...And I'm putting these questions to you, Josh Marshall.

Do you think we'll just... fade away? Into the night? Forgotten, forsaken and dispossessed?

Admit it: You wanted to dump us because we were getting too close to your participation in the 9/11 hologram coverup - right? I knew it!

That's confirmantion of the old saw, in case we needed it: We can't trust anyone.

Oh... you've got your news and your cocktail parties and your orgies with fat hookers at the Watergate. The whole, messy Washington, DC, fleshpot spread before you. Corrupt, horney, rightwing. Wide stance... Ask yourself, though... What do your faithful, lapdoggie reader bloggers have?

I'll tell you. We've got letters to mom and "Cheaters" reruns. That's about it. And mom doesn't give a damn about our opinions on unemployment, about our endless sanctimony about fascist Tea Partiers.

And, besides, in my case, mom's deader than Rick Lazio.

You're unplugging our delusional insights, Mr. Marshall. I hope that makes you happy.

...Maybe as happy as successfully hushing up your extensive criminal record? The smuggling charges, perhaps? The pimping rap you took the fall for?

Youthful indiscretion, I suppose.

How about those long-lost, hidden-away illegitimate children with LaToya and Anna Nicole? Who's paying for their pacifiers and Developing World nannies? Donald Trump?

But I'm not going to turn into a pumpkin at midnight. Not me. Right now, I'm taking my mindless chatter and psycho diatribes over to thoroughly invisible Blogger.com until I can launch my own site. You can see it at AMERICAN CARRION, if you can contain your mocking laughter long enough!

I'm gonna keep my little balls rolling.

And maybe run you right outta Cyber Town!

Are we to believe the GOP has a brilliant formula for ending the recession? If it is a double-dip meltdown, won't Republicans be blamed for the second installment if they take control of the House of Representatives this year. Won't they take the political hit in 2012?

This is all the GOP has up its sleeve. Cut and shift blather is all they've ever had. If they invest their tax bounty in anything, the rich will sink it in companies sending jobs overseas - because that's what most American companies are doing. Unemployment is THE crisis right now, and a GOP victory this year will cure that the way oatmeal evaporates cancer.

I posted this yesterday on Robert Reich's excellent blog yesterday:

 ...Wouldn't it be a hell of a thing if Obama was handing the midterm to the Republicans in order to ensure a Democratic success - and his own re-election - in 2012? We can be pretty damn sure the Republicans don't have a magic forumla to create jobs and pull us out of what's looking a lot like a "double-dipper". And the banks won't suddenly spring the cash to boost GOP recovery success if they're constrained by a scary economy. Two years of Democratic rule brings... GOP re-election. Two years of GOP failure will bring... Democrats back into ascendance?

Now... I'm not suggesting the Obama Administration is that Machiavellian. But if an election disaster this year is already a fait accompli'...?

Here's the deal, though: If no progress is made turning around the country's economic fortunes by the next presidential election, whichever party is in charge will take the hit.

Sometimes, to win, we must sacrifice?

One of the biggest problems with Obama's stimulus is the "1937 Syndrome". That was the year, after some progress had been made toward recovery in our grandparent's Depression, Roosevelt listened to his advisers, turned his attention to reducing the deficit, and all but ended his New Deal spending programs. The worst of the Depression came roaring back.

Polls had showed the public was tired of that era's stimulus, since miracles were slow to evolve. Once recovery efforts were reversed when the Roosevelt ended his then-revolutionary programs, public distrust of such soft-socialism even deepened. As Paul Krugman notes about our step-by-step replay of 70 years ago:

And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration's initial economic plan has landed it -- and the nation -- in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public's eyes the failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs...

The economic moral is clear: when the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don't apply. Austerity is self-defeating: when everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is depression and deflation, and debt problems grow even worse. And conversely, it is possible -- indeed, necessary -- for the nation as a whole to spend its way out of debt: a temporary surge of deficit spending, on a sufficient scale, can cure problems brought on by past excesses.

Thirty years ago, Reagan's party took a bath in mid-term 1982, but he was re-elected president two years later, in an election that saw GOP gains across the board. If a Republican majority is forced to take up even a few Democratic strategies to end our present ecomomic woes, they could face a reversal of fortune in 2012.

At least... it's a dim light at the end of a long tunnel. 

We become, again, savages... If not particularly noble ones.

Like our political parties.

This year, Democrats fret over ways to energize their base. As Rachel Maddow pointed out last night, one key poll notes four million more Republicans than Democrats voted in this year's primaries. Bang! The GOP is energized. A back row of teeth in their hungry mouths tastes blood in the water.

The Right has enthusiasm. The Left has Barney Frank.

The only argument Democrats have to charge-up voters is the lame, "We're the least worst." That's like preventing suicides by advising despairing souls to drown themselves, since it'll leave them time to back out and swim to shore.

Democrats' biggest obstacle runs deeper than the failed recovery or the party's perceived inaction. Voters are disenchanted. They're hopeless. They've come around to the idea that they are missing from any political consideration or initiative our leaders may give or take.

Voters feel abandoned because they have been.

Both parties tow a generic line devised for them by captains of industry and investment. Elections decide which insular tribe wields power. Our major parties differ only in self-congratulatory rhetoric. Origin and direction of hot air, though, is worthless. The key elements are policy and legislation; these vary in design and are tailored to common citizens not at all. This is nothing new. But nowadays there is no counterweight, no balancing bloc - like unions, or immigrant associations - to assure interests of "little people" aren't left out there in the dark. Overlooked now are the lowly, the working class - which has come to encompass anyone earning less than President Obama's milestone $250,000 a year. We're lucky even to enjoy whatever bounty trickles down to us.

Democrats are smartly downplaying healthcare reforms they successfully installed a year ago. Republicans and the media crow that the party is fearful of conservative rancor at the measure, when, in truth, most Americans are disappointed that the initiative was gelded and rigged against them. It is as ineffective a "landmark" as ever has disconcerted this low-expectation country. Now we're forced to buy private health insurance. Thanks for nothing.

The same is true for banking and investment "re-regulation" and the cursory recovery program. Lobbied to death. Useless dumb show meant to convince us that we're in a new age of FDR-scale titans. In truth, we're chewed hollow by dwarfs.

I couldn't let TPM go without one last tirade, a final diatribe. Sure... I'll drag myself to the polling place in November. And I'll vote the Democratic ticket. It IS true, you know. There is no alternative.

But is this what our democracy has come to? A choice of the lesser of two gutless evils? Are we so ineffectural and stupid we let ourselves be ruled by detached hogs and defined by a clueless, lickspittle media?

There's no answer to any of this of course. Solutions are as elusive and baffling as genuine reasons for the Iraq War, so our information industry doesn't even TRY to delve into the mystery. Instead, the world stops, dumbfounded, while a jackleg preacher shepherding a congregation in the dozens weighs soberly whether to set afire someone else's pie-in-the-sky. What's that? Wait. WAIT!!!

