Billionaire Meg Whitman spent $88 million in a primary election for governor. Yes, it’s for the most populated state in the Union; California is home to 38 million people. But still, only a tiny fraction of them turn out to vote in primaries. After all the votes were counted, she received a whopping 1,101,528 – or 64%. Her personal purse secured her as the GOP nominee for Governor of California.

Quick math: that breaks down to about $80 per vote. Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, Republican who’s railed against bulging government budgets just spent the equivalent of a brand new high-end 4GB iPod Shuffle on each person who actually voted for her. “Buy now.”

To contrast that number, the winner of the Democratic primary for governor of California, Jerry Brown spent $200,000 in the primary and he received 1,478,752 votes, 377,224 more than Whitman. The self-described penny-pincher Brown spent a paltry $.14 per vote.

A couple of things: why would average Californians, hardworking regular people want to give money or time to elect Mommy Morebucks? Imagine that fundraising letter, “Meg needs your support. Please send whatever you can – $20 can secure her a quarter of a vote. Donate today!” The message? Take back Sac from wasteful bureaucrats and give it to a wasteful billionaire.

But also the reason why we give our elected officials a salary is so that they don’t have to have a personal fortune to hold public office. The trend in California’s 2010 primary was for campaigns to be a quaint vanity project for the ridiculously wealthy. Whitman’s main opponent in the race was Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, whose previous bout as a high tech entrepreneur enabled him to have $24 million to sink into his primary campaign (with 461,823 votes he spent around $52 per). All that and he lost by a proportionate amount. But don’t worry about ol’ Not-As-Richie, that cost is under “promotion” and according to my CPA is a Schedule A deductible.

Poizner ran for lower taxes!

Whitman has said that her cap on donating to her own campaign is $150 million dollars. She spent half of that on the primary. This is a governor’s race. One state. Just to put this into perspective, in 2008 John McCain spent $350 million total to run nationally for president. That’s all 50 states.

Whitman’s campaign will eventually ask people to phone bank on behalf of the candidate. Much like BP asking for volunteers to clean up oil in the gulf, it’ll be seen as tone-deaf. Money can buy you many things, but not charity for being wealthy beyond comprehension and cheap.

What this means is the Republican primary in California was won by the highest bidder, (insert obligatory eBay joke here). It was won by the person who knew she was going to keep upping the ante until it was too steep for anyone else.

Not the one with best ideas, or the most experience, or the greatest vision: just the most cash to blow. Making wealth the only political virtue of any value.

It’s not just unprecedented. It’s not just scary in an undemocratic way. It’s obscene. To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it.

Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr

The term “deep water” usually means you’re in trouble and “horizon” is what lies ahead. So the ill-fated drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, is aptly named.

Doom has arrived on our shores and our prospects are tacky with tar balls.

The geyser of crude, a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico, exposed America for what it is: bent over a barrel of oil.

The party that defiantly and happily chanted “drill, baby, drill” at their 2008 convention has been content to obsess about the Joe Sestak job offer story in lieu of drilling, baby, drilling. Why aren’t they defending their bumper sticker? With glee they’ve been chasing the hope something illegal happened in the White House so they can pounce on possible political gain in the middle of a the potential loss of our Southern shoreline to sludge. Republicans, with their 30-year menagerie of sound bites railing against government interference with business, have not surprisingly stayed away from direct action on this front. Except for Governor Bobby Jindal, who now publicly wants federal help instead of shaking his fist against the stimulus and then posing in photos handing out those government checks.

That size-of-South-Carolina amorphous blob of crude is the realization of Republican values: no regulations for drilling our way out of an energy crisis. It’s the rainbow connection!

Then the new darling of the right-wing, Rand Paul “shrugged” and said accidents happen and criticized President Obama for being “un-American” for coming down too harshly on BP. Then the old darling of the right-wing, Sarah Palin, whose husband worked for BP for 18 years, didn’t recuse herself from discussing the issue as a paid Fox News contributor because of a potential conflict of interest. Instead she accused Obama of being the one in bed with the oil companies. Which is so ridiculous it’s like Sarah Palin being the person to accuse Obama of being in bed with the oil companies.

