When I drifted off to sleep this morning I wasn't expecting the House to vote down the credit market rescue bill, but that was the news I woke up to this afternoon.  I guess John McCain wasn't expecting it either.  Has anyone bothered to tell him that the deal on the bill has collapsed, or is he still out on the stump taking credit for putting it together?  Good work on that one, John!

This morning, I was worried that the market had fallen 300 points in half an hour.  It managed to fall nearly 500 more points while I was dozing. If you think it's hit bottom, I suspect you're still asleep and dreaming.

Of course you can't blame the House Republicans for voting 2-1 against the bill — Nancy Pelosi was mean to them in a speech before the vote, right there on the House floor, in public.  It was like the most popular girl in high school (like, the homecoming queen or something) dissing them at assembly — in front of everybody!  You could hardly expect them to be thinking clearly, or considering the welfare of the country, after something like that.  It's not like we're dealing with grown-ups here.

My friend PZ sends a line from an old pop song — “They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday's just as bad.”  I fear that Tuesday will in fact be much worse.

I'm writing this just after seven in the morning Pacific Time.  After working all night, I was getting set to go off to bed when I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach — a sense that the bail-out bill crafted by the geniuses in Washington wasn't going to work, that the markets would feel the same way about it . . . and that the American economy was about to go under, suddenly, in one fell swoop, today.

I turned on the television and saw that the Dow Jones Average had plummeted three hundred points in less than half an hour.  I hope things won't continue in that vein, but I have a horrible premonition that they will.  If the House Of Representatives approves the bail-out bill in the next few hours and the market continues to fall, it means that Washington has waited too long — dithering around for a John McCain photo-op and other exercises in political posturing and giving more banks time to fail, undermining investor confidence beyond repair.

As I head off to bed once again, I have a feeling that I might wake up in a world that has been utterly changed.

As you undoubtedly know, John McCain and I have been working tirelessly over the past few days to rescue America from its worsening economic crisis.  John felt it necessary to suspend his campaign for the Presidency in order to spend more time on the phone asking people how things were going, while monitoring events closely on CNN.

I suspended this blog, vowing to contribute only “Freedom Bulletins” until the crisis was resolved.  This is Freedom Bulletin No. 2.

John also threatened to withdraw from the first Presidential debate, in order to dramatize the seriousness of the situation.  Simultaneously, working in close coordination with John's staff, I threatened to leave the dishes in my sink unwashed until Congress made meaningful progress on a rescue bill.

Our unprecedented actions bore fruit — Congress did make meaningful progress towards a bill, John showed up at the debate and I am making plans to begin work on my dishes any day now.

All of this has taken a terrible toll on John and myself, both physically and emotionally.  Last night I decided I needed to take a break from the almost unendurable strain, so I headed off to the Paris, Las Vegas casino to play some poker.

                                                                                                                     [Image © 2006 Paul Kolnik]

I played for about six hours and showed a profit at the end of the session of $31 dollars.  $31 may not seem like a lot of money in real terms, but it's actually very hard to win any money at all at a Las Vegas poker table.  Sure, there are a lot of tipsy tourists who are easy to best, but there are just as many local sharks who know how to strip you of your chips, your dignity and your sense of self worth.

Driving home at about 3am I heard on the radio that Hank Paulson believed a deal on the bail-out bill was done.  I raced home to await his call thanking me for my efforts to get America out of this mess, but he must have been too exhausted to contact me at that hour.  I understand this, and feel that no slight towards me was intended.

I poured myself a beer, averting my eyes at all times from the kitchen sink, stretched out in the La-Z-Boy and smiled.  I didn't feel like a hero — I had only done my duty.  I thought of the extra $31 in my wallet, the prospect of America solvent and prospering once again, and the dance Fred Astaire and Ann Miller do to Irving Berlin's “It Only Happens When I Dance With You” in Easter Parade.