Angelina Jolie told a group of Muslims in Pakistan she was outraged by a Florida pastor's plan to hold a Koran book-burning on Sept. 11.

Thank you, Parade. Now it's all real! Now it's ACTUALLY HAPPENING!

The Koran burning has been VERIFIED BY A CELEBRITY!!!

Be still, o my fluttering heart!

I almost dropped my spoonful of cat food! Nothing but a bombshell like this could've distracted me from learning there's something called "cancer" and it's kind of... dangerous... because Michael Douglas is suffering from it!

Note to media: Look... we're not all children out here. Many of us actually possess the rare ability to make our own medical decisions. We don't need celebrities to "teach" us the importance of keeping ourselves healthy and seeking regular check-ups. I don't want to shock you, but we NEVER needed that "help". This claptrap is an attempt to imbue celebrities with far more insight and gravity than they ever could hope to have in the real world. I'm sorry Michael Douglas is ill. But he and Ms. Jolie are entertainers, actors; all they owe us are good performances - and both have turned in many. If we boil it down to basics, they wear makeup, stand under hot lights, and recite lines someone else wrote. We don't need Douglas' illness to inform us cancer is a dread disease. We can discern ugly hate and potential disaster in the Koran burning without Ms. Jolie's imprimatur (regardless of how fetching she is swathed in silk). This stuff locks our country in infantile paralysis. Not the disease - THE MINDSET!

Please. Finally. Publishers, editors and media moguls: If you have nothing of value to report, have mercy on us and shut the f*ck up!

Here's why drooling on this stuff is obscene: We've spent $3 trillion on our useless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and our major cities, even those of legend like New Orleans, are left to drown or burn, our infrastructure crumbles beneath us, and now we're told there's nothing left in the cupboard for unemployment benefits or Social Security. We are a whipped peasantry herded by remote, contemptuous elites. Nothing we do benefits us, at all. We needn't worry about the underdeveloped world immigrating here to degrade our pristine homeland; our nation is being turned into a subsistence-level pesthole while we sleep.

Don't bother to wake us! There was a time when entertainment and purty picture were not the focus of our lives. Waaaaay back when...

Ooo. I feel much better.

Thanks, TPM, for letting me vent for the past few years...

- President Barack Obama, Aug. 31, 2010

Aside from the whiney excuse "we all wanted revenge for 9/11, so don't blame us politicians for these stupid wars", there's a key problem with this explanation for our continued presence in Afghanistan - or Iraq, for that matter:

There's no reason to assume al Qaeda is still in the wild tribal territories of the Afghan/Pakistan frontiers. Its terrorist leadership could be anywhere, just as the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon Sept. 11, 2001 were plotted by al Qaeda operatives in Malaysia, Yemen and the United States itself. Not Afghanistan. And not, as we discovered too late, in Iraq.

Yet 9/11 has become the blood flag waved every time our Mideast quagmires are doubted, every time someone questions expanding the conflagration. ...To Iran, maybe.

Someone, some group or faction or tribe must take control of this non-state. And they must do that by force, since they have so many competitors for the "prize". The same will happen in Afghanistan someday, when we finally, wearily quit that sand trap, having re-learned the hard lessons of Vietnam; it seems our leaders are like like dense second-graders grappling repeatedly with the same 2+2 formula they found so difficult the previous school year.

One of the reasons the wars have lasted this long is that no apparent sacrifice is sought from us citizens, only from our troops. President Obama spent a good part of his address thanking them for their service, skipping still-obscure reasons for the thousands of lives lost. This is another similarity to Vietnam - no American except the soldiers who fought, and their families, suffered during the ordeal. But Vietnam came to be opposed by most of the nation. Our campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have been, up to now, mostly ignored. As Hendrik Hertzberg noted in the current New Yorker:

'We have spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas,' Obama noted. As it happens, a trillion dollars is roughly the sum that the Bush tax cuts have bestowed on the richest five per cent of us. And no one has been drafted: for the first time in a century, America is fighting a long war--indeed, two long wars, each longer than our participation in both World Wars put together--without conscription.

That disconnect, that dispassion about a seemingly endess involvement in questionable conflicts is perhaps why no firm reason comes to mind why the wars were launched, and certainly why our troops are still fighting them.

And by the way, when everything is factored in, the true cost is more like $3 trillion. That's more than a fifth of our GDP. But... we can't afford unemployment benefits and Social Security, anymore. Go figure.

Reasons for the Iraq War have changed radically in the past eight years. At first the Bush White House alleged Saddam Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction", a scare phrase that varied from nuclear warheads, to chemical and biological weapons, to both. Once we'd invaded, we discovered there were no such weapons in Iraq, that Saddam had dismantled his WMD programs years before, following the first Gulf War. Likewise, accusations that Saddam was a co-conspirator in the 9/11 attacks and subsequent "anthrax letters" also shattered when they collided with the incovenient brick wall of truth. Refurbished reasons given by Bush's administration afterwards were:

• To spread democracy in the Middle East - a project that has proven a disastrous failure. We are now cursed by Muslims in the region.
• To overthrow a dictator. Saddam was that, and in the capacity, one of dozens the world over. Some of them are our friends. We can't afford to get rid of them all - apparently, just one.
• We're fighting terrorists over there so we won't have to fight them here. Well... Not all planes al Qaeda jumps onto are then flown into buildings. Terrorists actually travel that way - with carry-on luggage, check-in hassles, sunblock - just like everybody else. No army of occupation, anywhere, will stop them, because al Qaeda can be everywhere. It's said Somalia is its new headquarters... so... what are we doing in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Bush also gave reasons like protecting Iraq's oilfields and, easily his most absurd, that the chief reason for the war is... uh... the war. As he said two years ago, "If we were to allow our enemies to prevail in Iraq, the violence that is now declining would accelerate and Iraq could descend into chaos." God knows, it's the apotheosis of sober administration and order today.

The real reason for the Iraq invasion remains elusive - mostly because it's the most deliberately ignored issue since solar power... or infrastructure renewal. Our media, so excited by the prospect of covering real, live wars early last decade, suddenly go mute on the subject. No one will pick up the question. It's explained away as results of "bad intelligence", then dropped. We have more important stuff, like Koran burning and Glenn Beck, to light us up.

Whenever troublesome questions arise, 9/11 is waved before our eyes like a sideshow hypnotist's pocket watch. Sleep... sleep. And be very, very afraid. To the extent we're fearful, we are mindless... and forgetful. We're constantly reminded of the burning towers, as if this tragedy was the signal event of the country's history. That moon landing thingy? Small potatoes.

