But now, one of the remnants of the Bush 41 era has popped into the news with a simple statement he made at a speech given in another school. James Baker, who was Secretary of State during the first Gulf War go-around with Saddam and Company, was asked what he thought was the best way to continue attracting young people into government service - or more specifically, how to keep up the military in the recent wake of several costly and disastrous wars. His answer was simple: reinstate the military draft.

If you’re old enough to remember, or if you’re a student of recent history, you may recall when America last had a military draft - during the Vietnam War. And you may also have seen old news footage or still photographs of the protests that policy fostered - riots, sit-ins, draft card burning, college takeovers, etc. Bottom line: when America last had a military draft, we also had a whole never ending shitstorm of unhappiness to go along with it. So why on earth would we ever even consider walking down that road again?

For years now, Democratic congressman Charlie Rangel has been beating his drum about reinstating the draft - or as it is more properly known, the “Selective Service”. Meaning the government does the Selecting, and 18 to 25 year-old males do the Service. Up until now, his has been a lone voice - mostly because suggesting a reinstatement of the draft drew an uncomfortable parallel between our present predicaments in Iraq and Afghanistan and the seven-year nightmare of Vietnam in the sixties and early seventies. But now Former Secretary Baker seems to be taking the same position, and for the same general reasons as Rangel.

These two guys are universes apart philosphically, ideologically, and politically. But they share a common point of view on war - if you, either as a simple citizen or as an elected official, knew that your kid might suddenly have to drop everything, dress up in a camo suit, and go get shot at in some idiotic war started by some despotic idiot President over some dreamed up fantasy, then you might think twice before going ahead and giving the green light to such a policy.

As long as wars are owned by somebody else, and fought using somebody else’s children as cannon fodder, wars are easier to approve. There’s not as much personal investment in the process or in the outcome with some luckless volunteers carrying all the weight. But when you know that it might be your kids drafted into defusing those roadside bombs and eating those rocket-propelled grenades, it could be a whole lot harder to just give blanket approval to whatever some nutjob in the White House decides is a good idea. Which is exactly what we ended up doing after 9/11.

Folks, you’re just gonna love this model. To begin with, I can guarantee you that no other car manufacturer in the world is offering this - nobody! Oh sure, there will be others (and soon) who will try to imitate this, who will try to dazzle you with the sheer size of their failure, with their incredible inability to change with the times and stop building monster trucks and SUVs. But when they do, remember - you saw it here first!

This new model is smaller and lower, with less overhead and little under the hood. But it’s no slouch - it can go from huge profits to $20 billion in debt in less than 18 months! It’s sleek and aerodynamic, and cuts through the hot air coming out of Washington with ease. And thanks to our friends at Fiat, who helped us build this little beauty, it even idles with an Italian accent! No folks, you’re not gonna find a vehicle like this anywhere else in the world - and all with a government-backed warranty!

And, we have some extra special deals for those of you who are former Chrysler auto workers - for a limited time only, we’re offering you up to 39 weeks of unemployment benefits to go along with losing that job you’ve had for 30 years. No no, don’t thank us - thank your local UAW representative. And let’s not forget our thousands of suppliers and others we owe money to who helped make all this possible. We’re rolling out a second new model just for you - the all new Dodge Creditors! Sign on the dotted line and you fine folks can drive away with 29 cents for every dollar we owe you! Well, at least some of you will anyway - your mileage may vary. As for the rest of you, well - that’s Car Biz!

So get down to your local Chrysler dealer (if you can find one that’s still in business) and sign up today for the all new Chrysler Bankruptcy. We’re expecting a huge turnout for this, in fact we’re decided to shut down all of our manufacturing plants indefinitely until the orders start rolling in. Accept no imitations - those copycats over at General Motors will have a competing model out in a month or two, but by then our model will have set the standard for manufacturing collapse in the twenty-first century.

Arlen Specter is one of the five oldest Senators still serving in Congress. He’s been there since 1966, and always as a Republican. He’s had two bouts with cancer, but he always came back, and was always one of the staunchest defenders of the ideology espoused by the GOP. But lately, cracks had begin to form in that ideology - Specter was one of only three Republican Senators to break ranks with their party and vote in favor of Barack Obama’s stimulus bill a couple of months back.

