Remember privatization?

It was George Bush’s number one priority for his second term—privatization of Social Security. Like the number one priority of his first term – the Iraq war – it was a disastrous idea that would have been disastrously bungled in its corruption-ridden implementation.

Wall Streeters dearly loved the whole concept—no doubt because it was theirs to begin with. And with the help of their lavish political contributions and their lobbyists, Republican congressmen and a few Democrats loved it, too.

Full disclosure: I am not a lawyer or a judge. I don’t own a black robe—or a white one with a hood, for that matter.

Thus you can be reasonably well assured that I haven’t been paid to dress up somebody’s crimes in the costumes and cosmetics of hallucinatory constitutional precedent in order to make them look perfectly legal and otherwise acceptable, despite their perversion of cherished American freedoms.

I’m explaining this just so you know that everything I say will be even-handed and unbiased, which is a stunning achievement for a citizen living in a country being run by war criminals.

Next up at The New Yorker...

Quickly smoothing its petticoats after the brouhaha over its controversial Obama cover, the New Yorker prepares to bounce back with a pre-emptive strike on magazine stands everywhere. Photoshopping by the ghost of James Thurber.

Out of the reptilian brain of Karl Rove,
beneath the spleen, through unimpeded
airspace, ear to ear, of George W. B.
and on to the Pentagoing, going, gone,
to polished brass at Vandalbird AFB,
the ultimate ultimatum – strike at dawn!

"Bomb anywhere they bow to East, not West,
Iran, Waziristan, and in between
plus Denver, when the Democrats convene,
the blue states’ inner cities and all the rest,
and load up all the B-1 undercarriages
for San Francisco and those same-sex marriages."

Meantime,

By writ of Yoo/Addington/Gonzales obsessives,
"It’s legal to use nuclear munitions
in questioning non-caucasoid progressives
or scientists or liberal academicians
or any Muslim-looking beard or stubble.

"Post Armageddon, we control the rubble."

Once on a charter fishing boat off Miami, I noticed a discreet sign on the topdeck:

Marriages performed by the Captain are valid only for the duration of the voyage.

I assume the same protocol holds true for a campaign bus such as the "Straight Talk Express." All the journalists who have fallen in love with John McCain — to the point of being blinded to his endearing faults, contradictions, blunders, and closet Bushism — will eventually go back to their wives, and husbands, but mostly wives.

I’m sure your family heard some version of this story back in the days of the first oil shocks of the 1970s.  In Pittsburgh, the bad news was that UFOs had landed on Grant Street (where all the city and county offices are).  The good news was that the aliens eat bureaucrats and piss gasoline.

As of this morning, I had reached page 43 of the current New York Review, where there is a major article by Freeman Dyson: "The Question of Global Warming."  And in Saturday’s New York Times, Joe Nocera refers to the same article, which he was reading on a plane headed for the Exxon-Mobil annual meeting in Dallas.  Small world, and warm.

I was just reading a review by John Cassidy of the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. (New York Review, June 12)

One reason the book matters is that its authors are on a wavelength with Barack Obama and "behavioral economics" – a bridge between the extremes of Keynesian big-government economics (FDR, et al) and doctrinaire capitalism, in which the free market settles all questions and solves all problems. This battle has dominated economic policy for most of the past hundred years.

Let’s play Russian Roulette. My rules.

I’m betting $1,000 the chamber will be empty. You hold the gun to your head and pull the trigger. Click. You owe me $1,000. Next round, same rules, you hold the gun to your head and fire. Click. Now you’re down $2,000, but why complain? You’re still alive, aren’t you? Isn’t that worth $2,000?

Next round, you’re not so lucky. Since there doesn’t seem to be anyone left to collect the bet I just lost, I take my $2,000 and go looking for the next patsy.

If my rules seem unfair, at least they’re founded on well-established precedents. Big hedge funds and investment banks have figured out how to make billions on heads-I-win, tails-you-lose games of high risks and very high but entirely one-sided rewards.

Since you’re busy and I’m not, I try to survey the arcane world of bleeding-edge research and abstract the few key findings worth your attention. The following are sourced from Science, the publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Science, of which I am a member until one of their editors stumbles onto this website.

I am a huge fan of Talking Points Memo and, in particular, TPM Election Central, so the following must be taken in the spirit of admiration and bonhomie in which it is offered:

You guys don’t know how to report on polls. Seriously. You’re utterly clueless.

