The Commentariat -- April 14, 2014
Internal links removed.
Paul Krugman: "... society is devoting an ever-growing share of its resources to financial wheeling and dealing, while getting little or nothing in return.... There is a clear correlation between the rise of modern finance and America's return to Gilded Age levels of inequality. So never mind the debate about exactly how much damage high-frequency trading does. It;s the whole financial industry, not just that piece, that's undermining our economy and our society." P.S. Chris Christie is a jerk.
** Bernie Sanders brings the reality of inequality to the floor of the Senate:
Philip Elliott of the AP: "An overhaul to the nation's broken immigration system remains stalled because 'the Republican base does have elements that are animated by racism,' the head of the House committee to elect Democratic lawmakers said Sunday. Rep. Steve Israel's comments are in line with those from House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi earlier this week, in which she blamed racial issues for the GOP's failure to act on comprehensive immigration legislation.
Seung Min Kim & Burgess Everett of Politico: "Republicans hope to turn Sylvia Mathews Burwell's nomination to run the Department of Health and Human Services -- announced by President Barack Obama on Friday -- into a proxy war over Obamacare.... [Despite the Senate's unanimous vote for her confirmation as OMB director last year,] the Republican message, according to one senior aide: 'We would argue that there is no person on earth capable of making this horrible law work.'" ...
... Elise Viebeck of the Hill: "Outgoing Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she was 'flat-out wrong' to believe that HealthCare.gov was ready to go on Oct. 1, 2013.... Sebelius did not mince words when describing the pressure of last fall, calling October and November a 'dismal time.'" ...
... Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "Sebelius leaves the office having enrolled some 10 million people in health care coverage. This was only possible because she convinced numerous Republican lawmakers in bright red states to extend health care coverage to the poorest Americans. No one is talking about it, but it is her biggest and most impressive achievement as secretary."
Anemona Hartocollis of the New York Times: "... New York State, almost from the start, has provided a textbook lesson in how to make the Affordable Care Act work.... New York has signed up more than 900,000 people for commercial or government plans, lured 16 insurance companies onto its exchange, provided subsidies for most customers and reduced premiums across the board.... But New York also took some aggressive and unpopular steps that few other states have taken, by creating a highly centralized system limiting consumer choice, essentially giving insurance seekers little incentive to shop off the exchange. As a result, most New Yorkers who are not insured through an employer are effectively barred from choosing any doctors or hospitals they want."
Laura Vozzella of the Washington Post: Virginia "hospitals, the state chamber of commerce and corporate leaders have been calling, writing, visiting and buttonholing, pushing what they call 'the business case' for expanding coverage to thousands of uninsured under the health-care law, with the federal government promising to pay most of the cost." But Republican state legislators -- united behind opposition to ObamaCare -- are unmoved. ...
... CW: This would be a good time to highlight a few Virginia tragedies like the horrifying story of the death of Floridian Charlene Dill (see Beutler's piece below). ...
... Brian Beutler of the New Republic thinks Democrats should exploit this story: "On Wednesday, the Orlando Weekly published the explosive and infuriating story of Charlene Dill, a struggling, 32 year old mother of three who collapsed and died on a stranger's floor late last month. According to Weekly reporter Billy Manes, Dill suffered from a treatable heart condition. She also fell into what policy experts call the Medicaid coverage gap -- a hole the Supreme Court punctured in the health safety net when seven of its justices rendered the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion entirely voluntary." ...
... CW: Beutler is right. However, using Dill & similar victims to tell the story of GOP obstructionism, Koch money & Supreme Court stupidity (six other justices voted with Roberts) must be done with exquisite consideration for victims & their families. But the know-nothing public has a crying need to know what state GOP legislators, aided & abetted by the entire anti-Obama coterie, are doing to end and/or ruin the lives of the most vulnerable Americans. The GOP has convinced the voting public that ObamaCare is about expanding bureaucracy, depriving innocent Americans of their wonderful, cheap insurance policies & giving free health insurance to lazy bums of the darker complexions. The public should find out its about negligent homicide on a massive scale.
Chris Wallace is sick of the IRS "scandal". Via Josh Israel of Think Progress:
"Hate of an Ancient Vintage." David Von Drehle of Time on the murders at the Jewish centers in Overland, Kansas. ...
