Anyone been in Jeb Bush’s garage lately? I ask because U.S. Postal Service agents are scrambling to find thousands of absentee ballots that have yet to be received by Florida voters. Broward County deputy supervisor of elections Gisela Salas said only a few of 60,000 absentee ballots had actually been delivered. “It’s really inexplicable at this point in time and the matter is under investigation by law enforcement,” Salas reported. Though the postal service assured Broward officials that the ballots had been processed by the post office to which they had been taken, U.S. Postal Service Inspector Del Alvarez put on a different spin: “We’re looking for it, we’re trying to find it if in fact it was ever delivered to the postal service. It’s highly unlikely that 58,000 pieces of mail just disappeared.”

He’s got a point there. It’s nearly unimaginable as losing, say, 380 tons of high-impact explosives from an Iraqi munitions depot. Yet according to a U.N. watchdog agency, that is precisely what has occurred. “America is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site,” offered President Bush. “It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime’s fall,” countered a top Iraqi scientist who recalled that Saddam insisted “not even a shred of paper” be removed. The Pentagon, for its part, has said it does not know when the explosives went missing.

“I want to remind the American people: if Senator Kerry had his way, we would still be taking our global test, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, he would control all those weapons and explosives, and could share them with out terrorist enemies,” charged the President form the campaign trail. Well thank God we’ve eliminated the middleman – now our troops can get blown up much more efficiently.

What the White House has no trouble locating is an egregious tax break for the richly undeserving. $136 billion of which was ladled out last week despite the government’s fulminating debt crisis. John McCain (R. Ariz.) described the bill as “the worst example of the influence of special interests I have ever seen.” The administration tried to justify the giveaway by proffering that tax cuts will prod small business owners into hiring new employees. Well, they’d better hurry up because long-distance carriers AT&T, Sprint and MCI are collectively dumping 8,600 workers while Bank of America (4,500) and American Airlines (1,100) are slashing payrolls as well. Despite the $10 billion handed out to tobacco farmers the bill is probably, in the final analysis, detrimental to the employment picture. A major provision attempts to repatriate overseas earnings by lowering the corporate tax rate from 35% to 5 1/4%. In effect, Washington is enticing American companies to set up offshore subsidiaries and outsource jobs as a means of lowering their taxes.

By now most of us have heard stories of Mexican workers “worth their salt” who came to the U.S. – illegally, in the main – to secure a good job only to find, years later, that their factory is moving back to Mexico in search of lower wages. While the irony is delicious, this trend is beginning to infect the high-tech sector of our economy. Indian computer programmers and Silicon Valley engineers, like Laxmikant Mandal, are following their paychecks back to Bangalore. But even for those lucky enough to have kept their jobs, the future looks dim. With a national savings rate around 1%, it is particularly disquieting to accept that pension benefits are no longer a sure thing. General Motors and Ford are both under SEC investigation for accounting methods related to retirement and health benefits. The city of San Diego, after years of underfunding its public employee pension program, is technically insolvent. The airlines, well, enough said there. And Social Security is clearly doomed regardless of feckless attempts (i.e. raising the retirement age) at tinkering under the hood. Meanwhile, the largest store of wealth in this country, the housing stock, is beginning to experience falling prices for the first time in a decade.

The financial train wreck headed our way is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. With a tank of gas fetching $50, the public hardly needs the Conference Board to tell us that consumer confidence is in the crapper. Maybe this is why the Christmas sales have already begun. Everyone seems to be worried about that metaphoric “rainy day”. Everyone perhaps except the President who is spending money faster than a coke head on an unauthorized leave of duty.

 

Finished with the task of stuffing $500 million into Howard Stern’s pockets, the FCC has progressed to consecrating Sinclair Broadcast Group’s plan to air the anti-Kerry film Stolen Honor only days before the general election. While the move is seen by cynics as aquid pro quo for prohibiting its ABC affiliates from showing Ted Koppel reciting a list of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and for requiring on-screen journalists (including sportscasters and weathermen) to pledge support for President Bush, the feds tried to pose as impartial.