Overnight, on Day 39, cable news put up neon graphics that it’s Day 39! Now the press is paying attention. CNN ran stories about how this spill is going to hurt BP’s image as a green company. Because this spill is a PR issue like terminal cancer is a problem with morale.

Suddenly 25 times more oil is coming out of the blown well than BP initially reported. Suddenly the press needs someone to blame. BP, Transocean and Halliburton get passed up for the government response. There is no response that would have saved the Gulf. But context doesn’t matter. We need a bullhorn moment to broadcast. That’s Obama’s failing: no bullhorn. Bush’s bullhorn was…well bull (Osama Bin Laden will die of old age). But we need to see the leader of the free world not being thoughtful – we need action. We need Obama to clean off some tar-covered birds! Why isn’t he in a flight suit err wetsuit!? He’s clearly not doing enough!

The oil companies in this snap shot are in arrested development. In the 1930’s some estimated we’d run out of oil in 10 years. Yet here we are. They’ve innovated to find more oil and effectively kept innovation from making them obsolete. It’s a marvel of modern lobbying, marketing and engineering. But are we out on the streets protesting them? No, we’re having a Tea Party about government tyranny.

The BP spill exposed that we’re still commuting in eight cylinder singly occupied vehicles, hopped up on plastic goods and scoffing at high-speed rail projects. Our government is representative – we haven’t clamored to get off oil. If anything we’ve threatened to riot for having to pay too much at the pump. Because of our myopic need to not alter our way of life – the Deepwater Horizon has altered our way of life. There’s a state-sized slurry of death floating around in the ocean and it’s just the price of doing business.

Calls for more drilling in the wake of the BP Oil Spill are as sound as a junkie shooting up into an abscess.

Louisiana Congressman Charlie Melancon said that these are not just Louisiana’s wetlands but America’s wetlands. And I would add that it’s not just endangered pelicans covered in debilitating oil – we all are covered in debilitating oil.

Image via Wikipedia

There are no democratically elected leaders in the Christian bible. I know – it’s shocking. But, if you catch the rhetoric pertaining to the US Constitution, you’d think the Ten Commandments are its bullet points. They’re not. The whole idea of a representative democracy (a Greek word) comes from Ancient (think then-solvent) Greece. The leaders in the bible were all kings and/or tyrants and the Bill of Rights is nowhere in the New or Old Testament.

Simply: Democracy isn’t biblical. But neither is the combustible engine, CAT scans or GPS – it doesn’t make them any less awesome.

So when fly-by-night pontificators, the loudest being the scholarly Sarah Palin, claim this country’s laws are ordained by God via the bible, she needs to show her work – because freedom of the press, due process and freedom of speech are not through-lines in biblical teachings. Nor is the citizenry bearing arms.

“Go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant – they’re quite clear – that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the Ten Commandments,” Palin sputtered on FNC earlier this month.

Evidently, just because it’s “protected speech” doesn’t make it “factual.”

When you break it down, three of the Ten Commandments are universal laws with zero controversy (do not murder, do not steal, no false witnessing). The teetering point to make half of the most widely accepted version of the Ten Commandments actual laws have been fought over by the states. Blue Laws, laws prohibiting things on Sundays based on the Commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, are still on the books in some places. They’re some of the sillier laws in the country. In Texas you couldn’t buy anything on Sundays you could do work with. So hardware stores had to put blue price tags on things like hammers up until the law was overturned in 1984. There are still places where you can’t buy a car on “the day of rest.” Let alone booze.

Talk about over-reaching government dictating what businesses can do.

Other attempts to pass laws to abolish cursing, an interpretation of using the Lord’s name in vain, have been tried. The most amusing one was by the real Victorian-era sheriff of Deadwood, South Dakota, Seth Bullock. He cracked down on cussing in his rowdy mining camp only to have the most curse-laden HBO show in the history of television about it 140 years later. Then adultery is still illegal in some states while the Supreme Court overturned sodomy laws in 2003.

