I’ve spent a lot of time studying Republican political anatomy.   You see, I’m not only an armchair anthropologist, but I’m a social neuro-surgeon (a brand-new expertise, created today).   After careful review of all available relevant data, I have developed a precise chart (click on the thumbnail below) detailing each of the major features of the modern Republican brain.  

No, you won’t find “Iraq” on this anatomical diagram, even though it reveals each of the major neural substructures found in the modern Republican brain.  That’s because the modern Repubublican has developed relatively recently.  No specialized “Iraq” module has thus had time to evolve. You will nonetheless find each of the brain structures that, working together, compel the instigation of multiple fear-induced, needless, destructive, ineptly planned, corrupt and potentially non-ending military conflicts in the Middle East. 

Whenever sufficient numbers of these malignant features are found in the brains of those who hold substantial political power, one can expect the atrophy of an entire country, absent immediate and dramatic political resuscitation. 

Without further ado, here it is.  Just click on the thumbnail for all the gory details:

If you’d like to review some fascinating and rigorous psychological data of what it means to be a conservative, check out this post regarding a study by Frank Sulloway or this post considering the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

Was it Comcast?  Whoever it was, this tactic is disgusting.

There was huge turnout at [the Feb 25] public hearing in Boston on the future of the Internet. Hundreds of concerned citizens arrived to speak out on the importance of an open Internet. Many took the day off from work — standing outside in the Boston cold — to see the FCC Commissioners. But when they reach the door, they’re told they couldn’t come in.

According to this article in Harpers, the Congressional elite include most of the members of Congress.   Consider this, for example:

Since 2005, at just ten of D.C.’s priciest restaurants, House membvers have spent more than $5.4 million of political funds.

The title to the article is “Beltway bacchanal: Congress lives high on the contributor’s dime.” 

I’m more concerned than ever that this well-entrenched and well-monied lobbyist-filled culture will repel most good-hearted citizens from ever wanting to serve in government.   Combine this repulsive culture with the threats that even good-hearted people would face if they dare ran for high public office, and it leaves you wondering how Congress is run by any well-motivated people at all.

It appears that John McCain has put himself into situations suggesting that he had an sexual affair with a 40-year-old female lobbyist.  This politically devastating information can’t possibly be relevant to the current presidential campaign, unless…

Unless McCain has long-supported a political party that has consciously decided to make sexual moral pronouncements a major and unrelenting part of its political existence, all-the-while conflating the U.S. Constitution with the Ten Commandments and spewing this mentally-stunted version of democracy in a holier-than-thou piss-on you-if-you’re-different-than-who-we-claim-to-be sort of way.  McCain, of course, is also a prominent member of the Republican serial polygamy club, another manifestation of Republican hypocrisy when it comes to alleged Republican sexual purity.

Those conservatives who get angry at seeing political smear tactics involving sexual innuendo need to shut up and take this medicine because they’ve all earned it by voluntarily associating with a political party that specializes in hypocritical villainizing (sexual, racial, immigration status, religious beliefs, you name it).  If those who are upset by the release of this information regarding McCain and Iseman want these sorts of incidents to become irrelevant, they need to tell the Republican Party (by voting) to get government out of America’s bedrooms, for starters.

[The General George Meade statute located in front of the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, D.C., created by Charles Grafley in 1927, apparently in a cultural climate much different than our own.  Posted here just for the hell of it - photo by Erich Vieth]

We’ll know that we’re cured of our obsession with the sexual practices of politicians when a politician’s private sexual choices are no more interesting to us than the private sexual choices of a sports celebrity or a famous movie director.   Can you imagine refusing to go to a movie because the director once had a marital affair?

Incidentally, private sexual conduct has nothing to do with whether a person would be a competent president.  Consider that each of the following presidents reportedly had affairs: Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy , Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland (who had a child with his mistress) and Thomas Jefferson.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg, because extremely powerful men are highly likely to have sexual affairs. It’s a fact of life, though this information often doesn’t come out until 30 years after the man’s death.  While that fact is not publicly known regarding a particular powerful living man, it is usually because he has a close-knitted circle of powerful comrades who keep that knowledge in check (for example, visit the above links and read about John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt).

