Thanks to Candice’s fast wits in requesting tickets to the Daily Show using multiple emails, she was able to score us two tickets to the Daily Show, which is filmed in “Hell’s Kitchen” neighborhood of Manhattan. Since they generally overbooked to ensure full capacity, we waited outside through stormy weather beneath semi-leaky plastic weather tarps for 3 or 4 hours to ensure we got in.

After we got the door passes, we stopped off at a Subway and while were eating, Candice recognized Aasif Mandvi as he came in to get a sandwich. My angle wasn’t the best so I didn’t recognize him at all, but she assured me it was him, so again, thanks to her, I was able to shake hands with him and tell him that I enjoyed his work.

After exiting the Subway, Candice then suggested to check out Dewitt Clinton Park across the street. Suddenly, a film crew appeared. The director, a young man in casual attire, described how he wanted the scene to go with his group of extras. A cop was going to walk by and spray indiscriminate New Yorkers with the pepper spray. When the director and the “cop” had their back turned, I tried to sneak into the group of extras so that I could end up in the scene, but someone recognized me and told me to stand back. They did two takes of the cop walking by and spraying by-passers, and I noticed that the extras botched both takes, mostly reacting a second or two after being “pepper sprayed.”

Then they did a close up of the cop and for the first time I noticed he was Christopher Meloni, the lead cop in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. So not only did Candice score the tickets, helped me meet Aasif Mandvi, but she also helped me watch Christopher Meloni do a live scene for a Daily Show skit. Thank you, Candice!!

They must be concerned with trademark issues because he politely told someone next to me not to film him with his cell phone. They filmed an extended scene of him spraying every which way with two sprayers, one a stream spray and the other a mist spray. The way he just played around for a minute or two, you could tell most of it was going to be cut.

Finally, we got in to see the show. The studio seemed much smaller than it does on television, but I suppose that is from the way the cameras are panned. The show started with a short introduction by a local comedian for about five minutes to liven up the audience. Then Jon came in to take some questions from the audience, although like djinni rules, they asked that it please not be for an autograph or whatever because he would have to give one to everyone. Candice and I were on the second row center, so I thought I had the perfect seat until the camera rolled out right in front of me. Sure, there was a television screen off to the side of what was being taped, but I had to move my head to the left to actually see him.

The scene they shot right outside their studios was about the elderly Deputy Inspector Anthony Balogna pepper spraying multiple Occupy Wall Street protestors in a row, along with a shot of him spraying wildly at the camera. Since Jon did an extended skit about his nickname being “Tony Balony” involving everything that rhymes with “balony,” they must have naturally thought of Christopher Meloni.

After the show, we went to the theatre district in Times Square. I had become weary from the constant bombardment of advertisements, but there it’s actually quite nice. On the way there, we got to hear Radiohead playing a song from their Kid A album as we passed the Roseland Ballroom, between 7th and 8th Avenue, and also passed by David Letterman’s studio.

*****

Throughout the trip, I couldn’t help but compare everything to my last trip to Tokyo. Whereas everything in Tokyo from building and street architecture to convenience store products were new and interesting, New York at first seemed like a typical American city, only more. While Tokyo was clean and spacious, New York was dirty, stinky, crowded, and it seemed as if everything was tagged. Some stores were in hovels on the streets, selling close to nothing on their makeshift shelves.

No more was the difference between New York and Tokyo evident than the subway systems, which I feel compelled to talk about since I spent so much time lost in it. While Tokyo’s Subway of the Future is nothing less than an underground city, complete with its own shopping centers, New York’s subway is more like an amusement park trolly shoehorned into the city’s sewer system. You can often see the subway through rain grates on the streets above. When a subway passes you from below, it becomes pretty loud and the sidewalk vibrates a little. In Tokyo, the subways are much further down and no one above knows when one passes by. While Tokyo boasts huge clean corridors that have a modern look to them, New York has dirty, cramped and rough caverns of brick and steel that look centuries old. Some of the brick pillars are broken down into red stalagmites, as if someone has taken a sledge hammer to them, leaving only a steel rod core running from the floor to the ceiling.

The first train I got on shook violently enough to warrant a “Must Be At Least This Height to Ride” warning. Then the train made a sudden forced departure at one of its early stops, and we had to find an alternate route, which wasn’t easy. Only later did we find out that 90% of the time, these forced departures are due to someone committing suicide by jumping in front of the train. It started happening all the time after the economy crashed. It took a long time because they had to take the train off and go through and clean the rails and the wheels up and down. Definitely not the most considerate way to go.

The one time my binoculars came in useful was following a rat as it crawled across the bottom of the tracks as I waited for a train that, odds are, was taking us away from our intended destination. Another time I was studying the electronic map listing all the stops to figure out where I was going when I was told by a pedestrian that it was actually the wrong map.

But despite all the subway’s faults, even paying the fairs in wrong-way trips (as well as paying your way to go back through the entrance booth because the few information desks there are happen to be on the outside of the exit booths), mass transit is still cheaper than riding in a cab. Their rates are murder and they literally take you for a ride.

Dirty and stinky and trash-filled as the subway is — oh and I forgot to mention all the hobos singing songs for money in the corridors and the elderly Bible-beating black woman who promptly made me make a race out the door for a different car — New York’s subway is still what makes it what it is: a truly modern city where anyone can get from point A to point B in less than 30 minutes (provided they don’t get lost).

And at least on New York subways, people felt safe to mess around on their cell phones, which I hear you can’t do in Detroit because people will just come up and grab them out of your hand. New Yorkers are famous for being rude and willing to step right over you. One guy on a subway was told me sternly to move as he moving quickly through the car, but he came back and apologized, saying that he didn’t mean to be rude. But the part about willing to step over you is completely true. I think in the South people have an internal compass that steers them out of the path of oncoming people that New Yorkers simply don’t have.

Another thing I thought was really cool was that the subway runs above the streets in some parts of the city, and we ate in a restaurant underneath a highway and the subway. It’s a mark of engineering that makes the city more interesting, as well as a mark that everything in New York is compacted into something else. Most buildings use their basements and have multiple stories since space is so scarce and expensive.

