This song came up today in the iTunes. John Lennon had many memorable songs, but a few chestnuts are hidden away in his sub-par albums of the 1970's, including Sometime In New York City, issued in 1972 during Lennon's political phase. Great album cover, by the way.

At the time, Lennon was being harassed by the U.S. government which was trying to deport him back to England because of his political activism. We could sure use that activism today, and frankly we could use Lennon today as well. Along with songs like this. A very pleasant folk song that combines both melody, fun strumming and angry lyrics which could easily apply in today's world, where the same brutal policies are being inflicted all around the world, although by different people, of course.

The desperate man does what he has to do to get by. He'll jump off a building to impress the women, gamble away the mortgage in Vegas and . . . you get the picture. This applies equally in presidential campaigns. The latest polls show Obama is leading McCain by 7-10 points. It's October, and the election is four weeks away. What's McCain gonna do? Go negative.

The Washington Post reports:

With just a month to go until Election Day, McCain's team has decided that its emphasis on the senator's biography as a war hero, experienced lawmaker and straight-talking maverick is insufficient to close a growing gap with Obama. The Arizonan's campaign is also eager to move the conversation away from the economy, an issue that strongly favors Obama and has helped him to a lead in many recent polls.

"We're going to get a little tougher," a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. "We've got to question this guy's associations. Very soon. There's no question that we have to change the subject here," said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

According to the Post, McCain is not showing any positive advertisements. Going negative for four straight weeks? Whatever it takes. This will all surface at the next presidential debate, on October 8. The Post says, "McCain hinted Thursday that a change is imminent, perhaps as soon as next week's debate. Asked at a Colorado town hall, 'When are you going to take the gloves off?' the candidate grinned and replied, 'How about Tuesday night?'"

The guy's a creep. McCain has a vicious temper and his finger will be on the button if he wins the presidency. Don't believe me? Watch the below video, showing McCain fielding relatively mild but skepical questions from an Iowa newspaper. Would you trust this guy to be your house-sitter?

Presidential elections bring out the worst in us. This year is no different. Barack Obama represents the new face of American politics. John McCain is the old face. McCain has no positive message, so he is attacking Obama's character at a time when the country is falling apart brick by brick. Somehow McCain's people think this will work. The tragedy will be that it does work.

For months, right-wing commentators have been screaming about Obama's relationship with a former radical, William Ayers, who used to belong to the Weather Underground, a late 1960's-early 1970's organization that protested the Vietnam war and other injustices with violence of its own. Ayers is now a respected college professor. Obama was a little kid when Ayers was advocating violence against American institutions, but who cares? The way the conservatives see it, Obama should not have anything to do with Ayers at all. True, Obama knows him, sat on some boards with him and used Ayers to launch his political career a decade ago, but does that make Obama any differerent from any other politician who belongs to organizations or boards with diverse personalities?

The rhetorical questions that I outlined above are legitimate questions, but they do not go to the heart of what is wrong with the Obama-Ayers angle, which the media has picked upon so much that the New York Times ran a front-page story last weekend exploring the true nature of the Obama-Ayers relationship. The conclusion is that there is not much to that relationship. No matter. McCain's shallow cheerleader and vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, has incorporated the Ayers connection in her stump speeches, bringing out the worst in her audiences which have shouted out violent responses during these campaign rallies.

The real question is: how do we judge a candidate's associations? It remains off-limits for national candidates to have left-wing associations. We know that to be true. The red-baiting bullshit of the Cold-War era has never really left American culture. There is something wrong with opposing imperialistic wars and advocating the redistribution of wealth toward the middle class and poor. You cannot be too right-wing in this culture. No one is punished for repeatedly wrapping himself in the flag, supporting the troops no matter what they are doing abroad and proclaiming that capitalism and free enterprise remain the best economic models for mankind. It's when a candidate is liberal and asks too many questions about the inequities of American society that he is tarnished as anti-American and "not one of us." Our refusal to take social and economic problems seriously is precisely why American society is falling apart, brick by brick.