Numerically contorting the First Amendment into a Catch-22, the government disclosed its inability to pursue a violation of the equal-time provision until after an actual broadcast. As such, all 62 company-owned stations can carry the so-called documentary with impunity. While Sinclair will most likely offer any requisite airtime to Senator Kerry on or about November 3rd, odds are that CEO David Smith won’t be around for the festivities. According to authorities, Mr. Smith was arrested in Baltimore for engaging in an “unnatural and perverted sex act.” Out here in California this would be taken as doing it with one’s own wife, but not so in Maryland, where Smith was caught with street-corner prostitute Mary DiPaulo. “I discovered them,” recounted the arresting officer, “smearing their animal stains across the leather interior of a company-owned Mercedes as Mr. Smith shouted, “Take that, Lewinsky!”

At least Dave had the decency to unzip on a public thoroughfare. Bill O’Reilly, according to court documents, accesses his concupiscence via speed dial. You’ve heard of Voice-Over-Internet Protocol, well, this was Ejaculate-On-Employee Protocol. Associate producer Andrea Mackris claims her boss called incessantly in an attempt to engage in phone sex. One time O’Reilly boasted that he owned a vibrator “shaped like a cock with a little battery in it.” The complaint states: “It became apparent that Defendant was masturbating as he spoke. After he climaxed…” I guess Bill found his fist unworthy of the no-spin zone because in an ensuing conversation he suggested, “We should do it together, I could coach you through it.” He later regaled Mackris with a well-honed fantasy: “I’d be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda’ kissing your neck from behind… and then I would take the other hand with the falafel thing and I’d put it on your pussy…” My God, the imagery is so incredibly disgusting; I need to stop typing so I can puke. Can you imagine, food in the bathroom?

Is there anyone besides Clarence Thomas among us who would order an entrée with pubic hair? Well, with two or three Supreme Court vacancies projected over the next four years, we may just find out. The election – and the future direction of the judiciary -is beginning to turn not on the faltering economy (declining durable goods and factory orders) or the mangled health-care system (Brother, can you spare a flu vaccine?) but rather on the war in Iraq. The White House is accusing the Kerry camp of utilizing scare tactics (envision Hitler indicting Stalin for genocide) by posting rumors of an impending military draft along “the internets.”

The President flatly declared during the debates that, “We don’t need the draft. Look, the all volunteer Army is working.” It is? How then did 19 members of the 343rd Quartermasters Company refuse a command to deliver a convoy from Tallil to Taji? The reservists were directed to drive rickety, unarmored trucks filled with fuel so contaminated that it was refused at another Army depot through the heart of Baghdad’s “shooting gallery” – an undertaking described as a pointless suicide mission. But, no matter, orders are orders and God help us if our troops start questioning if all this is worth the risk to life and limb.

The good news is that if you get shot up in Iraq, you may get better care than what’s offered by your HMO back home. The Selective Service has issued a confidential report on plans for a draft of doctors, nurses, and other health care workers. Richard S. Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service System, said Monday, “We have been routinely updating… the Selective Service System plans on delivering about 36,000 health care specialists to the Defense Department…” Col. Roger A. Lalich, a senior physician in the Army National Guard, added: “It appears that a general draft is not likely to occur. A physician draft is the most likely conscription into the military in the near future.” While this may be nothing more than raw speculation, I’ve been having this recurring nightmare: I’m trying to bid on 36,000 sets of golf clubs on eBay but I repeatedly have to run to the bathroom just before each auction closes. And the worst part is that I can’t get an appointment because my urologist is in Mosul.

Mayor Richard Daily enjoined the denizens of Chicago to vote early and often. And while it’s true that the last JFK was carried to the White House on the shoulders of corpses, this week’s elections in Afghanistan have citizens around the world scratching their heads over this thing called Democracy.