As for the sites: The statue of liberty is a much lighter lime green than as typically seen on television. And the Brooklyn bridge is really not all that impressive at all. In fact the all but unknown Verrazano-Narrows Suspension Bridge, which looks like a grey sister of the Golden Gate Bridge, is far more fascinating.

Even discounting whatever alien language is used to tag New York’s buildings, I have never seen so many different languages spoken and written in the same place. I knew all the jokes about “Jew York,” but I didn’t know there was an entire quarter of Orthodox Jews, all dressed exactly alike, like in that scary introduction to the HBO show Weeds, only with long tassels attached to bald scalps hidden beneath black long-rimmed hats. There’s also the Mexican part of town and the Italian part of town. I joked that I heard more English in Japan, but I think having so many different ethnicities makes New York one of the few truly International Cities.

*****

The day after going to the Daily Show, I learned that the U.S. had for the first time in history admitted to the assassination of an American citizen without due process and most of the country cheered it. Awlaki is said to have been affiliated with 3 of the 9/11 hijackers, the Fort Hood shooter, and the “Christmas Day” bomber, but his role appears to be only that of an advisor. Many have tried to justify his assassination by saying that by fleeing the U.S., al-Alwaki gave up his right to citizenship, but as State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said several days ago: “Under U.S. law, there are seven criteria under which you can strip somebody of citizenship, and none of those applied in this case.” You can’t justify it by citing treason either, as Article 3 of the Constitution reads: “No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

Yet only Glenn Greenwald and Ron Paul really gave a dissenting voice to this new definition of presidential powers. I was surprised to find myself siding with Ron Paul against Bill Maher on this issue. But even Maher had to think twice about at the idea of a President Bachmann having the power to assassinate American citizens who are suddenly labelled “terrorist.” I was never a big believer in the “slippery slope” by this slope leads to a hole in the frozen lake of the American popularity contest.

Angelo points out that the Constitution actually reads: “No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law.” Since the Constitution uses the word “person” and not “citizen,” the Bill of Rights expresses this as a human right, not a national right. All humans have these rights by their very nature. But this would mean we would have to arrest and try every terrorist foreign and domestic, and the term “war” would have to be retired, since it would be purely a police act. I would think in the world of high-tech terrorism, information would be key and so arrests and interrogations would be superior in result, so arrests should be the supreme goal of fighting terrorism. In the show 24, Jack’s constant challenge was always keeping the terrorist from committing suicide so that he could get information out of him.

The matter has some bearing as to whether the Founding Fathers would approve of a War on Nouns as opposed to a war on a specific group of people. Christopher Hitchens has tried to use Jefferson’s war on the Barbary Pirates as a precedent for the War on Terrorism, but the First Barbary War had actual naval battles. These drone strikes are assassinations done far away from a battlefield. The best way to combat al-Qaida-style terrorist cells is through intelligence work, and arresting and interrogating people are an important part of that process. If he was really connected to three incredibly famous terrorist acts, then he must be a fountain of information.

To me it seems a great disservice to all the victims of mob violence since, unlike foreign terrorists, organized crime is so deeply rooted in society that they can buy off the police and politicians (like Rudolf Murdoch’s son), tamper with juries, keeps the mob boss unconnected to his orders, and even cause economic disasters (like how Japan’s “Lost Decade” was helped by the Yakuza), yet we don’t just break the law to kill the top guy. Instead the police are forced to find some technically like tax evasion for Al Capone. If we can spare a Seal Team to kill Bin Laden (and an unarmed woman), then what’s wrong with sending a team down to fetch back an American traitor?

Cheney has come out and demanded an apology from Obama, which as Glenn Greenwald points out, is not unreasonable. Cheney explains: “They, in effect, said that we had walked away from our ideals, or taken policy contrary to our ideals, when we had enhanced interrogation techniques. Now they clearly have moved in the direction of taking robust action when they think it is justified.” As Bryan Lambert says, “When Dick Cheney tells you you’ve done the right thing, that is a sign that you need to seriously re-evaluate your moral priorities.”

Here’s the “scholar” of the Republicans, Newt Gingrich, on the controversy: “They got due process. The president signed an order to kill them. That was due process.”

The far more popular outcry from the Left has been against the death penalty case of Troy Davis. Everyone on the Left, including most of my favorite bloggers, have taken up his cause. This includes: Glenn Greenwald, Matt Bors, Tom Tomorrow, Arianna Huffington, Alan Colmes, Michael Moore, the “Libertarian” Bobb Barr, Roger Ebert, Alec Baldwin, Wil “Wesley Crusher” Wheaton, Jimmy Carter, and Pope Benedict. But from the articles that I’ve read about him, the mountain of evidence of witness tampering doesn’t hold up. What is indisputed but never mentioned by my favorite liberal bloggers is that Troy Davis, not wearing his round-eyed “You wouldn’t lethally inject a man with glasses” spectacles, was with Daryl Collins at not one but two different shootings in the same night in 1989. The first shooting was at a pool party at someone who mocked them while driving by, resulting in a bullet in the jaw, and the second was against a cop who was trying to help a homeless man from being pistol whipped over an argument over alcohol at 1 in the morning. Mark MacPhail, who was working as a security guard for Burger King, was shot twice: once through the heart and a finishing blow to the face. Although the two men carried the same type of gun and the murder weapon was never recovered, the details I’m familiar with make me think Troy Davis is the more likely of the two to have killed MacPhail. But even if he isn’t, he was present at one attempted murder headshot and decided the night wasn’t over yet.

Other details listed in this conservative article also provide some pretty damning arguments, although I can not vouch for its truthfulness, or even who authored it, since both Erick Erickson and Curt from Flopping Aces claim to have written it.

Even Amnesty International, who I think started the whole thing, doesn’t actually have an opinion as to his guilt but admits the whole point of focusing on the “catastrophic flaw in the U.S. death penalty machine.” This is seems a bit insincere when posting Troy Davis’ mug with the look of “Don’t kill me” on it all over the web. Even assuming there was witness tampering as has been alleged, it still seems more likely to me that they framed a guilty man, and regardless there is no denying he took part in an at least one attempted murder.

