You know what burns my ass?

A flame about three feet high.

I keep hearing the right wing media calling this “The Obama Recession”.

Now, I could take the tack that this is just the Heritage Foundation’s way of manipulating the language so that the right wing doesn’t get any blame (or the bill) for the trough feeding frenzy that crony capitalism has had over the last 10 years of so. Instead, I think it shows the main difference between right wing world and the rest of the world.

Obama isn’t even in power yet, and already he is so amazingly powerful that he was able to destroy the economy a year before taking office. He was able to REACH BACK IN TIME and shatter big financial institutions, destabilize the dollar and cause a huge speculation bubble in oil and homes. Damn, that makes Superman and Thor seem like pikers.

Another group of people being blamed for it are the poor who had the temerity to think that some of the INCREDIBLE WEALTH being shoved in their face on a daily basis would trickle down to them. It’s not like they were lied to, pressured into anything, or given loans so complex that they needed a lawyer (that they couldn’t afford) to understand. Maybe I’m not that bright, but when I went in to buy a car a year and a half ago, three different car dealers offered me “low monthly payments”, and when I asked for the actual interest rate, or final payments, I got a lot of hemming, hawing, double talk and the like, and when I left and checked with my friend who was a car salesman, he explained to me how they were screwing me over.

Home loans make car loans look like working with those Duplo Lego blocks.

At the root of it all was the right wing myth that everyone is going to be rich. They have pitched this idea as a way of getting poor people to agree with giving rich people incredible tax breaks. In the waning days of the campaign, John McCain would say in every speech “I want everyone to be rich!” TV, music, movies, etc… now all push the idea that everyone is rich, and if you aren’t, you are not just to be laughed at, but there is something seriously wrong with you. Thrift is a joke, spending money is the only way to show that you aren’t a loser, a redneck, or a worthless human being.

We’re undergoing a historic correction, and I’m not just talking about the stock market, housing costs or the like. The years of spending endlessly for shit you don’t need are coming to a screeching halt…and the world is going to be a vastly different place in ten years.

How we deal with it depends on who we listen to. The voices of the Heritage Foundation, Limbaugh, etc… will tell us that we need to fear. Fear the unions, fear the poor, fear the line workers, fear everything that isn’t just like them.

But there are other voices. Voices that say it IS time to change, to live more simply. To help each other and quit thinking that we need a new car every three years, a bigger house, a 70 inch TV and instead make sure than instead of “I want everyone to be rich”, saying “I want everyone to live a decent life free from fear and need.”

That’s what change is.

The greed of the last 30 years brought us here. Now it’s time to wake up.

2008 Election Predictions

First, the big one – Obama will pull between 350 and 360 electoral votes. He’ll pick up the states Kerry won as well as CO, FL, IA, MO, NV, NM, NC, OH, and VA. Republicans will allege all sorts of fraud and shenanigans just like they are doing with Olberman’s ratings and the new “people meter” radio ratings showing Limbaugh isn’t nearly as popular as we all thought he was.

Second, the Senate will not change enough for a filibuster proof majority, but it will be the end of any “Northern Moderate” Republicans.

Last, and here’s where I put on my Pundit hat:

The Republican Party under Bush has returned to a Regional Party, as it was through most of the 20th Century. However, it’s not going to be a New England/Western party this time, but a Southern/Western party. Why?

Under Bush, “conservative” has changed to a term defining far right Christianist views, a weird form of bailout crony capitalism, interventionalism, the biggest government welfare program of all time, sheer incompetence and lockstep adherence to denying facts. Fox may be the number one news network, but it is the mouthpiece for this group of people who never want their views challenged by facts. They have developed an insular media to the point where they have their own version of Wikipedia so they don’t have to let the world intrude upon their vision of How Things Are. An entire generation has been turned off by the blatant lying of the members of this media, Bush’s failures and their insistence on holding on to values that just don’t work for these people. They use gays are a fear tactic, while most people under 30 look at anti-homosexuality the same way us Gen Xers look at racism.

McCain’s campaign is a “last gasp” of these folks, living in a world where the economy is FINE, supply side economics works, and Bush and Cheney are heroes. The word “liberal” no longer has the fear stink to it, as it’s been used to demonize so long that it has lost all meaning. Obama “the liberal” is for nuclear power, fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and “traditional marriage”.

Will the Republican’s rebuild? The Democrats have been rebuilding, bringing in a series of pro-military centrists and slightly right leaning politicians to build a new coalition, but it hasn’t been covered by the MSM because Republicans still yell the loudest. Starting at the local level, the Democratic party is being rebuilt, and for all the pissing and moaning about Nancy Pelosi, she has been working hard to bring in these new Democrats. I have read REPEATEDLY that Southern Democrats are told that they are to represent their constituents and not worry about party line votes. The national party under Dean has been working to get out the word about the national positions, as the polls show that the majority of Americans agree with most Democratic proposals, but the chattering class pushes the idea of the Limbaugh listener as the “average American.”

Don’t get me wrong, the Republicans still have a stranglehold on the media (except on line). They also have shown in the 80’s and early 90’s they actually do BETTER as an opposition party. They may learn from this election as they did in 1964 and 1976 and retool in such a way to regrow. However, the Palin thing has shown me that the right-wing attack machine has lost much of its power, and the explosive growth of left wing media like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and blogs like Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos make me think that the stronghold is breaking.

Watching the cable news over the weekend, you’d think Sarah Palin is a rock star, John McCain is surging and Obama and Biden are hiding. They don’t mention the discrepancy in crowds, and shoot the McCain and Palin rallies in such a way that they look as big as Obama’s. I saw Palin on my TV almost all weekend as the cable news just showed speeches, and they NEED to make it seem like the race is tightening to hold onto their record ratings.

It didn’t.

If anything, Obama increased his state-by-state lead.

Now, winning power and keeping it are two different things. Carter oversaw the implosion of his party post-Watergate, and Clinton had to get his ass kicked in 1994 to start being a great President. The media will be out to pounce on Obama at 5 AM tomorrow morning, and Fox is salivating at the prospect of being able to be the opposition. Limbaugh’s tanking ratings will be bolstered by him once again being able to be the stone in the President’s shoe (he lost 12 million listeners from 1998 to 2008).

At least that’s what I think.