He did take the SATs, and there is a curious story about that. By virtue of signing his name and accidentally hitting a few correct answers when he filled in about ten of the circles before getting bored, Dubya got a combined score of 408. However, his presence at the exam caused a huge vortex, and nearly all of the intelligence was sucked out of the room. None of the two hundred and twelve students that took the exam in that location received combined scores over 620. The Educational Testing Service was at its wit's end to explain this score anomaly, and, facing lawsuits, had to let the whole group retake the exam. Dubya was happy with his score, as it was so far over 100 and he never ever got 100 on a test before, so he didn't bother. It wasn't until Dubya became President that the ETS finally solved the mystery of the low scores.

There is a straw poll by some progressive groups to see if we want Specter challenged in the primary. I say dump the bum. Link at sig.

I also want to ask Renegade Iconoclast where s/he read that Chomsky only supports free speech for Holocaust deniers. I am very curious to see that evidentiary support.

I don't have problem in the least with a Fairness Doctrine. Bring it back, please. I'm a big boy and can decide for myself whose full of shit and who makes sense. But to have AM radio dominated by political talk voicing aggressive policies without a counterpoint is having consequences. Everybody isn't as bright as you are, sysprog.

My first thought is that I agree, I would like to see the Fairness Doctrine restored. But then I become uneasy with the idea that uneducated people are too easily swayed by the Limbaugh types. Clearly, our educational system has been neglected and decaying for some time, and this has had a profound effect on our democracy. Ignorance and poor reasoning and critical thinking skills breed all kinds of ugliness and shortsightedness. Is education where the reforms are really needed, then? Or is that even at the root of things? --when we live in a consumer culture that doesn't value knowledge and deep understanding. But also, the terms "left" and "right" in the US are so narrowly defined, and, to me, are so close together on the political spectrum that to dictate equal time for "opposing" viewpoints seems almost to be an exercise in futility. The delimiters on our political discourse are always already in place, so I am not sure that the Fairness Doctrine will expand the discussion to encompass ideas outside the usual MSM offerings. I mean, the idea of single-payer health care, a perfectly sane and rational and proven system, has been successfully silenced as something out of the lunatic fringe. What the fuck. And you know what? Seeing that the wingnut chorus already screams incessantly that the press is a liberal conspiracy, I bet that if the Fairness Doctrine were to return, they'd all be demanding that the added opposing viewpoints be from the right!! What a world.

P.S. I have some revealing photos of Scalia at sig.

and Geithner is the Grand Nagus.

The Bailout, aka Crony Capitalism, is straight out of the Rules of Acquisition.

This overseeing woman, btw, was on The Daily Show and admitted she didn't know what was going on--everyone laughed because they thought she was joking at first.

Naomi Klein was on Rachel Maddow last night and made it crystal clear why what is going on with taxpayer money must be shrouded in this way.

Here are some notes from the discussion:

Klein's thesis is that corporate interests use disasters--natural and economic--to re-engineer societies in ways that the people would otherwise resist. The bailout fits this thesis, and on the most massive scale ever.

In New Orleans, the disaster was used to transfer public housing to developers. Here, there is an enormous transfer of public wealth into private hands.

Even if they claim it is working, this crisis created by deregulated capitalism isn't being solved; it is instead being moved, that is, the cost is being shifted to the public. The question of who pays for this is exemplified by the fact, for example, that AIDS funding in Africa has been cut by 6.6 billion dollars.

While the poorest and most vulnerable are being forced to pay the elites, these elites are unbound by laws. They work within an economic model that is a crisis creation machine, and there are no rules or consequences for them.

This happened on a smaller scale in Chile, and Pinochet ended up having to nationalize the banks because of their enormous debt.

Klein sees a problem of "two tracks," where the administration is being Keynesian with respect to the stimulus (although that is woefully inadequate in its scale) while it is maintaining crony capitalism in the banking sector, where money goes to lobbyists who use it to defeat measures that would help average homeowners.

She said that Obama is blowing his chance to channel the public rage into meaningful change. FDR used the public rage at double standards to put the Glass-Spiegal Act in place, and that worked very well, until it was done away with in the late 90s.