Feminists and many other liberals have signed on to the Romney campaign
after his shocking revelation that his mother and his wife were both women.
The Obama campaign response was to reach out to racist conservatives by reminding them that his mother was white.
A spokesperson for Jill Stein, candidate of the Green Party, said "Jill is both a woman and white and given the intellectual level of the corporate campaigns that should be enough to put her in the, uh, white house."
Friday, August 31, 2012
THIS MAY TURN OUT TO BE THE DUMBEST MOST EXPENSIVE AND MEANINGLESS ELECTION IN AMERICAN HISTORY..
See Above.
Understatement?
Understatement?
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
OUR GRANDMOTHERS COULD RUN THIS ECONOMY
The political and economic crises grow but you wouldn’t
know that to listen to the alleged representatives of the people. Especially
the two major party candidates for CEO of a bankrupt corporation which is being
bailed out every day by a public that needs to lose its collective patience and
not ask for but demand control of its political and economic process.
It should
not seem so difficult a task if we simply consider what a total mess alleged experts have achieved. Our grandmothers could run this economy with more
brains, humanity and capability than these stupendous failures and when they ran
into a problem beyond their personal experience they’d simply hire a
professional to take care of it. That’s what the mafia does and what our rulers
do, but the difference would be if people like our grandmothers ran
things on behalf of all of us, the professionals they hired would work for all of us, not simply the 1%.
If you vote, write in your grandma's name. At least you'll be choosing someone who loved you and at the very least respected most other people. And even if she's long dead, she'd still be a better symbolic leader than the dreadful corporate turkeys you're being asked to support.
France tells Syrian opposition to form govt, pledges to recognize it
Syria has pledged to recognize a government formed by French muslim immigrants in opposition to the racist government of France.
The Non-Aligned Movement of more than 100 nations will soon announce a list of formerly colonial regimes whose opposition groups may be recognized as legitimate governing bodies. The American Tea Party is meeting with NAM leadership in hopes of becoming the first such recognized entity.
The Non-Aligned Movement of more than 100 nations will soon announce a list of formerly colonial regimes whose opposition groups may be recognized as legitimate governing bodies. The American Tea Party is meeting with NAM leadership in hopes of becoming the first such recognized entity.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Twat Rebels Band Beaten To Death After Singing(?) at Jewish and Catholic Venues
Punk Group in Blood Soaked see-thru under garments protested
that Jesus was a goy and Obama a Roman Muslic alien.
The Fifth Avenue Temple Jewish Defense League savagely beat
and chased the semi- naked women to St Patrick’s Cathedral where they were
finally stomped to death by an angry mob of transvestite multi-cultural priests
and nuns.
Friday, August 24, 2012
False Savior: Barack Obama (Part 4): Rewarding Crime in the Suites
"As you know, we're working through a difficult period in our financial markets right now, as we work off some of the past excesses."
-----Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, White House press conference, September 15, 2008, with the U.S. economy on the brink of collapse
"Who is going to buy this shit?"
-----Vice-chairman of JP Morgan-Chase James B. Lee Jr., same day, referring to the need to unload "toxic" assets, upon which the entire financial system was based
Nowhere has Barack Obama failed the country more than in his refusal to confront the Wall Street criminals that first reaped huge profits creating an unsustainable housing bubble, then earned another windfall betting on its inevitable collapse. Trillions of dollars of wealth were sucked out of the real economy to pay for the paper illusions peddled by glorified swindlers, who had been issued a license to steal by deregulation policies dating back to the Carter era.
Obama appointed a coterie of Wall Street insiders to staff his administration, all of whom opposed enforcing laws against securities and accounting fraud, or even simply breaking up the largest banks and closing legal loopholes. He also opposed efforts to reform executive compensation, even for companies dependent on federal bailout money, as most of them were in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. The Obama administration took no effective action on the foreclosure crisis, and played almost no role in the investigations carried out by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. In fact, the administration limited FCIC's budget to a paltry $6 million, sharply resticted its subpoena power, and scheduled its report to come out only after the 2010 midterm elections.
Worse, the Obama Justice Department proved completely uninterested in prosecuting banks and bankers for white collar crime (Obama insists no laws have been clearly broken), which was assigned a very low priority. The administration chose not to appoint a special prosecutor, not to create a task force, not to even investigate major securities and accounting crimes related to Wall Street's engineering of the housing bubble and its subsequent collapse. Investigations against Countrywide, Angelo Mozilo, AIG, Joseph Cassano, and others were dropped. The few financial crime cases pursued, such as those involving Wachovia's bid-rigging, were settled without fanfare based on deferred prosecution and fines. To this very day there has still not been a single bubble-related criminal prosecution, of either a company or a senior financial executive, by the Obama administration. As Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano points out, there are people in jail all over the world for stealing a couple of chickens, but no one has even been indicted for looting trillions of dollars in home equity and retirement pensions while gutting America's job base.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has pursued only a handful of civil cases, which have eventuated in mostly trivial fines, with no institutional or individual admission of wrong-doing. In no case has an individual executive been required to pay more than a tiny fraction of his net worth or ill-gotten gains from the bubble.
In fact, when a few state attorneys general failed to understand that corporate predators enjoy impunity under capitalism, trying to get a little tough with a few banks in 2011, the Obama administration forced them to stop. A few slaps on the wrist were the order of the day, and even these were only applied after prosecutors surrendered all future rights to sue banks for fraud.
But with the coming of the Occupy Movement and the approach of the 2012 elections, Obama felt obliged to at least pay lip service to the problem. In his 2012 State of the Union address, therefore, he announced the formation of a federal-state task force focused on financial crime. However, one of the co-chairman appointed to it was Lanny Breuer, who was the head of the criminal division that hadn't brought any criminal cases in the prior four years, and the other was New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who had backed off from getting tough with the banks when the Obama administration told him to. The task force was assigned a total of ten F.B.I. agents, and was projected to have a total of 55 employees when fully staffed. This to investigate some of the largest financial institutions in the world, possessed of truly global reach.
The outcome was, predictably, pitiful. Three Credit Suisse traders were arrested for a minor fraud supposedly committed in 2007, and which victimized Credit Suisse, not investors and homewners. After this, state foreclosure cases were settled for a mere $26 billion. Less than a million people who lost their homes were slated to receive checks averaging $2000 each. Another million were to receive some mortgage relief. Over twenty million others whose mortgages were underwater, have gotten nothing.
Obama has been similarly useless in confronting the issue of executive compensation, even though foreign governments saw fit to take action on this. In 2009, Great Britain established a fifty percent tax on banking bonuses. The same year Christine Lagarde (then French Foreign Minister) and six other European finance ministers published a joint letter in the Financial Times calling for G20 nations to reign in financial compensation, arguing that "the bonus culture must end." Most of the G20 did end up adopting executive pay controls, including mandatory "clawbacks" of bonuses when losses occurred subsequently. Such clawbacks were implemented in Europe, forcing senior executives of Barclays, Lloyds, and several other European banks to give back millions of dollars they had previously received in bonus payments. But in the U.S. the Obama administration said and did nothing.
Sources:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross, "Too Big To Fail - The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System - and Themselves," (Viking: 2009)
Ferguson, Charles H. "Predator Nation - Corporate Criminials, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America," (Crown: 2012)
-----Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, White House press conference, September 15, 2008, with the U.S. economy on the brink of collapse
"Who is going to buy this shit?"
