I’m going to take an opportunity for some sarcasm here, so be warned: The word “maverick” is not found anywhere in the first Article of the US Constitution.

So is being a “maverick” a qualification for President of the US? Before we can make a definitive statement on this question, I would like to explore what exactly a “maverick” is. Merriam Webster’s online dictionary traces the word to a feller on the Great American Plains during the second (and therefore super-romantic) half of the 19th century named Samuel A. Maverick. This guy apparently did not brand his calves, for whatever reason. This is interesting to me, that this word, which has been appropriated by both McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin to describe themselves, should come from such a source. It seems to me that since January 20, 2001, our country has been presided over by someone who affects cowboy images and cowboy lingo to describe his foreign policy. Need we bring up the “Wanted Dead or Alive” comment?

We can leave off that a maverick is, according to mw-online, an unbranded calf. I find the etymology of the term especially interesting because of the second definition of the term: “an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party”. Does McCain not have a Party? Does he NOT vote with the Republican Leadership and President George W. Bush more than 90% of the time?

Right, right, those are talking points of the Obama Campaign. Gotta watch out for that. Fact is McCain is a Republican. He is running on the Republican Brand. He doesn’t consider himself a libertarian, he considers himself a fiscal and social conservative. Read the rest of this entry »

First, a preemptive word. I have been getting like 50 or so hits on each of these posts on Sarah Palin. This says a couple things to me. Most of the people who are googling her name aren’t coming up with Supernova Earth’s site. And second, those who are keenly interested in reading about her (either against or for her) are not reading Supernova Earth. The right wingers continue to pay attention to their media, and the left wingers continue to pay attention to larger leftist blogs. This is fine. I write for myself anyway, and if someone else sees it, I am that much more famous for it. I raise this topic, because just this once I hope Sarah Palin visits my blog, so she can rectify some of her recently identified deficiencies.

Second, I want to make a note as to why I have dramatically increased my volume of posting since the conventions. Sarah Palin is just a great story. It is my opinion that she is less qualified than George Bush to have anything to do with the White House, and that is saying a lot. She regularly supplies material for a curmudgeon like me to write about. In short, I don’t know if I could help it but to write about her even if I wanted to.

Now to the meat. Let’s talk about Sarah Palin’s lack of knowledge about the Bush Doctrine. You can see her “soft” ball interview with Charles Gibson, but pay special attention to the line of questioning about the Bush Doctrine . Clearly (and pretty much everyone agrees) that she tripped on this one. “In what respect, Charlie?” is almost the stock answer to a “yes or now” question in which someone doesn’t know the context and doesn’t want to fuck it up. Ok Cool.

1st point. The media rallied to Palin’s defense on this one. Don’t believe me? Youtube is a remarkable resource where not only is a source usually cited, but you can watch the words coming out of someone’s mouth. I discovered there, after a one minute search, a clip of people on several news channels saying “Oh. Don’t worry about that. Nobody refers to it in these terms, nobody knows what the Bush Doctrine is. It’s no surprise that Palin doesn’t.” Here’s the link. No one knows what it is, so why should she? It is simply stunning to me that the corporate media is willing to give her a pass on this, because the Bush Doctrine is the ideological foundation for the war in Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the Nazi’s are at it again, or so it would seem. Apparently there have been rumors going around the anti-Palin blogosphere concerning her desire to compose a list of books to have banned while she was mayor of the small town in Alaska. This added to her now discovered false statements concerning selling jets on EBAY and firing official governor cooks is just more fodder for the ultra-paranoid left to write more blog posts attacking Palin and trying to get people to see just how wicked and Nazi-ish she really is.

Problem is, apparently this book burning story is completely false. I was watching Fox News today, you know to find out what the enemy is saying (apparently a WHOLE LOT LESS coverage of the Presidential election than MSNBC, which really REALLY surprised me.) They had some dude on there yacking about how the liberal media (by which they neglect to mention, they mean leftist blogs, which are NOT legitimate sources of news, regardless of how many people pretend that they are, and I mean this one too) were claiming that Palin tried to have books banned. I thought, “Huh, how about that… Good thing I don’t trust or even read leftist blogs, because I know every last site that presents commentary as if it were legitimate journalism is full of shit… Next Story.”

