It is hard for some of us to post regularly during most of the year, and harder still in the summer. The work that pays the bills tends to increase in the summer, and it did this year, and then there is "the vacation" trip.

Still, getting out of the usual orbit and talking to people we love, but do not see enough, can provide a better perspective on what bothers us. More reflection and a bit less immediate pontificating has resulted in the following ideas to just toss out into this minefield:

Did we really think that the election of the most qualified person to serve as President of the United States since the murder of President Kennedy, would change the basic corruption of our system of government? Is it fair to ask whether the complete mess left by the least qualified to serve in any living person's memory, made President Obama's election possible, but changed little else? In other words, are we not still headed for a cliff, just more slowly?
That's how it seems. A country easily distracted by the death of a pop star, by the resignation of some dopey diva who ran, amazingly enough, for Vice President, and then by the arrest of a college professor, is easily manipulated to its disadvantage. The pop star's death is again threatening to overwhelm the limited attention span of our poorly educated fellow citizens. In the meantime, we seem to have lost the will that saved us in 1933, and that President Kennedy summoned us to in 1960, and then after taking office in 1961.

If the most recently departed President not been so amazingly out of touch, so foolish as to nauseate even the people who voted for him because his opponent in 2000 could not help but sigh when debating such a fool, and his opponent in 2004 went wind surfing, we would not have been able to elect a President Obama. It was a fluke, because the Republicans experimented with how low they could sink and guessed wrong, sort of, though they managed to get him in the White House for eight horrific years.

They did that, lest we forget, by threatening the overthrow of the government if they did not get their way. You will recall James W. Baker III announcing that the Florida Supreme Court's decision to count ballots was "unacceptable", and his announcement on Nov 11, 2000 that

If we keep being put in the position of having to respond to recount after recount after recount of the same ballots, then we just can't sit on our hands and we will be forced to do what might be in our best personal interests

and then the mobs they sent down to Florida to disrupt the recounts.

In this summer of Woodstock plus forty (and the moon plus forty, and the Mets plus forty, and Nixon's inauguration plus 40....), the idea that "the revolution" that the Jefferson Airplane sang about there, in the name of the "Volunteers of America" has become the call of those now feeling dispossesed should not be surprising but, contrary to the false parallels being drawn, very few of us in those scary days sought or believed that armed conflict was the way to go. Our "counterparts" of the right seem to believe, probably correctly, that nothing else will work for them. It was in 2000, and it is now, "playing with fire" as Anthony Lewis wrote in 2000. We did not riot when they stole that election, nor did we threaten the guy they placed in office with violence by ringing him with openly armed thugs.

But this is how they work. The blow dried hairdos that play act as if they were journalists on cable tv (and now the broadcast version) report the noise, without any reference to the intimidation it represents. Without going Hitler on you, it is fair to question how television might have covered kristallnacht ("while some have condemned the use of such tactics, others believe that the Jews are, in fact, responsible for most of the economic woes besetting the nation").

As an "emergency post" elsewhere tried to explain, this is not, as "some" claim, democracy at work. It is a threat to democracy, but a frequently used tactic of the right wing screwballs who now control one of our major political parties and one which has resulted in tragedies with incalculable consequences in our relatively recent past.

So President Bush's gross incompetence got us President Obama, but nothing else has changed. We remain the captives of dolts; our fellow countrymen and women. Poorly educated, easily cowed and manipulated. There they are: the tired and the poor, railing against health care insurance proposals so that they can keep pouring money into the coffers of insurance companies, until they lose a job and then become uninsured. And to those who point this out, they complain that they are being looked down upon.

Prior posts in this space have discussed this issue, and has not always gotten a favorable response. The voters are always right. If our message does not resonate, we ought not to succeed, we are told.

But some messages cannot be reduced to that level.

This summer's good news for me has been a new obsession with Regina Spektor (my second in three years). Two of her songs appear in a movie that's floating around the country these days called "(500) Days of Summer" and in one of those songs, she sings this:

Power to the people
We don't want it
We want pleasure
And the T.V.s try to rape us
And I guess that they're succeeding
And we're going to these meetings
But we're not doin' any meetin'
And we're trying to be faithful but we're cheatin', cheatin', cheatin'

It would be easy to say that Regina's generation, at least that part which is not the member of a family who were able to take advantage of perestroika in 1989 to leave the Soviet Union's anti-semitism and settle in the Bronx with a nine year old who read a lot and sings beautifully, is somewhat responsible for what followed their earnest and intense support for the election of our new President. Having accomplished that, these young ones went back to their pursuit of fluff, leaving the heavy stuff to their brain addled elders. Big mistake, it was indeed, but hardly the only one and certainly the not the most significant reason we will have, at best, a pretend reform to a health care system that is as much, if not more, dedicated to the profit making potential of insurance companies than helping the sick.

It is, in fact, clear from all that has transpired this summer that the failure to enact meaningful campaign finance reform will doom us forever to a regime where money---and only money---will win out over all. I am not so naive to believe that there is anyway to prevent those with from getting their views to be considered beyond their value. The issue is whether the rest of us have a chance.