The real dirt about McCain is not that he might have had sex with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, but that he spends so much time with lobbyists.  McCain, the “anti-lobbyist,” is very comfortable with lobbyists.  For instance, consider with whom McCain huddles these days now that he’s essentially wrapped up the Republican nomination:

[W]hen McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington’s lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.

Here in America, we get the support of superdelegates the tried and true way.   If you want a superdelegate’s support, pay them money.   This sordid practice was described by Massie Ritsch, Communications Director for the Center for Responsive Politics, in an interview with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow:

MASSIE RITSCH: Well, what we did, Amy, was look back to 2005 and the 2006 election cycle and take a look the contributions that Clinton and Obama have made to the superdelegates, who are also elected officials themselves and have reelection campaigns, election campaigns that they have to raise money for. And what we’ve found is that, since then, Clinton and Obama have have contributed about $900,000 to these superdelegates. And then we’ve also found an interesting correlation, that you could predict with about 80 percent certainty which candidate these superdelegates would endorse, based on how much money they’ve gotten in campaign contributions from them.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait. Can you explain why are the candidates giving these delegates money?

MASSIE RITSCH: Well, I think what they were doing was giving other Democrats money. I don’t think they were thinking of them as superdelegates at the time, because we’re talking about the last election cycle, for the most part. But that’s what politicians do to get each other elected and reelected. I mean, it’s one way that you build relationships and introduce yourself to the rest of the team. You’re expected to support each other. And when you have money in your campaign coffers and someone else is in need of money in theirs, there’s often a transfer, a contribution made to help them out. And then the expectation is that the favor will be repaid somehow down the road.

AMY GOODMAN: And just be clear who the superdelegates are, they’re all current members of Congress?

MASSIE RITSCH: Well, they’re not all current members of Congress, but the ones that we were looking at were the elected officials: current members of Congress who are Democrats, state governors. And then, the rest of the superdelegates are party officials.

Ralph Nader recently sent a pointed letter to President Bush.   The letter concerned a annual national tragedy of 58,000 of needless workplace deaths.  Here is an excerpt (from Common Dreams):

Dear President Bush:

I was listening to your address before the self-described Conservative Political Action Committee gathering in Washington, D.C. last week, while reviewing materials on occupational hazards in the workplace. The contrast between your declarations and the ongoing annual tragedy of 58,000 Americans losing their lives due to workplace diseases and traumas (OSHA figures) was astonishing and deplorable.

Your remarks included such phrases as “You and I believe in accountability;” “People should be responsible for their actions;” “Maintaining a culture of life;” and that “My number one priority is to protect you;” “All human life is precious and deserves to be protected.”

These are words and phrases that you have been using year after year in your capacity as a judicially-selected President who has sworn to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the land.

Therefore, let us apply your verbal sensitivities about accountability, responsibility and the safety of working Americans, to your sworn duty to uphold the job safety laws of your Administration.

Is the United States doing everything it can to protect its citizens from deaths and injuries from exposure to chemicals?  Not at all.  In fact, the U.S. is working hard to keep its citizens in the dark, according to this disturbing article from Harpers.  The Harpers article concerns the E.U. chemical regulation called REACH—Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals:

Europe is now compelling other nations’ manufacturers to conform to regulations that are far more protective of people’s health than those in the United States. Europe has emerged not only as the world’s leading economic power but also as one of its moral leaders. Those roles were once filled by the United States.

The U.S. media needs to focus harder.  A death is a death, but we get distracted in this time of our “war” on “terrorism.”   For our news media, a death at the hands of a “terrorist” is 1,000 times more newsworthy than most other deaths (including most other preventable deaths).  There is no good reason for this disparity.

For more on deaths and statistics, “mere statistics.”visit this article regarding some of the many ways 3,000 people could die.  And see this post for many examples of mere statistics that should deeply move us.  Real life spiders make us jump and the cancellation of a TV show makes us visibly angry, while most real life deaths bore us. 