Then I get something from my friend Dave McReynolds in NYC that contained a mea culpa from some dude at www.flamesofdiscontent.org saying “Whoops. I got this book-burning story from someone I thought was a reliable source, and I heard the rumor on NPR, so I immediately wrote up a report and sent it out to presumably everyone on my email list. Sorry: it turns out it wasn’t correct after all, but that still doesn’t mean Palin isn’t dangerous.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’m no financial expert, nor do I profess a deep understanding of the US economy (for example, I’ve only been trained in macro and labor economics theory… a far shot from understanding precisely the relationship between the gold rate, interest rates and stock future prices.)

That is a disclaimer of course. Given my lack of comprehensive knowledge, I would like to offer a superficial response to the government “seizing” the two mortgage guarantee companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. But I think this is fine, because while I have a lot of intelligent associates and friends, I am willing to bet that nobody really knows much about these two companies. So I can feel free to write, and look forward to being corrected if I present an inaccuracy:

It would seem that these companies are sponsored already by the US government. As much as I can tell, the government backs up these private companies’ loans. The company itself goes about buying loans, which allows individual banks to extend credit far beyond their own ability to cover, because they know that these private companies, which are guaranteed by the government, will buy them. In exchange, banks make loans to individuals, using criteria set up by these two agencies (provided as conditions under which these loan buyers will actually purchase the loan.) Supposedly this relieves the burden of backing up the credit from the bank (who immediately turns around and sells the loan, keeping a percentage, and therefore making money), while allowing millions of people who would normally have been turned down by an individual bank to buy homes. The criteria provided by these megalithic companies is much laxer than what would be applied by an individual bank, and can be because the investors in the guarentee agency know that their investments will be covered by the government should some catastrophic downturn in the financial market occur.

Well… it has. Read the rest of this entry »

I want someone to go on television and say, “Well, the Republicans are fascists.” I want one of these pundits to discuss how the GOP is synonymous with the German Nazi Party. It’s a discussion that needs to be had. I just wanted to get that out there, in the blogosphere. In my opinion if you put a Republican Party activist and a Nazi with no german accent into a dark room and then asked them both to tell me what they believed, I don’t know that I would be able to tell which was which. The Republican Party is the Nazi Party of the United States, in my humble opinion. Period.

I’ve had the opportunity to tune in to a couple of the keynote speeches of the GOP convention now just ending. I watched Fred Thompson, Guilliani, Sarah Palin, and of course Mr McCain, the Republican Party’s nominee for President. I’ll dispense early with the speech I preferred of those four. John McCain’s speech was even. I noted a few jabs at his opponents, and the standard Republican fare we have all become accustomed to: More jobs, lower taxes, better schools, more money to religious institutions, against reproductive choice, middle class, Country first, military blah blah blah (notice he didn’t talk about immigration. That issue sort of lost salience when Tom Tancredo exited from the race). Not much new there. McCain’s speech, probably because he isn’t really that good a speaker (especially when compared to Obama), but more likely because I will bet he used his own speech (unlike Palin) was a decent speech, a nice rousing speech that I can’t find much fault in except it is for the Party of white millionaires Read the rest of this entry »

This is a post I wrote for a group on Facebook called “Progressives (Critically) for Obama”. It was created by a guy apparently for people who call themselves progressives and yet who still (despite Obama’s strong centrist position) still support Barack Obama for President. It was in a response to a post the author sent to my mail inbox there which complained about Obama moving to the center and not being the kind of progressive he should be, and potentially picking a VP choice who is also a centrist Democrat, like Evan Bayh. But it is also a response to people in general complaining that Obama is such a dissapointment, and a potential feeling of buyers remorse, and whatnot that is being engendered by a news media that is suffering a little withdrawal after the binge that was this spring, and the few people in this country that seem to believe that Hillary Clinton should still be the nominee because she was somehow “cheated” out of something that was her right by a fellow who did not “wait his turn”. We all know who these folks are: They are the people that Clinton herself has organized a delegate whip team to stand in front of them when they begin chanting from the floor or blowing kazoos(?) at the convention or whatever.

Anyway… Here is the post. For progressives only (the right is not allow to know that the left is eating itself alive, so if you don’t like Obama because he is “too liberal” then tune out now, please.)

(this post is mainly a response directed toward the messages I got in my Faceboook inbox from the owner of this group concerning Obama’s VP selection)

As a socialist, and a former member of the Socialist Party who swore up and down that I would never support a Democrat, I have resigned from the SP and have thrown my support behind a Democrat. And apparently, one who is a little more conservative than most of those folks on the progressive left would like him to be.

I got one thing to say about that: Too damned bad. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, today is the last contest in the Presidential Primary Season. First a couple of predictions:

Obama will win South Dakota by less than 10 points, and will win in Montana by less than 15 points. I may be wrong on Montana, and it may be a walk for him there (because every democratic supporter I know there supports Obama, but this isn’t really a fair characterization, because I haven’t met a Clinton supporter yet this year.)