“Freedom is powerful,” boasted President Bush. “Think about a society in which young girls couldn’t go to school, and their mothers were whipped in the public square, and now they’re holding a presidential election. Due to the heroic efforts of our armed forces, Afghan women can now enjoy getting fucked in whole new ways.” Massooda Jalal, the only female on the roster, complained that the process to mark voters was rigged. “The ink that is being used can be rubbed off in a minute,” she decried, “Voters can vote 10 times!” Despite episodes of violence, voter fraud was rampant: The U.N. reported widespread cases of multiple-registration, with some Afghans in possession of four or five voter ID cards. Abdul Sirat, one of fifteen dissenting candidates complained, this “is not a legitimate election. It should be stopped and we don’t recognize the results.” Only Hamid Karzai, known here as the American puppet, endorsed the final tally. “The election was fair,” he said, adding, “this kind of thing goes on in Florida all the time.”

Indeed, it’s just that Jeb Bush is using state-of-the-art technology to bring cheating into the 21st century. Touch screens in the panhandle are routinely undercounting results, with final sums dropping around 5% of voters who activated their electronic ballots. “I have always been concerned about the undervote,” said Rebecca Mercuri, a Harvard computer expert. “We don’t know what happens with the votes because there is no real audit of the machines.” Miami-Dade county election official Orlando Suarez said a “serious bug” in the software has rendered the system virtually “unusable.”

Because the need for a paper trail is self evident, some counties are moving towards a bubble card regimen. Unfortunately, the optical scanners utilized don’t mark the cards as having gone through the reader and thus any given card can be counted multiple times. But even perfect machines cannot ensure a proper outcome. When Rob Behler recently took over a Diebold warehouse he noticed that “somebody broke in and stole fourteen of the machines and, I think, one of the servers.” He feared that with a little reprogramming, the entire election could be hijacked.

That the Bush-Halliburton administration remains in a position to again pilfer the November proceedings can only trouble those hapless members of the polity cursed with an intellect. How can the very folks who twist a CIA report debunking Saddam’s WMD aspirations and links to Al Qaeda into justification for another Vietnam capture the minds of so many? In short, it’s because while they’ve been in the White House, Bin Laden has yet to follow up on the events of September 11. Yeah, well, he hasn’t attacked France either. Not that there hasn’t been plenty of violence to go around. Witness Spain, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Russia and Egypt.

As for the French, their anti-American stance has garnered them little currency in the radical Islamic world. Two of their journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, are still held hostage in Iraq. A month after being abducted, they remain in some macabre limbo, caught somewhere between American and British contractors (beheaded after failed rescues) and Italian aid workers (successfully ransomed into freedom). When the kidnappers demanded that Chirac’s government repeal a headscarf ban in public schools, Le Figaro editorialized, “France, due to its position on the war in Iraq, could have hoped it was safe. This was not the case.” With a Muslim population pushing past 5 million, the cheese monkeys are sweating Brie. Foreign Minister Michael Barnier supplicated, “France has always rejected the vision of a clash between the West and Islam. She defends – in Iraq, in Palestine, in the near and Middle East and throughout the world – the justice and dignity of people.” The practice of groveling is lost on us Yanks, but I guess with that 35-hour work week and two months’ paid vacation the Frogs have plenty of time to suck ass.

When President Bush boasted that, “I saw a poll that said the right track / wrong track in Iraq was better than here in America,” I immediately logged onto Orbitz and bought a one-way ticket to Toronto. Burning the last of my Delta Sky Miles, I upgraded to seat 4B, right between Paul Bremer and Colin Powell. Yesterday, Bremer described the conditions during his stint in Iraq as “horrid” and confessed that not having “enough troops on the ground… established an atmosphere of lawlessness.” Disturbingly, the Secretary of State now concedes that, “it’s getting worse.” In contrast to W’s edict that we are better off without Saddam, Powell allowed, “We have seen an increase in anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.” No shit. British diplomat Sir Ivor Roberts framed the issue beautifully when he quipped, “Bush is the best recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda. If anyone is ready to celebrate his eventual re-election, it is [Bin Laden].”

