New Guinea at the Last Manatee

There is some more good news about the Washington Post article on our bloated, inefficient intelligence corporation. It means that the probability of conspiracy theories being true has increased dramatically. This will be a boom to novelists, Hollywood and Alex Jones. The downside is that if you work abroad in any capacity the odds are you will be seen as an American agent.

Marco Rubio, the first candidate adopted by the teabaggers, says that we have to unleash the power of the free market and that corporations have plenty of money to invest but are uncertain because of new Washington regulations. Forgetting for a moment the horrendous record of our corporations in creating jobs for the past decade, I propose a total tax moratorium for two years for all U.S. corporations in return for the creation of 15 million jobs. If they can't do this, then the government seizes them. That's fair.

Charles Cook has some new numbers of how low George W. esteem is and how voters prefer Obama's treatment of the economy better than W's. In fact, astonishingly 65% of Republicans do not believe GOP will return to these policies. Suckers! However, over the weekend, several Republican leaders emphatically argued that we have to return to these policies on the economy. In other words, the Marco Rubio line now is the standard GOP argument. Forget how the global economy collapsed and how many hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost running up to the election of Barack Obama. The whole Karl Rove corporate branch of the GOP, America at the Crossroads, is running ads against Democrats recalling year X, when the unemployment rate was low and then comparing it to now. So vote Republican. I thought John Boehner's America was supposed to be the 1950s but I guess it was the W years.

My apologies to the baby-boomers, there will be no retirement. Scott Thill at Alternet posted a scary article a few days ago. One out of 3 Americans do not have retirement savngs beyond Social Security and about 35% of those over 65 rely almost totally on Social Security. And then factor in that anyone 40 or under will not have a pension. Dallas Salisbury of Alliance for Investor Education and the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) broke down the remaining 2/3rds of Americans as follows: 27% report less than $1,000 in savings; 16% between $1,000 and $9,999, 11% between $10,000 and $24,999, 12% between $25,000-$49,999, and 36% $50,000 or more. He recommends saving 25% of your gross income for retirement but does say the biggest risk with this is that fund-managers tend to squander your savings. So good luck. The other finding was that older Americans will have to continue some type of work until they die. So the bottom-line is that no Baby Boomers or any one younger can retire. We are now the post-retirement society.

Glenn Beck told a Salt Lake City audience that he will be blind in a year from macular dystrophy, which I take to be a type of macular degeneration. It's a horrible thing even to happen to a horrible man. Having talked over the years to Johns Hopkins about this illness because my mother suffered from it, I can report some progress has been made but not enough. The last time I asked the Doctor told me to literally eat carrots, which they found amerliorated the situation. Who knew? I thought that was an old wives tale.

Glenn Beck said on a recent show: " The policies that are being enacted in Washington are not enemies of ours. They are enemies of God, because God is about freedom." What can you say to that?

Gallup has released a monster poll where they surveyed more than 90,000 adults nationwide for Obama's approval rating. Obama averaged 49% nationwide since January, compared to 57% over the entire previous year. To give you some idea of how stable the rating is, today's Gallup tracking poll had him at 48%.

So Obama tops out at 85% in Washington, D.C. because he goes to Ben's Chili Bowl and Hawaii, which thinks he was born there, is 68%. He ranks high in Delaware at 62%. (Note here: it's widely assumed Mike Castle, the moderate conservative Republican, will win the Democratic Senate seat in November. Watch this space because with this number taht might change.) Maryland, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois and Vermont as well as California top out the top 10. In California, he has a 56% approval rating. (Watch this space whether this aids Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer in the Fall.)

With the exception of New Hampshire, we don't really care if the bottom ten states leave the union. His lowest rating is Wyoming at 29% followed by Utah, West Virginia and Idaho at 34%. Oklahoma, Alaska and Montana round out the 30s. Then Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, New hampshire, Alabama and Missouri at 40-41%.

In Texas--given the race for governor there, he ranks a 47% approval rating.

Barack Obama's approval rate surpasses disapproval in 31 out of the 50 states. None of the remaining states have any significant weight in terms of the electoral college if you're looking at 2012.

If you're a GOP operative, looking at these numbers you realize that Obama will take every state with a significant Latino population. That's why we are seeing the re-emergence of Jeb Bush on the political scene. Jeb showed up for a fund-raiser for Rand Paul this past week. The reasoning is that all the potential candidates for the GOP are pro-Arizona state law and anti-Latino. Jeb is married to a Latino and his son is an active political player in the Florida Latino community. So this little trial balloon of whitewashing W's record may have more to do with paving the way for Jeb, rather than with any serious policy implications.

Nate the Great Silver at www.fivethirtyeight.com has redone his Senate projects with a slight uptick to the Republicans. So Democrats hold the Senate with 53.5 seats. Contrary to today's Wall Street Journal piece today, which argues the GOP can take back the Senate, Nate puts it at a 6% possibity but higher to 18% possibility if Crist caucuses with the GOP.

Making a contribution to our political dialogue is the Constitutional Accountability Center, which today published a paper "Setting the Record Straight: The Tea Party and the Constitutional Powers of the Federal Government". See www.theusconstitution.org They promise to have a watch list of constitutional boners said by tea party candidates. This project is important because people are now referring to the tea baggers as populist constitutionalists, giving them more gravitas than they deserve.

For an antidote to the Washington Post piece on the military/ terrorist state, I recommend Bruce Fein's American Empire Before The Fall (Campaign for Liberty, 2010,paperback). I always view Bruce Fein as the canary in the mine shaft. If something is a problem with constitutional issues, he will be the first to holler. I believe he beat the ACLU to the punch on the Patriot Act and was the only conservative to testify for the impeachment of George W. Bush. While he seems to have become more of a libertarian than I remember, Fein's book is an excellent reminder that we really did not want an empire and we can't afford one. He promises in his introduction to offend everyone with the book but he remnds us how far we've gone away from the American ideals. He is also tough on Obama for retaining much of the national security apparatus created by W and Dick Cheney.

In reference to a few posts back, I talked about Detroit as the "arsenal of Nazi Germany". This was in reference to Ford and General Motors building so much of the German war machine. In Ford's case, it is particular to the influence Henry Ford had over Adolph Hitler, who hailed in the first edition of Mein Kampf Henry Ford's refusal to bow down to the Jewish financiers. With our experiment in ethnic cleansing in Arizona and the revival of the neo-nazis and white supremacists in the United States, it's useful to remember what a powerful influence America played in the rise of Nazi Germany and its racial theories. In a small--160p--book entitled Nazi Nexus--America's Corporate Connections to Hitler's Holocaust,Edwin Black summarizes his various works on the Holocaust and American corporations into easy-to-use chapters. Stefan Kuhl, a sociology professor at the University of Munich,works backwards from Nazi Germany to the U.S. to discuss the enormous influence American racial theories and eugenics played in the development of German National Socialism in The Nazi Connection-Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism. (Oxford, 1994)