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No Way Are We That Friggin’ Lucky!

Nov 24

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Politics | 1 Comment

Sarah Palin demonstrates her native intelligence with a sly wink!

I was cruisin’ the tubes when I came across a blog post on the Atlantic Monthly site about female support (or more precisely, the lack thereof) for Sarah Palin. At the bottom of the comments section was this gem from a “tnorton:”

If she didn’t have a good chance you liberals would not keep running stories daily headlines about her not being qualified, nor would your supporters spend most of their time responding or commenting on how she doesn’t have a chance. Funny how an attractive, intelligent republican female scares you guys so much. Must be because she not the average female liberal, A mullet wearing, PETA supporting lesbian member of NOW. Poor libs cant sleep at night worring about her. GO SARAH!!

If she didn’t have a good chance you liberals would not keep running stories daily headlines about her not being qualified, nor would your supporters spend most of their time responding or commenting on how she doesn’t have a chance. Funny how an attractive, intelligent republican female scares you guys so much. Must be because she not the average female liberal, A mullet wearing, PETA supporting lesbian member of NOW. Poor libs cant sleep at night worring about her. GO SARAH!!

Now, suffice it to say, I had one or two points of disagreement with this brilliant person, but the foremost was the idea that liberals thought that Palin running for President was a BAD THING. I felt compelled to share the following insight:

Are you freakin’ kidding me? I’m wetting myself with glee, and so is everybody I know. She’s our dream opponent. She lays bare everything about your party and ideology that we hold in utter contempt: Your cluelessness, arrogance, utter lack of concern for the vulnerable and the future, your worship of wealth as the determinant of human value, your casual attitude toward the grave responsibilities of public office, your substitution of glib talking points for policy analysis, your mindless jingoism, your rank hypocrisy, your deeply troubled relationship with the truth. She is a better refutation of the conservative creed than anything we could make up. She is a giant gift-wrapped wet dream for liberals who might otherwise be concerned about 2012. I’m on my knees praying to the God I cherish that conservatives are THAT FRICKIN’ STUPID! If she announces, I’m going to launch a fund-raising drive for her among my liberal friends. In the words of my second-least-favorite President: “Bring it on!”

Reading that last paragraph, the only thing I regret is the absence of the word “vacuous.” Feel free to insert it where appropriate.

The Republican Party has experienced hacks and gifted wonks at its call. It has people who can look good in a suit, stare into a camera, and recite a focus-group tested soundbite with the best of them. Can we dare to hope that the rabid base is gullible enough to believe that this human train wreck is the best choice to run against one of the best political operators in the history of American politics? Can we really be that lucky?

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How We Lost The Public Option

Aug 18

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Florida, Politics | 2 Comments

Secretary Sebelius on Sunday claimed that the public health insurance option is “not an essential element” of health care reform. President Obama said at a town hall on Saturday that the public option was just “one sliver” of reform. This could hardly be more wrong. A universally accessible public option would give low-income people too rich for Medicaid access to meaningful health insurance and is the only way to approach universal access to insurance without a mandate or single-payer.

The wave of chronic conditions America faces over the rest of the century demand early detection and intervention to control the costs and misery that they produce. Gaps and lapses in coverage will make those diseases more expensive for those patients and the rest of us. Preventing those gaps in coverage will require serving the low-income patients currently ill-served by the current mix of overstretched public programs and private high-deductible plans and still bend the cost curve down. That will require a plan that can deliver overhead in the 3-6% range. Only a public plan can do that.

The best solution would have been to put the entire population on a very low overhead plan. This was HR 676, Medicare for Everybody, Single-Payer. It never had a chance. Both Houses “placed it off the table” before negotiations began. The reasons for that decision are irrelevant, its consequences are all too clear. Moderate Democrats now pronounce the barely adequate public option DOA in the Senate. Without single-payer to draw fire, the opposition can focus on defeating the public plan option, If they had focused their energy on the socialism (i.e., public policy with which conservatives disagree) of single-payer health care, we could respond with the massive market reform of retaining the entire private health insurance with a single public program with subsidies for those who earn up to 4 times the localized poverty rate. Conservatives would hail this as a leg-up to the middle class, rather than welfare. We would have gotten the public plan we wanted, with ribbons affixed. They would hail their great market-driven defeat of the evil socialism of the hated liberals and declare it a great victory,

Instead we took the bogeyman away before the game started, leaving the public option as the target of the antis. We did so hoping to make them pros. This was possibly the most naive moment in contemporary American politics. The antis are anti not because of the actuarial tables or because Ludwig Von Mises hated regulation, but because we’re not them. We can’t be trusted to worship at the alter of God, CEO, therefore we are the enemy of all that is fine and good.