But even worse, MacPhail’s mother has been getting threatening phone calls over the case. So Representative John Lewis’ statement that “Today, we are all Troy Anthony Davis. Tonight, a little piece of all of us will die” does not really resound with me since I don’t think he’s the best test case to use to try and fight corporal punishment. Neither al-Alwaki nor Troy Davis should be executed if they were only accessories to murder, but unlike al-Alwaki, Troy Davis did get due process, and if I’m wrong about which of the two pulled the trigger, I wouldn’t make it a national cause like a presidentially-approved assassination of an American citizen should be.

Aside from Troy Davis, there’s the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas for the death of his three daughters in a fire that consumed their home on December 23rd, 1991. This case has been used to constantly attack Rick Perry for allowing an innocent man to be executed, usually along with a quote from some right-wing buffoon praising Perry since “It takes balls to execute an innocent man.” Early investigators found evidence that an accelerant was used to start the fire, but a second investigation found shoddy science had been used and proved that the cracked glass that was supposed to prove quick heating could have occurred by quick cooling. But his wife came out saying that he confessed that he killed the girls because she had threatened him with divorce and another witness overheard him telling the corpse of his oldest daughter that she was not the one who was supposed to die. Again, this is not the prima fica case I would be using to attack the death penalty.

Although DNA tests overturning court verdicts and the cost of putting people to death compared to surprisingly cheaper alternative of feeding them for life has made me very sympathetic to the anti-death penalty view, watching Law and Order has given me some respect for allowing the prosecution to use the death penalty as a part of deal-making, so part of me wants the death penalty to technically exist yet never actually be used.

*****

While Candice and I were eating at the Subway where we ran into Aasif Mandvi, CNN did a report about how Occupy Wall Street had mixed messages, a narrative echoed through the mainstream that appears designed to enlist dismissal of the cause.

Looking at the schedule offered by Occupy Wall Street, the criticism has some merit. Among other causes, one of the marches for one of the days I was there was “SlutWalk,” which was to protest blaming rape violence on women’s dress by marching scantily dressed or topless. Early on, many were protesting the execution of Troy Davis, and even then I was worried it could be distraction. But that at least was topical, whereas pro-sex, anti-rape statements were as divisive and off-topic as it got. Neither had anything to do with Wall Street.

But while the pet causes of the individuals who have amassed on Wall Street may be varied, they are all progressive causes that do not contradict each other, and scheduling different events at least gives the protestors something to do. The Tea Party was originally against the bank bailout but now does anything it can for the banks, wanting to repeal the Frank-Dodd reform bill that didn’t go far enough. Progressives may take the side of the guilty in order fight against the death penalty, but conservatives take the side of anything that goes against Obama, and overall they want to go back to the way things were before the crash. But I suppose it’s typical for conservatives to always desire to go backwards in time.

Try and find a sign this sophisticated among the Tea Party crowd…

As Angelo has pointed out, the idea that this country is one monolithic set of principles that has lasted for over 200 years is just a fantasy. There’s a drastic difference between pre-civil war and post-civil war America, and most countries in the modern era are based at least formally associated with the philosophy of John Locke. Any attempt to return to the romantic “golden age” past is just a cover for radical right-wing change. Just look at the Tea Party. They profess to want to want to go back to the Constitution, minus about half the Amendments. But only the Amendments they want. Hence, it’s not a “return” but a complete revision. Constitutionalists who in the past derided the “sliding slope” and moral relativism now seem to believe that taking away Amendments is more pro-Constitution b/c it’s going back to the original Constitution!! The original constitution that says you can make Amendments. Following that logic, taking away the Second Amendment would be part of that, but even though Obama just loosened drug laws, the NRA just announced it was a secret plot to make gun users complacent so he could ban guns in his second term. So pretty much the NRA is no longer about gun rights but a Republican political group.

Angelo suggests that if we take the Second Amendment within the context of the original constitution, it’s really giving rights to the states vs. the federal government and that states should be allowed to institute restrictions. I believe gun laws should be handled on the county or parish level.

The Tea Party also wants to go back to the time when only property owners can vote, since the moment everyone is losing their homes seems like the best time to start denying voting rights based on having property. That’s pre-Andrew motherfucking Jackson.

What’s the logic behind it? It stops young people from not being able to vote. The Tea Party knows they are a small group of Baby Boomers, so they have to stop ALL new vote registration. The typical excuse is that you need “skin in the game.” People don’t care about things they don’t own. Hence, if you don’t own property, you don’t have a financial incentive to care about what happens in the country. As Angelo points out: “So… if you take away voting rights, how is that going to make them “care” more about the U.S.?”

*****

Candice and I went down to Wall Street on Friday. There were no protestors there at the time, but it was still cordoned off, with cops swarming the place everywhere. The fence didn’t divide the street evenly at all. Everyone who wanted to walk through was shoehorned into a very confined area which made taking pictures difficult, while vast unused space around Wall Street’s buildings lay bare, holding only bored police men. Yet the protestors had not caused any damage to any of Wall Street’s buildings and the only protestor there at the time was a single man holding a sign up comparing bankers to Nazis.

Federal Hall National Memorial on Wall Street was built in 1842 as the New York Customs House, on the site of the old Federal Hall, to act as a sub-Treasury building. This was the location where George Washington was inaugerated as the first president of the United States. A statue of Washington stands outside the monument. Looking at the picture of the Founding Fathers on the side of the monument, one has to wonder how they would feel about how the country they founded “for the people by the people” was now having police cardon off the people into Orwellian-named “Free Speech Zones” so that the Masters of Wall Street would not have to be bothered by such ruckus.

If you have any doubt that the traders on Wall Street has absolutely no concern for those outside their little bubble, one only has to look at this video of their reaction to an earlier protest. People who believe they are being falsely accused typically either ignore the protestors or try to defend themselves. Instead, these Wall Street plutocrats came out smiling at the protestors while drinking champagne, purposely embracing the cariacture that the protestors had of them.

The message couldn’t be clearer: “Yes, we destroyed the economy, took the bailouts, used it to give ourselves bonuses. We know you’re angry about being screwed so we’re going to take this champagne that your tax dollars bought for us and drink it right in front of you, and if you don’t like it, you can go fuck yourselves.”

