Yoo skates through.

The Obama administration has decided that this and future administrations that engage in human rights abuses and war crimes should not fear punishment. They implemented this decision by using a reliable Department of Justice career veteran, David Margolis, to quash the recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility that Bush administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee not face possible disbarment for approving the use of torture. (If we're all scared, it's okay, right?)

Now comes the news that many of Yoo's email messages while at DOJ have mysteriously gone missing. So much for restoring confidence in the integrity of the U.S. government at home and abroad.

Dear President Obama,

My assumptions about Washington have been more than borne out by the past year: The Republican leadership and nearly all Republican members of Congress only care about one thing: defeating and punishing Democrats. They don’t have an altruistic bone in their bodies and they have no interest in bipartisanship. Their game plan is like that of any other grueling sport where time is a factor. They want you to lose badly, for anything you accomplish to take as long as possible so that you will achieve as little as possible, and for controversies surrounding your unfinished agenda to get carried into the next federal elections.

I said a year ago that in your first months in the White House you should be very decisive and take advantage of your mandate to get a lot done. Any delay caused by bi-partisan efforts would simply be exploited by the Republicans to propagandize against your agenda, whip unsophisticated voters into a frenzy and scare them to death. This would slow down the process and prevent you from accomplishing much. Was I right?

The message the voters sent you in Massachusetts was not that they hate your health care plan, although Brown did exploit fears that the state was not getting a fair deal. The message was that they don’t want you and Congress to spend anymore time on this. They want you to fix the economy!

You should threaten to pour boiling oil on reluctant Democrats in the House, get them to pass the Senate health care bill, and sign it! If you don’t get substantial reform done, you will lose your base. Some tea partiers will get over their hysteria once they see that previously uninsurable people they care about can get insurance, but only if you get a bill signed in time for this take effect before elections in November.

You need to get health care off the table ASAP and move on so that 90% percent of your time and your messages to the voters are about fixing the economy. People want you to kick the banks hard. You have to stop the perception that you are in the pocket of Wall Street. Be swift and decisive with regulation to avoid dragging out stock market reactions. The sooner you get this done, the sooner the markets will recover. You don’t want to cause any major downturns less than six months before the mid-term elections.

Your message to the voters, passionately delivered several times a week, should be hope. Just like FDR. You know how to do that well. You should continually paint the Republicans as only interested in obstruction and protecting big business at the expense of the people. If you don’t do this you may lose Congress in the fall.

It’s not going to get any better for you with Congress. Your majorities in Congress will only get smaller. You may have just this year to get anything significant done in your time in the White House. Think of this as your last chance. Unlike the Republicans in Congress, I want you to succeed.

Blackwater's crusade.

According to a disturbing interview on the NPR program Fresh Air today, it seems that the U.S. now has the largest mercenary army in our history -- and in the world -- with its own intelligence service and air force. There are more U.S.military contractors in Afghanistan today than U.S. troops.

Blackwater, renamed Xe, is the largest contractor and is run by Erik Prince, who according to sworn affidavits of former employees, "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

Blackwater is entirely funded by U.S. tax dollars, yet is accountable to no one. It's doubtful that its employees could be prosecuted for rape or murder since Dick Cheney and others made sure they were exempt from U.S. law, and the laws of the nations we invaded. According to the author of the articles cited above (and others who've reported on this) Blackwater employees are making some targeting decisions instead of U.S. troops.

But whether or not it's a good idea for the U.S. be on a crusade to wipe out Islam is immaterial at this point. We've made sure Erik Prince has a strong profit motive to get the job done.

A mere 16 years ago, our greatest national fear was about private domestic militias dedicated to bringing down our government. Perhaps in our paranoia about external terrorists, we've already forgotten our own recent history.

Coopting cooperation.

A recent NY Times article collects a wide range of interesting facts about cooperation, but having read many articles by journalist Nicholas Wade I am dismayed about the incorrect impressions it conveys. I have not read Michael Tomasello’s new book Why We Cooperate, cited throughout, but anyone who has read more than one of Frans de Waal’s books knows that cooperation is definitely not what distinguishes humans from animals. Some of the ways that we cooperate are more elaborate, but anyone who asserts that “shared intentionality” makes us different from chimps must be unaware of de Waal’s seminal study Chimpanzee Politics written more than 25 years ago.