I thought of one poker hand in particular from the evening now coming to a close.  I was dealt AK of spades.  There was a fair amount of betting before the flop — the pot was sweet.  I stayed in, of course.  The flop came with the makings of a low straight, but two of the cards were spades.  A guy bet 20 bucks, I called and everybody else folded.  I figured he was drawing to the straight.  The turn brought another card in the straight sequence.  My opponent bet 15 bucks.  I figured he'd made his straight and was feigning weakness, hoping for a call.  I called.  The river brought a jack of spades.  My opponent bet $30.  I raised him $30, sensing that was the most I could induce him to call.  He thought about it for a long time and called. 

Inspired by John McCain's example, I have decided to put country first and suspend this blog until Congress passes legislation to solve the nation's credit crisis.

I will continue posting as usual, but I will not think of my entries as “posts” — I will think of them as “Freedom Bulletins”.  I encourage everyone to think of my posts as “Freedom Bulletins”.

If my “Freedom Bulletins” lead to a rapid solution of the deadlock in Washington, I will let the American people decide, in their own way, how to honor my sacrifice.  If they wish to place a small historical marker at the site of my birth, so be it.  If they wish to erect a full-scale equestrian statue on the Mall in Washington, so be it.

It looks as though even the national media have decided it's o. k. to use the “p” word — even if they have to teach the American public what it means.

As you watch the current Wall Street meltdown unfold you should bear in mind that the crisis doesn't represent a failure of capitalism, it represents a triumph of plutocracy — government by, of and for the wealthy.  This is the way plutocracy is supposed to work.

In a plutocracy like ours, the wealthy instruct the government, a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America, to construct a system, a set of rules, under which corporate America can behave like a pack of rabid hyenas in its hysterical pursuit of short-term profits.  When and if the hysteria leads to a breakdown of the system — basically because the suckers get tired of being defrauded, or run out of money to lose — corporate America instructs the government to bail it out with tax dollars from ordinary Americans . . . that is to say, the same suckers it was trying to swindle by other means.

Such moments in history are instructive.  They remind us that corporate America, and conservative apologists for the “free market”, have no real interest in free markets — they are interested in free money for the wealthy.  If they can get it through unregulated fraud, that's fine — if they can get it through corporate socialism, that's fine, too . . . as long as they get it.

This is the sort of racket which used to be called “the old army game”.  Like any sophisticated con, it's a no-lose system for the hucksters who are running it, corporate America's wealthy elite.  Trust me — Dick Fuld is not going to give back the 22 million he got for doing his part to send the world economy into a tailspin, placing the welfare of millions at risk.  And he's not going to jail, either — because he was operating within the laws that he and his fellow hyenas paid to have enacted.

On the face of it, the total collapse of Barack Obama's momentum in his race for the Presidency seems puzzling — but any poker player will find the phenomenon all too familiar.

Obama doesn't know how to play a big stack in a no-limit tournament.  He ran up an enormous lead in chips early on by taking chances — positioning himself as a new kind of Democrat, one who'd risk it all to live up to his principles.  Then, when he had the Democratic nomination locked up, coffers filled with contributions from millions of small-time donors energized by his boldness and courage, he changed his style of play — cow-towed to the wicked Clintons, picked a safe running mate, started breaking his promises to his Progressive base.

John McCain, who's holding 7-2 off-suit, just pushed all his chips into the pot with the Sarah Palin stunt — one of the most daring bluffs in the history of American politics.  “Don't call me,” McCain says, “or I'll accuse you of hating motherhood, small-town America and ordinary folks everywhere.”  Obama's holding a pair of Jacks.  If he calls McCain, if he just states the plain truth that Sarah Palin is a religious extremist (when she's talking in church, if not on national television) and a compulsive liar, he wins.  But, as I say, he's lost his nerve.  He thinks that if he lays down his Jacks, he might get an even better hand on the next deal.

He might, but that's not the point.  You can't play poker when you've lost your nerve — when you aren't willing to risk it all, especially against an obvious bluff.  It's a lesson Democrats never seem to learn.

Look for John McCain to win this particular tournament.

I've posted some harsh things here about Sarah Palin, but much as I fear — and think everyone should fear — what she might do if she ever got control of America's nuclear arsenal, I must confess that there's a part of me that loves her.  Camille Paglia (pictured above), in the extraordinary article from Salon below, made me realize why I love her:

New Blood For the Vampire

You won't read anything like this article anywhere else in the national media — it's an exhilarating exercise in free thought, a celebration of Sarah Palin by a liberal, atheist, dissident-feminist lesbian who hates John McCain, supports Barack Obama and is a passionate advocate of choice on the abortion issue.