But, astoundingly, after almost a decade, it's beginning to wear thin. Even the mainstream media, so willing to play court bard to the rich and powerful, to our new warlords, are coming around. In last week's Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria points out, finally, that we overreacted to 9/11,

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority, and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is a war without end. When do we declare victory? When do the emergency powers cease?

Never, Fareed. Because the wars will never end. And to certify that bad news, we have none other than champ newsman and mustache wax poster boy Geraldo Rivera:

It will be like Korea, Germany and Japan. We will never, ever leave for very good strategic reasons. I think we will always have a presence there as I think we should because the alternative to yield what was so costly to obtain is to lose its sphere of influence there to people who don't have America's best interests at heart. We will be there in 100 years. Afghanistan will be very similar.

Our crapulent, phony "war on terror" has seen us revive torture dungeons of the Dark Ages, spy on our own citizens, declare our right to commit targeted assassination and shred our Constitution - locking up "terror" suspects, without trial, apparently forever.

As our TPM blogs fade, at least for now, let's keep that in mind. And maybe do something, anything to stop it.

A beach begins with a grain of sand, Kahuna.

"There was a big Elvis drought," (Doo Wop Shop) manager Rob Baker said of the recession's impact on Elvis impersonators and the businesses that service them... But Elvis is back in the building, those businesses say - and economists suggest it may be a sign of better economic times ahead... "Elvis is a dipstick, of sorts, for our economy," Baker said. "The party business is coming back.

Wow...

I'd love to believe this hunk-a hunk-a burnin' news, but in my household, there's still a whole lotta shakin' goin' on.

OK. I promise: I'm done. In truth, I'll take any dipstick cheer I can get.

Last week's news that the economy grew only 1.6 percent instead of hopeful estimates of 2.4 confirmed even to our ostrich media what Main Street America already knows: Economic recovery has stalled, and we could be in for that much-feared "double-dip" recession. This isn't much of a surprise down here in the lower depths, since the post-2008 picture resembles less a 'W' than a 'backslash'... downward. We've never bounced out of that first dip.

Every talking head who can find airtime is blabbing that this is the key factor pulling the GOP 10 poll points ahead of the Democrats as we head drearily into the fall election. That's the biggest lead Republicans have enjoyed since - get this! - 1942. That was the year Lucky Strike went to war and girlish Judy Garland dated Andy Hardy; in other words, a billion years ago. Even President Obama's approval ratings are in the 40s, the lowest ever for him.

Things look bleak for the donkey party and here's my vow: I'm going to keep my scolding of Democrats to (what I consider) a minimum. From now on, we need a moratorium on liberal bashing except for egregious cases. ...And even though almost all cases of Democratic mendacity are just that.

There are a few bright spots. As Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, these political popularity polls have reversed about a half-dozen times this year - so next week, it might be Democrats on top.

And there's the matter of the GOP itself. Its popularity is due solely to public disenchantment with Democrats' sluggish response to the economic meltdown and unimpressive "achievements" like the much ballyhoo'd healthcare "reforms" crippled by the party's eagerness to please the very industries that needed curtailing. There is no popular support for the nonexistent Republican platform; the party's recipe for recovery is the same old song-and-dance of deregulation, spending cuts for social programs and privatization. The Republican party has neither updated itself nor tamed its combatative obstinance since its own voter meltdown just two years ago.

This should be a Democratic walkover. Rarely has the GOP been more fragmented. From Alaska to Kentucky, Republicans are fronting radical candidates repellant to the party establishment. Traditional Republicans blanch at Rand Paul and Sharron Angle. They'd rather drown them in the tub, but instead they're stuck with their candidacies as the downside of a devil's bargain with the roiling, oddball "Tea Party" faction.

Cheering from the sidelines is a sweaty, lynch-mob auxiliary composed of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin... even the jackboot preacher John Hagee, who managed to utterly alienate Catholics at Beck's rally Saturday and believes Hurricane Katrina was God's payback for New Orleans' embrace of Sodomite Pride.

For the GOP, rubbing elbows with these reactionary clowns is like introducing the Kennedys to a relative who dresses like Minnie Pearl and thinks gophers control her brain. Party regulars like John Boehner grit their teeth and fake partisanship to whore for votes from the "Feeb-35", that third of the population mezmerised by birther mythology and Zirconium Night on The Shopping Channel.

But it's independent voters who are really recoiling from this raft of fools. Alaska's Joe Miller, who upset Sen. Lisa Murkowski in that state's primary, wants to ban abortions even in cases of rape or incest. His kind of extremist GOP seems to be gaining traction in the hinterlands; Murkowski, who conceded yesterday, is the seventh incumbent to lose primaries to these fringe newcomers. Can anyone picture moderate, nonpartisan voters in Nevada pulling the lever for Angle - who would abolish the Department of Education and pull America out of the U.N.?!

Last night on the Rachel Maddow show, Jonathan Alter pointed out that establishment conservative support for its radical fringe is a new development in American politics. When he ran for President in 1936, Alf Landon didn't suck up to anti-Semitic "Radio Priest" Father Coughlin. But this year, the hateful DJ Bill Cunningham ("Barack Hussein Obama"), who was disavowed by John McCain two years ago, claims he's been invited to broadcast Election Night coverage from Boehner's ioffice. If our nightmare comes true that night, Boehner will be the new Speaker of the House of Representatives. Evidently, GOP leadership has folded: It now believes hatred and divisive sideshows are the way to win.

The antics of Beck and even candidates like Angle are pop-culture topsoil of an ugly paradigm beginning to emerge within America's elite: 'out' plutocracy. The top tier is open, shameless and increasingly hostile toward this country's peasant class. They'd rather we ate cake - as long as it has a pet-food frosting.

We have reprobate Alan Simpson, somehow nominated to Obama's deficit commission, pushing an overhaul of Social Security that would toss out the window this safety net for millions of retirees now and in the future. This asshole has even suggested our fiscal mess is intensifed by greedy veterans who foolishly ingested toxic defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War:

The system that automatically awards disability benefits to some veterans because of concerns about Agent Orange seems contrary to efforts to control federal spending... 'The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess,' said Simpson...

And their constant coughing is sooo unpleasant!

Multi-billionaire Stephen Schwartzmann thinks his ilk are over-taxed, bristles at suggestions Bush's egregious tax cuts for the wealthy will be allowed to expire, and even compared Obama to Hitler over the issue. Oh... and the founder of his company, Peter Peterson, has a big stinger for Social Security, too. Adding a note of academic imprimatur to this "undeserving poor" meme is Harvard economist Robert Barro; his discredited claim that jobless rates would be 6.8 percent had Congress not extended unemployment benefits still gets plenty of play in toilet networks like Fox.

To a man, they refer to these benefits as "entitlements" - even though the working poor have their paltry paychecks gouged to pay for them. Aw... so much better to cover the gaps left by our scofflaw betters.