... Chicago Tribune: "The suspect in the Passover Eve killings of three people at two Jewish community centers in the Kansas City area was scheduled to appear in court Monday to face murder charges. Police said it was too early to determine if Sunday's killings were motivated by anti-Semitism, but a leading anti-hate group [the Southern Poverty Law Center] said the suspect was a former senior member of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan movement."
Parade of Horribles. Janet Allon of AlterNet, in Salon, picks the seven worst right-wing moments of last week. It's hard to pick a favorite. ...
... CW: I'd add an 8th: the decision of Miami-Dade County Board of Elections supervisor John Mendez & a deputy county attorney to ban voters from using restrooms at polling places. Patrizia Mazzei of the Miami Herald: "Emails from a deputy elections supervisor and an assistant county attorney say Miami-Dade voters are banned from using restrooms at polling places. But the chief deputy elections supervisor pooh-poohed the notion." (I suspect the pun was intended.) The reputed reason? Some precincts are located in private buildings that have bathrooms that don't meet federal ADA standards. If the disabled can't pee, no one can pee.
Ben Fox of the AP: "... two separate but related events are forcing [the secret Camp 7 of the Guantanamo prison] into the limelight." ...
There's no way to explain the security measures that they use from the perspective of the safety of the guards or the safety of the detainees, beyond that they must be hiding something. -- Suzanne Lachelier, an attorney for Camp 7 inmate Ramzi Binalshibh
Presidential Race
Jill Lepore of the New Yorker reviews Elizabeth Warren's oeuvre, including Warren's new book, an autobiography titled A Fighting Chance, which "only adds to the speculation that Warren is considering challenging [Hillary] Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016. And, even if Warren doesn't run, this book is part of that race." My favorite bit of the review:
In the spring of 2009, after the [bailout oversight] panel [on which Warren sat] issued its third report, critical of the bailout, Larry Summers took Warren out to dinner in Washington and, she recalls, told her that she had a choice to make. She could be an insider or an outsider, but if she was going to be an insider she needed to understand one unbreakable rule about insiders: They don't criticize other insiders.'
... CW: That, people, is how the Very Serious People operate. It is among the reasons our government is so dysfunctional.
Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "... three Republicans who are considering a run for the White House -- Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor -- pitched their views on Saturday for how conservatives can retake power in Washington.... The event was the Freedom Summit, a gathering of several hundred put together by two of t.he most influential groups on the right, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and Citizens United. And what unfolded on stage in a conference center next to the regional airport [in Manchester, New Hampshire,] was a display of today's Republican Party in all its dynamism, division and sometimes strange spectacle." ...
I'm beginning to think there's more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States. When I go to the airport, I have to get in the surrender position, people put hands all over me, and I have to provide photo ID and a couple of different forms and prove that I really am not going to terrorize the airplane -- but if I want to go vote I don't need a thing. -- Mike Huckabee
Mike, we will all be happy when you move to North Korea to soak up all that great freeeedom. -- Constant Weader
... Margaret Hartmann of New York: Rand Paul's advice for Jeb (Not His Real Name) Bush: "Voters might get the wrong idea if you don't immediately explain how you'd crack down on that 'act of love.'" (That's Hartmann's interpretation. Close enough.)
News Ledes
New York Times: "In a new sign of desperation, Ukraine’s acting president asked the United Nations on Monday to send peacekeeping troops to the east of the country, where pro-Russia militias have seized government buildings and blocked major highways with seeming impunity. A deadline set by the Ukrainian government for the militants to vacate occupied buildings passed earlier Monday without any signs of an effort to enforce it, while militants, in an apparently coordinated strategy, used the day to seize another police station in an eastern town, then hoist a Russian flag over the building." ...
... Reuters: "U.S. President Barack Obama told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday that Russia's actions in Ukraine were not conducive to a diplomatic solution of the crisis in that country, and the White House warned that Moscow would suffer further costs for its behavior. Obama spoke to Putin at the Russians' request, a senior administration official said, describing the call as 'frank and direct,' a diplomatic construction that usually means tense."
AP: "Megan Huntsman ... told police she either strangled or suffocated [six of her babies] immediately after they were born. She wrapped their bodies in a towel or a shirt, put them in plastic bags and then packed them inside boxes in the garage of her home south of Salt Lake City. What's not clear is why."