This is what Alessio Rastani, a Wall Street banker, told the BBC: “For most traders, it’s not about – we don’t really care that much how they’re going to fix the economy, how they’re going to fix the whole situation. Our job is to make money from it.” Rastani, who also claimed “Goldman Sachs rules the world,” said, “Personally, I’ve been dreaming of this moment for three years… I go to bed every night and I dream of another recession. When the market crashes… if you know what to do, if you have the right plan set up, you can make a lot of money from this.”

The occupation camp was actually not on Wall Street itself but at Liberty Square, about a block away. They day after the pepper spraying incident, the protest moved to the police station to remind them that they are there to serve and protect. Even two journalists from Fox News recently got pepper sprayed and hit with a baton, so you can guess how judicious the NYPD is being with their crowd control gear.

I went there Saturday morning to see what it was like. I had thought that they were only protesting during the daylight hours, but when I got there I found sleeping bags among propped up umbrellas wet from last night’s showers. Despite the direction on Occupy Wall Street’s main poster to “bring tent,” the police were not allowing any tents to be put up in the square or anywhere else. Everyone looked wet, tired and worn out. One woman who had suffered a seizure was being taken away on a stretcher. The movement turned out to be a lot more hard core than I thought.

After talking to a few people, I learned that many of them had come from all across the country. Many of them were homeless. Others were young progressives. Most of them had a story to tell about being laid off or losing their home. All of them believed what they were doing was important.

There was electricity so one group was able to plug their laptop in order to make updates. Along the west side, everyone had laid down the signs in a line for people to read while they weren’t being held up. I forgot to bring my camera that morning but was able to find some pictures on the internet.

One sign I didn’t see read: “I am 20K in debt and am paying out of pocket for my current tuition while I start paying back loans with two part time jobs.”

Another read: “I am a 28 year old female with debt that had to give up her apartment + pet because I have no money and I owe over $30,000.”

As Ezra Klein points out: “These are not rants against the system. They’re not anarchist manifestos. They’re not calls for a revolution. They’re small stories of people who played by the rules, did what they were told, and now have nothing to show for it. Or, worse, they have tens of thousands in debt to show for it.”

The common mantra for Occupy Wall Street has become “We are the 99%.” As Politifact shows, the “mega-rich” pay only 15% in taxes while the middle class pays between 15% to 25% and are then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot. Last year, the 400 richest taxpayers saw their incomes grow by 400% and their tax rates fall by 40%. Six banks have assets that equal 60% of our GDP. Meanwhile, the number of Americans living below the poverty line has grown to 15%, the highest percentage in 18 years and the highest number of people in the 52 years the Census Bureau has kept statistics. The jobs crisis actually began a year into Bush’s first term. Even the nonpartisan CBO is saying: “Spend money now!”

Republicans instead ignore the obvious problem with the economy — weak demand — and continue to work the same narrative they used for 8 years before the crisis: too many regulations, too many unemployment benefits, and not enough privitization. But a study from the Ecoomic Policy Institute shows that regulations aren’t to blame for the economy, and another study from Berekley shows that unemployment benefits do not weaken job search efforts. Also: privitizing things makes it cost more. Why is it that 9/11 changed everything but the 2008 crash changed nothing?

People like Greenspan don’t care when their predictions don’t come true. They actually find it “regrettable” when the disastrously high interest rates they predict don’t happen and lament that the free markets they hold so dear aren’t “discipling the government.” They just repeat obvious lies to themselves like that the stimulus “created zero jobs.” They’re so antagonistic to the government that Ron Paul actually criticized Rick Perry for creating 170,000 jobs because they were government jobs! To see what a world where Ron Paul is president, one only has to look at his former campaign manager, who was uninsured at died of pneumonia at 49, leaving his family $400,000 in debt. It doesn’t matter that Democratic presidents have created more private sector jobs and increased the debt less than Republicans.

There is some worry that the Occupy Wall Street movement will become just another DNC recruiting tool the way the Tea Party became a rebranding campaign for the Republicans, but given this harsh response to MoveOn.Org, that possibility seems pleasantly unlikely.

Following the debt ceiling debate, politics became really depressing for me. It seemed like destiny that while people in Greece for rioting over entitlements they couldn’t afford, the only people bringing civil unrest over austerity measures in the face of the worst Recession in 80 years were people whining about birth certificates and how the country with the lowest taxes in the world and had just decreased taxes to a 50-year low was crippling the country with overtaxation. Even though I see the same arguments every night on MSNBC, I’m glad to see there are still rebels on the Left who are willing to take on a corrupt government that’s subserviant to Wall Street even when there’s a Democratic president in office. It gives me faith that maybe we aren’t all a bunch of compromise-taking centrists who respond to Republican obstination with more concessions. As for those who act condescendingly towards Occupy Wall Street with the typical accusations of class warfare and cariactures of lazy potheads, the perfect response comes in the form of a tweet I read from one of the protestors: “Why is it easier for you to believe that 150 million people are lazy and stupid than 400 people are greedy and malicious?”

TEA PARTY HOBBITS: It is time to slay the Debt Dragon!

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: We have less than half our hit points! We’ll get annihilated!!

TEA PARTY HOBBITS: But we have to kill him NOW! He gets stronger every day!!

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: Maybe from eating, but not from healing. The Debt Dragon has been around for 600 years! We’d gain more hit points a day than him just resting for a while, especially since you’re too cheap to buy healing potions.

TEA PARTY HOBBITS: We can’t buy anything. We’re broke.

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: No, I’m broke. Greenspan the Green got tons of gold kicking all those dark elves out of their lairs in the Tower of CDO’s. We told Greenspan, “You’ve made plenty of money off these guys. Let’s Teleport back home,” but he said I was restricting your free movement, and you followed him, then boom, we get hit with an encounter we can’t run away from and wake up with half the cash gone. So why don’t you use some of Greenspan’s gold to buy some Potions of Healing for us?

GREENSPAN THE GREEN: I am a Potion Creator, not a Potion Buyer.

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: Not this again. This is what you always say. ‘Give me more money and I’ll create the potions myself.’ Then you go off and sell the rest of the potions to make money to magic items for yourself. How many times do you expect us to fall for that?