Let's not fool ourselves, government and media have become lapdogs for this sector. But the GOP is a little more heel-and-roll-over than "progressive" Democrats. Let's keep this in mind, in November, in the voting booths: We have no choice.

OK. Want to triumph on Election Day? Or, more realistically, just hold on to some key seats? Or would you rather hand over Congress to America's bizarre Hayseed Right and our arrogant yankee aristocracy?

Take off the gloves and SuperGlue the GOP to these neo-Klan bozos. Stop playing nice. Don't merely play up the crazy delusions of a Sharron Angle in her home state. Go large. Paint the entire Republican Party as a violence-prone hillbilly mafia that would roll back the country to 1860 and rummage through your daughters' panty drawers.

This isn't the time to mince around and be all nicey-nicey. Republican = throwback. Sell that.

Republicans have made their bed. They've invented this dirty game themselves.

Turn the tables and let them face the consequences.

For God's sake: Fight dirty.

...If not longer.

Amazingly for such cheap-glory bottom-feeders, the Washington establishment are latecomers to the table. MSNBC viewers watched the "end of the war" two weeks ago - live - as the last combat brigade was withdrawn from Iraq. When they sniffed a political plus in this flea-circus victory, everyone climbed aboard. Both Democrats and Republicans can point to this molehill milestone and chortle, "See! The war is over! We knew it would end some day. You don't have to blame us for this strategic catastrophe anymore!" The White House can cut a notch as another campaign promise followed through.

That will leave behind 50,000 troops - about 25 brigades - who will remain there until... Iraq has a stable government... we decide things are "safe"... it can stand up so we can stand down... hell freezes over.

We're never leaving.

In the two weeks since this latest "mission accomplished" (a phrase Obama has promised he won't use), hundreds of Iraqis have died in fighting. The total for August is just over 350. Estimated Iraqi casualties since March 2003, including insurgents, amount to between 700,000 and 1.3 million; the figures are unclear, since no one has bothered, or wanted, to keep a tally. Only a couple of American troops have died since VI Day, exactly 200 percent more than have died in combat at any other American military base, anywhere. This follows a July that saw four added to the list of honored dead.

This will go on, into eternity. No matter what is said tonight, remember: We will never leave Iraq. We stationed a military force in the middle of the Middle East to... guarantee our oil access... preserve Israel's brutal hegemony in the region... maybe a few more piddling strategic reasons. This is a process that began in 1990, when we suckered Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait, then used that invasion as an excuse to militarily emasculate him and beef up our presence in the Arabian boot.

The 50,000 strategic janitors we've left behind will continue to sporadically battle insurgents - despite the hysterically funny designation "non-combat" troops. These will comprise an American Foreign Legion, without the panache.

Remember all the double-talk about an absolute withdrawal by the end of next year? Everyone from Gen. Ray Odierno to Sec. of Defense Robert Gates have been driving Peterbilt trucks through the loopholes they've torn in that commitment.

Around 50,000 U.S. soldiers will stay in Iraq through 2011 as military advisers. Odierno said deployment beyond 2011 was possible at the request of the Iraqi government.

Odierno said two weeks ago it would take a "complete failure" on the part of the Iraqi military for Washington to change its plans for quitting Iraq. Here's the catch: The Iraqi military has been a complete failure for the past eight years. There's absolutely no reason to think everything will turn around in 16 months.

I won't be watching tonight. If there is a surprise announcement that our troop presence in Iraq will number zero next week, I'll hear about it tomorrow and be pleasantly surprised.

I won't hold my breath. And I won't watch.

I've seen this hypocritical deceit before.

I've hit my bullshit-tolerance wall.

If anyone has requested this already, I apologize, and I'd love to know what the response is... and any procedures on how to accomplish this.

Also, I realize it's infuriating to have us faceless hysterics, given the privilege of pouring out our opinions, worldviews and paranoid delusions, start assuming we own this site and can tell you what to do. There is, at every blog, an almost instant "community" that appears and becomes wildly territorial without an inch of ground to stand on. It's like hearing from your least favorite relatives, day in day out.

Frankly, I don't know how you've managed to store all this material. My own ravings number more than 300 (last time I counted). Multiply that by dozens, if not hundreds, and you've got huge globs of bandwidth shot in the ass.

I've chided TPM a bit - especially commenting on Muckraker - but I've always appreciated this site. And, yes, I enjoy the company of reader-bloggers/commenters who always show up and butt in with their own, sometimes perverse, two cents. Even in scatalogical battles with them, I always learn something - if I may cite a TIRED cliche.

If you decide to close it down, here's one curmudgeon who's appreciated the ride.

How about it? Remember: This is one of the very few times I've EVER used the idiotic term 'community'.

Silver, you see, can foretell the future. I know... it is exciting. He has an uncanny knack for picking winners in elections by crunching poll tallies, figures from past elections, diagnostic tables of Election-Day weather and likely personality quirks prevalent in geographic areas, then dividing the results by the number of times Mitch McConnell can be jabbed with a pin - and remain near-catatonic.

Two years ago, Silver tabbed Barack Obama the next President while everyone else was decrying our inability to overcome instilled racism, that Obama's campaign was fruitless from the beginning - a noble gesture that only would underline empty evil dwelling in our deepest little deepie soul pit blah, blah, tiresome blah.

Last night, Silver told Rachel Maddow the Democrats would lose six to seven seats in the Senate this week.

And I just can't bring myself to give a damn.

Let me remind you of what you already know: Dodd opposes her because she's honest, apparently incorruptible and tells the truth. In short, she's everything Dodd is not. Here's his legislative quandary in his own words:

"You are working against, what was it, a thousand lobbyists that got hired to work against this bill?" he said. "I don't have a Republican partner, I have a one-vote margin in conference. It's a complicated subject matter. I've got a left that doesn't think you're being strong enough and a right that thinks you've gone too far."

Dodd is talking here about the weak-kneed financial reform act that recently was passed. But he could have been talking about the watered-down health care bill that passed earlier this year. So now we're required to buy private insurance. Gee, thanks. In fact, Dodd could be referencing everything Democrats have tried to accomplish - or, more to the point, talked about trying to accomplish - in the past two years.

It's the push-pull that Democrats feel about legislating anything with teeth that's sooo tough on them. And it's the rule this tug of war always falls to interests that can afford lobbyists that so enrages America.

You know who wins elections? Independents and swing voters - the people who couldn't give a rat's ass about "party loyalty" or that robotic way the faithful sing-song talking points of a platform that considers them not at all. Independents and swing voters are swinging anywhere but to Democrats this year. They feel they helped elect in 2008 what has become known as "Republican Lite." In reality, it's a corporate structure that clapped our democracy in chains and wadded up our "two-party" system for service only to those who see government as a means to tip their way scales of power and gelt.