New unbelievable rule from the Bush Administration, as reported by MSNBC:

A Bush administration plan to crack down on contract fraud has a multibillion-dollar loophole: The proposal to force companies to report abuse of taxpayer money will not apply to work overseas, including projects to secure and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why these two exceptions? Is it because the system would be overwhelmed by the fraud they would find? Or will one best find the answer by following the money?

“I hate to sound cynical, but what lobbyist working for a contractor in Iraq wanted this get-out-of-jail card?” asked Patrick Burns, spokesman for the government watchdog group.

I learned of this detestable new Bush policy on the same day I received my copy of Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers,” a DVD by Robert Greenwald. I’ll comment on this video soon.

This bit of depressing news was reported by The Crypt: 

An attempt to strip lawsuit immunity for telecom firms which helped the government tap phone calls fell well short in the Senate, leaving liberal Democrats on the losing side of what they believe is a fundamental civil liberties debate.

Only 31 senators _ all Democrats _ voted to take away retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies facing lawsuits over wiretaps carried out under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Sixty-seven senators _ a mix of Republicans and Democrats _ voted against the amendment.

The vote also provided an opportunity to showcase the key differences on national security between presidential candidates, as Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), voted against immunity for telecoms, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), voted to keep immunity in the bill. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) did not show up for the vote. All three candidates were in the Washington area for the region’s three primaries today.

For more background, see this post by Glenn Greenwald.

Is there a better way to spend the money we are currently spending in Iraq?

The January 18, 2008 issue of Nature reports that Congress is telling NASA that NASA needs to dig up $60 Million in funding for a planet-hunting telescope out of its general budget, money that simple doesn’t exist (this article is available on line only to subscribers).  NASA is outraged. Congress will not provide any additional funding. The stated purpose of the project is undeniably worthy according to scientists.  Because of the attitude displayed by Congress, however, other NASA projects are also endangered, including “missions to study dark energy, gravity waves and X-ray astronomy.”

The thing that struck me on reading this article is the tiny amount in controversy regarding this NASA project, relative to enormous size of the Iraq budget.  We spend $275 million per day to do the things we do in Iraq.

This makes me wonder? How many other worthy science projects are not getting funding because of Iraq expenses? It would be interesting and depressing to see people raise their hands in response to this question:  How many of you have had federal funding denied on worthy projects because of the “lack of money in the budget.”  We need to constantly call “lack of money” for what it is. It’s not lack of money.  Rather, we’re spending that money on Iraq.

It’s not simply that we are pissing away money on the “War on Terror”  (BTW, it’s not a war and it’s not about terror, though it pretends to be).  And this “war” effort is even worse than a simple misallocation of money.  We are causing massive political damage by doing the things we are doing in Iraq. People around the world hate what we are doing in Iraq and have no respect for the reasons we utter for pursuing this “war.”  The great majority of Americans now agree with the people around the world (those people we used to scoff at when they doubted our intentions and methods).

How many worthy projects will never be funded? And how many unfunded humanitarian projects are not being funded because of the “war”? What could that money have accomplished?  What about new cures for malaria, TB, cancer and dozens of other diseases that take the lives of millions every year?  What about funding new methods of conserving, generating and storing energy, to lessen our dependence on oil?  What about new improved methods of birth control, to reduce the demand for abortions, which, in turn, might put somewhat of a damper on the culture war that is tearing the U.S. apart?

Dollars and hours are fungible, which means that the Iraq “war” is utterly immoral, especially so in that it has accomplished none of its stated objectives; further, it’s failed to accomplish those objectives at horrific cost.  We can see much of the carnage and destruction, but there is equal amount of damage that we can’t see.  This invisible damage consists of things that we could have done with the time and money we have squandored on Iraq.  Iraq is, and always was, a domestic issue.

All of these unfunded projects must be viewed in the context of the hundreds of thousands of people killed and wounded and the millions that have been displaced in pursuit of the misbegotten so-called “war.”

The Center for Public Intergrity has now added them up.  There were 935 lies from high-ranking Bush officials.  All of them designed to convince us to invade Iraq for no good reason.  Here’s a summary:

The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

There are almost 300 of them in this comprehensive list. Dozens of these scandals would seem to constitute impeachable offenses, in my opinion.