The first president to explain this to us did so in the starkest of terms, in his campaign for re-election in 1936:

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live....These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

Yet here we are, more than a half century later, still unable to find a way to care for our fellow citizens the way every other industrialized nation has, and besieged by opinionmakers whose opinion has been bought and paid for by the precise group we thought we had defeated with the election and re-election of President Roosevelt and now by the election of President Obama.

There is no question about what is happening to us. Senator McCain, before his silence was purchased, explained it clearly in 1999, when he was running against the same G. W. Bush, the symbol of the bought and paid for presidency.

He proposed a health care plan that was not a good one, but something. It depended on the generosity of private entities, of course, since that's what Republicans do. But more importantly, as Senator McCain announced his plan, he pointed out why his fight, with Senator Russell Feingold, for campaign finance reform was critical to any change.

''Taking the $100,000 special interest checks out of politics is the gateway through which all other reforms including the reform of our health care system must pass...Republicans want to protect the insurance companies from lawsuits. The Democrats want to let the trial lawyers sue anyone for anything.''

Announcing his campaign for the presidency, Sen McCain explained that

To improve our health-care system, we must rein in the power of trial lawyers and the influence of insurance companies.

Later, in a debate among Republican candidates, Sen McCain said, in reference to comment by Gary Bauer about an issue his mother had with an H.M.O.,

Washington is gridlocked by special interests. Gary, why do you think it is that we couldn't give patients some fundamental rights?...The Republicans are in the grip of the H.M.O.s and the insurance companies and their huge six- and seven-figure donations.

The line about big bad trial lawyers is, again, from the Republican playbook and not to be taken very seriously as anything more than political blather (as anyone who has tried to sue a malpracticing doctor would know). The rest of what he said enraged Republicans and probably redoubled their efforts to elect the Bush whose family came from the insurance industry heaven known as Connecticut.

Those were the good old days. The President was an Eisenhower Republican who called himself a Democrat (since the Republican Party had itself been taken over by screwballs) and he was impeached because, well, because the Republicans could impeach him. They are good at this stuff, distracting the easily distracted so that the interests President Rooselevlt unmasked can do their dirty business.

And it is so easy.

For instance, one of the three traditional broadcast networks feature sponsored segments called "What Works" and "Making a Difference" which present feel good stories about a person or entity doing a good deed for others. There certainly is nothing wrong with an ocassional story of this sort, the answer to President Johnson's complaint that the evening news programs report so much bad news and not enough "good news." But, of course, the sponsored segments, requiring that independent news judgment be sacrificed for happy stories to meet a commitment to a paying sponsor, seriously retards the broadcast of actual news in broadcats that, as it is, manage to devote only about 22 minutes to the supposed subject of their programs.

More importantly, these segments (and a certain part of the rest of those programs) are heavily sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, in the belief that old people tend to watch them, and they (we) need medicine. One might wonder whether the heroes of television news, Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, or their less celebrated but perhaps more important off camera executives: Richard Salant and Fred Friendly of CBS News, "Shad" Northshield and Reuven Frank (Huntley-Brinkley and then McNeill-Lehrer), Lawrence Grossman, Nothshield's successor at NBC News, and others of that ilk, would have trouble matching the journalistic demands of their programs with the biases of its sponsors, but there can be little question that none of those people, and nobody like them, are around today.

As a result, television news repeats the mantra of its paying customers. Health care reform is dead, or at least any public option which would compete with NBC's sponsors (or the other networks programs as well) cannot possibly pass. It's all a matter of politics, they explain. Reconciliation to avoid filibusters is unfair, they tell us (ignoring the same game when played by Republicans when they were in control, or the fact that the creation of a new health care agency or the expansion of medicare is obviosuly budgetary and subject to reconciliation.

There is precious little discussion of how the arguments against socialized medicine are the same ones presented against medicare in the Johnson adminstration or how nonsensical it is. There are constant references to the freat care we all get compared, ostensibly, to France, Britain and Canada, which all have some sort of single payer system, without any real attempt to look at those countries, the care patients actually receive and whether it has worked. One exception to this sponsored news reporting is, of course, Bill Moyers on PBS , President Johnson's press secretary, now making amends for anything false he may have presented so many years ago.

The sad story is money, money, money. Money for commercials. Money for campaigns. It has always been so that those with money have a louder voice than those without. President Roosevelt, a man who had money, from a family that had even more money, tried to even the score, but the fifty years that followed was long enough for those with money to find a way to pervert the system, and that they have had. Now they use that ability to prevent us from changing the system that has served them well in preventing another Roosevelt to unseat them. It is a horror movie with no happy ending in sight.

It is no wonder that this debate has been so sad. The wonder is that we have managed to suvive as a nation.

So, that's how one man's summer has gone. I hope yours has been better. I saw Kurt Andersen speaking at Barnes and Noble one day and he has some worthwhile ideas that make a person hold onto at least some semblance of hope. In the course of the evening, however, he took some of it back. So I dunno.

This long summer replacement post has to end sometime, and that time is now. For the moment, then, we will not deal at any length with a designated hitter who made me happy only by cheating, the baseball team that fell apart by thinking (as many of its fans did) that a five game lead in June was proof of their superiority. The cheating baseball player is just another of those who have decided that the issue is not right or wrong, but what one can get away with, and what benefits to oneself might accrue. And, as the estimable Ms. Spektor says:

if you're never sorry, you can never be forgiven