And they're right. There's no countervailing power to oppose them - like strong unions, or a public not stupefied by our pornographic popular culture, not cynical about any chance of changing this oppressive, rigged system. We're fed incessant chimp-chant rhymes of mindless political correctness. We are directed to hide our true feellings and opinions, lest they reveal our latent hate, racism and murderousness. This is cognitive disonance, this is erosion of what was once a public arena tolerant of any viewpoint, no matter how despicable, because it could be countered with opposing argument that made more sense. Now we cower in hysterically polarized zones, Right and Left, each sanctimoniously condemning the other. And secretly, deep inside, we hate ourselves for our simpering cowardice. And that's the intention.

The GOP has managed to elect a collection of stooges worthy only as pie-fight targets on a vaudeville stage. Alaska Sen. Janet Murkowsky apparently has been upended by "tea party" candidate Joe Miller, whose "no abortion" stand is so radical it would prevent women aborting fetuses seeded by rapists. Sharon Angle, Rick Scott, Carly Fiorina? What blind, deaf, stupid cat dragged in them? Oh... wait. They were vetted by Sarah Palin...

Our politics have become joyless cartoons, imbecilic gags.

And Democrats? They'll find the micrometer-edge of the very middle of the middle road. And squat there.

We've had a very mild summer so far out here on the Left Coast. Temperatures have been mostly in the 80s. In the valleys, which usually broil in the triple-digits, that low mercury has been welcome. Verrrrrry welcome.

...Everywhere, in fact, but perennially goose-bumped local news. I finally figured it out: Most of these highly paid feat puppets live at the beach. When it's mild everywhere else, thermometers drop to the 50s out there. Chilly. Can't butter up and bag some rays. But when temperatures are a comfortable 70s-80s on the sand - from Malibu up through Ventura to Big Sur - the marine layer has lifted, the low pressure has moved off, and the valleys bake at a searing 104-108.

It's a perception thing. And... a geography thing, too. And, yes, of course, a money thing. Pacific Palisades, cool in the fog, is very high-rent - if you can find a rental. TV news celebrity rich...

Perceptions vary, it's true. Take the Iraq drawdown that's suddenly a hot topic. Despite the fact we're leaving behind a foreign legion of about 50,000 troops, this partial pullout is nothing less than the end of the Iraq War to some interested observers. Finally, after seven and a half hellish years... Mission Accomplished:

"This is a historic mission!" (Lt. Col. Mark Bieger) bellowed, struggling to be heard over the zoom of fighter jets and unmanned drones deployed to watch over the brigade's convoy to Kuwait. "A truly historic end to seven years of war."

But hold the ticker-tape for a moment. What about those 50,000 non-combat, transitional, jazzercise instructors we've left in-country? Seems reality, as so often has been the case in the last decade, runs counter to narrative.

Our Iraq Legion will be doing pretty much what American troops have been doing in Iraq since early 2003 - trying to keep the country from fragmenting into warring factions and dropping deeper into the failed-state morass. See... nobody told the insurgents we've won the war. Today, 46 Iraqis died in insurgent attacks on security forces. We demolished this jug in the global Pottery Barn, and its shards won't be put together again.

But the storyline is key here, not the blood-drenched reality. It goes like this: If we've won in Iraq, then nation-building works, our campaign to democratize the Mideast can still bear fruit. The domino effect, in which the Iraq invasion would prompt Muslim nations across the region to roll over and worship at the feet of Jefferson instead of Allah, tumbles slowly, but, dammit, it's tumbling.

Those gravity-challenged dominoes have been specifically designated by neoconservatives before and since the Iraq, and even Afghan, war began. Oddly, they include all of Israel's enemies in the Mideast. As Jeffrey Goldberg hysterically warned in 2002:

"...At the outset of an American campaign against Saddam, Iraq will fire missiles at Israel - perhaps with chemical or biological payloads - in order to provoke an Israeli conventional, or even nuclear, response... Hezbollah, which is better situated than Iraq to do damage to Israel, might do Saddam's work itself... its state sponsors, Iran and Syria, maintain extensive biological- and chemical-weapons programs." 

These Mohammedans are mad, MAD, you see. It would be better to take them all out at once... In one mighty swipe of the Pentagon's sword.

Somehow, cooler heads prevailed.

Is that the purpose of all the out-of-place celebrating? The withdrawal of the "last combat brigade" from Iraq last week almost went unnoticed. Then... fireworks!

The paranoid cynic in me suspects this is all staged for a reason. The factions pushing us to war with Iran have ratcheted up the rhetoric. This is another talking point in their counterintuitive arguments. With Iraq at... peace... we have troops to spare. F*ck it! Let's roll!

Iraq down. Iran to go?

(It's) a comedy where the Midwest meets the exotic East in a hilarious culture clash. The series centers on the all-American company Mid America Novelties that sells whoopee cushions, foam fingers and wallets made of bacon - and whose call center has suddenly been outsourced to India. The new company's manager... learns that he's being transferred to India to run the operation.

Can't wait. Very few chuckles have rocked the nation in this overheated summer. But I doubt anyone at the AFL-CIO will be laughing. Remember unions? They once were strong and mighty - an antidote to government-by-corporation. Gradually, over the years, we believed all that crap about how corrupt all of them were (and, in truth, there was corruption). We were told they were unnecessay, and we believed that, too. Unions lost membership, grew weaker, and now are a mere remnant of what they once were.

So, for the past few decades, corporations run the show. Let's review some hilarity in this New Order:

A survey by Deloitte Research found the world's 100 largest financial services firms expect to shift $356 billion worth of operations and about two million jobs to low-wage countries over the next five years. Another Deloitte survey of 42 global telecom operators projects 275,000 jobs in the sector will be sent off-shore by 2008.

In the past 10 years millions of jobs and billions in payroll have been lost. Nobody actually counts jobs shipped overseas - that would be inconvenient and controversial, I'll bet - but estimates runs as high as 70 percent of those missing jobs.

Leave it to CommonDreams to outline, bluntly, the reason for all this "globalization":

There's a stark logic to outsourcing: jobs will go wherever they cost employers less. Geographic movement tends to follow the bottom line. Just as yuppies move to Brooklyn when they can no longer afford converted East Village tenements, so companies like IBM are spurred by the Pavlovian capitalist impulse to set up shop in Mumbai for cost-efficient computer work.

Not to worry, though. the Peasantization of America has created a new dynamic: Americans willing to work for cheap are keeping some jobs at home.

"We need to be very aware [of what's available] as people [in the US] are open to working at home and working at lower salaries than they were used to," said Mr Bhasin. "We can hire some seasoned executives with experience in the US for less money."

That helps. Not us working stiffs, though.

We've regressed from problem to punchline.