Paglia is dead wrong about many things but she's right about what Palin represents, at least in part — America's frontier past, its real frontier past, in which women hauled their fair share of the freight, and then some.

I especially commend this article to my fellow progressives, who need to understand its profound insights if they're ever going to have a chance of electing politicians who represent their views . . . something I fear is not going to happen this time around.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

Honorable behavior in uniform doesn't necessarily translate into honorable (much less competent) behavior in public office.  Look at Ulysses S. Grant, who presided over one of the most corrupt administrations in American history.  It also doesn't translate into honorable behavior in one's personal life.  Look at the way John McCain treated his first wife, the truly honorable American woman who waited for him and raised their children alone during his ordeal of captivity in North Viet Nam.

If he's going to ask us to judge him on the basis of his honorable acts many decades ago, shouldn't we also take into account his dishonorable acts from the same era?  Do we have any way of knowing which John McCain will show up to work at the Oval Office, especially given his record of inconsistency where political expediency is concerned?

McCain opposed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy which he now supports.  He opposed the off-shore drilling he now supports.  He supported immigration reform which he now disowns.  More importantly he once opposed the influence of the nutty wing of the religious right and now asks us to place a right-wing religious nut a heartbeat away from control of America's nuclear arsenal.

Obama doesn't have a lot more political courage than McCain, and has made a disgraceful retreat from his support of the U. S. Constitution, but he also isn't selling himself as paragon of transcendent honor, and he doesn't have a running mate who sees the war in Iraq as “God's task”.  (End of debate for Sarah Palin, folks — you can't argue with God.)

Palin, a
self-described pit-bull with lipstick, must find Jesus's example of
“community service” to the least of men downright hilarious, compared to the serious
responsibility (and true charity) involved in getting streets paved for
upwardly mobile Alaskans.

Back at the beginning of this year's Presidential campaign I was talking to some friends who were John Edwards supporters.  I told them that while I liked all the issues Edwards was talking about I just couldn't get past his “someone-is-tickling-my-ass-with-a-feather” smile.  I said it reminded me of the smiles you see on the faces of crooked used-car dealers.

Bingo.

I'm still having a hard time believing that Barack Obama actually voted with the Bush administration to cripple the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, much less understanding why he would do such a thing.  I know he's got a lot of very intelligent advisers.  Did they identify a large group of swing voters who would be more inclined to support Obama knowing he was willing to trash the Constitution in order to create a false sense of security about terrorism?  Was it larger than the group of committed supporters, like myself, whose support would be catastrophically undermined by the vote?

This is all made even more mysterious by the fact that Obama had previously vowed to support a filibuster against any bill granting immunity to the telecoms for violating the Fourth Amendment.  When such a bill came before the Senate he couldn't even bring himself to vote against it, as so many other Democratic Senators did.

The only conclusion I can come to is that Obama is a true Democrat, a true American progressive.  He's committed, unconsciously at least, to losing.  The American Left is all about losing.  It enjoys complaint and grievance — it has no ambition to govern.

What else could explain the Democratic Party's effort to nominate Hillary Clinton in place of Obama?  What else could explain the Clinton campaign's decision to play the race card repeatedly, in an effort to divide the electorate, and to continue with this tactic long after it was clear that Hillary wasn't going to win the nomination?  What else could explain Jeremiah Wright's efforts to derail Obama's quest to become the first African-American President, or Jesse Jackson's bitter animosity towards Obama?

Indeed, what else could explain the odd cover recently published by The New Yorker, a leftward-leaning publication?  Masquerading as satire, it merely sent an image out into the culture around which irrational suspicions of Obama could coalesce.

The truth is that the American Left is terrified that Obama might actually win this election, violating the only enduring image it has of itself — that of self-righteous loser.  Obama, far from transcending outdated images like this, seems to be buying into them.  My guess is that the vote to undermine the Fourth Amendment won't be his last effort to alienate his most passionate supporters, the only way he can lose a contest whose outcome ought to be a foregone conclusion by now.