All about Obama

Paul Ryan Is Not Ready to Give Up on Health Care - Robert Costa - National Review Online

2010-03-23T11:56:00.000+02:00

What about the practical consequences of Obamacare? “Soon, we’ll see individual-market insurance companies go out of business and dump their people,” Ryan says. “Tax increases on capital are going to hurt the economy in 2011. These arbitrary Medicare cuts will adversely affect the providers and therefore their beneficiaries. You’ll have the Internal Revenue Service beefing up its enforcement of this new mandate, which people have no clue is coming. And you’re going to have employers dump employees in this exchange once it’s up and running — funneling everyone into a government-run rationing system. Then we’ll see a big spike in insurance rates, and the Democrats are going to wager that they can just blame the insurers for that, and therefore that means they will need to institute insurance price controls or have a public option. Our side is going to say, ‘Look at what you just did to ruin our health-care system,’ and focus on repeal.”

via Paul Ryan Is Not Ready to Give Up on Health Care – Robert Costa – National Review Online.

[Via http://inzax.us]

Facebook rising as a source of news traffic - Holy Kaw!

Bart Stupak’s challenger doesn’t have a Web site (yet), but the dough is coming in | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

2010-03-23T03:57:00.000+02:00

Bart Stupak’s challenger doesn’t have a Web site (yet), but the dough is coming in

By Alex Pappas — The Daily Caller 03/22/10 at 4:54 PM

Dr. Dan Benishek was flipping the channels between the Michigan State basketball game and Fox News last night when the phone calls started coming through.

The Republican doctor running for a seat in Congress representing Michigan’s Upper Peninsula area had just become a Tea Party hero — and he wasn’t prepared. More than $20,000 in campaign donations poured in Sunday night alone. Benishek’s secret? He’s running against Bart Stupak, the eight-term Democrat whose last-minute deal allowed President Obama’s health-care legislation to pass.

“It’s hard to sort it all out, to tell you the truth, because I’m not a pro at this,” Benishek told The Daily Caller. “I’m just a regular person.”

Benishek, who has never run for office, doesn’t have a campaign Web site (for now, a Facebook page that has increased from 700 to 14,000 followers will do) or staff for that matter (his wife is taking press calls while he searches for a campaign manager). But by late last night, the RNC had stepped in and set up a PayPal account for him so he could raise money online.

via Bart Stupak’s challenger doesn’t have a Web site (yet), but the dough is coming in | The Daily Caller – Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.

[Via http://sroblog.com]

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 3/21 - Arrowhead Pride

Obama calls for "Urgent" Action for One More "Problem"

2010-03-21T11:51:00.000+02:00

The battle over Health Care isn’t even over, and already SnowBama is drawing another line in the sand and calling it “Urgent” that Congress act now.

Now it’s Financial Reform. For those he’s not about wanting to expand the government, or be agressive about more take overs, wonder they have to say.

The part of the article which caught my attention is “Would give government unprecedented power to split up big financial firms”. Wow. You get big by being successful at what you do, and for surviving as an institution for generations. Now – being big is “bad”. Being “Big” has to be stopped.

I wonder if we would consider that for Washington?

At the end of the article, he makes another interesting point:

“But what we have seen over the past two years is that without reasonable and clear rules to check abuse and protect families, markets don’t function freely”.

Interesting – because I can say exactly the same thing about his administration:

What we have seen over the past two ears is that without reasonable and clear rules (Constitutional requirement for votes – and not deem/pass), to check abuse and protect families, people’s choice don’t function freely.”

It all sounds good – wanting to “check abuse”, but after watching him demonstrate how he defines “transparancy” and “listens to the people”, I’m almost afraid to see what he would define as “abuse”. No doubt, at the front of his mind is “Price increase” and “executive bonus”.

The president says he remains a “vigorous defender” of free markets. I’d agree with 95% of that – he is a vigour defender of “make it free”.

Old-Man-Tex

[Via http://theafiles.com]

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 3/20 - Arrowhead Pride

REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED IN 1994?

2010-03-21T03:38:00.000+02:00

DEMOCRATS THAT VOTED FOR HILLARYCARE WERE THROWN OUT BY WE THE PEOPLE! 34 DEMOCRATS LOST THEIR ELECTION FOR NOT LISTENING TO WE THE PEOPLE! WE THE PEOPLE DID NOT WANT HILLARYCARE AND WE DO NOT WANT OBAMACARE!

TRUST WE THE PEOPLE… NOT PRINCESS PELOSI! ONLY WE THE PEOPLE CAN SAVE YOUR JOB!

[Via http://ohiobelle.wordpress.com]

Microsoft Contemplating 360 USB Storage? News

The looming Peril

2010-03-20T11:45:00.000+02:00

The looming Peril

Ever heard of Cass Sunstein? If not, then it’s about time you did, because he is without doubt the most dangerous man on this planet.

Even as you read this, he is plotting to turn the very bastion of capitalism, the United States of America, into the new leader of capitalism’s very nemesis, communism.

While this blog is primarily about South African affairs, this is profoundly relevant, as, whatever happens across the Pacific to the nation that was once the leader of the free world, will determine our fate as well..

Sunstein is, with a tongue as forked as the serpent in the garden of Eden, laying the psychological groundwork that will test the waters of American resistance to his diabolical plans. He has already fired the first salvos, and astoundingly, unbelievably, and quite incredulously, not a single shot has been fired back, well, not one that has had any telling impact anyway. As a consequent, one is forced to ask oneself the most simple of questions. Why?

As the newly elected regulatory Czar of the Obama administration, he is attempting to single handedly usurp the Constitution by introducing, under the guise of increased justice for all, draconian laws that will harness the free world to the yoke of oppression and slavery, which, as we know, is the end goal of the evil doctrine of Marxist Communism.

The bad news is, that unless we act quickly, unless we act decisively, driven by fear of the consequences of inaction, he will succeed.

There is a force that is ruling the USA, an unelected body of power hungry psychopaths, who have managed to hijack the system through their unchallenged dominance of the financial institutions, as well a the electronic and printed media.

If I were to write a book about Aliens who take over the world using mind manipulation, it would be categorized as science fiction because it sounds preposterous, but in effect, this is exactly what is happening in the USA today.

America has been invaded by an Alien body whose interests centre purely around the acquisition of power, nothing else.

Only when the good people of the USA stand up and call them out, will this destruction of their nation end. As long as they cower behind the city walls, too afraid to fight back, the enemy will keep hammering away at the portals until they collapse, and then their final enslavement will be complete.

Never be fooled into believing that communism is dead. At the end of the cold war, the reds only feinted defeat, and through glasnost (propaganda) and perestroika (restructuring), pretended to cross the floor, falling into the welcoming embrace of the victorious Western alliance. In reality, the West should have dealt these vipers a fatal blow, but instead, they patted each other on the back and rejoiced at what they saw as a great victory for liberty and freedom.

The truth is, the viper was only pretending to be dead. It had already detected the chink in our armour, and it was in this area that they concentrated their next assault.

The weakness they detected was a perversion called liberalism.

One of the traits of the white race is our humanity. As it distinguishes us from the rest of mankind, I hesitate to call it a weakness, but in effect, that is what it is. Our enemies decided to remove their red cloaks and don less conspicuous attire so as not to attract attention as they set about taking full advantage of us in this most vulnerable of areas. They marched to the forefront of the liberal movements and took up the banners, pulling the useful idiots along behind them as they replaced the simple ideology of a bunch of idealistic dreamers with their own brand of treachery.

If you think liberalism is a pacifist movement, think again. It has been transformed by the Bolshevik agitators from the flower power movement it once was, into the most militant group in western society. They practice exactly what they accuse their enemies of – hate, fascism, threats, intimidation, and outright violence. These once peaceful flower children have been turned into a bunch of criminal thugs, and the best part is, they have been conditioned to believe this behaviour is justifiable in the name of democracy and individual freedom.

The new leaders of the revolution are a Felix Frankfurter professor who goes by the most unlikely name of Cass Sunstein (Sunshine?), and his sidekick, Ben Shalom Bernanke, who controls the economic arm of the same movement, the Federal reserve bank of America. They have been chosen to lead the final assault. The beauty of their plan is that, as they march behind the first black president of the United States of America, no one can challenge them without being mockingly dismissed as a radical rightwing racist.

I’ve often wondered why, after the 1994 elections in South Africa, the ANC, who have never hidden their ideological affiliation to communism, simply didn’t abandon capitalism and hoist the red flag over the stately Union buildings in Pretoria. I have now concluded that their new masters decided it was premature. Don’t think they were naive enough to believe the ANC could make a success of South Africa, only, the proclamation of their failure needed the right timing.

If one examines what the west have actually done in real terms to ensure the success of the black government in South Africa, it is glaringly obvious that the answer is, nothing. On the lead up to the 1994 elections we were promised not only an end to the crippling sanctions that had been imposed on the Nationalist Government, but also an unprecedented rush to invest in the new rainbow nation, a promise that never materialized.

The truth is, the leaders of the west had a reasonably good idea what the outcome of a black government would be. They knew that in the short term, while the legacy of white ruled South Africa still sustained the illusion of a successful transition, things would turn over without too much trouble. What they also knew though, was that in the long term, the house of cards would eventually come crashing down. What was essential therefore, was that the collapse be seen as a result of the failure of capitalism, and not as a result of a switch in ideology. But as I´ve already explained, the timing had to be right.

Because they are still a few years away from their ultimate goal, and the ship is sinking fast, they needed to throw us a lifeline. The football world cup is seen by many as a life prolonging injection, something that is designed to keep the patient alive until the time to announce his demise is ripe.

If Cass Sunstein and Ben Shalom Bernanke have their way, that time is just around the corner.

Published by Piet The Pirate.

Posted by: Mrs Goldstein – on December 30, 2009.

[Via http://whitelocust.wordpress.com]

More News about Omidyar's Peer News

Obama Is Attempting A Constitutional Coup d'Etat

2010-03-20T03:45:00.000+02:00

What is currently happening in Washington regarding the Obamacare legislation is more than just an attempt to ram through a partisan, corrupt and unpopular bill. This is an attempt by the Obama-Pelosi-Reid leadership to overthrow the Constitutional provisions for legislation – an effective Constitutional coup d’etat.

The pro-government leftists are finally showing their true colors. They have been trying to mask their motives for years, but now they aren’t even trying to hide them. They have been weakening our Constitutional structures and the separation of powers for the past century while the rest of us looked on, and now they’re going for the jugular – a way to pass massive bills into law without even holding a recorded vote.

This is not a Republican or a Democrat issue. This is about preserving the only thing standing between us and a tyrannical Federal government that wants control over every aspect of our lives – the Constitution of the United States. Any supporters of these methods should stop and think about what might happen if this same power were wielded by the opposition in the same manner.

This is a dangerous and unnecessary course, and every citizen of the United States should oppose this. If a law cannot be passed at the Federal level with a broad consensus, it does not deserve to be passed into law. What is being done is a crime against the Constitution – treason – and Obama, Pelosi and Reid should absolutely be held to account.

[Via http://thehughesview.com]

TF2 releases first user-made content News | PC | Eurogamer

Obama: The Louisiana Purchase helps the victims of the earthquake in...Hawaii?

2010-03-18T11:58:00.000+02:00

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? What is this socialist tool talkin about? Quoth The One in his interview with FNC:

OBAMA: I am certain that we’ve made sure, for example, that any burdens on states are alleviated, when it comes to what they’re going to have to chip in to make sure that we’re giving subsidies to small businesses, and subsidies to individuals, for example.

BAIER: So the Connecticut deal is still in?

OBAMA: So that’s not — that’s not going to be something that is going to be in this final package. I think the same is true on all of these provisions. I’ll give you some exceptions though. Something that was called a special deal was for Louisiana. It was said that there were billions — millions of dollars going to Louisiana, this was a special deal. Well, in fact, that provision, which I think should remain in, said that if a state has been affected by a natural catastrophe, that has created a special health care emergency in that state, they should get help. Louisiana, obviously, went through Katrina, and they’re still trying to deal with the enormous challenges that were faced because of that. (CROSS TALK) OBAMA: That also — I’m giving you an example of one that I consider important. It also affects Hawaii, which went through an earthquake. So that’s not just a Louisiana provision. That is a provision that affects every state that is going through a natural catastrophe. Now I have said that there are certain provisions, like this Nebraska one, that don’t make sense. And they needed to be out. And we have removed those.

First of all, it’s a friggin’ lie that “we have removed” the special provisions like the Cornhusker Kickback and Gator Aid. They were vote buyoffs to get the Senate to pass ObamaCare, which it did…and now that very Senate bill is sitting in the House’s lap! Now while B.O.’s proposal may have been to eliminate those vote buyoffs, that’s irrelevant, because his bill isn’t the one that the House is considering to cram down our throats.

Now, on to the part where I make fun of this Mensa scholar…

If he was talking about Haiti instead of Hawaii, then how in the Sam Hill does passing ObamaCare or using Landrieu’s vote buyoff help the people of Haiti? I mean, unless Haiti is one of those 57 states I didn’t know about, this does jack squat for them.

If, however, he actually meant his “birth state” (and no, I’m not referring to Kenya, which I think is not the 57th state…yet), then Gateway Pundit finds a slight problem with his statement:

In 1868 there was a major earthquake in Hawaii that killed 77 people. In 1975 an earthquake in Hawaii killed 2 people.

Seriously…what in the blue Hades is this guy talking about???

Also, as Gateway Pundit mentions, B.O. said in this interview that “that provision, which I think should remain in, said that if a state has been affected by a natural catastrophe, that has created a special health care emergency in that state, they should get help.” Yet another damnable lie. Texas and Mississippi were states that were both affected by hurricanes (i.e. “natural catastrophes”) and declared to be major disaster areas…yet neither were covered by this provision of which he speaks. The provision refers to one state and one state alone: Louisiana. And why not? Louisiana was the only state along the Gulf coast who had a Senator ripe for a buyoff. Sens. Cornyn and Hutchison (TX), as well as Wicker and Cochran (MS) were firm opponents on ObamaCare. But not Landrieu.

Anywho, do you ever get the feeling that maybe, just maybe, our President doesn’t exactly adhere to the truth very often?

[Via http://crushliberalism.com]

NFS World closed beta begins News | MMO | Eurogamer

Filtered news 3/17/10

2010-03-18T03:49:00.000+02:00

If you’re still confused by the banking scandals that ruined our economy (as most of us are) Jon Stewart explains it very well (and as only he can)

Keep it klassy wingnuts Right wingers attacking 11-year-old boy whose mother died

The New York Times reports on just how deliberate the Republican strategy of obstructionism has been

Immediate improvements when health care reform finally passes:

* Prohibit pre-existing condition exclusions for children in all new plans;

* Provide immediate access to insurance for uninsured Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition through a temporary high-risk pool;

* Prohibit dropping people from coverage when they get sick in all individual plans;

* Lower seniors prescription drug prices by beginning to close the donut hole;

* Offer tax credits to small businesses to purchase coverage;

* Eliminate lifetime limits and restrictive annual limits on benefits in all plans;

* Require plans to cover an enrollee’s dependent children until age 26;

* Require new plans to cover preventive services and immunizations without cost-sharing;

* Ensure consumers have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to appeal new insurance plan decisions;

* Require premium rebates to enrolees from insurers with high administrative expenditures and require public disclosure of the percent of premiums applied to overhead costs.

Lying liars telling lies Fox News and other opponents of health care reform have taken to making up surveys and falsely attributing them to the New England Journal of Medicine.

Corruption watch How Pay-Day Lenders Weakened Financial Reform And Sway Lawmakers

Keep it klassy wingnuts Health care reform protesters mock man carrying sign saying he has Parkinson’s disease. David Kurtz at TPM comments on the video and notes that it’s really not about health care reform:

Those guys screaming about “handouts” would be perfectly at home at a rally in the 1990s, or the 80s, or the 70s and so on. This isn’t new, and it’s not original. The social and cultural currents running through this debate exist independent of the debate, and the anger can’t be tempered or avoided by procedural figleafs that few people inside Washington understand or by better messaging. At the end of the day, even abandoning reform won’t calm that kind of anger.

Crazy Shelly — living up to her name – Accuses The Media Of ‘Treason,’ Claims Use Of ‘Deem And Pass’ Warrants ‘Impeachment’

Catholic nuns break with bishops and urge passage of health care reform.

The bishops are increasingly alone in their position. Last week, both the Catholic Health Association and a group of 25 “pro-life Catholic theologians and Evangelical leaders” also sent Congress letters supporting the Senate bill.

Keep it klassy wingnuts Tasteless and dishonest — great combo!

“These attacks from a Washington-based front group are false, tasteless, and shameful,” said Congresswoman Dahlkemper. “In the past month, I’ve lost both my parents to cancer. It’s truly disgraceful for outside groups to then attack me for not being tough enough on cancer.”

After calling the self-executing rule “breathakingly unconstitutional,” some Rushlicans admit that, indeed, they’ve used it themselves. It’s also very, very common. Check out these charts.

Air Force Strategists Say US Should Unilaterally Cut Nukes By 90 Percent

Yeah, but climate change is a hoax…. Fargo Sees Fourth ‘Ten-Year Flood’ In A Row

Corporate media at play CNN Taps Unhinged Conservative Blogger Erick Erickson As Regular Political Commentator. Can we dispense with the “liberal media” crap now? Just how nutty is this wingnut? Check it out.

Social Justice Back in 1967, when Mitt Romney’s daddy was my governor, he said he’d quit the Mormon church rather than give up fighting for social justice and racial equality. That was my daddy’s GOP. Damn, but they have fallen a long way. Meanwhile:

Christian leaders of all denominations — from progressive Jim Wallis to arch-conservative Southern Baptist theologian Albert Mohler — have challenged Beck’s attack on social justice. Religious scholars of Beck’s adopted faith, the Church of Latter-Day Saints, have explained that social justice is essential to Mormonism.

Accidental honesty Rushlican Alexander (R-Tenn) admits the GOP is blocking health care reform merely for partisan gain

Hypocrisy watch Conservatives Who Demanded We ‘Listen To’ And ‘Stand Behind’ Gen. Petraeus Now Disregard Him

Lying liars telling lies No, dear Rushlicans, the health care reform bill does NOT fund abortions, and even your calling Dems “demons” doesn’t change that fact

Corporate media at play Once again, Brooks is wrong

Obama To Fox News: Voters Won’t Be Fooled On Health Care

In It For The Money? Birther’s Conservative PAC Spends Big On Salaries, Not So Much On Candidates

It’s about time Lawmakers introduce legislation outlawing Florida’s 33-year ban on gay adoptions.

It’s NOT the guys in uniform who are so cowardly as to fear homosexuality More Than 70% Of Iraq And Afghanistan Veterans Comfortable Serving Alongside Openly Gay Troops

[Via http://filterednews.wordpress.com]

MGS Peace Walker delayed 3 weeks News | PSP | Eurogamer

More sleazy backroom deals on Obamacare

2010-03-16T11:52:00.000+02:00

From Tapscott’s Copy Desk

Tapscott’s Copy Desk Fresh and insightful opinion from Tapscott’s Copy Desk, by the Washington Examiner’s Editorial Page Editor Mark Tapscott. Got a tip or an oped to place? Send an e-mail to mark.tapscott.

TODAY’S WASHINGTON EXAMINER EDITORIAL SECTION HIGHLIGHTS

More sleazy backroom deals on Obamacare

Examiner Editorial

"Lobbyists writing bills behind closed doors, special-interest deals to buy votes, campaign cash for support — wasn’t that what Obama and the Democrats in Congress ran against?"/a>

Enviros play dirty on coal, natural gas

Cal Thomas, Examiner Columnist

"Here’s a shocker: The Office of Management and Budget has calculated that about half of all federal employees do work that is not ‘inherently governmental.’"

Obama and Bush’s enemy combatant policyGene Healy, Examiner Columnist

"But love the Bush approach or hate it, if you’re drawing a sharp distinction between his policies and Obama’s, you’re misinformed at best."

A tale of two cities

Barbara Hollingsworth, Examiner Columnist

"Instead of being at each other’s throats, Democrats and Republicans in the oldest continuous legislative body in the Western Hemisphere worked together to close the largest budget deficit in Virginia’s history."

Talking points versus reality

Thomas Sowell, Examiner Columnist

"The Congressional Budget Office can only deal with the numbers that Congress supplies. Those numbers may well be consistent with each other, even if they are wholly inconsistent with anything that is likely to happen in the real world."

Yellen is spellin’ future inflation

Lawrence Kudlow, Examiner Columnist

"This is a crucial juncture. The Fed is going to encounter excruciatingly difficult problems as it deals with the magnitude and timing of its decisions to start withdrawing excess cash and raising the fed funds target rate."

Specter says Senegal is shaking down U.S. taxpayers

David Freddoso, Examiner Columnist

"Earlier this decade, Senegal was considered a model African nation, relatively well-governed. But experts say the nation’s progress has been derailed by top-level government corruption."

[Via http://freemadd.wordpress.com]

Bad News : CJR

What has Obama done in his time in office?

2010-03-16T03:56:00.000+02:00

I got into a discussion about this at work today, and if you reading this sorry bud, but I didn’t know much about what he’s really done I just know he’s done a lot and that he’s done more then many Presidents in the past.

I think we all don’t really know what he’s done because they have been minor changes that don’t affect our daily lives. I guess what we were looking for from this president was for day to night kind of change and now that we don’t see it we now criticize him as doing nothing.

Just the mere fact that he is still trying to pass a Healthcare Reform and tried to do it at first in with a Bi-partisan favor is enough. We’ve had many Presidents not even try to take this challenge and this President took it and looks like will deliver, of course not the one we were hoping but if we can go that direction then I’m happy.