As for the strength of the urge to cooperate, it does not correlate with a species’ intelligence, and is not a measure, as this article implies, to infer that one species is superior to another. To give just one example, the highest level of cooperation measured in one classic experimental design came from a species known for its murderous inclinations: the spotted hyena. Hyenas are the only mammals that are both matriarchal and regularly murder adults of their own kind. In cooperation, they blow chimpanzees off the chart. Does that make them a better example of our nature? (Some have speculated that this hyena study was suppressed for 15 years because it upended the notion that cooperation tracked with intelligence and evolutionary sophistication.)

Rooting out torture.

In considering whether to appoint a prosecutor to investigate torture, Obama is deciding whether to dip a toe into the cesspool that Bush administration created with its torture and detainment policies. Cleaning up this mess could is the most important legacy President Obama will leave. A generation or two or more later, if the US goes down such a dark path again, people will ask why Obama failed to reinstill a national ethos that humane treatment and due process are the bedrock on which out nation stands or falls. (See my previous post.)

Subprime mortgages rejected by Calfornia voters.

The day after their defeat in a California special election, it’s clear that most voters viewed Props 1A-E like a subprime mortgages. I’ve used this analogy in a previous post about Bush’s unsustainable tax cuts, and it fits equally well here. In trying to solve an unprecedented financial challenge, these propositions offered voters a quick fix based on completely unrealistic revenue projections.

If Props 1A-E passed, voters were smart enough to realize that in a few short years they would be just like homeowners with subprime mortgages: unable to pay the bills and wondering how they got bamboozled into creating debts they couldn’t repay.

Subprime “victims” were told they could refinance their homes when their debt payments ballooned or bought into a fantasy that the ballooning economy would trickle down higher salaries to them that would cover their debt. Voters in yesterday's election were told that when the state’s income needs would further balloon in a couple of years – in large part because of the elaborate borrowing against future revenues orchestrated by these propositions – that either a huge economic recovery or the “rainy day fund” created by Prop 1-A would cover the gap. (Never mind that it might take decades, if ever, for the fund to grow large enough to keep voters from getting soaked.)

Another sad truth has been reinforced by the election: if the private sector figures out a way to fleece unsophisticated consumers, after politicians denounce the hucksters for their immoral greed those same politicians sometimes have the gall to try to fleece voters in a similar way. The focus on today at the expense of planning for tomorrow that has famously plagued American industry since the 1980's also has deeply infected politics and public policy. In California, with term limits forcing every newly elected public official to immediately set his or her sights on the race for the next office, it’s a miracle the ship of state didn’t sink years before yesterday.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts some long standing issues that must be fixed as part of raising the wreck, such the requirement that any bill with fiscal impact pass by a two-thirds vote. Hopefully this will all play out like a disaster movie formula, and we’ll be rescued in time. My additional hope is that the Governator will make good on his promise to leave politics forever, and that future entertainers who assume that public office is just another venue that would draw on their existing skill set will study the careers of Arnold and Jesse and try stand up comedy instead.

Is that a gun in your pocket or do you just want to rape me?

I’m feeling violated by Obama’s signature on a bill demonstrating that no matter who sits in the Oval Office, the National Rifle Association packs the biggest pistol in Washington. One of the main reasons I’ve preferred to visit, camp, climb, backpack, and volunteer to work in National Parks is because I’m much less likely to run into visitors or “campers” with pistols. Sorry this decades old policy banning weapons in the parks is inconvenient for those too fearful to leave home without a gun at the ready, but getting away from some of the more insane aspects of our society for a weekend is fundamental to my wilderness experience.

Our National Park System (NPS) is perhaps the most important cultural and environmental contribution the United States has made to the world. Jazz is the only positive thing that even comes close. (Feel free to educate me with a comment, if you disagree.) Few Americans realize this, but the no other nation had a federalized park system before we created one well over a hundred years ago. The idea of preserving areas of great scenic beauty or ecological importance with a commitment that would endure as long as the nation that contained them was the most important catalyst of the modern environmental movement.

In his campaign for President, Mr. Obama brought hope to hundreds of millions around the world that the terrible vectors in our national policy that acquired so much traction after 9/11 would be drastically altered. Obama sought to reestablish the notion that the U.S. had earned its place as the leader of the free world through its values and its deeds. We’re more than just a posse of drunken cowboys presumptively in charge only because we have more rifles than anyone else. Perhaps no one outside the U.S. will care that we’ve just shot some holes in our greatest contribution to world culture. But I worry it’s symbolic that our efforts at self-rehabilitation – and the change many so fervently fought for – are one step closer to being scattered to the ill winds of political expediency.

