Japan, as a major holder of US Treasury issues, in order to cope with the massive reconstruction effort needed to repair the losses sustained over the past several days, will be issuing its own bonds and dipping deeply into its savings to become whole again. What are the consequences in the bond markets for our own issues? Likewise, whoever prevails in Libya, the events of the last month are going to create havoc in oil markets. What will be the effect on our struggling economy?

Due to the seriously malfunctioning safety mechanisms of the Japanese nuclear reactors damaged by the quake and tsunami, one should presume that the nuclear power industry will be forced to rethink many of its protocols and designs. If Libyan oil is removed from the global market–even for a short time–one should presume that the barrel price of oil can inch even higher. The oil industry is no stranger to fifth column political manipulation; high gasoline prices are a convenient way to make the earth move under President Obama’s feet during his re-election campaign.

Isn’t this a perfect moment to discuss our energy future and the national sacrifices we have to make  in order to effect energy reform? Obama had such a moment last year when, in April, the BP oil spill commenced. He didn’t make much use of it. Isn’t this also a good time to discuss the role of public and private debt in restructuring economic priorities?

If President Obama continues to allow Republicans to dominate the national political agenda with their cynicism, hypocrisy and “Wal-Mart” policy values–cheap ideas taken down off the lay-away shelf  every four years–who will be motivated to appear on his behalf at precinct polling stations?

What should he talk about? How about the “return on investment” we get from our enormous Defense Department budget? LINK How about the challenges we face globally that are in no way linked to the”war on terror” or war-making–China, for example, is financing the modernization of the Panama Canal, and can be observed in Africa, South America, Europe and Central Asia doing business, not waging war. Watching the drama of the middle east struggling to self-actualize; South Asia and South America striving to develop; and Japan, not to mention Haiti, coping with chaos and ruin.

How lucky we are, and always have been, as a nation; and what a third-rate, banana-Republican job we are doing to secure our future.

GEE, WHAT DID WE JUST SAY? LINK AND, AGAIN, FROM REUTERS AT 11AM EDST;  and  Monday, March 14th: LINK In addition, this LINK from the NYTimes on Friday, March 18, about effects of the Japan crisis on the US auto industry.

O’Keefe, one may recall, was arrested last year in a futile exploit against Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. O’Keefe and his posse–in and out of the Tea Party movement–are emblematic of the assault the nation is under from the janissaries of the right involving established areas of progressive public discourse and policy that one presumed were untouchable.

And how easy it has been for these people to mount their campaign.

First, using Dick Armey and others, let’s create a “grassroots” movement– “Americans for Prosperity”–funded by the odd and  oligarchic Koch brothers, Charles and David; then combine this alliance (motivated not because of reform of health care,  but on racialist indignation at the prospect of a family of African-American Democrats in the White House–just as Ron Schiller suggested in the O’Keefe video) with that traditional source of Republican sanguinity, the tax cut. The tax cut cures everything, including AIDS and dropsy. Sustain tax cuts for the top five percent of earners, enhanced with dramatic effect by a deep recession and a consequent  massive decline in tax revenues everywhere, then whine about government spending, deficits, bail-outs and the national debt.

Then, let’s check off, one by one, a conservative’s laundry list of canards: public broadcasting, abortion, integrated schools and public schooling itself), Muslims and sharia law, regulation of banking and other industries, labor unions, the Consumer Protection Agency and the FTC……..and so on.

Third, use as exponents–in addition to the eternal squawk box of the right, Fox News–a freshly-elected crop of Republican ideologues, combined with the usual suspects, career politicians like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner.

No one, of course, can trump the demagoguery of Glen Beck, who has recently been the object of scorn of a number of RINOs–to use the tea party’s sobriquet for them–like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. Beck has even surpassed Rush Limbaugh as uber Metropolitan of unorthodox conservative demagoguery and frequently emits gibberish that would make Father Coughlin blush. Fox News will be sure to help us.

As a nation, we now endure an orchestra of hyperbole and cynicism that includes, as the NY Times pointed out LINK , Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, who frequently makes statements that cannot be substantiated; and the vaunted governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker–notably, the son of a Baptist minister–who was caught on tape LINK conspiring in a telephone call with a man posing as Charles Koch. This is not to mention NY’s Congressman Peter King who is holding hearings, HUAC style, on home-grown  Islamic terrorism. This hypocrite has been a known sympathizer with the IRA LINK; but one guesses that Irish terrorists are among the good guys. For one thing, they’re white. Can the reader imagine if a Democrat with King’s background was hosting such an event? Where is William Ayers, by the way?

