Friday, May 26, 2006
Mike Farrell on Baghdad ER
This is what "BJ Hunnicutt" had to say about the film..... Isaac Peterson
I saw "Baghdad ER" on HBO last night (Sunday, May 21). I'd heard that the Defense Dept. had issued warnings urging servicemen and women back from Iraq to be wary of watching as it might trigger PTSD symptoms. Perhaps they hoped those about to go wouldn't watch as well, for fear they might not show up."Baghdad ER" is a documentary about a "CASH," a Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. I recommend it for every American, but the queasy be warned: it is excruciating.
I cringed at the gore, was sickened by the death, wept at the frustration and resignation of the medics, at the faith of the chaplain, at the simple, shocked, blank expressions on the faces of kids younger than my son – victims of this fool's war. Listening to the bravado of some, aching to comfort those who came in knowing they were hurt but not how badly, made me want to scream. Watching this horrifying, endless process, the tears on my face kept drying from the heat of my anger. Glorious, generous, talented, dedicated human beings forced to be part of this circus of carnage made me so furious I couldn't speak at the end.
I loathe the people who have created this monstrosity. I want the criminals who lied and cheated and pretended and twisted and perverted reality - and those who rationalized their crimes - so they could send over 2400 servicemen and woman to their death, nearly 18,000 to come home torn - some never to be whole again - thousands more to suffer mental damage, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians to be swept into the garbage can of "collateral damage," to pay.
These bastards and their apologists should be stripped naked and forced to walk the main streets of America, allowing every city and town that has lost a loved one to injury or death in this shameful catastrophe to heap on them the scorn they deserve.
John F. Kennedy said America would never start a war. Well, it has now, and its architects have damaged our character, poisoned our standing in the world and soiled the soul of what was once the greatest nation in the history of the world.
I saw "Baghdad ER" on HBO last night (Sunday, May 21). I'd heard that the Defense Dept. had issued warnings urging servicemen and women back from Iraq to be wary of watching as it might trigger PTSD symptoms. Perhaps they hoped those about to go wouldn't watch as well, for fear they might not show up."Baghdad ER" is a documentary about a "CASH," a Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. I recommend it for every American, but the queasy be warned: it is excruciating.
I cringed at the gore, was sickened by the death, wept at the frustration and resignation of the medics, at the faith of the chaplain, at the simple, shocked, blank expressions on the faces of kids younger than my son – victims of this fool's war. Listening to the bravado of some, aching to comfort those who came in knowing they were hurt but not how badly, made me want to scream. Watching this horrifying, endless process, the tears on my face kept drying from the heat of my anger. Glorious, generous, talented, dedicated human beings forced to be part of this circus of carnage made me so furious I couldn't speak at the end.
I loathe the people who have created this monstrosity. I want the criminals who lied and cheated and pretended and twisted and perverted reality - and those who rationalized their crimes - so they could send over 2400 servicemen and woman to their death, nearly 18,000 to come home torn - some never to be whole again - thousands more to suffer mental damage, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians to be swept into the garbage can of "collateral damage," to pay.
These bastards and their apologists should be stripped naked and forced to walk the main streets of America, allowing every city and town that has lost a loved one to injury or death in this shameful catastrophe to heap on them the scorn they deserve.
John F. Kennedy said America would never start a war. Well, it has now, and its architects have damaged our character, poisoned our standing in the world and soiled the soul of what was once the greatest nation in the history of the world.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Sunday Morning Musings
I just had this Sundays' "THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE" with my breakfast. This is a very good issue. Of special interest to me was a story about President Thomas Jefferson. For some reason the thought came to mind and I asked myself, when did the Right, the Republicans or the Religious ever produce a brainy, intellectually gifted radical as a President determined to move this country forward? These are certainly are not the three RRRs that made America the greatest nation on the face of the Earth.
These three RRRs have made us the laughing stock of the civilized world.
Mussolini was a good man compared to our people up in the bridge with banners that claim lies to be truths. Our vessels no longer ship oil they just ship muddy water and that is a good sign because our ship of state is aground. At least Mussolini had things running on time. These men of God cannot do anything right they are hitting the toilet cover more times than what is going in the bowl so they had to sit down for while.
Methinks that they have begun to hit some heavy seas and this is good because while they are not killing they maybe losing their "Big Mo" as Daddy Deep Do Do said when he came North to kick a little ass. The worst kicks that the greatest nation on the face of the Earth can receive comes from the moral indignation of better countries.
Most of my youth was lived as the orphan of a canvas sailor, but I was lucky to be my maternal grandfather's first grandson. He was loved by everyone and he adored me. He was famous for his saying, "You can afford to believe me, you can," and I will repeat that these rotten bastards are in trouble and they will never stand up and piss on the world again. Folks, the will and desire for collective survival are the new forces gathering steam.
Our Empire is no longer an Empire, we cannot organize a coalition and we will never be able to do that again. This world is about many things but most of all it is about people because they make things happen. America and Israel since the end of World War 2 have made many things happen that were bad, but they no longer have the support to make to make decent things happen because neither of these countries of God can use their ultimate weapons without being annihilated. ............Carl Johnson, NY
Monday, May 15, 2006
We Have Heard Much About Taking Back Our Country......
I hope that if Rove is to be indicted that Fitzgerald will put it off as long as he can until after the end of June. American politics is similar to these new frying pans from China, black on the insides with bright shiny bottoms. Just fry a few pieces of bacon in them and the outside is just as black as the inside and they are not worth anything after six months.
I read a report about Barbaro, the colt that won the Kentucky Derby. That horse is going all the way. There is a photo of Barbaro on the front page of the New York times Sunday Sports. In terms of haughtiness the horse's looks matched the look of joy on the face Mr. Matz his trainer. I happened to know Mr. Wolfsenson the owner of Secretariat as a customer. His trainer was Mr. Fitzgerald. I went to see Secretariat train. A few days later Mr. Wolfsenson came into the bank. I told him I saw your horse and he is solid nobility. Mr. Fitz who was training him for the Kentucky Derby asked, "Does he look like a Triple Crown winner?" I told him, "Mr. Fitz its in the bag."
Just imagine what will happen to the Democratic Party if this Mr. Fitz can bag Carl Rove. All this Round Robin losing, religious hatred and graft is bad for America, OUR COUNTRY. Although the Republican Party is not as old as the Democratic Party ---our Party--- the Republicans have never done anything right for the American people in its entire history. I have just begun to pay attention to John Mc Cain. I hate to use the term because someone may think that I am referring to Barabro, but McCain is a real horse's ass. That is not the horse, but the jackasses that carries the oats for the nobler steeds.
For the first time in over sixty years there is hope from better sources with regard to the Palestinian people. The Muslim World finally united in support of Palestine. Economic help now flows to those beleaguered people. The Council for the National interest Foundation has started a program to counteract the Propaganda of the Israeli Lobby in America. A new dynamic came to the battle when Drs. Mearsheim the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Dr. Walt Academic Dean at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University decided to publish their paper, "The Israel Lobby."
We have heard much about taking back our country and that is laudable. However, we will never take it back until we admit how we lost it. Communications and Transportation are the heart and blood of all politics. The story must be told and we need a way to get around. America has been going on wild goose chases hurting those who never did us anything until they could take no more and decided to hurt us. If we were on the right side in supporting Israel for so many years, we are definitely on the wrong side now because the tide or world opinion when it comes to Israel is Germany all over again. This new showdown will not be won by bombs, success will come from the weight of people and human opinion. The score is one hundred and fifty billion people to about twelve million eternal losers, except for money and precious metals.
We all want a better world for our children and grandchildren and we could have had that before now if our politicians and the media had cared more for America than they did for Israel. Here is what two super Zionists had to say.
>>>Eliot Engel (D-NY the United States House of Representatives) called the Mearsheim and Walt piece, "The same old anti-Semitic and anti-Holocaust drivel Given what happened in the Holocaust, it's shameful that people people would write reports like this."<<<
>>>Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, a colleague of Walt, denounced both authors and called them liars and bigots and compared their arguments to neo-Nazi literature."<<<
New Study of Israel Lobby http://www.cnionline.org/learn/IsraelLobby/new_study_of_israel_lobby_draws.htm
* http://www.cnionline.org/ * WWW.rescueMideastPolicy.com
Let us try to make this wonderful undertaking a roaring success and a credit to human deceny'................ Carl Johnson, NY
I read a report about Barbaro, the colt that won the Kentucky Derby. That horse is going all the way. There is a photo of Barbaro on the front page of the New York times Sunday Sports. In terms of haughtiness the horse's looks matched the look of joy on the face Mr. Matz his trainer. I happened to know Mr. Wolfsenson the owner of Secretariat as a customer. His trainer was Mr. Fitzgerald. I went to see Secretariat train. A few days later Mr. Wolfsenson came into the bank. I told him I saw your horse and he is solid nobility. Mr. Fitz who was training him for the Kentucky Derby asked, "Does he look like a Triple Crown winner?" I told him, "Mr. Fitz its in the bag."
Just imagine what will happen to the Democratic Party if this Mr. Fitz can bag Carl Rove. All this Round Robin losing, religious hatred and graft is bad for America, OUR COUNTRY. Although the Republican Party is not as old as the Democratic Party ---our Party--- the Republicans have never done anything right for the American people in its entire history. I have just begun to pay attention to John Mc Cain. I hate to use the term because someone may think that I am referring to Barabro, but McCain is a real horse's ass. That is not the horse, but the jackasses that carries the oats for the nobler steeds.
For the first time in over sixty years there is hope from better sources with regard to the Palestinian people. The Muslim World finally united in support of Palestine. Economic help now flows to those beleaguered people. The Council for the National interest Foundation has started a program to counteract the Propaganda of the Israeli Lobby in America. A new dynamic came to the battle when Drs. Mearsheim the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Dr. Walt Academic Dean at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University decided to publish their paper, "The Israel Lobby."
We have heard much about taking back our country and that is laudable. However, we will never take it back until we admit how we lost it. Communications and Transportation are the heart and blood of all politics. The story must be told and we need a way to get around. America has been going on wild goose chases hurting those who never did us anything until they could take no more and decided to hurt us. If we were on the right side in supporting Israel for so many years, we are definitely on the wrong side now because the tide or world opinion when it comes to Israel is Germany all over again. This new showdown will not be won by bombs, success will come from the weight of people and human opinion. The score is one hundred and fifty billion people to about twelve million eternal losers, except for money and precious metals.
We all want a better world for our children and grandchildren and we could have had that before now if our politicians and the media had cared more for America than they did for Israel. Here is what two super Zionists had to say.
>>>Eliot Engel (D-NY the United States House of Representatives) called the Mearsheim and Walt piece, "The same old anti-Semitic and anti-Holocaust drivel Given what happened in the Holocaust, it's shameful that people people would write reports like this."<<<
>>>Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, a colleague of Walt, denounced both authors and called them liars and bigots and compared their arguments to neo-Nazi literature."<<<
New Study of Israel Lobby http://www.cnionline.org/learn/IsraelLobby/new_study_of_israel_lobby_draws.htm
* http://www.cnionline.org/ * WWW.rescueMideastPolicy.com
Let us try to make this wonderful undertaking a roaring success and a credit to human deceny'................ Carl Johnson, NY
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
FINALLY! A Journalist with the courage to say what many of us have been saying for 5 years!
WHEN America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.
This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.
President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.
We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.
Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets" secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees "to countries that routinely use torture." Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that "plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms. Priest's, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can't afford to lose.
The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved "thousands of lives." The White House's journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposé "may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."
Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.
Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.
Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.
Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't play games with the nation's defense during wartime.
Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."
What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and its policies in our work." His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss's management disasters.
Soon to come are the Senate's hearings on Mr. Goss's successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He's "the right man" to lead the C.I.A. "at this critical moment in our nation's history." That's not exactly reassuring.
This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss's appointment in the autumn of 2004.
Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they'll fail to investigate the nominee's record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."
If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.
By FRANK RICH - NY Times
WHEN America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.
This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.
President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.
We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.
Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets" secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees "to countries that routinely use torture." Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that "plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms. Priest's, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can't afford to lose.