(Other essays bring different perspectives to mixing guns and parks, including the fact that pepper spray protects people from large animals much better than guns.)

U.S. productivity miracle a statistical illusion.

Paul Krugman's blog questions whether the boom in the U.S. financial industry actually increased the productivity of the economy, and speculates that the “the apparent US productivity miracle, a miracle not shared by Europe, was a statistical illusion created by our bloated finance industry,” as its recent collapse demonstrated. 

Krugman cites a paper showing that standard of living, the best measure of economic productivity, has increased more in Europe than in the U.S. in the past thirty years.

The paper took into account a number of measurements that track tradeoffs a nation makes in allocating resources for short term consumption at the expense of long-term growth, such as living on debt and not saving. Another important factor taken into consideration was adjusting for decreases in the balance of trade. Larger trade deficits translate into increases in the standard of living – as the U.S. has seen though buying cheap goods from China – but are not sustainable in the long term because the imbalance must eventually decrease and thus erase the standard of living gains. The paper also uses net domestic product instead of gross domestic product so resources that go simply to replace deteriorating capital equipment and infrastructure do not count toward economic growth.

So much for the notion that the U.S. version of unrestrained free markets and absence of a social safety net is superior to the European brand of regulation and more socialist human services programs.

No brains in California May Propositions

“No brainer” is the tag line for the campaign urging voters to approve the latest smoke and mirrors referendums put forward by California’s dysfunctional state legislature and Governator. “No brain” is a better description of the opinion the “leaders” behind these referendums have of voters. There has been very little public discussion of these six propositions, which will be on the ballot on May 19. I believe that the supporters do not want voters to know much about the details and are hoping to fly them through under the radar.

These propositions are a train wreck resulting from the inability of the legislature to agree on a budget year after year. The Democrats won’t reduce spending the Republicans won’t raise taxes. In good economic times, they stumble all over themselves to reduce taxes to make voters happy, knowing full well that the in bad times they won’t have the courage to raise taxes in order to keep the state out of the red. The requirement for a two-thirds vote to pass a budget gets us a worsening series of accounting tricks, of which these propositions are the latest.

We’re told that this is the best deal we’re going to get, and that failure to pass these six propositions will plunge the state back into uncertainty. We should not buy into to these scare tactics. The plan is already fatally flawed because it is based on unrealistic revenue projections. Even if these propositions pass, the latest estimate is that the state will still be facing an additional eight billion dollar deficit this year that they do not address.

1A continues the tax increases recently approved for four years instead of two. Rather than hiking the gas tax and encouraging people to get fuel efficient vehicles or drive less, one Republican legislator whose vote was needed to pass the budget insisted on a sales tax increase instead, which is the most regressive form of taxation (hurts the poor the most). To take the heat off the legislature and get voters to swallow this bitter medicine themselves, 1A sets up an automatic rainy day fund. The problem with this is that revenue only flows into the fund when the State actually spends the amount of money on education mandated by Prop 98, which never happens (see 1B below). Given how many prior propositions are being eviscerated by the May 19th “gang of six” (see below), it’s hard to believe much about how all of this will work in the future.

1B would give schools and colleges 9.3 billion dollars starting in 2010-2012 they think they should have been paid under Prop 98 and that they think the Governator screwed them out of. Is the only way to solve this dispute is via another proposition? What are the odds various government entities will be fighting about this new one in 2010 and beyond? Where is the 9.3 billion dollars going to come from?

1C is an end run around Props 58 and 98 and is one the worst accounting tricks. It borrows money from future lottery revenue that is supposed to go to education to help close today’s budget deficit. This whole Madoff-like Ponzi scheme depends on the economy roaring back in 2010 so there will be money for the payments mandated by 1B. Oh, and it removes competitive bidding requirements from some lottery operations.

1D is an end run around Prop 10 that allows the state to take tobacco litigation money that is supposed to go to "First Five" early childhood development programs and instead spent it on other human services programs. Many First Five programs will end. Just to be consistent with the name of the programs it will kill, 1D will steal that money for five years.

1E allows the state to take money that voters said in Prop 63 should go to mental health programs for children and instead use it to pay for federally mandated Medicaid programs. Cutting and reducing funding for mental health programs will hurt people who need the help the most and cost taxpayers more in the long run, as failing to treat mental health problems always does. Its annual savings are less than half of one percent of the deficit.