So to recap: Three of the Ten Commandments are covered by federal laws and three are laws in some states. But the other four are nowhere to be found in US law.

Which from a statistical stance sums up the debate about religion and our government: a third of people think this is and should be a Christian nation, others waffle yet most think it’s not a good idea in practice.

In fact, none of the Ten Commandments are in the US Constitution. The Constitution is the charter of the government outlining the rights of the people and the limits of government. Comparing the two is like apples to a red herring.

“The Constitutional protections are on what they [the Founders] thought was right and wrong, and what they thought was right and wrong is based on the Ten Commandments,” claimed Bill O’Reilly on his cable show.

The question is: do we really want to live in a country that makes not honoring your mother and father a crime? Is it wise to have a law mandating you can’t have any other gods or make false idols or covet your neighbor’s spouse? The Founding Fathers (ahem) clearly thought it wasn’t.

Why, if you want America to be more religious, do you need to co-opt history to accomplish it? Have the courage to stand up for your convictions without creating fiction about the founding documents. I don’t agree with the Founding Fathers about everything (slavery, women’s rights, native peoples rights). But that doesn’t make the US Constitution, in my eyes, any less of an amazing feat for humanity.

So go ahead and stand up for your faith and be proud. But lying for it is, ya know, after all – bearing false witness.

Image by www.WinningMan.com via Flickr

Hold the skinny jeans, we’re in the middle of a massive obesity epidemic. Every night we have to stare at stock footage of Americans waddling around in their maxed-out sweat pants on the nightly news. It’s clear; we’re fat. Our kids are fat. Our pets are fat. According to some Wall Street insiders, the trader who accidently entered the wrong number of share orders and nearly crashed the entire market – his fingers are fat.

If you combine overweight and obese, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association about 70% of us are fat. That’s nearly three out of four people in the US – a whopping majority.

But when we talk about this plague that will ensure this generation will die younger than their parents, we always wag our fingers at the “poor choices” fat people are making. It’s a way of blaming the victim, not addressing the issue and not offending business. It’s well-worn creed spouted often and rarely thought about. And we’re still fat.

Two percent of the population and it’s a personal responsibility issue. Seventy percent and it’s a little more complicated.

Here’s the thing: if you’re a capitalist – think it’s the only thing that can drive our economy, spur innovation and create “all that’s good in the world” (or in the case of BP all that’s gooed in the world), if that’s what you think makes America “American” – then obesity is great.

If capitalism is a virtue, fat people are saintly. The obese are good consumers. They’ve clearly done what they’re supposed to do – consume.

Food companies have done a great job with their tenets of capitalism making their products so irresistible – we don’t resist them.

So, stop blaming fat people for doing what companies have urged them to do. That’s like stalking someone for decades and then calling the cops once they agree to go out with you.

This week marks the end to the ninth season of the NBC’s The Biggest Loser, where overweight contestants battle it out to drop pounds. As a middle-of-the-pack runner, I got into the show because I enjoy watching people who are bad at sports do them on national television. Most sports broadcasts have elite athletes showing off their greatness. Who cares. Where do us average, picked-last-in-P.E. schlubs go to see ourselves represented on TV? The Biggest Loser. It takes the egalitarian nature of reality shows and then levels the playing field.

If you watch the show, as millions do, it’s basically a two-hour long infomercial for the overweight. The trainers hock sponsor’s products in staged scenes where contestants ask about healthy meals, ways to store their healthy snacks or are curious about products deemed healthy. Their gym is a sponsor; they tout their own brand of whey protein shakes and their own Wii Fit game. It’s like watching QVC with commercial breaks.

The contestants turn into shills for the companies advertising on the show. “I’m learning how to make the right choices.” In fact The Biggest Loser’s dogmatic phrase “make the right choices” is as about as commercial friendly as possible. Because it doesn’t discourage consuming, it encourages. Has The Biggest Loser thwarted our nation’s epidemic? No, but it has made a bunch of money off of it. Which is the point, right?