The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved "thousands of lives." The White House's journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposé "may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."
Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.
Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.
Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.
Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't play games with the nation's defense during wartime.
Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."
What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and its policies in our work." His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss's management disasters.
Soon to come are the Senate's hearings on Mr. Goss's successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He's "the right man" to lead the C.I.A. "at this critical moment in our nation's history." That's not exactly reassuring.
This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss's appointment in the autumn of 2004.
Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they'll fail to investigate the nominee's record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."
If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.
By FRANK RICH - NY Times
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Did media miss real Colbert story?
www.suntimes.com
Did media miss real Colbert story?
A "blogstorm" is thundering across liberal Web sites. Many liberals are furious at the White House press corps for virtually ignoring Stephen Colbert's keynote speech at the press corp's own White House Correspondents' Dinner last Saturday. To non-liberals, this may seem like an isolated complaint. To liberals, it further justifies their belief that the media, particularly TV news, is a big stinking cabal of conservatives.
The truth is many in the media wrote about Bush's stand-up routine at the dinner as if they had just watched the coming of a comic genius, but they didn't report much on Colbert's funnier, harsher jokes. This may have been a case of the press corps following a standard motto: to the winner goes the spoils, and Bush got more laughs (out of copy written for him) than Colbert did.
How did Bush tickle reporters? He made fun of the fact that he can barely speak English (he is quite simply the worst communicator of all U.S. presidents), that our vice president is a heartless face-shooter, and that Bush is basically an idiot.
Ha ha, our "war president" knows he's a village idiot? To members of the White House press corps, that's some real funny stuff. To non-insiders, this looked like another example of good old boys and gals slapping each other on the back.
Colbert's routine was more remarkable for its unique and creative brazenness. He joked that Bush's presidency is like the Hindenburg; that Bush's wiretappers were monitoring this very event, and that the White House press corps, sitting in front of Colbert, gave Bush a free pass, scandal after scandal, until recently (when his polls numbers dropped).
How's this for a newsworthy lead? It was perhaps the first time in Bush's tenure that the president was forced to sit and listen to any American cite the litany of criminal and corruption allegations that have piled up against his administration. And mouth-tense Bush and first lady Laura Bush fled as soon as possible afterward.
From whom were they fleeing? A star comedian pretending to be a Fox News-like blowhard doing a sort of performance art that America hasn't witnessed nationally since the days of Andy Kaufman. Even if Colbert's bit had been reported as a train wreck, that would have sufficed. Instead, shocking lines like the following were barely covered by any traditional organ except industry magazine Editor & Publisher: "I stand by" Bush, Colbert cracked, "because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble, and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."
For TV reporters in particular to quote that gruesome line would be an agreement with Colbert, that they helped Bush mix politics with corruption from the ashes of 9/11 ("aircraft carriers and rubble"), and failed to see through Bush's politicization of the drowning of an American city after a hurricane ("recently flooded city squares").
But ignoring a newsworthy keynote speech -- at an event the press corps itself set up -- doesn't go unnoticed anymore. Internet stables for liberals, like the behemoth dailykos.com, began rumbling as soon as the correspondents' dinner was reported in the mainstream press, with scant word of Colbert's combustive address.
This is trouble for the media. It has been losing customers to bloggers and Web sites for years. This won't help. The media's implosion of silence could be one of the final reasons many liberals use to not turn on TV news. It's not like they feel a vested interest in the industry anyway, since it has been bought and parceled by conservatives.
There is Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, that Pravda of GOP propaganda and breeding ground for Bush appointees. There are the networks' Sunday news shows that give more face time to Republicans. There are cable news channels like MSNBC, where Republicans have programmed the shows and hired on-air Republicans and conservatives-lite, from Tucker Carlson to Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews. Some TV watchdogs even chronicle these conservative media daily, backed up by transcripts and video clips from TV news shows, in the expansive Web site, MediaMatters.com.
On cable, only CNN still plays the journalism-school middle ground most of the time, questioning liberals, moderates and conservatives with equal skepticism and respect. Clearly, in terms of advertising revenue, CNN alone cares to attract the disposable income of American viewers of all political stripes.
To liberals, this must be somewhat puzzling, since the rest of the conservative media primarily sides with a president whose approval ratings stand at 32 percent, a whisker better than Nixon's before he resigned in disgrace.
Liberals find true solace on TV only in the fake news of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show," a place where Jon Stewart merely has to show actual clips of Bush speaking, or Condi Rice, or Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld to elicit laughter at their hubris. If NBC News let in audiences during its broadcasts, those people might also laugh at the president.
But the TV news corps, the unthinking and unblinking herd of pack journalists, prefer to laugh with the president, and kiss many viewers goodbye.
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-elfman07.html
Did media miss real Colbert story?
A "blogstorm" is thundering across liberal Web sites. Many liberals are furious at the White House press corps for virtually ignoring Stephen Colbert's keynote speech at the press corp's own White House Correspondents' Dinner last Saturday. To non-liberals, this may seem like an isolated complaint. To liberals, it further justifies their belief that the media, particularly TV news, is a big stinking cabal of conservatives.
The truth is many in the media wrote about Bush's stand-up routine at the dinner as if they had just watched the coming of a comic genius, but they didn't report much on Colbert's funnier, harsher jokes. This may have been a case of the press corps following a standard motto: to the winner goes the spoils, and Bush got more laughs (out of copy written for him) than Colbert did.
How did Bush tickle reporters? He made fun of the fact that he can barely speak English (he is quite simply the worst communicator of all U.S. presidents), that our vice president is a heartless face-shooter, and that Bush is basically an idiot.
Ha ha, our "war president" knows he's a village idiot? To members of the White House press corps, that's some real funny stuff. To non-insiders, this looked like another example of good old boys and gals slapping each other on the back.
Colbert's routine was more remarkable for its unique and creative brazenness. He joked that Bush's presidency is like the Hindenburg; that Bush's wiretappers were monitoring this very event, and that the White House press corps, sitting in front of Colbert, gave Bush a free pass, scandal after scandal, until recently (when his polls numbers dropped).
How's this for a newsworthy lead? It was perhaps the first time in Bush's tenure that the president was forced to sit and listen to any American cite the litany of criminal and corruption allegations that have piled up against his administration. And mouth-tense Bush and first lady Laura Bush fled as soon as possible afterward.
From whom were they fleeing? A star comedian pretending to be a Fox News-like blowhard doing a sort of performance art that America hasn't witnessed nationally since the days of Andy Kaufman. Even if Colbert's bit had been reported as a train wreck, that would have sufficed. Instead, shocking lines like the following were barely covered by any traditional organ except industry magazine Editor & Publisher: "I stand by" Bush, Colbert cracked, "because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble, and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."
For TV reporters in particular to quote that gruesome line would be an agreement with Colbert, that they helped Bush mix politics with corruption from the ashes of 9/11 ("aircraft carriers and rubble"), and failed to see through Bush's politicization of the drowning of an American city after a hurricane ("recently flooded city squares").
But ignoring a newsworthy keynote speech -- at an event the press corps itself set up -- doesn't go unnoticed anymore. Internet stables for liberals, like the behemoth dailykos.com, began rumbling as soon as the correspondents' dinner was reported in the mainstream press, with scant word of Colbert's combustive address.
This is trouble for the media. It has been losing customers to bloggers and Web sites for years. This won't help. The media's implosion of silence could be one of the final reasons many liberals use to not turn on TV news. It's not like they feel a vested interest in the industry anyway, since it has been bought and parceled by conservatives.
There is Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, that Pravda of GOP propaganda and breeding ground for Bush appointees. There are the networks' Sunday news shows that give more face time to Republicans. There are cable news channels like MSNBC, where Republicans have programmed the shows and hired on-air Republicans and conservatives-lite, from Tucker Carlson to Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews. Some TV watchdogs even chronicle these conservative media daily, backed up by transcripts and video clips from TV news shows, in the expansive Web site, MediaMatters.com.
On cable, only CNN still plays the journalism-school middle ground most of the time, questioning liberals, moderates and conservatives with equal skepticism and respect. Clearly, in terms of advertising revenue, CNN alone cares to attract the disposable income of American viewers of all political stripes.
To liberals, this must be somewhat puzzling, since the rest of the conservative media primarily sides with a president whose approval ratings stand at 32 percent, a whisker better than Nixon's before he resigned in disgrace.
Liberals find true solace on TV only in the fake news of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show," a place where Jon Stewart merely has to show actual clips of Bush speaking, or Condi Rice, or Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld to elicit laughter at their hubris. If NBC News let in audiences during its broadcasts, those people might also laugh at the president.
But the TV news corps, the unthinking and unblinking herd of pack journalists, prefer to laugh with the president, and kiss many viewers goodbye.
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-elfman07.html
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
It's Impeachment Time !
I don't know about you but I am sick of the cowardly members of Congress who sit back as George Bush tramples all over our Constitution & the Bill of Rights. I agree with Carl Bernstein that the time has come where we can no longer turn a blind eye to the way this pathetic little man has lied, cheated & deceived the American public.
Murder & mayhem has been undertaken in our names resulting in the deaths of almost 2500 U.S. Soldiers and thousands of innocent citizens of Afghanistan & Iraq, mostly women and children. The bumbling incompetence has shown it's ugly face again this week with Rumsfeld being exposed as the arrogant know nothing that we knew him to be. Are we going to stand idly by as the king of egos, George Bush, nukes Iran? I read an article this morning that declared Bush to be certifiably insane. Although I am not qualified to determine if he is insane, I do feel that we are insane if we allow the murder & mayhem to continue.
It's Impeachment Time !
Carl Bernstein has this to say in Vanity Fair.....
...............................................
After Nixon's resignation, it was often said that the system had worked. Confronted by an aberrant president, the checks and balances on the executive by the legislative and judicial branches of government, and by a free press, had functioned as the founders had envisioned.
The system has thus far failed during the presidency of George W. Bush—at incalculable cost in human lives, to the American political system, to undertaking an intelligent and effective war against terror, and to the standing of the United States in parts of the world where it previously had been held in the highest regard.
There was understandable reluctance in the Congress to begin a serious investigation of the Nixon presidency. Then there came a time when it was unavoidable. That time in the Bush presidency has arrived.
Full article at:
http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/articles/060417fege08
George Bush is a power hungry, out of control person who is aided and abetted by a bunch of old war lords who have convinced him that he is above the laws of this land, that he can do as he pleases. It's time to hold Bush & the United States Congress to the oaths of their office. We The People have been shoved aside, dismissed by a bunch of corrupt war-mongering, fake Christians who seem to think they have the divine right to trample on our rights in order to obtain their own greedy, self-serving goals.
In the process we believe that they have committed war crimes & crimes against humanity with their vile policies. A friend, (Edward P) wrote that "Bush & Cheney are not scared of the rest of the world. Their response is simple: f**K them, Nuke them, Move on, No Problem"
Let's make it a problem for George Bush and his gang of thugs who have violated our Constitution and made a mockery of our entire justice system. Whether you believe that Bush/Cheney were legally elected or not, it's time to get rid of this gang of crooks. They have no respect for the laws of the land nor for We The People. It's Impeachment time. These abusers of the Constitution of the United States should be impeached, removed from office & prosecuted for their crimes against the Constitution & the citizens of this country.
Let's get the ball rolling! Sign this petition and then call your congressmen and demand an investigation into this corrupt presidency. Keep the calls going until they decide to get off their comfortable, ample backsides and do their job. These people were installed in office against the wishes of the U.S. Voters. We The People need to see that they are removed from office before they start World War III.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/806547876
Toll Free to Congress -888-355-3588, 888-818-6641 or 800-426-8073
Murder & mayhem has been undertaken in our names resulting in the deaths of almost 2500 U.S. Soldiers and thousands of innocent citizens of Afghanistan & Iraq, mostly women and children. The bumbling incompetence has shown it's ugly face again this week with Rumsfeld being exposed as the arrogant know nothing that we knew him to be. Are we going to stand idly by as the king of egos, George Bush, nukes Iran? I read an article this morning that declared Bush to be certifiably insane. Although I am not qualified to determine if he is insane, I do feel that we are insane if we allow the murder & mayhem to continue.