But in case you don’t know what he’s done here is a list I got from http://www.whatisobamadoing.com/2009/05/20/so-what-has-obama-really-done-so-far/

Reversed restrictions on stem cell research
Appointed an assistant to the president for science and technology policy
Created a foreclosure prevention fund for homeowners
Expanded loan programs for small businesses
Extended and indexed the 2007 Alternative Minimum Tax patch
Expanded eligibility for State Children’s Health Insurance Fund (SCHIP)
Expanded funding to train primary care providers and public health practitioners
Directed military leaders to end war in Iraq
Sent two additional brigades to Afghanistan
As promised gave a speech at a major Islamic forum in the first 100 days of his administration
Granted Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send money to Cuba
Restored funding for the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (Byrne/JAG) program
Released presidential records
Now requires new hires to sign a form affirming their hiring was not due to political affiliation or contributions
Pushed for enactment of Matthew Shepard Act, which expands hate crime law to include sexual orientation and other factors
Created a White House Office on Urban Policy
Supported increased funding for the NEA
Funded a major expansion of AmeriCorps
Worked to overturn Ledbetter vs. Goodyear
Banned lobbyist gifts to executive employees
Pledged to weatherize 1 million homes per year
Invested in all types of alternative energy
Enacted tax credit for consumers for plug-in hybrid cars
Provided grants to encourage energy-efficient building codes
As promised appointed at least one Republican to the cabinet
Extended unemployment insurance benefits and temporarily suspended taxes on these benefits.

[Via http://jeyburd.wordpress.com]

South Africa Politics and News Monitor – Cracks are showing in ...

When Will Jews Wake Up?

2010-03-14T11:12:00.000+02:00

When will Jews wake up and understand that the Obama Administration does not have the interests of Israel foremost in their middle east strategy.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was strongly critical of Israel’s decision to build housing in East Jerusalem. Ms. Clinton did not want the building to jeopardize the peace process. If one does an honest review of the history of the peace process, beginning with the Oslo Accord, a prudent question becomes “What Process?”

How do you have a process when one of the parties to the process avows the destruction of the other. Do Jews need to be reminded of the name Dalal Mughrabi and the deadliest terror attack in Israeli history? Mughrabi was the leader of a Palestinian gang of terrorists who went on a rampage that killed 37 citizens of Israel (13 were children) and 1 American. Perhaps since the attack took place in 1978 it has been forgotten. It is still fresh in the minds of the Palestinians who dedicated a public square in Mughrabi’s memory this week.

Which brings us to the question; When will Jews wake up? You overwhelmingly supported the election of Barack Obama, and election after election vote Democrat. In return the current administration admonishes Israel for building homes while practicing a feckless policy against Iran and their nuclear ambitions.

Will it take the use of those Iranian nukes, against those same Israeli buildings, for Jews to wake up?

[Via http://garneringrightideas.com]

Molyneux: Natal is bigger step than Move News | Xbox 360 | Eurogamer

Plan presented to White House and Congress pays for the public option w/o new taxes

2010-03-14T03:40:00.000+02:00

The government already has the money to pay for universal health and at the same time reduce the carbon footprint of office buildings by 50%.

The Federal government pays for almost one billion square feet of office space. Most office space sits unused 70% of the time because most white collar work is scheduled for only one shift per day or only 45 hours out of a 168 hour week. 30% efficiency is completely unacceptable in today’s economy. We could schedule 2 shifts of white collar workers, thus increasing our efficiency by 100% and reducing our carbon footprint by 50%. We could cut the cost of overhead for each employee by 40 to 50%, half as much infrastructure, half as much office space, half as many computers and supplies. With the overhead for each of our 2 million Federal workers approaching $40,000 per year, the potential savings could be $20 billion per year, enough to pay for health care reform.

If extended to private industry, this simple plan will:

•Save federal gov a half trillion dollars in next 10 years

•Exactly amount needed for universal healthcare

•Reduce white-collar overhead costs by 50%

•Reduce carbon footprint of office space by 50%

•Reduce budget deficits for most state governments

•Reduce our dependence on foreign oil

•Make workers competitive in the global economy

•Improve profits for all businesses and

•Increase tax receipts for state/fed governments

•Businesses can hire more employees & lower prices

For details and comments see:

http://whitecollargreenspace.blogspot.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/greenspaceguy

[Via http://whitecollargreenspaceguy.wordpress.com]

Browse Newspapers in Google News Archive

The Coffee Party

2010-03-13T11:57:00.000+02:00

Today is the national launch of the Coffee Party; the so-called grassroots organization that is out to silence the Tea Party. In reality it is a healthcare movement to push Obamacare down the throats of the American people.

This group is certainly pro-Obama, pro-government control of everything and certainly not grassroots. Listen very carefully to the choice of words used to describe the organization and to what exactly they hope to achieve. They themselves will convince you of their underhanded agenda; you will find this ’coffee’ very bitter.

[Via http://acitizenusa.wordpress.com]

The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » The Quintessential TV News ...

Lesser known fetishes. Today fetish: laundry.

2010-03-13T03:47:00.000+02:00

I knew a girl, that had a laundry fetish.

If we went to the grocery store,

she would always wander off, I would

find her sniffing laundry detergent,

and fabric softeners. I once watched

her do this for like twenty minutes.

It was the craziest thing I had ever

seen. When she saw me walking

toward her, a look of panic and guilt

crossed her face.

I told her I had a poor sense of smell,

and asked if she would pick the best

detergent for me.

Her face lit up immediately,

she appeared weak in the knees.

She had that look on her face

that said,

“cool, you’re into this too”.

(you all know exactly which

look I’m talking about)

She opened bottle after bottle,

closing her eyes as she drew

the scent in her nose.

she gave in depth details,

reminiscent of a wine tasting.

It was really hot actually,

she was getting so turned on.

I have never been to her house,

when the washer and dryer were

not running.

She would always try to start

a load of laundry prior to having sex.

She has stopped in the middle of sex

to put clothes in the dryer.

I have seen her take clothes off hangers

and out of drawers and throw them

in a laundry basket,

and then put them in the washing machine.

She would always ask me if I had any

laundry she could home with her to wash.

Fuck, I miss her.

[Via http://leroyscandal.wordpress.com]

Durian » Blog Archive » News about Chaos & Evolutions

Extreme Makeover: Obamacare Edition

2010-03-11T11:23:00.000+02:00

Obama’s out trying his damnedest to whip the crowd into a frenzy to “move that bus” on the health care make-over , but no one wants to see what’s on the other side. As he doubles down on shoddy construction, folks have wizened up and have left the lot.

Would you want to "move that bus" if you knew this was on the other side? Welcome to Obamacare.

After vehemently disagreeing with my father-in-law all week long regarding every aspect of Obamacare, I offer this Walter Williams piece on rights and wishes. With his usual ease and eloquence, my favorite economics professor writes:

Say a person, let’s call him Harry, suffers from diabetes and he has no means to pay a laboratory for blood work, a doctor for treatment and a pharmacy for medication. Does Harry have a right to XYZ lab’s and Dr. Jones’ services and a prescription from a pharmacist? And, if those services are not provided without charge, should Harry be able to call for criminal sanctions against those persons for violating his rights to health care?

You say, “Williams, that would come very close to slavery if one person had the right to force someone to serve him without pay.” You’re right. Suppose instead of Harry being able to force a lab, doctor and pharmacy to provide services without pay, Congress uses its taxing power to take a couple of hundred dollars out of the paycheck of some American to give to Harry so that he could pay the lab, doctor and pharmacist. Would there be any difference in principle, namely forcibly using one person to serve the purposes of another? There would be one important strategic difference, that of concealment. This resonates for myriad reasons:

True rights, such as those in our Constitution, or those considered to be natural or human rights, exist simultaneously among people. That means exercise of a right by one person does not diminish those held by another. In other words, my rights to speech or travel impose no obligations on another except those of non-interference. If we apply ideas behind rights to health care to my rights to speech or travel, my free speech rights would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with an auditorium, television studio or radio station. My right to travel freely would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with airfare and hotel accommodations.

Liberals equate free speech with the Fairness Doctrine–their speech is free, but not that of Conservatives. They need government intervention to succeed.

More Williams:

To argue that people have a right that imposes obligations on another is an absurd concept. A better term for new-fangled rights to health care, decent housing and food is wishes. If we called them wishes, I would be in agreement with most other Americans for I, too, wish that everyone had adequate health care, decent housing and nutritious meals. However, if we called them human wishes, instead of human rights, there would be confusion and cognitive dissonance. The average American would cringe at the thought of government punishing one person because he refused to be pressed into making someone else’s wish come true.

Wow. And how many people voted for Obama for that express purpose–to make wishes come true?

[Via http://politicaljunkiemom.wordpress.com]

StatusNet Signs Up ABC News And Sh*t My Dad Says For Hosted ...

Genghis Khan could not hold onto Afghanistan. Neither will the United States

2010-03-11T03:56:00.000+02:00

by Dahr Jamail:

The United States Empire is following a long line of empires and conquerors that have met their end in Afghanistan. The Median and Persian Empires, Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, the Indo-Greeks, Turks, Mongols, British and Soviets all met the end of their ambitions in Afghanistan.

On September 7 the Swedish aid agency Swedish Committee for Afghanistan reported that the previous week US soldiers raided one of its hospitals. According to the director of the aid agency, Anders Fange, troops stormed through both the men’s and women’s wards, where they frantically searched for wounded Taliban fighters.

Soldiers demanded that hospital administrators inform the military of any incoming patients who might be insurgents, after which the military would then decide if said patients would be admitted or not. Fange called the incident “not only a clear violation of globally recognized humanitarian principles about the sanctity of health facilities and staff in areas of conflict, but also a clear breach of the civil-military agreement” between nongovernmental organizations and international forces.

Fange said that US troops broke down doors and tied up visitors and hospital staff.

Impeding operations at medical facilities in Afghanistan directly violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which strictly forbids attacks on emergency vehicles and the obstruction of medical operations during wartime.

Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, a public affairs officer for the US Navy, confirmed the raid, and told The Associated Press, “Complaints like this are rare.”

Despite Sidenstricker’s claim that “complaints like this” are rare in Afghanistan, they are, in fact, common. Just as they are in Iraq, the other occupation. A desperate conventional military, when losing a guerilla war, tends to toss international law out the window. Yet even more so when the entire occupation itself is a violation of international law.

Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild and also a Truthout contributor, is very clear about the overall illegality of the invasion and ongoing occupation of Afghanistan by the United States.

“The UN Charter is a treaty ratified by the United States and thus part of US law,” Cohn, who is also a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and recently co-authored the book “Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent” said, “Under the charter, a country can use armed force against another country only in self-defense or when the Security Council approves. Neither of those conditions was met before the United States invaded Afghanistan. The Taliban did not attack us on 9/11. Nineteen men – 15 from Saudi Arabia – did, and there was no imminent threat that Afghanistan would attack the US or another UN member country. The council did not authorize the United States or any other country to use military force against Afghanistan. The US war in Afghanistan is illegal.”

Thus, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, along with the ongoing slaughter of Afghan civilians and raiding hospitals, are in violation of international law as well as the US Constitution.

And of course the same applies for Iraq.

Let us recall November 8, 2004, when the US military launched its siege of Fallujah. The first thing done by the US military was to invade and occupy Fallujah General Hospital. Then, too, like this recent incident in Afghanistan,doctors, patients and visitors alike had their hands tied and they were laid on the ground, oftentimes face down, and held at gunpoint.

During my first four trips to Iraq, I commonly encountered hospital staff who reported US military raids on their facilities. US soldiers regularly entered hospitals to search for wounded resistance fighters.

Doctors from Fallujah General Hospital, as well as others who worked in clinics throughout the city during both US sieges of Fallujah in 2004, reported that US Marines obstructed their services and that US snipers intentionally targeted their clinics and ambulances.

“The Marines have said they didn’t close the hospital, but essentially they did,” Dr. Abdulla, an orthopedic surgeon at Fallujah General Hospital who spoke on condition of using a different name, told Truthout in May 2004 of his experiences in the hospital. “They closed the bridge which connects us to the city [and] closed our road … the area in front of our hospital was full of their soldiers and vehicles.”

He added that this prevented countless patients who desperately needed medical care from receiving medical care. “Who knows how many of them died that we could have saved,” said Dr. Abdulla. He also blamed the military for shooting at civilian ambulances, as well as shooting near the clinic at which he worked. “Some days we couldn’t leave, or even go near the door because of the snipers,” he said, “They were shooting at the front door of the clinic!”

Dr. Abdulla also said that US snipers shot and killed one of the ambulance drivers of the clinic where he worked during the fighting.

Dr. Ahmed, who also asked that only his first name be used because he feared US military reprisals, said, “The Americans shot out the lights in the front of our hospital. They prevented doctors from reaching the emergency unit at the hospital, and we quickly began to run out of supplies and much-needed medications.” He also stated that several times Marines kept the physicians in the residence building, thereby intentionally prohibiting them from entering the hospital to treat patients.

“All the time they came in, searched rooms and wandered around,” said Dr. Ahmed, while explaining how US troops often entered the hospital in order to search for resistance fighters. Both he and Dr. Abdulla said the US troops never offered any medicine or supplies to assist the hospital when they carried out their incursions. Describing a situation that has occurred in other hospitals, he added, “Most of our patients left the hospital because they were afraid.”

Dr. Abdulla said that one of their ambulance drivers was shot and killed by US snipers while he was attempting to collect the wounded near another clinic inside the city.

“The major problem we found were the American snipers,” said Dr. Rashid, who worked at another clinic in the Jumaria Quarter of Falluja. “We saw them on top of the buildings near the mayor’s office.”

Dr. Rashid told of another incident in which a US sniper shot an ambulance driver in the leg. The ambulance driver survived, but a man who came to his rescue was shot by a US sniper and died on the operating table after Dr. Rashid and others had worked to save him. “He was a volunteer working on the ambulance to help collect the wounded,” Dr. Rashid said sadly.

During Truthout’s visit to the hospital in May 2004, two ambulances in the parking lot sat with bullet holes in their windshields, while others had bullet holes in their back doors and sides.

“I remember once we sent an ambulance to evacuate a family that was bombed by an aircraft,” said Dr. Abdulla while continuing to speak about the US snipers, “The ambulance was sniped – one of the family died, and three were injured by the firing.”

Neither Dr. Abdulla nor Dr. Rashid said they knew of any medical aid being provided to their hospital or clinics by the US military. On this topic, Dr. Rashid said flatly, “They send only bombs, not medicine.”

Chuwader General Hospital in Sadr City also reported similar findings to Truthout, as did other hospitals throughout Baghdad.

Dr. Abdul Ali, the ex-chief surgeon at Al-Noman Hospital, admitted that US soldiers had come to the hospital asking for information about resistance fighters. To this he said, “My policy is not to give my patients to the Americans. I deny information for the sake of the patient.”

During an interview in April 2004, he admitted this intrusion occurred fairly regularly and interfered with patients receiving medical treatment. He noted, “Ten days ago this happened – this occurred after people began to come in from Fallujah, even though most of them were children, women and elderly.”

A doctor at Al-Kerkh Hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity, shared a similar experience of the problem that appears to be rampant throughout much of the country: “We hear of Americans removing wounded Iraqis from hospitals. They are always coming here and asking us if we have injured fighters.”

Speaking about the US military raid of the hospital in Afghanistan, UN spokesman Aleem Siddique said he was not aware of the details of the particular incident, but that international law requires the military to avoid operations in medical facilities.

“The rules are that medical facilities are not combat areas. It’s unacceptable for a medical facility to become an area of active combat operations,” he said. “The only exception to that under the Geneva Conventions is if a risk is being posed to people.”

“There is the Hippocratic oath,” Fange added, “If anyone is wounded, sick or in need of treatment … if they are a human being, then they are received and treated as they should be by international law.”

These are all indications of a US Empire in decline. Another recent sign of US desperation in Afghanistan was the bombing of two fuel tanker trucks that the Taliban had captured from NATO. US warplanes bombed the vehicles, from which impoverished local villagers were taking free gas, incinerating as many as 150 civilians, according to reports from villagers.

And today, the US Empire is on the fast track of its demise. A recent article by Tom Englehardt provides us more key indicators of this:

In 2002 there were 5,200 US soldiers in Afghanistan. By December of this year, there will be 68,000.

Compared to the same period in 2008, Taliban attacks on coalition forces using Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) has risen 114 percent.

Compared to the same period in 2008, coalition deaths from IED attacks have increased sixfold.

Overall Taliban attacks on coalition forces in the first five months of 2009, compared to the same period last year, have increased 59 percent.

Genghis Khan could not hold onto Afghanistan.

Neither will the United States, particularly when in its desperation to continue its illegal occupation, it tosses aside international law, along with its own Constitution.

[Via http://thepeopleofpakistan.wordpress.com]

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 3/10 - Arrowhead Pride

Washington Still Fiddling

2010-03-09T11:52:00.000+02:00

Bob Herbert’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times echos what we discussed here last week—it’s time for Congress and President Obama to get past health care reform and move on to jobs. Please.

“The Obama administration and Democrats in general are in trouble because they are not urgently and effectively addressing the issue that most Americans want them to: the frightening economic insecurity that has put a chokehold on millions of American families.

The economy shed 36,000 jobs last month, and that was trumpeted in the press as good news. Well, after your house has burned down I suppose it’s good news that the flames may finally be flickering out. But once you realize that it will take 11 million or more new jobs to get us back to where we were when the recession began, you begin to understand that we’re not really making any headway at all.

…Instead of focusing with unwavering intensity on this increasingly tragic situation, making it their top domestic priority, President Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill have spent astonishing amounts of time and energy, and most of their political capital, on an obsessive quest to pass a health care bill.”

“Obsessive quest” is right. But sadly I don’t see it ending any time soon. Now the talk is to have health care done by Easter. Anybody who believes that believes in the Easter bunny. But never mind, Congress. Take your time. The good economic news is that another million people stopped looking for work last month and no longer count in the unemployment statistics. Hooray.

By the way, what happened to “jobs must be our number one focus in 2010″ from the State of the Union speech in January? Just curious.

[Via http://desperadosoutpost.com]

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Obama and Congress Respond To The Kerchner Appeal

2010-03-09T03:32:00.000+02:00

Mario Apuzzo Esq

Obama and Congress File Their Opposition Brief to the Kerchner Appeal.

Today, March 8, 2009, putative President Barack Obama and Congress filed their Opposition Brief to the Kerchner appeal currently pending in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The brief may be viewed at this link. We now have until March 22, 2010, to file our reply brief which will address the arguments the defendants have made in their opposition brief.

The defendants brief is a presentation of general statements of the law of standing. Appealing to what other courts have done, the defendants basically tell the court that the Kerchner case should be dismissed because all the other Obama cases have been dismissed. Its main point is that the Kerchner plaintiffs have not proven that they have standing because they failed to show that they have suffered a concrete and particularized injury

via A Place to Ask Questions to Get the Right Answers: Obama and Congress File Their Opposition Brief to the Kerchner Appeal.

[Via http://aconservativeedge.com]

PressThink: News Without the Narrative Needed to Make Sense of the ...

03/07/2010

2010-03-07T11:56:00.000+02:00

We’re in a rally, yes – but a cautious rally. These are some things you should know BEFORE you invest this time. Read on …

Written: Sunday, Mar 07, 2010 (U.S. 10am EST)

IN MY OPINION:

The temperature of the market is in the good range for continuing an uptrend. Four sectors are outperforming the S&P 500 by a wide margin, while five sectors are doing poorly.

Those outperforming are the Consumer Discretionary Sector, the Industrials Sector, Materials, and the Financial Sector.

The Consumer Discretionary Sector (the leader, right now) includes such stocks as Disney, McDonald’s, Target’s, Amazon, and Home Depot.

On the lackluster side are the Technology, Consumer Staples, Energy, Healthcare, and the Utilities Sectors.

Indicators showing Market Breath are mostly all positive. I would expect this rally to continue, with certain reservations about the future.

Charting tells you what is going on today, but you can’t use charts in a vacuum. There are other things in the future that we are aware of, that could cause some hesitation in the forward progress.

Namely – the market began this rise last March 2009, after the Great Crash of 2008-2009. The first rally had a tremendous amount of volume. The next rally, and each succeeding rally, has had less and less volume.

The rally that started a few weeks ago had the least amount of positive volume of all. Now, either buyers have used up all their cash to buy stocks, OR … there aren’t that many buyers left out there.

Mutual funds, for instance, have almost all their cash invested, and can’t push the market much higher with additional buying. Their only alternative is to sell off good stocks and take a profit in order to raise cash to buy more during the next round.

In any case, weak volume on the upside is a cause for concern.

Add to that, the fact that many long-term buyers that got in last year are coming due for their long-term capital gains. They could be potential sellers – as the rally moves upward.

Low volume and tax-selling are a couple of future indications that THIS rally may not be as extended as some people might think.

In the meantime, enjoy the profit potential – but with a cautious hand on the SELL trigger.

Stay Tuned !

Jack

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

[Via http://exposed2010.wordpress.com]

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 3/6 - Arrowhead Pride

Obama Message Maven Finds Fingers Pointing at Him

2010-03-07T04:02:00.000+02:00

Obama Message Maven Finds Fingers Pointing at Him

By MARK LEIBOVICH

WASHINGTON — David Axelrod was sitting at his desk on a recent afternoon — tie crooked, eyes droopy and looking more burdened than usual. He had just been watching some genius on MSNBC insist that he and President Obama’s other top aides were failing miserably and should be replaced.

“Typical Washington junk we have to deal with,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview. The president is deft at blocking out such noise, he added, suddenly brightening. “I love the guy,” he said, and in the space of five minutes, repeated the sentiment twice.

Critics, pointing to the administration’s stalled legislative agenda, falling poll numbers and muddled messaging, suggest that kind of devotion is part of the problem at the White House. Recent news reports have cast the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, as the administration’s chief pragmatist, and Mr. Axelrod, by implication, as something of a swooning loyalist. “I’ve heard him be called a ‘Moonie,’ ” dismissed Mr. Axelrod’s close friend, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. Or as the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, joked, “the guy who walks in front of the president with rose petals.”

Still, it is a charge that infuriates Mr. Axelrod, the president’s closest aide, longest-serving adviser and political alter ego. “I guess I have been castigated for believing too deeply in the president,” he said, lapsing into the sarcasm he tends to deploy when playing defense.