Not so fast with the goat’s milk, Osama. Despite Fox News polls giving the President 25-point lead, cracks are beginning to appear in the hull of HMS Crawford. Contravening the well-worn adage that Democrats fall in love with a candidate and Republicans fall in line, the rats are starting to jump ship. Neo-conservative godfather Francis Fukuyama lambasted this administration’s forays into social engineering and nation building. Stephen Moore of the conservative Club for Growth said that Bush was not “very forthright” about his budget proposals and that his fiscal record has been “abysmal.” Chairman William Niskanen of the Cato Institute opined, “there’s no way to accomplish [Bush’s] major new measures, including tax reform, without substantial increases in spending.” Pat Buchannan simply called the President a fag and suggested the country would be better off if George would resign and live out his final days as a houseboy for some “wrinkled Hollywood Jew.”

Dissension in the ranks finds the handful of Republican Senators unwilling to bail out fostering mutiny. In a desperate attempt at self-preservation, Chuck Hagel told CBS that as for the war, “No, I don’t think we’re winning,” and that “we’re in deep trouble in Iraq.” Richard Luger blamed “incompetence in the administration,” while John McCain declared, “I would never have allowed the sanctuaries [like Sadr City] to start with…We’re not going to have those national elections until we get rid of [them].” Rumsfeld concurred, advocating partial-birth elections in “in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country.” Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage tried to quickly mop up the mess by telling a House Appropriations panel, “We’re going to have an election that is free and open, and that has to be open to all citizens.”

Amid the swirl of mixed messages, Bill O’Reilly begged the commander-in-chief for clarity: “But can they vote when people are being blown up and these guys are threatening them?” “Yes,” replied Mr. Bush, “That’s when you’re supposed to vote.” Anyone serving in the military will tell you that it’s easy to talk about doing the “hard work” when you’re surrounded by Secret Service agents and the gravest threat to your well-being comes in a bag of pretzels. But no matter, the message never got to Baghdad where Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the January elections. “Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans?” For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?”

Timing, they say, is everything and so it seems for drug maker Pfizer. Back in August, the company ended its less-than-remunerative senior discount program, leaving 536,000 elderly cardholders without access to affordable medication. “A lot of people will be left high and dry,” decried Robert M. Hayes of the Medical Rights Center, fearing the episode would prove “a harbinger of trouble ahead” with the new Medicare drug program.

With the pharmaceutical behemoth already cast as an uncaring, greedy monolith, news that rival Merk would be ladling billions of dollars a year into Pfizer’s coffers only served to exacerbate the rampant geriatric dyspepsia. It seems that Merk’s Cox-2 inhibitor, Vioxx, doubled the risk for heart attack and stroke for patients who used the drug for more than 18 months. With Vioxx pulled off the market, sales of Pfizer alternatives Celebrex and Bextra will easily jump 100%. Now imagine if the Vioxx windfall was announced before the decision to shaft the old folks. Pfizer management would not be seen merely as callus profiteers but rather as a band of shameless, butt-raping pirates.

Yet as long as Viagra remains available, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia won’t give the matter a second thought. It seems his honor has a penchant for gangbangs, observing, “Sexual orgies eliminate social tension and ought to be encouraged.” Bear in mind, this is the same Justice who went duck hunting with Dick Cheney while the Vice President had a case pending before the court, but still, the revelations are appalling. When asked, hypothetically, how he would react to knocking up a fellow group sex practitioner, Scalia mused that matters such as abortion and assisted suicide are “too fundamental” to be resolved by judges. Unwrapping a quart-sized pump bottle of personal lubricant, the Justice summed up his thoughts: “It is blindingly clear judges have no greater capacity than the rest of us to determine what is moral.” Amen to that.