-----Vice-chairman of JP Morgan-Chase James B. Lee Jr., same day, referring to the need to unload "toxic" assets, upon which the entire financial system was based
Nowhere has Barack Obama failed the country more than in his refusal to confront the Wall Street criminals that first reaped huge profits creating an unsustainable housing bubble, then earned another windfall betting on its inevitable collapse. Trillions of dollars of wealth were sucked out of the real economy to pay for the paper illusions peddled by glorified swindlers, who had been issued a license to steal by deregulation policies dating back to the Carter era.
Obama appointed a coterie of Wall Street insiders to staff his administration, all of whom opposed enforcing laws against securities and accounting fraud, or even simply breaking up the largest banks and closing legal loopholes. He also opposed efforts to reform executive compensation, even for companies dependent on federal bailout money, as most of them were in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. The Obama administration took no effective action on the foreclosure crisis, and played almost no role in the investigations carried out by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. In fact, the administration limited FCIC's budget to a paltry $6 million, sharply resticted its subpoena power, and scheduled its report to come out only after the 2010 midterm elections.
Worse, the Obama Justice Department proved completely uninterested in prosecuting banks and bankers for white collar crime (Obama insists no laws have been clearly broken), which was assigned a very low priority. The administration chose not to appoint a special prosecutor, not to create a task force, not to even investigate major securities and accounting crimes related to Wall Street's engineering of the housing bubble and its subsequent collapse. Investigations against Countrywide, Angelo Mozilo, AIG, Joseph Cassano, and others were dropped. The few financial crime cases pursued, such as those involving Wachovia's bid-rigging, were settled without fanfare based on deferred prosecution and fines. To this very day there has still not been a single bubble-related criminal prosecution, of either a company or a senior financial executive, by the Obama administration. As Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano points out, there are people in jail all over the world for stealing a couple of chickens, but no one has even been indicted for looting trillions of dollars in home equity and retirement pensions while gutting America's job base.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has pursued only a handful of civil cases, which have eventuated in mostly trivial fines, with no institutional or individual admission of wrong-doing. In no case has an individual executive been required to pay more than a tiny fraction of his net worth or ill-gotten gains from the bubble.
In fact, when a few state attorneys general failed to understand that corporate predators enjoy impunity under capitalism, trying to get a little tough with a few banks in 2011, the Obama administration forced them to stop. A few slaps on the wrist were the order of the day, and even these were only applied after prosecutors surrendered all future rights to sue banks for fraud.
But with the coming of the Occupy Movement and the approach of the 2012 elections, Obama felt obliged to at least pay lip service to the problem. In his 2012 State of the Union address, therefore, he announced the formation of a federal-state task force focused on financial crime. However, one of the co-chairman appointed to it was Lanny Breuer, who was the head of the criminal division that hadn't brought any criminal cases in the prior four years, and the other was New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who had backed off from getting tough with the banks when the Obama administration told him to. The task force was assigned a total of ten F.B.I. agents, and was projected to have a total of 55 employees when fully staffed. This to investigate some of the largest financial institutions in the world, possessed of truly global reach.
The outcome was, predictably, pitiful. Three Credit Suisse traders were arrested for a minor fraud supposedly committed in 2007, and which victimized Credit Suisse, not investors and homewners. After this, state foreclosure cases were settled for a mere $26 billion. Less than a million people who lost their homes were slated to receive checks averaging $2000 each. Another million were to receive some mortgage relief. Over twenty million others whose mortgages were underwater, have gotten nothing.
Obama has been similarly useless in confronting the issue of executive compensation, even though foreign governments saw fit to take action on this. In 2009, Great Britain established a fifty percent tax on banking bonuses. The same year Christine Lagarde (then French Foreign Minister) and six other European finance ministers published a joint letter in the Financial Times calling for G20 nations to reign in financial compensation, arguing that "the bonus culture must end." Most of the G20 did end up adopting executive pay controls, including mandatory "clawbacks" of bonuses when losses occurred subsequently. Such clawbacks were implemented in Europe, forcing senior executives of Barclays, Lloyds, and several other European banks to give back millions of dollars they had previously received in bonus payments. But in the U.S. the Obama administration said and did nothing.
Sources:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross, "Too Big To Fail - The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System - and Themselves," (Viking: 2009)
Ferguson, Charles H. "Predator Nation - Corporate Criminials, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America," (Crown: 2012)
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
THE AUDACITY OF HYPE
More bloodshed is guaranteed in Syria as the USA and its
minions arm the rebels, refuse to negotiate, cause the retirement of a faithful
western UN servant, and have their affirmative action hires at the state dept.
shriek about humanity and democracy while defecating on the moral codes of
every belief system known to humanity.
And this from an administration which passes for the lesser
evil to an opposing group that makes them seem tolerable in the way that polio
might seem tolerable to cancer. Thus, we approach what is being called the most
important presidential election in history. Every election is given that title by
professional hysterics and this one will be the usual profaning of democracy,
but there is one title we can justifiably give this November farce:
It will be the most expensive in history, with billions
spent on bending, twisting and distorting reality to make two leisure class
tools of minority capital seem as though they represent the overwhelming
majority who work for a living.
This while burying the nation in a tsunami of advertising
slime that may bring an even lower turnout than usual as disgusted voters stay
away from the polling places to avoid further contamination. Meanwhile, the
campaign avoids anything approaching real problems and continues to hype
scandals, gossip, mudslinging and character assassination. At this rate justice
and democracy would triumph if only the candidates immediate families and
highest paid hustlers showed up to vote for them.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
ELECTORAL RAPE
Quite apart from his general idiocy on the issue and the reproductive
powers of women, the Republican who used the word “legitimate” in referring to
the crime of rape has offered the slime patrol a much greater meal than it deserves.
His use more than likely, if not clearly, meant as opposed to illegitimate,
given that charges of rape are sometimes made without basis except to accuse
someone of a crime – like Julian Assange? – for reasons other than real
brutality and violation of a woman’s body.
That so many of the bottom feeding political paparazzi and
other members of the low morality club have used his stupid mistake to make
themselves and the Obama campaign, by their closer to god nature, look good by
comparison is only more indication that voters who choose either corporate
candidate in our November parody will suffer illegitimate theft of their votes
and further violation, or rape, of their
democracy.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
False Savior: Barack Obama (Part 3): Obummer's "Team of Rivals"
"I cannot recall the last time Republicans felt so positive towards a Democratic presidential figure."
-----former Bush advisor David Frum, on Barack Obama
Never forget: The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain. And after he made his major appointments, Obama's picks were openly praised by Karl Rove, Joe Lieberman, Max Boot, John McCain, and David Brooks. The next time you hear a raving reactionary accusing Obama of "socialism" ask yourself when Lenin, Marx, Mao, and Castro ever won the praise of leading reactionaries.