GREENSPAN THE GREEN: Potions will not help us. We should just rest until we heal.

GROVDO, THE TEA PARTY HOBBIT LEADER (grabs woman): We go and fight the debt dragon NOW, no potions, or she dies.

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: You know, we WERE fighting the debt dragon before you came along and said we were beating him too early. Then Greenspan led us to defeat at the Dotcom Cave and the Tower of CDO’s. Now you want us to go and fight the debt dragon for no other reason than you suspect Barack will get killed and you may survive.

GROVDO: You must be thinking of someone else. I did not join the party until after Barack defeated the Wizard Cheney and his chimpanzee familiar.

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: Different character. Same player.

BARACK THE BARBARIAN: Let her go and I’ll do what you say.

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: What?? He’s just a Hobbit. You could use one of your barbarian maneuvers to just grab her.

BARACK THE BARBARIAN: My advisers are not persuaded that is a winning maneuver.

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: What advisers? Didn’t most of them quit? And couldn’t you have made them promise not to do this while you were negotiating the spoil cuts just a little while ago?

BARACK THE BARBARIAN: I was sure that they would act responsibly.

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: Great call.

GROVDO: We’re going! Now!! (Cuts the woman.)

MCCAIN-SMEAGOL: The idea seems to be that if he kills the hostage, a crisis in the party will ensue and the people will turn en masse against Barack, then he would have no choice but to fight the Debt Dragon, destroy the Ring of Spending, and the Tea Party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

MCCAIN-GOLLUM (changes personality): You Tea Party Hobbits! You can’t have our Precious!

TEA PARTY HOBBITS: Have it! We’re trying to destroy it!

BARACK THE BARBARIAN: You’re right, Tea Party Hobbits. The Debt Dragon is an important menace that we need to tackle right now…

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: …

BARACK THE BARBARIAN: But we must tackle it together, all of us at once if we are going to stand a chance!

GROVDO: Us? We’re destroying the Ring of Spending, not fighting the Debt Dragon. You are.

BARACK THE BARBARIAN: It is the only way we can take him down. I am willing to take considerable heat from my party to extend a hand to you and fight the Debt Dragon together… if you just provide a little auxiliary help from the side.

GROVDO: No, we’ve provided enough for the party as it is. As soon as you begin fighting the Debt Dragon, we will get a blessing from the Confidence Fairy and finally be safe from the Invisible Bond Market Vigilantes.

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: This is truly amazing. You heralded the Confidence Fairy every chance you got when Cheney led this party, but it’s never made an appearance. And it’s one thing to be intimidated by Bond Market Vigilantes. It’s another to be intimidated by the fear that Bond Market Vigilantes might show up one of these days.

GREENSPAN THE GREEN: I am in favor for the first time in my memory of having the Hobbits fight with us.

BARACK THE BARBARIAN (to the Hobbits): How about if I agree to fight the Debt Dragon without your help, and I give you everything you ask for, plus some things you didn’t ask for, will you at least let go of the hostage?

GREENSPAN THE GREEN: The fact that I am in favor of going back to the ways things were before Cheney is merely an indicator of how scared I am of this Debt Dragon that has emerged and its order of magnitude.

MCCAIN-GOLLUM: Take it! Take it!

TEA PARTY HOBBITS: No.

BARACK THE BARBARIAN: All right.

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: I think you’ve been emboldening them by the way you keep folding in the face of their threats. You surrendered on the spoil cuts; you surrendered when they threatened to break up the party; and now you’re surrendering on a grand scale to raw extortion over the hostage. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.

(The Party Begins to Travel to the Debt Dragon, headed by the Grovdo and his companions: Bach-Sam, Perry, and Pip-Palin.)

MCCAIN-SMEAGOL: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell should be repealed following a study. The DREAM Act will provide a path to citizenship. Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.

MCCAIN-GOLLUM: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell shouldn’t be repealed. No, I wouldn’t vote for my own DREAM Act bill. Rev. Falwell came to my office and said that he wanted to put our differences behind us. I was glad to do that. I never considered myself a Maverick.

GREENSPAN THE GREEN: This is going to be disastrous. We’re not going to be able to get away from the dragon until we take some serious damage.

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: You were the one who reincarnated Grovdo after Barack killed him in his battle against McCain-Gollum. Our soothsayers prophesized that his soul would be lost in the wilderness for 400 years, but you brought him back in only a year stronger than ever. You had him charmed to do your bidding, and now you lost control over your own monster. He’s convinced he was conceived in a virgin birth, but even he doesn’t know the truth about his own origin story, that he’s the long lost son of Ron Paul.

GROVDO: Once the Spending Ring is destroyed and the Debt Dragon is defeated, our party we be back on the road to being great again, just like it was back in the original D&D red box edition.

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: You look back and wax nostalgic about the “simpler time” in the Golden Age of the original system, but you purposely forget minority races had only one class back then, and the wizards you put in charge like Greenspan instead run Second Edition AD&D games where all the high level characters use kits and ridiculous math to take control of the whole game away while entry-level characters have to multi-class just to keep up. At least First Edition AD&D allowed different races to be anything they want.

GREENSPAN THE GREEN: But then Third Edition went to ridiculous lengths to balance things out and it still doesn’t work. The original D&D’s rule about experience being awarded according to the gold piece standard would be a good system to bring back.

(Frum the Bard, a former writer for Cheney’s familiar, walks up.)

FRUM THE BARD: The original D&D’s rule about experience being based on the gold piece system was not as great as you imagined since none of the dice had huge modifier bonuses attached to them and experience awards were extremely random.

(The Party reaches Mordor and splits up, with the Hobbits taking the Ring of Spending to the Volcano and the rest of the party facing up the Debt Dragon. As the Hobbits climb, the Ring bears down on them and they begin to fight among themselves.)

GROVDO (entering volcano): I will have to do this alone….

(Grovdo holds the Ring of Spending over the volcano.)

GROVDO: Wait, if I throw this ring into the volcano, I won’t have any power over the party any more. (Releases his hostage)

(Meanwhile, the party fights the debt dragon.)