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Reader Comments (21)
"The one unbreakable rule about insiders: They don’t criticize other insiders."
Well it sure sounds like Obama swallowed that line of bullshit whole with respect to the Bush/Cheney torture team.
And I'd be curious to see the definition of "insider" according to Mr. Summers. Was he hoping to curb the rage of Ms. Warren directed towards his banking buddies I suspect? Because there was no public vote on which greedy asshole would take the reins of our fabled Too-Big-To-Fail banks, so they should technically be considered outsiders. Yet nearly ALL the insiders were pampering their cheeks while they should have been paddling. Then again with the revolving door in Washington today, I guess it just depends on what jacket you wear on any given day...
But as Krugman notes, the world of Finance operates in upside down world in the US, where outsiders are insiders, increased wealth leads to increased poverty, billion dollar losses lead to huge raises, and taking companies down secures you a golden parachute.
Sounds nice. Except for the whole losing your soul part.
Kudos to Igor Volsky and Think Progress for an excellent article on little realized achievements of Ms. Sebelius; there will be more revelations about how she did everything possible to get people adequate healthcare.
And to those who think that we missed getting a single payer system by a few votes in Congress, they are forgetting the long tortured history, since President Truman in 1947 who, even with huge Democratic majorities in Congress, failed to get a basic health care plan passed. I urge a reading of this article to refresh one’s memory. Remember, even Mr. Obama said that, if he had to do it from scratch, he would have preferred a single payer system, but we had to settle for what could be passed, and not let the good become the enemy of the perfect.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=615
I guarantee that we will eventually have a single payer system in ten or twenty years. We see it developing even now as physicians and hospitals form their own group for delivering health care without the intervention of the insurance companies, similar to Mayo, Kaiser and others.
Remember, we’re Americans; we try to avoid doing the right thing until the very end.
After reading Krugman this morning I wanted to know more about this Spread Network––how do THEY gain from this. Found article below from Forbes making the argument––very badly, I think––that Krugman is wrong over the value of high frequency trading and Spread Networks. I have a hard time understanding some of the jargon––need my husband to help me understand––"say, I'm in the peach business and I am able to buy them faster than you, thereby you would have to pay more ...etc."
Yes, safari––that losing your soul part.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/14/where-paul-krugman-goes-wrong-over-the-value-of-high-frequency-trading-and-spread-networks/
Both Sides Do It, ad infinitum...
I'm really getting fed up with NPR. Although never perfect, it was once a much needed source of thoughtful news analysis, a relative oasis of sanity in the media desert. And now, more than ever, the country needs a source of information that does not go along to get along, that offers more than what you can see on any run of the mill, insipid, corporately controlled news organizations (and I'm not even talking about the joke of so-called right-wing "news" outlets).
But someone at NPR has decreed that all water coolers must be filled with the Both Sides Are to Blame Kool-Aid.
This morning, I heard Alisa Chang, a reporter who has turned in good work in the past, do a jokey piece on the show votes that clog congress, especially prior to mid-term elections (and most especially since mental defectives have taken over one of our two major parties). Votes taken on bills that have no hope of becoming law, but are done to make a point. Okay. I buy that. That is true, as far as it goes. What infuriates me is the wrapper in which this information is delivered, the Both Sides Do It wrapping paper. Sure, both sides do this, but Chang seems to think there's no difference.
The difference could not be more apparent if it were accompanied by a mushroom cloud.
Democrats are voting on things that are clearly useful and necessary to the American public: fairness in workplace pay and conditions, the right to vote, non discrimination. Republicans hold votes to help the wealthy, take health insurance away from the poor and the middle class, further diminish protections against climate change, shelter for corporations as citizens are forced to stand in the rain, and on and on. Nearly 60 votes to repeal the ACA but not a single bill designed to help Americans residing outside the gated and heavily guarded 1% Land.
No difference? Really? They both do it? Ho-ho. Very funny, Alisa. Very clever. And very unhelpful. It does nothing to address or identify the real problem here, the cynicism, mendacity, and intransigence of the GO fucking P. And, as with all these types of stories, it encourages any independent minded voters who don't have a clear idea of what's really going on (living in a cave is tough on the inflow of information) to throw up their hands and curse both houses.