So now, just as the never-ending saga of the Minnesota Senate election last fall finally appears about to resolve itself in favor of the Democrats, Specter suddenly defects. He switched sides faster than an Afghan Warlord flipping between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. And with his defection, combined with the likely victory of Al Franken in Minnesota, the Democrats will have their filibuster-proof magic number of 60 seats in the Senate at last.

But hold on a sec. As late as last year Specter was asked, since he seemed to disagree with party policy more and more, why he didn’t just become a Democrat. His answer - “because I’m a Republican”. See, that’s the kind of political non-answer to a direct question that gets you reelected to your senate seat for eight consecutive terms. Well, he ain’t no Republican now - he’s decided to bray with the Donkeys instead of pray with the Elephants.

Unfortunately, this behavior appears to make Specter an obvious hypocrite. Back in 2001, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords, a Republican, got so steamed at his own party he left and became an Independent. And when he did, Arlen Specter totally ripped him a new one. He even proposed a new rule that would prevent serving politicians from switching parties while in office. At the time he said “that kind of instability is not good for governance of the country and the Senate.” But I guess what’s good for Arlen takes precedence over even that.

Specter has great power in Washington because he’s one of the last surviving secret keepers. Before beginning his career in the Senate, Specter was an attorney and counsel for the Warren Commission that investigated the assasination of JFK. In fact, it is widely believed that Specter is the author of the infamous “single bullet” fantasy that was used to tie Lee Harvey Oswald up into a neat “lone nut” package for sale to the American public. The point being, he’s no stranger to pulling the wool over America’s eyes - and being a Democrat instead of a Republican won’t change that one bit.

And although the recent “Swine Flu” scare might seem like something new, it’s really not. It’s just another variation on the “mass death by silent microorganism” scenario that’s been with us for dozens of years. A couple of decades ago it was known as the Hong Kong flu, then we had the Avian or “Bird” flu panic just a few years back. And in between, we were all supposed to get wiped out by Mad Cow disease - none of which happened.

All this fuss also serves as a clever distraction for everything else that’s going on right now. The Obama Administration would like you to spend more time worrying about catching Swine Flu than about the Gazillions of dollars they are pouring down the national financial rathole in order to try and jerk the economy back to life. Besides, all this gives the national Centers for Disease Control some visibility and something to do. Their officials come down out of their ivory tower and put their public service hats on and stand in front of the cameras pretending they are actually in control of the situation. When in reality, the only things they really control are the Billions of dollars we waste every year on bloated and ineffective government agencies like the CDC, and the FDA, and FEMA.

In the fall of every year, the CDC starts hounding the American public about getting flu shots. Which is inevitably followed by a “shortage” of supply, which helps nicely to drive up the demand for flu shots even more. Then, around the first of the year, the CDC announces that the current flu strain has “mutated”, meaning that the current flu vaccine they’ve been jabbing folks in the arm with for six months will be ineffective against it. Seems like every year this is the same scenario, over and over - and how that passes for “disease control” is certainly beyond me.

And of course, there are still those folks out there that believe every sneeze is the result of some biological attack by Al-Qaeda, or a faulty product from China, or some Russian bio-electric satellite gizmo. In the post-9/11 world, every unpleasant event is seen as a potential terrorist attack. We spend so much time on the edge of our seats, it’s no wonder we keep slipping off and falling on our face. And the current panic is over the flu - maybe a newer variation than we’re used to, but still just the flu. It’s not the Black Death and it’s not Nuclear Annihilation, it’s just a new stain of an unpleasant viral disease that used to be called the “grippe”.

So get a grip.

If you posted the odds on this plan in Vegas, it would certainly qualify as a long shot. This is not a marriage made in heaven, as these two auto companies really have very little in common and nothing to really offer each other. Fiat is probably looking at the failed marriage between Chrysler and Daimler from a few years back. Even 100+ year-old giant Daimler couldn’t make a horse race of it with Chrysler. They even had their goofy chairman Dieter Zetsche personally shilling for Chrysler in their tongue-in-cheek television ads.