The Tonight Show announced that host Jay Leno is being yanked in favor of Conan O’Brien. But before you crack open the champagne and reprogram your TiVo, remember that O’Brien will remain at helm of Late Nightuntil 2009 which will afford ample opportunity to shed what little talent he brings to the screen. In other words, there’s plenty of time to renew that Ambien prescription.

A lot of things can happen in five years; according to the commodity markets, however, regaining the ability to both support your drug habit and to put gas in your SUV isn’t one of them. With oil today fetching $50 a barrel, it’s of little solace that the NYMEX December 2009 contract is stubbornly trading around $35. Coupled with the specter of further interest rate hikes, these stratospheric commodity prices should lead you to the conclusion that the economy is booming. Yet it’s not. 350,000 new souls lined up for unemployment insurance last week, joining the 2.88 million poor slobs already on the dole. Meanwhile, the tealeaves don’t exactly portend sunnier days ahead. The Index of Leading Economic Indicators fell for the third straight month while lousy news from Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever, General Mills and Wal-Mart means those few consumers not yet tapped out have severely curtailed their spending.

Mentor Corp. could well be the canary in the coalmine, with its stock price slumping 10% despite an eight-cent dividend hike and a litigation obviating cross-marketing agreement with rival American Medical Systems. The company’s prospects have soured because sales of their breast and penile implants are conspicuously _______ [choose one: sagging, flaccid, limp, pendulous]. If indeed folks are no longer willing to pay to be amorous I can’t imagine they’re lining up for a new flat-screen TV. But don’t despair. While the economy plunges headlong down the toilet consider that collective detumescence may just be the way to stop those infuriating Viagra ads from clogging up your email.

Inexplicably, Colin Powell’s latest blog snaked its way through my spam filter, and his comments on Russian political reform left me pondering our own worrisome state of affairs. After a spate of brutal terrorist attacks, President Putin swiftly consolidated power by altering parliamentary election rules and recasting governorships as appointed positions. “There can be no political dialog with terrorists,” averred Powell, adding that “at the same time you have to find a balance between fighting terrorism in an aggressive way and also making sure that you don’t undercut the institutions of state that are based on the foundation of democracy.” You mean like the judiciary? Earlier this month House Republicans forced through a bill barring federal courts from reviewing cases involving the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance. Before you know it they’ll be nullifying lawsuits involving corporate polluters or crimes committed with assault weapons.

The White House’s ham-fisted response to 9/11 has been to corral civil liberties while leaving ports and nuclear power plants virtually unguarded. Under Orwellian regulations, ordinary citizens can attend Bush-Cheney rallies only after signing a loyalty oath and consenting to publication of their names as supporters of reelection. “It’s not right for me to have to sign an endorsement to hear [Cheney] speak,” lamented John Wade of Albuquerque, who was asked to sign the form when he picked up his tickets. Wade angrily inquired, “Whose vice president is he?” “Yeah, don’t we pay his salary?” queried Ford Meeker from Las Cruces. No, Ford, Halliburton pays his salary.

Now the airlines (bankrupt and solvent alike) have been ordered by the government to turn over all passenger data collected in June. The TSA will then check the information against an obsolete FBI watch list. In addition to a roster of names, the records include telephone and credit card numbers, travel plans and addresses. ACLU spokesman Barry Steinhardt says the system is too intrusive and fails to prevent people from being misidentified as threats.

It took Ted Kennedy three weeks to get his name off the “no-fly” list while Yusuf Islam, née Cat Stevens, had his London to D.C. flight diverted to Maine before being summarily deported. The list doesn’t contain Islam’s exact name but there is a “Youssouf Islam, which is close enough,” commented Asa Hutchison, Homeland Security’s border and transportation guru. A bemused Islam recounted, “I was not given… any explanation whatsoever as to what it is I am accused of.” And he probably never will because the Justice Department refuses to acknowledge any double secret probation for air travelers. Government attorneys declared, “In order to protect air travel security, a federal statute and accompanying regulations prohibit [us] from disclosing any such directive.” Which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense.