A visitor to the Fortified Mountain Compound earlier this week was taken aback by something hung prominently in one of our more open public spaces, an American flag. A member of the cultural left, she was uncertain how to react to such a bold display of raw patriotism.

She knows me from activities extracurricular to the Timothy Jordan Show, is well aware of my deeply felt political leanings, and didn’t know how to reconcile these with the Stars and Stripes up on one of our Compound’s walls.

“I wouldn’t have thought…” she said. She couldn’t understand it because she didn’t identify our nation’s flag with herself.

And this is the thing: too often those of us on the left of the political spectrum have ceded one of our nation’s oldest symbols to social conservatives. Why? Why do we? It’s our flag too.

In fact, I’d argue that it’s more our flag than theirs. Our nation’s founders were counted among the liberal radicals of their age. Proposing an egalitarian secular republic in a world dominated by church-sanctioned monarchies was not a conservative act. Rejecting the rule of England’s King was not a conservative act.

It was the conservatives, the Tories, who sided with King George and fought alongside England’s Armies, not our won.

The Stars and Stripes fly today because our fledgling nation’s conservatives lost the Revolutionary War.

So it’s a hell of a lot more our flag than theirs. I say that it’s time to take back the flag from those people who would claim it as their own, because we’ve been doing a hell of a lot better job defending its ideals than they have since this country fought for its independence.

They certainly haven’t been doing much for our country’s economy. That and more on the Timothy Jordan Show News for the 19th of September, Ought-Eight.

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If you haven’t noticed, things aren’t going so well in the economy. Remember a year ago when I said that the nation’s troubles were only just starting? Well, yeah, sometimes it sucks to be right.

After seven years of the Bush Administration’s tender care, our country is teetering on the brink of insolvency. In the last week and a half we’ve seen government intervention on a scale unmatched since the worldwide Depression of the 1930s.

In these last few days the Administration has assumed control of debts in the trillions of dollars, from mortgage debt worth $5 trillion, to as much as $800 billion in insurance obligations. The decision will add hundreds of billions of dollars to our national debt every year.

This economic meltdown happened under the Republican Party’s watch, in an era of deregulation and a hands-off approach to the financial sector. Now it’s looking more like the government’s hands should have been at least somewhere near the steering wheels of our nation’s economy before we started doing a fiduciary skid towards a cliff of liquidity meltdown.

Yeah, I like to use big words.

I’m not alone in that. Most of the discussion of this crisis hasn’t been understandable without a degree in economics.

So what happened to put us here? Acting under long-standing ideological orders by a government in the hands of Republicans, the Department of the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission were willing to look the other way while shady, but highly profitable, bundles of risky mortgages were bought and sold. These were the sub-prime loans, interest-only and adjustable rate loans made to people with no realistic hope of paying them off once their rates began to rise.

These bundles, packaged mortgage debts, included some low-risk mortgages, just enough that their overall risk could be made to appear low to smaller banks and institutional investors. These same banks and investors then packaged the same sets of mortgages, now carrying the mark of a low-risk investment, and sold them to major investment houses, the same companies that are being bailed out by the government, as mortgage-backed securities.

These are supposed to be among the safest of the safest investments, held by retirement funds and low-risk hedge funds around the world.

Much of the growth of the U.S. economy outside of the military sector under President Bush was fueled by the sale of cheap loans bundled under the guise of mortgage backed securities.

The only problem is that nobody thought about what would happen if interest rates began to rise and a few people started defaulting on their loans. As the number of defaults grew, they started pulling down home prices in their neighborhoods, making it harder for others to get out from underneath a growing mortgage payment by selling their house.

The natural outcome is foreclosure. The banks and investment houses now own those homes. But they don’t want to own those homes; they only want to skim a portion of the monthly mortgage payment. They are unprepared to own those homes, and so when came time to pay the owners of the bundled bundles, those mortgage backed securities, the pot ran dry.

In essence, the foundations of our nation’s economy were replaced with balsa wood while Bush and his friends ran the country; and now they’re struggling to prop it up before it ruins all hope of putting a Republican in office ever again.