But in the end German practicality dictated the ultimate outcome, and Daimler unloaded Chrysler. And there’s no reason to believe that Chrysler and Fiat will somehow find each other irresistible and end up skipping merrily down the automotive road for the rest of their days. The Treasury Department, with a huge financial and political stake in this whole deal, doesn’t appear to have very much faith in it either. The fact is, Treasury seems to have already decided that Chrysler is going to be a bankrupt company very soon.

They have entered into secret negotiations with the UAW and are willing to protect their pensions and retiree health care benefits if a Chapter 11 filing for Chrysler becomes a reality. They also appear to have been quietly negotiating with Chrysler’s creditors and pressuring them to accept some ridiculously reduced amount for what the car company owes them. The latest offer from the Feds is 22 cents on the dollar and a 5% stake in the new, reorganized company. However, the creditors want 65 cents on the dollar and a 40% stake. Stay tuned.

But there’s more to the story than just saving jobs and pensions and an American automotive icon. The U.S. Government appears to be crash testing a Chrysler bankruptcy to see how it all works. It’s a practice run, a rehearsal if you will, for the much bigger potential bankruptcy of General Motors, when and if that also becomes necessary. They’re out there on the driving range with a bucket of Chrysler balls figuring out how to hit them long and straight, so when they step up to the first tee they can swing at those GM balls with confidence.

It will be interesting to see what kind of crash test results come from all this. Airbags aren’t going to help much in this impact, and survivability in the crush zones will be questionable at best.

Fidel seems to have his fatigues in a wad because of a comment made by Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother who took over the reins of the family oxcart a couple of years ago. Raul said Cuba was willing to sit down with the U.S. and discuss important issues including human rights, freedom of speech, and political prisoners. So he certainly left the impression in the mind of Obama that virtually “everything” was discussable. Uh -uh, not so says Fidel - don’t listen to him, he’s just my kid brother. Sure, he’s 77 years old, but he’s still my kid brother.

Castro now insists that Obama “misinterpreted” his brother’s comments. This is a little like when President Ronald Reagan, in the midst of an Alzheimer’s brain fart, used to say something that seemed to indicate a major change in U.S. policy. Then his handlers would jump in and say the President “misspoke”, so just forget all that good stuff he was babbling about yesterday. This is essentially what Fidel is doing, except instead of blaming his kid brother for screwing up he’s decided to blame Obama instead.

One concession that Obama was hoping for from Cuba was getting them to reduce or eliminate a tax they impose on money sent to Cuban citizens from exiled relatives in the States. Cuba currently slaps a ten percent tax on every dollar that comes into Cuba in that way. Castro claims that tax money goes to help provide free health care and free education, and to subsidize food for his people. But here in America, health care costs are beyond the reach of millions and a college degree can cost $100k. So naturally, we would like Cuba to come to their senses and do things the way we do them in the land of the free.

But let’s not forget those important issues like human rights and freedom of speech. Because in Cuba ordinary citizens can have their phones tapped and their mail read without a court order, where as in the U.S. - well, bad example. Maybe we should talk about freedom of freedom of speech instead. In Cuba, talking smack about government leaders can get you financially and politically destroyed, whereas here in America - oops, that’s the Dan Rather story isn’t it? Another bad example.

Never mind all that, let’s talk about all those political prisoners in Cuba. The ones being held against their will without being charged with any crime, being subjected to torture and being denied access to lawyers. That’s just wrong, and you won’t find any of that here in America. But it’s been happening for years in Cuba - especially in one little corner of the island known as Guantanamo Bay. Whoops - another bad example. Let’s just forget the whole thing.

The most recent revelations have come in the form of memos written by the Justice Department during the Bush Administration. They detail the forms and frequency of “interrogation methods” that were applied to post-9/11 “enemy combatants” to get the “detainees” to provide “actionable information”. Which is all politically correct government jargon and Pentagon-speak - translated, it means those memos spell out exactly how the United States scooped up suspected bad guys, threw them in a prison camp, and tortured the crap out of them until they sang like canaries.