Which brings me to the topic of this post, and my last of the the primary analysis. I have in the past said a number of times that it is a good thing that Clinton has remained in the race, from an ideological point of view. But she is finished, her race is over. She will celebrate a successful campaign tonight, and may even concede, but she will not get the nomination, not tonight, not in August.

Now a lot of people are looking for answers as to why she lost: some people say it was poor organization, some people say it was her abrasive personality that turned a lot of people off, some claimed it was black voters who voted for one of their own instead of her. It is true that Clinton never considered the possibility that she might not win. I watched an interview she did with Katie Couric last year, where Couric asked Clinton if she had considered what she would do if she didn’t get the nomination, and she responded, “You just can’t think like that, Katie.” As if, don’t mention it, because if you do, you are beaten. OR, don’t mention it because there is no possible way it will happen. Clinton and everyone else believed that she was supposed to be the nominee of the Party. It was time to go back and retry something that “worked” while William Clinton was President. It was time for a correction back to when things were supposed to be so good for the US. She was “inevitable”. Read the rest of this entry »

I am not a huge fan of hard science. It has its goods, but it also has its bads, and has become, within the last couple centuries, a religion of its own, where people swear by it. The scientific method has become a paradigm which discounts things which cannot be quantifiable, for example, thoughts, feelings and opinions. It has made people seek to present their opinions as if they were fact (just so they can appear to others to be considered “legitimate”), rather than allowing them to remain merely opinion, and allowing their readers to read them as such. And this is problematic, when people try to play a game for which they are not fit, or more likely, which is not fit for what they are trying to do. Empiricism defeats metaphysics, and this taken out to its extreme is problematic for a complex organism like a human, who can question, but more importantly, doubt.

But, that said, allow me to present a small obituary of a great scientist, one of the few that have existed in my lifetime. The man’s name was Albert Hoffman. An article about his death from the AP can be found by following this link. He was a Swiss scientist who died at 102. He worked for European pharmaceutical giant Sandoz. And by the way, he was also the inventor of LSD. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the contest in the state of Pennsylvania. It is therefore apropos that the Wizard of S make a comment on it.

First the prediction: Clinton by 6 points, give or take 3.

What is behind the prediction? Well, let’s just call it a gut feeling. Clinton has been doing well in the state, though not as well today as a month ago. Obama has not been able to erode her support in the state to the point where he can win, so he will have to accept a single digit loss there. The cities are important for Obama, but the majority of the state is not city, and those areas tend to vote for Hillary. The “scandals” have not hurt Obama, but they also haven’t helped Clinton. So Clinton wins, as expected, and if I am wrong, I will issue a retraction.

Now to the accompanying analysis. Long have the political junkies in this country waited for another contest. SIX WEEKS! Over this time, we have seen the slugfest on television, but the one thing we haven’t seen is the effects that the hard campaign has had on the attitudes among not only the people in Pennsylvania, but also in the country. About a week or so ago, news reports began talking about Obama in terms of “When” not “if” he takes on McCain in the fall. Now Pundits say things like “What is Clinton doing?”, as if she had no reason to continue the process, and should have dropped out.

But these last few weeks demonstrate clearly why she stayed in the race after March. She has been able to continue promoting her agenda, even though she now faces an overwhelming tide of support for Obama in the country, on the television, and in people’s mind. She is now running the classic protest campaign, and I say good for her. The Socialist Party would do well to take at least this lesson from her: when you know you aren’t going to win, you stop trying to win and start saying what you really mean. She is in a position to put her real agenda out there, because it is very unlikely that she will have to implement any of it, OR defend it for very long. She knows she will probably not get the nomination, nor will she be considered for VP, so she has the latitude that Obama does not have, and that is the freedom to use the “kitchen sink” and whatnot.

Some seem to think that Clinton’s continued participation in the primaries is damaging the Democratic Party. Many television commentators discuss this ad infinitum. I think that Obama accurately stated it on the Daily Show last night when he said that by October, this will be old news, but not for the reason he said. He said that eventually voters will see that there is a real difference between what McCain proposes and what generic Democrat, probably Obama proposes, and they will forget the bickering. Yeah, but this is not why they will vote Democrat.

First consider this Hypothetical Distribution of votes in the US electorate this year. This is on the standard left-right spectrum, and everything is clearly labeled. Read the rest of this entry »