But, truth be told, my relationship with the Democratic Party has resembled a high school performance of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”  Lots of anger, disappointment, blame, and ugly history together.  It’s rarely been something to be proud of, with rare exceptions like the night President Obama was elected.

A few times I flirted with leaving it via a third-party, but not seriously. Ralph Nader was right that corporations have a death grip on the federal government. Ross Perot was right about the giant sucking sound of disappearing manufacturing jobs, only the economic vacuum would turn out to be located in China, not Mexico. Too often the third-party options were really about single issues, not governing. And it was obvious that no third-party has any chance for winning the presidency or many congressional seats. The two major parties had colluded to make third-party options all but impossible.

The real differences between generic Democrats and Republicans are slight. Certainly the Democrats have had their share of war mongers and crooks. Bill Clinton was a fiscal conservative, who, guided by Robert Rubin from Wall Street, started the bubble economy that was bound to collapse. Ben Nelson, the senator from Nebraska who recently announced he will not run for re-election, was a right-winger.

In the past couple of years, the accomplishments of the Democrats in Congress have been minimal. Here and there, they have shown a little courage and determination, like when Pelosi and Reid finessed the flawed Affordable Care Act, but they’ve not shown much desire for a good fight.

But in 2012, I’ll still support Democrats because on the Ultimate National Good-Bad Meter, if you add up their intentions on foreign policy, labor, civil rights, jobs, women’s rights, education, defense, healthcare, and the environment, the needle points very, very slightly to the good, though you might need a magnifying glass to see it.

Obviously, I’ve risen in my influence. During the last election cycle, my wife and I donated a couple hundred bucks to the Obama campaign and were invited to nothing. I know the odds of winning the $3 lottery are slightly better than  being hit by lightning. And if I won, I would be seated at a table across a vast ballroom. The President and Michelle would feel no closer than when they are on TV.

But, for fun, I imagine what it would be like at the main table, a few seats down from the First Couple. I’m guessing the President would be tied up with a big donor from Ohio, and I’d then have the First Lady’s ear. Being an exercise nut and working in healthcare, I’d praise her for her efforts to get Americans to exercise and better food in school lunches.

Then speaking as fast as I can, because I know she’d be uncomfortable with the litany of my advice for her husband, I’d say:

Forget trying to compromise with Republicans. That is like knowingly having unprotected sex with someone with AIDs.

congratulations for getting us out of Iraq. Now get us out of Afghanistan.

Get rid of Timothy Geithner to show you are not in cahoots with Wall Street bankers. It won’t fix anything, but will show bankers do not completely control you, as many fear they do. Tim will get a nice job with a fat salary, not to worry.

Quit talking about having every unemployed person go back to school to become a computer nerd. We need also need to have people who can clean floors and empty garbage or prepare food get a decent wage so we have clean and safe places to work.

I’m sure that would be about as far as I would get before Michelle excused herself to go to the restroom or greet Hillary Clinton’s husband, but worth it for $3 and the cost of the plane fare.

I wish they wouldn’t send these impersonal emails. Whether it’s Newt or Mitt, both equally repugnant, I’ll donate to the President again, without the fund-raising machine even asking. The emails just remind me what an empty money game politics has become, one in which a citizen is just another cheap date.

Our American version is exemplified in the disappointing and destructive move my the Republicons to refuse to approve President Obama’s nomination of Dr. Donald Berwick to head up the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS is a massive agency that has a huge role in healthcare and the well being of millions of Americans.

Read about Berwick and these remarks from the NY Times, then weep.

He is a truly remarkable man because he knew what to do and had the vision to fix the healthcare system. In six months, he made a big impact on CMS. The Republicons hated him because he saw there were lessons to be learned from Europe, where people receive better healthcare for less money.

In the US, healthcare now consumes $2.8 trillion, almost 20% of GDP. The Republicons made sure this will only get worse. They were the Commies in this story, not Berwick, and as lunatic in their ideological fixed ideas as Mao himself.