No one has taken the perceived failings of the administration more personally or shown the strain as plainly as Mr. Axelrod, who as White House senior adviser oversees every aspect of how Mr. Obama is presented. As such, Mr. Axelrod, the president’s mustachioed message maven, has felt the brunt of criticism over what many view as the administration’s failure to clearly define and disseminate Mr. Obama’s agenda and accomplishments for the country.

“The Obama White House has lost the narrative in the way that the Obama campaign never did,” said James Morone, a political scientist at Brown University. “They essentially took the president’s great strength as a messenger and failed to use it smartly.”

Mr. Axelrod said he accepts some blame for what he called “communication failures,” though he acknowledges bafflement that the administration’s efforts to stimulate the economy in a crisis, overhaul health care and prosecute two wars have been so routinely framed by opponents as the handiwork of a big-government, soft-on-terrorism, politics-of-the-past ideologue.

“For me, the question is, why haven’t we broken through more than we have?” Mr. Axelrod said. “Why haven’t we broken through?”

That question has dogged Mr. Axelrod in recent months and has preoccupied Mr. Obama’s inner circle, fueling speculation that the vaunted “No Drama Obama” team might be fracturing. Not surprisingly, the White House has no patience for this.

“You guys want to fit people into boxes and categories that are just not accurate,” Mr. Emanuel said.

Mr. Axelrod would not discuss what counsel he offered to Mr. Obama, though he denies any “fissure with my buddy Rahm” and any charge that he is too infatuated with the president to recognize the political risks of his ambitious agenda.

“Believe me, if we were charting this administration as a political exercise, the first thing we would have done would not have been a massive recovery act, stabilizing the banks and helping to keep the auto companies from collapsing,” he said. “Those would not even be the first hundred things he would want to do.”

But Mr. Axelrod argued that the president, confronted with “breathtaking challenges,” did not have the luxury of moving more slowly or methodically.

In an interview in his office, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.” He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”

When asked how he would assess his performance, Mr. Axelrod shrugged. “I’m not going to judge myself on that score,” he said. But then he shot back: “Have I succeeded in reversing a 30-year trend of skepticism and cynicism about government? I confess that I have not. Maybe next year.”

The criticism of the administration’s communication strategy — leveled by impatient Democrats, gleeful Republicans, bloggers and cable chatterers — clearly stings Mr. Axelrod, as well as the circle of family, friends and fans he has acquired over three decades in politics as a consultant and, before that, a reporter for The Chicago Tribune.

“Every time I hear that the White House is getting the message wrong, it breaks my heart,” said Mr. Axelrod’s sister, Joan, an educational therapist in Boston.

Ms. Axelrod says that while her brother is devoted to Mr. Obama, he is not a sycophant. She paused when asked whether he admired the president too much. “He is very, very loyal, sometimes to a fault,” she said.

Added Mr. Gibbs: “The list of people who have to deliver bad news to the president is very small, and David is first on that list. I’m probably second.”

Mr. Axelrod’s friends worry about the toll of his job — citing his diet (cold-cut-enriched), his weight (20 pounds heavier than at the start of the presidential campaign), sleep deprivation (five fitful hours a night), separation from family (most back home in Chicago) and the fact that at 55, he is considerably older than many of the wunderkind workaholics of the West Wing. He wakes at 6 in his rented condominium just blocks from the White House and typically returns around 11.

Unlike other presidential alter egos, Mr. Axelrod is not viewed as a surrogate “brain” (like Karl Rove), a suspicious outsider (like Dick Morris in the Clinton White House) or a co-president (James Baker in the first Bush White House). Sometimes portrayed as a bare-knuckled Chicago operative, he is also a bantering walrus of a man in mustard-stained sleeves who describes himself as a “kibbitzer,” not a “policy guy.”

Sitting at his desk next door to the Oval Office last week, he was tearing into a five-inch corned beef sandwich on rye with a Flintstone-size turkey drumstick waiting on deck. “I am the poster child for the president’s obesity program,” he said.

A few minutes later, Mr. Obama walked in unannounced, scattering two aides like startled pigeons. “Hey,” Mr. Axelrod said by way of greeting (no “sir” or “Mr. President.”) Mr. Obama surveyed the spread on Mr. Axelrod’s desk with a slight smirk.

“What is this, King Arthur’s court?” he asked, then pulled Mr. Axelrod aside to talk about a health care speech he was about to deliver.

Mr. Axelrod is often at the president’s side; he sits in on policy and national security meetings and is routinely the last person he talks to before making a decision. He directs the administration’s external presentation, overseeing polls, focus groups and speeches and appearing on the Sunday shows. Mr. Emanuel describes Mr. Axelrod as “an integrator of the three P’s” — press, policy and politics — “and how they make a whole.”

White House officials describe Mr. Axelrod’s focus as big themes rather than day-to-day sound bites. There has been no shortage of Democrats willing to second-guess his messaging approach.

“They made a big mistake right out of the box with the Inaugural Address,” said former Senator Bob Kerrey, adding that a president pledging bipartisanship should not have disparaged the previous administration in his speech, as many listeners believed Mr. Obama did.

Chris Lehane, a former top aide to Vice President Al Gore, says the administration should tell a clearer story. “They have been enormously capable in dealing with the day-to-day challenges of the government,” Mr. Lehane said. “But they don’t seem to get the credit they deserve for that because they’ve communicated no overarching big idea or philosophical framework of where they want to take the country.”

Others question what happened to the Mr. Axelrod who so effectively marketed Mr. Obama, the candidate, as a change agent. He and some defenders, though, say that trying to explain a president who is dealing with a fusillade of difficult governing issues is far different.

“In a campaign, you’re not held to the same standard of actually doing what you say you’re going to do,” said Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director and Obama campaign adviser. Mr. Axelrod can still sound like the self-described idealist who developed Mr. Obama’s campaign message, expressing impatience with what he calls “the gritty pragmatist school that says you have just got to accept the system” in Washington. “I’m not surprised that there are people who never liked us in the first place trying to have a big ‘I told you so’ about how you really can’t change the system,” he said.

Mr. Axelrod has never lived in Washington before and has come to loathe what he calls “the palace intrigue pathology of Washington.”

“I know I’m not cut out for this town,” though he has respect for the people who work there, said Mr. Axelrod, who tries to spend one week a month with his wife, Susan, who lives in Chicago, as do two of his three children.

Mr. Axelrod is tired, but he says that is nothing new. “I have dealt with a lot of ‘real stuff’ in my life,” he said, referring to his daughter’s long struggle with epilepsy, his father’s suicide and his wife’s bout with breast cancer. “The disapprobation of some folks in Washington doesn’t seem very meaningful.”

His friends still worry. “I think he’s getting close to a burnout kind of thing,” said Sam Smith, a former Chicago Tribune sports writer, basing this not on anything Mr. Axelrod told him. Mr. Smith added that he speaks only sporadically to his friend these days, mainly about sports, and that Mr. Axelrod has always driven himself exceedingly hard.

As Mr. Obama began his term, Mr. Axelrod told him he would stay at the White House for a finite period — believed to be about two years — and that time frame remains unchanged. “I’ve learned more things in the last year than I will ever learn in my life,” he said. “It’s just something you can’t do forever, or it will kill you.”

[Via http://bsimmons.wordpress.com]

Sony announces SOCOM 4 News | PS3 | Eurogamer

Obama wants a "straight answer" from health insurers...

2010-03-06T19:47:00.000+02:00

clipped from www.reuters.com President Barack Obama attacked the country’s biggest health insurers on Saturday for failing to give him a “straight answer” on why they were “arbitrarily and massively” hiking their premiums.

Obama’s renewed criticism of insurers comes as he tries to rally support among Americans and lawmakers within his own Democratic Party for a final push to pass a bill reforming the troubled $2.5 trillion healthcare industry.

The president and his health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, met the chief executives of four of the largest U.S. health insurance companies — Aetna Inc, Cigna Corp, UnitedHealth Group Inc and WellPoint Inc — at the White House this week. “They couldn’t give me a straight answer as to why they keep arbitrarily and massively raising premiums — by as much as 60 percent in states like Illinois,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address. “If we do not act, they will continue to do this.” There’s more HERE.

[Via http://underthelobsterscope.wordpress.com]

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 3/6 - Arrowhead Pride

On David Brooks, Quisling Punks, and the Course of Human Events

2010-03-06T03:56:00.000+02:00

Who other but David Brooks could write this swill?

Brace yourselves: Tea Partiers are now inherently anticonservative.

But the Tea Partiers are closer to the New Left. They don’t seek to form a counter-establishment because they don’t believe in establishments or in authority structures. They believe in the spontaneous uprising of participatory democracy. They believe in mass action and the politics of barricades, not in structure and organization. As one activist put it recently on a Tea Party blog: “We reject the idea that the Tea Party Movement is ‘led’ by anyone other than the millions of average citizens who make it up.”

For this reason, both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.

What’s most funny about this? The radical Lefties in the White House are doing their damnedest to tear down our democracy–the Constitution, social structures, institutions, and just authorities–in order to impose their own socialist vision. Conservatives believe in the Constitution, Mr. Brooks, and our God-given rights. And if the social structures, institutions, and just authorities have been completely and utterly corrupted by liberals and infected with politically correct group-think, then they need to be replaced.

That’s right replaced. À la Dan Riehl:

Reconcile this, you distasteful, malevolent little quisling punk – a timely reminder of some words I never thought would have such import during my lifetime.

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

The cause is well known and it is just. When the alleged leader of a democratic republic places his own wishes so above those of the complete body politic, he is no longer worthy of the title, leader, no matter what office he might occupy.

Quisling. My new word of the day. More:

This neophyte, this joke we have in the White House has absolutely no idea of the force and the rage he is about to unleash on him and his entire political party. If there are not enough responsible adults left within his party to rein in this accidental, affirmative action jerk, this self-styled, extremely flawed little man, then his party is worthless to America. It deserves to be marginalized electorally and, ultimately, utterly destroyed, before being relegated to the dung heap of history with the rest of the marxist, socialist clowns Americans have dispatched before.

Read the rest. Hat tip: The Anchoress.

[Via http://politicaljunkiemom.wordpress.com]

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Good news: Pop stars now posing in ...

DailyFinance: (Financial Crisis) One Year Later: Are We Socialist Yet?

2010-03-04T19:44:00.000+02:00

via dailyfinance:

Of all the effects of 2008’s economic meltdown, the most significant might be the growing belief that the country is now on the road to socialism. Within days of the government’s 2008 bailout of Sallie Mae (SLM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), the media began to resound with complaints about the country’s supposed shift leftward; over the next few months, investors and commentators began declaring that the United States was now more socialist than Canada and more communist than China.

The first problem with this pink panic lies in its assumption that capitalism and socialism are irreconcilable enemies, that markets are either completely free or completely government-controlled. The truth, however, is far more complex: after all, if socialism and capitalism were such diametric opposites, then one could argue that the first time the government paid an employee, gave a contract to private industry, or loaned money to a failing company, it effectively made the leap into socialism. If this was the case, then America has been socialist for most of its history.

A more useful, traditional definition of socialism holds that a socialist system must fulfill three basic tenets. The public — or, in this case, the government — must own the means of production, control the means of production, and distribute the profits of production to the general population.

[Via http://pneumaticaddict.wordpress.com]

Infinity Ward bosses suing Activision News | Eurogamer

The Chalice Show - Patriot's Heart Broadcasting - BlogTalkRadio Network - 9:45 PM EDT Sunday 30 Aug 2009 - Update on Kerchner v Obama & Congress

2010-03-04T03:53:00.000+02:00

Originally Written & Posted by CDR Kerchner @ Apuzo1.BlogSpot.com: Sunday, August 30, 2009 @ 4:21 PM

The Chalice Show – Patriot’s Heart Broadcasting – BlogTalkRadio Network – 9:45 PM EDT Sunday 30 Aug 2009 – Update on Kerchner v Obama & Congress The Chalice Show – Patriot’s Heart Broadcasting – BlogTalkRadio Network 9 to 11 p.m. EDT Sunday 30 Aug 2009 – Kerchner et al v. Obama & Congress lawsuit. Atty Mario Apuzzo and Charles Kerchner, Lead Plaintiff will be the guests for the second hour of the show at 10 p.m. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/PatriotsHeartNetwork/2009/08/31/The-Chalice-Show.

Charles Kerchner, Lead Plaintiff

Help the Cause: http://www.protectourliberty.org/

####

[Via http://cdrkerchner.wordpress.com]

Platinum's Vanquish for Japan this winter News | Eurogamer

Obama and Clinton offer support to Tiger Woods

2010-03-02T11:08:00.000+02:00

New York: US President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton have come out in support of Golfer Tiger Woods, who has been under fire from several quarters for his sex affairs with many women.

“President Obama made a personal call to offer encouragement. So did Bill Clinton, whose experience might be particularly instructive”, reported the Golf Digest magazine. Both leaders

The Golf Digest also confirmed that Tiger Woods visited the Gentle Path clinic in Mississippi for sex rehab.

After tendering a public televised apology on February 19, Tiger Woods spent a week with his wife Elin Nordegren and two children at Scottsdale, Arizona. Later, Elin returned to her Florida home.

[Via http://newshyderabad.wordpress.com]

Facebook-Like News Feed Headlines First Round Capital's Redesigned ...

Tea Party - Obama and the SEIU Unions and Why?

2010-03-02T03:35:00.000+02:00

photo taken by me in Durham at Congressman David Price Town Hall on Health care, check out SEIU union member checking us out LOL

If you happened to miss Glenn Beck tonight, it was one of the most important shows of his career. He revealed why Obama is so compelled to pass Health Care Reform.

The whole reason is that the unions are obligated in their pensions to money they don’t have.

The union pensions are underfunded and if healthcare is passed, they will be off the hook for the health care portion of their contracted pensions.

That is why the SEIU union boss is the MOST Frequent visitor to the white house.

And now we know the rest of the story

[Via http://randysright.wordpress.com]

What's the Good News at the New York Times? | Peter Kafka ...

U.S. Economy Grew at 5.9%

2010-02-28T03:21:00.000+02:00

U.S. Economy Grew at 5.9% Annual Pace Last Quarter (Update2) Share Business ExchangeTwitterFacebook| Email | Print | A A A

By Timothy R. Homan

Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. economy expanded at a 5.9 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, more than the government reported last month, reflecting stronger business investment and a greater contribution from inventories.

The rise in gross domestic product, which exceeded the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, marked the best performance in more than six years, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Inventories added 3.88 percentage points to GDP, more than previously reported, and investment in software and equipment grew at the fastest pace in almost a decade.

Manufacturers such as Deere & Co. may continue to lead the recovery as increasing sales prompt companies to boost purchases and add to stockpiles. At the same time, consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the economy, is likely to be restrained by an unemployment rate that’s forecast to average 9.8 percent this year.

“There’s still room for inventories to add to growth,” said James O’Sullivan, global chief economist at MF Global Ltd. in New York, who accurately forecast the rise in GDP. “Going forward, the question comes back to sustainability, and the key to that is a clear pickup in the labor market, which I think is coming.”

Stock-index futures swung between gains and declines after American International Group Inc.’s bigger-than-forecast quarterly loss overshadowed the GDP report. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures expiring in March rose less than 0.1 percent to 1,103.30 at 9:14 a.m. in New York after rising as much as 0.4 percent.

Economists’ Estimates

The economy was forecast to grow at a 5.7 percent annual pace, the same rate the government initially reported in January, according to the median estimate of 76 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates ranged from gains of 4.2 percent to 6.3 percent.

For all of 2009, the economy shrank 2.4 percent, the worst single-year performance since 1946.

The GDP report is the second for the fourth quarter and will be revised in March as more information, such as corporate profits, becomes available to the government.

Consumer spending rose at a 1.7 percent pace, compared with the 2 percent rate forecast by economists and a 2.8 percent gain in the prior quarter. Spending added 1.23 percentage points to GDP.

Third-quarter purchases received a boost from the government’s auto-incentive program that offered buyers discounts to trade in older cars and trucks for new, more fuel- efficient vehicles. The plan expired in August.

Household Purchases

Household purchases dropped 0.6 percent last year, the biggest decrease since 1974.

Increases in production last quarter stemmed the slide in inventories from earlier in the year. Stockpiles dropped at a $16.9 billion annual pace following a $139.2 billion decline the previous three months. Inventories declined at a record $160.2 billion pace in the second quarter.

Today’s report showed purchases of equipment and software increased at an 18.2 percent pace in the fourth quarter, the most since 2000. The gain helped offset a 13.9 percent drop in commercial construction, leaving total business investment up 6.2 percent during the final three months of 2009.

A report yesterday showed companies ordered more capital goods in January, driven primarily by bookings for commercial aircraft. Declines in other, less volatile industries indicate business investment may be slowing, according to yesterday’s Commerce Department figures.

[Via http://janenathan.wordpress.com]

Google News Tries Sharing With Facebook, But Where's The Buzz Button?

The Case of the Vanishing Justice Department E-Mail

2010-02-27T11:37:00.000+02:00

The legacy of Rose Mary Woods is alive and well at the Justice Department:

“Large batches of e-mail records from the Justice Department lawyers who worked on the 2002 legal opinions justifying the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation techniques are missing, and the Justice Department told lawmakers Friday that it would try to trace the disappearance.”

And in a stroke of what I’m sure is pure coincidence, what’s missing just happens to be from a crucial time period:

“The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility…pushed to get access to a range of e-mail records and other internal documents from the Justice Department to aid in its investigation.

But it discovered that many e-mail messages to and from John Yoo, who wrote the bulk of the legal opinions for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, were missing…Also deleted were a month’s worth of e-mail files from the summer of 2002 for Patrick Philbin, another Justice Department lawyer who worked on the interrogation opinions. Those missing e-mail messages came during a period when two of the critical interrogation memos were being prepared.”

But never fear, the Obama DoJ is on the case. Kinda, sorta, maybe:

“Gary Grindler, the acting deputy attorney general who represented the Justice Department at Friday’s hearing, said he did not think there was “anything nefarious” about the deletion of the e-mail messages, but he could not explain what happened to them.

He said he had directed administrative personnel at the Justice Department to review the situation and determine whether there were problems in the department’s system for automatically archiving internal documents. He said the review would also seek to recover the missing e-mail messages if possible.”

Why do I get the feeling that in the spirit of the cover-up looking forward, not back, recovering the missing messages will be found impossible. Just a hunch.

[Via http://desperadosoutpost.com]

Source: Paterson To End Campaign Today (Updated)

Dem Dumb and Dirty NY Dems

2010-02-27T03:55:00.000+02:00

Never really paid much attention to Congresswoman Louise Slaughter ( D-NY-28 ) until yesterday’s 7-hour “bipartisan” summit. It turns out that even though she has served twelve terms in Congress, she apparently hasn’t read the 2700 page health care bill about which she gave this rambling, emotional defense concluding with an odd bit about someone using a dead someone else’s dentures…..Louise…hello?

There is NO DENTAL plan in the proposed national health care bill, Ma’am. Are reading glasses included in yours?

Turns out, this is the same Rep. Slaughter who gave another rambling reason for why she refused to hold town hall meetings on health care last summer with “those people.”

So Slaughter’s dumb, now for the dirty:

***************************************************************

Remember when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told us what we had voted for in 2006 when Democrats took over the majority in the House?

Because we aren’t too bright, the Madame needed to tell us that Americans “voted for change, and for Democrats to take the country in a new direction.” Remember she told us we had voted for Democrats to restore “civility” and “bipartisanship” and integrity and honesty to Washington D.C.? Remember Ms. Pelosi said that election night that “Democrats intend to lead the most open, most honest and ethical Congress in history?”

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY)

House Ways and Means Corruption-Enabler Charlie Rangel (D-NY) may be getting the heave-ho from his committee chairmanship. The first of what are hopefully several well-deserved slaps to Rangel were served up today by the House Ethics committee. Obviously, Ethics committee chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) does not have quite the thirst for blood that she might if Rangel were a Republican. Nonetheless the committee has admonished Rangel for taking improper corporate-funded trips.

Today, the surly Rangel is still dug in and lawyered-up, despite calls from deep south Democrats that he give back his gavel. Nancy stands by her man, Charlie. Isn’t that sweet?

Rangel has several complaints still pending: for funky real estate deals, tax evasion and use of federal property.

Finally, the governor of New York has caved to the Obama administration pressure and bad publicity and has decided not to run for re-election after all. For all his troubles, David Paterson has done his part to advance the cause of special needs people everywhere: How does a blind guy score so much booty and get into so much trouble? Sheesh!

Gov. David Paterson (D-NY)

And there, dear readers, is yer New Yawk minute.

[Via http://randysright.wordpress.com]

Exclusive: What happens next in health care - Mike Allen ...

OBAMA VS BROWN

2010-02-25T11:52:00.000+02:00

Could President Barack Obama use the basketball court to avenge a Democrat’s loss in a key Senate race?

A spokesman for new Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown says he’s game for a matchup offered by the mayor of basketball’s birthplace.
An Obama spokesman says the invitation is being studied.
Springfield Mayor Dominic Sarno says in a letter Wednesday to the White House that the event could benefit charities in the city.
CLICK HERE for the full story.

[Via http://kluv.radio.com]

News of the World phone hacking: Reaction to the MPs' verdict ...

Health Care Summit: Trick of Trick?

2010-02-25T03:51:00.000+02:00

Republicans have a big opportunity here. The democrats are just trying to smear them as the “party of no.” The democrats are going to come to the table with the same stuff that America has already SOUNDLY rejected and say to the republicans “If you don’t agree with us, your just obstructing health care.” The republicans have had constructive ideas on the table for just about as long as the health care “reform” issue has been debated, but the democrats have been the real obstructionists because they have been the ones who have refused to meet with republicans. You may remember Obama’s very brief meeting with republican leadership shortly after his coronation where he informed them of the “new reality” when he said to them “I won.” He had no intention of any ‘bipartisanship’ with republicans.

The ONLY reason Obama is trying to draw in ANY republicans is so he can use them as scapegoats.