To top it off, even the title seeks to apportion blame for stagnation equally between a party that is trying to get things done and one that says no to everything but knighthood and peerage for the wealthy:
"Congress expected to be less productive"
Wait, they forgot the "even" between "be" and "less". There must be some way of calculating Republican sloth when productivity dips below zero, but I guess we won't be hearing that story on NPR, or any other MSM news program anytime soon.
Jesus! These people!
So Mike Huckabee doesn't need anything when he goes to vote?
That's because he's not a) a Democrat, b) a black or Latino voter c) a poor person, or d) all of the above.
Otherwise he'd be lucky to be allowed to vote for dogcatcher without producing more papers than a dissident Jew trying to leave the USSR in 1963. Or a Democrat trying to vote in Ohio in 2014.
And in case he's been living in a cave too, all those security precautions at airports were instituted by a Republican administration afraid of its own shadow but too stupid and lazy to read classified emergency briefings about imminent terrorist attacks.
These assholes light fires then bellyache about the heat.
Yeah, Mike, bring your sermons and your Bible and your whining complaints about security states to Pyongyang. They'll roll out the fucking red carpet for you.
Re: speakin' about peaches; I would like to take a little time in thanking the publisher/editor/proofreader/essayist/custodian of Realitychex for bringing to my demented mind the following quote; "She’s still milking the vagina business, and is a minor celebrity among feminists." Nolan Finley
Where to start?
How 'bout here; Jez, you'd think if you were in the vagina milking business you'd be more than a minor celebrity among feminists.
Or; Holy shit, you can?
Maybe; How far up your ass does your head have to be to come up with "vagina milking business"?
Finally; stay the fuck away from my diary cows.
@Akhilleus. I sent your comment to NPR. Had to take out the very useful (& appropriately placed) Anglo-Saxon gerund to get it to clear, but other than that, they got the message, along with a note that I concurred with your views.
Marie
@JJG: Apparently Republican men are so unfamiliar with the female anatomy that they have tits & ass ass-backwards. No surprise there.
Marie
Re: leave my riding cows alone; I usually just laugh at my mistakes after I send off my comment. I don't take time to proof read because of time restrains. Today's spelling opps was too good to pass up. My cows do not write diaries. If they did they sure would expose vagina milking scandals.
Re: Insiders and Outsiders. Twas always thus.
Insiders are inside because the cabal that has the power does not want to relinquish it; they wish to keep and extend it. Anyone who criticizes them, their persons, actions or goals is by definition Outside. If the Outsiders become too bothersome, the Insiders withhold rewards, attack them as boogeymen, a Muslim say, (or women, like the one with San Francisco values), and do all they can, nefariously if necessary, to destroy them.
At times the Outsider cracks the envelope and succeeds far enough to gain some amount of power for himself, but the struggle does not end there. The forces of co-option and marginalization are still at work.
Just imagine the conflicting impulses and difficulties a black President who really believed that people should have health care, that the top one percent should not own half of the nation, that all people in a democracy should be allowed to vote...might encounter. You would think a twice-elected President would be the ultimate Insider...but I suspect anyone with with those values and that color skin would still find himself outside the inner circle his election threatens....
Hard to imagine, I know. Just a crazy thought before I head--outside. It's a beautiful day here in the Northwest.
JJG,
Damn dude. Diary cows! I was a-gettin' ready to fire up the Googly machine for that one.
Seriously, it reminds me of a great children's book, "Click, Clack, Moo, Cows Who Type", in which cows learn the values of communication and solidarity. What they type pisses off the farmer because they want better work and living conditions, or no milk. When he finally agrees (they want electric blankets), the duck he's been using as his negotiating go-between decides that ducks should learn to type so they can demand better conditions as well.
Very clever stuff. But, of course, the wingnuts are up in arms about it, screaming that it teaches kids that unions are good and other left-wing propagandistic lies. They even complain that it's anti-creationist (that's a bad thing?) because it suggests that cows and other animals might have rights.
Ah, me. No repose for the imbeciles.
But now that the cows are out of the barn, so to speak, you should probably introduce yours to blogging. They couldn't possibly be less insightful than Douthat or Brooks.