1F is a Trojan Horse built to fool voters into thinking that elected officials are sacrificing something in this package. All it does it prevent salary increases for public officials during deficit years. It does nothing to prevent foregone increases from being made up later when times are good. This sort of faux pain for politicians is often used to bait voters into supporting propositions containing bad public policy.

Where is the proposition to lower the votes in the legislature to pass a budget or raise taxes from two-thirds to something more sensible like sixty percent, or God forbid, the simple majority used in Congress and most state legislatures? Vote no on the May 19th gang of six.

We're not in Kansas anymore, are we?

A report from the inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department, says The NY Times, found that a former senior official at the Justice Department, Bradley Schlozman, "selected conservative lawyers for prime assignments and transferred three lawyers out of the Civil Rights Division because they were seen as liberals who were opposed to his political agenda. All three later brought federal discrimination claims and returned to the division after Mr. Schlozman left. The transfers, the report found, violated federal civil service law and 'constituted misconduct.'

"The investigation found that among people hired by Mr. Schlozman, 63 of 65 were considered Republican or conservative, but that when he was not involved, 'the results were more balanced,' with conservatives and liberals split about evenly.

"In a 2003 voice-mail message to a colleague, Mr. Schlozman said experience in civil rights law was not needed to work for the division. 'I just want to make sure we don’t start confining ourselves to, you know, Politburo members because they happen to be a member of some, you know, psychopathic left-wing organization designed to overthrow the government,' he said." (It's amazing how conservatives embrace affirmative action if it applies only to conservatives - see my previous post.)

"The investigators for the inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that Mr. Schlozman’s repeated denials to the Senate in 2007 that he had used ideological considerations in his personnel decisions constituted a 'false statement,' and they referred the matter to prosecutors for criminal prosecution last year."

The United States Attorney’s Office, headed by a Bush appointee, declined to prosecute. Mr. Schlozman is happily practicing law in his native Kansas.

No credit? No problem if you're dealing with the Bush administration.

A sly college student activist recently was able to disrupt a fire sale of oil and gas leases announced by the Bush administration on election day by bidding up the prices at auction and buying leases at high prices other bidders could not afford. The truly astounding thing about this sting is that it could only be accomplished because the Bush administration is still blind to the lessons from the mortgage crisis. They were so eager to sell off government assets on the cheap that they didn't do a credit check on the buyers. The student had no money to complete his purchases and the auction can't be repeated until after Obama, who has vowed to stop it, takes office.

Save your confederate money, boys.

The South, I mean the Republican Party, shall rise again. The latest debate in the GOP is over whether the song, “Barack the Magic Negro” is an appropriate holiday gift to the party from a candidate for new party leader. Tough call. Decide for yourself.

We have too many well educated voters.

And it costs too much to educate them, says a conservative's op-ed in The NY Times. Having been stung by the results of this problem in the most recent election, conservatives are fighting back. Reset our national goals so that we channel most students wanting a post high school education into vocational schools and we solve two problems. Cut government spending, and ensure that there will be fewer voters in the future capable of dissecting big public policy issues. This should help candidates such as Sarah Palin climb right to the top down the road. As the op-ed points out, most people aren't really deep thinkers anyway, so why try to force them to study a range of subjects that will just frustrate them?

HerMcCain Sarah.

May turn out to be the most powerful storm of the season. Will Pentecostal Palin ultimately sink McCain the way Katrina sank Bush, or help him? Will voters be turned off by Palin's literal interpretation of the Bible in light of Bush's deeply flawed character trait of "religious certainty about his decision making?"

Obama's two short years in the US Senate.

One of the things that Republican speakers are now saying (incorrectly) is that Obama has only been in the US Senate for two years. It's four! That's a big difference in a position in which it takes a year just to get your bearings. The attempt, of course, is to bring Obama down to Palin's level. People should call Republicans on this lie everytime they say it - as TV interviewers are failing to do, except on the Daily Show.

McCain will win the election by saying Obama will lose the war.

Obama may lose the election because McCain has changed the conversation about the war. Obama’s huge strength as a candidate is that he had the courage to oppose the worst U.S. foreign policy mistake of the past fifty years, and possibly of all time. Yet, McCain paints Obama as naïve and inexperienced in foreign policy and military affairs. McCain keeps saying that Obama wants to let the U.S. lose the war in Iraq, but Obama is not really answering this charge, except to defend his patriotism and repeat that he will impose a timetable.