It's Impeachment Time !
Carl Bernstein has this to say in Vanity Fair.....
...............................................
After Nixon's resignation, it was often said that the system had worked. Confronted by an aberrant president, the checks and balances on the executive by the legislative and judicial branches of government, and by a free press, had functioned as the founders had envisioned.
The system has thus far failed during the presidency of George W. Bush—at incalculable cost in human lives, to the American political system, to undertaking an intelligent and effective war against terror, and to the standing of the United States in parts of the world where it previously had been held in the highest regard.
There was understandable reluctance in the Congress to begin a serious investigation of the Nixon presidency. Then there came a time when it was unavoidable. That time in the Bush presidency has arrived.
Full article at:
http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/articles/060417fege08
George Bush is a power hungry, out of control person who is aided and abetted by a bunch of old war lords who have convinced him that he is above the laws of this land, that he can do as he pleases. It's time to hold Bush & the United States Congress to the oaths of their office. We The People have been shoved aside, dismissed by a bunch of corrupt war-mongering, fake Christians who seem to think they have the divine right to trample on our rights in order to obtain their own greedy, self-serving goals.
In the process we believe that they have committed war crimes & crimes against humanity with their vile policies. A friend, (Edward P) wrote that "Bush & Cheney are not scared of the rest of the world. Their response is simple: f**K them, Nuke them, Move on, No Problem"
Let's make it a problem for George Bush and his gang of thugs who have violated our Constitution and made a mockery of our entire justice system. Whether you believe that Bush/Cheney were legally elected or not, it's time to get rid of this gang of crooks. They have no respect for the laws of the land nor for We The People. It's Impeachment time. These abusers of the Constitution of the United States should be impeached, removed from office & prosecuted for their crimes against the Constitution & the citizens of this country.
Let's get the ball rolling! Sign this petition and then call your congressmen and demand an investigation into this corrupt presidency. Keep the calls going until they decide to get off their comfortable, ample backsides and do their job. These people were installed in office against the wishes of the U.S. Voters. We The People need to see that they are removed from office before they start World War III.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/806547876
Toll Free to Congress -888-355-3588, 888-818-6641 or 800-426-8073
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Auditioning for "The Apprentice" - Jane Stillwater
"We are going to hold the next season's auditions in California," said The Donald on TV last Monday night. "If you want to be on the show, come to one of our casting calls." Okay. I want to be the next Apprentice. Hang in there, Mr. Trump. I'm on my way!
The nearest auditions were being held on March 31 in Sacramento. 75 miles away? I could do that. My 1990 Toyota could make it that far. No sweat. So I booked a room at the nearest Motel 6, drove to Sacramento, sat around all that evening in my motel room watching HBO and showed up at 5 am the next morning at the Channel 3 TV studios on D Street. 5 am? That's insane. No one gets up at 5 am! I did. And even despite all that, there was still nine people ahead of me.
Then the news crews came. They asked me, "Ms. Stillwater, why are you doing this?" They looked around. I looked around. I was easily 30 years older than anyone there.
"Mr. Trump always tries to get a variety of types on his show," I replied. "Men, women, ethnic minorities, different nationalities. Well, I am here to represent SENIOR CITIZENS! The Donald needs some geezers to go on his show." In addition, every group of Apprentices so far seems to have at least three bitchy ladies and one loose cannon in the cast. So with me they could get two for the price of one -- a loose cannon AND a bitchy female. Represent!
Well, we stood around outside the studio in long lines in the cold for another five hours before they let in the first 20 applicants. We were ushered into this large room and were instructed to all sit around this huge table, next to a casting director who was old enough to be my grandson. "Tell me why YOU would make a good Apprentice," he asked.
"Because I love to write and I could help Mr. Trump write his books -- not, mind you, that he needs any help of course." Plus I was cute?
Then the casting director asked a hot-button question of all 20 of us and then all hell broke lose. "Is America safer before or after 9-11?" I think he wanted to see who could hold their own in an argument. He did. We did.
"I'm a blogger," I spoke up first. "Bush knew beforehand about 9-11. And what about the photo of the woman standing on the steel beams in the North Tower -- the ones that were allegedly supposed to be so red-hot that they were about to melt?" Then everyone else around the table jumped in.
"Bush is a saint."
"We must double security."
"We got to start investing in infrastructure at home and get out of Iraq."
Everyone else tried to drown me out (I was just an old lady after all) but I wouldn't let them. I jumped right in there with the rest of them. And, among all those sharks, I had the final word. "We need to run the U.S. like Mr. Trump runs his organization -- we need to look for talented and honest and capable people instead of just a handful of rich guys and greedy jerks who steal America blind!" Ha!
Then the group job interview was over. It had been five minutes of hell. Grueling. I left the room shaking. But when I got outside, some guy actually asked me for my autograph! "I saw you on the news this morning! You were great!" Really? I signed his napkin, "To Ron, lots of luck from Jane 'Senior Citizen' Stillwater" and I went home happy. I had had my 15 minutes of fame.
Will the casting director call me back? Probably not. Did I have fun? Absolutely YES!
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com
Stillwater is a freelance writer who hates injustice and corruption in any form but especially injustice and corruption paid for by American taxpayers.
The nearest auditions were being held on March 31 in Sacramento. 75 miles away? I could do that. My 1990 Toyota could make it that far. No sweat. So I booked a room at the nearest Motel 6, drove to Sacramento, sat around all that evening in my motel room watching HBO and showed up at 5 am the next morning at the Channel 3 TV studios on D Street. 5 am? That's insane. No one gets up at 5 am! I did. And even despite all that, there was still nine people ahead of me.
Then the news crews came. They asked me, "Ms. Stillwater, why are you doing this?" They looked around. I looked around. I was easily 30 years older than anyone there.
"Mr. Trump always tries to get a variety of types on his show," I replied. "Men, women, ethnic minorities, different nationalities. Well, I am here to represent SENIOR CITIZENS! The Donald needs some geezers to go on his show." In addition, every group of Apprentices so far seems to have at least three bitchy ladies and one loose cannon in the cast. So with me they could get two for the price of one -- a loose cannon AND a bitchy female. Represent!
Well, we stood around outside the studio in long lines in the cold for another five hours before they let in the first 20 applicants. We were ushered into this large room and were instructed to all sit around this huge table, next to a casting director who was old enough to be my grandson. "Tell me why YOU would make a good Apprentice," he asked.
"Because I love to write and I could help Mr. Trump write his books -- not, mind you, that he needs any help of course." Plus I was cute?
Then the casting director asked a hot-button question of all 20 of us and then all hell broke lose. "Is America safer before or after 9-11?" I think he wanted to see who could hold their own in an argument. He did. We did.
"I'm a blogger," I spoke up first. "Bush knew beforehand about 9-11. And what about the photo of the woman standing on the steel beams in the North Tower -- the ones that were allegedly supposed to be so red-hot that they were about to melt?" Then everyone else around the table jumped in.
"Bush is a saint."
"We must double security."
"We got to start investing in infrastructure at home and get out of Iraq."
Everyone else tried to drown me out (I was just an old lady after all) but I wouldn't let them. I jumped right in there with the rest of them. And, among all those sharks, I had the final word. "We need to run the U.S. like Mr. Trump runs his organization -- we need to look for talented and honest and capable people instead of just a handful of rich guys and greedy jerks who steal America blind!" Ha!
Then the group job interview was over. It had been five minutes of hell. Grueling. I left the room shaking. But when I got outside, some guy actually asked me for my autograph! "I saw you on the news this morning! You were great!" Really? I signed his napkin, "To Ron, lots of luck from Jane 'Senior Citizen' Stillwater" and I went home happy. I had had my 15 minutes of fame.
Will the casting director call me back? Probably not. Did I have fun? Absolutely YES!
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com
Stillwater is a freelance writer who hates injustice and corruption in any form but especially injustice and corruption paid for by American taxpayers.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Corrupt Elections, Corrupt Government, Etc.
A lot of things have bugged the hell out of me since the first time I was old enough to vote.
** I hate the two party system. At least 99% of the time I have had to chose the lesser of two evils. We should have at least a half dozen parties to even pretend to start representing the people of this country. Some people say this would create a mad house in Congress. In my opinion, a madhouse would provide welcome relief from the self-aggrandizing Millionaire Good Old Boy's Club that currently exists.
** Down with the electoral college..... Direct election of the President & VP is a must. The words electoral college is a misnomer if ever there was one. The people of this country are intelligent enough to choose their elected officials. We don't need any winner take all or the 'go betweens' (electoral college) who may or may not vote according to the wishes of the people. A national election should have national totals.
Back to the old system of electing a President with the guy who comes in second being the VP.
When the Founders of the American Republic wrote the U.S. Constitution in 1787, they did not envision a role for political parties in the governmental order. The electoral college was supposed to insulate the new republic from political parties and factions. http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/election04/parties.htm . But since we have evolved into the very thing the forefathers tried to prevent some things need to change.
** The instant run-off method of voting, where one votes for their first, second, third, etc., choice of candidates, might be ideal for promoting honest and verifiable elections.
** Forget the phony primaries where a half dozen states decide who is going to be president. Bush & Cheney are the best example ever, of two people who give us a good argument for changing the system where one thug buys the primaries, then selects his own personal crook to assist him in his rotten agenda.
** A political party must be recognized by 51% of the states in order to have a presidential candidate on the ballot. States could determine the limitations/qualifications to be recognized as a legitimate party thereby preventing every Tom, Dick & Harry Party from appearing on the ballot.
** In the National elections, the only thing appearing on the ballot would be President, Vice president & Congressional candidates. State & local elections will not be conducted on the same day as the national elections.
** Electronic voting machines were designed with fraud in mind . Let's go back to paper ballots & counting them in each precinct by hand then transmit the totals to multiple sources, election officials, news sources,etc., for grand totals and confirmation. These paper ballots would be counted publicly with an area where citizens can observe the counting process. The confirmed precinct totals would then be publicly checked at every state level with precinct totals read aloud, displayed publicly for easy checking. These totals could be transmitted electronically but with checks and double checks all along the way. A simple majority wins.
** Public funding of elections is a must. Get the corporations out of our electoral system and out of government by prohibiting all donations.
** Speaking of corporations, whatever laws that were passed that gave them the same rights as a person should be rescinded. Let those jokers get back to running their businesses. If they don't spend money bribing Congressmen then they should be able to lower the prices of their products.
** Women should be president for the next 43 elections then we could alternate ! We have elected 43 male presidents and they have not lived up to the idea of a Democratic government of the people, by the people, for the people. It's time for the women to show us how it should be done! Yep, we can already hear the screams of righteous indignation from the Good Old Boys!
** And speaking of presidents, the person elected to the office of president & vice president should be prohibited from campaigning for members of their own party since he occupies an office that is supposed to represent all the people. Once again George Bush is a prime example of a presidency gone bad. Combining vacations, campaign trips, & humping for the rabid right religious nut cases, we U.S. taxpayers have been stuck with a huge bill for a job not done. In the case of this current, fraudulent president that might be money will spent. If he had been on the job full time the world might be nothing but charred remains like Iraq.
** We should adopt some of Great Britain's parliamentary procedures in our Congress. Can you imagine the fun we could have if Bush had to appear before Congress for a grilling on a regular basis? And speaking of Bush, this little dictator should have his presidential powers stripped down to bare bones basics. It's time for this sorryass congress to do the job for which it is handsomely paid.
For sure elections would be more interesting if we were not stuck with just the
two pathetic, greedy, self-serving parties in today's 'market'.
AND I'd bet millions (if I had millions) that the general citizenry would be a thousand times more interested in politics & more likely to vote! We the citizens, who have been screwed for generations, could watch the heads roll as we conduct real, legitimate, and verifiable direct presidential & congressional elections.
Ah.... what a grand day that would be!
Proud Liberal Bitch........ still dreaming, still hoping.