What about McCain's associations? It is no secret that he has relied on the foreign policy advice of Henry Kissinger, regarded as a statesman in polite society and the former Secretary of State under President Nixon. Associating with William Ayers is one thing. Associating with Henry Kissinger is quite another. Kissinger is probably responsible for more deaths and home and abroad than any other living American. He should be avoided like the plague. His role in prolonging the Vietnam war and its offshoots into Cambodia and Laos killed thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia. These wars were illegal, and by any definition of the word, Kissinger is a terrorist for his role in these nightmares. Not to mention Kissinger's role in overthrowing the elected governments of countries like Chile in 1973, where he famously said that the U.S. government should not sit idly by when a foreign country elects the wrong person. The overthrow in Chile ushered in a vicious military dictator, Pinochet, who killed thousands of people and made Saddam Hussein look like a nice guy.

So why is McCain getting away with his association with Kissinger? Because American culture does not punish anyone for being too militaristic and violent -- so long as the militarism and violence is the name of the United States. Wholesale violence on behalf of the American government is legitimate. Retail violence against the American government -- like that practiced by Ayers -- is not. Obama cannot mention any of this during the campain. The American people do not have the intellectual infrastructure to appreciate these arguments, and even if they did, there is no way that the limited formate of the televised debates would allow for an intelligent discussion of these issues.

The history of surveillance on American citizens is as old as dirt. It's still going on. The thugs who run the country are spying on American citizens, as I knew they would once the Bush administration deemed it necessary to wage the war on terror. I have always said that we know very little about what the government actually doing, and that when scandal emerges, you can multiply the bad news by five to gain a real sense of what's going on. The below story -- published on October 9 -- was part of that great unknown. What else don't we know?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Congress is looking into allegations that National Security Agency linguists have been eavesdropping on Americans abroad.

The congressional oversight committees said Thursday that the Americans targeted included military officers in Iraq who called friends and family in the United States.

The allegations were made by two former military intercept operators on a television news report Thursday evening.

A terrorist surveillance program instituted by the Bush administration allows the intelligence community to monitor phone calls between the United States and overseas without a court order -- as long as one party to the call is a terror suspect.

Adrienne Kinne, a former U.S. Army Reserves Arab linguist, told ABC News the NSA was listening to the phone calls of U.S. military officers, journalists and aid workers overseas who were talking about "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

David Murfee Faulk, a former U.S. Navy Arab linguist, said in the news report that he and his colleagues were listening to the conversations of military officers in Iraq who were talking with their spouses or girlfriends in the United States.

According to Faulk, they would often share the contents of some of the more salacious calls stored on their computers, listening to what he called "phone sex" and "pillow talk."

Both Kinne and Faulk worked at the NSA listening facility at Fort Gordon, Georgia. They told ABC that when linguists complained to supervisors about eavesdropping on personal conversations, they were ordered to continue transcribing the calls.

The outrageous disgrace that is the McCain campaign for the presidency is reaching new lows. Anyone who pays attention to the media these days knows that McCain campain rallies are turning into hate rallies, as the candidate is often formally introduced by a guy who refers to "Barack Hussein Obama," and the audience shouts out physical threats to Obama and calls him a terrorist. McCain had to calm down some supporters last week when someone in the audience called Obama an Arab and someone else said he was afraid to bring his unborn child into Obama's America.

In 2000, McCain ran against George W. Bush in the Republican primaries. Bush won the critical South Carolina primary after anonymous allegations surfaced that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock. In fact, McCain had adopted a girl from Africa. Many thought this racist campain tactic bore the fingerprints of Bush campain wizard Karl Rove. McCain was probably ready to strangle Bush for this nonsense, and the word on the street was that McCain had little use for Bush after the 2000 election and contemplated joining the Democratic Party.

That was the old McCain. The new McCain is a disgrace. To himself and to his country. He nominated an imbecile for his Vice President, a woman who knows very little about policy and is nothing more than a cheerleader on the campaign trail, thoughtlessly making outrageous claims about Obama hanging around terrorists and claiming that Obama basically hates our way of life. She does not know what she is doing. No matter. The Republican rank and file loves her. God help us if the 72 year old cancer survivor McCain dies in office, and a dimwit even dumber than George W. Bush is sitting in the Oval Office. The rank and file that supports McCain and screams out threats at McCain rallies does not see this.