Obama handed out cabinet posts and other major government positions to the cream of the crop of Wall Street swindlers, who became the architects of his anemic economic "recovery." (There's nothing like hiring arsonists to run the fire department.) Reviewing the records of Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, which met on November 7, 2008 to determine how to handle the financial crisis, Jonathan Weil of Bloomberg News concluded that "many of them should be getting subpoenas as material witnesses right about now, not places in Obama's inner circle." About half "have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an economic tailspin, or both." Is it really believable, Weil asked, that "they won't mistake the nation's needs for their own corporate interests?" Weil also pointed out that Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel "was a director at Freddie Mac in 2000 and 2001 while it was committing accounting fraud." When he was in the House of Representatives, Emmanuel was described as one of the biggest recipients of Wall Street money in Congress, raking in $1.5 million from the investment industry for his 2006 re-election campaign.
One of the leading members of Obama's initial economic team was Bob Rubin, a big fan of the deregulation that was a crucial factor in the economic crash of 2008. As treasury secretary, Rubin worked hard to abolish the Glass-Steagall Act, greatly benefitting Citigroup, which was facing the prospect of having to sell off its insurance underwriting subsidiary. (Glass-Steagall had required that commercial banks be kept separate from investment banks that incurred high risks.) Rubin had a personal interest in torpedoing Glass-Steagall. After leaving his position as treasury secretary, he became vice-chair of Citigroup, where he was paid $120 million over the subsequent decade. In 2001, acting on Citigroup's behalf, Rubin called his former colleague Peter Fisher at the treasury department, asking for help in preventing Enron's credit rating from being downgraded, thus allowing Ken Lay and Co. to defraud the public for a few more frantic weeks.
Rubin was replaced by Larry Summers (who Obama made Director of the White House United States National Economic Council), who presided over legislation barring federal regulation of derivatives, the "weapons of mass destruction" (Warren Buffet) that helped crash the financial markets into disaster. Summers ranks as a key villain in that drama. Economist Dean Baker, one of the few to predict of the impending crisis, says that placing financial policy in the hands of Summers and Rubin was "a bit like turning to Osama bin Laden for aid in the war on terrorism." This observation had more ironic bite before the U.S. backed Al Qaeda mercenaries in a successful attempt to demolish much of Libya.
Obama selected Timothy Geithner to become Treasury Secretary, after Geithner had helped cover up massive fraud at Lehman brothers. As Treasury Secretary Geithner gave away trillions of dollars of public money to plundering banks deemed "too big to fail." None of the Wall Street looters has ever been indicted; none has returned any of the stolen money.
Obama continued with Bush's choice for Defense Secretary (Robert Gates), a man with a lengthy and disturbing history at the CIA, which has helped kill millions of civilians in dozens of interventions around the world since the end of WWII. Can anyone really be surprised that Obama has attacked one country after another since making this appointment?
Obama's picks to head up his foreign policy team were so reactionary they won GOP praise. Richard Perle confessed that he felt "relieved . . . Contrary to expectations, I don't think we would see a lot of change" from the Bush neo-con policies. Retiring senior Republican senator John Warner, former chair of the Armed Services Committee, said "the triumvirate of Gates, Clinton and (James) Jones to head Obama's national security team instills great confidence at home and abroad and further strengthens the growing respect for the president-elect's courage and ability to exercise sound judgment in selecting the best and the brightest to implement our nation's security policies."
As his special assistant on the Middle East, Obama chose Dan Kurtzer, Clinton-Bush ambassador to Egypt and Israel, respectively. Kurtzer is close to Obama adviser Dennis Ross, whose position as a negotiator for the failed Camp David negotiations was that Israel has "needs" whereas Palestinians only have "wants," the latter inherently less significant. In any event, according to Israel's leading diplomatic correspondent, Akiva Eldar, Kurtzer played a role in writing Obama's speech to AIPAC in 2008, the content of which was even more disgustingly obsequious than Bush had ever been. "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon," said Obama, repeatedly stressing "everything" to make it clear Washington was willing to engage in nuclear war on Israel's behalf, and never mentioning the lack of evidence for an Iranian nuclear bomb. (Tehran insists it is producing nuclear energy only, not bombs). He also declared Jerusalem would be the permanent capital of Israel, an attitude practically guaranteed to eventuate in nuclear catastrophe.
Obama's most important staff pick was vice-president Joe Biden, a major Senate facilitator of state propaganda to invade Iraq and one of the strongest supporters of the invasion among Senate Democrats. Biden brought smiles to Wall Street faces when he supported a measure to make it harder for hard-pressed individuals to erase debt by claiming bankruptcy. And he made sure to go down on his knees before the Israel fanatics, declaring himself a dedicated "Zionist" on a visit to the country, where he was promptly insulted by his hosts. Unfazed, Biden continues to publicly adore them.
For White House Chief of Staff Obama chose Rahm Emmanuel, an "ex" Israeli soldier, long-time Washington insider, a leading sponsor of Israeli militarism and apartheid, and one of the strongest supporters of the Iraq invasion in the House of Representatives. The leading Democratic party strategist in 2006, he purged anti-war Democrats in favor of pro-war candidates, much to the detriment of Democratic party election results that year.
Hillary Clinton was the pick for Secretary of State. She was a leading Iraq war hawk who approved a Bush plan to attack Iraq in late 2007, exulted in the capture, torture, and execution of the Libyan head of state in 2012, and aggressively pushed the Israel line on Iran.
For attorney general Obama picked Eric Holder, who explained on CNN that the U.S. can't adhere to the Geneva Conventions banning torture because we are dealing with "terrorists," the usual infinitely elastic demon category used to justify every conceivable state atrocity. Holder has justified continuing Bush's illegal program of warrantless wiretapping of American citizens on the grounds of protecting state secrets. He also helped the Senate extend the Patriot Act for another year, allowing the president to, "treat . . . . human rights advocates as criminal terrorists, and threaten . . . them with 15 years in prison for advocating nonviolent means to resolve disputes." But Holder's crowning Orwellian triumph was going around the country explaining how President Obama has legal authority to assassinate Americans at will, so long as he designates them "terrorists" first.
Obama appointed Ken Salazar as Interior Secretary. In his first year on the job Interior put 53 million acres of offshore oil reserves up for lease, far surpassing the record of the Bush Administration. When Salazar served in the Senate, he publicly chided the Bush Administration for what he perceived as its slow pace of drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico.
Perhaps Salazar's greatest crime was in retaining the "services" of Bush appointee Chris C. Oynes as assistant director of the Minerals Management Service. Oynes had been for twelve years the director of oil and gas leasing operations for the MMS in the Gulf of Mexico. Under his watch repeat offenders in the oil industry were allowed to police themselves, writing their own environmental analyses and safety inspection and compliance reports, often thoughtfully done in pencil so all the MMS regulators had to do was trace over the letters in ink. The Interior Department's inspector general filed a scathing report that the agency under Oynes fostered a "cultural of ethical failure."
To put it mildly. Oynes is the one constant figure in the Horizon Deepwater disaster, which dumped over 200 million gallons of oil in the Gulf and contaminated hundreds of miles of coastline. The road to catastrophe was laid during Oynes's watch in the Bush Administration, and was continued by the Obama Administration - without environmental review.
Perhaps this is just more "change you can believe in"?
-----former Bush advisor David Frum, on Barack Obama
Never forget: The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain. And after he made his major appointments, Obama's picks were openly praised by Karl Rove, Joe Lieberman, Max Boot, John McCain, and David Brooks. The next time you hear a raving reactionary accusing Obama of "socialism" ask yourself when Lenin, Marx, Mao, and Castro ever won the praise of leading reactionaries.
