No, ignoring would result in no reference to this humble “troll.” And the award was bestowed upon me by yourself, when you decided to run your silly poll/trial that few cared about but yourself. The result was you lost. So I thank you for the award I neither sought nor wanted. It looks good on my imaginary mantel. But I’m sure the world is thrilled you have declared yourself in essential agreement, in the bold strokes, with Watcher.

I guess I’ll just have to rest on the laurels of my last exchange with you, since you don’t want to attempt to explain the post I originally questioned this time around.

If memory serves, you lost your last go round with poor little me, based on your own curious challenge and the rather few responses to the same. I can understand your reluctance to engage in another dialogue with me.

#s 83 and 84 do seem to address my question about where you stand on the bail-out, but that question wasn’t really in question. It was pretty clear you were opposed to it. That question was more lead-in for clarification regarding your illogical comments apparently blaming Republicans for killing a bill you personally opposed. That just doesn’t make any sense.

I’m not really interested in how you want to classify your political leanings. I’d wager most people who feel they are intelligent try to say they are independent/moderate when it comes to politics. That tends to be the response considered appropriate for the intelligent. But whether you are independent, Dem., Rep., Lib., Green, whatever, that doesn’t really clarify your confusing posts. And throwing in the LBJ comment is simply pointless.

Now, if you’re blaming all Rs for the last eight years of rhetoric, then you must conveniently ignore the fact that Ds have not been silent, not to mention the fact that Ds have been in charge of Congress most recently. The rhetoric, regardless of who is in charge, comes from both sides of the aisle.

You seem to refuse to address direct questions when doing so would undermine whatever message you hope to transmit. The trouble is, unless you get more direct, I fear whatever is your message will be lost on most of those whose mental abilities are not in line with yours.

To #87: See 83 & 84. That will have to do. I intend no more endless, pointless dialogues with you. I have not yet seen an original idea pass your lips, and I am not betting it will happen anytime soon, if ever. If memory serves, you evade direct questions whenever it suits you.

Can you answer any of my questions from #82?

Great heroes rising out of the ashes of executive, economic, military, judicial, legislative and ecological disaster, (now all occurring simultaneously) tend to bake toxic waste into the cake of power-elite entrenched bureaucract, iced by legislators orgiastically involved with lobbyists, carpetbaggers and other influence peddlers of every stripe. This includes powerful deregulated bank/investment/mortgage giants.

And let us not forget the military industrial complex. Here is the most especially virulent cancer, which pervades our nation now, more greatly than even at the height of the cold war.

The first real alarm was sounded in President Eisenhower’s Farewell Speech to the nation a half century ago. It is worth reading in its’ entirety. It was a prophetic warning of what could happen. It is for this particular speech that I hold Ike in esteem That and his opposition to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when Truman was President.. You could find this speech in my blog archives, but it is quicker just to use a search engine. President Eisenhower’s words need no amplification from me. It is too bad that he also did little to put an end to the McCarthy Witch Hunts, another particularly excruciatingly virulent period in American history.

If this were not enough, we also have an educational system entwined like a gordian knot with governmental power and patronage. It is the puppet of policy handed down by faceless bureaucrats. It is that facelessness of so many of those wielding significant powers, with no real scrutiny or restraining mechanisms that may threaten us most.

It is not the learning, the discovery, the invention, the skills we develop that come first. First is the labyrinth of funding, the student grants, or the loans loading the student with debt for many years.

And then there is the medical/pharmaceutical/government/insurance cabal. That too is of too great a scope to comprehend, and constitutes an almost insurmountable danger to the body politic.

And we are about to put a new cherry on this half-baked, fallen down cake. Which ever one we choose, he will fight for unprecedented powers with which to cope with the whole array emergencies he inherited. Both favored this bailout. Neither suggested anything creative, like suspending trading in America while having an extraordinary session of the congress which went on nonstop until a True Bill was crafted. One that was short, succinct and free of ambiguity. That may be the hardest thing for our legislators, most of whom are under the serious handicap of being lawyers.