It is this rank and file that must lose this election. McCain, too, but really the rank and file. The campain and its supporters. An Obama victory would bring us into a new era. Many people thought this over the summer, but we did not what kind of hate the Obama candidacy would unleash. Now we are looking at a different consequence flowing from an Obama victory. It would not only bury the Bush legacy by punishing the Republican Party and its heir to Bush's throne, McCain, but also the forces of unbridled hate and ignorance that characterize the McCain campaign, top to bottom. I hold no fantasies that Obama would change the world. But he would symbolize a giant step forward from the ignorant views of his opponents. And that is good enough for me.

The two weeks leading up to a presidential election are the longest two weeks in politics. This time around, it'll be no different. Although Barack Obama is leading in the polls and is carrying over 300 electoral votes (you need 270 to win), no one is breathing easy. In my view, this is because the Republican Party is capable of pulling anything, ANYTHING, to insure victory in November.

John McCain is a candidate without any real issues. Sure, he has some kind of economic plan and a health plan to speak of, but that's not his focus. His focus is attacking Obama in ways that take advantage of the ignorance of the American people and suggest that Obama is not like the rest of us.

First, as Josh Marshall points out at Talking Points Memo, "McCain himself and his top handful of advisers[] are banking on the residual racism in a changing America to get them over the finish line. The second is an aggressive use of innuendo to convince casual voters that Obama is in league with Islamic terrorists bent on killing Americans. How is McCain doing this? Marshall points something out that I could not put my finger on all this time that McCain has vigorously tried to associate Obama with a former Weather Underground radical who participated in violence against American institutions during the early 1970's but is today a respected college professor in Chicago. McCain is playing to our post 9/11 fears by using the Bill Ayers connection to associate Obama with terrorism.

Marshall writes:

Many people have asked whether enough Americans really care any more about the cultural convulsions of the 1960s. The answer? It doesn't matter. For the McCain campaign, Bill Ayers has nothing to do with 60s radicalism. Ayers is nothing more than a tool that permits McCain, Palin and all their surrogates to use the noun "terrorist" in polite company in the same sentence as "Obama," over and over and over again. It allows them to cobble together a 'respectable' version of those Obama smear emails they can push in commercials and robocalls and surrogate talking points every hour of every day.

Stripped down to its components McCain's message to voters is this: "Don't forget. He's definitely black. And he may be a terrorist." That's the message. The nuts and bolts is a concerted effort to keep Democrats from voting -- through intimidation, by striking new voters from the rolls, which is going to happen to lots of them, clogging polling stations to create delays that keep late day (predominantly) Obama voters from voting altogether. Smears in the air and voter suppression on the ground.

That hits the nail on the head. McCain said at last week's debate that he doesn't care about "some washed up terrorist" and that his real focus is why Obama hasn't told the truth about his (attenuated) relationship with Ayers. McCain's contradictory strategy makes perfect sense now. It's an excuse to link Barack Hussein Obama with terrorism, even if it's a different kind of terrorism that most of us think about, i.e., domestic terrorism that took place over 35 years ago.

There's another angle to the strident McCain effort to drag Obama through the mudpile. It's McCain's own associations. But no one knows or cares about them. Yet, they exist. I have written about McCain's reliance on Henry Kissinger's foreign policy advice during this campaign.
Kissinger was a terrorist by any definition. He was President Nixon's chief foreign policy advisor and as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor he orchestrated the Vietnam war and other international horrors that investigative journalists are still trying to untangle today. But who remembers Kissinger? Many Americans were not even alive when Kissinger last held public office. Kissinger is not an issue.

Thanks to David Letterman, however, this late night comic (of all people) brought up another comparable McCain association: G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy is a very dangerous man who actually carried out the crimes of the Nixon administration in the course of intimidating political opponents. Liddy went to jail for this. Letterman asked McCain about Liddy, and McCain gave a lame answer and was clearly unconfortable. McCain showed the face of a pathetic man who got caught in a major contradiction. There is no difference between Ayers and Liddy. Yet, McCain is getting away with the outrageous Ayers connection. Cheers to Letterman, who called out McCain on this issue in a manner that no investigative journalist that I am aware of has attempted.

