In a culture increasingly dominated by lies of all kinds,it should not come as a surprise that bankruptcy will be a constant threat in all walks of life.

Take McCain.Having squandered the moral authority he had earned as a POW by supporting a war based on false pretexts and even worse, aiding and abetting the torture of prisoners, McCain finds himself in the arms of a racist  fundamentalist from the school of Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.Even his constant evocation of his status as a POW now elicits derision.

I believe that the embrace of Palin by McCain is a sign of desperation of a man realizing he is totally bankrupt.Expect more and more bizarre acts up until election day.

Not to be outdone by the politicians of our day, GM, the king of all auto makers in yester years, now says it needs up to 25 billion dollars in cash infusion to produce fuel effecient cars.What is left unsaid is why in a market overflowing with fuel efficient cars made by many nimble competitors, anyone even has to consider buying a GM product.It is the same trap the United States finds itself in after many years as the undisputed ruler of all it surveys.The world has moved on to what Fareed Zakaria calls the Post American World.GM,in its own blindness does not realize that the world has changed, for the worse for GM.

Someone once said Time and Tide wait for no man.In a paraphrase we can say Time and Tide do not wait for GM to produce a fuel efficient car.GM's days are gone,never to return.

Lastly,a sorry chapter in American excess will also draw to a close as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two Government sponsored enterprises (GSE's) will also bite the dust.Much of the excesses of the mortgage industry were underwritten by these two giant institutions which were used as piggy banks by the mortgage banking business and run to the ground.I am tempted to say that the death of these two institutions will mean better behavior in the future on the part of Americans.Their insatiable appetite for luxury homes and McMansions caused a collapse of massive proportions dragging the poor into this disaster.

As the lies proliferate,it is impossible for us to find a single personality that has the courage to utter the truth about any of these failings.

That is because at its core our failure as a society is moral.Only a spiritual awakening can rectify that.

Meanwhile, I am now looking at the revolting image of Cheney in Georgia condemning Russia for invading Georgia!

As I listened to Ms.Palin it became clear that her task as a McCain surrogate was to belittle the black man who would challenge the established pecking order of white supremacy at its core,i.e.in intellectual superiority over black men.Her second objective was to restate the primacy of her Christian beliefs, especially the one that brooks no interference from 'terrorist'religions like Islam.Thirdly, her constant invoking of her self reliance theme made it all but clear that she thinks that all other races except the tribe she belongs to are people without enterprise and so are in effect smooching off the efforts of the white ancestors.

From the thunderous ovations she received,it was also clear that she struck a nerve with her predominantly white audience.They came to St.Paul to ratify the fact that America is a white male christian dominated society meant for the furtherance of capitalism.Anyone or anything that stands in the way will be destroyed by the Palin Goddess like a moose she is so used to have for her dinner.

If you think Reagan dragged this country to paleo times, wait until Sara gets through with you.

And,God Bless America.

As one watched the defiant lies emanating from Sara Palin's mouth to great acclamation from the all white audience at St.Paul, one realized that only by believing in lies can the GOP survive in a nation that has passed it by.In this sense, the group in attendance at the GOP convention resembles the last days of Apartheid South Africa.Each lie that is uttered becomes a support for the lies that have gone before.Because the society at large has become the enemy of the GOP in its values and more's,it has to be opposed tooth and nail at every opportunity.No reasoned discourse can be permitted.

Another revealing bit to emerge from that convention was Ms.Palin's remarks about "Community Organizers".In a litany of code words,Ms.Palin's derisive reference sent the message to the audience that a black man doing community service work with predominantly black people in the South Side of Chicago is catering to the welfare bums and cheats who exist by sucking the life blood out of the white majority.The thundering ovations attest to the direct impact of that code.That was Reagan Redux,pure and simple,with his image of welfare queens in cadillacs.

Only a total defeat, as in South Africa, will change the mindset of these die hard racists.While they will never mention race, they have become so adept at transmitting code words and images to a willing audience that nothing short of a complete collapse of their world view will make things better.The well has been poisoned too long for it to dissipate the poisons in the water and make it drinkable.

One reason Sara Palin was picked was because the others,like Kay Bailey Hutchison,Joe Lieberman and other Republicans did not want the job.They saw clearly that Admiral McCain was going to hit the reef soon and did not want to be on a sinking ship.