President Obama and Congressional leadership egregiously underestimated the irrational sectarian motivations of their opponents and chose to try to accomodate them, which merely served to slide the agenda rightward while buying nothing we couldn’t already take were we willing to ignore those we beat in November, as they have done to us and will again.

Thus are 22,000 Americans a year sacrificed to the demon of “Dear God, don’t let us be seen being Democrats.” God Bless America.

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Personal Responsibility

Jul 27

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Politics | 6 Comments

rush_limbaughThe election of President Obama has done at least one thing to improve the political climate, and that is to put health care front and center as an issue. That’s fortunate, because we have been ignoring multiple parallel crises in the American care system for decades, and the consequences are becoming deadly serious. We spend more than any other country on health care, and we get less for our money than any industrialized nation.

The first problem is under-participation. The AMA has estimated that more than half of Americans do not have their own Primary Care Physicians.  Add to that, of course, the more than 50 million Americans with no health coverage at all, and you can see that more than 150 million people in this country are not getting regular checkups, do not have the medical care they do receive coordinated by anybody, have no central store for medical records, have no way to manage the risk of pharmaceutical interaction, are not detecting disease early and are not treating it effectively. We can see the consequences when more than ten percent of our health care costs stem from one disease: Diabetes. Since most diabetes is Type 2, the vast majority of these costs are preventable through early risk identification and lifestyle changes. Instead, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to treat people who should never have been sick.

The second problem is the role of profit in the health insurance industry. It’s not simply that thirty percent of our extravagant spending goes to profit and the recision and denial mechanisms necessary to protect it, but the profit motive of employer-based care produces perverse incentives. Care is denied whenever possible. Early intervention is denied to minimize “medical loss,” even though it would reduce future outlays, because insurers do not know if they will cover the patient when they get sicker. They have no incentive to reduce their future costs by eliminating deductibles and co-pays for diagnostic and preventive care. Thus the financial incentives of insurers are perversely related to the health outcomes of their policyholders. Insurers are profitable while Americans become sicker every year.

The third problem has been the least-discussed: the subsidized corn sugars and soy oils that are killing us. The modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes are directly related to the late twentieth-century surge of subsidies into factory farms that produce little but empty calories. Our foods contain steadily diminishing quantities of vitamins, anti-oxidants and amino acids as a giant biochemistry experiment engulfs its third generation. The health consequences of our fast-food culture are so severe that life expectancies are actually beginning to drop.

So, we’re facing a fifty trillion dollar Medicare iceberg at the same time we’re spending tens of billions a year to subsidize the foods that are killing us. But conservatives choose to blame poorly educated working class families with little money and less time for patronizing the businesses these same conservatives spend their time fighting for. The hypocrisy of it would be startling were not hypocrisy the operating standard of the conservative movement. On the one hand, the mounting data linking modern factory food to every form of chronic disease is dismissed as liberal “culture war” against good old-fashioned American food. On the other hand, people who uncritically consume this fare are blamed for the diseases that result. Don’t they know this stuff is bad for you?

All too often, they don’t. Industrial food is huge business in the United States, spending billions of dollars a year to market their products, targeted specifically at younger, poorer people who do not know about the link between the epidemics of diabetes and obesity and the food they are eating. Fast food outlets are located where poorer, less-educated people work, shop and live. Two-income families working three or four part-time jobs with little control over their working hours lack the ability to get together for a home-cooked meal. Even if they could make the time, they find that the fresh fruits and vegetables they need to stay healthy are not subsidized, not as available in their neighborhoods and require a struggle to get small children to eat, a struggle they no longer have the time or energy to undertake. So they get the fried chicken or the Happy Meal and stave off hunger for another day, frequently unaware that these foods are not just vaguely unhealthy but specifically deadly to precisely the kind of poorer, less-educated families the companies that sell them target with their advertisements and store placement.