Ann Coulter said it very well when she said “Obama’s sole objective at the ’summit’ is to hoodwink Republicans into agreeing with some of his wildly unpopular ideas on national TV. If this were a reality show on NBC, it would be called, ‘Dateline: To Catch a RINO.’

The TRUTH is that Obama is LYING about everything he says to us.

He says the housing market is recovering. Actually, today the new numbers came out and showed the WORST month for new home sales in the 50+ years that the statistics have been kept. My kind of recovery, huh?

He says that he just didn’t educate the people well enough about his health plan. Had he TRUTHFULLY educated the people about his health plan, they would have rejected it en masse much sooner.

Jobs created or saved? There is no way to quantify it, and Obama knows it. And to illustrate the fact, every one of his cronies who speaks about this ‘statistic’ quotes a different number.

Obama is a snake oil salesman whose only interest is power. He wants to demonize those who earn, take their wealth, and give it to those who don’t earn or create wealth in order to buy votes and cement his power base. In doing so, he is acting out the script of ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ He is driving all productive business out of the country, and penalizing those who create and provide jobs to the point that they are giving up and leaving millions unemployed because it’s just not worth it to stay in business anymore.

So, call you congressmen and senators and remind them that America doesn’t want MORE government interference in our lives. They can take this camel’s nose of a health care bill and stick it where the skin turns pink. Get the government out of our way, and watch America flourish.

[Via http://texan2driver.wordpress.com]

Wonk Room » Fox News Attacks 'This Guy' Van Jones With 'Sound ...

High Schools to Offer Plan to Graduate Early

2010-02-23T11:56:00.000+02:00

Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th-grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but also subjects like science and history.

The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, England, Finland, France and Singapore.

The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and its goals include insuring that students have mastered a set of basic requirements and reducing the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. More than a million college freshmen across America must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree.

“That’s a central problem we’re trying to address, the enormous failure rate of these kids when they go to the open admission colleges,” said Marc S. Tucker, president of the center, a Washington-based nonprofit. “We’ve looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you’ll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has provided a $1.5 million planning grant to help the national center work with states and districts to get the program running, Mr. Tucker said. He estimated that start-up costs for school districts would be about $500 a student, to buy courses and tests and to train teachers.

To defray those costs, the eight states intend to apply for some of the $350 million in federal stimulus money designated for improving public school testing, Mr. Tucker said.

High school students will begin the new coursework in the fall of 2011 in Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. The education commissioners of those states have pledged to sign up 10 to 20 schools each for the pilot project, and have begun to reach out to district superintendents.

The project’s backers hope it will eventually spread to all schools in those states, and inspire other states to follow suit. Supporters include the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.

Kentucky’s commissioner of education, Terry Holliday, said high school graduation requirements there had long been based on having students accumulate enough course credits to graduate.

Obama Guilty of Treason

2010-02-23T03:51:00.000+02:00

Waterboarding Abu Zubaydah saved lives. A recently released report from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility provides incontrovertible evidence proving former Vice President Dick Cheney was right.

In May of 2002, Jose Padilla was arrested. Padilla was planning to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area. But Cheney and the American patriots who tortured Zubaydah in August of 2002 thwarted Padilla’s diabolical scheme. In other words: Torture works. Period.

The Obama Administration should be ashamed of, and must be held accountable for, giving the enemy our most vital national security secrets. Barack Obama must be impeached now that the world knows we have a time machine.

We know the time machine was used to stop Padilla in May, after Zubaydah was tortured in August. What we don’t know, is how many other deadly threats were stopped thanks to our superior technology. But you can bet Iran is hard at work developing their own flux capacitor…

“I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.” – George W. Bush, May 12, 2008

[Via http://relentlesstransience.wordpress.com]

TRANSFORMATION 2010 LIVE: News And Twitter Updates From AAAA ...

Behind Clinton’s tough talk on Iran

2010-02-21T11:56:00.000+02:00

The goal of Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric seems to be to promote conflict and convince Americans Iran is a threat to their security

Mark Weisbrot, The Guardian/UK, Feb 18, 2020

In a visit to Qatar and Saudi Arabia this week, Hillary Clinton said that Iran “is moving toward a military dictatorship,” and continued the Administration’s campaign for tougher sanctions against that country.

What could America’s top diplomat hope to accomplish with this kind of inflammatory rhetoric? It seems unlikely that the goal was to support human rights in Iran. Because of the United States’ history in Iran and in the region, it tends to give legitimacy to repression. The more that any opposition can be linked to the United States’ actions, words, or support, the harder time they will have.

Continues >>

[Via http://suzieqq.wordpress.com]

Sigma releases 85mm F1.4 EX DG HSM: Digital Photography Review

"What kind of America do you want your children to inherit?"

2010-02-21T03:41:00.000+02:00

Asked Marco Rubio at the CPAC. Larry Thornberry hits the highlights at Amercian Spectator:

Rubio praised America as the greatest country in the history of the world. He said our greatness, our exceptionalism, comes from our commitment to limited government, personal freedom, and the free enterprise system, all things our predecessors chose, fought and bled for, and that are being attacked now by the current leftist administration and Congress. He said we need to send people to Washington who will offer and fight for a clear alternative to what is nothing less than a threat to America’s continued greatness.

“What kind of America do you want your children to inherit,” Rubio asked. “We must decide. Do we want to continue to be exceptional? Or do we want to be like everyone else?”

Rubio said our personal freedoms and the material bounty Americans have enjoyed are threatened by a clueless political class, too many of whose members believe the free enterprise system is unfair, who believe that America’s enemies exist because of something we did, who believe the answer to everything is more government, and who while they frequently invoke “democracy,” are in fact contemptuous of personal freedom.

The same question birthed this blog and has propelled hundreds of thousands into action across the country. And not that I claim to have my finger on the pulse of the American public or anything (heck, I thought it impossible for so many people to be so duped by Obama-ade in ‘08), but I’m likely to be a few steps closer to reality than the President and his circle, now doubling down on health care.

Veteran Democrat pollster Charlie Cook thinks the Obami are so far out of the loop that Obamacare is an unshakable albatross. H/T: Jennifer Rubin. All the more reason to cram it down our collective throats, right? We’ll love it all the more later!

Democrats piled all this cotton candy and pork and junk and pet projects into [the Stimulus], so it discredited [it] in the minds of a lot of voters and at the same time, it wasn’t big enough. It was totally insufficient, yet they wanted to keep it under a trillion dollars because they didn’t want to spend a lot of political capital on a really big stimulus package because they wanted to save it for cap-and-trade and health care. And so we start off with the original sin of a very imperfect and inadequate economic stimulus package and then moving off the economy almost entirely going into cap-and-trade and health care.

And then when unemployment numbers started proving to be much, much tougher and it started becoming more clear that the stimulus package hadn’t worked properly, they just kept plowing ahead on health care. And this isn’t a communications problem. This is a reality problem. And I think they just made some grave miscalculations and as it became more clear that they had screwed up, they just kept doubling down their bet.

And so I think, no, this is one of the biggest miscalculations that we’ve seen in modern political history.

The comments make interesting reading, too. Some folks got their knickers in quite a twist regarding Cook’s comments. Truth hurts, doesn’t it?

[Via http://politicaljunkiemom.wordpress.com]

iPod, iPhone feature poll ends, App Store content poll begins ...

Selling the stimulus

2010-02-20T11:33:00.000+02:00

President Obama is trying to sell the idea that the stimulus package is a success in reviving the economy, which suggests that he has more or less given up on trying to accomplish anything more than he already has. The Democrats point out that the rate of job loss is slowing down, but what people experience is the still-increasing cumulative job loss whose effects will be with us for years to come. While the President is still popular, “things could be worse” is not a winning slogan.

[Via http://philebersole.wordpress.com]

PSN Update: Yakuza 3 demo tops bill News | PS3 | Eurogamer

Why neither conservatives nor liberals are right

2010-02-20T03:51:00.000+02:00

There are only two possibilities, mathematically speaking — either we have a balanced budget, or debt goes up. Can people of all political stripes agree on that?

Here is my question to my friends on the conservative end of the spectrum. Assuming that continuously increasing debt is intolerable, we must balance the budget, right? Okay, how do we accomplish that? There are only two variables in the balanced budget equation: spending and taxation. But you flatly reject taxation as a solution. So that leaves us trying to balance the budget ENTIRELY through spending cuts. With the deficit running at $1.3 trillion annually, we would need spending cuts in that amount to balance the budget. I would be curious just what cuts you have in mind of that magnitude. If you cannot cut $1.3 trillion in spending, and if we cannot raise taxes, then how is it mathematically possible to balance the budget? And if you cannot balance the budget, are you not advocating for for increased federal debt? The math is inescapable.

Here is my question to my friends on the liberal end of the spectrum. This is a breakdown of Obama’s FY2010 budget:

Mandatory spending: $2.184 trillion (+15.6%):

$695 billion (+4.9%) – Social Security

$453 billion (+6.6%) – Medicare

$290 billion (+12.0%) – Medicaid

$0 billion (−100%) – Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)

$0 billion (−100%) – Financial stabilization efforts

$11 billion (+275%) – Potential disaster costs

$571 billion (−15.2%) – Other mandatory programs

$164 billion (+18.0%) – Interest on National Debt

Discretionary spending: $1.368 trillion (+13.1%):

$663.7 billion (+12.7%) – Department of Defense (including Overseas Contingency Operations)

$78.7 billion (−1.7%) – Department of Health and Human Services

$72.5 billion (+2.8%) – Department of Transportation

$52.5 billion (+10.3%) – Department of Veterans Affairs

$51.7 billion (+40.9%) – Department of State and Other International Programs

$47.5 billion (+18.5%) – Department of Housing and Urban Development

$46.7 billion (+12.8%) – Department of Education

$42.7 billion (+1.2%) – Department of Homeland Security

$26.3 billion (−0.4%) – Department of Energy

$26.0 billion (+8.8%) – Department of Agriculture

$23.9 billion (−6.3%) – Department of Justice

$18.7 billion (+5.1%) – National Aeronautics and Space Administration

$13.8 billion (+48.4%) – Department of Commerce

$13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of Labor

$13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of the Treasury

$12.0 billion (+6.2%) – Department of the Interior

$10.5 billion (+34.6%) – Environmental Protection Agency

$9.7 billion (+10.2%) – Social Security Administration

$7.0 billion (+1.4%) – National Science Foundation

$5.1 billion (−3.8%) – Corps of Engineers

$5.0 billion (+100%) – National Infrastructure Bank

$1.1 billion (+22.2%) – Corporation for National and Community Service

$0.7 billion (0.0%) – Small Business Administration

$0.6 billion (−14.3%) – General Services Administration

$19.8 billion (+3.7%) – Other Agencies

$105 billion – Other

Why must we have a 13.1% increase in discretionary spending? Isn’t that the height of irresponsibility in these times? The economy is booming again. The stock market is up by 60% in the past year. The massive job losses of 2007-08 have ended, and all signs point to job creation around the corner as the economy continues to expand. Surely we can have a budget that acknowledges the economic drag that $1.3 trillion annual deficits, and $13 trillion of cumulative federal debt, have.

No matter how I look at things, I come back to the same conclusion. Ideologues are America’s greatest enemy.

[Via http://thecentersquare.wordpress.com]

Thrilling News! reMail is Going Bye-Bye!

Obama’s new envoy defended PIJ racketeer

2010-02-18T11:31:00.000+02:00

The scene: Tel Aviv, 1996. The New York Times told what happened:

The latest bomber struck just before 4 P.M. outside the Dizengoff Center, the biggest shopping mall in Tel Aviv and a crowded center of popular hangouts and boutiques like the Hard Rock Cafe, Benetton and McDonald’s. The crowds included many children dressed in Halloween-like costumes for the Jewish feast of Purim, traditionally a festive and carefree holiday.

The police said the bomber had apparently wanted to enter the mall, but turned back when he saw police officers. He then went into the intersection surrounded by a throng of people crossing the street and set off his bomb, which, like those of the previous three bombings, was laced with nails and screws.

The huge explosion shattered windows, neon signs and marquees for 200 yards and sent victims sailing through the air. The police said the toll was 14 killed, including the bomber, and about 130 wounded, many seriously. Many were children.

Tali Gordon and Inbar Attia, university students and friends in their 20s, were two of the victims of the Dizengoff bombing.

Tali Gordon & Inbar Attia

But why did this bombing happen, and who was responsible for the murder of Tali, Inbar, and 12 others? The organization responsible was the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an offshot of the Muslim Brotherhood that the PIJ viewed as too moderate (see the Council of Foreign Relations backgrounder on PIJ). PIJ has carried out many other terrorist attacks throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

And, as this blog likes to ask, how are these organizations funded? The Council of Foreign Relations says PIJ is Iran-funded and Syrian-supported. But it was also supported through a U.S.-racketeering enterprise launched in 1984 by PIJ leaders residing in America.

One of those PIJ leaders that started the racketeering effort in the United States was Sami Al-Arian. For his crimes of funding, supporting, and maintaining ties with the PIJ, even as it launched attacks like the Dizengoff Center bombing, Al-Arian would eventually plead guilty.

The St. Petersburg Times pointed out that Al-Arian’s ties to PIJ continued after the Clinton administration designated PIJ as a special terrorist organization in January 1995: “In the plea agreement, Al-Arian admits conspiring to help people associated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad and covering up his knowledge of the PIJ associations by lying to Harper [a reporter] and others. He also admits that he had been associated with PIJ during ‘the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s.’”

In a press release about the original indictment against Al-Arian, then Attorney General John Ashcroft said, “We have an extensive record in breaking up terrorist financing. Our record on terrorist financing is clear: We will hunt down the suppliers of terrorist blood money, we will shut down these sources, and we will ensure that both terrorists and their financiers meet the same, swift, certain justice of the United States of America.”

To summarize, PIJ is a radical jihadist organization responsible for despicable terrorist murders against civilians in Israel. Sami Al-Arian knew it and continued financial support for PIJ. So what? Case closed, right?

Not so fast. Pres. Obama has named Rashad Hussain as the new U.S. envoy to the (dangerous) Organization of the Islamic Conference. It turns out that Rashad Hussain dismissed the prosecution of of Sami Al-Arian as “politically motivated persecution.” From the Global Muslim Brotherhood Report:

According to an archived notice in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:

A session on civil rights called “Get up, Stand up; Stand up for your Rights: The State of Contemporary Civil Liberties” was held Sept. 5 at the annual conference for the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada, held alongside the Islamic Society of North America’s 41st annual convention in Chicago. Laila Al-Arian, daughter of civil and political rights activist and Muslim leader Sami Al-Arian, opened the session with her father’s story. She gave a heart-wrenching, emotional account of an innocent man targeted for free-speech activities, whose rights were stripped thanks in part to the PATRIOT Act. Al-Arian, who has not yet been to trial, has been held in a federal penitentiary for over a year and a half. Al-Arian’s situation is one of many “politically motivated persecutions,” claimed Rashad Hussain, a Yale law student. Such persecution, he stated, must be fought through hope, faith, and the Muslim vote.

(It should be noted that in the latest version of the above report, the two sentences pertaining to Mr. Hussain have been removed, sometime after October 2007 according to the Internet Archive.)

In 2006, Al-Arian was sentenced to 57 months in prison for conspiring to violate a federal law that prohibits making or receiving contributions of funds, goods or services to, or for the benefit of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

In fairness, Al-Arian had not pled guilty to the charges at the time Hussain made those comments. However, Florida newspapers had been describing Al-Arian as a PIJ “leader” throughout the early 1990s. What did Hussain think of that?

I’ve taken some heat in commenting over at Jihad Watch for not being critical enough of the appointment, but I’ll repeat here exactly what I said there, which is that the appointment of somebody naïve enough to believe that Sami Al-Arian was innocent is troubling. At best, Hussain will be easily duped by his new OIC hosts. Hussain will also defend suspicious OIC activities the same way he defended Al-Arian.

Mr. President, please go back to the drawing board and appoint a mature realist as envoy, not a naïve apologist like Rashad Hussain.

[Via http://moneyjihad.wordpress.com]

Midway titles disappear from XBLA News | Xbox 360 | Eurogamer

Ahmadinejad: 'Yep, I'm Nuclear'

2010-02-18T03:55:00.000+02:00

by Ann Coulter at Human Events

The only man causing President Obama more headaches than Joe Biden these days is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who, coincidentally, was right after Biden on Obama’s short-list for V.P.)

Despite Obama’s personal magnetism, the Iranian president persists in moving like gangbusters to build nuclear weapons, leading to Ahmadinejad’s announcement last week that Iran is now a “nuclear state.”

Gee, that’s weird — because I remember being told in December 2007 that all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Iran had ceased nuclear weapons development as of 2003.

At the time of that leak, many of us recalled that the U.S. has the worst intelligence-gathering operations in the world. The Czechs, the French, the Italians — even the Iraqis (who were trained by the Soviets) — all have better intelligence.

[Via http://americayouaskedforit.wordpress.com]

NPR News v1.2 Adds Live Station Streaming | AndroidGuys

ANWR.org

2010-02-16T11:35:00.000+02:00

On the coastal plain, the Arctic winter lasts for 9 months. It is dark continuously for 56 days in midwinter. Temperatures with the wind chill can reach 110 degrees F Below Zero. It’s not pristine. There are villages, roads, houses, schools, and military installations.

It’s not a unique Arctic ecosystem. The coastal plain is only a small fraction of the 88,000 square miles that make up the North Slope. The same tundra environment and wildlife can be found throughout the circumpolar Arctic regions. The 1002 Area is flat. That’s why they call it a plain.

The residents of Kaktovik, the only people living on the Coastal Plain of ANWR, support oil and gas development in their ‘back yard’. Alaska’s indigenous people have benefited greatly from North Slope production. In addition to providing a tax base for the local government, oil development has provided jobs, funding for water and sewer systems and schools.

So much for the Eco-Freaks claim that drilling kills off wildlife.

One million barrels is what might today be flowing from ANWR if in 1995 President Clinton had not vetoed legislation to permit drilling there. One million barrels produce 27 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel.

Seventy-two of today’s senators — including 38 other Democrats, including Obama, and 33 Republicans, including John McCain– have voted to keep ANWR’s estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil off the market.

[Via http://onemansthoughts.wordpress.com]

Apple planning to employ FairPlay DRM for iBookstore? | iLounge News

JCS Chairman Mullen: "Option To Attack Iran Is Still On The Table"

2010-02-16T03:55:00.000+02:00

February 15, 2010: Defence Professionals (Defpro.org) – February 15, 2010

U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, attended a press conference after his arrival to Israel and made it clear that all options are on the table. “We would operate all our forces for Israel.” “Politically, it is prohibited in any way that Iran will have nuclear weapons”, said Mullen during a press conference convened on Sunday evening only hours after his arrival to Israel.

“Right now, diplomatic efforts continue,” he explained, but did not rule out military option, “The option to attack Iran is still on the table, but we’re not there yet.” “It is very difficult to expect the pace of the Iranian government, I am very concerned with their use of rhetoric and their uranium enrichment program,” said Mullen. “Iran undermines the stability of the region – also in Yemen and Afghanistan. The U.S. government has very serious intentions to impose harsh sanctions and I very much hope that it will end the conflict.”

Mullen also noted that according to the American assessment Iran could obtain a nuclear bomb from one year to three years. However, Mullen stressed that, “conflict with Iran would be a big problem for everyone. I worry about the unintended consequences of an attack. While every situation has limits, we’re not there yet. The diplomatic efforts must be exhausted until the end.”

We Are Close Partners

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S military referred to Israel’s security and made it clear that the U.S. stands behind it. “Israel supports the policy that Obama leads. The Chief of the General Staff Gabi Ashkenazi made this clear to me in a meeting a few weeks ago. That does not mean we are not worried. We have appreciation for Israel and we can take care of its security.”

Additionally Admiral Mullen stressed that between Israel and the U.S. there is real cooperation. “This important relationship with Israel grows stronger every day,” he said. “We are close partners, since the establishment of the state. I am aware of the needs of Israel in every step. I’m here to understand the perspective of those who live here. I worry about the stability and the possibility for instability in the region. We will operate all our forces to have a stable and secure Israel and for the people of Israel.”

Mullen was also asked about the possibility that Israel would attack Iran, and he answered, “Israel’s sovereignty is important to us. We would not hurt Israel’s sovereignty or any other country’s. We worked hard in recent years to improve our abilities in different areas, here in Israel and elsewhere in the region, including the Persian Gulf. Improving capabilities is not a response, but collaboration – all the improvements are only defensive.”

Mullen’s Request: A meeting with the Israeli Delegation to Haiti

During his visit, Admiral Mullen will hold a private meeting with Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi, as well as a briefing with senior commanders of the General Staff, including Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Maj. Gen. Benny Gantz, Head of Israel Defense Intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, Head of Strategic Planning Directorate, Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, and the military attaché to Washington, Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni. The discussion will focus on cooperation between the two militaries and mutual security challenges. In addition, Admiral Mullen will meet with Minister of Defense Ehud Barak.

Admiral Mullen will be greeted at the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) General Headquarters in Rabin Base, Tel Aviv (Kirya), by an honor guard consisting of IDF soldiers from the ground, air and naval forces, to the sound of the national anthems of Israel and the United States of America.

Admiral Mullen will also visit the Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial and Museum, where he will pay respects to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. At his request, Admiral Mullen will see members of the IDF rescue delegation to Haiti, and hear about their professional experiences with regard to rescue operations and field medical treatment.

The Tonka Report Editor’s Note: As the U.S. military coup of Haiti continues to ensure dominance of the Caribbean and seal off access to the Gulf of Mexico via the Atlantic, the key third piece of the multi-part geographical puzzle in the Middle East (Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan) is about to fall into place with the attack of Iran, thus plunging what’s left of the American economy into full blown depression and this former Republic into a militarized police state under the directorate of a corporate-fascist dictatorship as WWIII begins. Unless we say, No! Weapons of war are rendered useless with no soldiers to pull the triggers… - SJH

Link to original article below…

http://www.defpro.org/news/details/13160/

[Via http://stevenjohnhibbs.wordpress.com]

Charlie Gasparino Goes To Fox Business News

haiti, western intervention and the left

2010-02-14T11:28:00.000+02:00

by Rob Kirby

Tony Blair’s appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry brought up once again his hoary old argument that as Iraq is better off without Saddam, the invasion of British troops was a progressive thing for Iraqis.