** I hate the two party system. At least 99% of the time I have had to chose the lesser of two evils. We should have at least a half dozen parties to even pretend to start representing the people of this country. Some people say this would create a mad house in Congress. In my opinion, a madhouse would provide welcome relief from the self-aggrandizing Millionaire Good Old Boy's Club that currently exists.
** Down with the electoral college..... Direct election of the President & VP is a must. The words electoral college is a misnomer if ever there was one. The people of this country are intelligent enough to choose their elected officials. We don't need any winner take all or the 'go betweens' (electoral college) who may or may not vote according to the wishes of the people. A national election should have national totals.
Back to the old system of electing a President with the guy who comes in second being the VP.
When the Founders of the American Republic wrote the U.S. Constitution in 1787, they did not envision a role for political parties in the governmental order. The electoral college was supposed to insulate the new republic from political parties and factions. http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/election04/parties.htm . But since we have evolved into the very thing the forefathers tried to prevent some things need to change.
** The instant run-off method of voting, where one votes for their first, second, third, etc., choice of candidates, might be ideal for promoting honest and verifiable elections.
** Forget the phony primaries where a half dozen states decide who is going to be president. Bush & Cheney are the best example ever, of two people who give us a good argument for changing the system where one thug buys the primaries, then selects his own personal crook to assist him in his rotten agenda.
** A political party must be recognized by 51% of the states in order to have a presidential candidate on the ballot. States could determine the limitations/qualifications to be recognized as a legitimate party thereby preventing every Tom, Dick & Harry Party from appearing on the ballot.
** In the National elections, the only thing appearing on the ballot would be President, Vice president & Congressional candidates. State & local elections will not be conducted on the same day as the national elections.
** Electronic voting machines were designed with fraud in mind . Let's go back to paper ballots & counting them in each precinct by hand then transmit the totals to multiple sources, election officials, news sources,etc., for grand totals and confirmation. These paper ballots would be counted publicly with an area where citizens can observe the counting process. The confirmed precinct totals would then be publicly checked at every state level with precinct totals read aloud, displayed publicly for easy checking. These totals could be transmitted electronically but with checks and double checks all along the way. A simple majority wins.
** Public funding of elections is a must. Get the corporations out of our electoral system and out of government by prohibiting all donations.
** Speaking of corporations, whatever laws that were passed that gave them the same rights as a person should be rescinded. Let those jokers get back to running their businesses. If they don't spend money bribing Congressmen then they should be able to lower the prices of their products.
** Women should be president for the next 43 elections then we could alternate ! We have elected 43 male presidents and they have not lived up to the idea of a Democratic government of the people, by the people, for the people. It's time for the women to show us how it should be done! Yep, we can already hear the screams of righteous indignation from the Good Old Boys!
** And speaking of presidents, the person elected to the office of president & vice president should be prohibited from campaigning for members of their own party since he occupies an office that is supposed to represent all the people. Once again George Bush is a prime example of a presidency gone bad. Combining vacations, campaign trips, & humping for the rabid right religious nut cases, we U.S. taxpayers have been stuck with a huge bill for a job not done. In the case of this current, fraudulent president that might be money will spent. If he had been on the job full time the world might be nothing but charred remains like Iraq.
** We should adopt some of Great Britain's parliamentary procedures in our Congress. Can you imagine the fun we could have if Bush had to appear before Congress for a grilling on a regular basis? And speaking of Bush, this little dictator should have his presidential powers stripped down to bare bones basics. It's time for this sorryass congress to do the job for which it is handsomely paid.
For sure elections would be more interesting if we were not stuck with just the
two pathetic, greedy, self-serving parties in today's 'market'.
AND I'd bet millions (if I had millions) that the general citizenry would be a thousand times more interested in politics & more likely to vote! We the citizens, who have been screwed for generations, could watch the heads roll as we conduct real, legitimate, and verifiable direct presidential & congressional elections.
Ah.... what a grand day that would be!
Proud Liberal Bitch........ still dreaming, still hoping.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Are You Buying Into It? --How the Dimocrats are Gaming You
Are you buying into the confirmation vote record of Alito as evidence of the Dimocrat Congress being staunch, firm, fierce, and loyal? Yes? Congratulations, you just got hosed. That little caper, wherein it was made to seem that only four were Party traitors, was merely a mild form of PsyOps (Pyschological Operations). Do you remember what came just before that? That's right: a 72-to-25 Senate vote to end debate, bring cloture, and vote to confirm Samuel Alito. That was what guaranteed Alito his passage: all those joyously delivered Dimocratic cloture votes. Now, all you have to do is sit back and listen to the machinery endlessly bleating (because the quisling Congressionals will never say it with their own mouths) about "the poor, brave, hard-fighting, disconsolate Dims worrying about re-election chances in Red States"...hence their outrageous ballot-casting.
From there, you start buying into their re-education process. However, if you do accept venality that easily, there's no reason to read further; this article will make little sense to you. In fact, it'll probably piss you off.
The way the media - all the media; let me say that again: ALL the media - inferred it, was that there was still a filibuster opportunity after the cloture vote. There never was. There couldn't be. ‘Cloture' means ‘a closing' and it cut off any further procedural possibility of debate and, thus, filibuster. A congressperson can only filibuster while debate is open, not during the actual vote. But, um, you weren't really told that, were you? Certainly not by the Right press and...not by the Left either. This should be disquieting.
So, the Dims made absolutely sure there would be no filibuster at the very same time they were telling you that it was a wide open possibility. But think about it: most Dims voted for cloture absolutely knowing it would guarantee Alito his spot on the court. No doubt about it. Then they began the theater work, "standing firm", "supporting the rank and file", "holding strong to American principals" when it all was absolutely devoid of meaning. Didja fall for it?
Ah, but there was also the fusillade of diversionary role-playing all the while. The Sunday before, Minority Whip Dick Durbin informed the press he had 37 of the 41 votes needed to clinch the filibuster. What happened? No one cared to follow up his allegation, Right or Left. If Durbin's claim was indeed a truism, yet so jaw-droppingly many Dims voted for cloture - voted against filibuster - what went on there? Might Durbin have been lying? If not, was he being lied to? Without a micron of doubt, blatant prevarications were being told, it only remains to determine exactly where. I know what I think.
Note, too, that all eight Dims on the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously voted against Alito before the nomination appeared on the floor. That is, the Dimocratic members of a committee totally devoted to jurisprudential candidate fitness overwhelmingly rejected him on all fronts...and yet...the committee's comrades elsewhere were about evenly split on the question of filibuster. Isn't that interesting? Were they paying attention at all? The most involved Dim members as much as said "Drop this idiot like a scalding anvil!!!" and they were ignored...by their own.
John Kerry once again waffled. Early on, he was against filibustering, following the futile hope that his primary silence wouldn't be broached; then, at the last minute - hmmm, almost at the exact same time the entire PsyOps scheme would have been coming together - he flew in "valorously" to push for something it appears he may well have known hadn't a hope in Hades. Where'd he wing it from? Ah, well that was ignored too, again: by both Right and Left press. It was the Davos Conference, where the richest people on Earth gather to decide the fate of the globe. John Kerry, who married into immense wealth. John Kerry, who wouldn't raise even the feeblest leg up on a hideously obvious Vote Fraud and who caved in, in what may have been a world's record in concessions, amidst very public and very heated knowledge that something was criminally amiss in the electoral process...just as...hmmmm...just as Al Gore had also done during the last Vote Fraud. What a coincidence! Are we seeing a pattern here?
But also: John Kerry, who was once an icon, protesting the VietNam War and cracking open the biggest financial scandal in world history (BCCI), and now appears to be no more than an actor with lines written by divers hands, playing a Centrist role to attenuate the malefactions of what may not be a party opposite him, after all.
Oh, and remember "Hot Again, Cold Again" Dianne Feinstein, the corporatist's dream? You may recall the Dims were quietly, and not so quietly - certainly not on Feinstein's part - whispering that Alito was a "done deal" and that filibuster was foolish, until public pressure ratcheted up, then suddenly very grudgingly mouthing the public position, saying they'd support a filibuster, simultaneously stating such could never succeed. Say what??? Gentlemen and ladies, movies have been made about the filibuster as the most wildly successful ace-in-the-hole in American history. Does the name "Mr. Smith" ring a bell? How about "Jimmy Stewart". The Dims were hoping you never saw the flick. Maybe you didn't.
What, exactly, would be the only thing that could have defeated the confirmation process once it started, and at exactly what point? Filibuster, right at the cloture juncture and nowhere else. Oh, I forgot: neither the Right nor the Left press much cared to state that clearly enough. Odd, no? Well, as exculpatory nonsense currently goes, they probably "didn't even think of it!". Are you buying into that? They certainly hope so and, if polls (God help me, now I'm referring to the damn things!) are correct, you did. Or...did you? After all, what's prompting the polls, who's being poled [sic], what were the questions, and who are these faceless bastards running them? Doesn't matter, as any unwillingness to initiate the filibuster at all was a clear signal of collusion with the Repuglican status quo. The rest is horse manure. All the Dims now have to do is obfuscate that fact as much as possible, and that's what they're doing.
And by the way, where was "rebel" Howard Dean during all this? Did you like his weak-kneed from-the-closet Dim performance?
Merrily joining the flip-floppers, Barack Obama was said to have criticized filibustering, then, at the very last moment, pledged to vote it in. Note what went on there: one doesn't vote for a filibuster, one votes against cloture, then a filibuster just occurs. But that's not what Obama said. He was referring to something that doesn't exist. Makes for a good excuse later on. Let's see now, is he a lawyer? Obama didn't like the filibuster at all, instead averring, "There's one way to guarantee that the judges who are appointed to the Supreme Court...reflect [Dimocratic] values and that's to win elections." So, voting for anything but candidates is a mistaken action, is that it, Mr. Obama, and screw anything like, oh, issues, law, Supreme Court Justices, and such trivialities? That's an alleged verity I find surprising in an American.
Joe Biden was equally cagey, gritting his teeth as he said, "I think a filibuster makes sense when you have a prospect of actually succeeding...I will vote one time to continue the debate." Pardon me? Condescending to follow the will of the people...one time? Because it perhaps goes against one's own private interests? Let me check again and see what Party Biden belongs to. He, all along, was heralding that "the fact of the matter" was that Alito's confirmation was - and one has to wonder where this came-from-nowhere sentiment originated - a done deal. Is that a "D" I see next to is name? Must be a typo.
Alito got through because the Dimocrats allowed it and for no other reason. The Repuglican vote was the only "done deal", and there was a possible several-member dissent there almost from Day One, which means the Dims could still have handily thwarted the necessary 60 vote halt. They didn't. Why?
You can either listen to their inane blather, delivered pontificatingly as received wisdom (and wisdom is gaining its hoariness in mere nanoseconds nowadays, it appears), amidst welters of hand-wringing, choked-back tears, looks of exhaustion, and other stage effects, or you can look at the facts, decide what's really going on, and quit regurgitating back the cue lines Dims are feeding you. That's where the PsyOps can be found - an' it ain't jes' yer down-home Repugs who're peddling it to ya, Jeeter. It used to be called propaganda...but that's what propaganda is: PsyOps. Goebbels knew it, Mussolini knew, Rove knows it, and now the Dimocrats know it.
Do you know it?
by Mark S. Tucker
February 3, 2006
-----------------------
Mark S. Tucker, a critic, has written for numerous magazines and presently writes for Perfect Sound Forever on-line, as well as this forum. He can be reached at progdawg@hotmail.com. This article is originally published at opednews.com. Copyright Mark S. Tucker, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.
Toll Free to Congress -888-355-3588, 888-818-6641 or 800-426-8073
From there, you start buying into their re-education process. However, if you do accept venality that easily, there's no reason to read further; this article will make little sense to you. In fact, it'll probably piss you off.
The way the media - all the media; let me say that again: ALL the media - inferred it, was that there was still a filibuster opportunity after the cloture vote. There never was. There couldn't be. ‘Cloture' means ‘a closing' and it cut off any further procedural possibility of debate and, thus, filibuster. A congressperson can only filibuster while debate is open, not during the actual vote. But, um, you weren't really told that, were you? Certainly not by the Right press and...not by the Left either. This should be disquieting.