Political grifter Newt Gingrich, he of the five-thousand dollar gavels and numerous discarded wives, is also in the choir, and is traipsing around the country using as a meme the fear of sharia law. Hot on his heels is yet another RW has been: former Senator Rick Santorum.

Ideologues abound at the local levels of government as well. Take note of Ron Margiotta, the  chairman of the Wake County School Board and his fellow member, newly-elected, tea-party infused, Jon Tedesco LINK. Margiotta was recently recorded referring to people who disgareed with him at a school board meeting as “animals” LINK. Here is a tape of the actual remark. Right-wing ideologues and business interests are striving to alter the very notion of a diverse public education in Raleigh-Durham, NC LINK–one more detail in furtherance of the over-all conservative agenda.

If one recalls, the attempts made by members of Congress in 2009 to explain the details of the Affordable Health Care Act to their constituents in public meetings–that were frequently turned into raucous shouting matches by tea party thugs and Americans for Prosperity lackeys–became harbingers of our current national dialogue. Right-wingers are unable to compromise on anything and will force their values on the public unless they are met with vehement opposition.

The life Brown describes is worthy of page six in the National Enquirer and is as sleazily superficial as only American lives can get. Admittedly, a dose of narcissism is  a necessary trait for those who lust after the White House. But the only CV that is more lurid than this one belongs to Sarah Palin.

John Boehner’s biography is hardly better than these, and is probably the source of his lachrymosity. He has good reason to burst into tears today, as his leadership was rebuffed by his own House members LINK, as well as sensible Democrats, who passed an amendment defunding the second jet engine to be built for the F-35–in Boehner’s home state of Ohio. Of the jobs to be lost as a result? Well, to quote the speaker, “So be it.”

A few days have passed,

After telling the judge that he couldn’t express remorse for something he didn’t do, DeLay went on for ten minutes,  saying  “This criminalization of politics is very dangerous. It’s dangerous to our system. Just because somebody disagrees with you they got to put you in jail, bankrupt you, destroy your family.”

Tell that to Bill Clinton and the dozens of his friends and staffers who were subpoenaed by Kenneth Starr because of a GOP manipulated scandal that sought to impeach, and destroy the presidency of, the forty-second president.

Bon Voyage Tom. Give our regards to “Duke” Cunningham, and don’t loiter in the shower.

In the past several weeks

The real damage to Barbour’s ambition may not turn out to be “Willie Morris” issues, but rather to a good ol’ dose of “Willie Hortonitis”. Bob Herbert,  the NY Times columnist LINK,  discusses governor Barbour’s “suspension” of the life sentences of two African American women convicted of abetting an armed robbery in which no one was harmed and that netted the perpetrators a mere eleven dollars. Meanwhile, in several previous commutation or pardon situations, governor Barbour has sanctioned the release of a number of men convicted of  heinous murders; some had served as trustees at the Mississippi governor’s mansion. Bullspin has yet to determine if, as suspected, the men are white. Here is a LINK to Slate, where Radley Balko has commented on the subject.

Mike Huckabee has a “Willie Horton” skeleton in his corner as well. LINK

We’re checking into controversial pardons from Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney. Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana, has a criminal record for possession of marijuana; his pardon record has included only those convicted of marijuana offenses.

We’ll keep digging. So many Republican governors, so little time.

In many ways, it’s proof of that famous remark of Ross Perot’s about the “giant sucking sound” he predicted would result from passage of NAFTA. Except that, in this case, the cash and the jobs aren’t going across the border to Mexico; they’re going to India, China and Africa and to South America (just look at what Cargill, Monsanto and ADM are doing in Paraguay with industrial soy production LINK).

The LA Times editorial includes links to a number of sources upon which it based its criticism; the most significant was a recent study done by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland which suggested that frequent Fox viewers were more likely to be misinformed (Bullspin‘s language) on a large number of significant national and international issues.

PR Watch, part of the Center for Media and Democracy, using Alternet as its source, also made reference to the egregious habits of NewsCorp and Fox–especially Fox managing editor Bill Sammons’ notorious daily memos to news producers.

Needless to say, if you have the occasional misfortune to get into a conversation with a regular Fox viewer, you don’t need a U of Md study to persuade you that something is seriously wrong that person’s perception of national events. Fox viewers enjoy their cluttered and manipulated worldview–an intellectual Fibber McGee’s closet–as it confirms their tunnel visions about planetary life and their vivid social prejudices. As in the vaunted conservative echo chamber, one after the other, carefully selected and emphasized Fox news items are like ping pong balls swatted around inside a Port-o-Potty. In turn, the anchors , from one program to another, all take a turn with them. Finally, they are regurgitated as fact by the idiots who have Fox as their principal source of news.