Whilst Blair’s stance is clearly a self-serving attempt at justification for the barbarism that was unleashed on Iraq, the broader argument that Western troops can sometimes be a force for good does have currency for some on the left.

These tensions emerged recently on the issue of Haiti, as The Commune was criticised for articles on our website calling for “troops out” and accused of kneejerk anti-imperialism. It is worth examining the origins of these arguments, and restating the basic objections to the invasion and occupations of other countries by our own.

To give our critics their due, there has been a reflexive and ill-thought through aspect to some thinking on the left on this issue in recent years; they are right that each situation does need to be taken on its specificities – but they are entirely wrong on the specifics of this case and on the general principles underlying the attitude that communists have towards foreign intervention, which this article will seek to address.

Soldiers aren’t aid workers

The first and most superficial point to make is that soldiers and aid-workers aren’t the same thing. Whilst the role of NGOs is to tend to and help the victims of the earthquake, the role of the military forces sent to Haiti is generally recognised to be to “maintain order” over the people living there, to protect property rather than people, and to ensure the continuity of a widely discredited and authoritarian government.

To allow western governments to elide this distinction is to uncritically accept their narcissistic self-image as a “force for good” in the world, and to buy into the propaganda of “humanitarian” militarism that they successfully used to prosecute a succession of wars from the Balkans to Somalia in the 1990s.

Foreign intervention is undemocratic

In an independent country, the state requires the active or passive support of a substantial proportion of the population to be able to function effectively. The state, whether democratic or not, does have to have some kind of basis in the society it governs, even if that is with a section of the population we might have no sympathy with, such as the bourgeoisie or landlords.

A country under occupation, however, can be governed by appeal to the political desires and physical force of the occupying powers, essentially removing the state from any necessity to appeal its own population. A case in point is the recent rigged elections in Afghanistan; Hamid Karzai’s belated decision to undergo another round of voting had more to do with the desires of his external backers than any militancy on the Afghan street. The Afghans were entirely disenfranchised, in every way, reliant on external arbiters to keep their government in check. The sham “democracy” there, even if looked upon charitably, is still a gift of the west; freedom and democracy imposed from outside cannot be sustained by the societies on which they are imposed, and are perverted mockeries of the real thing.

Democracy is a relation between states before it can be a relation within them. The Chinese or Iranian working class, whilst living under harshly authoritarian regimes, can at least fight within their countries to further their positions.

Those under military occupation such as the Palestinians have no control over their own fate; that is why national self determination is so jealously and violently guarded by people around the world, and progressive struggle in subject nations generally takes the form of national liberation movements. To second guess and condemn the attempts of people to liberate themselves from foreign domination would be laughable if it were not so reactionary: support for national self determination requires no ifs or buts if it is to be consistent.

The state is not progressive

One of the critics of The Commune’s stance commented on the group’s “trajectory” from support for workers’ self-management to “idiot anti-imperialism”. In a certain sense this critic is correct – consistent opposition to imperialism is a natural development of The Commune’s anti-statist politics. The remainder of the British left’s fixation with and loyalty to state socialism means they are predisposed to see progressive potential in the actions of the state – even, occasionally, when they are military in nature.

Probably the clearest example of this blind spot was during the conflict in Northern Ireland. Groups perfectly willing to support any national liberation movement, no matter how brutal or bizarre, in faraway places in the third world, balked at providing consistent support to people struggling within their own borders.

When so much of the Labour-influenced left saw socialism as coming through state action, and supported the welfare state as truly progressive rather than just palliative, the existence of an armed organisation fighting against “their” state provoked the same kind of reactions seen amongst those socialists who supported war in 1914.

Resisting imperialism

In resisting imperialism, the labour movement does two things. Firstly, it provides consistent solidarity to workers and others abroad; aiming to make it impossible for our government to subjugate those peoples. Secondly, and equally importantly, it is about us here; by resisting the imperialist aspirations of our government, we develop the ideological independence from the state necessary to fight for our own class. Buying into the “white man’s burden” myths of Haitian savagery and western nobility do nothing to further either aim.

[Via http://thecommune.wordpress.com]

Stabroek News - Marketing and small business

Dem Sen. Rockefeller On Obama: "He's Beginning To Be Not Believable To Me". Common Sense Comes Later For Rockefeller Than The Rest Of Us

2010-02-14T03:16:00.000+02:00

RealClearPolitics.Com

Dem Sen. Rockefeller On Obama: “He’s Beginning To Be Not Believable To Me”

via RealClearPolitics – Video – Dem Sen. Rockefeller On Obama: “He’s Beginning To Be Not Believable To Me”.

Dem Sen. Rockefeller On Obama: “He’s Beginning To Be Not Believable To Me”

[Via http://aconservativeedge.com]

App Store Now Has 150000 Apps. Great News For The iPad: Paid Books ...

Little Barry statue heads back to school

2010-02-13T19:50:00.000+02:00

The promise to move the Barry Soetoro (Barack Obama) statue is coming true.

The Central Jakarta administration said they will move the controversial “Little Barry” statue from its current location at Taman Menteng in Central Jakarta to state elementary school SDN 01 Menteng next week.

“We are currently discussing with officials from the school and its alumni association,” city spokesman Cucu Ahmad Kurnia told reporters Friday. “We hope the move will happen next week.”

US President Barack Obama attended a Muslim elementary school and was indoctrinated by Islamic teachings for almost two years when he spent part of his childhood in Jakarta.

Erected by the Jakarta-based Friends of Obama Foundation in December last year, the statue, which resembles Obama as a boy, recently sparked wide public criticism for insulting the nation’s pride.

On Wednesday, the Central Jakarta District Court held a hearing to try a class action lawsuit by five plaintiffs representing 50,000 members of the “Take down the Barack Obama statue from Menteng Park” group on Facebook.

Although appreciating the administration’s plan to remove the statue, one of the plaintiffs Heru Nugroho said the group would go ahead with its lawsuit saying the statue didn’t deserve a place at the park and should be immediately removed.

“We will only withdraw the lawsuit if the city administration publicly apologizes for its one-sided decision to permit the statue,” said Nugroho.

The world is quickly discovering what a total fraud Barack Obama is as indicated by his falling popularity in the US and around the world.

[Via http://lordcrimson.wordpress.com]

Stabroek News - Marketing and small business

Deconstructing Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps

2010-02-13T11:30:00.000+02:00

The U.S. Treasury Department has designated construction company Khatam al-Anbiya as a supporter of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) controls Khatam al-Anbiya. The Iranian military general in charge of Khatam al-Anbiya was also designated personally, along with four Khatam al-Anbiya subsidiaries.

Khatam al-Anbiya is a threat because it generates income for the IRGC through its profitable engineering and construction projects. Put plainly, IRGC is using those revenues to support Iran’s efforts to acquire a nuclear bomb.

Under Secretary Stuart Levey

Stuart Levey, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said “As the IRGC consolidates control over broad swaths of the Iranian economy, displacing ordinary Iranian businessmen in favor of a select group of insiders, it is hiding behind companies like Khatam al-Anbiya and its affiliates to maintain vital ties to the outside world… Today’s action exposing Khatam al-Anbiya subsidiaries will help firms worldwide avoid business that ultimately benefits the IRGC and its dangerous activities.”

As with many recent Treasury announcements like this, the legal authority for the designation comes from George W. Bush’s Executive Order 13382, which blocks assets of proliferators of weapons of mass destruction.

Although this announcement was made before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asserted that Iran is now a “nuclear power,” this designation is not a complete coincidence. Understanding that they may never be able to get international support (ie, Chinese or Russian support in the U.N. Security Council) for “crippling sanctions,” the Obama administration appears to be pivoting toward “targeted sanctions” instead.

[Via http://moneyjihad.wordpress.com]

Michael Wolff: Not News (but Good to Be Reminded): The Internet Is ...

A Message to the U.S. Military and its Enforcers

2010-02-11T11:30:00.000+02:00

I have been openly critical of the U.S. military’s role in world affairs for several years now, and in the responses from soldiers themselves I have noticed a common theme: I should be respectful, I am told, because they are defending my freedom. This is not a brusque summarization–I have not heard an elaboration on this claim. Everyone should be grateful for the sacrifices of the U.S. military, from the Iraqis and Afghans to U.S. citizens, because without the exact current role of the U.S. military, a nebulous and shadowy enemy will step forth to threaten my personal freedom or safety.

Because you are doing this for me, I am formally asking you to stop.

Like the mafioso who gives a gift with strings attached, or offers to provide “protection” which is in reality extortion under threat of violence, you cannot impose an obligation upon me simply because you claim to be acting on my behalf. I never asked for this. Neither did the targets you are currently bombing and shooting, and neither do they threaten me or anyone else.

There has been an undeniable attack on freedom, but the enemy is within the U.S., not in some foreign land. Where were you when the Patriot Act legalized warrantless wiretapping? Where were you when it was revealed that national security letters were being abused by the F.B.I. in the vast majority of cases? Where is your protection of the 50,000 Americans who see their freedom cut off each year by death for lack of health insurance? You aren’t doing bombing runs on Aetna (which is planning to drop 650,000 clients in 2010, in order to increase already-sufficient profits) or the Justice Department (where torture was given a sheen of legality), you are bombing women and children halfway across the world (85% of victims of U.S. air raids in Iraq are women and children). What in god’s name have they done to me? What have they done to you?

Nothing. They are caught in the middle of U.S. economic policy, already a noted child-killer in Iraq, where sanctions killed at least half a million children previously. When confronted with this fact, then-Secretary of State said that the price of half a million children was “worth it.” Worth it? For what? Were those children threatening our freedom too?

Now, we are moving against Iran. Why? It is legal for Iran to pursue nuclear power, yet we are moving nearly a billion dollars worth of weapons into Israel, and giving the warmongering government permission to use them in case of “emergency” (for free and with no oversight). Presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and John McCain have both on record in support of bombing Iran, as has former Vice President Dick Cheney (who urged Bush to attack Iran before the end of his second term) and the Obama administration has stepped up sanctions against Iran as well as military pressure. What has Iran done to threaten my freedom?

What have the Yemenis done? U.S. military involvement there (and in Latin America) is more about stifling opposition to U.S. hegemony than protecting us against any valid threat.

You are reduced to propagandizing five-year-olds in your quest to legitimate the wasteful military-industrial complex. The government monetarily penalizes any school which attempts to ban recruitment on campus, and popular video games and toys act as explicit recruitment tools.

If you were protecting us, would we need this extensive propaganda? Wouldn’t the threats be obvious to us? Would you need the approval of god (the military is heavily religious, and there have many incidents of church-state intermixing) if you had moral certitude? Would you need the sloganeering jingoism found in “Support the Troops” and unceasingly pro-soldier treatment in the U.S. military if you had confidence in yourself and your mission? Hardly.

It is time to recognize that you are on the side of the oppressors. I say this with respect, because if you honestly believe that you are sacrificing some part of yourself for others, then your intentions are not wholly sinister. But they are in error–grave, destructive, poisonous error.

Here is a piece by William Astore, with an introduction by Tom Engelhardt:

Here’s a bit of cheery news: Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates met with the nation’s top defense company executives, including the CEOs of those mega-military-industrial combines Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and called for a “closer partnership.” He also made them a promise. He pledged, according to his spokesman, “to work with the White House to secure steady growth in the Pentagon’s budgets over time.”

Let’s put that pledge in context. Last week, President Obama did something common in the Bush years, something he swore never to do; he requested a supplemental $33 billion over and above the fiscal year 2011 defense budget, mainly for his Afghan surge. That sum, when appropriated by Congress, will bring the total official Pentagon budget to $708 billion dollars ($159 billion of which will be directly slated for Afghan and Iraq war costs). To put that sum in context, it’s close to what the rest of the world combined spends on military matters. And you can be guaranteed of one thing: this won’t be the last supplemental request of 2011.

By the way, if you were to add up the real “defense” budget, including funds for the Department of Homeland Security, the Energy Department (which handles the U.S. nuclear arsenal), veterans’ care, the State Department’s planned near-billion-dollar expansion of its embassy in Pakistan into a mega-command post for the region and the planned doubling of the number of personnel in its already monstrous embassy in Baghdad for a similar purpose, and many other relevant things, you would be closing in on $1 trillion per year.

Meanwhile, in December 2009, the total funds Congress has so far appropriated since 2001 only for our two wars topped $1 trillion dollars, with no end in sight, and that figure doesn’t include projected future costs ranging from care for soldiers wounded in those wars to the cost of replenishing worn out military equipment. At the war-fighting level, the Congressional Budget Office has already projected direct war costs over the next decade at $867 billion.

The Pentagon’s 2011 budget is already the highest since World War II, according to defense analyst Winslow T. Wheeler. Now, consider that the secretary of defense has just “pledged” more of the same for years to come. And note that none of this — with the possible exception of that $33 billion supplemental request — is considered particularly controversial by anyone who matters in Washington, or worth much front-page news attention. Sums that put health-care reform in the shade cause barely a stir. In other words, the Pentagon rules the roost and, as TomDispatch regularWilliam Astore indicates, it could get a lot worse. – Tom

A Very American Coup

Coming Soon to a Hometown Near You

By William J. Astore

The wars in distant lands were always going to come home, but not this way.

It’s September 2016, year 15 of America’s “Long War” against terror. As weary troops return to the homeland, a bitter reality assails them: despite their sacrifices, America is losing.

Iraq is increasingly hostile to remaining occupation forces. Afghanistan is a riddle that remains unsolved: its army and police forces are untrustworthy, its government corrupt, and its tribal leaders unsympathetic to the vagaries of U.S. intervention. Since the Obama surge of 2010, a trillion more dollars have been devoted to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and other countries in the vast shatter zone that is central Asia, without measurable returns; nothing, that is, except the prolongation of America’s Great Recession, now entering its tenth year without a sustained recovery in sight.

Disillusioned veterans are unable to find decent jobs in a crumbling economy. Scarred by the physical and psychological violence of war, fed up with the happy talk of duplicitous politicians who only speak of shared sacrifices, they begin to organize. Their motto: take America back.

Meanwhile, a lame duck presidency, choking on foreign policy failures, finds itself attacked even for its putative successes. Health-care reform is now seen to have combined the inefficiency and inconsistency of government with the naked greed and exploitative talents of corporations. Medical rationing is a fact of life confronting anyone on the high side of 50. Presidential rhetoric that offered hope and change has lost all resonance. Mainstream media outlets are discredited and disintegrating, resulting in new levels of information anarchy.

Protest, whether electronic or in the streets, has become more common — and the protestors in those streets increasingly carry guns, though as yet armed violence is minimal. A panicked administration responds with overlapping executive orders and legislation that is widely perceived as an attack on basic freedoms.

Tapping the frustration of protesters — including a renascent and mainstreamed “tea bag” movement — the former captains and sergeants, the ex-CIA operatives and out-of-work private mercenaries of the War on Terror take action. Conflict and confrontation they seek; laws and orders they increasingly ignore. As riot police are deployed in the streets, they face a grim choice: where to point their guns? Not at veterans, they decide, not at America’s erstwhile heroes.

A dwindling middle-class, still waving the flag and determined to keep its sliver-sized portion of the American dream, throws its support to the agitators. Wages shrinking, savings exhausted, bills rising, the sober middle can no longer hold. It vents its fear and rage by calling for a decisive leader and the overthrow of a can’t-do Congress.

Savvy members of traditional Washington elites are only too happy to oblige. They too crave order and can-do decisiveness — on their terms. Where better to find that than in the ranks of America’s most respected institution: the military?

A retired senior officer who led America’s heroes in central Asia is anointed. His creed: end public disorder, fight the War on Terror to a victorious finish, put America back on top. The United States, he says, is the land of winners, and winners accept no substitute for victory. Nominated on September 11, 2016, Patriot Day, he marches to an overwhelming victory that November, embraced in the streets by an American version of the post-World War I German Freikorpsand the police who refuse to suppress them. A concerned minority is left to wonder (and tremble) at the de facto military coup that occurred so quickly, and yet so silently, in their midst.

It Can Happen Here, Unless We Act

Yes, it can happen here. In some ways, it’s already happening. But the key question is: at this late date, how can it be stopped? Here are some vectors for a change in course, and in mindset as well, if we are to avoid our own stealth coup:

1. Somehow, we need to begin to reverse the ongoing militarization of this country, especially our ever-rising “defense” budgets. The most recent of these, we’ve just learned, is a staggering $708 billion for fiscal year 2011 — and that doesn’t even include the $33 billion President Obama has requested for his latest surge in Afghanistan. We also need to get rid of the idea that anyone who suggests even minor cuts in defense spending is either hopelessly naïve or a terrorist sympathizer. It’s time as well to call a halt to the privatization of military activity and so halt the rise of security contractors like Xe (formerly Blackwater), thereby weakening the corporate profit motive that supports and underpins the American version of perpetual war. It’s time to begin feeling chastened, not proud, that we’re by far thenumber one country in the world in arms manufacturing and the global arms trade.

2. Let’s downsize our global mission rather than endlessly expanding our military footprint. It’s time to have a military capable of defending this country, not fighting endless wars in distant lands while garrisoning the globe.

3. Let’s stop paying attention to major TV and cable networks that rely on retired senior military officers, most of whom have ties both to the Pentagon and military contractors, for “unbiased” commentary on our wars. If we insist on fighting our perpetual “frontier” wars, let’s start insisting as well that they be covered in all theirbitter reality: the death, the mayhem, the waste, the prisons, and the torture. Why is our war coverage invariably sanitized to “PG” or even “G,” when we can go to the movies anytime and see “R” rated, pornographically violent films? And by the way, it’s time to be more critical of the government’s and the media’s use of language and propaganda. Mindlessly parroting the Patriot Act doesn’t make you patriotic.

4. It’s time to elect a president who doesn’t surround himself with senior “civilian” advisors and ambassadors who are actually retired military generals and admirals, one who won’t accept a Nobel Peace Prize by defending war in theory and escalating it in practice.

5. Let’s toughen up. Let’s stop deferring to authority figures who promise to “protect” us while abridging our rights. Let’s stop bowing down before men and women in uniform, before they start thinking that it’s their right to be worshipped and act accordingly.

6. Let’s act now to relieve the sort of desperation bred by joblessness and hopelessness that could lead many — notably male workers suffering from the “He-Cession” — to see a militarized solution in “the homeland” as a credible last resort. It’s the economy, stupid, but with Main Street’s health, not Wall Street’s, in our focus.

7. Let’s take Sarah Palin and her followers seriously. They’re tapping into anger that’s real and spreading. Don’t let them become the voices of the angry working (and increasingly unemployed) classes.

8. Recognize that we face real enemies in our world, the most powerful of which aren’t in distant Afghanistan or Yemen but here at home. The essence of our struggle to sustain our faltering democracy should not be against “terrorists,” with their shoe and crotch bombs, but against various powerful, perfectly legal groups here whose interests lie in a Pentagon that only grows ever stronger.

9. Stop thinking the U.S. is uniquely privileged. Don’t take it on faith that God is on our side. Forget about God blessing America. If you believe in God, get out there and start trying to earn His blessing through deeds.

10. And, most important of all, remember that fear is the mind-killer that makes militarism possible. Ramping up “terror” is an amazingly effective way of shredding our Constitution. Putting our “safety” above all else is asking for trouble. The only way we’ll be completely safe from the big bad terrorists, after all, is when we’re all living in a maximum security state. Think of walking down the street while always being subject to a “full-body scan.”

That’s my top 10 things we need to do. It’s a daunting list and I’m sure you have a few ideas of your own. But have faith. Ultimately, it all boils down to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words to a nation suffering through the Great Depression: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. These words came to mind recently as I read the following missive from a friend and World War II veteran who’s seen tough times:

“It’s very hard for me to accept how soft the American people have become. In 1941, with the western world under assault by powerful and deadly forces, and a large armada of ships and planes attacking us directly, I never heard a word of fear as we faced three powerful nations as enemies. Sixteen million of us went into the military with the very real possibility of death and I never once heard of fear, except from those exposed to danger. Now, our people let [their leaders] terrify them into accepting the destruction of our economy, our image in the world, and our democracy… All this over a small group of religious fanatics [mostly] from Saudi Arabia whom we kowtow to so we can drive 8-cylinder SUV’s. Pathetic!

“How many times have I stood in ‘security lines’ at airports and when I complained of the indignity of taking off shoes and not having water and the manhandling of passengers, have well educated people smugly said to me, ‘Well, they’re just keeping us safe.’ I look at the airport bullshit as a training ground to turn Americans into docile sheep in a totalitarian state.”

A public conditioned to act like sheep, to “support our troops” no matter what, to cower before the idea of terrorism, is a public ready to be herded. A military that’s being used to fight unwinnable wars is a military prone to return home disaffected and with scores to settle.

Angry and desperate veterans and mercenaries already conditioned to violence, merging with “tea baggers” and other alienated groups, could one day form our own Freikorps units, rioting for violent solutions to national decline. Recall that the Nazi movement ultimately succeeded in the early 1930s because so many middle-class Germans were scared as they saw their wealth, standard of living, and status all threatened by the Great Depression.

If our Great Recession continues, if decent jobs remain scarce, if the mainstream media continue to foster fear and hatred, if returning troops are disaffected and their leaders blame politicians for “not being tough enough,” if one or two more terrorist attacks succeed on U.S. soil, wouldn’t this country be well primed for a coup by any other name?

Don’t expect a “Seven Days in May” scenario. No American Caesar will return to Washington with his legions to decapitate governmental authority. Why not? Because he won’t have to.

As long as we continue to live in perpetual fear in an increasingly militarized state, we establish the preconditions under which Americans will be nailed to, and crucified on, a cross of iron.