So, the Dims made absolutely sure there would be no filibuster at the very same time they were telling you that it was a wide open possibility. But think about it: most Dims voted for cloture absolutely knowing it would guarantee Alito his spot on the court. No doubt about it. Then they began the theater work, "standing firm", "supporting the rank and file", "holding strong to American principals" when it all was absolutely devoid of meaning. Didja fall for it?
Ah, but there was also the fusillade of diversionary role-playing all the while. The Sunday before, Minority Whip Dick Durbin informed the press he had 37 of the 41 votes needed to clinch the filibuster. What happened? No one cared to follow up his allegation, Right or Left. If Durbin's claim was indeed a truism, yet so jaw-droppingly many Dims voted for cloture - voted against filibuster - what went on there? Might Durbin have been lying? If not, was he being lied to? Without a micron of doubt, blatant prevarications were being told, it only remains to determine exactly where. I know what I think.
Note, too, that all eight Dims on the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously voted against Alito before the nomination appeared on the floor. That is, the Dimocratic members of a committee totally devoted to jurisprudential candidate fitness overwhelmingly rejected him on all fronts...and yet...the committee's comrades elsewhere were about evenly split on the question of filibuster. Isn't that interesting? Were they paying attention at all? The most involved Dim members as much as said "Drop this idiot like a scalding anvil!!!" and they were ignored...by their own.
John Kerry once again waffled. Early on, he was against filibustering, following the futile hope that his primary silence wouldn't be broached; then, at the last minute - hmmm, almost at the exact same time the entire PsyOps scheme would have been coming together - he flew in "valorously" to push for something it appears he may well have known hadn't a hope in Hades. Where'd he wing it from? Ah, well that was ignored too, again: by both Right and Left press. It was the Davos Conference, where the richest people on Earth gather to decide the fate of the globe. John Kerry, who married into immense wealth. John Kerry, who wouldn't raise even the feeblest leg up on a hideously obvious Vote Fraud and who caved in, in what may have been a world's record in concessions, amidst very public and very heated knowledge that something was criminally amiss in the electoral process...just as...hmmmm...just as Al Gore had also done during the last Vote Fraud. What a coincidence! Are we seeing a pattern here?
But also: John Kerry, who was once an icon, protesting the VietNam War and cracking open the biggest financial scandal in world history (BCCI), and now appears to be no more than an actor with lines written by divers hands, playing a Centrist role to attenuate the malefactions of what may not be a party opposite him, after all.
Oh, and remember "Hot Again, Cold Again" Dianne Feinstein, the corporatist's dream? You may recall the Dims were quietly, and not so quietly - certainly not on Feinstein's part - whispering that Alito was a "done deal" and that filibuster was foolish, until public pressure ratcheted up, then suddenly very grudgingly mouthing the public position, saying they'd support a filibuster, simultaneously stating such could never succeed. Say what??? Gentlemen and ladies, movies have been made about the filibuster as the most wildly successful ace-in-the-hole in American history. Does the name "Mr. Smith" ring a bell? How about "Jimmy Stewart". The Dims were hoping you never saw the flick. Maybe you didn't.
What, exactly, would be the only thing that could have defeated the confirmation process once it started, and at exactly what point? Filibuster, right at the cloture juncture and nowhere else. Oh, I forgot: neither the Right nor the Left press much cared to state that clearly enough. Odd, no? Well, as exculpatory nonsense currently goes, they probably "didn't even think of it!". Are you buying into that? They certainly hope so and, if polls (God help me, now I'm referring to the damn things!) are correct, you did. Or...did you? After all, what's prompting the polls, who's being poled [sic], what were the questions, and who are these faceless bastards running them? Doesn't matter, as any unwillingness to initiate the filibuster at all was a clear signal of collusion with the Repuglican status quo. The rest is horse manure. All the Dims now have to do is obfuscate that fact as much as possible, and that's what they're doing.
And by the way, where was "rebel" Howard Dean during all this? Did you like his weak-kneed from-the-closet Dim performance?
Merrily joining the flip-floppers, Barack Obama was said to have criticized filibustering, then, at the very last moment, pledged to vote it in. Note what went on there: one doesn't vote for a filibuster, one votes against cloture, then a filibuster just occurs. But that's not what Obama said. He was referring to something that doesn't exist. Makes for a good excuse later on. Let's see now, is he a lawyer? Obama didn't like the filibuster at all, instead averring, "There's one way to guarantee that the judges who are appointed to the Supreme Court...reflect [Dimocratic] values and that's to win elections." So, voting for anything but candidates is a mistaken action, is that it, Mr. Obama, and screw anything like, oh, issues, law, Supreme Court Justices, and such trivialities? That's an alleged verity I find surprising in an American.
Joe Biden was equally cagey, gritting his teeth as he said, "I think a filibuster makes sense when you have a prospect of actually succeeding...I will vote one time to continue the debate." Pardon me? Condescending to follow the will of the people...one time? Because it perhaps goes against one's own private interests? Let me check again and see what Party Biden belongs to. He, all along, was heralding that "the fact of the matter" was that Alito's confirmation was - and one has to wonder where this came-from-nowhere sentiment originated - a done deal. Is that a "D" I see next to is name? Must be a typo.
Alito got through because the Dimocrats allowed it and for no other reason. The Repuglican vote was the only "done deal", and there was a possible several-member dissent there almost from Day One, which means the Dims could still have handily thwarted the necessary 60 vote halt. They didn't. Why?
You can either listen to their inane blather, delivered pontificatingly as received wisdom (and wisdom is gaining its hoariness in mere nanoseconds nowadays, it appears), amidst welters of hand-wringing, choked-back tears, looks of exhaustion, and other stage effects, or you can look at the facts, decide what's really going on, and quit regurgitating back the cue lines Dims are feeding you. That's where the PsyOps can be found - an' it ain't jes' yer down-home Repugs who're peddling it to ya, Jeeter. It used to be called propaganda...but that's what propaganda is: PsyOps. Goebbels knew it, Mussolini knew, Rove knows it, and now the Dimocrats know it.
Do you know it?
by Mark S. Tucker
February 3, 2006
-----------------------
Mark S. Tucker, a critic, has written for numerous magazines and presently writes for Perfect Sound Forever on-line, as well as this forum. He can be reached at progdawg@hotmail.com. This article is originally published at opednews.com. Copyright Mark S. Tucker, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.
Toll Free to Congress -888-355-3588, 888-818-6641 or 800-426-8073
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Comment From Cyberspace
In a different context or under other circumstances, I'm quite sure I'd like you guys and would enjoy spending time with you and tossing ideas back and forth - on faith, on governance, on compassion and suffering, on football. That's sincere, not a rhetorical deception. But I don't like you now. I am deeply angry and dismayed at the moral and intellectual positions your partisan or nationalist loyalties have led you to.
You accept, with almost no reflection, nearly anything and everything this adminstration you support tells you from the small details to the large "mottos".
Abramoff was an "equal money dispenser", said Bush. It was a lie. You bought it, or at least excused it. How many more such inaccuracies and deceptions have I seen you swallow and parrot?
"They want to destroy our way of life and Western Civilization", says Cheney. You guys suck that in and it gives you meaning and purpose even while that consequence from that cause is so nearly impossible as to be laughable. There are how many of these guys on camels with rifles? The combination of Germany, Italy and Japan - highly technically and militarily advanced nations with millions of trained soldiers and huge military machines didn't pose the threat described above, though they posed something real but much smaller. In fact, it is our modern culture and militarism which poses that threat to the cultures of the desert arabs. Perhaps it ought to, but at least you should get the whole picture right side up in your thinking.
You argue that the media doesn't tell the good news about the war. But the media has been almost completely sterile and devoid of the realities of this war. Have any of you seen even a single picture of a blown apart innocent Iraqi child? Have any of you heard them screaming for the two days it took for their burned bodies to expire? I don't want to witness this either, but we should be forced to witness exactly this.
You justify and excuse torture, though you define what has happened as something else even when if your parents of siblings suffered these acts, you would consider it nothing other than inhuman. Or you justify it as necessary and think "turn the other cheeck" and "let him who has no sin throw the first stone" are notions as quaint as the international rules on torture. Do you imagine Christ committing such acts? Do you imagine Christ condoning such acts? Do you imagine Christ dropping a cluster bomb?
................Blatham
You accept, with almost no reflection, nearly anything and everything this adminstration you support tells you from the small details to the large "mottos".
Abramoff was an "equal money dispenser", said Bush. It was a lie. You bought it, or at least excused it. How many more such inaccuracies and deceptions have I seen you swallow and parrot?
"They want to destroy our way of life and Western Civilization", says Cheney. You guys suck that in and it gives you meaning and purpose even while that consequence from that cause is so nearly impossible as to be laughable. There are how many of these guys on camels with rifles? The combination of Germany, Italy and Japan - highly technically and militarily advanced nations with millions of trained soldiers and huge military machines didn't pose the threat described above, though they posed something real but much smaller. In fact, it is our modern culture and militarism which poses that threat to the cultures of the desert arabs. Perhaps it ought to, but at least you should get the whole picture right side up in your thinking.
You argue that the media doesn't tell the good news about the war. But the media has been almost completely sterile and devoid of the realities of this war. Have any of you seen even a single picture of a blown apart innocent Iraqi child? Have any of you heard them screaming for the two days it took for their burned bodies to expire? I don't want to witness this either, but we should be forced to witness exactly this.
You justify and excuse torture, though you define what has happened as something else even when if your parents of siblings suffered these acts, you would consider it nothing other than inhuman. Or you justify it as necessary and think "turn the other cheeck" and "let him who has no sin throw the first stone" are notions as quaint as the international rules on torture. Do you imagine Christ committing such acts? Do you imagine Christ condoning such acts? Do you imagine Christ dropping a cluster bomb?
................Blatham
Monday, January 16, 2006
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Narcissism, the public, and the President
Bush spoke last week to wounded soldiers at Brooke Army Medical Center and uttered these immortal words indicating a lack of true appreciation for the suffering of the gravely wounded, often permanently disabled soldiers he was speaking to:
"As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself -- not here at the hospital, but in combat with a Cedar. I eventually won. The Cedar gave me a little scratch. As a matter of fact, the Colonel asked if I needed first aid when she first saw me. I was able to avoid any major surgical operations here, but thanks for your compassion, Colonel."
At a time when the number of severely wounded soldiers is rising, this lack of appreciation is disturbing and portends badly for adequate resources being made available to care for damaged soldiers and veterans over the coming months, years, and decades.
This episode was far from the first time Bush uttered bizarre sounding comments in response to the injuries of others. Who can forget his remarkable message to the hundreds of thousands of people, many poor and black, whose lives were devastated by Hurricane Katrina:
"Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
While Bush's comments to wounded GIs were uttered together with the usual platitudes expected on such occasions, these quotes illustrate Bush's greatest strength and also his greatest weakness, his narcissism.
Narcissism
At an observable level, narcissism involves a self-centeredness that makes one oblivious to the emotional existence of others. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (IVth edition: DSM-IV) defines its pathological extreme (narcissistic personality disorder) as:
"A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy."
In the odd DSM manner, this condition is diagnosed by having a threshold number of the following symptoms (5 out of 9), regardless of which five symptoms they are. (To be diagnostic of a clinical condition each symptom should be possessed to the extent that it interferes with functioning or causes distress):
"Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
"Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
"Believes that he or she is "'special"' and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
"Requires excessive admiration
"Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
"Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
"Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
"Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
"Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes"
full article at: http://www.opednews.com
"As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself -- not here at the hospital, but in combat with a Cedar. I eventually won. The Cedar gave me a little scratch. As a matter of fact, the Colonel asked if I needed first aid when she first saw me. I was able to avoid any major surgical operations here, but thanks for your compassion, Colonel."
At a time when the number of severely wounded soldiers is rising, this lack of appreciation is disturbing and portends badly for adequate resources being made available to care for damaged soldiers and veterans over the coming months, years, and decades.