Obama handed out cabinet posts and other major government positions to the cream of the crop of Wall Street swindlers, who became the architects of his anemic economic "recovery." (There's nothing like hiring arsonists to run the fire department.) Reviewing the records of Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, which met on November 7, 2008 to determine how to handle the financial crisis, Jonathan Weil of Bloomberg News concluded that "many of them should be getting subpoenas as material witnesses right about now, not places in Obama's inner circle." About half "have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an economic tailspin, or both." Is it really believable, Weil asked, that "they won't mistake the nation's needs for their own corporate interests?" Weil also pointed out that Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel "was a director at Freddie Mac in 2000 and 2001 while it was committing accounting fraud." When he was in the House of Representatives, Emmanuel was described as one of the biggest recipients of Wall Street money in Congress, raking in $1.5 million from the investment industry for his 2006 re-election campaign.
One of the leading members of Obama's initial economic team was Bob Rubin, a big fan of the deregulation that was a crucial factor in the economic crash of 2008. As treasury secretary, Rubin worked hard to abolish the Glass-Steagall Act, greatly benefitting Citigroup, which was facing the prospect of having to sell off its insurance underwriting subsidiary. (Glass-Steagall had required that commercial banks be kept separate from investment banks that incurred high risks.) Rubin had a personal interest in torpedoing Glass-Steagall. After leaving his position as treasury secretary, he became vice-chair of Citigroup, where he was paid $120 million over the subsequent decade. In 2001, acting on Citigroup's behalf, Rubin called his former colleague Peter Fisher at the treasury department, asking for help in preventing Enron's credit rating from being downgraded, thus allowing Ken Lay and Co. to defraud the public for a few more frantic weeks.
Rubin was replaced by Larry Summers (who Obama made Director of the White House United States National Economic Council), who presided over legislation barring federal regulation of derivatives, the "weapons of mass destruction" (Warren Buffet) that helped crash the financial markets into disaster. Summers ranks as a key villain in that drama. Economist Dean Baker, one of the few to predict of the impending crisis, says that placing financial policy in the hands of Summers and Rubin was "a bit like turning to Osama bin Laden for aid in the war on terrorism." This observation had more ironic bite before the U.S. backed Al Qaeda mercenaries in a successful attempt to demolish much of Libya.
Obama selected Timothy Geithner to become Treasury Secretary, after Geithner had helped cover up massive fraud at Lehman brothers. As Treasury Secretary Geithner gave away trillions of dollars of public money to plundering banks deemed "too big to fail." None of the Wall Street looters has ever been indicted; none has returned any of the stolen money.
Obama continued with Bush's choice for Defense Secretary (Robert Gates), a man with a lengthy and disturbing history at the CIA, which has helped kill millions of civilians in dozens of interventions around the world since the end of WWII. Can anyone really be surprised that Obama has attacked one country after another since making this appointment?
Obama's picks to head up his foreign policy team were so reactionary they won GOP praise. Richard Perle confessed that he felt "relieved . . . Contrary to expectations, I don't think we would see a lot of change" from the Bush neo-con policies. Retiring senior Republican senator John Warner, former chair of the Armed Services Committee, said "the triumvirate of Gates, Clinton and (James) Jones to head Obama's national security team instills great confidence at home and abroad and further strengthens the growing respect for the president-elect's courage and ability to exercise sound judgment in selecting the best and the brightest to implement our nation's security policies."
As his special assistant on the Middle East, Obama chose Dan Kurtzer, Clinton-Bush ambassador to Egypt and Israel, respectively. Kurtzer is close to Obama adviser Dennis Ross, whose position as a negotiator for the failed Camp David negotiations was that Israel has "needs" whereas Palestinians only have "wants," the latter inherently less significant. In any event, according to Israel's leading diplomatic correspondent, Akiva Eldar, Kurtzer played a role in writing Obama's speech to AIPAC in 2008, the content of which was even more disgustingly obsequious than Bush had ever been. "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon," said Obama, repeatedly stressing "everything" to make it clear Washington was willing to engage in nuclear war on Israel's behalf, and never mentioning the lack of evidence for an Iranian nuclear bomb. (Tehran insists it is producing nuclear energy only, not bombs). He also declared Jerusalem would be the permanent capital of Israel, an attitude practically guaranteed to eventuate in nuclear catastrophe.
Obama's most important staff pick was vice-president Joe Biden, a major Senate facilitator of state propaganda to invade Iraq and one of the strongest supporters of the invasion among Senate Democrats. Biden brought smiles to Wall Street faces when he supported a measure to make it harder for hard-pressed individuals to erase debt by claiming bankruptcy. And he made sure to go down on his knees before the Israel fanatics, declaring himself a dedicated "Zionist" on a visit to the country, where he was promptly insulted by his hosts. Unfazed, Biden continues to publicly adore them.
For White House Chief of Staff Obama chose Rahm Emmanuel, an "ex" Israeli soldier, long-time Washington insider, a leading sponsor of Israeli militarism and apartheid, and one of the strongest supporters of the Iraq invasion in the House of Representatives. The leading Democratic party strategist in 2006, he purged anti-war Democrats in favor of pro-war candidates, much to the detriment of Democratic party election results that year.
Hillary Clinton was the pick for Secretary of State. She was a leading Iraq war hawk who approved a Bush plan to attack Iraq in late 2007, exulted in the capture, torture, and execution of the Libyan head of state in 2012, and aggressively pushed the Israel line on Iran.
For attorney general Obama picked Eric Holder, who explained on CNN that the U.S. can't adhere to the Geneva Conventions banning torture because we are dealing with "terrorists," the usual infinitely elastic demon category used to justify every conceivable state atrocity. Holder has justified continuing Bush's illegal program of warrantless wiretapping of American citizens on the grounds of protecting state secrets. He also helped the Senate extend the Patriot Act for another year, allowing the president to, "treat . . . . human rights advocates as criminal terrorists, and threaten . . . them with 15 years in prison for advocating nonviolent means to resolve disputes." But Holder's crowning Orwellian triumph was going around the country explaining how President Obama has legal authority to assassinate Americans at will, so long as he designates them "terrorists" first.
Obama appointed Ken Salazar as Interior Secretary. In his first year on the job Interior put 53 million acres of offshore oil reserves up for lease, far surpassing the record of the Bush Administration. When Salazar served in the Senate, he publicly chided the Bush Administration for what he perceived as its slow pace of drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico.
Perhaps Salazar's greatest crime was in retaining the "services" of Bush appointee Chris C. Oynes as assistant director of the Minerals Management Service. Oynes had been for twelve years the director of oil and gas leasing operations for the MMS in the Gulf of Mexico. Under his watch repeat offenders in the oil industry were allowed to police themselves, writing their own environmental analyses and safety inspection and compliance reports, often thoughtfully done in pencil so all the MMS regulators had to do was trace over the letters in ink. The Interior Department's inspector general filed a scathing report that the agency under Oynes fostered a "cultural of ethical failure."