William J. Astore teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology (wastore@pct.edu). A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), he has also taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism.

[Via http://ianganderson.wordpress.com]

AP Articles Reappear On Google News

Obama hearts banksters: Krugman goes "OMG, WTF"

2010-02-11T03:54:00.000+02:00

Based on the transcripts of the latest Bloomberg interview with the POTUS, it emerges that Banker-loving Barack has no problems with high bonuses and salaries awarded to banksters that got bailed out by the taxpayer who are now indebted and unemployed by the millions in the US. I’ve never seen a president more determined to keep his presidency to only one term. Yes, Mr. President – what you say is the rational cold truth. Too bad the American public ain’t gonna see it that way. To them, you’ve just thrown in your lot with the guys that got them fired in the first place. Prepare for some burning in effigy – at home.

From NYT “Oh. My. God. Obama Clueless” by Krugman

I’m with Simon Johnson here: how is it possible, at this late date, for Obama to be this clueless?

The lead story on Bloomberg right now contains excerpts from an interview with Business Week which tells us:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

Obama sought to combat perceptions that his administration is anti-business and trumpeted the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies. He plans to reiterate that message when he speaks to the Business Roundtable, which represents the heads of many of the biggest U.S. companies, on Feb. 24 in Washington.

Oh. My. God.

First of all, to my knowledge, irresponsible behavior by baseball players hasn’t brought the world economy to the brink of collapse and cost millions of innocent Americans their jobs and/or houses.

And more specifically, not only has the financial industry has been bailed out with taxpayer commitments; it continues to rely on a taxpayer backstop for its stability. Don’t take it from me, take it from the rating agencies:

The planned overhaul of US financial rules prompted Standard & Poor’s to warn on Tuesday it might downgrade the credit ratings of Citigroup and Bank of America on concerns that the shake-up would make it less likely that the banks would be bailed out by US taxpayers if they ran into trouble again.

The point is that these bank executives are not free agents who are earning big bucks in fair competition; they run companies that are essentially wards of the state. There’s good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private. And at the very least, you would think that Obama would understand the importance of acknowledging public anger over what’s happening.

But no. If the Bloomberg story is to be believed, Obama thinks his key to electoral success is to trumpet “the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies.”

We’re doomed.

[Via http://singaporeuncletrader.wordpress.com]

Andy Borowitz: Fox News Gives Palin's Hand Job

Check these kicks out!

2010-02-09T11:20:00.000+02:00

New high tops…YES PLEASE

[Via http://davinche.wordpress.com]

Manchester United target Everton star, and Juventus plan a double ...

What I like about President Obama

2010-02-09T03:38:00.000+02:00

What I like about President Obama is that he is Presidential. He acts like my idea of what an American President should be. His eloquence, his mixture of dignity and informality, his civility and unflappability, his mastery of the issues, his ability to relate to people different from him – all these qualities, to my mind, represent my country at its best. At a time when half the news media and a large fraction of the electorate are utterly delusional, Obama’s basic sanity is a quality which, unfortunately, cannot be taken for granted.

President Obama has appointed qualified people to public office. This, too, is something which, unfortunately, cannot be taken for granted. President Bush and Vice President Cheney despised government, and saw no reason not to fill public offices with political hacks. We saw the results of that with the FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) response to Hurricane Katrina, and the attempt to stack the Justice Department with federal attorneys who would prosecute Democrats but not Republicans. Unfortunately Obama’s efforts have been partly stymied by the Republican minority in Congress, including Senator Shelby of Alabama, who has asked for a “hold” on all pending appointments until he gets certain earmark spending for his home state.

President Obama appointed a qualified, moderate and non-ideological Supreme Court justice.

President Obama has kept to his timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq. I don’t know what will happen to that country, but I don’t think its situation can be made better by keeping troops there, and Obama deserves credit for resisting the inevitable pressure to slow down. President Obama has accomplished important negotiations with Russia to reduce the nuclear threat, and raised U.S. standing in the world generally.

President Obama has not yet accomplished much on health care reform, financial reform or global warming, but at least he has put these issues on the national agenda. What I don’t like about President Obama is the way in which he articulately explains an issue, proposes a reasonable and moderate solution, and then seems to leave it at that. But this is better than denying problems exist and proposing things that make them worse.

In the first comment, I have clickable links to statements about President Obama’s accomplishments.

[Via http://philebersole.wordpress.com]

SNL - Fox News Satire | TV | Mediaite

POLITICAL: Who's "manning the walls" in the Obama administration?

2010-02-07T11:37:00.000+02:00

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/specialengagements/moviespeechafewgoodmencodered.html

American Rhetoric: Movie Speech

“A Few Good Men” (1992)

written by Aaron Sorkin

Colonel Nathan R. Jessep Addresses the Court on “Code Red”

*** begin quote ***

You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives…You don’t want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty…we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use ‘em as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it! I’d rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to!

*** end quote ***

This rings true more today that ever.

Who’s “manning the walls” in the Obama administration?

Sorry, but the Department of Defense and the National Guard should be deployed here at home. Like the Coast Guard should NOT be off gallivanting.

We have bases in reportedly 170 countries. Time for a base closing commission of taxpayers.

Did you know that the Constitution only authorizes a permanent Navy. The Army is only allowed for two years. Guess the Dead Old White guys understood about the dangers of a permanent army. What do you think they’d have thought about the alphabet agencies: FBI, DEA, BATF, CIA, NSA, yada, yada, and yada?

Argh!

# # # # #

[Via http://reinkefaceslife.com]

Fox News Building Sarah Palin A TV Studio In Her House | Oliver Willis

STEPHEN F. HAYES: Politicizing Intelligence | The Weekly Standard

2010-02-07T03:41:00.000+02:00

Politicizing Intelligence

The Obama administration leaks and spins.

BY STEPHEN F. HAYES

February 15, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 21

Last week, a little more than 24 hours after the FBI warned senators not to disclose the sensitive information that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was cooperating with the FBI, the White House shared the information with the news media.

An indignant Christopher “Kit” Bond, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, immediately wrote to President Obama, complaining that he had been told by FBI Director Robert Mueller that the cooperation of the Nigerian terrorist who tried to bomb a Northwest passenger jet over Detroit was extremely sensitive information and was to be kept quiet. It was so sensitive, in fact, that the entire committee wasn’t briefed, just Bond and the committee chairman Dianne Feinstein.

“On Monday afternoon, the leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee received notification from the Federal Bureau of Investigation concerning Abdulmutallab’s recent willingness to provide critical information,” Bond wrote. “FBI officials stressed the importance of not disclosing the fact of his cooperation in order to protect on-going and follow-on operations to neutralize additional threats to the American public; FBI Director Bob Mueller personally stressed to me that keeping the fact of his cooperation quiet was vital to preventing future attacks against the United States.”

via Politicizing Intelligence | The Weekly Standard.

[Via http://sroblog.com]

News Ticker: Michael Jackson, Thom Yorke, Pitchfork Festival ...

How to fix America

2010-02-06T11:41:00.000+02:00

By: Frosty E. Hardison

Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. Much like Akham’s Razor suggests that all things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the correct one – sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one too. After months of pondering these questions about the “pending” economic recovery, even during the Bush Administration, I have a few simple low cost solutions myself.

Education: Frankly, we have lost our way. If you take the time to research our public school system over the last hundred years, or even pick up a book or two by John Taylor Gatto (Amazon) you will understand how programmed the American sheeple have become in Amerika. Programmed to go to work in the factories, allowing government to think for them and take care of them. Yeah take care of them as slaves! What happened to self reliance?

Next, we have too many languages to cater to in public school. There should never have been more than one. Divisiveness is killing us from within. Learn it or leave it. Instead of teaching diversity – unite us as a nation. One language, one history and one science not junk science and unproven THEORIES.

You want to teach history? Have some of our soldiers go on a speaking tour with some of the History Channel’s documentary videos relating to the battles some of these soldier were actually in. You want to show the greatest level of respect for a vet? Have them teach about that war and allow our children to learn from real heroes. The benefit of learning history is that we hopefully have learned something from the past mistakes.

I am a Star Trek fan, which we will come back to, I would like to see our nation begin thinking beyond self and stop making politicians richer and making bankers richer – let us focus on the future of our species, our planet and space exploration. Let us unite as a nation and stop bickering about our differences. Let us speak one language (English) and have a second language increase our culture and experience to enhance us not inhibit us.

Let’s build Star fleet Academy and train our brightest to learn truth by experience, experimentation and observation. Have them seek the truth at all costs and NEVER EVER allow a group of people ever stifle continued discussion of ideas like they are doing now to creationists. (Ben Stein) Let us learn and teach hypothesis and facts – and how to distinguish the two. Let us test ideas for accurace and if a theory does not have all the answers – let’s keep looking!

The THEORY of evolution is a THEORY and still not a provable fact – it too has too many holes to be the stand alone explanation for life on earth. However, again the simplest explanation in the written record of events by those living at the time who witnessed it first hand cannot be thrown out with the bath water entirely. Get over it. Another historical fact is that nations in history that have a solid understanding of the fundamentals of human rights, laws and believe in the existence of a loving God, flourish and those who lose their moral compass soon perish. Call it God, call it whatever you want to – a society that believes in God and has a sense of good nature and morality – thrive.

Learn by example and emphasize producing repeatable results as a conclusion not some random test sample or basing our facts on a dating method such as radioactive decay that has an accuracy rate of +/-1 – 800 million years.

Economy: First off a simple question. How do companies make money? I mean boiled down to the basics… create a product or service in demand and sell said – right? Wrong. That’s only a partial right answer – to make money means turning a profit. T o do that a company has to have revenues that are greater than it’s expenses and serviceable debt. Sure you can create a product or service but unless you make money (a profit) you’re out of business! A hundred and twenty years ago debt was taught as a bad thing to get yourself into. It was part of elementary education. Don’t borrow more money than you can pay back. Cash is king. You can’t borrow yourself out of debt. Common sense right? Look around you today.

According to creditcards.com (Link) the average household had 5 cards or more in 2008 averaging $10,679 – each. Hello?

These are simple no brainer concepts no longer taught in public schools. This needs to change.

Also, I would like to offer a slight dis-agreement to Ronald Reagan’s “Trickle Down Economics” philosophy. Trickle down economics doesn’t work nearly as well as TRICKLE UP economics. I state that as a fact of spending habits in combination with Paretto’s Law of 80/20. Whereby 20% of the population own as much as 80% of all assets and wealth in America; while 80% are lucky to make the house payment each month. Continued out in extrapolation – 20% of the population have all they need and the other 80% are heavy consumers needing to spend their income on daily needs. Understand? With that baseline established….

May I offer the solution that if we can stimulate the 80% (major consumers) to be more productive they tend to spend 80% or more of their income on living expenses – which yes may include beer, cigarettes, cable and the basics of life, but let us remember that those industries are owned by the other 20%; so the money still flows north and up the chain then needs to come back down – like the water cycle. Whereas this last stimulus package the Obama-nation supported went to the 20% of wealth owners in America. The problem is conservative estimates suggest the stimulus money stayed right there. That’s $3.3 trillion that went nowhere but into the pockets and bank accounts of the wealthiest people in the world. (Stimulus went where?)

Ergo – this is the very reason we have not seen a fast economic recovery. The banks and big business owners that this last stimulus money went to never made it into the creation of jobs, never got spread around throughout the economy – it did however go to line the pockets of senior executives in just about every echelon of big banks and businesses. Billions of dollars in tax money went to pay bonuses and 6-7 figure incomes. Where do you think that money went? Did you see any of it? Where is your bailout? We covered earlier that these 20% need not spend their money as much as the 80% do right? I mean when you’re making millions of dollars and you house payment is a mere 2 – 10% of that – you get to save more of your money in off shore bank accounts – right?

The best way to jump start the economy is simple, stop the pork in Congress, stop allowing lobbyists to bank roll government officials, stop giving bankers any stimulus money to manage, demand an accounting for the money they already have accepted and spend that money on getting rid of the Federal Reserve, re-establish fair lending laws making 12% the maximum interest rate any bank, credit card or contract can charge.

Next? Get rid of the income tax for a sales tax. The nation will make more money with a sales tax than with an income tax anyway. By getting rid of the Federal Reserve we can allow banks to borrow from the US Government and pay interest there where the cost/expense of credit go back into our nation’s economy.

Finances: How do you fix finances? Again look at history. In the late 1920’s the nation of Germany had hyperinflation. The government had printed so much paper money that it became valueless. Sound familiar? It took thousands of Marks to buy a loaf of bread. (Germany 1924) The U.S. is headed that direction if we don’t get the Federal Reserve off our backs and overhaul our Congress.

An old saying suggests that when you are in a hole the first step to getting out is to stop digging. We need to turn the tables on banks that offer credit cards at 30%. We need to put the caps back and since the average persons credit rating is held so high as a measurement of worth in this country, make the credit bureaus a lot more accountable to accuracy.

Again, the first and cheapest solution to fixing our nations finances is making the money stable and backed by something of value. Again we have to get rid of the Federal Reserve printing more and more worthless paper that is no longer worth anything more than an idea. I don’t know about you, but I have had enough of the tax and spend by both sides of the house and senate. One of the first signs of a government getting out of hand is once they have a spigot installed on your wallet. Once that happens all accountability goes out the window and they have total power. Didn’t we learn anything from the Magna Carta? Once taxation was taken away from the king – the king lost all control. I could go on here about Rothschild and the Napoleonic war and how his hired man rushed the news of victory to Rothschild who spread the rumor that England had lost only to buy nearly everything for pennies on the dollar the next day when the market collapsed. I’ll save that story for another rant, I mean another day.

The key point is your money is losing value daily. The reason is our paper dollar is not backed by tangible assets any longer. That needs to change. What good is it to have a million dollars in the bank, and in 10 years have two million – with less buying power?

Healthcare: We need to get government and lawyers out of the healthcare business. A free society needs to have the choice of competition in medicine – or we will surely die of the cure instead of the disease. “Government governs best when it governs least.” That is a quote from Thomas Paine which still holds true today. (Thomas Paine). I tell you a key to getting politicians out of our healthcare system is to mandate that politicians have to use the same healthcare and stand in line like the rest of us – with no chance of favoritism being given to them. What’s good for the nation should be good enough for these public servants.

I like this quote too: ‘It would be a better place if the guy telling us nothing can be done would get out of the way of those of us actually already doing it!” I find this a particularly fun quote as my wife and I used to teach finance classes and when it came to fast growth stocks and negotiating with creditors… we heard all kinds of excuses of why it wouldn’t work from people that had never tried it. Then I showed them I already did it. Yeah, lead follow or get out of the way. If you’re not a part of the solution you are part of the problem. If you want to tell me how to fix something – be prepared to back it up with proven results.

Frosty Hardison is a graduate of Colorado Technical University with a degree in Business Administration. Frosty is most recognized for standing up against the Al Gore film “An Inconvenient Truth” being shown as a stand alone science film in his daughter’s science class in January 2007. He specializes in data research and analysis as well as workflow/production efficiency. You want to fix something – go back in time when it was working – and learn from the mistakes we’ve made in taking from some to give to others.

If lazy people wish to be lazy – let them reap what they sow. But don’t sit there and punish me because I want more for my family out of life than to live in a mobile home and be a beer drinking redneck. I have not gone to college for 12 years and taken all the classes I can to be more – just to have my go getter attitude taxed so that some lazy fool can get his welfare check. I did not sign on for that in life.

And that my dear reader is how we can fix America before it becomes Amerika.

God help us.

Frosty E Hardison

Frosty E. Hardison is a graduate of Colorado Technical University with a degree in Business Administration. An MBA honors student with a 3.83 GPA, Frosty is most recognized for standing up against the Al Gore film “An Inconvenient Truth” being shown as a stand alone “science film” in his daughter’s science class in January 2007. He specializes in data research and analysis as well as work flow/production efficiency. For questions, see his website.

[Via http://fwcon.wordpress.com]

CBS, News Corp. Grab For Station Retransmission Dollars Could Get ...

what, another spending spree?

2010-02-06T03:54:00.000+02:00

The president is asking for 3.8 trillion dollars for so-called economic boost. But hasn’t the president learned that spending constantly does more damage than good? That this trillion dollars is going to do little unless he forces jobs to stay in this country. So for Obama has done nothing but lower the value of the dollar and helped destroy the economy with his spending spree.

What is his vision? Even with this trillion dollar spree a huge percent (9.8%) of people will still remain unemployed.

[Via http://lionabouttown.wordpress.com]

Fox News Shuns Obama Q&A, MSNBC Gets Snitty When He Encourages ...

Just in case you missed the awesomeness

2010-02-04T11:49:00.000+02:00

Which I would completely understand given the fact that it was an exhausting but wholly rewarding National Signing Day yesterday, after which you collapsed in a heap of inebriated, blobby JOY like I did and maybe, just possibly, perhaps missed another satisfying Jon Stewart logic/reason/reality badass beatdown of Bill O’Reilly’s assfucked accounting of current events.

If so – enjoy …

[Via http://lifeisacookie.wordpress.com]

Photo of the Week: iPod touch in California | iLounge News

Finally feeling it...

2010-02-04T03:50:00.000+02:00

I was out of the office all day Friday and away from home Friday night so I did not get to see the live coverage of the GOP luncheon. Saturday morning, my alarm went off and the news was on the radio. First thing I heard was the opening line “The Obama administration will not be trying terror subjects in New York City.” I screamed. I was just so angry, so tired of what seems to be giving in to what the other side wants. I turned off the radio without listening the story. I swore off the news. We had to be out of town over the weekend and I didn’t listen or watch any newscast. By Monday afternoon I was jonesing for some news, but waited to get it from Jon Stewart. When I saw the clips of the GOP luncheon, I was pissed I had missed it. I watched it online. It made me feel so much better! It is such a novelty to have one person say something completely false and another person, in this case the President, calmly point out that what they said was not true. It was lovely. I was feeling it again. I went back and watched the Sunday morning programs only to hear David Axelrod explain what had happened regarding the trial in New York. There will be still be trial, but most likely not in NY. He explained why and put the blame squarely and clearly where it belongs – Bloomberg and the city officials changed their minds. Wow! Another novelty! Plain spoken and direct! The new tone is finally putting the situation into focus.

Why has this taken so long?

[Via http://coginthewheel.wordpress.com]

News to know: Google Tablet; Mobile OS updates; iPad; Murdoch ...

Obama sez HCR gets between you and your doctor

2010-02-02T11:52:00.000+02:00

If you look at, the package, that, we’ve presented. And there’s some cra-stray cats and dogs that got in there that, we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating for example, tha-for example, wuh-we said from the start, uhh that, uhh, oh, that it was going to be important, uhh for us to, be consistent, in, saying to people if you can have your, i-i-if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it; that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor, in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions, that got snuck in, uh, might have violated that pledge.”

Gee, ya think so? Some “stray cats and dogs,” such as the entire basis, the entire premise of either the democrat senate or house bill! The smoove speaking transcribed above was followed by… nonsensical nonsense, at least I could make on sense of it. No wonder he reads from a teleprompter all the time. How many times has he stated that if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance? How many times has he stated that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor? How many times has he said that no one will get between you and your doctor’s decision making? KILL THE BILL. There is that deficit of trust thing… again. Here are questions: Where in the United States Constitution are they given the power to prevent you from keeping your insurance company? Where in the constitution are they given the power to prevent you from keeping your doctor? Where in the constitution are they given the power to get between you and your doctor’s decision making? Where is the Mainstream media? A confession, this is news! KILL THE BILL. Stray cats and dogs… and they want to run health care for the entire country. They want to be getting in between you and your doctor, in your decision making You trust them to do that? (Be sure to vote on November 2, 2010. Harry Reid, a lot of the Senate, Nancy Pelosi and the entire House of representatives are up for re-election.)

http://wp.me/pFeEj-jK

[Via http://oldhardhead.wordpress.com]

News to know: Google vs. Apple; Firefox; Amazon | Between the ...

Commission to Review Racially Tinged Mandatory Minimums

2010-02-02T03:47:00.000+02:00

Mandatory minimum laws apply to an array of crimes, the most controversial of which is drug sentencing. Essentially, thanks to mandatory minimum laws, which were implemented in 1986 after basketball star Len Bias overdosed on crack cocaine, require judges to determine a defendant’s sentence without considering outside mitigating factors. In the most controversial example, crack cocaine users (who are predominantly black) receive a punishment 100 times more harsh than powder cocaine users (typically white). Back in October, the Obama administration asked the US Sentencing Commission to review the minimums. I called the leadership of Families Against Mandatory Minimums about the story:

Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) argues that the requirements have not achieved their intended purpose of reducing crime and scaring minor criminals into giving information about the most flagrant offenders in return for lighter sentences. As any self-respecting fan of The Wire knows, those at the bottom of the drug pyramid don’t get details about what goes on up top. So while the drug kingpins have an avenue through which to reduce their sentences, says Jennifer Seltzer-Stitt, FAMM’s federal legislative affairs director, “[minor users] who don’t have anyone to trade get longer sentences.”

[Via http://benbuchwalter.com]

Greek Bailout News (1) | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion

‘It seems that the Indian polity is divided, India is confused’: Shah Mahmood Qureshi

2010-01-31T11:50:00.000+02:00

RupeeNews

LONDON: Referring to the meeting between the two ministers in New York September last, Shah Mahmood Qureshi clarified: “I gave him (S M Krishna) a very crisp proposal, a roadmap for the future. He said he would get back to me, but he has not got back to me. That means he has nothing to offer.” He persisted: “It seems that the Indian polity is divided, India is confused.”

The war of words between India and Pakistan has escalated with external affairs minister S M Krishna on Friday attempting damage control after his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s accusations against India a day earlier. Both ministers were in London to attend the Afghanistan Conference.

Qureshi had also stated that the MEA was divided on Pakistan. Krishna retorted: “I don’t know what makes him say that the MEA speaks in two voices. I think there is total unity of thinking in the ministry and unity of approach.”