Last night on the "Maddow" show, sub-host Chris Hayes and "Pat Tillman Story" director Amir Bar-Lev agreed the fabrications surrounding the death of the football player and military volunteer twisted the truth to meet the mood of a country blinded by nationalism and "jingoistic" fervor. Evidently, Bar-Lev's new film sets the record straight about a celebrity war casualty whose tragic end has become shorthand for all the lies about our endless crusades.

Not to show disrespect to Tillman and his family, however, I submit most of America isn't concerned with Pat Tillman as much as we are with the wars themselves. Tillman's death was a sidebar event that surely exposes government and military mendacity, but most of us out here in strip-mall America note the war that took his life is still raging, still killing. And it's not the only one.

It wasn't the jingoistic mood of Americans that fueled our misdeeds at the time. It was the cynical - and murderous - schemes of the White House and its handmaiden, the media. They whetted a largely nonexistent bellicosity by headlining lies about Saddam's WMD, then nonsense like Tillman's heroic battle death or Jessica Lynch's "miraculous" rescue. By the time the insurgency blasted away impressions of happy, liberated Iraqis celebrating the West's "cakewalk" victory, such propaganda could be dropped. It had served its purpose: It was too late to easily extricate our troops from what had become a deadly battlefield. We were trapped.

Pinning this garbage on a vaporous, blobby "America" allows the real culprits to skate off unblamed. And that's yet another vomitous crime in a trove of them.

It's hard to slow down and take note of secondary stories like Tillman's or even atrocities cited in the Wikileaks transcripts as the wars drag on and more blood is poured on the streets of Baghdad or in valleys of the Helmand province. Pictures from a suicide bombing in Iraq Monday, which killed 60 army recruits, is undistinguishable from images and footage in the war's opening days seven and a half long years ago. That was before the "miracle" of the surge, the announcement of this month's troop "draw-down". Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis ago. Remember?

On Sunday's "Meet the Press", Gen. David Petraeus proposed we're beginning to see progress in the new-fangled, upgraded approach in Afghanistan. Well... it's actually not that new. It's another troop surge in time for the November elections. Petraeus' optimism is reminiscent of Gen. William Westmoreland's "light at the end of the tunnel" vision in 1967, a few months before the Tet offensive demolished any hopes for U.S. military victory in Viet Nam, and in so doing erased everyday Americans' appetite for that endless quagmire. And in case we're deluded enough to believe almost a decade of American intervention in the "Graveyard of Empires" has been effective:

The Taliban on Sunday ordered their first public executions by stoning since their fall from power nine years ago, killing a young couple who had eloped... The stoning deaths, along with similarly brazen attacks in northern Afghanistan, were also a sign of growing Taliban strength in parts of the country where, until recently, they had been weak or absent. In their home regions in southern Afghanistan, Mr. Nadery said, the Taliban have already been cracking down. [New York Times]

In our eternal search for fresh, noble excuses for the Imperium, a new one has emerged: Upholding the rights of Afghan women. Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, meet your new ally - the U.S. military. What will it be next year? Handicapped children and orphans? Mesopotamian homeowners? I'd celebrate the idealism of this initiative were it not so brimming with deceit it's practically a British Petroleum press release.

After a decade of battle, after relocating our insane crusade from Iraq to the Hindu Kush, the Taliban are back, stronger than ever. Does this resemble anything like victory?

One of the most idiotic slogans from the Bush White House was "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here". This sales jingle had a disturbingly long shelf life, despite it's obvious defect: As evidenced by 9/11, al Qaeda has discovered something called the airplane. This is a foe that's as mobile as it is sophisticated. Today, the terrorists are everywhere our armed forces aren't.

Al-Qaida has cells worldwide and is reinforced by its ties to Sunni extremist networks... Some al-Qaeda members at large probably will attempt to carry out future attacks against US interests. Other known areas of operation: United States, Yemen, Germany, Pakistan. Al-Qaida is a multi-national network possessing a global reach and has supported through financing, training and logistics, Islamic militants in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Eritrea, Kosovo, the Philippines, Somalia, Tajikistan, and Yemen, and now Kosovo. Additionally, al-Qaida has been linked to conflicts and attacks in Africa, Asia, Europe, the former Soviet Republics, the Middle East, as well as North and South America.

In the election campaign 2008, when Obama told us our real enemy was in Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas, it seemed affirmation that the Iraq War was launched on false pretenses, that is was pointless and would be short-lived. I assumed, and I knew I wasn't alone, that his promise not to repeat Bush's mistakes meant that he would scour South Asia for al Qaeda and destroy them. And that would be that. Two years later, we're set to "wind down" our Iraq involvement, leaving behind 50,000 "transition troops" hunkered down in Fort Kafir; they'll leave actual fighting to the undependable Iraqi "army", but ride out to rescue our capricious allies when they falter. And we know they will.

We'll be there forever if our foreign policy experts have their way.

Afghanistan is no better. We are attempting to do what we know in our hearts is impossible: Build a nation out of a checkerboard of relentlessly warlike tribes who've tossed out everyone from Alexander the Great to the Soviets.

We made a big mess. And we must get out. Our continued presence will only make things worse. Other people, innocents, will pay in blood and misery for our cruel machinations. But there's no way around that. At some point, someday, the killing will end and our evil will stop compounding itself.

We must quit Iraq and Afghanistan now.

Look... Mr. President... Can I call you Barack?...

We're in trouble out here. Not just here in Los Angeles - and, by the way, I don't think it's news to you and the rest of the country that our trouble tends to be f*ckin' crazy.

Police are searching for a suspected gang member who tried to shoot and kill a 9 year-old girl playing in the backyard of her North Hollywood home.

Evidently, he deliberately tried to shoot her. He and some buddies drove up, he looked directly at her, hung a gun out the car window - probably in that lazy, sideways, f*ck-aiming style favored by brainless gangbangers - and fired some rounds her way.

This happened just a few blocks from me, but I was totally unaware. Like most self-respecting WASPs, I probably was somewhere playing tennis or fretting my jacarandas.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the shooter didn't mistake her for an enemy gang member. Not part of that world, and just surmising here, but I think it's safe to say he was just marking his territory, in the way an animal pisses on a bush to let his fellow hyenas or wild pigs know they'd better beware. By spreading fear, these street businessmen control their territory by intimidation. In some court cases involving organized hoodlums, witnesses who were brave - or foolish - enough to step forward have disappeared from the face of the earth. That makes people afraid to talk. But generalized terror can also be imparted by setting the example: "I'm not above killing a little girl for the hell of it."

No one has an answer to this. No one knows how to stop this urban - and now, rural - bloodbath. The only thing liberal academia can do, evidently, is recommend our legal system "stop snitching", suggesting this process of striking deals with felons is corrupting the legal system. On the other hand, as a Publishers Weekly critic correctly points out, "turning" high-level mobsters has led to a decline of traditional organized crime organizations like the Mafia. Either way, it seems pretty lame balm when grade-schoolers are dodging bullets in the inner city.