Another reason could be purely financial.Without the fundamentalist Christian money, McCain's campaign would have to depend on Federal money which would be totally inadequate to take on the well oiled Obama Machine.

I think McCain has had it,Sara or no Sara.

As the ringing oratory of Barack Obama at Mile High Stadium came to an end and the celebrations began with fireworks and festivities, it became apparent to even the most rabid Republican from McCain's crowd that one of the fundamental pillars of American society was under assault and the ground was moving under their feet.

Forty one years before Barack Obama's speech,Martin Luther King,Jr.in a speech at the Riverside Church challenged the notion that the United States had the moral authority to invade Vietnam and kill millions of its people.That challenge cost him his life because MLK too had tread upon the implicit authority of the White Power structure to wage war against the black,brown,yellow and red skins at home and carry that war over to foreign shores using the same oppressed minorities in the US as mercenaries in wars they had no say in initiating.It was his identification of American blacks with the Vietnamese that triggered the wrath of the powerful.

Although times have changed,Barack Obama's oratory has created panic in the halls of the Republican Party which has responded with the anointing of Sara Palin, a Christian fundamentalist,gun lover and abortion opponent to stem the tide of Democratic resurgence.

The message from McCain-Palin is that America is a White Male Christian dominated nation and you are playing with fire if you challenge that fact.

Normally I am sympathetic to people in physical or emotional distress.

But I am going to speculate that Cindy McCain's carpal tunnel syndrome in her right arm smells fishy.

I would like to explain why.

Carpal tunnel syndrome is experienced by people who engage in repetitive motion for a prolonged time without any rest such as using a screwdriver or a saw putting a lot of effort at the tasks involved.This inflames the tendon and cartilage. That inflammation causes excruciating pain.

In Cindy's case,it would make no sense for her to exert herself to the extent I have described.Leading a life of privilege,she has an army of people at her beck and call that would eliminate the need for the kind of repetitive motions that would lead to carpal tunnel.

I suspect Cindy does not like to shake hands with the riffraff.

First,it was Mrs.Clinton who,in her imagined role as a Commander in Chief at the Tuzla Airport, claimed she was evading snipers as she ran toward a waiting helicopter after her plane landed.We know how connected to reality was our presumptive Commander in Chief.

Now,John Mccain has claimed that during his stay at the Hanoi Hilton, he was so despondent that he tried to commit hara kiri and was saved by a cross in the sand.

Unfortunately that cross in the sand was a famous phrase in the Gulag Archipelago written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

It is a clear indicator of the barren lives led by our politicians that they have to resort to these made up incidents to spice up their wretched existence.

I believe that they show the moral emptiness of our ruling class.

Maureen, who is nothing if not sex obsessed,has taken a fancy for the Senator from Illinois,flirting with him on his campaign plane and asking him to loosen up and become playful,instead of becoming a policy wonk.That way Maureen could have a direct pathway to his important organ.I meant his heart,not the other organ your dirty mind was thinking about!

Maureen has cast herself in the new movie sequel to Gone With The Wind.As the new Scarlett,she imagines herself as the mistress of Tara sipping on mint juleps in the hot Georgia sun while the slave,Mandingo Obama, works up a sweat in her cotton plantation.

Maureen, ever solicitous as a Southern Belle is supposed to be, invites Mandingo inside the mansion for,what else, a mint julep.One thing leads to another and as they say Maureen feels fulfilled after a few thrusts and parries.

Whatever happened on that campaign plane, Maureen will not say a word bad about Obama,I think.

She likes the three pointers.

As the entire world watched with awe the opening ceremonies at the Olympic Games in Beijing, NBC which ahd the "rights" to televise the Olympics in the US was up to its old tricks as a propaganda organ of the US Establishment.Throughout the ceremonies,the NBC commentariat kept on yakking about the shortcomings of the Chinese and their system,bringing in politics into a purely sports event.

What was worse was that this idiot group of commentators missed the historic significance of the games entirely as only the certified ignorati of TV are capable of doing.

For those who need a reminder, China, in a matter of 60 years has risen from the ashes of defeat,turmoil, ostracism by the US influenced boycott and many other indignities inflicted on a proud and ancient people.For forty of those sixty years, the US kept up the pretense that China did not exist and was forced to cave in when the force ofa billion people could not be ignored any longer.

