I’m thinking that Gray Davis signed his own political death-warrant with his de-regulation policies.

It’s sort of the old Democratic Party dilemma. Enron gave the Democratic Party something on the order of 20 percent of its political donations — an 80-20 score is a landslide, but nonetheless… there… it is.

Some more of The voices of Enron:

#1: “You gotta think the economy is going to fucking get crushed, man. This is like a recession waiting to fucking happen.”

#2: “”This is where California breaks.”

“Yeah, it sure does man.”

#3: “What we need to do is to help in the cause of, ah, downfall of California. You guys need to pull your megawatts out of California on a daily basis.”

“Wow, fuckk ’em, right!”

#4: “You want to do some fat boys or, or whatever, man, you know, take advantage of it.”

(Ah… “Fat Boy”… was that the atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima or the one dropped over Nagasaki? I can never remember…)

“It’s called lies. It’s all how well you can weave these lies together, Shari, alright, so.”

“No, this is marketing,”

Corrupted marketing, but marketing nonetheless.

#5: “If these are ever heard by a jury, they’re going get strung up.”

These are the people who own Schwarzenegger, the heir apparent to the bizarrely metamorphasizing Reagan / Bush II/ Schwarzenegger Republican legacy. Enron had merely rented Gray Davis.

So, anyway. When’s Cheney going to release the minutes of his energy policy meeting? Depending on what nefarious path you want to believe, we either had a meet and greet with Enron, Saudi Arabia, or the Taliban…

In the meantime, these Enron tapes are second only to the Nixon tapes in their schedenfruede-inducing entertainment / disgust value.

“A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

Then again, when I alluded that to my Republican sister once, she pointed out that Reagan was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, sooo…

……………………

“Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us realize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

There’s a number of ways to view that quotation. #1: Reagan moved from alluding to John Wayne movies to alluding to science fiction movies. #2: Reagan was telegraphing a message about he knows that we do not know. “People say that the aliens are going to come one day to save us. While I say, the aliens are here and they’re here to eat us!” #3: Straight-forward inspirational words to put our world conflicts into perspective.

Or perhaps a mixture of the three…

…

What was this one all about?

I hear that that one was Pat Buchannan’s idea…

…

Davis A. Stockman claimed this, in a book I’ve not read by way of a blog entry excerpt:

Incredibly, Weinberger had also brought with him a blown-up cartoon. It showed three soldiers. One was a pygmy who carried now rifle. He represented the Carter budget. The second was a four-eyed whimp who looked like Woody Allen, carrying a tiny rifle. That was – me? – the OMB defense budget. Finally, there was GI Joe himself, 190 pounds of fighting man, all decked out in helmet and flak jacket and pointing an M-60 machine gun menacingly at – me again? This imposing warrior represented, yes, the Department of Defense budget plan.
It was so intellectually disreputable, so demeaning, that I could hardly bring myself to believe that a Harvard-educated cabinet officer could have brought this to the President of the United States. Did he think the White House was on Sesame Street?

…

Oh, and remember when the Bushes tried to kill Reagan?

Okay. Never mind that last one.

God love the Captains of Industry.

#1: “Burn, baby, burn. That’s a beautiful thing,” a trader sang about the massive fire.

#2: “He just fucking California,” says one Enron employee. “He steals money from California to the tune of about a million.”

“OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day,” replies the first.

#3: “If you took down the steamer, how long would it take to get it back up?” an Enron worker is heard saying.

“Well, why don’t you just go ahead and shut her down.”

You know… back in 2001, when Harpers Magazine (and others) were accusing Enron of largely manufacturing California’s energy crisis, the charge was “Conspiracy Theory.” My bizarre conspiracy theory is coming up shortly… but read through the next bunch of quotes anywho…

#4: “They’re fuckingg taking all the money back from you guys?” complains an Enron employee on the tapes. “All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?”

“Yeah, now she wants her f——g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a megawatt hour.”