"Ctrl Alt Delete, Cows Who Blog".
Can only imagine what the wingnuts would come up with to counter that.
@JJG & Akhilleus: The minute I saw the typo, I was sure "The Cow Diaries" would be an excellent sequel to "The Vagina Monologues."
Marie
How can Ted Cruz run for President since he was born in Canada of an American mother and Cuban father? Oh I see. That's legal in his case, since he's the right color. I guarantee his primary opponents will play the birther card. Of course, that doesn't apply to Obama. He was born in Hawaii, which became the 50th state in 1959. E
Ken,
Speaking of the insiders who need to make sure the outsiders remain just that...
I watched "12 Years a Slave" this weekend. Very hard to watch. As someone wrote, it makes "Roots" look like the "Care Bears Movie".
But after regaining the ability to move, I wondered what kind of reaction the reactionary insiders had to this amazing film.
Are you holding your breath?
Of course, they attacked it as propaganda. Propaganda unfair to conservatives. Hollywood propaganda, liberal guilt, lies, the whole schmeer. I won't even mention their attacks on the filmmakers for daring to portray the vital role Christianity played in the establishment and perpetuation of the slave state. One idiot even went so far as to say that it was unfair to all the nice slave owners who had happy, carefree slaves.
I am not even kidding. Someone really said that. James Bowman, in the American Spectator, whined that "12 Years a Slave" was untrue (because, of course, he was there) and unfair (because everything that isn't complimentary to racist conservative crackpots is unfair).
Nice slave owners.
The fact that someone could even publish that phrase as anything but a sick joke points directly to the heart of right-wing savagery still active against non-white minorities who seek to empower themselves by exercising their voting rights.
This is why, over a century and a half after the Civil War (pardon, The War of Northern Aggression against Wonderful Southern Christian White People Who Never Did Anything Bad to Those Horrible, Ungrateful Nee-Groes), conservatives are trying to outdo that old ratio of counting slaves as 3/5ths of a person. Of course they wanted slaves to count for their political power but didn't want to pay taxes on them as property, because, I assume, freedom.
Still, today, the descendants of that slave state, both through genetics and in spirit, seek to count voters of color as ZERO through the never-gets-old trick of polling skullduggery and vote suppression.
What they couldn't win in that war they seek to take by force of law passed by the heirs of Jim Crow.
No wonder they hated this movie.
No less than they hate the idea of man who should, by their lights, still be stepping and fetching for them, sleeping in the White House.
Their goal is to remake and modernize the Solomon Northup story and make it "Forever a Slave" and forever outsiders. Them and anyone who rallies to their cause.
Marie,
Thanks for forwarding the comment.
I can't wait for NPR to throw out the Kool-Aid. Who says threats of economic sanctions by vindictive conservatives who believe everyone is out to get them don't work?
Any day now I expect a Shrub retrospective "Bush 43. Not as Bad as You Thought", or maybe a fluff piece on Jim DeMint: "Not DeMented Anymore."
Any day now, I would imagine NPR revisiting the career of this guy, had Mel Brooks not already done it:
Not many knew it, but der Fuhrer vas a vonderful dancer...He told better jokes than Churchill, and he had more hair!
Safari,
I still have trouble getting my head around Obama giving the Bush/Cheney torture masters a pass.
Several things might come into play here. First, is the president's eternally exasperating efforts to appease the right, to play nice hoping they'll come around and be good boys and girls.
Sure, and John Gotti would have turned over a new leaf and gave up his entire organization if only the feds had given him some milk and cookies. So that's one problem.
The other is the problem that all new presidents, but especially ones like Obama and Jack Kennedy, who hadn't had all that much experience in the backroom gamesmanship before attaining the presidency have to contend with entrenched power bases who have a lot to lose by letting a president mess up the works.
The longtime insiders try everything they know to rattle and control the newcomers. Maybe they got him to buy the whole national security canard. Who knows?
Professional conniver and back stabber Allen Dulles got JFK to buy into the Bay of Pigs clusterfuck, but Kennedy was smart enough not to allow Dulles to bite him twice by sending in the Marines after the whole thing went to shit. Still, that fiasco perhaps steeled Kennedy for the Cuban Missile Crisis later on.