And maybe that's the trouble. Our arguments are sounded out far from the issue at hand. Sitting in a comfortable law office or professors' lounge, it's easy to let the mind wander and consider that the lives of a few put-upon thugs, or even foolishly responsible neighborhood folk, could be saved by banning jailhouse information and stool pigeons in general. Highly paid thinkers love to consider the civil rights of misunderstood souls taking potshots at children - maybe snitching itself is a violation of due process and perhaps the very concept is turning us into Tattletale Nation. Hey... could be our gangbangers today could be our triumphant revolutionaries tomorrow. A cop with about 30 years experience once told me the average criminal is neither smart nor brave, but with the right stylist - boom - ghetto Che just might emerge.

And while we're on the subject of absentee problem-solvers, let's look a moment at our economic reality here in America.  

Mr. President... Barack... you've gotta stop suggesting the recession has improved. It's improved somewhat for high-level bankers, hedge-fund managers and investors on Wall Street, maybe. But down here on the pyramid's broad base, things are looking not-so-hot. There has been little good news since September 2008, and now it seems,

The US economy is almost certainly headed back into a double dip recession, and economists aren't seeing it because they're using "the old rules of thumb" that don't apply this time, well-known economist David Rosenberg told CNBC... "The risks of a double-dip recession--if we ever got out of the first one--are actually a lot higher than people are talking about right now," he said. "I think that it's almost a foregone conclusion, a virtual certainty."

Via CNBC, Rosenberg notes the household employment survey has declined three months in a row, and that condition spells recession "98 percent of the time". That's a blow, but it's not news to us. It seems a lot of experts are coming around to double-dip reality since it will affect Wall Street as well as Main Street.

Don't get me wrong. If there are financial bigwigs out there who had their hearts set on owning a bigger boat to puke, they might have to settle for the tiny 98-footer they've got, regardless of whether guests like Mike Tyson plan to come aboard.

Their pain hurts. It hurts all of us.

Here in Smallville, it's a slightly different picture, since Republicans are actually blaming the jobless for the high unemployment rate, for being piggish with their unemployment compensation. They're lazy. They won't look for work. They've been spoiled and coddled by indulgent government that should cut them off to fend for themselves. Newt Gingrich made a big stink about an unemployed mechanic who turned down at least half a dozen jobs paying a princely minimum wage of $7.75 an hour because - get this - he couldn't pay his ridiculous little mortgage with a paycheck that low! Disgusting!

Keith Olbermann talked to Mike the Mechanic last night. He's now employed at a wage he can live on, and this is what Mr. Hatchell said:

Keith, I think it`s no surprise to us that, as it has been for quite some time, that our politicians are going to use that word, are not in touch with the American people, especially the middle class or the lower class people, because - I mean, that`s the only thing that`s keeping us going... I mean, obviously, (the jobless) didn`t ask to be laid off, you know? And as far as I know, it`s still unemployment insurance, and we all pay into that. It should be a situation where anyone who calls it welfare, I don`t understand how he even calls it welfare.

Mr. Hatchell, Gingrich called it "welfare" because that term is a dirty word to Republicans. In fact, anything that helps Americans outside the treasured top two percent is anathema to them. They'd rather we take a crap in their best Sunday shoes than bring up the subject, except to salt into urban legends about ungrateful little piggies.

But here's what you can do, Barack... uh... Mr. President:

As I proposed above, stop saying stuff like "despite progress on economic recovery, we still have a long way to go". Down here, we haven't even started yet. Prohibit your advisors from using terms like "we've turned a corner". We remember Bush's flunkies used the very same term talking about Iraq, and we ended up turning so many corners we almost spiraled through the time/space continuum.

When you are that disengenuous, I think you're electioneering... Painting a smiley face on a bullet wound. You don't want to alienate voters, so you sugarcoat our predicament. The Democrats have been in charge for almost two years, and if there aren't any bright spots now, there won't be any Election Day. I don't know who buys that tack, but American workers can't. The wolves are just too close to our front doors.

Listen to us. Call some townhall meetings and don't be afraid of the reactions you hear, or the Tea Partiers or whatever. We know how it is down here. You can base your relief programs on that feedback, not on ideas from self-designated experts brainstorming light years away from the problems. Mostly, when their programs are launched, people starve... or die. Or both. And a whooole lotta cash goes missing.

Spend more money now on jobs programs and state aid and to hell with your critics. TARP was a tarp on a volcano. You're coming off tentative here, Barack, like you're afraid to commit. You need to fight and you need to fight DIRTY!

We need ideas for the present. For NOW. We don't need remedies based on long-ago experiences and dead issues. Let's go back to our urban battlefields a moment. More African Americans die in gang violence every year than were lynched in the entire history of the U.S. Every year! But nobody has a prescription to end this bloodbath. It simply isn't addressed. Both Left and Right barely bring it up anymore. It has become part of our routine background noise, out of sight, rarely noted. It seems general belief holds that if we ignore it, this catastrophic tragedy will go away. It hasn't. It won't. It's gotten worse and will worsen.

And that's what scares me about this recession and working Americans. If our problems aren't addressed, they'll be ignored. And they will get worse.

We're bailing water out of lifeboats made of Sham-Wow. We need help.

And your very first step: Admit we're in deep, deep trouble.

From opening credits to screeching end tune, HBO's "Blood" is a glossary of urban American liberals' dated stereotypes of the South: Civil rights bloodshed and the Klan, purty hillbilly sex-bombs and good ol' boys in trucker caps. But with fangs. It's a foolish misstep by a production team that's probably never been farther southeast than Taos.

For lack of anything better to do, I thought about all this nonsense reading a blog by someone named David Gosztola, a film student in Chicago who's interested in "becoming more involved in progressive leadership and using media for social change."

God I hope he doesn't become a filmmaker. We're already burdened by artistes absolutely convinced they are political shamans and the rest of us are painted savages boiling strangers in pots. And wrong. And just plain evil. You "want to use the media to blah, blah social awareness"... We have too much of that already, Dave. Films primarily should entertain, not masquerade as political and social manifestos. Art and politics mix badly, and results are always propaganda. Every Hollywood production has at least one moment set aside to teach us some awesome moral lesson, like "rape is wrong" or "we shouldn't behead each another". Of course, these basics we already know - but that doesn't keep us from getting force-fed them as if they're deep, insightful revelations just discovered crawling under flagstones flipped over by Guatemalan gardeners of tanned, balding Hollywood producers.