The media can’t deal with candidates that buck the system.  Glenn Greenwald discusses three dramatic cases, John Edwards, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee.  On Edwards, Greenwald writes:

It is very striking how little Edwards’ substantive critique of our political system has penetrated into the national discourse. That’s because the centerpiece of his campaign is a critique that is a full frontal assault on our political establishment. His argument is not merely that the political system needs reform, but that it is corrupt at its core — “rigged” in favor of large corporate interests and their lobbyists, who literally write our laws and control the Congress. Anyone paying even casual attention to the extraordinary bipartisan effort on behalf of telecom immunity, and so many other issues driven almost exclusively by lobbyists, cannot reasonably dispute this critique.

Yet because that argument indicts the same Beltway culture of which our political journalists are an integral part, and further attacks the system’s power brokers who are the friends, sources, and peers of those journalists, they instinctively react with confusion, scorn and hostility towards Edwards’ campaign. They condescendingly dismiss it as manipulative populist swill, or cynically assume that it’s just a ploy to distinguish himself by “moving left.” In the eyes of our Beltawy press, the idea that our political system is “rigged” or corrupt must be anything other than true or sincerely held.

Marty Kaplan writes about big  problems with our political primary system:

What I’m trying to get at is the stupendous sense of powerlessness among our citizenry that our current political system has created. It’s as though the best democracy can do is to cough up this beast that we’re being required yet again to ride. The nominating system, despite the folksy patina that quadrennially makes reporters swoon, is thoroughly idiotic, and it’s gotten worse every time than the cycle before, yet we treat it like a force of nature, not an act of hacks. Money is more important than ever. And though the Web has enabled unprecedented citizen pushback on candidate deception and media spinelessness, its reach feels puny, compared to the paid messages that special-interests can buy in the marketplace; its impact feels impotent, compared to the partisan fearmongering posing as news and the circus acts masquerading as information on our mass media.

Electability is much on Democrats’ minds. But no matter who runs against the GOP next fall, the political system we pretend to have inherited from the Founders could still produce a President Giuliani, a President Romney, a president more Bush than Bush, more Cheney than Cheney. This is not the genius of American democracy. This is the pathology of a terrible systemic illness. Some people may be too busy waving flags or scarfing corn dogs to notice the symptoms.

Compliments of Dana Milbank.  For those who’d like to reminisce. 

Paul Krugman points his finger at the ever-more-visible source of the problem. Our economy is extremely fragile and we are all about to pay the price–we’ll not all of us . . .

Now the bill is coming due, and almost everyone - that is, almost everyone except the people responsible - is having to pay.

[The] people who should have been alert to the dangers, and taken precautionary measures, instead blithely assured Americans that everything was fine, and even encouraged them to take out risky mortgages. Yes, Alan Greenspan, that means you.

But another part of the answer lies in what hasn’t happened to the men on that Fortune cover — namely, they haven’t been forced to give back any of the huge paychecks they received before the folly of their decisions became apparent.

Around 25 years ago, American business — and the American political system — bought into the idea that greed is good. Executives are lavishly rewarded if the companies they run seem successful: last year the chief executives of Merrill and Citigroup were paid $48 million and $25.6 million, respectively.

According to this post at Alternet, there are many forms of rampant self-indulgence.  The GOP specializes in the most pernicious forms:

While the culture at large was adjusting to the idea that families don’t all look the same and that private sexual morality was not the business of the state, the decadent economic elite and right wing ideologues had systematically defined deviancy down to the point where Moynihan’s deviant “altruism” can be illustrated as giving bonuses to workers who denied cancer patients their medicine; his deviant “opportunism” is seen as giving hundreds of millions of dollars to failed business leaders who lost their companies billions; and his deviant “normalizing” can be observed as society tossing aside its taboo against government-sanctioned torture.