So, minimum wage workers must show “personal responsibility” but food industry and health insurance executives are allowed, no, required, to cut any corner, tell any lie, spare no expense, walk away from any number of sick and needy people, to make profits that enrich them and their shareholders. If one were to wake up and say to herself “I make money from human misery and basic human decency demands that I stop,” she would be treated as mentally ill and possibly face tort action.

Capitalism is a vital part of modern society and I wouldn’t live in any country without it, but if there are no other values in a society save those of the marketplace, that society is in crisis. We have to stop arguing about the obvious and we have to stop treating corporate interests as if they were inviolate. Our physical and economic futures depend on it. Let’s put single-payer back on the table and justify it by pointing to the fiscal crisis in Medicare. And let’s stop paying Cargill, Monsanto and ADM to make us sick.

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What We Can Learn From the Right

Jul 17

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Politics | 1 Comment

In the last 35 years, Progressives have been lost in the policy wilderness. The parties have been up and down, but the shift of American politics has been inexorably to the right. The question is: why?

Let’s start by asking: what is the right? Broadly speaking, the Right started as a coalition of Libertarians, Theocrats, and Business types that might be at odds, but were unified by extreme anti-communism. When the Wall fell, the Right had achieved its ultimate object, but lost its unifying cause. Libertarians, Evangelicals, and Corporate executives seeking special market advantage through government will naturally be at odds about every significant issue.

“Liberalism” is a weak rallying point because, well, it doesn’t really exist. There are liberals in both houses of Congress, but no more than, say, Corvair fans. It would make just as much sense to construct a political philosophy around opposing the philatelist menace.

Yet these rebels without a cause have won every important political battle of the last thirty years! Clinton got elected, but couldn’t even pass a health care bill. He wound up abolishing AFDC, declaring the “era of big government is over,” deregulating the banks, keeping the inevitable tax hike limited to a one percent top bracket marginal bump, balancing the budget, and keeping the defense budget intact. The only concession the conservatives had to make was the letter after the President’s name. Clinton was the most effective Republican president of the Twentieth Century.

Then, they crooked their crazy nephew in, and he screwed the pooch. His administration was so corrupt and inept they actually managed to convince the smarter type of conservatives (all six of them) not to be conservatives any more. Still, they keep winning battles. They bottled up the Employee Free Choice Act, watered down the cap-and trade bill, gutted the stimulus bill, turned a slam-dunk Supreme Court confirmation hearing into a circus, and may well end up killing health care reform. And that’s with large Democratic majorities in both house and the White House in Democratic hands!

How do they pull off controlling the course of American politics without holding the seats of power? They control the terms of the debate. When the handful of Progressives that actually exist proposed that we reform our health care system by instituting a single-payer national insurance plan that will actually address the problems behind escalating health-care costs, we were told by our betters that it was politically impossible. One of the people delivering this message was our “Yes We Can,” “Change We Can Believe In,” “Muslim Socialist” President explaining, in conservative terms, that change would be too disruptive. We have to preserve a system of employer-based health insurance born out of the unique experience of World War II that no longer makes sense in a country where people change jobs every few years because it had somehow become “the American Way.” In one lifetime? Really?

Conservatives didn’t have to beat Barack Obama, and they didn’t have to join him. They swallowed him whole. This is why the Birthers are so crazy. They are so out there they don’t even realize they are unnecessary.

Conservatives have turned the preservation of corporate interests into a national religion. They control the language of national debates, they set the baseline of acceptable policies, and they have a stranglehold on my model voter, the radiology tech from Casselberry. When I talk politics with him, his questions, concerns, and objections may as well have been written by Frank Luntz himself.

They did it with money, time, and attacking ideas first and people second. The conservative foundations (Bradley, Scaife, Olin, Coors, Annenberg, et al.) committed themselves to funding the think tanks and media outlets that spread conservative ideas. These institutions plucked right-wingers out of college and gave them jobs, nurturing three generations of conservative leaders and providing an economic base for the movement. They established quiet, invite-only meetings in Washington where staffers, elected officials and lobbyists receive their marching orders. They maintain safe houses in the DC area so they don’t get caught influence-peddling and screwing around. They are a real movement.