Here is Media Matters reporting on Fox’s response to the study, called “bizarre” by the school. Typically, Fox won’t engage directly. Conservatives rarely, if ever,  respond to argument, debate or discussion except in furtherance of their talking points and propaganda.

Fox didn’t directly respond to the points in the study; but News Busters, a rabid right-wing news aggregator-distorter and leading member of the RW echo chamber, presented this defense of Fox. The Baltimore Sun‘s TV critic offers his opinion on the controversy. Notice that, even though he’s right there in Maryland, he doesn’t take the time to interview anyone associated with the study.

Our take on the announcement is that it’s like kicking a man when he’s down; another, inner, voice suggests it’s our just desserts. Petroleum is traded world-wide in dollars; the dollar has been for half a century something of a world currency; this fact has been one of the cornerstones of our purported empire. Whether it will remain so is yet to be determined. One thing may be surmised: Moscow can become the next Houston, just as China has turned into the world’s factory.

This turn of events is yet another indication of how parlous our prospects are as a nation and how out-of-touch our current political environment is with where the world is heading–and where our path should lead us. Republicans and ersatz conservatives, in all of their ghastly guises–from generic K Street corporate bag men to louche libertarians to militarist-dominionist evangelical “Chreestyins” talking in tongues–offer hackneyed policies, obstruction,  and outright duplicity as a panacea for the nation’s problems. Democrats have barely enough adrenalin left to formulate any policy at all.

What effect this action on the part of the Chinese and Russians will have on our economic prospects remains to be seen. However, as Paul Kennedy pointed out LINK in 1988 in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, neglect of an empire’s socio-economic fundamentals leads in time to corrupting decay, loss of global influence and domestic trauma.

We might have been able to ease our way into a world of diminishing expectations but the psychiatrist instead prescribed eight years of Bush-Cheney. How quickly our national dream dissipated and how determined we seem to be to destroy whatever good fortune we might have wrought from the Obama presidency.

A friend in North Carolina

Among the subjects Bullspin tracks is the chaotic madness of the petroleum industry.  Recently, the Marcellus Gas Shale issue in Pennsylvania has become an object of concern to environmentalists–specifically, the dangers that extraction via “fracking” poses to ground water. The new governor of Pennsylvania is, sadly, a generic Republican free market sociopath (“Pennsylvania is open for business!”) and he will probably enhance continued damage to water resources in the state (and region–for that matter; even the Chesapeake Bay’s waters are vulnerable as fracking is used to extract gas. (One has only to look at the chemicals the O&G industry uses.) Of course, NC Carolina’s Castle-Hayne is no stranger to the depredations of industry activity and mining, with the Aurora phosphate mine set up to wreak all kinds of havoc in perpetuity (and this was accomplished under a Democratic legislature; just imagine what your new GOP-led legislature can accomplish.)

Anyway, my point is this: little Georgie-Porgie couldn’t wreck the country all by himself. He had to have help. And not just from oil companies, either. There is, however, allegorical value in being able to point to the egregiousness of the petro-kleptocracy. Just observe the “usual suspects”–Halliburton, Bechtel, et al–not only profit from oil and gas exploration under relaxed or non-existent environmental standards, thereby screwing up world water supplies; watch as they profit from behind-the-scenes, strong-arm,  manipulation of water supplies, too–as they did in Bolivia, for example.

While we are not in possession of any statistics, Bullspin believes many editorial pages LINK are responding to the Republican threat of repeal with language that suggests that the 2010 Affordable Health Care Act should be modified or improved, not disposed of. Much reporting LINK suggests that the GOP would have a hard time accomplishing repeal. Meanwhile, what the usual suspects are specifically proposing is a”defunding” of elements of the law that would make it impossible to underwrite enforcement–beginning with the hiring of additional IRS agents who would be charged with verifying compliance.

Vice-President Biden today LINK remonstrated a GOP filibuster of the so-called “Doc-Fix” bill that addresses perceived inequities in Medicare compensation for physicians who treat seniors. Obviously, the Republican Party has no other goal than to block, delay and, otherwise, frustrate even an established governmental program to facilitate the delivery of medical care.

Here is former New Jersey governor Christie Whitman commenting on Sarah Palin and the 2012 prospects of the GOP: LINK

It will be interesting to see whether President Obama capitulates to right-wing truculence  and negativism on the Affordable Heath Care Act and, for that matter, whether he will cave in as well on extension of the Bush tax cuts–a subject on which Republicans are similarly fixated.