To put it mildly. Oynes is the one constant figure in the Horizon Deepwater disaster, which dumped over 200 million gallons of oil in the Gulf and contaminated hundreds of miles of coastline. The road to catastrophe was laid during Oynes's watch in the Bush Administration, and was continued by the Obama Administration - without environmental review.
Perhaps this is just more "change you can believe in"?
Republicans Expose Shocking Obama Oral Sex Act!
The Obamas’ First Kiss, Immortalized
By EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS
Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressThe
owners of a shopping center in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood
installed a granite marker commemorating where President Obama and his
wife, Michele, shared their first kiss.A historical marker was unveiled on Wednesday at the site, outside a shopping center in Chicago. The plaque features a 2007 quote from Mr. Obama from an interview with O, the Oprah Magazine.
“On our first date, I treated her to the finest ice cream Baskin-Robbins had to offer, our dinner table doubling as the curb. I kissed her, and it tasted like chocolate,” the plaque reads.
The granite marker is at the corner of Dorchester Avenue and 53rd Street outside a shopping center in the Hyde Park neighborhood, not far from the Obamas’ home. The plaque also features a photo of the couple kissing.
Although the Baskin-Robbins shop has been replaced by a Subway restaurant, there is a different Baskin-Robbins nearby, according to The Chicago Tribune.
The owners of the shopping center said they had been working to create a marker for several years because of interest from the public.
“We took on the project for the community, posterity and the tourists who seem interested in including the spot in their visit to Chicago,” said Jonelle Kearney, a spokeswoman for Mid-America Real Estate.
Whether it is a savvy marketing tool or an adorable tribute, Obama’s team probably welcomes attention to the couple’s love story as the presidential campaign has grown increasingly negative. In an interview on “The Tonight Show” this week, Mrs. Obama spoke of another kiss, explaining that she was not rebuffing the president when the couple was caught on the “kiss cam” at a recent basketball game.
Several Twitter users, however, were not amused by all this talk of the Obamas kissing. One woman wrote of the new historical marker: “I think I just threw up a little bit. GAG!”
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Mass Murders: Domestic and Foreign
This summary is not available. Please
click here to view the post.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Sample Questions from EDD exam
Sample Question From Entrance Exam for Students at E.D.D.
Mass Murders Are Increasing In/At :
a)
American movie theaters
b) American
places of religious worship
c)
American places of financial worship
d)
Syrian cities
e)
Iraqi cities
f)
American inner cities
g) American
suburbs
h)
Israeli settlements
i)
Israeli cities
j)
American bedrooms
k)
American kitchens
l)
Afghanistan weddings
m)Iraqi places of worship
n)
The market
o)
The mall
p)
The mall at the market
q)
The market at the mall
r)
All of the above plus more
Saturday, August 11, 2012
False Savior: Barack Obama (Part 2)
"My heart is filled with love for this country."
------- Barack Obama
Ever eager to help swindling financiers, he interrupted his 2008 presidential campaign to rush back to Washington and help rescue Bush's bailout, salvaging some of the most venal and corrupt enterprises on Wall Street while shielding their executives from prosecution, only to be later held in contempt by those he had rescued. Then after winning the election, he remained silent about Israel's latest mass murder campaign in the Gaza Strip (Operation Cast Lead), because "there is only one president." In other words, one moral coward at a time in the Oval Office, and no kibitzing, please.
For those still struggling with the "puzzle" of the president's descent from "King of Hope" to "Obummer," it might be worth recalling that Obama never was the great shining liberal so many mistook him for. Early in his career, Obama worked with Chicago slumlords on public housing initiatives that evicted the black poor in order to garner profits via gentrification. The eternally inconvenient poor were consigned to rat-infested apartments without heat. Today, after a full term of "hope you can believe in," forty-six million Americans live below the federal poverty line, an all-time record. Take that, gullible idealists.
No one should have been surprised. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama praises Ronald Reagan as a "transformative figure," which he certainly was, though not in the sense meant by Obama, whose account fails to mention that Reagan's policies demolished Central America, Southern Africa, and much of the Middle East, while attacking labor, the middle class, and the poor at home, all part of an immensely successful effort to enrich the already obscenely wealthy at the expense of everyone else. He has also long praised Clinton's "welfare reform" as a bipartisan policy triumph, though it plunged a million more American children into poverty (the U.S. already had the highest child poverty rate in the industrial world) and deprived the poor of $28 billion in food assistance. Obama admires both of these men.
His lone legislative achievement is a health care "reform" bill designed to expand the profits of the Health Mafia Organizations, while cutting hundreds of billions of dollars out of already underfunded Medicare, and leaving some twenty million plus Americans without any medical insurance at all. The fact that the administrative costs of Medicare are only four percent, whereas private insurers have administrative costs over 20%, didn't induce Obama to propose extending Medicare for all. [And Medicare doesn't make money by denying people care like the HMOs do.] In fact, in public discussions of health care Obama deliberately excluded advocates of Medicare For All.
Since Obamacare is his proudest achievement, can we really be surprised that he put Medicare and Social Security on the table to be cut, and extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich?
Perhaps his inner progressive is being unfairly held in check by the new Tea Party Congress? Well, that would mean that we could find evidence of progressive achievement when Obama had a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in both houses. Except we can't. Only a tiny fraction of his stimulus bill was directed at job creation, and though badly needed, no broad stimulus is planned or contemplated. Instead, in a time of deep recession, Obama has pushed deficit-reduction, cutting government services rather than repealing Bush's tax cuts for the rich. [Although erroneously described in the business press as massive public investment, Obama's spending plan was in fact tepid and miniscule, loaded with business-friendly tax cuts and short on immediate public works jobs.] At the same time, he expanded the bailout of the Wall Street swindlers, implemented an auto bailout that raided union pension funds and rewarded capital flight, undermined carbon emission reduction efforts at the climate talks in Copenhagen, declined to advance public works programs to check soaring unemployment, escalated strip-mining and deep water oil drilling, ignored his promises to help labor, and appointed a Deficit Reduction Commission headed by sworn enemies of Social Security. On the foreign policy front, he escalated war in South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan), continued the Iraq war long past the date he promised to end it, demolished Libya with the help of Al Qaeda, attacked Yemen and Somalia, passed a record Pentagon budget, used "humanitarian relief" as a pretext to expand the U.S. occupation of Haiti, aided and abetted coup governments in Honduras and Paraguay, and expanded U.S. imperial domination in death-squad ridden Colombia. His attitude towards those who dared oppose such policies was succinctly expressed by his then Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emmanuel, who referred to progressive critics of Obama policies as "fucking retards." Keep this in mind the next time an Obama apologist tries to pin exclusive blame for the coarsening of American political discourse on the Republicans.
After stating in his Nobel acceptance speech that he wanted to make nuclear disarmament the centerpiece of his foreign policy, Obama completely betrayed his promises. He refused to adopt a policy of nuclear deterrence, and increased U.S. spending on nuclear weapons to record highs, calling for hundreds of billions of dollars of new investments in nuclear bombs - over $7 billion in 2011 alone. He proposed some $36 billion in new nuclear loan guarantees, this added to $18.5 billion set aside by the Bush administration, and oversaw an expansion of nuclear weapons facilities. Worse, his administration's continual use of the obnoxious phrase "all options are on the table" in matters dealing with Iran, made it clear he is willing to nuke the country in order to appease the Israel fanatics.