I have a sinking feeling that the same thing that happened in China is about to be repeated on a similar scale with India which has announced its emergence from abject poverty with a serious assault on many industries that the Western world considered its unique turf.With nearly a quarter million graduates in the sciences and engineering emerging from its well respected institutes of higher learning,it is only a matter of time before another spectacle staged in New Delhi catches us by surprise.

In world seeing such massive upheavals in the expectations of the world's people, our idiot media prefer their mythologies intact.That mythology would have us believe that USA is number one at all times and anything that challenges that assumption must be put down by the paid and unthinking talking heads.

Don't forget that there are countries like Brazil,Russia,many Southeast Asian nations and African nations that will step into the shoes that India and China have worn.

The Beijing ceremonies should be seen as the beginning of the end of insupportable hubris the American Empire has displayed for a long time.

That is,if we are willing to observe and learn.

As the first family of Democrats, the Clintons had come to expect that they would always be at the head of the table in so far as the Democrats were concerned.
So, when Hillary declared her candidacy, it was expected that she would be a shoo-in for the Party's nomination.

Then comes Barack Obama from out of nowhere and eclipses Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

Oh,the indignity! not only does Hillary lose to a newcomer but loses to a guy with a funny name!

That brought out Bill who tried mightily to save her candidacy only to see it crashing down in flames.

Now that Barack Obama has sewn up the nomination, their next hope is to see Obama lose to their Great White Hope,John McCain.

Unfortunately,McCain has come up empty.

His entire story based on his experience has been trumped by Barack's triumphalist tour of Europe.

That has sent a chill down the spine of the entitled woman.She was hopong that Barack would not be able to prove his ability to show the world that he is leadership material,like ,shall we say, Hillary Clinton at the Tuzla airport evading sniper fire as she ran to the safety of the helicopter.

Then came the joke about McCain's energy policy of drill,drill and drill.When Barack countered with his tire inflation proposal,McCain ridiculed it until it was proven that the tire inflation would save more oil than drilling in the outer continental shelf.

Looks like this guy Obama is not willing to trip himself to make the Clintons the Emperor and Empress of America.

Now you know why Hillary is upset and Bill is even more upset.

I came across this term in a new book by Dr.Bryant Welch titled THE STATE OF CONFUSION. He derived this expression from an old movie with this title that starred Charles Boyer,the matinee idol of his days and Ingrid Bergman, who is of course well known.

In the movie, Boyer portrays a man who wants to get his hands on the considerable fortune of Bergman who plays Boyer's wife.He hits upon an ingenious and diabolical scheme to destabilze his wife mentally by using the ubiquitous gas lights of those days.He would intentionally turn down the brightness of those lights on some nights and when his wife complains about the dimness of the lights, he would claim they were perfectly OK and feign concern for her health.On other days, he would turn up the brightness far beyond what is needed and when she complains about the brightness, he would claim they are perfectly all right and only her poor health makes her say those ridiculous things.He also recruits his friends into this diabloical enterprise and they chime together in a chorus about how unhealthy she looks and how mentally tired she must be.

Dr.Welch who is a practising psychologist draws a parallel between the plight of that poor woman and America in the past eight years under Bush.He says that with Bush,Cheney and Rumsfeld in power we have all been subjected to a massive gaslighting by the unscrupulous power mongers.They have,in effect, implemented a massive nationwide gaslighting operation that makes us doubt our contact with reality with each and every event that has transpired.A short catalog of those events would suffice here.

During the run up to the election of 2000, a man of Al Gore's erudition and accomplishments was pitted against a mental midget like Bush and the chorus of newspaper columnists and TV talking heads made Bush appear larger than life while diminishing Gore intentionally.Thus, Maureen Dowd pronounced him a bore wearing earth tones against a virile Bush that sent her into paroxysmal orgasms round the clock.While we were certain that Al Gore was the legally elected President, Scalia thought otherwise and the chorus of Republican thugs declared Bush the winner.We know fully well how many subsequent events have been assaults on our sense of reality orchestrated by Rumsfeld.