If you think it’s difficult to read about the way America is wasting lives in Iraq, it’s just the beginning.  In an article entitled “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush,” Vanity Fair has examined the ways in which the Bush Administration has wrecked the American economy.  There is lots of bad news to share, including this:

Think of the interest we are paying, year after year, on the almost $4 trillion of increased debt burden—even at 5 percent, that’s an annual payment of $200 billion, two Iraq wars a year forever. Think of the taxes that future governments will have to levy to repay even a fraction of the debt we have accumulated. And think of the widening divide between rich and poor in America, a phenomenon that goes beyond economics and speaks to the very future of the American Dream.

Joseph Stiglitz, the author of this article, is the former chief economist of the World Bank and a Nobel laureate.  On the heels of this scathing report, consider this additional article reporting near-panic in light of recent Congressional testimony by Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke.

Whenever we take the time, we are better able to see that all issues are anchored by deep issues.   That’s the kind of day it was for me today. 

I’m in Washington D.C., attending the Consumer Rights Litigation Conference sponsored by the National Consumer Law Center.   NCLC is an invaluable resource for those of us who advocate and litigate for consumer rights.  At one of the afternoon sessions today, I had a chance to hear a panel of consumer advocates discuss recent developments in federal law regarding consumer rights. 

It’s quite depressing, for the most part.  You see, well-monied corporate financial interests own Congress.   Consumer rights are on the ropes.   Many industries are free to lie, cheat, steal and to impose onerous terms on consumers, thanks to the best federal laws money can buy.  They do this through corporate immunity, preemption and the imposition of mandatory binding arbitration before biased arbitrators.  All of these were gifts from Congress in return for huge amounts of money contributed by lobbyists.

I’ve been to Washington D.C. several times before, and I’ve always reveled in the history and the architecture.  

Now, I can’t help but feel ambivalent.  It’s a city awash in immense amounts of corrupt money. 

We are a country that preaches that the People are the government, but that is less true than ever.  If you don’t believe me, just try to call your Congressional representative, mentioning that you are a concerned citizen.  See if you can get five minutes with him or her.  Then offer to contribute $100,000 to his or her next campaign and see what happens. Here’s more proof that our lawmakers have little or no conscience when it comes to bribes:  note last week’s revelation that the head of the Consumer Products Safety Commission sees no problems taking $60,000 in gifts and trips from businesses she is charged with regulating.

Back to NCLC.  Here’s what kind of work NCLC does.  NCLC members represent the interests of un-powerful people (which includes many middle class folks these days).  It provides consumer lawyers like me with information that we need to litigate cases against powerful corporate interests.  I’ve sued predatory lenders that include payday lenders, title lenders and sub-prime mortgage companies; for each of these suits, I’ve drawn upon the guidance of NCLC.  When big corporate interests break state laws, many of them are allowed to hide behind mandatory arbitration clauses that they unilaterally impose upon their customers.  The ability to do this was yet another gift from Congress. 

Before I go any further, let me make one thing clear.  Many consumers plunge themselves into debt irresponsibly and get exactly what they deserve when the debt collector comes calling.  When a people can’t afford medicine for their children, they should never go out and put a big-screen TV on the credit card.  Again, there are many (many) irresponsible consumers.  But not all consumers who struggle financially are irresponsible.  That is why consumer lawyers feel compelled to do the work they do.

NCLC helps me (and other consumer lawyers) by providing an excellent set of legal reference books, updated by practitioners.   They offer advice to those who are new to the consumer law field.   This information is invaluable.  (more…)

The story was published by the Washington Post:

Testimony that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to give yesterday to a Senate committee about the impact of climate change on health was significantly edited by the White House, according to two sources familiar with the documents.

For commentary see this post from Huffpo.

I wish I could have taken credit for writing an article I just read:  The presidential primary scam: Why the game is rigged, and why true democracy is only a secondary factor in the nation’s rush to nominate the next president.   The author is Michael Scherer. Here a taste of the article:

The whole stinking process was designed by dead men in smoky parlors and refined by faceless bureaucrats in hotel conference rooms. It is a nasty brew born of those caldrons of self-interest known as political parties. At every stage, advantage is parceled out like so much magic potion.