LONDON: A one-day international conference on Afghanistan on Thursday rejected India’s argument that there were no degrees of Talibanism. British

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, hosting the conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, announced in his opening address the establishment of a $500 million ‘trust fund’ to buy “peace and integration” with warriors who are engaged in violence for economic rather than ideological reasons. A whopping $140 million has been pledged already for this year.

During his pre-conference discussion with the British foreign secretary David Miliband, external affairs minister S M Krishna had specifically said, “There should be no distinction between a good Taliban and a bad Taliban.” But this clearly fell on deaf ears. It was also unclear whether remnants of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, once cultivated by India, would be accommodated in any way. There was also no reference to the erstwhile foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, who put up a spirited fight in the first round of the recent controversial presidential election and exposed fraud before withdrawing from the contest.

Krishna was allocated a seat in the second of three rows of attendees at the conference which in itself reflected India’s peripheral role in Afghan affairs in the eyes of the international community. This, despite India being the biggest regional aid-giver to Afghanistan, with a commitment of $1.3 million. Earlier in the week, Turkey, an ally of Pakistan, did not even bother to invite India to a confabulation on Afghanistan.

Krishna was among more than 70 foreign ministers and officials of international organisations who attended the convention at the 185-year-old Lancaster House, a coveted venue for summits and high level interactions.

Pakistan supports a differentiation between Taliban segments, including being generally soft towards the Afghan Taliban, which was sponsored by the Pakistani Army’s Inter-Services Intelligence. In an interview to a British daily on Thursday, foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi claimed: “Pakistan is perhaps better placed than any other country in the world to support Afghan reintegration and reconciliation.”

As a goodwill gesture, the conference was preceded by a lifting of United Nations sanctions on five leaders of the obscurantist Taliban regime, which was ousted by armed forces led by the United States after the 9/11 attack on New York by the Afghanistan-based Al Qaida. Among the beneficiaries is a former foreign minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil.

However, Brown warned, “But those insurgents who refuse to accept the conditions for reintegration, we have no choice but to pursue them militarily.” It is widely believed that hardcore elements among the extremists will not accept the amnesty.

In keeping with United States President Barack Obama’s plan to start withdrawing American troops in a little over 18 months, Brown also declared that to fill the breach the strength of the Afghan army would be increased to 134,000 by October of this year and to 171,600 by October 2011. Corresponding enlargements would also occur in respect of the Afghan police. The template for Afghanistan is similar to the one utilised in Iraq, that of handover of responsibilities province by province to national security forces. Times of India. World rejects India’s Taliban stand

[Via http://siyasipakistan.wordpress.com]

Some former Cowboys assistant news | Dallas Cowboys Blog | Sports ...

The Jerusalem Post: Rush Limbaugh The Anti Anti-Semite

2010-01-31T03:16:00.000+02:00

While one may agree or disagree with Mr. Limbaugh’s views on many subjects, his outspoken support for Israel has been eloquent, informed and undeniable. Moreover, in commentary on the Jewish people, he has been nothing short of a philo-Semite. We are grateful for his strong and singular voice on these issues,” concluded the statement.

During a Jan. 20 broadcast following Republican Scott Brown’s upset victory in the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts, Limbaugh wondered if Jews — nearly 80 percent of whom backed Barack Obama in 2008 — were having second thoughts about the president.

[Via http://aconservativeedge.com]

Steam News

Whatever It Is, They're Against It

2010-01-30T11:52:00.000+02:00

In response to President Obama’s call for bi-partisanship in his Wednesday night State of the Union address, the Republican reply on Thursday was this:

“The Senate took a vote on extending the federal debt ceiling — without which the United States would go into default. All 40 Republicans voted no.

The Senate took a vote on requiring Congress not to pass legislation that it can’t pay for. All 40 Republicans voted no.

The Senate took a final vote on passing the overall plan. Thirty-nine Republicans voted no. The 40th, Sen.Mike Enzi (R-Wyo) skipped the vote.”

Groucho, you’re on:

[Via http://diogenesdigest.com]

Namco to distribute Fallout: New Vegas in Europe | News

British Iraq Inquiry: An ‘old fashioned anti-Semitism’

2010-01-30T03:52:00.000+02:00

Protesters outside the inquiry dressed (left to right) as Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Gordon Brown. AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis

“Criticism of Israel is old fashioned anti-Semitism,” Stephen Harper, prime minister of Canada.

“A greater transparency about involving legal advice would have prevented the issue being left entirely to the Attorney General,” ,” – Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the only top British civil official who resigned in protest to London’s support for Dubya Bush’s war on Iraq in 2003.

What is wrong with Brits these days, eh! Though their elites played a major role (Balfour Declaration) in getting rid of millions of Jews from the West to a far-away Muslim Arab land in the Middle East – now some of them in the legal business are hunting for the mass-murderers, but ‘respectable” Israeli politicians and military leaders for being involved in the genocide of Iraqis, Palestinians and Lebanese.

A ’secret’ Iraq Inquiry on the role of Tony Blair’s government in Washington’s attack on Iraq based on Mossad/CIA fasle evidence of Iraqi WMDs – was announced by the British pro-Israel prime minister Gordon Brown on June 15, 2009. Later, however, under criticism by parliamentarians , the British government agreed to make the inquiry public. Gordon Brown himself chose a panel of five to conduct the inquiry under the chairmanship of Sir John Chilcot. Therefore, the inquiry is sometimes called “Chilcot Inquiry”. The other four members are; Sir Lawrence Freedman, Sir Martin Gilbert, Sir Roderic Lyne and Baroness Prashar. Both Lawrence Freedman and Martin Gilbert are welknown pro-Israel Zionist Jews. In raelity, like Barack Obama administeration, Gordon Brown’ government is also dominated by members of Friends of Israel, a British Zionist lobby group – which hold major power in both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party.

In his testimony to the Iraq Inquiry, former British prime minister showed no remorse for collaborating with Bush which resulted in the murder of over million of Iraqi Muslims and Christians civilians for the security of Israel. Now the same Israeli poodle says that Islamic Iran is a bigger threat than (Iraq) in 2003. Contrary to Tony Blair’s hatred towards the Muslims, the former British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, exposed Tony Blair’s lies in front of the inquiry on January 21, 2010 by saying: “I would not have written cosy letters to the US President promising that Britain would be there when America went to war (against Saddam Hussein).” Jack Straw is also against military action against Islamic Iran on Iraq-WMD style Israeli Hasbara evidence.

Oliver Miles, former Ambassador to Libya, writing in the Independent on November 22, 2009 – raised the doubts that the presence of two pro-Israeli members on the 5-member Iraq Inquiry would most probably hide the pro-Israel Jewish Lobby’s role in Britain’s joining the invasion of Iraq. The Jewish-owned TIME magazine called Oliver Miles’ comment as “disgraceful”. On January 28, 2010 – BBC was quoted Martin Gilbert, whom it described as a “proud practicing Jew and Zionist” saying he feels “deep unease” at Oliver Miles comments.

Professor William A. Cook (University of La Verne, southern California) in his book Zionist control of Britain\’s government: 1940-2009 traces the history of how Britain became a Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG). Reviewing the book Gilad Atzmon (Israel-born UK Jewish citizen)made the comment: “After so many years of setting the tone, bribing UK politicians and controlling the BBC they (Zionists) are used to being untouchable”.

It’s obvious that Iraq Inquiry would be as much of an official cover-up of Israeli involvement as was the case in the US’s 9-11 Commission. Both involved Zionist Jews as members. For example, 9-11 Commission member, Philip Zelikow, who told an audience at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002:

“Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990—it’s the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.” ~ Rehmat’s World

[Via http://thepeopleofpakistan.wordpress.com]

Day 2, Non-Apple News - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Chris Matthews - Insane or EXTRA Crazy?

2010-01-28T11:50:00.000+02:00

“By all appearances, he’s post racial”…except that he’s black! Remember, Obama is a black guy. Black!!!! BLLAAAAAAAAAACK!!!!!

I don’t see Obama as a black man. I see Obama as a man. That’s the difference between me and Chris.

Of course, Chris Matthews also sees West Point as “the enemy camp”, so no wonder he needs to make sure everyone notices and remembers that Obama is a black man. Who is black. And a man. Just remember. Chrfis Matthews is obviously unable to process rational information in a way that makes some dang sense.

I think he doesn’t know what “post-racial” actually means. Or maybe he’s too busy dealing with all those “thrills” going up his leg.

[Via http://vivianlouise.wordpress.com]

Panasonic introduces DMC-ZS5 / TZ8 compact superzoom: Digital ...

Obama's Stunning Arrogance: ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’

2010-01-28T03:52:00.000+02:00

Barack Obama reminds me of the toy poodle we had when I was a child. It kept attacking our stronger dog. No matter how many times it had its butt kicked, it still believed itself to be innately superior.

If Barry Hussein was about one-thousandth as capable as he thought he was, we’d be out of the recession now instead of a lot deeper into it (as measured by the unemployment rate – which is currently 20% higher than Obama said it would be if we passed his porkulus plan).

Alas, he’s like our poodle: arrogant and psychologically unable to practice common sense. And he isn’t 1/1000th as capable as he thinks he is.

“The Big Difference” Between 2010 and 1994 “Is Me,” President Obama Says, Per Congressman

January 25, 2010 2:48 PM

Jake Tapper and Yunji de Nies report:

Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., fears that these midterm elections are going to go the way of the 1994 midterms, when Democrats lost control of the House after a failed health care reform effort.

But, Berry told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the White House does not share his concerns.

“They just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”

Asked today by ABC News’ Yunji de Nies if the president said that, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs pleaded ignorance.

“I have not talked to the president about that,” Gibbs said, employing one of his favorite dodges.

Gibbs seemed to suggest that he shared that view, whether or not President Obama said it.

“I hope it’s not newsworthy to think that the president hopes and expects to be an effective campaigner in the midterm elections,” Gibbs said.

Berry told the newspaper that he “began to preach last January that we had already seen this movie and we didn’t want to see it again because we know how it comes out…I just began to have flashbacks to 1993 and ’94. No one that was here in ’94, or at the day after the election felt like. It certainly wasn’t a good feeling.”

I wonder how many Secret Service agents it takes to pry Obama away from his mirror every morning.

From Missourah.

But more and more liberals are finally starting to recognize something that “dumb as a box of rocks” Sarah Palin figured out a year and a half ago: that you are a failure and a disgrace, just like conservatives predicted you would be.

Here’s a smattering of very recently-authored “Hey, you suck!” articles from liberals:

“He’s Done Everything Wrong” – by Mortimer Zuckerman

He’s improved America’s image in the world. He absolutely did. But you have to translate that into something. Let me tell you what a major leader said to me recently. “We are convinced,” he said, “that he is not strong enough to confront his enemy. We are concerned,” he said “that he is not strong to support his friends.”

The political leadership of the world is very, very dismayed. He better turn it around. The Democrats are going to get killed in this election. Jesus, looks what’s happening in Massachusetts.

It’s really interesting because he had brilliant, brilliant political instincts during the campaign. I don’t know what has happened to them. His appointments present somebody who has a lot to learn about how government works. He better get some very talented businesspeople who know how to implement things. It’s unbelievable. Everybody says so. You can’t believe how dismayed people are. That’s why he’s plunging in the polls.

“Why I Regret Voting For President Obama” – by Jill Dorson

All that changed when the Obama campaign became the Obama administration. I was a small business owner during 2008 election and my business ultimately failed under the weight of a horrendous economy. I am not ashamed. I worked hard. But I believed that Obama would try to level the playing field between big business and small, between thieves and honest business people, between greed and moderation. Instead, he bailed out the most wicked and left the rest of us fail.

I watched with horror as Obama followed Bush’s lead in bailing out banks, auto makers, insurance companies, all of those companies deemed “too big to fail.” What does that mean? My small company got thrown under the bus and my savings were ravaged – perhaps Wall Street is using them for bonuses this year.

Not to mention President Obama is recklessly spending our country’s future into oblivion.

It was clear after just 90 days what a mistake I’d made. My taxes have gone up and my quality of life has gone down. Hope has given way to disgust and I see now that change is simply a euphemism for “big government.”

“How to Squander the Presidency in One Year” – by David Michael Green

Barack Obama has now, in just a year’s time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime. Never has so much political advantage been pissed away so rapidly, and what’s more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis. It’s astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in a single year.

It was hilarious, of course, when Michelle Bachmann invoked the Charge of the Light Brigade at a rally against “Obama’s” (has he ever really owned it?) health care “initiative” (isn’t that too strong a word to use?), quite oblivious to the fact that the actual historical event was one of history’s greatest debacles. Obama, on the other hand, seems to be actually reliving the famous cock-up in the flesh. Except, of course, that he doesn’t really “charge” at anything. He just talks about things, thinks about things a real long time, defers to others on things, and waits around for things to maybe happen.

[Green proceeds to offer more than a dozen bullet points' worth of specific examples of Obama ineptness]

“Obama’s Credibility Gap” – by Bob Herbert

Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.

Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.

The last paragraph above is probably as close an admission as any New York Times writer will ever come to saying, “You LIE!“ to Obama (i.e., ala Joe Wilson).

I’m guessing that all of these liberals aren’t comforted by the fact that “they’ve got Obama.”

It is amazing that this incredibly failed president is actually still saying, “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.” There is something profoundly psychologically wrong with this guy. His comment amounts to an insult against former president Bill Clinton, who had the misfortune of not being as great and wonderful as Barack Obama. I despised Bill Clinton, but Slick Willie had more political instincts and legitimate personal charisma than Barry Hussein will ever have in his life.

Obama and everything he promised are empty, hollow, and meaningless. He is an empty suit that recites the script off a pair of teleprompter screens well. Nothing more.

[Via http://startthinkingright.wordpress.com]

Hotz releases PlayStation 3 hack | News

Obama, Mr. Freeze

2010-01-26T11:54:00.000+02:00

Se tem uma parada que eu gosto é economia. E a notícia que o Obama vai propor um congelamento nos gastos de “non-defense discretionary spending“ bem no meio da maior das crises é pra lá de preocupante. Eis uma boa análise:

As one deficit-hawk journalist of my acquaintance says this evening, this is a perfect example of the fundamental unseriousness of Barack Obama and his administration: rather than make proposals that will actually tackle the long-term deficit in a serious way–either through future tax increases triggered by excessive deficits or through future entitlement spending caps triggered by excessive deficits–he comes up with a proposal that does short-term harm to the economy as an alternative to tackling the deficit in any serious and significant way.

O Umair Haque é um dos que são radicalmente contra às medidas, como se pode ver em seus tweets:

america’s now an austerity program. welcome to the final stage of national decline.

Budget freeze b/c of the bond market? oh, you mean the guys that CAUSED A MASSIVE GLOBAL CRISIS? wtf. my pet hamster’s smarter than obama

every half decent economist in the world pretty much agrees. this is NOT politics, folks. it’s economic suicide.

Here’s the score. we spent huge $ on bailing out banks. that $ is now going to be cut from YOUR services. “austerity” begins with you.

Implications: double-dip recession almost 100%, income inequality spikes, job creation falls, china transfer accelerates. christ.

[Via http://runmotherfuckerrun.wordpress.com]

AMERICAblog News: White House adviser Plouffe fails to mention ...

Told ya so!

2010-01-26T03:53:00.000+02:00

The entry for December 20, 2009, on this Blog made the following prediction:

Faced with rising debt and the diversion of 30% of the Federal Budget into debt service, President Obama will solemnly address the Nation and speak of the need for sacrifice. Public employment in health, education, conservation, housing and so forth will be cut. Programs providing direct service will be cut 5 – 10%.

News reportstoday indicate that President Obama plans to cut domestic spending in order to economize. While war and homeland security will continue to be fully funded, indeed increased, education and health will be severely cut. It appears that we spent so much on war and in subsidizing the ultra-rich that there is no more left for such luxuries as food stamps, school lunches, housing the poor and the like.

President Bush, er, that is, President Obama will encourage the nation in his state-of-the-union address that it needs to sacrifice so that Halliburton can continue to enjoy its war-profiteering and those special friends of Barack, Goldman Sachs, their executive bonuses.

[Via http://dissentingdemocrat.wordpress.com]

Angelina Jolie » Current News Trends

Ohio - Obama Preaches To The Wrong Crowd.

2010-01-24T11:28:00.000+02:00

I can’t get no satisfaction could well be President Obama’s mantra these days. Picked audiences or not it just keeps getting worse for the embattled Barack Obama, while telling us about the ‘green jobs’ that may or may not be created by research into solar power and wind generation, which most experts agree will never amount to more than 20 per cent of the power requirements of this country at best. All the while bringing the entire weight of the government and its unelected regulatory agencies to destroy our most abundant sources of energy, coal, oil and natural gas.

It is so typical of Obama to speak out of ‘both’ sides of his mouth… promoting an unproven and economically questionable technology while attacking another economic sector and its jobs.

Speaking of his administration’s recent debacles in collisions with the American people Obama said, “I’m not going to walk away just because it’s hard”. Sounds a lot like Hillary saying, “I don’t feel no way tired”.

John Boehner

The fact is he got his butt kicked good and hard. Ohio Republican Minority Whip, John Boehner, speaking of Ohio’s TEN POINT NINE PERCENT UNEMPLOYMENT rate, referred to Obama’s touting of his failed stimulus. “Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs since the stimulus was enacted”. “Nine straight months of double digit unemployment”. The rest of the country echoes these words.

The entire machinery of Democratic governance nation wide is a runaway freight train on a collision course with the real world. Witness the State of California under a ‘liberal’ RINO (Republican In Name Only) Governor (Arnold Schwarzenegger), with a completely leftist state legislature more attuned to social engineering than action which would save this most populous state in the nation from bankruptcy and economic oblivion. With an unemployment rate at more than 10.6 percent, and some areas such as the San Joaquin Valley as high as FORTY PERCENT.

Ron Nehring

With our total state budget deficit at close to SIXTY BILLION DOLLARS and many of our Governor’s spending ‘cuts’ amounting to book-cooking budget shifts, the state legislature is proposing a universal health care system at an annual cost of some 200 billion dollars annually. I have run out of superlatives to describe this nuttiness but Ron Nehring, California State Republican Chairman, put it nicely, “California Democrats are either tone-deaf or delusional”.

This exact statement could be used just about anywhere in the country and especially at the national government level. The Democrats simply seem unable to stop or change course.

The American people will no longer tolerate BUSINESS AS USUAL, from Democrats or Republicans. That’s the message. Ignore it at your peril.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

[Via http://skipmaclure.wordpress.com]

News From Across The Pond: Rihanna and Beyonce sing for Haiti ...

Barack’s people are tracking clicks

2010-01-24T03:34:00.000+02:00

Emails sent by Barack Obama’s people often have URLs in them.

That’s fine but Mr. Obama’s people use a phishing technique where the link displayed is not the real link. My mail reader converts the emails to plain text by default, so it is obvious.

The text “http://my.barackobama.com/Haiti” is actually linked to some obscure URL at my.barackobama.com. This URL probably encodes information about the page to display as well as my identity. It is almost certainly there so that the people running my.barackobama.com can track my behavior if I were to click this link.

This is nothing new. Mr. Obama’s people have been doing things this way since the campaign and it is a common technique for tracking the behavior of people in email marketing campaigns. It has always bugged me, though, that Barack Obama does this.

[Via http://thoughtfulcode.wordpress.com]

Saber strikes back at Fox News, Sean Hannity on health care reform ...

Latin American Leaders Saying The US Military Is Occupying Haiti!

2010-01-23T11:47:00.000+02:00

January 23, 2010: Press TV - January 22, 2010

Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua say the US is using the international relief operation in Haiti as a cover-up for a military takeover.

Bolivian President Evo Morales said that he will request an emergency UN meeting to reject what he calls the US military occupation of Haiti.

“It’s not right that the United States should use this natural disaster to invade and militarily occupy Haiti,” Morales told a press conference on Wednesday.

“If you have all these problems with the injured and the dead from the earthquake, you have to go there to save lives, and you don’t do that from a military standpoint,” he added.

An outspoken critic of US policies, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez also had accused Washington of occupying Haiti “under the guise of the natural disaster.”

Nicaragua also has taken a similar stance toward US with respect to the situation in Haiti.

The United States is deploying up to 20,000 troops to Haiti. US servicemen have taken control of the country’s international airport.

The Pentagon has sent one of its biggest aircraft carriers to Haiti, along with other navy and coast guard vessels.

On Friday, Arturo Valenzuela, the US assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs rejected that the US was occupying Haiti.

“Haiti is a sovereign country, everybody respects Haiti’s sovereign country, the United States respects Haiti’s sovereignty,” said Arturo Valenzuela.

Link to original article below…

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=116809§ionid=351020706

[Via http://stevenjohnhibbs.wordpress.com]

AMERICAblog News: Corporations, Lobbyists and Republicans are big ...

Haiti Update: The News That's Not On Your TV

2010-01-23T03:26:00.000+02:00

U.S. given authority over Haiti ports and roadways in earthquake relief effort US Forces in Haiti to Grow to 20,000 A Haiti Disaster Relief Scenario Was Envisaged by the US Military One Day Before the Earthquake US Military to Enforce State of Emergency in Haiti Soldiers in Haiti told to stop handing out food US Military Operations Block Relief Efforts in Haiti Why Is The US Military Occupying Four Airports In Haiti? Mass US Military Presence in Haiti Arouses Contention The U.S. must not ‘occupy’ Haiti, declares French minister as aid FINALLY trickles through France should return the $40 Billion (U.S) it ransomed at gun point from Haiti between 1825 and 1947 Chavez says US ‘weapon’ caused Haiti quake Scahill on mercenaries: Haitians don’t need ‘more unaccountable people with guns’ The myth of Haiti’s lawless streets A Lootin’ an’ a Burnin’? Media Disinformation on Haiti Police kill man in Haiti over allegedly stolen rice HAARP, Haiti, Brzezinski and the NWO Oil in Haiti – Economic Reasons for the UN/US Occupation History of a Haitian Holocaust Chavez says U.S. occupying Haiti in name of aid Why the US Owes Haiti Billions:The Briefest History The Social Historical Context of “Natural Disasters”: Haiti The Crisis in Haiti and the Militarization of Aid VIDEO: Haiti: We Would Rather Die Standing Documentary: “Inside a Failed State – Haiti” The Right Testicle of Hell: History of a Haitian Holocaust Naomi Klein Issues Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert

[Via http://hope2012.wordpress.com]

AMERICAblog News: Pelosi: Don't have votes to pass Senate HCR bill ...

