the Veterans Admin circa 2004, while fighting cancer that killed him in 2006, that his medical benefits were being curtailed. The opening line: “As you know, America’s priorities have been changing since the attacks of 9/11 …” or very similar words to same effect. )
The clunky mechanical voting machines are set up in the basement of a local public school. What better venue?
And the associated PTA always has a bake sale — goodies and coffee for people who may find themselves waiting in line. I got two pineapple muffins and a piece of lemon coconut cake. Let the celebration begin.
After voting I filled out an exit poll. ABC and CNN were on the header with other organs.
I confessed that I had thought the Donkeys would do best to nominate Hillary. And, re religion: None.
I think I made only one boo boo — when asked about who was “qualified” to be First Lady. Michelle, or Cindy, or Both, or Neither.
I said Neither. A bit odd, given that the only qualification seems to be marriage to the president. (Or might somebody someday shack up in the White House? Stranger things have happened there.)
I guess the correct answer was Both, and that my hasty response was rooted in mild, superficial — unwarranted — dislike for both the wives.
Mrs Obama will do fine. And, in that she seems to represent more fully than her husband (who along with Boz Scaggs is actually a martian) the cause of African-Americans, I’ll be happy and proud to see her assume the duties of high office. What a day that was …!
Or … Am I tempting fate with this loose chatter?
It’s 6:14 pm.
Only thing that I did wrong
Was staying in the wilderness too long
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on
The great questions in the air — about how much lasting constitutional and foreign-affairs damage Bush-Cheney have done, about the ways and means of turning things around, and the capacity of the american people to be citizens rather than consumers — leave me for the moment speechless.
I do think the turn in the works is a major turn.
A premise there, however, is that the forces behind the Fascist Shift of the new century are not deeply rooted and are exhausted for now — leaving the new administration a horrible mess, yes, but also a durable mandate and some elbow room.
But — if the premise is false, then four years from now we may see Romney on the verge of victory, and the young Obama already a has-been.
This was one reason why, this past winter, I thought Hillary the better candidate for the Donkeys to nominate — to allow her to absorb the worst of the blast, while holding Obama in reserve.
But … The hour of doom is at hand. Let the sun shine …
The mandate will not be large. LBJ in 1964, riding a wave of sympathy re Kennedy’s murder the year before, gathered 486 EC votes and carried 44 states.
Nothing near that is in the cards for Obama. Rather, somewhere between 289 and 364 votes, with 22 to 27 states, plus D.C.
Clinton got 370 votes and 31 states in ‘92. And 379 and 30 in ‘96. Plus D.C. in each.
Reagan has the all-time high, against hapless Mondale in ‘84, with 525 votes and 49 states. Then FDR in 1936, against Landon, with 523 and 46 (of 48 total) states. And then Richard Nixon in ‘72, contra hapless McGovern. 520 votes and 49 states.
Then again … Even the greatest EC landslides were, roughly speaking, five people voting chocolate and five vanilla. Fifty-three Pistachio, forty-seven Rocky Road.
No matter what happens on Tuesday and across the next four years, there is no escaping or re-writing the fact that the failures to apply Due Process in the 2000 election, and to depose Bush-Cheney in 2004, were costly beyond measure and plain evidence that, on the national level, we are not a functioning democracy.
Only thing that we did right
Was the day we began to fight
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on
It’s an open question — whether WE can fight at all.
But … Team Obama has. They’ve run an amazing campaign — principled and potent.
Can the example revive an increasingly impoverished and brain-dead citizenry?
Seems all my NY friends are holing up Tuesday night. Me, I think it’s the first thing in the public sphere worth celebrating since … Can’t recall.
Let’s have a General Strike on Wednesday. And then, to the business of rebuilding.
Where’s my blue suede shoes?
Aha — a final pre-election postscript: Great overview from a waning & weeping Laissez Faire fellow in the London Daily Telegraph.
The excitement about election day is palpable in the streets of New York.
Then all the captains of the West cried aloud, for their hearts were filled with a new hope in the midst of darkness. Out from the beleaguered hills knights of Gondor, Riders of Rohan, Dunedain of the North, close-serried companies, drove against their wavering foes, pierceing the press with the thrust of bitter spears.
But Gandalf lifted up his arms and called once more in a clear voice.
“Stand, Men of the West! Stand and wait! This is the hour of doom!”
The airy author of this Guardian piece misleads with the notion that Seymour Hersh is the greatest American investigative reporter.
He is, rather, the trusted mouthpiece of hundreds and hundreds in the National Security Apparat.
Nevertheless, it’s good news that he’s expecting rain once the new president has been installed. Perhaps enough to float criminal prosecution of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bush et al.
This NY Times electoral college map incorporates among other things current state polls nationwide.
The map this week evinced a strenthening Blue Shift:
Colorado went from Tossup to Leaning Obama. And Missouri and Indiana (!?!) went from Leaning McPalin to Tossup.
The week before, Virginia had gone from Tossup to Leaning Obama.
And the week before that, North Carolina had gone from Leaning McPalin to Tossup, and Oregon from Leaning to Strongly Obama.
Obama is gauged to have 196 solid votes and 90 leaning. 270 are needed to win.
Six states are now gauged Tossups: Nevada, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida.
Here’s a site where with a map upon which one can play with the state votes. (Click and doubleclick on the states to change color.)
Alan Greenspan’s broad confession before Congress yesterday brings to mind the parade in 1932 through those once hallowed halls of big brains from Wall Street and the Fed, all confessing their ideas were bankrupt and that they’d nothing left to suggest.
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
“Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”
Mr. Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”
On a day that brought more bad news about rising home foreclosures and slumping employment, Mr. Greenspan refused to accept blame for the crisis but acknowledged that his belief in deregulation had been shaken.
“This modern risk-management paradigm held sway for decades,” he said. “The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”
As if in reaction, Asian and European stock markets went off the cliff overnight — Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 Index down 9.6%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng down 8.0%, the Financial Times 100 down 5.0% — and the US markets are now following.
Sheer panic and forced selling (by margin callers) aside, the more slightly more concrete cause seems to be data and earnings reports indicating that the credit crisis that began 15 months ago has surely pushed the industrialized world into recession.
By the time FDR took office in March 1933, every bank in the United States was closed.
In general, however, the banking system then was much stronger than it is now. The crisis of the early 30s was largely a liquidity crisis created by bad austerity policy enacted post 1929 crash, which artificial austerity crushed the general economy. The crisis of today is an insolvency crisis created by a mountain of bad debt, crushing the finance sector first.
Opportunities and strategies for recovery, then, are likely to be different than they seemed to the bewildered owner-operators 76 years ago. Last week a bunch of Friedmanesque Chicago-School economists warned that today’s Fed and Treasury were fighting the last Great Depression (as if the crisis were merely a lack of liquidity in the credit system).
Into all this strides Barack Obama (it seems).
His entry brings to mind the early years of Bush-Cheney, when Secretary of State Colin Powell was repeatedly sent on foreign missions, including to East 42nd street in New York, to explain (as if it were possible) and take flack for the collateral damage of their radical policies.
Will the Obama movement and all its hopes for a new age get crushed by the economic misery that will characterize his four years? Or will the misery be so widespread that it serves to found and root that new age?
I keep forgetting to mention this … Came to mind during the late winter, as the primary and golfing seasons got underway.
The astounding play and mind of Tiger Woods these past nine years have something to do with the astounding fact that the United States seem on the verge of electing a black man to the presidency.
Perhaps the point is obvious. If not …