What does this mean for the average person listening to this program? Well, the concern is that banks and other lenders will start placing stricter limits on who they’ll loan money. Those limits will involve higher interest rates and greater collateral, placing the cost of cash out of reach for individuals and small businesses.

When that happens, everything grinds to a halt. Small-scale credit evaporates. Imagine if you ran a restaurant and had to pay each one of your suppliers when they dropped off vegetables in the morning. It might be possible to do it for a little while, but a few slow days in a row and you’d have no money to pay your vendors. No vegetables, no food, so you lay off a few people.

There’s no work for those people who were laid off, because nobody’s hiring. They aren’t spending any money, because they don’t have any income, and so there aren’t any customers.

It’s how the Great Depression happened, and under George Bush’s watch, it’s on the verge of happening again.

Explain to me again how anyone is willing to call themselves a Republican…

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On the more sensible end of the scale, backers of California’s Proposition 7 garnered some welcome support from three Nobel laureates in their push for victory on the November ballot.

Prop. 7 is an aggressive change to existing state energy regulations, mandating that half of California’s energy production come from renewable sources by 2025.

It is being opposed most significantly by the state’s major energy producers: PG&E, Cal Edison, and Sempra Energy. They have contributed tens of millions of dollars to fight this voter-sponsored initiative. They have also enlisted, much to the disappointment of the people behind Prop. 7, influential environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the State Democratic Party.

In the face of large institutional opposition like this, Prop. 7 supporters welcomed today’s announcement that three Nobel prize winners working at UC Santa Barbara are joining them in the fight to win on the November ballot.

The two chemists and a physicist say, “that if made into law it would represent a very significant step forward…” providing, “several powerful tools significantly stronger than in existing federal legislation…” and that, “Adoption of Prop. 7 by the state of California would doubtless have an enormous impact also far beyond its borders.”

We’ll have more coverage of Prop. 7 and the rest of the November ballot, including your official Timothy Jordan Show Voters Guide in the coming weeks.

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Much of the talk about Iraq in the last few months has been focused on the success of the military surge of American personnel last year. Sen. McCain in particular has made the surge a cornerstone of his campaign. If he were to believed, the addition of five Army brigades to Iraq was critical to the decrease in violence from the open civil war of November 2006.

We expressed our doubts on this program at the time. The worst of the sectarian violence in late 2006 was centered in mixed Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad. We noticed reports of people fleeing the city during that summer. According to New Scientist magazine, some newly released satellite evidence shows that the lights began going out in Sunni neighborhoods long before the surge brigades began arriving in February of 2007.

Based on images from Department of Defense weather satellites, a team of UCLA researchers are suggesting that the peace of the surge wasn’t due to more military personnel, but fewer people to shoot at in Baghdad. The satellites, designed to image cloud cover, also captured the evening lights of Baghdad, which visibly diminished in Sunni neighborhoods beginning in 2003.

The study is far from definitive, based on only a few images over the four year span, but it weakens another pillar of support underneath backers of the surge.

• New Scientist, Satellite images cast doubt on success of Iraq surge

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The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government continuing to play sectarian games with the Sunni Sons of Iraq may knock those pillars right out from underneath Sen. McCain. We’ll have more about that next week. Right now, it’s time for excellence. It’s…

Our Award of Excellence this week goes to an organization that’s been a thorn in the side of our government for years.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, facing a potential shutdown of their lawsuits against AT&T and the NSA for warrantless wiretapping after Congress capitulated to government and industry demands for retroactive immunity, has sued President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and former Attorney General Gonzales for authorizing the program.

The Department of Justice gave notice last week that it would begin issuing the Congressionally-approved notices of retroactive immunity, effectively shutting down the 38 legal cases pending against AT&T and the NSA.

The new EFF lawsuit would instead go after the people who authorized warrantless wiretapping themselves. According to Wired’s Threat Level blog, the EFF says that they violated federal wiretapping laws, as well as protections under the First and Fourth Amendments.

And for that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is this week’s winner of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.

• Threat Level, Rights Group Suing AT&T for Spying Sues NSA and Cheney, Too