What Obama needs to repeat with all is oratory skill is that the war was never really designed to protect American interests. It was a blind spasm by a misguided President, a Wag-the-Dog diversion erected by his neo-con Vice-President who was determined to simultaneously subvert the constitution and destroy many of the noble values for which this country has stood. It has given a blank check to military contractors to whom the Republican Party is beholden, and to an unstable and dependent government in Iraq that will never step up and unless we are serious about stepping out. We financed the entire multi-trillion dollar war on credit and we can't fix our economy until we stop pouring money into this sinkhole. The only way to preserve American dignity, our stature in the world and our national treasury is to get on a timetable. Unlike Bush and McCain, Obama can show that as a leader, he has the discipline to get us out of the mess.

The public tolerated the war for a long time, even as facts mounted that the evidence for it was rigged, because people assumed the war was really about ensuring reliable and affordable fixes for our addiction to oil. Stratospheric gas prices exploded that myth.

Obama has already said these things, but in his quest to be seen as a uniter, he now seems afraid to offend any potential supporter. But unless he steps up, he risks losing the enthusiastic support of those who were passionate about his courage to lead, and worse, being unable to shake McCain’s tagging him as a weak leader. Today, he seems to have moved far away from his bold criticisms in 2002:

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

Tortured logic.

A number of journalists, as well as witnesses at recent U.S. Senate hearings, have described how the U.S. came to adopt torture as a so called "weapon" in the war on terror. After 9/11, the military reverse engineered techniques that had been intended to harden U.S. military personnel against interrogation methods North Korea used in the early 1950's to elicit false confessions.

The problem is that most professional intelligence officers don't believe that torture is the best way to get reliable information from a suspect. Persons being tortured often will say whatever they think their torturers want to hear. This is the reason U.S. courts do not allow the admission of confessions obtained by torture in criminal trials. It's not about compassion for the tortured - it's about ensuring that the criminal justice system is based on truth. If there is one place where we need facts rather than fiction, it's in fighting terrorism.

A determined criminal facing life in prison or death from a military tribunal knows he only worsens his situation by confessing while being tortured. He gets nothing in return other than a certain conviction. He is more likely to cooperate if he gets something of long term value in return, such as better food, reading material, a cell with a view, a shorter sentence, life rather than execution, etc. Indeed, that is exactly how the CIA "broke" the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

What about the "24" scenario? Some believe the Hollywood scripted nightmare that the U.S. might capture a terrorist who knew the location of a nuclear bomb set to explode in a few hours inspired the adoption of torture after 9/11. With no time for tried and true psychological interrogation methods, desperate officers might attempt the Jack Bauer approach. Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has said that no one would convict a torturer of a crime in such a scenario. We don't need a national policy permitting and encouraging torture in order to deal with this extremely unlikely situation.

As is clear from Jane Mayer's book, The Dark Side, a few powerful people in the Bush Administration made the decision to use torture without a careful analysis of its potential effectiveness for eliciting true information. The sudden adoption of torture might have been because Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted false confessions from alleged terrorists in order to justify the invasion of Iraq and the civil rights of U.S. citizens. Indeed, a false confession about an imaginary link between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein was a key element in the case the administration made for the invasion of Iraq.

Now come calls for a general amnesty or pardons for those who illegally justified the use of torture and did the torturing. One of the arguments made for amnesty is that it is the only way to learn whether torture in obtained accurate information about terror plots. Finding out whether torture provided any useful information is pointless because there are more effective methods to obtain the truth that rely on psychology alone.

No other single proposal could be more damaging to the health of our democracy and our credibility in the world. We need to ensure that this cancer is rooted out of our institutions, and that we send an unmistakable message that systematic torture and abuse of prisoners will never be tolerated again. Otherwise, we risk again being dragged into a war abroad or at home on false pretenses, and being forever compromised in our ability to end human rights abuses by our post 9/11 image as hypocritical fascist nation. Oh yes, and we would have no standing to demand that our soldiers not be tortured if captured by an enemy. We and the rest of the world deserve much better from our democracy.

Conservatives favor affirmative action for conservatives.