Then I would give Congress a week to go back and face their constituents. After which I would call them back into another marathon session to simplify, shorten the codes, and establish real regulatory safeguards that could be both understood and enforced, and that would assure fairness and equity to all parties. They would revamp entire codes from stem to stern, with the emphasis on transparency and clarity. The goal would be to shorten the Codes by half, and to get better law in the process.

And earmarks and other pigtails, including all riders unrelated to the specific intent and purpose of the law, would be rejected by line item veto, or the entire measure would be rejected by veto. That is what I would do if I were the new cherry on top of this this crumbling, collapsing cake. Then I would continue on with similar refurbishment and simplification in all the other codes, This is not something that can be done piecemeal. No accumulation of slight changes will do the job.

All debate would be televised and archived as permanent evidence of who did and said and voted for what. That way, the more interested and informed electorate would be better able to make wiser judgements and vote accordingly.

Of couse there woud be some national security exceptions to the ban on closed debate and secret votes. But it is clearly the combination of secrecy and chicanery in our public officials that has brought us to this lowest point in our national life.

And last, I would use the bully pulpet to expose and challenge those who most obstructed these policies. I would recruit and train a special staff of interlocuters for the task of debating and exposing the defects of these least constructive representatives or senators, broadcasting the hearings to their constituencies. And for their part, those legislators under this unusual Executive scrutiny would be able to defend their actions, with only their own constituents deciding the matter, not at the end of their term, but right at the conclusion of the public session if the approval vote were negative.

And perhaps there should be some provision for even a President to face a Vote of Confidence, not just Impeachment. We really can’t afford to let obvious, clear cut bumbling and incompetence, or clearly ruinous key policies continue for four or eight years. The Bush Doctrine alone should have triggered some mechanism of this sort.

The paradigm of lending and how corporations are funded has clearly started to show its failures. It is not consumer debt or consumer confidence that has been the problem this time. It has been that banks were too willing to accept the outrageously optimistic scenarios presented to them by corporations, and too greedy to exercise due diligence and to develop sufficient knowledge of what they were investing in. The world’s military spending spree of the last 8 years is unprecedented and military spending by definition does not build anything, its all about blowing things up after all. The supply jolts in energy and the global crisis in food have not been sufficiently analysed and we’ve been too happy to accept whatever 15 second dissimulation was presented to us by the BBC or CNN. Today, the markets are NOT allowed to operate efficiently. Government and business are far too intertwined and this is DANGEROUS. Who put up the trillion or so spent by the government and military in the last 8 years on national security and in various armed conflicts around the world by the US alone? How do they get their money back? Yes the multipler effect appeared to bouy the economy – if you worked for Blackwater or for Haliburton and you were being paid $100,000 a month, when you got home you would buy a house or go on vacation, and so housing looks good and so does tourism, but where did that money that you were paid come from in the first place? Some bank somewhere lent it. Usually on the understanding that they would get paid back through more government spending and more contracts. But these contracts do not construct anything. War is about blowing things up. (I said that already, what I mean is they do not result in fundemental or core growth in an economy). Reconstruction is a gravy train and a way to shuffle the money back around. We live in a command economy or an oligarchy at best. The signs have been clear to anyone interested to look. Why so much reconstruction funding for Iraq where only big contractors or those with close government ties have ventures, and relatively, so little for Louisiana? What is the story about oil prices? Who benefits the most from that? This one in particular has really confused me because try as I could, I never saw where there was a supply shortage. Yes, there were refinery shortages and capacity shortages and that can certainly raise the price at the pump but why would that raise the price of crude? If there’s insufficient processing capacity then doesn’t that normally drop the price of the raw material? But I’m beginning to rant so I shall stop. My hope now is that $700 billion is put to good use. Catching a few scapegoats and firing a few bank CEOs will have a palliative effect on public opinion, but this time, for once, I hope, a champion will stand and say we will not fall for it.