OK, perhaps not the originals. But, in fact, Obama has failed me personally so badly that I have decided to give up on him, and in fact have to ADD a golden rule, which nearly violates a golden rule, so you know it must be serious.

Let’s reiterate the Golden Rules for those who might not have been paying attention until recently, along with some explanation, and to add the necessary:
• Use your head for more than hatrack. Most issues can be sorted out easily if you just use your head and have a think about things as you are moving along. It’s a scalable rule, so if you have a brain that allows you to snort a line of coke off the back of a credit card while doing 140 down the autobahn while reciting Proust to your mistress, and you can think at light speed, then it wont take you any time at all. If your brain moves a bit slower, like most of us, take a short bit of time to come up with something. Long enough that you can make a difference, but not so long that it makes no difference.
• Be an adult. There is a reason for child labour laws, so if you are working with me, please don’t fail this expectation.
• Do something positive and productive. The positive and productive doesn’t necessarily have to look positive and productive in process, but it should be designed and operated with that end.
• Get some balls even if you are a chick. And here we have where Obama has unfortunately required me to make an addition. I didn’t think this needed stating in the beginning, so I left it out. But clearly it needs to be in here, and I will explain below why it means a huge amount to climate change, with a sniff of the world as we know it to boot.
• If you need more rules, be patient and persistent. These start out more as guidance really, but become rules to pass on to speed up development of those who come behind us. Feel free to skip on from here if you are young and impatient. But recognise that change of things, if you are set out to do that, is only achieved in a lasting manner through application of this rule.
• Don’t have too many rules. You really don’t need that many, so if you think you have too many, or no one will live with you anymore, you probably do have too many. Revise as required, but remember, we are here to live life, not waste time making rules for it.

Now, the explanation of what this has to do with climate change. Unfortunately, I have to let you know that I can sometimes predict the future, but pretty much only when it is going to be bad, due to my examination of human nature. Back in August I wrote, “. . . but let’s face it the Democrats are in power there, and they are likely to be too big of pussies to move anything like that through, despite their filibuster-proof majorities. So don’t even expect the US to even get to the climate change issue, and get a bill through both houses and signed into law.” See, there is one thing that is certain about politics in America that many have recognised through the ages: Democrats, when in power, insist on playing by the rules and being fair or even “bipartisan” during their stint running things, despite any previous example set by the other side of politics there. And unfortunately despite all his supposed brilliance and rhetorical gift, Obama appears to have made the mistake of letting the severely compromised leaders in both houses of congress in the US bring him something on all of his legislative agenda rather than leading on anything himself, as if he were elected arbiter in chief instead of commander in chief. His failure to lead on health care, civil rights, economic stimulus, troop withdrawal, closing Guantanamo (shall I go on) etc., means that we certainly will not now see any action out of the US on climate change legislation this year, and I would suggest not even in the single term of this democratic president if trends continue. And this term leads to forever, due to another unfortunate occurance that has occurred synchronistically in the US while they were all looking at which sex clinic Tiger got caught humping Brangelina’s secret love child with John Edwards in.

Last Thursday, the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations have exactly equivalent the same constitutional right to free speech as Joe Sixpack. In this case, that right will specifically manifest itself as each and every person (real or legal) being able to spend whatever amount they choose on the candidate of their choice. That’s right, the next time a big bank gets a bug up its arse about a politician and his voting record on the The Banks Don’t Get Absolutely Everything They Want Legislation, they will just heavily sponsor his opponent in the next primary or general election, or probably both. Better if said politician is from a small state politically, like Max Baucus of Montana. He currently whores himself out for about $2 million to the insurance industry, and look what it did for them in the health care debate. He nearly never got it started at all. Unfortunately, too many Americans were looking, so they actually had to get a health care bill out of the Senate Finance Committee that he heads, so waiting in the wings were several other stooges to stall or add unpalatable elements to the bill to make it basically not worth saving, and the real reason why the voters of Massachusetts rejected it and its progenitors by proxy in the election there last week.

So, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that big coal, big oil and even those making cars, road construction, and the electric utilities themselves, will all be going out to buy their own representatives for the next election. Or perhaps just getting off by threatening to oppose politicians in places where they can get them cheap. Imagine rural ignorant Appalachia, where cutting the tops off mountains for coal and dumping the waste downhill still seems like a good idea. The senator from there gets an equal vote with the one that represents the electorates of Harvard or Berkeley at the federal level. And as observed this year like many others, it only takes a couple federal senators to scuttle the efforts of a large majority, especially over an issue as complicated climate change legislation.

Left unchecked, this Supreme Court decision, that I unfortunately have to agree with given this narrow case upon which it is based, could lead to corporatocracy there very easy logical progression. And yes it is a word. I didn’t know it was real either until the other day, so do your reading. I read a few elections ago that the average US senate seat cost $40 million to win. Expect to see that go up an order of magnitude in 10 years.

Of course it doesn’t have to be that way. But can we expect the US government led by this president to make significant modification to the fundament issues of the definition of a person as applied to a corporation, or the donation transparency rules, or public financing of campaigns, that would be required to be enforced to allow the population there to have a true and functioning democracy? What do you expect from a democracy that cannot even provide affordable, universal preventative health care to its entire population?

I expect nothing if any congress is left to its own devices. Congress has always needed leadership from someone with balls. Balls to actually lead, by setting a direction and an objective, and herding, coercing and twisting arms to get the congress to move in that direction. W may have been and intellectual philistine and led by weird voices in his head, but he had the balls to say “This is where we are going”. And the moron got most everything he wanted with a congress not from his own party. Leading begins at the beginning, not by arriving like a superhero at the end to save the day. We read about leaders in history books and superheros in comics for a reason.

So, I guess I am not sure this guy has any balls to go with his intellect and oratory skills. Pity, as he looked like the real deal 18 months ago before all his goals went under the bus so he could get along with everybody in Washington.