And the primary tactic used to meet those objectives appears to have been the one commonly known as “waterboarding”. That’s not surfing lingo for some radical wave riding technique, it’s a surprisingly low-tech process involving an inclined bench, a smelly rag, some polluted water, and a generous helping of righteous fervor. And during these little adventures in intelligence gathering, the waterboardee reportedly has the sensation of drowning. What fun.

According to these memos, the really bad guys we had in chains- like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the crappo de tutti crappies - got the royal waterboarding treatment. Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in total and Mohammed was served up on the slanty board 183 times - in just one month. Now, how many of these treatments does it take before the waterboardee realizes that he’s not going to drown, and begins to just put up with it somehow, unpleasant as it may be? And since most of the alleged terrorists being waterboarded were Middle Easterners, Arabs  - desert people, that is - how much actual fear of drowning they might have is open to debate. I mean, if you’re born and raised in the Amazon rain forest you don’t usually end up with inordinate fears about freezing to death on an ice floe in the arctic, do you?

But beyond all that, a little math is in order. Doing anything 183 times in one month means doing t roughly six times per day, every day. That’s a lot - most people probably don’t yawn that often. If you eat regularly, you only have 90 meals a month on average. So during the month of March 2003, our intelligence goons felt it necessary to torture - er, waterboard - Khalid at least twice as often as they fed him. Twice as often. And still, it apparently took them 183 tries to get him to tell them something they wanted to hear.

Seems like even a real slow learner would probably figure out after fifty or sixty tries that this intelligence gathering tactic wasn’t working too well. At that point, all they were doing is wasting water and making themselves look bad. And doing it 183 times in one month just makes the detainers look inept and the detainees look resolute. Unless, of course, it was all super secret and nobody would ever find out…

John McCain as a young man was a hard drinking and hard driving Navy man, son and grandson of two Admirals. He liked to party and stay up all night drinking and carousing - and he liked gambling. Even later in life, there are legendary stories about John McCain the Senator dropping a bundle of his beer heiress wife’s cash at the gaming tables. And McCain’s gambling style was not to go halfway - he apparently believed in the old gambling rule that the more you bet, the less you lose when you win.

And according to Culvahouse, that’s the way McCain saw the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. An original 26 (!) potential candidates were winnowed down to a short list of six, including Palin. And McCain’s vetting team claims that they knew everything about Sarah Palin and her family well before she was picked as the potential VP - the teenaged daughter’s pregnancy, the Troopergate issue, the whole nine yards. Because McCain needed to know exactly what cards he was holding - he couldn’t take a chance that that Jack he was holding might really be a Joker.

Well, nobody’s gonna stand up and contradict Culvahouse at this point (least of all McCain or Palin), so he can say whatever he wants. Maybe the vetting team was really super thorough, and maybe Sarah was super honest about everything. Or maybe there’s some major league ass-covering taking place here. It just seems a bit odd that all this comes out only a few days after McCain essentially dissed Palin on the Tonight Show by very overtly omitting her from the short list of potential saviors for the GOP (see McCain Plays the “Sarah Who?” Game With Jay Leno). Culvahouse says Palin “would’ve made a great vice president”, but McCain now seems to think her potential ends at that level.

This smells an awful lot like another indication that the GOP was being very manipulative in how the Republican Presidential Ticket would be structured. Culvahouse says McCain could only pick a running mate that they had vetted, but who decided who got selected for the vetting process in the first place? It would have been easy for the Republican brain trust to control who got vetted and who didn’t - for example in Palin’s case, there were any number of things in her past and present that they could have used to disqualify her - if they had really wanted to.

And in the end, they even made McCain think the decision was his. They presented Palin to him in gambling terms, telling him she was the “high risk, high reward” option. And having been a risk-taker all his life, McCain just couldn’t resist pushing all his chips out onto the table and going for broke.