Then Blitzer said, “On a separate note, Kermit the Frog is coming to Washington.”

Do frogs eat Newts?

Is this institution trying to become more modern or more medieval?

Since the Second Vatican Council, the church has had an unresolved identity crisis. First it made the Mass have a more vernacular tone, hence it sounded more Protestant. But then, without the mystery of Latin, people could comprehend the words and realized there wasn’t much otherworldly about it, so why not just be a Protestant, and some even went off and became evangelical Christians.

Nowadays Catholicism is a hard sell – perverted priests, a Nazi sympathizer for a Pope, right-wing leaning politics, anti-women’s right to choose. It’s backwards, sexually repressive, disrespectful of women, not very Web 2.0.

Why on God’s earth would they want their script to sound like Latin? It’s a dead language.

Matt Miller’s wrote an op-ed  - actually a plea disguised as a faux legal brief – in the Washington Post on why the Supreme Court, despite its extreme right-wing biases, e.g., corporations are people (When’s the last time a corporation had sexual intercourse? Oh, is that what merger’s are?), should and must give the green light to the Individual Mandate.

I personally favored a single-payer system, as used by the civilized industrial nations.  But due to the plague of right-wing extremism, the Obama administration concluded such a logical solution had no chance to pass a in such a sick Congress.

As Miller astutely points out, the Affordable Care Act gives the private insurance companies the opportunity to address the problem of the uninsured. This would be a true test of the conservative bromide that free markets can solve all problems.

The right-wing court would be wise to declare it unconstitutional so the idea is never implemented because otherwise it would become plainly obvious that the corporate insurers will not solve the problem. Why do you think there are so many uninsured in the first place?

Two relatively stable institutions dependent on a core skill of deal-making have lost their game, as if they became demented and have forgotten appropriate behavior in their roles. In the case of Congress, the Super Committee cannot agree on budget cuts as the whole world watches, bewildered and fearful that a country who put a man on the moon is loony.

In the NBA, grown men who make obscene salaries playing a kids game and wealthy owners who make even more obscene wealth while sitting on leather sofas cannot agree on a simple contract to keep their money machine alive.

For both, it’s self-destructive. They are stuck, blocked, intransigent, irrational. In years to come, students at Harvard Business School will study their social pathology. How not to manage, how not to lead, how fools make wagers on money games nobody wins.

Neoliberal economics has not only destroyed the US economy, but has metastasized to emerging economies in as diverse places as Israel and Tunisia.

After generations of unrelenting conditioning against “socialist” notions of fairness for workers in the US that left many older workers disoriented and dispirited, a form of ideological PTSD, the dangerous idea economic equality is gaining new life with the young. The cruelest blow to a person may not be blocked from a ballot box, but more basically, to not have a way to earn a decent living.

Dangerous times for corporate princes who will hide behind the legalisms that protect private capital because the world’s youth are carrying the long-lost flag of worker solidarity, and they have nothing to lose.

The years have not been kind to either one of these economic ideologies. The Keynesian welfare states in the U.S. and Europe are going broke and the Hayek-esque de-regulated “free markets” have crashed from greed and corruption.  Both ideologies are so exhausted that they’ve been reduced to deadening slogans: fiscal stimulus with borrowed money on the Left, tax cuts for millionaires on the Right.

They say generals are always preparing to fight the last war. Likewise, it seems economists are always quibbling about how to fix the last economy.

Perhaps new thinking is needed, beyond the tired and codependent Left and Right.

The most important thing about OWS is that it’s cross-hairs are right where they should be: the bankers.

The No-Chance-In-Hell Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul is whacky on some things, but his critique of the Federal Reserve and banking system has merit when you look at these slides.

This is no time to get distracted by party politics. The elite can be starved by the free acts of consumers, like taking their funds out of the banks, more than in the dysfunctional political process. The banks should be a public utility, instead of a mandatory gatekeeper where they skim some off every transaction like a vampire.