He proved equally enthusiastic about promoting nuclear power, the establishment's "green" answer to reliance on dirty coal. Under Obama's rule there has been an increase in permit and license requests for new uranium mines and nuclear power plants. And while Japan's Dai-Ichi nuclear complex was in triple-meltdown in Fukushima Obama went to Chile and called for expanded construction of Chilean nuclear power plants in the wake of a gargantuan earthquake there.
Again, this should not come as a surprise, as Obama has a history of weakening nuclear regulatory legislation dating back to his time as senator of Illinois. In 2006, then Senator Obama introduced the Nuclear Release Notice Act of 2006, which initially mandated that state and local officials be notified of unplanned radioactive discharge from a nuclear facility within 24 hours. This legislation came about because of an Exelon power plant in Braidwood Illinois (a town in Obama's district), which was leaking tritium into the groundwater. Public outcry forced Obama to get the bill moving, but he made significant changes (largely brought about by Exelron and the nuclear industry's strong opposition) that took much of the regulatory force out of the bill. Obama ultimately removed the language requiring the disclosure of radiation leaks by the nuclear industry, and the bill never got out of Congress. Exelron subsequently contributed $150,000 to Obama's 2008 campaign.
On labor issues, Obama has consistently sided with capital against working people. On the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made joining a union as easy as putting a check mark in a box, Obama handed the ball off to his Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, who offered concessions to business, and the bill was stillborn. More seriously, after promising to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour, he reneged, leaving the poor to their own devices amidst the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. He chose Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, to be his jobs czar, (though GE has been offshoring jobs for decades), and anti-union Arne Duncan to be his Education Secretary, promoting charter over public schools while vilifying teachers and their unions. Meanwhile, Obama's Race to the Top initiative is a continuation of Bush's No Child Left Behind, which offers boot-camp style obedience schools for the poor, one in a long line of attempts to make them submit to animal training instead of education. [Obama is on record deploring the tendency of poor black men to "sire" children out of wedlock.] This treatment makes a military draft superfluous, since a continual supply of war recruits can be "drafted" informally from the bottom tier of the dismal public school system.
Candidate Obama said that he opposed cuts to Social Security, as well as privatization, and favored raising the cap on income subject to FICA taxation, which allows the rich to pay social security tax on only a tiny portion of their incomes. He also said he was opposed to appointing a social security commission. However, once in office he reversed course and said he was open to benefit cuts, and announced that he would appoint a deficit reduction social security commission.
On the economy, Obama has engineered a "recovery" with more economic misery in it than the initial stages of the Great Recession. In 2009 Obama proposed a $787 billion "stimulus package" to counteract recession - supposedly. But it was packed with tax cuts for business and short on labor-intensive projects that would have put the unemployed to work right away. And it went unmentioned that corporate America has been living off stimulus packages since WWII, without being condemned for sucking at the tit of the "nanny state." Is there any wonder why? These packages are laughably called "defense expenditures," always the largest item in the discretionary federal budget, and the national security state of which they are a part is now far and away the largest planned economy in the world, though none dare call it communism. These contracts come with guaranteed cost overruns and generate huge profits.
Is he the worst president in U.S. history? Very likely, but only until the next one arrives.
------- Barack Obama
Ever eager to help swindling financiers, he interrupted his 2008 presidential campaign to rush back to Washington and help rescue Bush's bailout, salvaging some of the most venal and corrupt enterprises on Wall Street while shielding their executives from prosecution, only to be later held in contempt by those he had rescued. Then after winning the election, he remained silent about Israel's latest mass murder campaign in the Gaza Strip (Operation Cast Lead), because "there is only one president." In other words, one moral coward at a time in the Oval Office, and no kibitzing, please.
For those still struggling with the "puzzle" of the president's descent from "King of Hope" to "Obummer," it might be worth recalling that Obama never was the great shining liberal so many mistook him for. Early in his career, Obama worked with Chicago slumlords on public housing initiatives that evicted the black poor in order to garner profits via gentrification. The eternally inconvenient poor were consigned to rat-infested apartments without heat. Today, after a full term of "hope you can believe in," forty-six million Americans live below the federal poverty line, an all-time record. Take that, gullible idealists.
No one should have been surprised. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama praises Ronald Reagan as a "transformative figure," which he certainly was, though not in the sense meant by Obama, whose account fails to mention that Reagan's policies demolished Central America, Southern Africa, and much of the Middle East, while attacking labor, the middle class, and the poor at home, all part of an immensely successful effort to enrich the already obscenely wealthy at the expense of everyone else. He has also long praised Clinton's "welfare reform" as a bipartisan policy triumph, though it plunged a million more American children into poverty (the U.S. already had the highest child poverty rate in the industrial world) and deprived the poor of $28 billion in food assistance. Obama admires both of these men.
His lone legislative achievement is a health care "reform" bill designed to expand the profits of the Health Mafia Organizations, while cutting hundreds of billions of dollars out of already underfunded Medicare, and leaving some twenty million plus Americans without any medical insurance at all. The fact that the administrative costs of Medicare are only four percent, whereas private insurers have administrative costs over 20%, didn't induce Obama to propose extending Medicare for all. [And Medicare doesn't make money by denying people care like the HMOs do.] In fact, in public discussions of health care Obama deliberately excluded advocates of Medicare For All.
Since Obamacare is his proudest achievement, can we really be surprised that he put Medicare and Social Security on the table to be cut, and extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich?
Perhaps his inner progressive is being unfairly held in check by the new Tea Party Congress? Well, that would mean that we could find evidence of progressive achievement when Obama had a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in both houses. Except we can't. Only a tiny fraction of his stimulus bill was directed at job creation, and though badly needed, no broad stimulus is planned or contemplated. Instead, in a time of deep recession, Obama has pushed deficit-reduction, cutting government services rather than repealing Bush's tax cuts for the rich. [Although erroneously described in the business press as massive public investment, Obama's spending plan was in fact tepid and miniscule, loaded with business-friendly tax cuts and short on immediate public works jobs.] At the same time, he expanded the bailout of the Wall Street swindlers, implemented an auto bailout that raided union pension funds and rewarded capital flight, undermined carbon emission reduction efforts at the climate talks in Copenhagen, declined to advance public works programs to check soaring unemployment, escalated strip-mining and deep water oil drilling, ignored his promises to help labor, and appointed a Deficit Reduction Commission headed by sworn enemies of Social Security. On the foreign policy front, he escalated war in South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan), continued the Iraq war long past the date he promised to end it, demolished Libya with the help of Al Qaeda, attacked Yemen and Somalia, passed a record Pentagon budget, used "humanitarian relief" as a pretext to expand the U.S. occupation of Haiti, aided and abetted coup governments in Honduras and Paraguay, and expanded U.S. imperial domination in death-squad ridden Colombia. His attitude towards those who dared oppose such policies was succinctly expressed by his then Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emmanuel, who referred to progressive critics of Obama policies as "fucking retards." Keep this in mind the next time an Obama apologist tries to pin exclusive blame for the coarsening of American political discourse on the Republicans.