. . . This election cycle, a top Democratic candidate shaking someone’s hand in Miami before the end of January is breaking the rules, unless that someone is handing the candidate a check at the same time. To put it another way, Democrats’ communicating with voters has been barred in Florida, but taking money from voters is OK. To put it a third way, the system is not only irrational but offensive to the nation’s most basic values. “The only way that you can hear a candidate campaign is if you are willing to pay a campaign contribution,” explains Steven Geller, Florida’s exasperated state Senate Democratic leader. “It is astounding.”

They don’t teach all of this in school, because even a fourth-grader would get up from his desk and walk out of the classroom in protest.

The devil is in the details and this article provides plenty of details. 

Here a meta-aside.  Have you ever seen a parent dealing with an obstreperous three-year old?  A time-tested parent trick is to offer the child trivial choices, making the child believe that she is empowered with regard to the endeavor (“Would you like to clean your room before lunch or after lunch?”).  The trick is that the choices function as distractions, whereas the basic outcome is fixed from the get go. 

It’s the same thing with voting.   By the time Election Day rolls around, all of the deal-making has already occurred, much of it according to Byzantine political party procedures detailed by this article.  By the way, political parties are not even mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.  Good luck voting for a candidate who doesn’t ally himself with a political party.  The bottom line is that you get to vote for this corporate money corrupted candidate or that corporate money corrupted candidate.  It’s your choice!   That is the essence of the “freedom” to vote, that you have a choice that is not much of a choice at all.  

Why isn’t it a wide open field?  Because the whole process is corrupted by money (And see here and here). And because most highly qualified people want nothing to do with politics. And because even good people can be swift-boated into ignominy.  I recently disparaged the belief in free will.  The faux vote is a good example of how things feel wide open free when they are anything but (I can vote for this candidate or that one or I can throw away my vote on a write-in candidate).  The political system treats adult voters like three-year-olds.  

It takes immoral lawyers to make it all OK, according to this comprehensive article from the NYT.

Glenn Greenwald’s column at Salon.com shows how business is really done in the bowels of Washington D.C.   Yes, it’s always been ugly.  But has it ever been this ugly?

Speaking of the disease of the Washington Establishment, yet another report, this one from the Washington Post, indicates that “Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have said there is consensus that the [telecom] companies should have some form of relief” for past lawbreaking with regard to allowing the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping on their customers in violation of the law.

The same article details the generally commendable effort of some House Democrats at least to compel the telecoms to disclose what they actually did here, but the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee — the Dianne Feinsteins and Jay Rockefellers — are pronouncing a “consensus” that telecoms should receive amnesty even though they have no idea what the telecoms actually did and have little interest in finding out. I’m in the process of trying to work with the ACLU and other groups and bloggers to determine what, if anything, can be done to derail this absolute travesty, but as is often the case when there is bipartisan Beltway support for some corrupt Establishment-protecting measure, outside pressures are irrelevant.

The behavior of telecoms and their bipartisan cast of lobbyists and advisors, meeting in secret with key Democratic Senators and administration officials to concoct their amnesty scheme, becomes an impenetrable process. This is a perfect microcosm of the Beltway disease.

It’s called the American Dream because “you have to be asleep to believe it.”

I’ve rarely agreed so many times in four short minutes.

Here’s what Edwards had to say on August 23 in New Hampshire: 

Real change starts with being honest — the system in Washington is rigged and our government is broken. It’s rigged by greedy corporate powers to protect corporate profits. It’s rigged by the very wealthy to ensure they become even wealthier. At the end of the day, it’s rigged by all those who benefit from the established order of things. For them, more of the same means more money and more power. They’ll do anything they can to keep things just the way they are — not for the country, but for themselves.

[The system is] controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it’s perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to seriously cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed. This is the game of American politics and in this game, the interests of regular Americans don’t stand a chance.

This is spot on.  But Edwards wasn’t finished, as reported by Alternet:

“Let me tell you one thing I have learned from my experience,” Edwards said last week. “You cannot deal with them on their terms. You cannot play by their rules, sit at their table, or give them a seat at yours. They will not give up their power — you have to take it from them.”

Now we need a dozen other candidates telling it like it is, plus hundreds of elected officials willing to do something about it.  All of that is a long way off.   Edwards’ speech was important, though.  All important journeys begin with a single step.