Barack unleashes a flurry of cuts against the debt dragon (1,000,000,000,000 d), but a spell reverses the attacks and they instead strike Barack.

The Debt Dragon casts a Delayed Blast Fireball on him that will cause the same amount of damage once it explodes.

The Debt Dragon strikes Greenspan for 266 damage.

Greenspan casts a Minor Healing spell, gaining 30 hp.

The Debt Dragon breathes fire on Greenspan for 513 damage.

Greenspan casts a Minor Healing spell, gaining 61 hit points.

Greenspan then knocks Barack down, causing Barack to drop his Treasury Shield. Greenspan then drops his own weapon and runs over to take shelter behind the newly fallen Treasury Shield.

BARACK THE BARBARIAN: What the hell was that for?

GREENSPAN THE GREEN: It’s the Tea Party Hobbits’ fault for being so uncompromising!

(The Tea Party Hobbits and their leader arrive just as Greenspan says this.)

TEA PARTY HOBBITS: What was that?

BLITZER THE WEREWOLF: He said someone didn’t provide enough damage to the Debt Dragon.

GROVDO: That’s right. Barack got knocked down because he didn’t provide enough cuts! And obviously that Treasury Shield wasn’t doing enough.

BACH-SAM: Barack’s last adviser should resign! He said Greenspan would never turn against Barack!

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: Gpeenspan said he knocked Barack down because of you! But who cares what Greenspan thinks! It was his Poor Standards that convinced you climbing to the top of the Tower of CDO’s was worth the risk! And if the Treasury Shield wasn’t doing enough, why is he cowering behind it?

(Bach-Sam sees the Ring of Spending.)

BACH-SAM: Grovdo, don’t tell me you failed to destroy the Ring of Spending!

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: Don’t act so betrayed. You’ve used the Ring for your own family in the past and you agreed “in principal” to Paul Ryan’s plan to keep the Ring working for the benefit of you Hobbits for another 10 years.

FRUM THE BARD: Looking over these stats, we took a lot more damage from the Tower of CDO’s than we originally thought. When people tell me that I’ve changed my mind too much about too many things over the past four years, I can only point to the devastation wrought by this crisis and wonder: How closed must your thinking be if it isn’t affected by a disaster of such magnitude? And in fact, almost all of our thinking has been somehow affected: hence the drift of so many away from what used to be the mainstream market-oriented WASP-ington Consensus toward to Faustian demonics and Ron Paul style anti-magic item sharing. The ground they and I used to occupy stands increasingly empty. If I can’t follow where most of my friends have gone, it is because I keep hearing Susan Sontag’s question in my ears. Or rather, a revised and updated version of that question: “Imagine, if you will, someone who listened only to Greenspan these last 10 years, and someone who listened only to Krugman. Who would have been better informed about the realities of the current demonic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?”

The Debt Dragon breathes fire on Greenspan for 635 damage.

Greenspan casts a Greater Healing spell, gaining 430 hit points.

The Debt Dragon breathes fire on Greenspan for 520 damage.

Greenspan casts three Greater Healing spells, for 423, 126, and 214 hit points (763 hp).

The Debt Dragon claws Greenspan for 77 damage.

Greenspan drinks a healing tonic, gaining 4 hit points.

The Debt Dragon breathes fire on Greenspan for 420 damage and then claws Greenspan for 173 damage (593 d).

(The dragon circles the party ready to unleash more attacks on the party.)

SULLIVAN THE BARD: We’ve been told again and again that the real motivation of the Tea Party Hobbits is a multi-partisan movement to bring the debt and rule-making under control. I’ve never believed this, partly because these people were never to be found under Cheney’s familiar. It was primarily a laundering device to disappear the Bush years, re-brand the party as a wholly different entity and thereby avoid the long wilderness that the catastrophes of the last decade might have led them into. Now we have some large data sets to review the reality. And the reality is that the Tea Party Hobbits are largely the Cleric right-wing of the party. They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white right-wingers, they had a low regard for demi-humans long before Barack was leader, and they still do. Next to being a Greenspan follower, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party Hobbit is to see religion play a prominent role in politics. They seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party Leader may say their overriding concern is a smaller rule-making, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting the DM in the party. So Bach-Sam is not such a fluke, is she? Or a flake, for that matter.

FRUM THE BARD: It is a peculiarity of the current political moment that a politician with a history of pushing sectarian religious beliefs in rule-making has become a hero to a anti-magic item sharing movement. But is it so peculiar? The Tea Party is not exactly anti-magic item sharing – otherwise it would not so passionately defend medicine for old people. It’s a movement of relatively older and relatively affluent Hobbits whose expectations have been disrupted by the worst demonic crisis since the Great Cataclysm. They are looking for an explanation of the catastrophe – and a villain to blame. They are finding it in the same place that Bach-Sam and her co-religionists located it 30 years ago: a deeply hostile rule-maker controlled by alien and suspect forces, with Barack Obama as their leader and symbol.

BACH-SAM: And the Soviet Union!

KRUGMAN THE ROGUE: Looks like the dragon is coming down for another volley of attacks. Any last words?

GROVDO: This is all the fault of Barack’s leadership policies!

FRUM THE BARD: Question: Which policies? If so minded, you could describe Barack Obama as the biggest spoil cutter in history. You complain about excess spending. Fine. But isn’t the evil of excess spending supposed to be overshooting your maximum hit points rather than losing all of them?

PERRY: He spoke disrespectfully about Flying Carpet owners!

FRUM THE BARD: Really? That’s the indictment? Really?

A lot of crazy sex stories lately:

1. Last January, it came out that the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, had gotten the female dental hygenist who fixed his teeth (after they were chipped by a man punching him through his car window at a rally) to throw him a sex party. The girls, who were dressed as cops and nurses, gave him a lesbian show, and the 74-year-old managed to convince the dental hygenist to join the party. But that’s just par for the course for Berlusconi.

2. Ted Haggard came back to the spotlight last January to say: “I think that probably, if I were 21 in this society, I would identify myself as a bisexual.” Good to know. He also wanted to clear up that he didn’t have “sex sex” with the male prostitute he bought drugs for; he just got a hand job. He also says he would have come out with all of this earlier but was afraid of becoming konwn as the “masturbation guy.”

