Today we've got two great front page stories on how jacked up our traditional media has become. From Outfoxed to Glenn Greenwald's astounding use of Lexis-Nexis (11th grader-level research, without an endowment from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundation even!), we've seen the establishment tout some basic memes with no basis in reality.

One of these memes has, of course, surfaced in our recent spin cycle. It's the myth of McSaint, McBush, McW, Mc-Hundred-Years-of-War. Senator Bomb Bomb. Now, we can all have a rousing good laugh at the fact that John Mc-Murderous-as-Cain-when-he-killed-Abel is treated with kid gloves, even though the Senator-from-Arizona-to-the-gates-of-hell used to be called "McNasty" in high school. I mean, it was 1954, cut him a break. That was a loooong time ago, and you know he's sensitive about his age. He's just... sensitive, that's all. Like he's sensitive to the needs of working-class white uh, blue state uh, collar, Reagan Democrats in central Pennsylvania. But you just won't listen, you trollop. You know your problem, you're just bitter.

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said today that Medicare is essentially a "government-regulated price-fixing system."

If you're paying attention, you might notice that the Bush administration is still trying to sell us their policies. Even the ones we thought they'd abandoned in favor of making George W. a "War President" (War Presidents get 25% in the Presidential Library section of Home Depot). Even 5 years after their failed, illegal, unnecessary war has proven to be the result of deception.

At a briefing that should have been about making Social Security and Medicare provide, you know, benefits to all Americans, Mike Leavitt got up in front of the podium and essentially railed against the social safety net at a time when Americans are feeling the crunch of an oncoming Depression. And to make sure we were clear that yes, privatizing Social Security is back, AGAIN, our Social Security Commissioner ended his remarks by scolding us to make sure our scraping by and begging for tips in these lean years is supplemented by more aggressive personal savings. You aren't saving enough, see.

Bush is always talking about how Truman was unpopular. I'm waiting for someone to pop up and say, "Sir, I knew Harry S. Truman. You're no Truman. And also, I didn't even know Truman."

In a diary way long ago, before human spongiform candidate encephelopathy set in around here, smithneus pointed out that the New York Times article about a 1950 act to initiate mass jailings of suspected dissidents was incorrect on an important detail. The act in question, which thankfully never did lead to mass detentions, passed without President Truman's approval, but the article said the president signed it. Truman! You know, Truman, the guy who's always President in the parallel World War II video game universe from which George Bush draws analogies? Thanks smithneus! The McCarran Act was egregious, and Truman was no saint, but the act passed on the bloodlust of Congress alone-- that, and J. Edgar Hoover's megalomania. I was so mad at those damned dirty apesliberals at the New York Times for suggesting that there was a precedent for the kind of executive power-grabs that we're seeing a resurgence, that i wrote to them to point out that they were wrong in their article. And they printed a correction!

we got beat. we all got beat. democracy is what lost on November 2, 2004. America lost.
this is so much bigger than Red team vs. Blue team, bigger even than the backslide into fascism. and anyone who talks about leaving the country or abandoning the Red states is working through the problem-- which is what we should do, we should be depressed and angry and ready to give up on the system-- but they're not working toward the solution. the truth is, we've gamed the system to the limit of its representability. this is exactly the momentum that our system has had for decades, probably since the Voting Rights Act, the last time we really reconsidered electoral politics in this country. the notion that objectivity means fair and balanced without a fairness doctrine, that a 50/50 nation makes any sense at all, that a Democratic and Republican party have nothing to do with democracy and republicanism--at all--has come to its logical conclusion. this is the end.

so here's what we're going to do about it.