We are a disorganized grab-bag of people motivated mostly by common attachment to basic decency and empirical reality. We splinter more easily than a balsa-wood glider in a hurricane, so we litter the landscape with tiny factions devoted to a handful of issues. At the end of the day, we lose all the major policy battles because they are all playing on the same team and we are not.

The first thing we need to learn is to stop trying to sell our issues to the public. This is a waste of time. Right-wingers didn’t control the economic policy debate by sending every American a copy of “The Road To Serfdom.” No, they convinced Americans that pro-labor, pro-environment, pro-consumer policies were anti-American. They used the existing Horatio Alger myth to good effect, equating General Electric with the Gold Rush spirit. There are now tens of millions of poor, mostly white men certain that any measure to protect them as workers or consumers is taking the money out of their pockets they will have when they, uh … win the lottery or something, they’re not sure, but however these abused people are going to get rich, they don’t want some bureaucrat taxing them to pay for vital services or telling them that cannot cheat their workers or poison their customers.

If we want to undo the incalculable damage these maniacs have done, we must be patient and think strategically. We must work through the universities, think tanks, and the media. We must discredit the Church of Gimmie, expose conservative policies as crony capitalism, espouse real markets and level playing fields, and make conservatives as ashamed of their c-word as Democrats were of the L-word for thirty years.

Then, when our viewpoint has permeated the culture, we insist that our party conform. We challenge any Democrat, no matter how powerful, who persists in conservative heresy and drum them out of our party. We take over from the counties to the Speaker’s office. Then, and only then, can we address global warming, worker’s rights, economic security, and equal rights for all Americans. Until we turn the Democratic Party democratic, then electing corporate “Democrats” is just a waste of time and money.

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Clay Shirky – Organizing Without Organizations

Jul 15

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Politics | No Comments

I find this an illuminating way to think about the cultural and political connotations of new media.

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No More Easy Choices

Jul 11

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Politics | No Comments

TV Bill Moyers JournalWe face a 63 trillion dollar fiscal iceberg over the next 75 years, mostly because we perversely allow private health insurance companies to “cherry-pick” young, healthy people out of the health-care system, leaving under-funded public systems to carry the burden of the most expensive patients. Conservatives have often maintained that the retirement of the Boomers is responsible for the impending fiscal crisis, but for the past 23 years, we have been over-paying our payroll taxes to finance the looming retirement of the Boomers. We should have been running surpluses for the last two decades. Where did our money go? Into tax cuts for the rich. Republicans and conservative Democrats stole several trillion dollars of our money. Now we are told we must sacrifice more even as the top one percent of the top one percent burn our children’s birthright in their private jets. Of course, anyone who points this out is a “socialist,” although apparently demanding, and getting, trillions in taxpayer subsidies is the epitome of free-market capitalism.

Even as the poles have been heating alarmingly for decades, the champions of corporate interests have fought a long delaying action, first denying the facts, then their meaning, and finally that we can’t solve the problem. Most human beings live within 300 miles of the sea, and all are threatened by a surge in global sea levels. Every living thing is tied intimately to the ecosystems that we disrupt so heedlessly, yet those who think this should be treated as the survival issue that it is are told to grow up, to live in the “real world” of fake politics and false impunity.

Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the United States, the supposed exemplar of freedom, maintains nearly a thousand major overseas bases and a dozen carrier battle groups roam the oceans of the planet, pursuing a global grand strategy of denial and disruption as if we were at war with the world. We cloak this aggression in the language of patriotism and sacrifice, as if the nameless villagers of Helmand Province who we have bombed out with quarter-billion dollar stealth bombers were a threat to the United States. This is an unconscionable drain on our wealth, our most vulnerable and dedicated citizens, our goodwill overseas, and our national energy and attention at a time of real threats to our survival.

Average Americans, we are told, will never make the sacrifices necessary to address the problems that we face. This is, as Bill Moyers would so eloquently say, “bull.” On last night’s program, Mr. Moyers gave an impassioned diagnosis of the state of American democracy. Our nation’s deeply flawed policies have nothing to do with the preferences of ordinary Americans. They are bought and paid for a handful of people whose wealth finances, and is subsidized and protected by, the special interest industry in Washington and the state capitals.