Nonetheless, Barack Obama has ingloriously tied his name to the atrocities of Bush and his criminal apparatchiks and by letting them all skate into posterity to write their auto-lie-ographies, appear on Charlie Rose, and rake in the moolah; and he did a great injustice to the tortured victims and our equally tortured national prestige.
This wasn't exactly "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" but it wasn't the clean sweep we were hoping for either.
Thanks for sending A's comment to NPR. They need to hear anything we can send. Like: why is Cokie Roberts allowed to pollute the airwaves every Monday morning...
They did something horrible last week which I can't remember (lost in the slough of rightwing sludge in my brain--)and I have about decided no more money for them. It probably had to do with Murray... Anyhow, if it weren't for the Saturday entertainment, and Diane Rehm, there would be no possible reason for it to exist.
Background on Frazier Glenn Miller/Cross from the Southern Poverty Law Center's archive. A real piece of work... but maybe he's finally a finished piece of work.
http://www.splcenter.org/get%20informed/intelligence%20files/profiles/Glenn%20Miller
Scott Brown Returns To Dickhead Mountain
"Scott's happiest days as a young man were in New Hampshire. ...So it's going to be great to have a senator that was born virtually in the state of New Hampshire. Jean Shaheen, by the way, was born in Missouri!"
(Note to Sununu: ...it is senator WHO, not senator THAT....) No doubt he's a supporter of charter schools 'cause they learn you grammar better.
CP: Did you catch how Sununu cleverly described Brown as "virtually born" in New Hampshire? He was actually born in Maine..." (MAG: Sorry to learn that!)
CP: "...Brown's campaign, shepherded by GOP uber-consultant Eric Fehrnstrom...if you lose two (Brown's try to retain his Senate seat) very high-profile campaigns -- one of them (Romney), the highest high-profile campaign there is -- on the same day, do you still qualify as an uber anything?
Indeed. I would have thought uber-Fehrnstrom would look for another line of work!
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Scott_Brown_Returns_To_Dickhead_Mountain
P.S. Anyone notice how much Scott Brown resembles an aging version of the Winklevoss twins?
@Akhilleus re: "12 Years A Slave" My latest copy of New York magazine arrived in the mail today, haven't read the article yet, but Jonathan Chait writes on "the Color of the Presidency"—one of the call-outs said: "A recent poll found a nearly 40-point partisan gap on the question of whether "12 Years a Slave" deserved Best Picture. The article is probably available on the New York magazine Web site.
Did a quick check, but couldn't locate a link, however this Chait article from April 9 is somewhat related to the topic: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/obama-racism-and-the-presumption-of-innocence.html
MAG,
Let's put aside the issue of whether or not "12 Years a Slave" is worthy of a best picture Oscar. If a treacly offering like "The Blind Side", is deserves a best picture candidacy, a picture eons away from "12 Years", there can be no common ground on which to discuss the merits of any film. "Citizen Kane" couldn't be thought of any better than a margarine commercial.
But for there to exist a gap of 40 points on whether or not this film is even worthy of consideration ("Blind Side" no doubt is worthy because it is the story of a poh' black boy taken in and civilized by a decent Christian Southern Family--in other words, success in life donated by the generosity of conservative whites) is proof positive of the parlous effects of the sense of white supremacy endemic to the Republican Party.
It's all of a piece with lying, drug addicted, many-times married, draft dodging sack of shit Rush Limbaugh who despises this film because it has the word "Slave" in its title.
Conservatives cannot--CANNOT--under any terms, abide or consider their role in the perpetuation of illegal discriminatory practices stemming from the days of southern slavery; to the point where they simply must characterize any realistic description of the horrors of slavery as lying propaganda.
I cannot imagine that any of the founders, as used to slavery as they were on a daily basis, would countenance a single one of the vile, evil, reprehensible beliefs bolstered and beloved by the Republican Party today.
Party of evil shit-bag, racist Pigs.
I have an idea for one hell of a book The History of the United States After Obama Prosecutes Bush, Cheney, Bybee, Yoo, Tennant, The Crash of 2009, The Resulting Civil Wars, The Death of the Democratic Party, and the Power of the Birch Nationalist Militia Party.