3. Around the same time it came out that a Vatican department advised Ireland’s Catholic bishops in 1997 not to report priests suspected of child abuse to the police

4. An Indonesian Member of Parliament who helped pass a tough anti-pornography law has resigned after being caught watching sexually explicit videos on his computer during a parliamentary debate.

5. Wisconsin state Republican Senator Randy Hopper, while claiming to still live with his wife, was actually living outside the district he represents with a much younger 25-year-old mistress since May 2010. Hopper claimed to maintain an “apartment” in the district but the address he gave turned out to be $600,000 home owned by a high-ranking employee of his media company. She was then given a job with Governor Scott Walker’s administration with a 35% wage increase, despite the fact the administration was cutting wages and that she never actually turned in a job application. He filed for divorce last August.

6. Republican House Representative Christopher Lee resigned last April after a report emerged that he had tried to pick up a woman on Craigslist. He sent a bare-chested photo of himself to the woman, lying about his age, his marriage status, and his occupation (claiming he was a lobbyist), but for some strange reason used his real name.

7. New information also came out regarding the Ensign sex scandal. In November 2007, the Hamptons, old high school friends of Republican Senator John Ensign who worked for him and lived in the same gated community, had their house robbed. The robbery greatly shook up Cynthia Hampton, so Ensign convinced them both to move in with him, and soon afterwards began an affair with Cynthia. According to her, she at first asked if he had lost his mind, to which he said he had, then after being “very persistent and relentless,” and continuously calling, and never taking no for an answer, she gave in to him. Hampton, says the report, “was in a vulnerable emotional state and a mess at the time Senator Ensign was pursuing her, as her home had been burglarized, a family member was undergoing medical treatment, and Mr. Hampton’s travel schedule back and forth to Washington gave them little time to be together.”

Doug Hampton found out about it next month when he saw a message from Ensign come to his wife’s cell phone saying “How wonderful it is. … Scared, but excited,” just as Ensign was coming to the airport where they were to pick up the Hampton’s son. When Ensign got there, Hampton jumped out of the chased him. Cynthia stayed in the airport for hours and took a taxi home. The two families had a discussion on Christmas Eve, Ensign wept and promised to end the affair, and the two celebrated Christmas together.

The affair started again a month later and when Hampton found out again by seeing a call going to Cynthia on Ensign’s cell phone labelled “Aunt Judy,” he asked Ensign’s long-time spiritual adviser Tim Coe to help end the affair. Coe brought in his brother, as well as Marty Sherman (the founder of the secretive Fellowship Foundation) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). The group confronted Ensign about the affair at the infamous C Street house on Valentine’s Day, and Coburn convinced Hampton to forgive his wife again, but the affair continued. At one point, Coe saw both cars pakred at a hotel near their community and called Ensign saying, “I know exactly where you are. I know exactly what you are doing. Put your pants on and go home.” But Ensign replied, “I can’t. I love her.” The Hamptons went to Ensign to talk about the affair the next day, but he told them he was in love with Cynthia and wanted to marry her and that Doug couldn’t work for him anymore, after which Ensign called his wife to tell her about his feelings and moved out of the family home to live with his parents.

Mrs. Hampton and Ensign continued their affair, with the senator buying two new cell phones to allow them to talk without being detected, but Ensign’s wife found out about the phones and they were disconnected. Cynthia asked him to stop contacing her and other congressmen confronted Ensign, but the affair continued until Mrs. Hampton sent him an email in August 2008 imploring him to stop contacting her because her life and family is in shambles.

Ensign also had his parents pay the Hamptons $96,000, which Hampton admits was “severance,” even though severance pay is illegal. Ensign tried to claim his parents paid them this money “out of concern of the well-being of the longtime family friends during a difficult time,” but once the Ethics Committee started investigating, Ensign’s parents turned on their son and denied giving it.

At this point I should probably mention that Ensign is a Pentacostal and a member of the Promise Keepers. This is what Ensign had to say in one of his own speeches against gay marriage:

Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation.

So does homosexuality…. and divorce and remarriage, which is what Ensign was planning.

Ensign is also a member of the Christian evangelical group, “The Family,” located at the tax-payer-funded C Street House. The same C Street House where Governor Mark Sanford brought his mistress to have sex with so that his “Christan friends” there could help cover it up. The same C Street House where Mississippi Represntative Chip Pickering had sex with his mistress according to the “Alienation of Affection” lawsuit brought on by Pickering’s now x-wife and mother of his five sons against his girlfriend. The same C Street House connected to Laurent Gbagbo, the Christian African president who planned to enact Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” law (reportedly, the death penalty has been removed in subsequent negotiations). Senator Inhofe was so upset that Gbagdo lost in the last UN-sanctioned election against his Muslim opponent, he actually called on Hillary Clinton to demand a new election!

Hampton, now bitter at the Evangelical group, said that the people at C Street “think the consequences don’t apply. Those need to be dealt with differently. Because of the responsibility. Because of pressure. Because of the work that needs to be done… This is about preserving John, preserving the Republican party, this is about preserving C Street. These men care about themselves and their own political careers, period.”

8. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Director of the IMF and member of the French Socialist Party was arrested while boarding a New York flight back to Paris on charges he had forced the African American maid at his hotel to perform oral sex on him and then attempted to rape her. His lawyer has indicated he is going to allege the sex was consensual, but he apparently has a history of sexual aggression since in February 2007, a French journalist alleged that he had sexually assaulted her in 2002 during the course of an interview for a book, saying: “It ended really badly. We ended up fighting. It finished really violently … I said the word ‘rape’ to scare him but it didn’t seem to scare him much … “ Two weeks after the arrest, two female staff members brought charges against a junior minister, one of whom said the case encouraged her to come forward. Prosecutors also opened an inquiry after former education Minister Luc Ferry accused another unnamed ex-minister of being engaged in acts of pedophilia in Morocco. Following the Strauss-Kahn affair, Sunday’s Journal du Dimanche published an outpouring of allegations by female members of parliament about crude remarks by male legislators to their women colleagues and staff under the headline: “Routine sexism in parliament.” Ben Stein defended Strauss-Kahn by saying he never heard of an economist committing rape. Jon Stewart listed a litany of economists who had been charged with sexual assault and concluded that by Stein’s logic, economists are the “rape-ist profession going.”