It was refreshing to hear such honesty on national television, but sobering to realize that about eleven people were watching. Our vaunted democracy is a sick joke. A tiny number of people participate in politics, and even fewer are well informed about policy. Public life is dominated by superstition and outright lies. Parties go up, parties go down, but policies never budge. American politics is a shadowplay. It has the same relationship to the way we are governed as fan fiction does to the plot of a television program.

We all know this, and it’s weird that we accept it. Our futures and freedoms have been stolen for nothing more than the private gain of a a handful of wealthy people, and all we care about is what’s on TV. If we want to save our country, we’re going to have to expect more from our fellow citizens and from ourselves.

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Day of the Dreamer?

Jun 28

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Geek Life | 1 Comment

RAWI was originally going to call this blog “The Power of Crisis,” until I discovered that world-class scam artist Tony Robbins had beaten me to the name. The name was evocative because it seemed to crystallize the idea that there is opportunity in the impending collapse of much of our way of life. The inertia and apathy that helped to cement the post-war order can’t survive when the people who hold its assumptions can no longer breathe.

A crisis is what happens when one factor slips in a previously tolerable situation. Those living in the situation know, or should know, that things are getting worse. They patch or ignore the symptoms of the problem, hoping that things will get better or tell themselves that things are not so bad. Then the thing that allows them to practice this self-deception disappears. In a moment, a bad but tolerable situation becomes untenable in a way that no amount of self-deception can disguise.

A crisis is a fork in the road of our lives. It can lead us to death or to a kind of rebirth. Time and memory are divided into pre-crisis and post-crisis. It can rob us of everything we need to survive and adapt, or it can provide us energy, discipline and determination that we didn’t know we had. These resources can allow us to tackle the challenges we face. We can, if we are lucky enough to survive it, come to see a crisis as our salvation.

Other civilizations have declined, of course. Neither the Romans nor the British were famous for their ecology or human development. But the scale and global appeal of the American Dream threaten a human future on this planet in a way that neither of those civilizations could match.

Recent history is full of crackpots who foresaw elements of the current crisis. These contemptible nutcases drew guffaws if they were noticed at all. Meanwhile, the sober men of sound judgment built and maintained a civilization that has eaten the world then turned upon itself. People who can see beyond the present are more necessary than ever when the old answers have simply stopped working. So many of the ways in which we live our lives are just habit hardened into institution. The details of our daily life often have more to do with the interests of a few powerful people than with efficacy or the possibilities available to us. Instead of turning off our minds and ears when unusual people say unusual things we should be asking ourselves why we find them so threatening. Even those with so much invested in current practice could always adapt and reinvest in better ways of thinking and living. Why is change so scary?

I think people have learned to cope with the insane by pretending that it is normal. When our world is shown to be dangerously out of balance, it threatens this carefully-cultivated ignorance and the sense of well-being it allows. When Dr. Strangelove was released, it was beloved by younger audiences but reviled by older ones. Its undeniable picture of the lunacy of the Cold War was unacceptable for those who had helped construct that world. It caused them to feel the fear and shame which were the natural human responses to a thoroughly unnatural way of living. The reverence and consensus reality needed to stave off these uncomfortable feelings melted under the dark humor at the heart of Kubrick’s film.

We will have to learn to accept how unreal our world is. Our homes, our jobs, our politics, our culture and our lives are built around a series of expectations formed during a unique moment in history when the world was nearly destroyed and America alone stood unscathed, unrivaled in wealth and power. Those days have long passed, and the plenty they promised faded into memory for all but a few.

We can recover and even thrive in the years to come, but it will mean accepting new ideas regardless of the source. Workable ways of building a human future are not going to come from people saying the expected things and behaving in expected ways. They are going to come from the strange, the unusual, and the awkward. We need to be able to think in a way that allows us to perceive the value of ideas even if they scare us a little, because accepting the status quo is the most frightening idea of all.

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Thinking the Unthinkable

Jun 26

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Politics | 2 Comments

Family PicnicWe live in a strange time in American public life. Many of the truths we have held as immutable are revealing themselves to be aspects of a special and transient post-war world that is rapidly becoming untenable. From our identical homes on quarter-acre lots thirty miles away from work to our massive military forces securing the raw materials necessary to preserve this mausoleum civilization, from the escalating costs of education and health care to our steadily mounting debt financed by economic and strategic rivals, the post-war order is fraying badly and will fail completely more sooner than later.