After stating in his Nobel acceptance speech that he wanted to make nuclear disarmament the centerpiece of his foreign policy, Obama completely betrayed his promises. He refused to adopt a policy of nuclear deterrence, and increased U.S. spending on nuclear weapons to record highs, calling for hundreds of billions of dollars of new investments in nuclear bombs - over $7 billion in 2011 alone. He proposed some $36 billion in new nuclear loan guarantees, this added to $18.5 billion set aside by the Bush administration, and oversaw an expansion of nuclear weapons facilities. Worse, his administration's continual use of the obnoxious phrase "all options are on the table" in matters dealing with Iran, made it clear he is willing to nuke the country in order to appease the Israel fanatics.
He proved equally enthusiastic about promoting nuclear power, the establishment's "green" answer to reliance on dirty coal. Under Obama's rule there has been an increase in permit and license requests for new uranium mines and nuclear power plants. And while Japan's Dai-Ichi nuclear complex was in triple-meltdown in Fukushima Obama went to Chile and called for expanded construction of Chilean nuclear power plants in the wake of a gargantuan earthquake there.
Again, this should not come as a surprise, as Obama has a history of weakening nuclear regulatory legislation dating back to his time as senator of Illinois. In 2006, then Senator Obama introduced the Nuclear Release Notice Act of 2006, which initially mandated that state and local officials be notified of unplanned radioactive discharge from a nuclear facility within 24 hours. This legislation came about because of an Exelon power plant in Braidwood Illinois (a town in Obama's district), which was leaking tritium into the groundwater. Public outcry forced Obama to get the bill moving, but he made significant changes (largely brought about by Exelron and the nuclear industry's strong opposition) that took much of the regulatory force out of the bill. Obama ultimately removed the language requiring the disclosure of radiation leaks by the nuclear industry, and the bill never got out of Congress. Exelron subsequently contributed $150,000 to Obama's 2008 campaign.
On labor issues, Obama has consistently sided with capital against working people. On the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made joining a union as easy as putting a check mark in a box, Obama handed the ball off to his Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, who offered concessions to business, and the bill was stillborn. More seriously, after promising to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour, he reneged, leaving the poor to their own devices amidst the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. He chose Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, to be his jobs czar, (though GE has been offshoring jobs for decades), and anti-union Arne Duncan to be his Education Secretary, promoting charter over public schools while vilifying teachers and their unions. Meanwhile, Obama's Race to the Top initiative is a continuation of Bush's No Child Left Behind, which offers boot-camp style obedience schools for the poor, one in a long line of attempts to make them submit to animal training instead of education. [Obama is on record deploring the tendency of poor black men to "sire" children out of wedlock.] This treatment makes a military draft superfluous, since a continual supply of war recruits can be "drafted" informally from the bottom tier of the dismal public school system.
Candidate Obama said that he opposed cuts to Social Security, as well as privatization, and favored raising the cap on income subject to FICA taxation, which allows the rich to pay social security tax on only a tiny portion of their incomes. He also said he was opposed to appointing a social security commission. However, once in office he reversed course and said he was open to benefit cuts, and announced that he would appoint a deficit reduction social security commission.
On the economy, Obama has engineered a "recovery" with more economic misery in it than the initial stages of the Great Recession. In 2009 Obama proposed a $787 billion "stimulus package" to counteract recession - supposedly. But it was packed with tax cuts for business and short on labor-intensive projects that would have put the unemployed to work right away. And it went unmentioned that corporate America has been living off stimulus packages since WWII, without being condemned for sucking at the tit of the "nanny state." Is there any wonder why? These packages are laughably called "defense expenditures," always the largest item in the discretionary federal budget, and the national security state of which they are a part is now far and away the largest planned economy in the world, though none dare call it communism. These contracts come with guaranteed cost overruns and generate huge profits.
Is he the worst president in U.S. history? Very likely, but only until the next one arrives.
Friday, August 10, 2012
LATEST CAMPAIGN BULLETINS AND BRILLIANT IDEAS FOR ADS FROM DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICAN PARTY HEADQUARTERS
Democrats Charge Romney With Being A Capitalist!
“We knew it all along…he’s been trying to cover it up but
the man has been seeking profits and riches all his life” said an anonymous
spokesperson with a bag over its/his/her head.
Democrats Charge Romney With Being a Child Molester!!
“We knew it all along…he’s been trying to cover up his
desires for sex with innocent 17
year old girls, but we have his facebook, twitter and twatter accounts to prove
he’s a menace to our daughters, sisters or girlfriends” said another anonymous
spokesperson with a pair of panties over its/his/her head.
Republicans Accuse Obama of Cannibalism!!!
“Our guy may seek profits but their guy seeks human flesh”
said an anonymous spokesperson wearing a long black unisex robe. “We have
photos of him scarfing down the leg of his mother-in-law. We got them from the
source that revealed his birthplace as planet Jupiter. It’s shameful. Would you trust him
around your parents? Near lunch or dinner time?”
Republicans Initiate Law Suit Claiming Democrats Are Not
Citizens Of The USA
“We have evidence that they all secretly speak Spanish,
Yiddish or Ebonics when they are at home with their multi-ethnic families and extended families of
perverts, degenerates and seat sniffers” said an unidentified spokesperson
wearing a black latex mask and leather pants with openings at the crotch
revealing a bible.
Democrats Initiate Counter Suit Charging Republicans With
Bullying and Other Hate Crimes
No spokesperson was willing to comment…
Stay tuned…things will get much worse
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Headlines : Developing Stories
Drone Re-Directed By Hacker Hits Congress
Music Business Revived By New Satanic Family Junk Rock
Market
Minister Charged With Having Sex With Daughter
Pleads “It’s In The Bible”
Unable to Purchase Food After Losing Job, Man Eats Family
Unable to Digest Meal After Eating Family, Man Eats Big
Pharma
New Harry Potter Vampire Bromance Disaster Cartoon Epic
Grosses Forty Billion Opening Day
Pet Food Sales Skyrocket, Food Stamps Cut, Dogs and Cats
Attack Owner-Master-Companion-Lovers in Outbreak of Mental Rabies
Secretary of State Has Stomach Ripped Open by Alien While
Addressing United Nations
Serial Killer Family Reality Show Has Highest Ratings Since
Child Molesting Reality Family Show Of Last Season: Producers say “It’s in The
Bible”
U.S. Mass Murder Team Takes Olympic Gold: Again…Still…Yet
New Democratic Party Group, The Obamalets, Make Kosher Egg
Dishes To Raise Funds
Adolf Hitler's Olympic Village of 1936: Conservationists race to save relic of infamous 'Nazi Games'
a fact usually, and
conveniently , left out in the "infamous" depiction of this event:
"Ironically,
Owens’s tiny room – No 5, in block 39 – is so far the only athlete’s room that
has been renovated. It’s a simple space that reflects the modesty of the humble
man who stayed there –
a man who,
paradoxically, enjoyed more freedom in Nazi Germany at that time than he did in
his segregated U.S. homeland."
but...but...wait a
minute...golly...gosh...jeepers...oh my god...or, omg...
we were the land of the
free, home of the brave, cradle of liberty, and they were the evil fascist
genocidal nazi racist monster killer maniacs from hell !
the copy editor who let
that one through may be looking for a job...