#5: “Government Affairs has to prove how valuable it is to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling,” says one trader.

“Do you know when you started over-scheduling load and making buckets of money on that?

#6: “It’d be great. I’d love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy,” says one Enron worker.

“When this election comes Bush will fucking whack this shit, man. He won’t play this price-cap bullshit.”

Thus far, the buk of George W. Bush’s re-election ads have been negative attacks on John Kerry. John Kerry’s ads have been positive “introduce me to you” ads. (Advocacy ads, say from moveon.org, are different beasts altogether… as is this new concept in political advertising which Michael Moore is offering up to the nation.)

There’s a John Kerry attack ad right there.

But you want a conspiracy theory?

This Enron scandal, and the manufactured energy crisis, was nothing other than the first step in the process of putting Schwarzenegger into the White House.

They think that far ahead, you see…

I don’t know why, precisely, but the passing of Reagan reminded me of something I saw it on TBN a couple years back.

It was bizarre. A made-for-TBN film from the era of Reagan. See: you have this recently – delinquint teen in midwestern America… the heartland. His father is known as the town atheist.

We know he’s an asshole because he yells at Reagan’s more overt religious pronouncements over the tv. And he debates Christians on public access television.

His wife convinces him that it’s probably alright to send him to a Christian rehabilitation camp that’d help rehabilitate him. This is bizarre to me: why would such a hardcore atheist send his son to the Christians?

Anyway, what do you know? The Christian discovers the love of Jesus! The father shrugs it off. Things run apace.

Here, one of the teen’s former friends slowly turns on him. He doesn’t understand why he doesn’t drink beer with the guys anymore. The kid slowly becomes part of the Christian-group.

Move forward, and we have this confrontation, where the somewhat delinquint kids drive around in circles and mock the Christian kids (hanging out at the church). Persecution is tough, I hear. Anyway, the most jarring scene is of this boy dressed in a pink cut-off shirt, I think we have the innuendo that he’s a homosexual, breaking in and stealing stuff from the church. Cause that’s what kids who we can sort of hint at being gay but don’t explicitly say so do, you see…

The kids are given an assignment to share what the most important thing in their lives are. The former-friend, who is quickly falling into disrepair, gives this odd beat poem about his car, ’cause it drives fast. Apparently, the educational system is in such disrepair that nobody in this class can write a coherent sentence.

I turn off the tv for a while. I turn it back on to catch the end: after much soul-searching the kid shares his love of Jesus. And the former friend who is slipping through the cracks? The chief protaganist manages to rescue him, and show him the way.

I don’t understand the movie. Who was the market for this swill? Was it shown to Christian youth groups? Something on par with the films described by David Prill at the beginning of the book.

Big in the Heartland! They just don’t get it over there in LA!

Different Strokes handled relevant issues much more effortlessly, what with their “very special episodes” and all…

My brother was ahead of the curve on some key voting-issues which have gained some level of prominence post-2000.

But back in 1984, I voted in the Arthur H. Smith School presidential election. Our balloting system was a program on the Commodore 64 in Miss Carlson’s second grade classroom. The entire school voted on that single machine. There were no paper backups, and if someone had hit “Break” (… or the Commodore equivalent. I may be remembering our Tandy computer.) and then restarted the program, all the previous votes would have been lost and no one would have known.

Concerns over computer voting? Wow… Jeff was twenty years ahead of the curve!

On the night of the November ’88 election, I watched the TV coverage up until I left to go to a Boy Scout meeting. Dukakis wasn’t far behind Bush in the popular vote, but he’d only picked up Massachusetts in the Electoral College count. I tried to express how wrong this seemed to me to some of the other scouts, but no one was sympathetic.

Nobody thought much about the electoral college until the 2000 election… eveyone pretty much assumed that the winner of the popular vote would almost inevitably end up following over to the electoral college. Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 votes — which leads one to the bizarre conclusion that Gore was the most popular figure in America.

Anyway…