The effect of McCain's attempt to link Obama with terrorism has produced some very ugly video footage from McCain campaign rallies. But here is some footage OUTSIDE a McCain campaign rally that is quite unsettling. It's hard to imagine that we all live the same country as the idiots and racists who openly spoke up on videotape. Take a look at the ass with the Obama monkey.

This country is on the verge of something extraordinary. There is a very good chance that Barack Obama will be elected President. Unknown only a few years ago, he is about to shatter the last true bastion of racism in the United States: the presidency. An Obama victory would be jarring to the extreme right wing which has gone to war on American values ever since Ronald Reagan became President in 1981. They will try to destroy him. But the focused campaign that took Obama this far will, I hope, repel the bullshit that the American right wing got away with in the 1990's, when its war against Bill Clinton resulted in his impeachment in 1998.

I have been obsessed with the public opinion polls for this election for about six weeks, ever since Obama began breaking away from McCain. Obama began pulling away in key states, and the projected electoral vote has favored Obama ever since. The excitement is not that Obama will change the world or reverse all of the disasterous consequences of the Bush presidency. But in certain areas, you can be sure that things will be different.

Before I talk about the good stuff that awaits if Obama takes the White House, let's review the last eight years. Many investigative journalists and writers have documented the absolute disgrace that has been the Bush administration. We will be picking up the pieces for years. The economy is in a shambles. We are fighting two wars without end. One war, Iraq, was a war of choice, comparable to a high school student breaking into a kindergarten to kick the shit out of five year olds and declaring victory. Except that the Iraq war goes beyond bullying. It is costing this country 10 billion dollars per month. That money has been flushd down the toilet at a time when we desparately need it. For this reason alone, Bush should be condemned in the harshest of terms. Elect a madman, and you get madness.

The war in Iraq is the tip of the iceberg. Torture of prisoners in the "war on terror" in violation of international law. Wiretaps without court warrants, in violation of U.S. law. Conservative judges who narrowly interpret civil rights, issuing precedents that will remain "good law" for decades. Obsessive secrecy managed by an autocratic vice president, Dick Cheney. Deregulation of American industry at the expense of health and safety. Accelerated gap between rich and poor. Irreversible damage to the environment through neglect and denial, including global warming which will leave our children and grandchildren a very different world. All of us have our own pet issues of importance which were manhandled by the Bush administration.

What a difference an Obama presidency would be. Bush is an anti-intellectual and religious zealot who governs from his gut and cannot admit to any mistakes. Obama was a constitutional law professor. That's night and day, like eating out of the dumpster compared with the finest resturant in Italy. Obama will not be able to pick up all the pieces if he takes office. But I can guarantee that his administration will accomplish the following:

1. He will save the U.S. Supreme Court from permanent right wing domination. Right now, the Court leans conservative, but it remains only one vote (out of nine) from radical conservativism, including narrow interpretations of our civil and constitutional rights, strong support for Presidential power in waging war and other policies and favoritism toward the most powerful elements in American society, including big business, the military and the war-makers. Obama can appoint merely average or competent judges to the Supreme Court and it will be an improvement over anyone that a Republican President would appoint. I can guarantee this. For many of us, the Federal courts will be the first thing we think about if we wake up the day after Election Day to hear about an Obama victory.

2. He will do something about global warming, the single most important issue that mankind will ever face, in my view. Rampant consumerism and corporatism in this country and autocratic governance around the world is destroying the only planet that gives us life. The Bush administration maintained a catastrophic approach to global warming. It ignored the problem, censoring government documents which outlined the problem and consistently citing the need for jobs and economic growth as an excuse to piss in the river. I seriously doubt Obama will continue with this approach.

3. There will be no more Iraq wars. This war is built on lies, deception and arrogance, leaving in its wake hundreds of billions of dollars in the toilet, four thousand American deaths and God knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths that land squarely at the feet of an anti-intellectual and macho Bush administration. All of the war makers from the administration should be immediately charged with war crimes on January 21, 2009. Obama probably feels this way. Normal people do not want to commit war crimes. Obama is one of them. No more Iraq wars.