This episode was far from the first time Bush uttered bizarre sounding comments in response to the injuries of others. Who can forget his remarkable message to the hundreds of thousands of people, many poor and black, whose lives were devastated by Hurricane Katrina:
"Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
While Bush's comments to wounded GIs were uttered together with the usual platitudes expected on such occasions, these quotes illustrate Bush's greatest strength and also his greatest weakness, his narcissism.
Narcissism
At an observable level, narcissism involves a self-centeredness that makes one oblivious to the emotional existence of others. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (IVth edition: DSM-IV) defines its pathological extreme (narcissistic personality disorder) as:
"A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy."
In the odd DSM manner, this condition is diagnosed by having a threshold number of the following symptoms (5 out of 9), regardless of which five symptoms they are. (To be diagnostic of a clinical condition each symptom should be possessed to the extent that it interferes with functioning or causes distress):
"Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
"Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
"Believes that he or she is "'special"' and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
"Requires excessive admiration
"Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
"Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
"Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
"Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
"Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes"
full article at: http://www.opednews.com
Comments from Cyberspace
Our army is getting it's butt kicked in Iraq, and the commander-in-chief is a maniac. A narcissist psycho who knows nothing because he loses it when he hears something he doesn't like, he lives in a dream world. He's not the only one. His pals live in a dream world too. In the gulf war Iraqi army was no match, and when it was ruined, Iraq suffered ten ormore years of bombing and enbargoing by Americans, mostly killing children (thanks Bill) . Yes, Iraq was easy pickings, but they're fighting back. Syria and Iran won't be pushovers like Iraq.
Iran has a gigantic defense machine, a navy and missiles poised on the mountains overlooking the the Hormuz Straits. Both Syria and Iran are supplied ofmilitary by both Russia and China. Iran has contrrolled missiles that fly at 5.5 mach that can destroy large navy vessels, and we have nothing that can match that. In a war with America, both Russia and China would backIran, they could care less about Israel. An overworked right-wing mantra is the world is dangerous. Well yes, when we don't behave ourselves, it could even get more dangerous. Americans should learn not to vote maniacs into the office of president.
Don Phelps
California
_________________________________________________________________
I almost can't stomach watching the judiciary proceedings without having my emotions getting wrung dry. Although I vote Democratic, I find almost everything Republican has a stain of repugnant dishonesty about their hypocritical behavior trying to showcase Alito as pillar of the community type when in reality, he is a rightwing anti-abortion pro-corporation extremist who supports an imperial presidency and I just can't link this kind of cesspool methods to Democrats.
During the judiciary hearing I hear straight forward questions from Democrats with Alito giving evasive answers or not answering the question at all, then comes a Republican softball question that allows him slime through his anti-abortion stance as something that protects Democracy, but in reality it forces women to accept health care concepts as practiced by intelligent design instead of medical science.
This nominee should be rejected and quit wasting the people's money for a performance in which the votes have been cast before the hearings began. The Republicans haven't asked Judge Alito not one question of substance. The Democrats must be unanimous in their rejection of Samuel Altio, and if necessary, filibuster. The future of our nation is at stake.
Larry Little
Iran has a gigantic defense machine, a navy and missiles poised on the mountains overlooking the the Hormuz Straits. Both Syria and Iran are supplied ofmilitary by both Russia and China. Iran has contrrolled missiles that fly at 5.5 mach that can destroy large navy vessels, and we have nothing that can match that. In a war with America, both Russia and China would backIran, they could care less about Israel. An overworked right-wing mantra is the world is dangerous. Well yes, when we don't behave ourselves, it could even get more dangerous. Americans should learn not to vote maniacs into the office of president.
Don Phelps
California
_________________________________________________________________
I almost can't stomach watching the judiciary proceedings without having my emotions getting wrung dry. Although I vote Democratic, I find almost everything Republican has a stain of repugnant dishonesty about their hypocritical behavior trying to showcase Alito as pillar of the community type when in reality, he is a rightwing anti-abortion pro-corporation extremist who supports an imperial presidency and I just can't link this kind of cesspool methods to Democrats.
During the judiciary hearing I hear straight forward questions from Democrats with Alito giving evasive answers or not answering the question at all, then comes a Republican softball question that allows him slime through his anti-abortion stance as something that protects Democracy, but in reality it forces women to accept health care concepts as practiced by intelligent design instead of medical science.
This nominee should be rejected and quit wasting the people's money for a performance in which the votes have been cast before the hearings began. The Republicans haven't asked Judge Alito not one question of substance. The Democrats must be unanimous in their rejection of Samuel Altio, and if necessary, filibuster. The future of our nation is at stake.
Larry Little
Monday, January 09, 2006
Over 50, Have SIA , Kiss My Grits !
My cyber friend, Les, wrote this amazing, insightful commentary this morning and it's too good not to share:
From: Hubmaster@aol.com
I’ve been a different man since I developed SIA.
You know, when you’re young, you’re easily intimidated by the so-called mores of our society that dictates how you are supposed to act, what you are supposed to wear and what you are inclined to say.
All my life I heard from my two spinster aunts (no one would marry these viragos, harridans, “castrators:,” whatever God rest their heartless souls!) about all of the things that I was doing wrong and how I was rapidly becoming the black sheep of the family. Everyone in my family did things better than I did, it seemed. Exactly right; not really an ego-building environment because all of the ego was already used up.
Whatever I managed to accomplish, they accomplished it better, faster and smarter!
I guess that was the reason I was so eager to get away from everybody, left home young, joined the Army, became an adviser and disappeared for four years plus!
When I got out, I lived in California, Florida and Boston before coming home for a fortnight before moving out to my own pad and my own freedom and a home that I was never to return to.
And you know what?
Somehow, despite all of my failings, I actually was able to survive. Without all of the guidance, without all of the minute directions and details of what I should do and without
Becoming an activist in the First Church of Science where my aunt was a mucky-muck!
Now, my old age is proving the happiest time of my life.
Why?
Like I said before, after I developed SIA.
And I have to tell you, it’s contagious.
For those of you not familiar with SIA, let me explain.
It usually accompanies your AARP subscription. It means that you are now in your fifties, and you don’t have to explain anything to anybody anymore. You don’t have to smile when you don’t want to. And you don’t even have to be nice. On your time off, you can laze around in your underwear or your bra and panties. You can listen to the worst music on the air. You can rob the refrigerator; you can eat with your hands standing up, you can burp without fear~….and you can live.
Most importantly, I don’t have to put up with anyone’s bullshit. I can tell it like it is without fear of having somebody toss it back at me. And I can ignore anyone who is a complete asshole. I don’t have to be nice to my son-in-law’s parents, and if they don’t like it, who gives a rat’s ass. That’s what SIA is all about!--which is short-hand for Screw It Anyway…
My guiding philosophy.
Under a heightened condtion of SIA, I have told clients to pack their bags, I have turned down jobs, I have chosen to let my wife go visit the kids while I indulge in all of those cheap B movies that I love, I can cook all those heart-wrenching great foods that cut down on your life, I can get on the Internet and stay as long as I like and I can tell some idiot to suck lemons if that’s how I feel.
Ah yes, old age has its blessings.
Between you and me, I’ve never felt so good in my whole bloody life as I do now as an old codger. And I make sure that I go on the record in my local newspaper, and during all the meetings I participate in. Over all, I have never changed the fact that I am a curmudgeon. Why am I curmudgeon. Because I was once an Idealist. Idealists always become curmudgeons in their old age.
In fact, I wrote something the other day that I got back a few days later from Joe with a picture of Andy Rooney. I read it before realizing that I had written it originally.
But it sounded just like Andy Rooney. In fact, it sounded so much like him, that I sent it to him. If I sound like Andy Rooney, I feel I am in pretty good company.
But between you and me, I’m having a field day. So there….
Hurry up and get old and then join me in expressing yourself any way you like!...
It’s the nearest thing to Heaven!
Les Aaron
www.lesaaron.blogspot.com
Les,
ROTFLMAO ! I have been reading your commentaries for several years now and as the years rolled by I started noticing that you were writing more and more like I was thinking without the "kiss my ass" routine that I usually insert when I try to write what I am feeling.
When I got to your sentence "It means that you are now in your fifties, and you don’t have to explain anything to anybody anymore", I literally ROTFLMAO because it was exactly what I have been saying for over ten yrs now!
I have had a great case of SIA for over 10 yrs. and I am loving it! I didn't know what it was called but I damn sure have it! It took a couple years after 50 until I got into the real swing of SIA but damn it has been fun since then.
And all this time some people almost had me convinced that I was a bitter old lady! Bitter my arse! I'm the Proud Liberal Bitch!
YeeeeeeeeeeHaaaaaaaaawwww and now I have a cyberSIAmate! What more could one ask for in their old age? LOL
By the way what do you call a female curmudgeon? hehehehehe!
I have to post this at my Proud Liberal Bitch blogspot! If you don't like it sue me!
From: Hubmaster@aol.com
I’ve been a different man since I developed SIA.
You know, when you’re young, you’re easily intimidated by the so-called mores of our society that dictates how you are supposed to act, what you are supposed to wear and what you are inclined to say.
All my life I heard from my two spinster aunts (no one would marry these viragos, harridans, “castrators:,” whatever God rest their heartless souls!) about all of the things that I was doing wrong and how I was rapidly becoming the black sheep of the family. Everyone in my family did things better than I did, it seemed. Exactly right; not really an ego-building environment because all of the ego was already used up.
Whatever I managed to accomplish, they accomplished it better, faster and smarter!
I guess that was the reason I was so eager to get away from everybody, left home young, joined the Army, became an adviser and disappeared for four years plus!
When I got out, I lived in California, Florida and Boston before coming home for a fortnight before moving out to my own pad and my own freedom and a home that I was never to return to.
And you know what?
Somehow, despite all of my failings, I actually was able to survive. Without all of the guidance, without all of the minute directions and details of what I should do and without
Becoming an activist in the First Church of Science where my aunt was a mucky-muck!
Now, my old age is proving the happiest time of my life.
Why?
Like I said before, after I developed SIA.
And I have to tell you, it’s contagious.
For those of you not familiar with SIA, let me explain.
It usually accompanies your AARP subscription. It means that you are now in your fifties, and you don’t have to explain anything to anybody anymore. You don’t have to smile when you don’t want to. And you don’t even have to be nice. On your time off, you can laze around in your underwear or your bra and panties. You can listen to the worst music on the air. You can rob the refrigerator; you can eat with your hands standing up, you can burp without fear~….and you can live.
Most importantly, I don’t have to put up with anyone’s bullshit. I can tell it like it is without fear of having somebody toss it back at me. And I can ignore anyone who is a complete asshole. I don’t have to be nice to my son-in-law’s parents, and if they don’t like it, who gives a rat’s ass. That’s what SIA is all about!--which is short-hand for Screw It Anyway…
My guiding philosophy.
Under a heightened condtion of SIA, I have told clients to pack their bags, I have turned down jobs, I have chosen to let my wife go visit the kids while I indulge in all of those cheap B movies that I love, I can cook all those heart-wrenching great foods that cut down on your life, I can get on the Internet and stay as long as I like and I can tell some idiot to suck lemons if that’s how I feel.
Ah yes, old age has its blessings.
Between you and me, I’ve never felt so good in my whole bloody life as I do now as an old codger. And I make sure that I go on the record in my local newspaper, and during all the meetings I participate in. Over all, I have never changed the fact that I am a curmudgeon. Why am I curmudgeon. Because I was once an Idealist. Idealists always become curmudgeons in their old age.
In fact, I wrote something the other day that I got back a few days later from Joe with a picture of Andy Rooney. I read it before realizing that I had written it originally.
But it sounded just like Andy Rooney. In fact, it sounded so much like him, that I sent it to him. If I sound like Andy Rooney, I feel I am in pretty good company.
But between you and me, I’m having a field day. So there….
Hurry up and get old and then join me in expressing yourself any way you like!...
It’s the nearest thing to Heaven!
Les Aaron
www.lesaaron.blogspot.com
Les,
ROTFLMAO ! I have been reading your commentaries for several years now and as the years rolled by I started noticing that you were writing more and more like I was thinking without the "kiss my ass" routine that I usually insert when I try to write what I am feeling.