Obesity and the hidden costs behind it are a classic example of privatizing profit and socializing losses. The more successful the food industry is, the fatter we become and the more society has to absorb those costs. The military has reportedly turned away over 48,000 recruits since 2005 for being too fat to serve. And if they can’t pass the military’s standard of 26% body fat, they’re not likely to make it as a civilian first responder either.

Obesity is the crowning achievement of the food companies. They don’t have to pay for the health costs of an entire nation being fat. They just reap the rewards of a society that keeps on plumping up and eating more over-processed, nutritionally void catchphrases from people selling us “feeling good.”

Because like we saw with the housing crisis, unregulated big business can lead to disasters of epic proportions. Just like those epic portions on your plate that you’ll admit are a “bad choice.”

You know what we value most as a nation by what we are not allowed to take on without widespread hysteria. The illuminating metaphor is known as the “third rail” of politics. Lose your footing and step on something we as Americans hold dear and – ZAP!

Our most lethal third rails are cutting Medicare, cutting Social Security, cutting defense spending, and raising taxes. So, we can’t cut anything and we can’t ask citizens to pay for it. USA! USA!

Our third rails have us painted into a mixed metaphor corner.

This all could be a quaint ideological tug-o-war between Left and Right: Left wants to spend and tax. Right wants to cut and cut. If that were actually true, it would be as simple as choosing your side and making your case. Do you want to be taxed more or do you want the government to spend less?

What’s clouded this question is what the dreaded government actually is. For example: the slogan often used by right-wingers, “We are a nation of laws,” is singing the praise of the government. Who makes the laws? Enforces them? Alters them? The government. Private industry isn’t deciding case law (not yet anyway). It’s not bringing criminals to justice. It’s certainly not regulating businesses to work for the public good. That’s what government employees do. Or in the case of the banks, are supposed to do. Government makes us a nation AND makes our laws.

Saying you have a “legal right” is saying the government agrees with you that you’re entitled to a said action. Legality is what the government decides based on the will of the people.

But you’ll hear people confess they hate government and are exercising their legal right to say so. And they’ll say it without irony. What do they think the government is?

The phrase “government spending” is always a pejorative. It’s a nasty phrase for excess. According to conservatives government spending is always “out of control,” unless it’s on the military. If it’s the military: We support our troops. Wave flags. Apple pie. Debate over.

The military is the government. It’s government funded and government run. Big military is big government. The President is the Commander-in-Chief of the military. You can’t be against government and be pro-military. That’s like being anti-rain but pro-precipitation.

“I’m for fiscal responsibility and a strong defense,” is a weathered battle cry. The two concepts are at odds with each other. According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in 2008 the U.S. spent 41.5% of the world’s military expenditures. That’s of the entire planet. The second on the list are the Chinese who spend 5.8%. So what are we spending over $600-$800 billion a year on? Who are we protecting ourselves from? What enemy of ours has had a submarine in the past 20 years? Why do we still have those billion dollar programs?

Going largely underreported, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke at the Eisenhower Library (named for the president who coined the term “military-industrial complex”), last week calling for cuts in the Pentagon’s budget. Gates asked, “Does the number of warships we have and are building really put America at risk when the U.S. battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which belong to allies and partners? “

Gates’ speech highlights the fact that we’re in a solo arms race. Every other nation quit the competition and we’re still sprinting to be on top. For the first time we disclosed the exact amount of nuclear warheads in our arsenal: 5,113. That enormous stockpile has to be maintained and by some estimates we spend $29 billion annually on it.

That’s right, we spend $29 billion a year maintaining weapons we only have so we will hopefully never use them. But bring it up and you’re a thumb-sucking pinko.

We have two current wars we are waging and we are still preparing for other wars our grandparents already won.

Military spending is a third rail hopefully made less charged by Secretary Gates, but not likely. For American politicians speaking about it is taboo. To incorporate the always colorful, currently incarcerated, former governor of Louisiana, Edwin Edwards, he said the only way he could lose the election against David Duke was to be caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. I’ll add: or admit plans for defense spending cuts.