9. There’s also Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose father-of-the-year award for hiding a now 13-year-old son makes John Edwards’ disowning his newborn daughter look almost whimsically slimy.

10. Anthony Weiner, Democratic Representative of New York, has been doing a lot of sexting and phone sex over the years, but he screwed up when he sent a picture of his hardon on Twitter. Someone who hated Weiner was able to download the pic before Weiner deleted it, and it eventually got sent to Brietbart. At first he tried to claim he was hacked and the pic was meant as a slight against his name. Jon Stewart, who happens to be an old college buddy of his, waxed conflicted over bashing an old friend and taking advantage of a golden comedic moment, but jokingly concluded that the boner was way too large to be his. When Weiner tried to dodge answering whether the pic was of him, he tried to claim that it didn’t look familiar but he didn’t want to say outright that it wasn’t him because…. Someone might have altered another Weiner pic. This obviously made it worse because it insinuated there are so many boner pics of him, he couldn’t even recognize it. Weiner even went on Rachael Maddow, saying: “Stuff gets manipulated. Maybe it started out as being a photograph of mine” that had been “taken out of context.” Cue laugh track. He even tried to cite Jon Stewart’s “that bulge is too large to be his dick” joke for support, as if Jon Stewart had a better idea of what his penis looked like than he did!

Republicans like Ann Coulter mocked him for getting a lawyer without involving the police. Bill O’Reilly tried to claim the possibility that the boner pic came from terrorists was too great to chance and that it was Weiner’s patriotic duty to involve the police. Brietbart and liberal bloggers began to tangle over the validity of the pics until finally, after Brietbart was able to get his hands on some other – far more embarrassing – pics, as well as some steamy sex-chat sessions, Weiner came out and admitted he was the one who sent the pic. Brietbart promised not to publish the new photos, saying “it’s better for him and his family.” Naturally, that lasted a day. He showed them to the radio jocks Opie and Anthony using his cell phone; the radio hosts took a pic of the unrestrained boner and posted it online.

If Weiner had just been honest in the first place, then the general populace would never have been able to see his dick and read these hilarious chats with Las Vegas blackjack dealer, Lisa Weiss:

Lisa Weiss: “To get us in the mood, first we watch back-to-back episodes of ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘Colbert Report’, Or if this is not your thing, we can just get drunk and have mad, passionate sex!”

Anthony Weiner: “Why choose? With me behind you can’t we both watch ‘Daily Show’?”

Lisa Weiss: “..couldn’t love you more than when you were on Bill Maher…”

Anthony Weiner: “Maybe Maher will let me do you on his desk…”

This turned out to be great schadenfreude for Matt Taibbi since Weiner led a media campaign against him, calling on everyone to trash their copy of the New York Press because Taibbi had written a tragically unfunny article making fun of the death of Pope John Paul. At the time, Taibbi thought it was an “odd take on the First Amendment, coming from an ostensibly left-leaning New York liberal Democrat,” but then Weiner called the police on a WCBS reporter just for asking him questions! “I love how all of these ACLU all-stars turn into little Pinochets the instant the heat on their beloved careers moves up past room temperature,” he writes. Taibbi was also “fascinated by the editorials blaming the media for their unjust treatment of Weiner – like it’s none of our business whether or not this guy is sending pictures of his boner to young women around the country.”

In contrast, Glenn Greenwald claimed just that journalists condemning Weiner like Megan McArdle, have “absolutely no idea what vows Weiner and his wife have made to each other, and she shouldn’t know, because it’s none of her business, despite her eagerness to learn about it and publicly condemn it.” Unlike other sex scandals, which typically have some pretense on politics, either because of illegal activity or gross hypocrisy, there is nothing to tie it to news other than pure muckraking. And although Greenwald has a point, it seems to me if only sex scandals based on hypocrisy were reported, it would generally be perceived as bias against Republicans. But as Greenwald points out, he’s not a fan of Weiner since the congressman is rabidly pro-Israel (even criticizing Obama stance), despite the fact that his pregnant wife is an Arab Muslim.

Jon Stewart was actually tougher on Weiner than Greenwald, saying that if Weiner was picking up women with boner pics, he had to go, but if he was just afraid to admit that he had pictures of his weiner on the computer, then, “welcome to the club.” Taibbi was even tougher, saying , “The truth is, if you’re worth the congressional office at all, your automatic answer to any question about pictures like that has to be, “No, that can’t be me in that picture, because I’m a United States Congressman and I don’t take digital pictures of my hard-ons.” Bill Maher went even further, treating the practice like a taboo, saying it was even creepier to have pictures like that on his hard drive than it was to actually send them, before lamenting that Weiner got all of the scandal with none of the sex. My own feelings can best be described by the line given by Bryan Lambert at YouAreDumb.org: “I don’t give a shit that he lied. I don’t give a shit that he Tweeted cock pictures to ladies on the Internet… But I cannot forgive him for letting Andrew Breitbart get something right for the first time in his life.”

11. John Edwards has been charged with using campaign money to pay for the concealment and generous lifestyle of his mistress, Rielle Hunter, and unborn child. Edwards now admits that he financed her with generous funds given by banker heir, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, an elderly philanthropist who agreed to pay for all of John Edwards’ haircuts personally when the media started hammering him on his $400 haircuts, but denies this was improper because the money was used for personal reasons, not political ones. Money was also provided for Andrew Young, the married staffer who originally took the bullet for Edwards and claimed he had knocked up Hunter. Edwards’ campaign finance chairman, Fred Baron, claimed that he had been providing financial assistance to both Hunter and Young “without Edwards’ knowledge.”

Bonus: If you need an inspiring story to wash the sex out, here’s a story about two long lost siblings that found each other through an internet dating service after 30 years. They say they figured it out before they…

Although Wiener’s sex scandal is by far the least offensive, it has gotten the most press, which goes to show that if you’re a politician involved in a sex scandal, and your name is synonymous with a sexual organ, do not allow Twitter to be involved with your sex life in any way.