In the East, pissed off taxpayers threw a Tea Party in New Hampshire’s state capitol and demanded a stop to such extravagances as the new $72,000 public bathroom recently installed at the State House in Concord. Over a hundred protesters showed up carrying signs, and demanding - well, who knows. Maybe that the fancy john be replaced by a row of port-a-potties or something. Unfortunately, many of the angry mob had too much coffee and had to use, umm, the “facilities”. That’s right, the very same luxury loo they were protesting against.

Traveling down to Texas, we find Governor Rick Perry insisting that his state can secede from the union if it wants to. Secede and go where? It’s not like you can just pack up an entire state into a fleet of rented Penske trucks and haul it off to greener pastures somewhere. Texas would either have to go it alone as an independent entity, or perhaps become part of Mexico again. Now there’s a sterling idea - trade your tax and spending problems in America for the poverty, open corruption, and escalating drug war in Mexico. Go for it Rick- nothing succeeds like secession.

Then if we make a right turn and head up to Minnesota, we find the land of a thousand lakes is still under water from last November’s Senatorial election. Six months have come and gone, and they’re still counting and recounting the votes from that election. There have been numerous lawsuits, episodes of name-calling, spurious accusations and the like, but for some reason nobody seems to know who the next Senator from Minnesota will be. The political parties hate each other, the political candidates hate each other, and this is not going to end well (if it ever actually ends). Remember, this is the state that elected Jesse “The Body” Ventura as Governor, so anything can happen there.

And finally, we move west to - where else - Alaska. America’s Last Frontier, where an ongoing battle has been raging between Governor Sarah Palin and the state’s legislators. They think their Governor spends far too much time courting the national Media to enhance her own political future and is largely ignoring the needs of Alaska. Palin, on the other hand, is struggling to cope with increasing deficits following the bursting of the oil-price bubble, and is also dealing with a few personal and family squabbles that you may have read about. She may not actually be able to see Russia from her house, but she certainly thinks she can see the White House. Whether she survives politically long enough to get there is another matter.

The bottom line? The grass is no greener (or browner) anywhere else than where you are right now. Stay put and, keep your head down, and try to ride it out.

Naturally, Leno wanted to know what the hell had happened to the once mighty Republicans. Specifically, he wanted to know who’s going to end up leading the Grand Old Party, besides Rush Limbaugh that is. And in response McCain rattled off a few names - all of them prominent Governors, some reasonably well known, others a bit obscure. One of them was his former opponent for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney. But the most interesting name was the one that he didn’t mention, a name that never came up once in that conversation about Republican leaders - Sarah Palin.

Think back to around ten days after the election last November, when John McCain made his first public appearance after losing big time to Barack Obama. He showed up (surprise, surprise) on the Tonight Show, sitting in that vary same chair and talking to that very same Jay Leno. And back then, he was telling Jay that Sarah Palin was not to blame for the election loss, that she was a big boost to the ticket, and that she had a great political career ahead of her. In fact, he went so far as to say that Sarah Palin was the future of the Republican Party.

Well, I guess they sure don’t make futures the way they used to. Because here’s John McCain, almost six months later to the day, acting as if Sarah Palin never even politically existed. It really makes you wonder what kind of back room deal was cut to put her on the ticket in the first place. Rumor was that he only met her once before she was named as his running mate, so the story that it was all his idea and his “choice” is a little hard to swallow.

My suspicion is that Joe Lieberman would have been McCain’s first choice, but the GOP shot that one down like McCain’s famous flight over Hanoi. Under pressure to choose a woman, he might have considered New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, but she probably would have said no (or maybe he did ask and she did say no). He might have even considered Mitt Romney at one point, but Romney was a bit of a religious liability (being a Mormon) - not to mention the fact that he owned even more houses than McCain did.

So, the GOP Election Machine probably sat McCain down and told him that his running mate would be Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and he’d just better get used to it. But in all fairness, arranged marriages between children of warring tribes in Waziristan probably have a better chance of survival than this political marriage ever did.

So it looks like the deconstruction of the Republican Party actually dates back to the beginning of August of last year, when the GOP brain trust put that magic match together. And - remember, you heard it here first - at some point, Sarah Palin will end up as the scapegoat for everything that’s happened to the Republicans since then.