Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Lest we forget the FIRE sector amidst health provisioning follies, do y'all remember the the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? Next month it's scheduled to disgorge its "final report"!

Here's a blog post by a stalwart lady tribune of honest people-person oriented credit dealings, to refocus our eyes some on the "horror" -- err, temporarily:

The gist: The Rethugulars on that commission are fixin' to go off reservation soon, and pre-emptively blame the last ten years of financial foolery on Barney Wonka and the chocolate factor.

Ms Blogger:

"The intent is pretty transparent: to discredit an effort at fact finding into the roots of the crisis, what was hoped to be a Pecora Commission, by making it appear partisan and launching an alternative narrative to muddy the waters. And the reason is clear. Even though FCIC is certain not to have the same effect that the Pecora Commission did, of discrediting major financial services industry figures and exposing various forms of chicanery, it appears that even lesser forms of criticism of the banksters must be sandbagged (the bizarre part of this drama is that at least some Democrats and very selectively, Republicans in office are willing to call out the predatory, extractive behavior of the large banks. But no one has the guts to buck an industry that is a major paymaster in a very serious way)."

Seeing stuff too soon, and from too great a distance, can make a snarling sniping growling dark-hole critter out of even the least asocial of us poor parlor pinks -- that is, if it don't make us completely into just another catatonic mute in the nation's basement.

From what I've read, her unforgivable flaw is that she's 1) a woman 2) who is acting like a spoiled, entitled, rude and insensitive man. According to the NY Post, she's been dragging drivers from their cars and publicly castrating them. That does seem a bit extreme, but... According to the NY Times, she's set up lots of pedestrian-only zones and lots of bike lanes. They also feel that mistakes have been made; by whom is an exercise left for the reader. An ambitious Democrat named Wienerschnitzel hates her for the bike lanes. That alone might be taken as a positive endorsement.

But I don't really know anything about what she's done, or whether it's any good. Any city dwellers care to comment?

Today's time square sentinel makes careful note: "members of Congress" are muttering about "violations" by Emperor O'Barry of nothing less than the 1973 "war powers act"!

Ahh, the war powers act...the war powers act... slowly I turn... step by step.... What a fucking noodle rod of chastisement that has been all these years, eh?

I suspect almost anyone of my Woodstockian generation recalls the feckless spasm of representative gubmint that produced it, way back there during the oh so horrific Nixonian miasma. But dare I say the memory comes only with a certain wistful chortle?

What a notion, now: the war powers act, unleashed from the stone like the Golem, to crush Barry in its embrace. What a contemplation that is, eh, comrades?

Stillborn wouldn't be too unfair a description -- stillborn and then pickled in a milk bottle and left under Frank Church's desk in the senate. Such has been the utterly lifeless history of this mocked bit of midnight-hour playacting by our nation's legislature.

A noble attempt to override Uncle's overreach? Perhaps failed, but nonetheless magnificant in its aspiration?

Hell, no. The damn thing is only noble and magnificent in its cynical contrived impotence. It's just another witch-doctor brandishment, like that perpetually waved shrunken head, the nuclear option.

From day one of its enactment till this morning's bomb runs over Col Q's camel tent that solemn act of Congress has been mocked and traduced at every turn. The damn thing has been shit on like a park monument. There's been act-defying "armed interventions" by every, yes every, single succeeding POTifex maximus.

The whole business is just bitterly, laughably farcical.

Any mention of the war powers act deserves the purest form of Curly Howard's dukes-flying rampage. It's so infamous, so infuriating, so enervating, that merely at the mention, well we all oughta....

Alas, my sputter fails me here in mid-motion. Come on, Paine, why bother to saw the air like old Lear? Isn't it far far better each of us simply subsides into one of those satori acts of pitch black sarcasm? Haven't we had enough indignation over the failures of Congress for ten lifetimes? It is we who are the fools, to get ants in the pants here... no?

If we keep this rallying up, it's us pwog croakers and lefticulated earthworms that are the hopeless dupes, not the juke-box players at the Nueva York "Kabuki Times" -- 'tis we that are the mutual face-slapping stooges.

What are we shaking our fists at, if not each other? And we do it at every senseless galvanic twitch of this dead third appendage of gubmint, this hunk of ham trailing along after the mighty death star of the... republic.

For the sake of creative thinking, what if a panel of prostitutes deplored the conduct of the Secret Service agents who were caught taking senators to their hotel rooms? The condemnation would have much greater moral force that way.