And this isn’t all that weird. All civilizations face these moments. What is odd is that those who do think strategically and historically about the country we live in are treated as dreamers, starry-eyed fanatics not fit for adult company. Those who pretend that Levittown can be built heedlessly into the sea and the great beyond are treated as the serious, rational players in public life.

From our industrial food culture making us sick to our SUVs running out of fuel and road and our mounting debts, we are reaching the point of crisis. A functional society would wake up and accept the truth about our future. But people who have told some uncomfortable truths about our way of life are dismissed as cranks. Admitting to any areas of agreement with Michael Pollan, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, or Ron Paul will exile you to the kids’ table. Visionary engineers like Fuller, Telsa or Ovshinsky found their patents bought by corporations who bury them and are remembered, if at all, as nutcases and mad scientists.

We believe things in this country that are virtually unique in the developed world. The idea that evolution is controversial is a national embarrassment. The belief in the selfless exceptionality of America on the world stage requires a carefully honed ignorance of our history that defies credulity. The national fear of change borders on paranoia. We demand to be treated as the big brothers of the world, wise and strong. But our national discourse is the rhetorical equivalent of a toddler with her ears plugged droning “la,la, la.”

If heedlessness is the test of gravitas we are in serious trouble.

The Pathology of Race

Jun 25

Posted by Rob Field in Culture | No Comments

Only in America can a poor Black boy grow up to be a rich White woman

- Anonymous

A sad figure passed from the American stage today, and a little reflection should serve to remind us of the sick racism that remains deeply embedded in our culture. This was a man who, from childhood wealthy and famous, could still not shake his self-loathing hatred of his own skin. He built himself a fantasy world in which he could be androgenously prepubescent forever in a baroque microcosm of pre-Boom White culture, a world that only began to collapse in the few years before his death.

Michael Jackson inhabited many fault-lines in our culture, masculine/feminine, straight/gay, black/white. He tried so hard to pretend that he was a normal heterosexual black man comfortable in his own skin when the contrary evidence rolled in waves over the public image of this sad, troubled man. This conflict helped produce some of the most bizarre public behavior and perverse private flaws of any major American celebrity.

Although most of us are more comfortable in our own skins than Mr. Jackson, let him serve as a warning that if we want a healthier culture, we need to be on better terms with the truth about ourselves and each other.

The Culture War is Over (And America Won)

Jun 24

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Politics | No Comments

For the last forty years, we have let conservative Republicans set themselves up as moral exemplars. Again and again they have shown themselves to be the rankest hsanford-familyypocrites, belying their simplistic moralizing.

Over the weekend, we learned that governor Mark Sanford, the firmly conservative governor of South Carolina, had disappeared. We were told that he was “writing something,” was “taking some time off.” It was suggested he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, a manly and worthy pursuit for a red-meat right-winger. It turns out he was in Argentina, continuing an affair that had gone on for at least a year. He claimed that he spent the week crying, which suggests that Republican incompetence extends even to philandery.

For those of us watching the stimulus, Governor Sanford is a familiar figure. The Governor wanted the legislature to turn down the state’s share of federal stimulus money. He was motivated by the kind of knee-jerk anti-government sentiment that characterizes the Republican Right. Gov. Sanford was widely applauded for his stance, taken regardless of the great cost to the state’s citizens.

This incident highlights the hypocrisy that runs through the conservative mindset. Authoritarian-minded movement conservatives have built a worldview around a stunted vision of sexual life, blaming the poor for their plight, demonizing public life, and exalting corporate values as the apotheosis of human life and meaning.

Meanwhile, their crusaders are continually being caught failing to adhere to to the standards they demand from all of us. Even those receptive to their message have begun to view these missives with suspicion, and the more shrill the admonitions become, the less effective they are.

In recent months, states from Vermont to Iowa have legalized same-sex marriage, which seemed impossible less than a year ago. There have been suggestions to decriminalize marijuana from across the ideological spectrum. “Moral” issues that seemed permanent obstacles to dialogue on serious national issues have been stripped to policy debates, flipping overnight. The impossible looks more possible everyday.

Americans have finally discovered that the right-wing Emperor has no clothes, and we will all benefit.

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