Because we are bombarded with lies all the time from all directions, we are not even aware that we are being gaslighted.Occassionally a truth teller like Dr.Steven Jones comes to our rescue and uses science to show that the WTC Towers were demolished on purpose using thermates putting the whole edifice of lies about hijacked planes at risk.Now, we also have Dr.Ivins's story coming apart under scrutiny by the blogosphere.These are important steps in restoring our sanity.

When fully restored to health this country will come to know why it is that the Republican machine is bankrupt.It has no raison d'etre other than to seek and retain power at all costs and assault us in ways that we have not come to fully recognize yet.

Go read THE STATE OF CONFUSION. The mind you save may be your own.

That is how Professor Nouriel Roubini phrases his prediction that thousands of banks will fail across this country in the next few months,causing losses in excess of 2 trillion dollars.

He says that the mortgage crisis has only hit the subprime loans as of today causing the crisis for homeowners and the big banks.

He says that the loan losses are going to hit even the upper end of the mortgage pole, causing a calamity of even greater proportions.

Bank failures will become ubiquitous.If the US treasury that bailed out Bear Stearns,Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac,repeated the pattern we will have hyperinflation and stagnation at the same time.

The US is at the end of its tether.What could be hidden before can no longer be done.

"Flee from the wrath to come" says the Bible.

Many years ago, as an engineeriung student I came across a mathematical concept called Imaginary or Complex Numbers that had me fascinated for a long time.In this system, numbers were classified as real and imaginary and a well developed set of rules were constructed to define the relationships between the two sets.Although the imaginary numbers themselves had no independent existence,with the rules deployed many problems in engineering,physics and mechanics could be solved yielding real results.

Those ideas came to my mind when Mr.Bernanke and Mr.Paulson went about saving the big financial houses while ignoring the clamor of the masses reeling under the mortgage and gasoline crises that have gripped the country.

Up until the mid 70's this nation's economy was primarily one in which the making and selling of good and services constituted the majority of economic activity.Those transactions had to be transparent because the primary participants in the activity were the buyer and the seller.

That simple economy underwent a radical change in the 80's as the financial middle men like Citigroup,J.P.Morgan and Chase entered the fray and began the looting of corporations that had done business with the equity that had been built up over many generations.The financial giants wanted to get their hands on this equity.They were able to entice the corporate bigwigs to loot their own companies by saddling them with debt and selling the corporations to bidders who had no money to begin with.Thus was born the subprime swindle of corporations destroying the auto and other manufacturing industries in the country.The role of the financial middle men can be compared to that of a parasite that eats the meat and leaves the dregs to the body of the organism.We now see that exact role being played out in our own economy.

Because the financial industry has no real stake in the economy other than to feast on the fruits of works of many generations, no solution to our problems is possible so long as the financial industry remains the beneficiary.The bailing out of the GSE's like Fannie Mae or Freddymac will only whet the appetites of the financial leeches and they will be back for more.

What was once a subordinate role for the financial industry has now become the dominant one over that of the real economy.We need to change that .Like Complex Numbers, when the imaginary numbers dominate, the result will also be imaginary not yielding real world solutions.

Now I know why my profesors taught me Complex Algebra.

In all the verbiage emanating from the candidates this political cycle, one constantly hears the refrain that either Obama or McCain will make us more secure in this age of terrorism.

What is never mentioned is the ludicrousness of this proposition.Given that this country spends more on "defense" than the rest of the world combined and maintains a string of well equipped bases around the world and has a huge CIA budget devoted to destabilization of foreign governments,propaganda and assassination of foreign leaders, elementary curiosity should provoke questions on who is the greater threat to others.Given the nature of our Press/media as propaganda organs, that is not likely to happen.

What this simple minded analysis shows is that no original thought about important matters would be allowed to cross the mind of the candidates or the Press.We will all be bickering around the edges, as it were, on whether Barack Obama is a celebrity in the mold of Britney or Paris,and,God forbid, they missed Lindsay or Madonna.

Meanwhile in the real planet GM and Ford are collapsing with bankruptcy looming for both in a matter of months.The federal budget deficit is approacing half a trillion dollars with no reprieve in sight.

But the bogeyman,the dark skinned Arab/Muslim is lurking in the smoldering ruins of the WTC Towers,the man with Anthrax is comfortably dead and Barack wants to put the make on your sister using high falutin' words.The terrorists are indeed here.