Yeah... greed is bad. Until it's good! Trendy - right along with Privatita pumps. This "I'm moral, you're not" fixation drives the American entertainment industry to produce far too many films and television no one wants to see; if it weren't for knock-offs of British ideas and shows, this town would go belly-up. (To a surprising extent, much of it already has.)

Left to his own devices, Gosztola will make deeply personal films reflecting his sober analysis of how the capitalist dynamic binds us soulless exploitation and depersonalization. With naked women. Audiences will run from it. Except for the naked women. A few true believers will stick around for that.

Writing about the tea party movement, he seems a little confused by emerging evidence some partiers out there are growing more and more antiwar, obviously influenced by tea party "godfather" Ron Paul. He's even downright shaken by Naomi Wolf's recent suggestion that the tea party is helping America fight fascism by shaking liberals out of their opinion-sharing cocoons.

"Liberals roll their eyes about going on "Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on people we don't agree with. It doesn't serve us well."

Other writers have noted the vast potential for a populist movement empowering the fight against our imperium, and as Goszola writes,

Leading scholar on the left, Noam Chomsky, spoke to a crowd in Madison, Wisconsin recently... about Joseph Stack, the 53-year-old software engineer who flew an airplane into an IRS building in Texas last February. He quoted from Stack's manifesto and said that Stack was "basically right" in his critique of American politics and capitalism. Then, Chomsky said "the left is failing the country by not reaching out to those in the Tea Party movement, who are frustrated and fed up with American government."

I must go one step further here, and suggest that not all the "reaching" would be one-way. It's just possible progressives could learn a thing a two from this much-demonized social sector. To overcome its malaise, antiwar movements need energy, and the Left has none. Still, it clings to its brain-fog of moral and intellectual omniscience. Much of what Goszola writes is marred by the same afflictions of anyone who uses terms like "progressive" and "social change" to describe themselves: He presumes inherent sanctity of his political worldview, that it has all the answers, and he arrogantly dismisses all others - despite clinging to threadbare dogmas that have frozen much of progressivism in the past... to failure. Goszola writes, as if to slap himself back to his own reality:

Yes, the Tea Party thrives on misogynistic, racist, homophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-ethnic, hyper-masculine, and (often) Christian fascist ideas. And, all of these ideas are ideas that should be challenged and neutralized. Definitely, nobody should be accommodating these ideas.

Oh. Please. The tea party is that bad? You forgot "classist", but then again, partiers don't have incomes to qualify for that. Look, don't turn a frustrated insurance salesman into Sauron. It just doesn't fit, and gives me the impression you're trying to add heroic drama to your own life by conflating political disagreement with battling Hitler. Bringing a powerful, venomous Klan to heel was left to the FBI decades ago. You were born too late and too dreamy-eyed. Have a brewski and chill.

To write off whatever is the tea party as American jackboot isn't simple - it's simplistic. What has become known as the "tea party" is a phenomenon that's attracted everyday America fed up with the cozy Beltway Mikado, because it accurately perceives itself shut out of accustomed participation in a country that's looking more and more like brutal economic aristocracy. And let's be honest here: What separates American progressives from this mom-and-pop rabble is income, education and class. The American Left is as certain of its shaky vision as it is disempathetic to downscale reality, as assumptive of affluent privilege as it is antipathic of anything it considers "Middle American". Scattered racist signs and confused, reactionary campaigning isn't a reflection of inherent political evil; it's the mark of a class insurrection still in gestation. To condemn out of hand any movement so leaderless, so rudderless - yet showing signs of mature vitality - is simply stupid.

The American Left has become what it is in Europe: A dotty monastary filled with self-confined chatterers engineering processes for camels to pass through needles' eyes.

On today's TPM, Jay Taplin quotes a piece by Edward Luce:

"Who killed the American Dream?" say the banners at leftwing protest marches. "Take America back," shout the rightwing Tea Party demonstrators.

If you can't see some common ground there, do us all favor and stop discussing politics. Don't vote. The media tells us tea partiers are angry at healthcare reforms that would benefit them, at federal spending to aid state and local governments, at letting tax cuts expire for America's top two percent. The media is owned by that top two percent. The are defining the "tea party" and the rest of us allow them to do so. Now, here are the obvious questions: What do common folk really believe? What do they really want? They're angry at Uncle Sam? With healthcare "reforms" that simply force us to buy private insurance and financial "re-regulation" that ain't, add me to the pissed list.

Both Left and Right are subsumed in election tunnel-vision. Complex issues are analyzed by how many votes can be squeezed from which position and keep lobbyists happy. As a result, we're conveyed political land fraud - cursory, tissue-paper "response" intended more to quiet protest than answer obvious needs, solve monumental problems. Both are out of touch with and contemptuous of the everyday America they would lead. Our would-be helmsmen don't know us. But they do know that fractured, we are powerless.

If you want to know who has the most daring - and novel - ideas? Ask yourself: Who is it that government and media both despise and fear? If an ounce of energy expended villifying any glimmer of populism could be turned into horsepower, we wouldn't need Hoover Dam and nuclear power to keep the porch lights on. We never approach any foe real or imagined, we never try for dialogue; this year, we'll applaud as the tea party splits the GOP into splinters, and next year be abandoned by the same winners we toasted election night.

No other political movement in history so tenaciously clings to its fantasies of how wondrous the world would be if humans weren't human. We need far, far fewer sermons and moral sanctimony from the Left. We need realistic appraisals of who we are and what we can do - now! Remember: The "professional Left" is matched by a professional Right not a bit reluctant to spell out just how ferociously they would eat the poor:

To treat Washington's spending addiction, the November elections are the taxpayer's best chance to stage an intervention. But until then, President Obama and the Democratic Congress are determined to keep pushing strung-out state governments to take one more fix. Witness yesterday's 247-161 largely party-line House vote to approve a Senate bill shovelling another $26.1 billion out to state education and Medicaid programs.

Kids! Sick people! Who needs 'em? However, I doubt in this downturn year, when state governments are turning back their social clocks to wood-burning technology and services of the 1920s, that many governors will grandstand by turning away aid money. Roads are going from asphalt to gravel, 911 calls ring unanswered and lamps are going out all over Dooleyville. I fear they won't again be lit in our lifetimes.

Ron Paul's daunting Libertarianism is the purest form of its philosophy: Don't just trim the fat, trim the lean from governement, as well. It's just not... well... my cup of tea. But no one can doubt his ability to galvanize a following; two years ago, in his out-of-nowhere Presidential run, he got churlish attention from an American press fevently trying its best to ignore him. He talks about the plague that is neconseravatism and is as opposed to international intervention as I'm opposed to seeing any movie directed by apprentice visionaries. When Paul talks about our endless wars bankrupting us and throwing away the lives of our countrymen and unfortunate foreign targets, his many critics are the ones who appear crazy and bizarre.

The Left has become a museum piece nobody notices anymore. It needs some fresh air.