All it takes is a shiny new press release to prompt the TPM guys to slap up a 48-point headline announcing the latest devastating news from the front lines of the electoral process.

The problem is that these polls do not share a common methodology and are often of uncertain provenance, so they aren’t measuring the same thing (and often, I suspect, aren’t even measuring the things they intend to), yet they are paraded across the screen to the viewer as though they represent succeeding chapters of a coherent narrative.

I am a huge fan of Talking Points Memo and, in particular, TPM Election Central, so the following must be taken in the spirit of admiration and bonhomie in which it is offered:

You guys don’t know how to report on polls. Seriously. You’re utterly clueless.

All it takes is a shiny new press release to prompt the TPM guys to slap up a 48-point headline announcing the latest devastating news from the front lines of the electoral process.

The problem is that these polls do not share a common methodology and are often of uncertain provenance, so they aren’t measuring the same thing (and often, I suspect, aren’t even measuring the things they intend to), yet they are paraded across the screen to the viewer as though they represent succeeding chapters of a coherent narrative.

Anyone with some high school math realizes that the race for the Democratic nomination has been over for about six weeks at this point. Obama continues to run a fairly classy, non-negative campaign largely because he has the luxury to do so. The Sound and Fury from the Clinton camp over the last two weeks is apparently important in the weird science of Television Entertainment (although on any other reality show I can think of she’d have been voted off by now ... except maybe a special edition of ‘Biggest Loser’). It’s enough to inspire some wailing and keening and gnashing of teeth on sites like TPM Cafe, but even there it is done so in half-hearted angst. The season is over. Time to rest up and get ready for the playoffs.

In the 1960s the CEO of an average Fortune 100 company made about 60 times as much money as his average employee. His pre-evasion income tax rate was 91% until 1964, when it was reduced to 77%.

By 2001, I thought the end times must be at hand because the CEO was now making 600 times as much as the average employee, and we were back to the extremes in wealth concentration that the U.S. had last seen during the gilded age of the robber barons.

It took Teddy Roosevelt, trust-busting, two world wars, the Great Depression, the rise of the labor movement, 90% tax brackets, and the G.I. bill to tame those excesses. But there it was again in 2000 – ostentatious avarice, back in fashion.

And where are we now?

It’s a good thing the Heart Association decided to stop recommending mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and just to urge people to do chest pushes on someone suffering a heart attack. I think I’m a member of the ACLU (I sent them money a few times anyway), and I’m opposed to unreasonable searches of my seizures.

Already they’re covertly collecting my longitude and latitude.

I have an E-Z Pass box on my windshield, and an On-Star system came with the car; so I guess the government snoops would take the position that I have voluntarily put my whereabouts up for public auction. Actually, I was just trying to get into the fast lane at the toll booths where the On-Star system often sends me by mistake.

Now I know how Gregor Samsa must have felt.

It’s a terrible thing, waking up in the morning to realize that overnight you have metamorphosed into a conservative. How do you face your family?

I was shocked...shocked, to realize suddenly that I hate entitlements. It’s conservatives who preach against entitlements, right?

Politico maintains a page marvelous in its simplicity and high-grade information: a log of daily superdelegate announcements and other developments.

Following this page over the past month, it’s hard to fight the sense of growing momentum in the Obama campaign when it comes to the superdelegates ... towards the end of February, the HRC campaign held a margin of almost 70 superdel endorsements when compared to Obama (they had the difference at 68 on Feb 25). Since then, the log book is a punishing repetition of Obama’s name, and as of April 4th, HRC’s overall count had gone up by 4, and Obama’s count had increased by 39.

FREE! BILLION DOLLAR MARKETING IDEAS!

For Orkin pest control — introduce the B/C Scrub. For $200 ($300 for large-format flat panel TVs), you treat the customer’s television set so that it’s completely free of Bushes and Clintons for eight years.

For newspapers, to reverse the decline in circulation:

Premium subscribers get a B/C-free edition guaranteed to carry no mention or image of a Bush or a Clinton, ever.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

Pigs like the smell of pigs. E Coli are determined to take over the digestive tract. And insiders think insiders should run everything.

Insider and one-time superdelegate Geraldine Ferraro (a Clinton campaigner) thinks that Democratic insiders should be able to pick the party’s nominee. That, in fact, is the subhead of her Op-Ed piece in Monday’s New York Times.

Superdelegates, she says, "were created to lead, not to follow. They were, and are, expected to determine what is best for our party and best for the country. I would hope that is why many superdelegates have already chosen a candidate to support."