When I got to your sentence "It means that you are now in your fifties, and you don’t have to explain anything to anybody anymore", I literally ROTFLMAO because it was exactly what I have been saying for over ten yrs now!
I have had a great case of SIA for over 10 yrs. and I am loving it! I didn't know what it was called but I damn sure have it! It took a couple years after 50 until I got into the real swing of SIA but damn it has been fun since then.
And all this time some people almost had me convinced that I was a bitter old lady! Bitter my arse! I'm the Proud Liberal Bitch!
YeeeeeeeeeeHaaaaaaaaawwww and now I have a cyberSIAmate! What more could one ask for in their old age? LOL
By the way what do you call a female curmudgeon? hehehehehe!
I have to post this at my Proud Liberal Bitch blogspot! If you don't like it sue me!
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Our pRes Is A liar
Our president Is A liar!
He was lying then and he is lying now!
A must watch 5 minute video: Windows media and Flash format
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11348.htm
Angry About the Strike? Then Where's Your Outrage at Politicians & Goldman Sachs?
And if you believe the city and state governments are in such financial dire straits that they can't afford $20 million, then how do you feel about the city and state governments recently giving away $2 billion of your hard-earned taxpayer dollars to Goldman Sachs, one of the wealthiest, profitable investment banks on the planet?
That's right, New York - your hard-earned taxpayer dollars were handed over to Goldman Sachs so they could build themselves a new palatial office.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/from-it-was-legal-to-i_b_12692.html
You'd think Americans would wake up to the idea that Republicans are always keeping us in deep doo-doo. Eisenhower kept sending spyplanes over the Soviet Union. They caught us. Nixon, well you know about Nixon, Republican as hell. Then Reagan's Contras and death squads in Central America, and now this idiot. Who's going to be next, Rush Limbaugh? How dumb can we be? Why not try someone who's smart? It can't get worse.
Don Phelps
To the ID's (Intelligent Designers): How come God put nipples on Adam?
..........................................
“This is the right thing to do for the country,” Schumer said after the deal had been announced. “To let the Patriot Act lapse would have been a dereliction of duty.” http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10562008/
Once again the Democratic "leadership" rescued defeat from the jaws of victory. What a sell out!.......... Jay Hubbell, Democracy Depot
..................................
ECONOMY -- TREASURY SECRETARY CLAIMS CLINTON'S SURPLUS WAS A 'MIRAGE': Bloomberg reports that Treasury Secretary John Snow called the $127 billion budget surplus left by President Clinton a "mirage." Upon entering office, President Bush immediately whittled away the Clinton surplus, running up a deficit of $319 billion in 2005 primarily through handsome tax cuts for the wealthy. But Snow incredulously believes "the president's legacy will be one of having significantly reduced the deficit in his time." "Snow's comment would be laughable if it weren't so pathetically and obviously inaccurate," said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution. Snow's economic analysis that Clinton's surplus "wasn't a real surplus" ranks up there with Vice President Cheney's prior claim that "deficits don't matter."
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/
The ‘Most Corrupt' Congress EverIncluding Elements of the Black Caucus
by BC Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble
The term "corruption" is vague, as is "theft" and "fraud" and other crimes. The "pork" that seems to be the princely meal savored by American legislative gluttons, is but one aspect of corruption. Putting aside the bid to fund "bridges to nowhere" in Alaska, the most gruesome (and lucrative) manifestation of endemic corruption is the Iraq war and occupation - a cash cow for favored corporations, and even companies that did not exist previous to the war and the promise of "reconstruction" of Iraq. However, even the rip-off of billions in this scam (and the theft of billions in Iraqi oil revenues) does not come close to describing the enormity of the crime: an attempt to steal the resources of a vast swath of the Earth, far beyond the boundaries of Iraq, and to transfer the proceeds to private hands, all the while billing the American public for the military muscle required.
Now, that's corruption, by anybody's definition.
www.BlackCommentator.com
12/22/05
He was lying then and he is lying now!
A must watch 5 minute video: Windows media and Flash format
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11348.htm
Angry About the Strike? Then Where's Your Outrage at Politicians & Goldman Sachs?
And if you believe the city and state governments are in such financial dire straits that they can't afford $20 million, then how do you feel about the city and state governments recently giving away $2 billion of your hard-earned taxpayer dollars to Goldman Sachs, one of the wealthiest, profitable investment banks on the planet?
That's right, New York - your hard-earned taxpayer dollars were handed over to Goldman Sachs so they could build themselves a new palatial office.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/from-it-was-legal-to-i_b_12692.html
You'd think Americans would wake up to the idea that Republicans are always keeping us in deep doo-doo. Eisenhower kept sending spyplanes over the Soviet Union. They caught us. Nixon, well you know about Nixon, Republican as hell. Then Reagan's Contras and death squads in Central America, and now this idiot. Who's going to be next, Rush Limbaugh? How dumb can we be? Why not try someone who's smart? It can't get worse.
Don Phelps
To the ID's (Intelligent Designers): How come God put nipples on Adam?
..........................................
“This is the right thing to do for the country,” Schumer said after the deal had been announced. “To let the Patriot Act lapse would have been a dereliction of duty.” http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10562008/
Once again the Democratic "leadership" rescued defeat from the jaws of victory. What a sell out!.......... Jay Hubbell, Democracy Depot
..................................
ECONOMY -- TREASURY SECRETARY CLAIMS CLINTON'S SURPLUS WAS A 'MIRAGE': Bloomberg reports that Treasury Secretary John Snow called the $127 billion budget surplus left by President Clinton a "mirage." Upon entering office, President Bush immediately whittled away the Clinton surplus, running up a deficit of $319 billion in 2005 primarily through handsome tax cuts for the wealthy. But Snow incredulously believes "the president's legacy will be one of having significantly reduced the deficit in his time." "Snow's comment would be laughable if it weren't so pathetically and obviously inaccurate," said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution. Snow's economic analysis that Clinton's surplus "wasn't a real surplus" ranks up there with Vice President Cheney's prior claim that "deficits don't matter."
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/
The ‘Most Corrupt' Congress EverIncluding Elements of the Black Caucus
by BC Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble
The term "corruption" is vague, as is "theft" and "fraud" and other crimes. The "pork" that seems to be the princely meal savored by American legislative gluttons, is but one aspect of corruption. Putting aside the bid to fund "bridges to nowhere" in Alaska, the most gruesome (and lucrative) manifestation of endemic corruption is the Iraq war and occupation - a cash cow for favored corporations, and even companies that did not exist previous to the war and the promise of "reconstruction" of Iraq. However, even the rip-off of billions in this scam (and the theft of billions in Iraqi oil revenues) does not come close to describing the enormity of the crime: an attempt to steal the resources of a vast swath of the Earth, far beyond the boundaries of Iraq, and to transfer the proceeds to private hands, all the while billing the American public for the military muscle required.
Now, that's corruption, by anybody's definition.
www.BlackCommentator.com
12/22/05
Thursday, December 01, 2005
The Prodigal Frog Sez'
After being asked to leave by the end of next year, The Bush Administration has already began its bombardment of pathetic excuses why we can't! This began with Condi Rice stating today that she didn't think Iraq could handle terrorism in its OWN country WITHOUT our help in that short a time span! The difference between the Bush view and Iraq's view cannot be better illustrated than by what Iraq ALSO said yesterday! If you read the WHOLE article* as opposed to JUST what was under the pictures (Placed there for Republican benefits) then you would ALSO understand Iraq ordered all of its citizens released that were not already sentenced or had sentences pending with a court date! This stems from Bush's attempt to stamp out all resistance whether they are actually terrorists or not by phosphorous bombing or napalming them or attacking them conventionally! The survivors, innocent or not, are then rounded up and jailed indefinitely without the benefit of trials! Iraqi's understand this and distrust Americans for this reason! It seems Bush came to Iraq, intent on stopping the torture of its citizens by torturing them himself! In fact, it appears Iraq has learned well from its occupiers, ALREADY torturing people in dungeons! Iraq ALSO made it abundantly clear, that Iraqi's participating in bombing incidences had a legal right to do so as long as INNOCENT arab's were not targeted! Well, when we THINK about that, that ONLY leaves Foreign born terrorists and American citizens which they now VIEW as legitimate targets for insurgents! So it seems Bush is intent on keeping our troops there for years while the Iraqi Govt excuses KILLING them! One can ask why Bush would do this?
Of course the answer is simple: Regardless of the govt Iraqi's want (Pro Iran/Islamic Law) Bush does not have the Govt HE wants there yet! (Pro American Business) Bush needs American Corporations to be able to FORCE their feet in the Middle East's oil and to be able to sell American products there! Bush KNOWS that if he leaves before he has an American Puppet in Charge, they will TOSS American's and their greedy corporations OUT on their ears and his wars will have been for NOTHING! This was the ORIGINAL reason I was against the war to start with! Down thru the decades of my life, I have learned that almost ANYTIME our country starts a war, it is for something that will be a net gain for our Godless corporations who have interests seeded thru out our govt thanks to their billions! At least this has been the case post WW2. This is of course true for the Democratic party too but in the past, they have been at least reluctant to involve us in wars over economics, though they have passed trade treaties just as bad for Americans! It seems our corporations are out to do ANYTHING to seize control of America and the World to increase their profits! The eventual aim is a One World Govt under fascism! Eventually we will WORK for the company Store, Live in the Company subdivision and BUY from the company store all designed to make us Economic slaves to them! They will even control our wages because they can raise the prices of their rent and products to offset any wage gains! By doing this, it keeps money FLOWING into the corporation and AWAY from workers!
Meanwhile Back in Iraq, Our boys are over there becoming LEGAL targets of the Same Govt we just installed, sorta, to increase profit margins for our corporations! We can also DIE for the company store it seems! Already 2000 plus American's have died for this STUPID Bush Policy! How can anyone THINK this is about terrorism anymore? It began with 911. They used the "Rebel Yell" to unite Americans into one massive mind set and then perverted the deaths of our very own citizens into their agenda! Like Rumsfeld said, "There are no interesting targets in Afghanistan!" and every since then, Bush has down played Afghanistan's importance, drawing troops from that terrorist laden country into Iraq! Afghanistan was a SECONDARY target!Remember O'Sama Bin Laden? Well, he's STILL over there even though recently Bush announced pulling 4000 troops from there in favor of Iraq! In fact, at the time Iraq HAD NO TERRORISTS and DIDN'T so until long AFTER the invasion. The terrorists became so put off by our ignoring them that they began pouring across the borders and ENTERING Iraq to GET to us! That's pretty bad when Bush says he's going after terrorism and misses them so badly that terrorist have to relocate to GET to us! In fact Iraq is NOW becoming a terrorism BREEDING ground and Bush has merely miscalculated their resolve! Why do you think Bush entered Iraq so unprepared? Not enough troops, no body armor, no armor for MOST of our military vehicles! I say its because he THOUGHT there were no terrorists in Iraq (A correct assumption at first) and didn't see the need for protection! All he wanted was to Force open Iraq's oil fields thereby lowering the cost of oil and Iraq was easy pickings because they had an Iraqi army that was basically demoralized by losing two major wars! He assumed Iraq would be a cake walk and NEVER contemplated terrorist relocating to get to us in massive relocation programs! He also never calculated Iraqi's JOINING in against him. He is an idiot though and MAJORLY wrong! Iraq IS an Islamic country! 2/3's are arabs and only an idiot would think an arab would side against another arab to help blue eyed Americans pilfer their resources to increase the profit margins of Haliburton and Exxon! What a BUMBLING Idiot! What's amazing to me is that these corporations backed Bush at all, but they needed an average looking Joe Blow like Bush to win! (Corporations think Bush is an average american and 52% of the really ignorant in America BOUGHT into that scenario! He looked great Against Kerry with all his billions! Don't get me wrong. Kerry is better than Bush and grew up in the middle class so he better than Bush knows how the Average American lives but the Democrats guessed wrong on one count! They didn't calculate Kerry coming off as a billionaire and Rove is a master at lying and making people think they've seen the truth!
