Click the image to the left and listen…as with much of Jon Stewart, although some words are bleeped, his comments might not be suitable for your young children.

Rep. Bachmann’s district has the single highest rate of foreclosure in all of Minnesota, higher even than the urban, low-income, multicultural district of neighboring Rep. Keith Ellison. She sure doesn’t act like it, though, casting votes against every piece of legislation that would aid homeowners suffering in this crisis, including allowing judicial modifications of mortgages and reining in abusive lending practices.

Rep. Bachmann thinks the CRA’s efforts at promoting minority and middle-class homeownership caused the crisis, so how does she explain her district’s severe crisis, when it is 93% white, only 6% poor — not exactly the kind of place the CRA aims to help? She doesn’t say.

The reality, of course, is that the explosion of bad loans in the last decade wasn’t driven by the 30-year old law, but by the exorbitant profits to be made from securitizing high-interest, subprime loans. It was greed, not good intentions, that paved this path to ruin.

Read the rest of this column by Austin King at Investor’s Business Daily.

But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration’s strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have — from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)

(Read the remainder of Camille Paglia’s column at Salon.com, September 9, 2009.)

It takes a MASSIVE effort to place a patient in front of a doctor in a hospital with resources to treat a problem. You have: years of public schools and public universities; student and professional testing boards; student loans or scholarships; internships in public hospitals (or private ones that might have some public funding); years of public review of drugs; equipment and drugs that were developed with public research money; hospitals built with generations of technical and professional knowledge and civic oversight; agencies that monitor safety and qualifications; laws and courts that keep the system honest and stable; investments that are monitored and regulated publicly to instill confidence and ensure a flow of money; regulations that keep patients safe; etc.. This represents a HUGE PUBLIC EFFORT that all taxpayers pay for.

If the powerful engines of government, taxation, public university hospitals, medical schools, research funding (not a small amount), etc only exist because of the work and taxes of ALL of us, why do only a portion of us get to benefit from them? Isn’t that wrong? Why isn’t this part of the discussion?

Additionally, why does the Baucus bill cost so much? Can’t we just pass laws that limit immoral corporate activity (like cherry-picking patients and denying coverage and buying legislators)? Why does stopping the pillaging of citizenry wealth by insurance companies (or greedy unregulated mortgage houses) have to cost the taxpayers? Are we somehow thinking about paying the insurance companies NOT to rip us off so badly? Are we doing something about compensation, like the CEO of United Health Care who received more than 1 billion dollars for less than a decade’s worth of work? Or will we be giving money away again so that disproportionate CEO and Board compensation is preserved?

I don’t get it!

It is still unclear what the ultimate cost of this bailout will be. But thanks to inquiries by Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, we do know of another, simply outrageous cost. As a result of the Fannie takeover, taxpayers are paying millions of dollars in legal defense bills for three top former executives, including Franklin D. Raines, who left the company in late 2004 under accusations of accounting improprieties. From Sept. 6, 2008, to July 21, these legal payments totaled $6.3 million.

With all the turmoil of the financial crisis, you may have forgotten about the book-cooking that went on at Fannie Mae. Government inquiries found that between 1998 and 2004, senior executives at Fannie manipulated its results to hit earnings targets and generate $115 million in bonus compensation. Fannie had to restate its financial results by $6.3 billion.

(Read the remainder of Gretchen Morgenson’s column at nytimes.com, September 6, 2009)

Buyer’s remorse? Not me. At the North American summit in Guadalajara this week, President Obama resumed the role he is best at — representing the U.S. with dignity and authority abroad. This is why I, for one, voted for Obama and continue to support him. The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair. Obama has barely begun the crucial mission that he was elected to do.

Having said that, I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy. When will heads start to roll? I was glad to see the White House counsel booted, as well as Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, and hope it’s a harbinger of things to come. Except for that wily fox, David Axelrod, who could charm gold threads out of moonbeams, Obama seems to be surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys.

Case in point: the administration’s grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton’s megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center.

But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises — or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama’s aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you’re happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

(Read the remainder of Camille Paglia’s column at Salon.com, August 12, 2009.)

While good, it is not his acting skill or his clothing that I think is brilliant. Neither do I think brilliant his literal message promoting uniculture and anti-tolerance with the goal of arousing the citizenry toward a second revolution to “stop the destruction of America.” What is brilliant, in my mind, is the conversion of an American icon away from its original meaning into its near polar opposite and the recognition of how effective that is in reducing the quality of public discourse into simplified ideological myths that are to be followed rather than understood.

Thomas Paine was an American revolutionary, thinker, intellectual, activist, and author of one of the most popular and important books ever published. Thomas Edison writes that, literally, there might not have been an American Revolution without Thomas Paine and Common Sense. Being highly skeptical of powerful institutions – governmental, corporate, aristocratic, and religious – he was a grass roots rebel. His skepticism and concern arose from his convictions about democracy: that a ruling elite shouldn’t have power over a larger underclass; that there should be free, universal, public education; that science and justice should not be subjugated to politics or religion; and that women should have equal rights. He argued for concepts and themes that included a living/minimum wage, government medical assistance, housing assistance, social security, food assistance, and more. He was against offensive wars.

On taxation, he argued for progressive taxation, stating in part:

“All accumulation, therefore, of personal property beyond what a man’s own hands produce is derived to him by living in society, and he owns on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.”

He was practically an 18th century Bernie Sanders! These ideas, many of which were described in Paine’s Rights of Man, were way ahead of their time. According to writer Thom Hartmann,

“…Rights of Man was written as an answer to a correspondence and debate Paine was having with Sir Edmund Burke, the famous British nobleman who is revered by modern conservatives (Russell Kirk, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Jr.) as the founder of modern conservative thought. In some ways, it’s a classic debate between conservative and liberal worldviews, with Paine presenting the liberal side of the equation.”

Quite a guy, truly.

So what are we to think when we see his image, his clothes, worn on top of a modern day pundit who utters not one Paine quote, who uses practically none of Paine’s thinking, who uses anger but not logic, fear but not reason? Are we to think at all? Are we to merely accept the words because of the veneer of clothing and bluster? Do we trust the wolf in sheep’s clothing because, well, it looks like a sheep?

It’s not the only time we’ve seen this phenomenon in recent months. Recently, a woman who wanted to promote a myth at a town hall meeting abandoned all reason and logic and opted for emotion and an impromptu recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Truly amazing. Equally brilliant. She even used words (or verse?) similar to Basso: Basso’s “plea to take back America” became from her “I want my country back!” (More can be read about the meaning of that related event at openleft.com) Similar hijacking of imagery was seen in the recent Tea Parties and in the dust up about lapel pins.

These techniques, in my opinion, don’t further quality in public discourse. They stop reasonable discussion. They stop reason and replace it with salutes, loyalty to ideology, slogans and, ultimately, falsehoods. Paine wanted to “break the chains of political superstition,” he didn’t want MORE superstition, propaganda, and myth. In fact, he said:

“When I contemplate the natural dignity of man, when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honour and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.”

So I’d like to call for a more accurate use of an honorable man’s image and thinking. As the video stands, my reaction from the left is that the portrayal is ironic, contemptible, perverse, dishonorable, does a disservice to democracy, and denigrates a true patriot and visionary. And it’s brilliantly and unfortunately effective.

James Dockstader,
Orange County, California

You can read a lot more about this at the following links, which served as sources:

• thomaspaine.org
• tompaine.com
• buzzflash.com
• youtube.com
• infidels.org