4. An Obama victory may also mean that we are moving away from the thoughtless, anti-intellectual policies and approaches that have torn this country apart for the past 40 years, ever since the backlash against civil rights and anti-war activity grabbed hold over American politics and gave us the criminals in the Nixon administration, elected in 1968 on the strength of an electorate that did not want to think its way through any of our problems. John McCain is not idiot, but he ran his campaign like one, attempting to divert the attention of the American voter with bullshit about Obama's associations and a beauty queen running mate with the intelligence of a handball. Sarah Palin is a major drag on the McCain ticket, polls say, and that's a good thing. Maybe we can't afford that kind of distraction when the U.S. economy has reached the unthinkable and proverbial rock bottom.

I harbor no illusions that an Obama presidency would right all the wrongs. The office of the Presidency turns each President into a loathsome creature solely on the basis of the horrible corporate policies that each President must adhere to in order to remain in power. It may be that the current economic crisis will create a new paradigm that will force Obama and the Congress to move our economic and political policies in a different direction. This has happened once before, during the 1930s, when the Great Depression forced President Roosevelt to enact policies that would guarantee fair wages and other policies that brought this country out of the stone age. We have to hope for the best. Out of something horrendous can come something new and better. I'd much rather see Obama navigate us through those changes than McCain and his dingbat running mate.

The world will focus on the presidential race all weekend. It's an excellent time for the corrupt Bush administration to pull a last minute fast one on the American people. That is exactly what is happening. The administration can get away with this for two reasons. First, no one is paying attention. Second, no one really understands the process of administrative regulations.

There is a hidden government in American politics. Not hidden like the CIA or FBI, but hidden in that few of us even know about it or pay attention. It's the administrative process, where the federal agencies make rules and regulations that affect business, the environment, banking and other aspects of American society. While Congress passes laws which get much of the attention, rules and regulations that have the same force and effect as laws get enacted by the administrative bureaucracy. Congress does not pass these rules; the agencies in the Executive Branch of government does. That's the presidency.

I know this sounds boring as hell. But the rules and regulations that come out of the administrative bureaucracy make a difference in all of our lives. They are supposed to be crafted by experts who work in agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the Justice Department, to name a few of the more high-profile agencies. But there is always a political element to these rules, as they affect the very businesses which hire lobbyists to push their preferred rules and regulations along and sometimes even help write them. These rules are hard to overturn in the courts, which give the agencies the benefit of the doubt in crafting them.

Work done by the administrative agencies is where the government really rolls up its sleeves. It's where the action really is. Since it's done quietly and only policy wonks pay attention to these agencies, they basically can do what they want. Now that no one is paying attention, the Bush administration is taking advantage of the obscurity of this very important process and kicking out some important but dangerous new rules that affect the issues we care about: the environment in particular.

According to Friday's New York Times (quoting the Washington Post):

A rule put forward by the National Marine Fisheries Service and now under final review by the Office of Management and Budget would lift a requirement that environmental impact statements be prepared for certain fisheries-management decisions and would give review authority to regional councils dominated by commercial and recreational fishing interests.

…

Two other rules nearing completion would ease limits on pollution from power plants, a major energy industry goal for the past eight years that is strenuously opposed by Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups.

One rule, being pursued over some opposition within the Environmental Protection Agency, would allow current emissions at a power plant to match the highest levels produced by that plant, overturning a rule that more strictly limits such emission increases. According to the E.P.A.’s estimate, it would allow millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, worsening global warming.

A related regulation would ease limits on emissions from coal-fired power plants near national parks.

A third rule would allow increased emissions from oil refineries, chemical factories and other industrial plants with complex manufacturing operations.

See how important this stuff is? But can you see how the media and popular culture doesn't pay attention? While the rest of us are complaining about bullshit like presidential gaffes and Sarah Palin's eyeglasses and respect for the American flag, the real business of government is taking place right under our noses. We call these last minute rules "Midnight Regulations." The title speaks for itself.

Now for the invective. God-damn the Bush administration for doing this. The Bush administration has done everything in its power to destroy this country, from the economy to national security to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to the lies and the torture and Hurricane Katrina and every other area that I can think of. On its way out the door, it drops a massive Christmas gift to its biggest constituency, big business and the anti-environmental interests which profit by destroying the environment for profit. I see very little commentary on this, but I did find the House of Representatives (run by Democrats) have objected. Dragging the country through the shit-pile one more time is only natural for the criminals who have tore apart this country brick by brick since the day they took office.