So where do we go from here? Of Course I am biased having a daughter AND a nephew now serving and BOTH returning recently from Iraq! (My daughter leaves there in a week) But that is not my only reason for wanting to withdraw! I love America too. We must weigh our net gains with our net losses and CHANGE the way we think!
First off, we have to change our foreign policy! The First thing we have to do is NEVER again use our military for economic reasoning! I have NOTHING against helping to free the world's people and HIGHLY believe in freedom. But, if you do that, you do it for freedom alone and you never do it by launching wars! You get the people oppressed to free themselves and you do it without attaching stipulations such as doing Business with us! That is selfish and TWO faced and is exactly why our countries image has and is being damaged! Freedom is its own reward and security in the world is best based on democracies! This is best based on allowing a people to free its self by supplying them with money and assistance! When you do this and DON'T stick in selfish reasons, those people will THANK you later! We must also recognize that not ALL govts that are NOT democratic are evil! There are hundreds of examples of non democratic govts in the world and in the past that in fact were quite good and did lots for their people! You only need to worry about those that are NOT free and that Harm MOST of their people! Lots of govts are monarchies, socialistic and democratic and do WELL for their people! If they are successful, LEAVE them alone! Because a govt has ONE leader, doesn't make it evil! Europe and south America have many examples of these countries! Even China is an example. Though China is not perfect yet, they ARE moving in that direction and I believe sooner or later they will be ok. They are the way they are because our Govt NUDGED them in that direction but did NOT go to war to FORCE them! Wars are highly destructive and SELDOM solve any problems! They should be reserved for TRUE self defense and in the case of extreme genocide! America cannot afford to be the world's police either economically or thru its sons and daughters due to limited man power!
Secondly, we need to change our govt at home! We are very two faced to the world! we preach about helping the oppressed and poor souls of the world but we treat our own people no better than many of today's unsuccessful govts! We deprive them of decent wages while we breed billionaires in excess! 44 million can't even afford health care! Why do we do this? It is thru greed! The wealthy know there is a limited amount of money here and recognize they can only remain billionaires if MOST of Americans are poor! So they use the power of their wealth to lobby laws to make it EASIER for them to keep their wealth! Don't be fooled! Most of their money is not EARNED: It's STOLEN! Stolen from workers who they vastly under pay for their services! When it comes down to it, workers are business owners too. Their widgets are hours they work and they should have the same rights as a Business when determining prices! Prices are determined by supply and demand but wages are NOT! At least not Legally! They are interfered with in MANY instances! One example is the FED! When raises rise too fast, the FED raises interest rates clamping down on the money supply which has the effect of cutting off capital needed for the rise of wages! CEO wages have gone up astronomically the past 4 decades but nobody interfered in that? Why should they interfere in the wages of lower paid Americans? And if the govt's allowed to do that, Then the govt SHOULD set a basic wage that ALLOWS Every American to have at least the basics! No One should be paid a wage so low, he cannot possibly live on it and thereby be FORCED to live off welfare JUST so some billionaire can make 100 million as opposed to 40 million! A basic Federal minimum wage should be high enough and KEPT that way automatically being adjusted for inflation to insure the Following:
1. Reasonable Healthcare
2. Housing
3. Transportation (To get to work and back)
4. Education (So that today's workers can keep up when a corporation dumps them)
5. Food
6. A little for savings for a rainy day!
Personally, in today's job market I think it should be some where between $12-15 an hour with healthcare provided by the job or the govt! It should also be tied to inflation rising with it without any votes! If the cost of living is 2% then the next year it automatically rises that much! Congress just voted them a 7% pay raise and has received pay raises every year just about for awhile! They also get free healthcare and Pensions if they serve a minimum amount of time!
I can hear them now! Oh, That will hurt business! The poor will suffer. LOL The poor are already suffering and I dont care if it DOES hurt business! America is NOT in the business of helping corporations that HURT their workers! If they cant make a buck without screwing their workers, I say tough shit! You shouldn't be in business anyhow! Sure some will go under and it will take a transition period but a few years down the road we will be much better off than we are now! This bleeding heart Liberal doesn't bleed for billionaires or millionaires! People today act like going from a billionaire to a millionaire is so sad! I should have such rotten luck!
The Prodigal Frog
*Iraqi Leaders Call for Timetable for U.S. Withdrawal, by SALAH NASRAWI , AP
Of course the answer is simple: Regardless of the govt Iraqi's want (Pro Iran/Islamic Law) Bush does not have the Govt HE wants there yet! (Pro American Business) Bush needs American Corporations to be able to FORCE their feet in the Middle East's oil and to be able to sell American products there! Bush KNOWS that if he leaves before he has an American Puppet in Charge, they will TOSS American's and their greedy corporations OUT on their ears and his wars will have been for NOTHING! This was the ORIGINAL reason I was against the war to start with! Down thru the decades of my life, I have learned that almost ANYTIME our country starts a war, it is for something that will be a net gain for our Godless corporations who have interests seeded thru out our govt thanks to their billions! At least this has been the case post WW2. This is of course true for the Democratic party too but in the past, they have been at least reluctant to involve us in wars over economics, though they have passed trade treaties just as bad for Americans! It seems our corporations are out to do ANYTHING to seize control of America and the World to increase their profits! The eventual aim is a One World Govt under fascism! Eventually we will WORK for the company Store, Live in the Company subdivision and BUY from the company store all designed to make us Economic slaves to them! They will even control our wages because they can raise the prices of their rent and products to offset any wage gains! By doing this, it keeps money FLOWING into the corporation and AWAY from workers!
Meanwhile Back in Iraq, Our boys are over there becoming LEGAL targets of the Same Govt we just installed, sorta, to increase profit margins for our corporations! We can also DIE for the company store it seems! Already 2000 plus American's have died for this STUPID Bush Policy! How can anyone THINK this is about terrorism anymore? It began with 911. They used the "Rebel Yell" to unite Americans into one massive mind set and then perverted the deaths of our very own citizens into their agenda! Like Rumsfeld said, "There are no interesting targets in Afghanistan!" and every since then, Bush has down played Afghanistan's importance, drawing troops from that terrorist laden country into Iraq! Afghanistan was a SECONDARY target!Remember O'Sama Bin Laden? Well, he's STILL over there even though recently Bush announced pulling 4000 troops from there in favor of Iraq! In fact, at the time Iraq HAD NO TERRORISTS and DIDN'T so until long AFTER the invasion. The terrorists became so put off by our ignoring them that they began pouring across the borders and ENTERING Iraq to GET to us! That's pretty bad when Bush says he's going after terrorism and misses them so badly that terrorist have to relocate to GET to us! In fact Iraq is NOW becoming a terrorism BREEDING ground and Bush has merely miscalculated their resolve! Why do you think Bush entered Iraq so unprepared? Not enough troops, no body armor, no armor for MOST of our military vehicles! I say its because he THOUGHT there were no terrorists in Iraq (A correct assumption at first) and didn't see the need for protection! All he wanted was to Force open Iraq's oil fields thereby lowering the cost of oil and Iraq was easy pickings because they had an Iraqi army that was basically demoralized by losing two major wars! He assumed Iraq would be a cake walk and NEVER contemplated terrorist relocating to get to us in massive relocation programs! He also never calculated Iraqi's JOINING in against him. He is an idiot though and MAJORLY wrong! Iraq IS an Islamic country! 2/3's are arabs and only an idiot would think an arab would side against another arab to help blue eyed Americans pilfer their resources to increase the profit margins of Haliburton and Exxon! What a BUMBLING Idiot! What's amazing to me is that these corporations backed Bush at all, but they needed an average looking Joe Blow like Bush to win! (Corporations think Bush is an average american and 52% of the really ignorant in America BOUGHT into that scenario! He looked great Against Kerry with all his billions! Don't get me wrong. Kerry is better than Bush and grew up in the middle class so he better than Bush knows how the Average American lives but the Democrats guessed wrong on one count! They didn't calculate Kerry coming off as a billionaire and Rove is a master at lying and making people think they've seen the truth!
So where do we go from here? Of Course I am biased having a daughter AND a nephew now serving and BOTH returning recently from Iraq! (My daughter leaves there in a week) But that is not my only reason for wanting to withdraw! I love America too. We must weigh our net gains with our net losses and CHANGE the way we think!
First off, we have to change our foreign policy! The First thing we have to do is NEVER again use our military for economic reasoning! I have NOTHING against helping to free the world's people and HIGHLY believe in freedom. But, if you do that, you do it for freedom alone and you never do it by launching wars! You get the people oppressed to free themselves and you do it without attaching stipulations such as doing Business with us! That is selfish and TWO faced and is exactly why our countries image has and is being damaged! Freedom is its own reward and security in the world is best based on democracies! This is best based on allowing a people to free its self by supplying them with money and assistance! When you do this and DON'T stick in selfish reasons, those people will THANK you later! We must also recognize that not ALL govts that are NOT democratic are evil! There are hundreds of examples of non democratic govts in the world and in the past that in fact were quite good and did lots for their people! You only need to worry about those that are NOT free and that Harm MOST of their people! Lots of govts are monarchies, socialistic and democratic and do WELL for their people! If they are successful, LEAVE them alone! Because a govt has ONE leader, doesn't make it evil! Europe and south America have many examples of these countries! Even China is an example. Though China is not perfect yet, they ARE moving in that direction and I believe sooner or later they will be ok. They are the way they are because our Govt NUDGED them in that direction but did NOT go to war to FORCE them! Wars are highly destructive and SELDOM solve any problems! They should be reserved for TRUE self defense and in the case of extreme genocide! America cannot afford to be the world's police either economically or thru its sons and daughters due to limited man power!
Secondly, we need to change our govt at home! We are very two faced to the world! we preach about helping the oppressed and poor souls of the world but we treat our own people no better than many of today's unsuccessful govts! We deprive them of decent wages while we breed billionaires in excess! 44 million can't even afford health care! Why do we do this? It is thru greed! The wealthy know there is a limited amount of money here and recognize they can only remain billionaires if MOST of Americans are poor! So they use the power of their wealth to lobby laws to make it EASIER for them to keep their wealth! Don't be fooled! Most of their money is not EARNED: It's STOLEN! Stolen from workers who they vastly under pay for their services! When it comes down to it, workers are business owners too. Their widgets are hours they work and they should have the same rights as a Business when determining prices! Prices are determined by supply and demand but wages are NOT! At least not Legally! They are interfered with in MANY instances! One example is the FED! When raises rise too fast, the FED raises interest rates clamping down on the money supply which has the effect of cutting off capital needed for the rise of wages! CEO wages have gone up astronomically the past 4 decades but nobody interfered in that? Why should they interfere in the wages of lower paid Americans? And if the govt's allowed to do that, Then the govt SHOULD set a basic wage that ALLOWS Every American to have at least the basics! No One should be paid a wage so low, he cannot possibly live on it and thereby be FORCED to live off welfare JUST so some billionaire can make 100 million as opposed to 40 million! A basic Federal minimum wage should be high enough and KEPT that way automatically being adjusted for inflation to insure the Following:
1. Reasonable Healthcare
2. Housing
3. Transportation (To get to work and back)
4. Education (So that today's workers can keep up when a corporation dumps them)
5. Food
6. A little for savings for a rainy day!
Personally, in today's job market I think it should be some where between $12-15 an hour with healthcare provided by the job or the govt! It should also be tied to inflation rising with it without any votes! If the cost of living is 2% then the next year it automatically rises that much! Congress just voted them a 7% pay raise and has received pay raises every year just about for awhile! They also get free healthcare and Pensions if they serve a minimum amount of time!
I can hear them now! Oh, That will hurt business! The poor will suffer. LOL The poor are already suffering and I dont care if it DOES hurt business! America is NOT in the business of helping corporations that HURT their workers! If they cant make a buck without screwing their workers, I say tough shit! You shouldn't be in business anyhow! Sure some will go under and it will take a transition period but a few years down the road we will be much better off than we are now! This bleeding heart Liberal doesn't bleed for billionaires or millionaires! People today act like going from a billionaire to a millionaire is so sad! I should have such rotten luck!
The Prodigal Frog
*Iraqi Leaders Call for Timetable for U.S. Withdrawal, by SALAH NASRAWI , AP
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