Yes, the proof is in. The report of the Justice Department Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility concludes that for at least five years, two Bush appointed Attorneys General illegally applied ideological and political litmus tests to civil service hiring for intern and career attorney positions. Applications to the Justice Department's Honors Program, which seeks the best talent from top law schools, were scrutinized for telltale signs of liberal affiliation, such as "buzzwords" like "social justice," or volunteer work for organizations perceived to have liberal goals.

In spite of the fact that the purpose of the civil service system is to keep politics out of the hiring process, a former spokesperson for Attorney General John Ashcroft. quoted on NPR, justified the illegal practice as a long overdue attempt to create ideological diversity in the Justice Department! Given that candidates with perceived liberal affiliations or leanings were rejected at three times the rate of those believed to be conservative, that means that standards were lowered in order to accommodate a particular subset of applicants- just as conservatives bitterly complained affirmative action programs did in the sixties and seventies. This seems to be a tacit admission by the Bush Justice Department that conservatives are not as bright and academically accomplished as liberals. A former justice department official said the policy meant that Justice was hiring from the B list instead of the A list.

Is it any surprise that during this time the Justice Department did not seek racial and ethnic diversity in its hiring? Not a single black lawyer was hired in the Civil Rights Division between 2003 and 2007.

Update: The Justice Department’s inspector general and its internal ethics office issued a report concluding that aides to Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales illegally used partisan and ideological criteria to select less-qualified applicants for nonpolitical senior career positions, including immigration judges, assistant United States attorneys and counterterrorism positions. This discrimination slowed the hiring process at critical times and damaged the department’s credibility. Applicants' views on "God, guns and gays" were a key part of the screening.

Bush's tax cuts are like a subprime mortgage.

More people are waking up to the fact that the Bush tax cuts cannot be sustained without slowing the growth of the economy, and the tax cuts eventually will have to be scaled back. On top of this, in order to pay the interest on the national debt created by the Bush tax cut, there will have to be a permanent tax increase of at least five percent (see my previous post). This forever tax probably will be even higher, depending on how long the current tax cuts last and whether there is consensus to pay down any of the enormous debt they've created. If you were a twenty year old who got a twenty percent tax decrease for ten years while your income was low, you may not be happy that as a thirty year old you'll face a five, six or seven percent tax increase for the rest of your life when your income is higher. In the end, you'll lose money on this "tax break." Come to think of it, this tax deal is structured like a subprime mortgage. You get a teaser payment upfront, and then get hit with high payments you can't afford later.

Are Republicans victims of battered person syndome?

Here and elsewhere, the long sad story of how the Bush Administration has abused the average U.S. citizen has been well documented and publicized.

• The disastrous war in Iraq is now understood to have been continuously marketed on false pretenses since Bush first proposed it. Opposition to continuing the lie and war is widespread - even among moderate Republicans (except those who are getting rich as private contractors in Iraq). Citizens will pay trillions of their tax dollars and sacrifice the blood of many of the nation's young people for this horrific mistake.
• Even teenagers understand that for the rest of their lives they likely will be paying off Bush's unprecedented, gigantic federal deficits - so far increasing the national debt by more than a four trillion dollars and nearly doubling it. The "free" money people get from Bush's tax cuts and rebates is not free (see my previous post). Today, nearly a tenth of taxes go just toward paying the interest on the national debt, with Bush's deficits responsible for half of that. (Many voters remember that Bill Clinton's fiscal discipline created four years of surpluses. Fewer realize that under Republican Presidents since 1948 we have been subjected to average annual increases in the national debt three times higher than under Democrats.) (Here's an even scarier analysis by a conservative economist.)
• Nearly everyone, except determined hermits, realizes that the Bush promise of getting government out of our lives was a lie regarding civil liberties. Sadly, it was true concerning protecting most of us from the consequences of natural disasters such as hurricanes and global climate change, and from greed and exploitation (a prime example being the subprime mortgage meltdown).

Yet many Republican voters support that party's nominee in 2008, John McCain, who promises very little change from present policies (see my previous post). Could they be suffering from battered person syndrome? A victim of this condition:

becomes depressed and unable to take any independent action that would allow him or her to escape the abuse. The condition explains why abused people often do not seek assistance from others, fight their abuser, or leave the abusive situation. Sufferers have low self-esteem, and often believe that the abuse is their fault. Such persons usually refuse to press criminal charges against their abuser, and refuse all offers of help, often becoming aggressive or abusive to others who attempt to offer assistance. Often sufferers will even seek out their very abuser for comfort shortly after an incident of abuse.