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Weekly Review of Media Absurdity Disorder (MAD)
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's remark that economic disparity between Israel and the Palestinians could be explained by "culture" and "the hand of providence" occasioned considerable stir this week, although it should not have, since both major political parties have longstanding and very open contempt for Arab peoples, especially the Palestinians, and both believe that Israel was ordained by God. (It's in the Bible - who can argue with Holy Writ?) But it makes for entertaining distraction, an essential function at any time, but especially in an election year, when voters have the power (theoretically, at least) to elect a representative government dedicated to promoting the general welfare. Where would our 1% be if that happened?
Next year "Internet use disorder" will be listed in the appendix of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, said Matt Richtel in the New York Times. The dangers of constant texting, tweeting, and web-surfing are said to be potentially devastating, since brain scans of Internet addicts, those who are online 38 or more hours a week, are said to resemble those of cocaine addicts and alcoholics.
Of course, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders also defined homosexuality as a grave mental illness until 1973, when the ideological idiocy could no longer be sustained, and the psychiatric profession has long pinned a whole host of alleged mental illnesses on women, whose clear lack of a penis encouraged psychiatric suspicion that they were mental and emotional defectives. And going farther back (1854), Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright of Louisiana did declare escaped slaves to be afflicted with "drapetomania," a dread mental illness characterized by an irrepressible desire for freedom. The bright side, said the good doctor, was that the disease was eminently curable.
Which is not to say that extreme internet use is not a bad thing. But it may very well turn out to be the case that 38 hours a week dedicated to any single activity is unhealthy. Obviously, the modern world is a complicated place, and people have a wide variety of needs and interests that put claims on their time. Consider just the short list - commuting, working, sleeping, cooking, eating, bathing, caring for children, housecleaning, paying bills, and recreating. Any full-time worker can tell you that it's an enormous strain to do all of these things if 38 or more hours a week are dedicated to holding down a job. So let's see the brain scans of people who devote 38 or more hours a week to housework, truck-driving, elderly care, data entry, plumbing, babysitting, and waiting on tables before we conclude that an extensive online life is among the gravest of threats to our national mental health.
The enemies of former Serbian Prime Minister Slobodan Milosevic are at it again. Ivica Dacic, Milosevic's former spokesman, has emerged as the new Prime Minister of Serbia, appointed by parliament to head up a coalition government three months after elections failed to determine a clear winner. Dacic is known for harshly criticizing the West for its bloody dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, an apparently outrageous and inexplicable failing, since all NATO wanted to do was selflessly bomb the country into submission, which it ultimately succeeded in doing. Said Liberal Democratic leader (anti-Milosevic) Cedomir Jovanovic, "Serbia is the only place in the world where someone destroys the country and can just change a tie and move on."
Huh? Bill Clinton and NATO leaders did precisely that, destroyed Serbia with 78-days of round-the-clock bombing, and then moved on. Milosevic's contribution to the violence that gripped Yugoslavia in the 1990s was in the context of trying to keep the country from being fractured into ethnic mini-states, an effort that ultimately failed. If forcefully trying to keep a federal union from disintegrating is a crime, then Abraham Lincoln was as much a genocidal maniac as Milosevic was.
When the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics included a commemoration of the 2005 London subway bombings after an appeal to allow an official moment of silence in memory of the six Israeli athletes murdered in the 1972 games had been rejected, Jonathan Tobin published his indignation in Commentary Magazine. "For the Olympic Committee, like the United Nations and the rest of the international community, there are always different rules for Jews. And chief of those rules is that Jewish blood is cheap."
Priceless. That's why it's so difficult to hear anything about anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, or suicide bombings in Israel. It's also why the Diary of Anne Frank and just about anything written by Elie Wiesel are standard textbook fare in our school system. And it's surely why the killing of the Israeli athletes was made into a popular movie while the London bombings are barely remembered just seven years after they occurred.
If chutzpah were an Olympic event, Tobin might well be draped in gold.
The Source:
"The Week - The Best of the U.S. and International Media," August 10, 2012
Next year "Internet use disorder" will be listed in the appendix of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, said Matt Richtel in the New York Times. The dangers of constant texting, tweeting, and web-surfing are said to be potentially devastating, since brain scans of Internet addicts, those who are online 38 or more hours a week, are said to resemble those of cocaine addicts and alcoholics.
Of course, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders also defined homosexuality as a grave mental illness until 1973, when the ideological idiocy could no longer be sustained, and the psychiatric profession has long pinned a whole host of alleged mental illnesses on women, whose clear lack of a penis encouraged psychiatric suspicion that they were mental and emotional defectives. And going farther back (1854), Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright of Louisiana did declare escaped slaves to be afflicted with "drapetomania," a dread mental illness characterized by an irrepressible desire for freedom. The bright side, said the good doctor, was that the disease was eminently curable.
Which is not to say that extreme internet use is not a bad thing. But it may very well turn out to be the case that 38 hours a week dedicated to any single activity is unhealthy. Obviously, the modern world is a complicated place, and people have a wide variety of needs and interests that put claims on their time. Consider just the short list - commuting, working, sleeping, cooking, eating, bathing, caring for children, housecleaning, paying bills, and recreating. Any full-time worker can tell you that it's an enormous strain to do all of these things if 38 or more hours a week are dedicated to holding down a job. So let's see the brain scans of people who devote 38 or more hours a week to housework, truck-driving, elderly care, data entry, plumbing, babysitting, and waiting on tables before we conclude that an extensive online life is among the gravest of threats to our national mental health.
The enemies of former Serbian Prime Minister Slobodan Milosevic are at it again. Ivica Dacic, Milosevic's former spokesman, has emerged as the new Prime Minister of Serbia, appointed by parliament to head up a coalition government three months after elections failed to determine a clear winner. Dacic is known for harshly criticizing the West for its bloody dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, an apparently outrageous and inexplicable failing, since all NATO wanted to do was selflessly bomb the country into submission, which it ultimately succeeded in doing. Said Liberal Democratic leader (anti-Milosevic) Cedomir Jovanovic, "Serbia is the only place in the world where someone destroys the country and can just change a tie and move on."
Huh? Bill Clinton and NATO leaders did precisely that, destroyed Serbia with 78-days of round-the-clock bombing, and then moved on. Milosevic's contribution to the violence that gripped Yugoslavia in the 1990s was in the context of trying to keep the country from being fractured into ethnic mini-states, an effort that ultimately failed. If forcefully trying to keep a federal union from disintegrating is a crime, then Abraham Lincoln was as much a genocidal maniac as Milosevic was.
When the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics included a commemoration of the 2005 London subway bombings after an appeal to allow an official moment of silence in memory of the six Israeli athletes murdered in the 1972 games had been rejected, Jonathan Tobin published his indignation in Commentary Magazine. "For the Olympic Committee, like the United Nations and the rest of the international community, there are always different rules for Jews. And chief of those rules is that Jewish blood is cheap."
Priceless. That's why it's so difficult to hear anything about anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, or suicide bombings in Israel. It's also why the Diary of Anne Frank and just about anything written by Elie Wiesel are standard textbook fare in our school system. And it's surely why the killing of the Israeli athletes was made into a popular movie while the London bombings are barely remembered just seven years after they occurred.
If chutzpah were an Olympic event, Tobin might well be draped in gold.
The Source:
"The Week - The Best of the U.S. and International Media," August 10, 2012