Principais notícias: déficit de transções correntes é maior desde 1947

2010-01-21T11:14:00.000+02:00

InfoMoney:

O déficit brasileiro em transações correntes – resultado das operações de comércio de bens e serviços com o exterior – atingiu no mês de dezembro seu maior patamar desde o ano de 1947.

Segundo os dados divulgados pelo Banco Central, o montante chegou a US$ 5,94 bilhões e ilustra o aumento dos ganhos das empresas estrangeiras, que, em decorrência disso passaram a enviar mais lucros e dividendos aos seus países sedes.

A notícia é um dos destaques da mídia nesta quinta-feira (21). Confira também as demais notícias de grande relevância nos principais jornais do país:

Estado de São Paulo

B1 – Déficit externo atinge R$ 5,9 bilhões em dezembro, o maior desde 1947;

B3 – Estrangeiro bate recorde na bolsa;

B5 – Fazenda vai tentar evitar alta dos juros;

B6 – País cria 995 mil empregos em 2009;

B10 – China aperta crédito e assusta bolsas;

B11 – Bolha é ameaça global, afirma ONU;

B14 – Pão de Açúcar vai investir R$ 5 bilhões até 2012;

B15 – GP deixa o capital da BR Malls.

Valor Econômico

A3 – Mesmo com crescimento zero, país gerou 995 mil empregos em 2009;

A14 – Obama está percebendo que as vezes ele “não pode”;

B1 – Petrobras reestrutura operação na Argentina;

B8 – Teuto na mira da Hypermarcas;

B8 – Chineses compram projeto de minério de ferro em MG;

B11 – Cade atende BRF e faz novas concessões;

C1 – Empresas repatriam US$ 10 bilhões com a crise;

C1 – Reservas crescem US$ 1,2 bilhão em 2010;

C2 – China freia ritmo do crédito e derruba bolsas.

[Via http://naaltaounabaixa.wordpress.com]

From Struggling, Squabbling Albany, Bad News for Schools - City ...

Schadenfreude

2010-01-21T03:51:00.000+02:00

I must say I am pleased by the turnout in the Massachusetts special election. I hope that the loss of a Democrat supermajority will but the brakes on some of Obama’s agenda- healthcare reform chief among them. I believe it is dangerous to have one party in control, regardless of which party that is. I think gridlock tends to encourage deliberation; sadly it also tends to encourage compromise which seems to manifest itself in pork, graft, bloat and corruption. But if we get some ineffective, bloated shadow of healthcare reform rather than the wholesale nationalization of our medical system, I’ll take it. We might even get a few decent reforms as a result.

[Via http://usofmind.wordpress.com]

Stocks in the News: Citigroup, Apple, Kraft, Tyco - DailyFinance

Muslims burned a child who refused to convert

2010-01-19T19:51:00.000+02:00

When will Europe wake up! When Europe will stops recognition and support of Islamic centers and mosques! When the EU will cease to recognize the Imams! When Europe is going to close all mosques and expile all imams ! Their success will transform Europe into a Muslim communities and will lead to the persecution of our Christian. Look at Turkey, which claims to be secular and see how they persecute non-Muslims! I ask you to post those videos on other sites to warn people from converting to imams ideology.

Look at all islamic countries In all Islamic countries and even the “moderates” countries , who receive support from Europe , and how they persecute people!

I alla Islamiska länder och även i de ” moderata ” som får stöd från Europa

The most dangerous ideology in the world, is the official imams ideology. the world must stop them all and to prevent their teachings

[Via http://mosquesdanger.wordpress.com]

Ubisoft shying away from licensed product // News

Corpses, ctd., and Guantánamo

2010-01-19T03:51:00.000+02:00

This morning, Harper’s published an investigation by Scott Horton into the 2006 death of three detainees-two Saudi Arabian men and a Syrian-at Guantánamo. The official account has the three detainees dying impossible deaths:

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

Horton, however, tells a different story, drawing on interviews with four members of an MI unit at Guantánamo, including Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman. It amounts to this: On June 9, the night the three detainees allegedly commit suicide, Hickman observed a white van travel three times to “an unnamed and officially unacknowledged compound” on the site. Such trips were not unusual. Hickman had been witnessed them before, had been instructed not to record the movements of the van, even though he logged every other coming and going at Camp Delta, including John McCain’s, and had come to understand that the driver of the van would “let the guards know they had a prisoner in the van by saying they were ‘delivering a pizza.’”

The trips began around 6 pm and ended around 8. But at 12:15,”Camp Delta suddenly ‘lit up’”: three dead detainees had been brought to the camp’s medical clinic; a “distraught medical corpsman” told Hickman that “they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised.”

Obviously, Horton’s investigation (all 7,900 or so words of it) provides considerably more detail and insight than that summary, but that should suffice to draw out the first loose end: the official story has the detainees dying by hanging; around the camp, American soldiers had heard the detainees had died by swallowing rags.

Somehow, though, the story gets stranger. The military accused the detainees of engaging in “asymmetric warfare.” (Apparently, by trying to force the public to scrutinize Guantánamo.) They were described as “fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg.”

No matter that none of the detainees had been charged with a crime. No matter that the two Saudi Arabian detainees had had their cases reviewed; one was on a list to return to the country, the other scheduled for transfer. According to Horton, “All that stood in the way of Al-Salami’s [the Yemeni detainee] release from Guantánamo were difficult diplomatic relations between the United States and Yemen.”

The men’s corpses, though, were sent to their home countries, minus “the neck organs.” Still, the corpses’ are not mute.

When Al-Zahrani ["a brigadier general in the Saudi police] viewed his son’s corpse, he saw evidence of a homicide. “There was a major blow to the head on the right side,” he said. “There was evidence of torture on the upper torso, and on the palms of his hand. There were needle marks on his right arm and on his left arm.” None of these details are noted in the U.S. autopsy report. “I am a law enforcement professional,” Al-Zahrani said. “I know what to look for when examining a body.”

Mangin, for his part, expressed particular concern about Al-Salami’s mouth and throat, where he saw “a blunt trauma carried out against the oral region.” The U.S. autopsy report mentions an effort at resuscitation, but this, in Mangin’s view, did not explain the severity of the injuries. He also noted that some of the marks on the neck were not those he would normally associate with hanging.

Strange, that the neckless corpse communicate so much. Strange that the murder of these detainees, if it was in fact murder, should dramatize the lies of torture. Crimeless victims. Gorged on rags, since they would not eat (all three men were on hunger-strikes); silenced by rags, they could neither scream, nor give up give up the secrets that Guantánamo was designed to extract.

[Via http://jdelrosso.wordpress.com]

Jack Myers: ESPN, Weather and CNN Lead News & Sports Nets in Multi ...

All The King's Horses And All The King's Men... May Not Be Enough.

2010-01-17T11:26:00.000+02:00

The Anointed One’s panic button must certainly have been pushed to stir him from the urgency of crafting more illegal deals in his ILLEGAL attempted takeover of 16% of our total economy, taking ownership of our bodies and way of life as well.

It remains to be seen how close they really are to agreement. It also remains to be seen how many of their House votes will hold in the final analysis, given the amount of pressure being placed on Democrat and ‘moderate’ Republican RINOs by an enraged and daily-growing number of voters in their districts, and a constant barrage of negative feedback from Conservatives and Independents around the country.

The note of desperation could not be kept from reports coming from DeMarxist house organs such as The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and The New York Times, as they changed tracks and began to trumpet the list of DeMaoist heavies called upon to come forth and do battle with the upstart, but highly effective and well-liked, Scott Brown in the Massachusetts US Senate special election to determine who will hold the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.

All of the administration’s sleaze mongers (those that could be spared from digging into Sarah Palin’s family) are desperately trying to find a way to destroy Scott Brown before the ballots can be counted. In the event of a Brown victory they will most surely attempt to steal the election, a la Barney Frank’s theft of his opponent’s victory through corrupt state election officials, operatives and liberal justices beholden to the left. It would behoove the Republicans to CAREFULLY monitor each and every polling place in the absolute certainty of the Maobamists pulling in the ACORN/SEIU and other Union thugocrats, to be prepared to stand up to them and for ONCE not get stepped all over. Conservative and Independent Tea Party Patriots would be perfect for this type of duty, as many of them have already been confronted by, and NOT intimidated by, the rent-a-mob goon squads.

It tickled the hell out of me to see a sign-wielding SEIU ‘protester’ in Massachusetts, who it turns out was an unemployed SEIU member, telling a television reporter that he was only there to collect the $50.00 being paid out by the union for the event. He further stated that he didn’t vote for Obama. This was a guy that was well aware what his union was doing. Don’t forget that SEIU and Andy Stern dropped a cool $680,000 on anti-Brown negative television ads. Hey, Andy! Ask for a refund. It didn’t work.

As we go into the final days of the campaign the DeMarxists are pulling out all the stops to try and salvage Martha Coakley. SHE CAN BE BEATEN!! Scott has been running consistently ahead in the polls in this liberal stronghold. No wonder the Enlightened One’s handlers are willing to throw away whatever capital he has left. THEY ARE DESPERATE.

Go online and give Scott whatever support you can – you don’t have to live in Massachusetts to actively help. Contact his campaign at www.brownforussenate.com

While the nation is rightly focused on this surprising thrust into the rotten heart of the liberal beast, don’t forget for a moment that we have major battles being fought on other fronts.

The DeMarxists have THIRTY SEVEN DISTRICTS that are in serious trouble from really aroused and ANGRY constituents who are definitely at risk of losing their jobs, and not nearly all of them are going to be willing to trust to the blandishments of cushy jobs being offered by Maobama, should they fall on their swords for him in vain. What? Not trust OBAMA? For shame.

Continue your efforts to call, fax, email, snail mail and visit your representatives’ offices. Make it so hot for them they’ll be afraid to show up. Don’t pay attention to the lies and invented stories of the LAME STREAM FRINGE MEDIA. It should be apparent to all and sundry by now that they have lied themselves into inconsequence.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

[Via http://skipmaclure.wordpress.com]

John Coleman's hourlong news special “Global Warming – The Other ...

Mass. Senate Race becoming National Spotlight

2010-01-17T03:33:00.000+02:00

Tensions are high since we are days away from the Massachusetts special election for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat. It is a race that democrats a few weeks ago thought was in the bag. They are now stuck with a nail-biter as Scott Brown continues to gain in the polls heading down the stretch. Nearly every poll you look at gives Scott Brown at least a slight lead percentage-wise over Coakley and that gap is increasing daily.

Brown’s recent success has not been entirely his doing. Martha Coakley has spent her time demonstrating to political hopefuls in Massachusetts how not to run a campaign. She needs to speak with her advertisement department because that has been an absolute and utter disaster for her. Mistakes ranged from misspelling her state to being sued by UPS for abuse of the company’s slogan to attack her opponent, Scot Brown. This doesn’t even take into account that controversy that came up out of Coakly’s role as a district attorney in the 2005 curling iron toddler rape case.

There is still time between now and Tuesday but taking into account the fact the Massachusetts democrats outnumber republicans 3 to 1 in that state, it’s amazing this race is even close. Scott Brown has also received a surprising endorsement from the Cape Cod Times, a newspaper that has not been known for its conservative opinion. This election could serve as a window into what we can expect in the year to come and could potentially be a big blow to democrats trying to pass health care reform. Scott Brown has campaigned on voting against the Health Care Bill which would trim the senate down to only 59 votes – not enough to pass the bill without reconciliation – still possible but not appealing to the left right now.

We will have a special edition of the show Tuesday night as the election results come in from what could be the biggest race for republicans yet.

[Via http://conservativetalker.wordpress.com]

John Coleman's hourlong news special “Global Warming – The Other ...

Blood on the Sock

2010-01-16T11:30:00.000+02:00

Not long ago, I thought the handlers of Martha Coakley to be idiots. Having crafted a game plan of keeping their candidate off the campaign trail, I figured it was their strategy that had forfeited her front runner status. But in the past five days, forced onto the campaign trail by her plummeting hopes, Coakley has proven them to be excellent judges of their candidate. Locked in a cupboard is where she belongs.

Dan Rea: Umm Would Barack Obama be in if this thing was not this close?

Martha Coakley: Umm it’s hard to know, I think that he uh is welcome in Massachusetts and I’m sure everybody is happy to see a president come.

Rea: 62 to 36

Coakley: But I think probably if it weren’t so close Rudy Giuliani would be here and besides he’s a Yankee fan (Laughter) I just want people to know (Laughter)

Rea: Uhhh yeah but now Scott Brown has Curt Schilling

Coakley: and another Yankee fan

Rea: Schilling?

Coakley: Yes

Rea: Curt Schilling a Yankee fan?

Coakley: nooo, alright I’m wrong on my, I’m wrong

Rea: The Red Sox’s great pitcher of the bloody sock?

Coakley: well he’s not there anymore.

Don’t forget that it was just a few days ago that Coakley was mocking Scott Brown for his hands-on approach to campaigning.

“Coakley bristles at the suggestion that, with so little time left, in an election with such high stakes, she is being too passive. ‘As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?’ she fires back, in an apparent reference to a Brown online video of him doing just that.”

What machine aristocrats like Martha don’t get is that the street provides sustenance. Scott’s pathway to success hasn’t been orchestrated by consultants in offices hundreds of miles away. His path has been built, day by day, brick by brick, on the sidewalks of our state.

Massachusetts has fallen in love with Scott Brown because his handshakes, his warmth and the sense of humor he’s displayed as he shares our cold have sent a clear message. When Scott gets to Washington he will be there on our behalf, as our representative, not the representative of the overstuffed tuxedos with ten thousand dollar checks hanging out of their pockets.

Scott seems to understand intuitively what values are and what character is, but, in fact, he’s worked hard to reach that understanding. It is that effort, that cause and effect, that plants Scott’s feet so firmly in our corner. This quality is one that is not likely to be found in the ‘bubble people’ like Martha, who move through life faster and more smoothly than others but somehow seem not to have experienced it.

Like riders on conveyor belts at the airport, the Coakleys of the world get whisked from point A to point B without exerting themselves. Without exertion, however, there is no struggle, and struggle is the only source of education that life offers. The shared reality of struggle connects us, and Martha’s refusal to pay that small price for our acceptance represents an obliviousness to our struggles. As such, she has failed to pay the admission for entry into our lives and our hearts.

On Tuesday, it seems certain, that Scott will finish first in a short race in which he will have prevailed over long odds. We have all enjoyed the richness of that ride, and we have enjoyed watching Scott’s growth over the course of the campaign, for our own sense of our own power has grown along with his – he has made his journey ours. The point of America is that the power is ours, and in the case of this campaign we have reclaimed it – hopefully not just for the one outing – and we send Scott forth knowing that he will be our representative, not another pretender.

We never doubted that Scott knew who Curt Schilling is - and even for Martha Coakley, it's a surprise that she doesn't. But that's not why we support Scott, nor why we oppose Martha. We're with him for the same reason that we were with Curt. Because he was fighting for us. Blood on the sock.

[Via http://realclearthinker.com]

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Local news shows are where the biased ...

Obama - Leader of crimes against humanity. Prosececute him.

2010-01-16T03:53:00.000+02:00

I posted on this recently. Since then there’s been some more developments:

Original story on ICH, December 31st 2009:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24290.htm

11th Jan 2010, the excellent MEDIALENS

wrote of the episode: Were Afghan children Executed by US-led forces and why aren’t the media interested? (http://www.medialens.org/alerts/10/100111_were_afghan_children.php)

15th Jan 2010, ICH post a followup to the story:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24403.htm

[Via http://lwtc247.wordpress.com]

Fox News' Thursday Ratings Dominate Cable News Haiti Coverage | TV ...

RAW: An Instrument of Indian Expansionism

2010-01-14T11:52:00.000+02:00

Daily.Pk

The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), created in 1968, has assumed a significant status in the formulation of India’s domestic and foreign policies, particularly the later. Working directly under the Prime Minister, it has over the years become and effective instrument of India’s national power. In consonance with Kautilya’s precepts, RAW’s doctrine is based on the principle of waging a continuous series of battles of intrigues and secret wars.

RAW, ever since its creation, has always been a vital, though unobtrusive, actor in Indian policy-making apparatus. But it is the massive international dimensions of RAW operations that merit a closer examination. To the credit of this organization, it has in very short span of time mastered the art of spy warfare. Credit must go to Indira Gandhi who in the late 1970s gave it a changed and much more dynamic role. To suit her much publicized Indira Doctrine, (actually India Doctrine) Mrs. Gandhi specifically asked RAW to create a powerful organ within the organization which could undertake covert operations in neighboring countries. It is this capability that makes RAW a more fearsome agency than its superior KGB, CIA, MI-6, BND and the Mossad.

Its internal role is confined only in monitoring events having bearing on the external threat. RAW’s boss works directly under the Prime Minister. An Additional Secretary to the Government of India, under the Director RAW, is responsible for the Office of Special Operations (OSO), intelligence collected from different countries, internal security (under the Director General of Security), the electronic/technica l section and general administration. The Additional Secretary as well as the Director General of Security is also under the Director of RAW. DG Security has two important sections: the Aviation Research Center (ARC) and the Special Services Bureau (SSB). The joint Director has specified desks with different regional divisions/areas (countries):

Area one. Pakistan: Area two, China and South East Asia: Area three, the Middle East and Africa: and Area four, other countries.

Aviation Research Center (ARC) is responsible for interception, monitoring and jamming of target country’s communication systems. It has the most sophisticated electronic equipment and also a substantial number of aircraft equipped with state-of- the art eavesdropping devices. ARC was strengthened in mid-1987 by the addition of three new aircraft, the Gulf Stream-3. These aircraft can reportedly fly at an altitude of 52,000 ft and has an operating range of 5000 kms. ARC also controls a number of radar stations located close to India’s borders. Its aircraft also carry out oblique reconnaissance, along the border with Bangladesh, China, Nepal and Pakistan.

RAW having been given a virtual carte blanche to conduct destabilization operations in neighboring countries inimical to India to seriously undertook restructuring of its organization accordingly. RAW was given a list of seven countries (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Pakistan and Maldives) whom India considered its principal regional protagonists. It very soon systematically and brilliantly crafted covert operations in all these countries to coerce, destabilize and subvert them in consonance with the foreign policy objectives of the Indian Government.

RAW’s operations against the regional countries were conducted with great professional skill and expertise. Central to the operations was the establishment of a huge network inside the target countries. It used and targeted political dissent, ethnic divisions, economic backwardness and criminal elements within these states to foment subversion, terrorism and sabotage. Having thus created the conducive environments, RAW stage-managed future events in these countries in such a way that military intervention appears a natural concomitant of the events. In most cases, RAW’s hand remained hidden, but more often that not target countries soon began unearthing those “hidden hand”. A brief expose of RAW’s operations in neighboring countries would reveal the full expanse of its regional ambitions to suit India Doctrine ( Open Secrets. India’s Intelligence Unveiled by M K Dhar. Manas Publications, New Delhi, 2005 ).

Bangladesh

Indian intelligence agencies were involved in erstwhile East Pakistan,now Bangladesh since early 1960s. Its operatives were in touch with Sheikh Mujib for quite some time. Sheikh Mujib went to Agartala in 1965. The famous Agartala case was unearthed in 1967. In fact, the main purpose of raising RAW in 1968 was to organise covert operations in Bangladesh. As early as in 1968, RAW was given a green signal to begin mobilising all its resources for the impending surgical intervention in erstwhile East Pakistan. When in July 1971 General Manekshaw told Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that the army would not be ready till December to intervene in Bangladesh, she quickly turned to RAW for help. RAW was ready. Its officers used Bengali refugees to set up Mukti Bahini. Using this outfit as a cover, Indian military sneakeddeep into Bangladesh. The story of Mukti Bahini and RAW’s role in its creation and training is now well-known. RAW never concealed its Bangladesh operations. Interested readers may have details in Asoka Raina’s Inside RAW: the story of India’s secret service published by Vikas Publishing House of New Delhi.

The Indians played upon Bengali sentiments in the aftermath of the 1965 Pakistan-India war through RAW so that when opportunity struck the Indians were well-prepared. It was RAW that gradually converted Sheikh Mujibur Rehman from being a staunch supporter of Pakistan as a student leader to envisaging himself as the possible ‘Father’ of a new nation – Bangladesh. Indian sources, including journalists, have put on record how much before 1971 RAW had established the network of a separatist movement through ‘cells’ within East Pakistan and military training camps in Indian territory adjoining East Pakistan. The Mukti Bahini were all in place organisationally to take advantage of the political trouble in 1971 and carry out acts of sabotage against communication lines so that Indian forces simply marched in at the ‘right’ time. RAW agents provided valuable information as well as acting as an advance guard for conducting unconventional guerrilla acts against the Pakistani defence forces. A Bengali, who was a Mukti Bahini activist, Zainal Abedin, has written a revealing book which includes his personal experience in Indian training camps, entitled RAW and Bangladesh. It was the post-fall of Dhaka period which exposed the Indians’ true intentions and made Abedin realise that It was evident from the conduct of the Indian Army that they treated Bangladesh as a colony … It is now evident that India had helped the creation of Bangladesh with the aim that it would be a step forward towards the reunification of India.

Because Mujib returned, Indian forces could not remain in Bangladesh permanently and so it fell on RAW to initiate other fronts to undermine the sovereignty of Bangladesh. RAW has since been seeking to create Indian dominance culturally, ideologically and economically in Bangladesh.

In addition, RAW has also created another insurgency force: The Shanti Bahini (Fighters for Peace). This force comprises the Chittagong Hill Tracts Hindu and Buddhists tribesmen (the Chakmas) and the intention is to bleed the Bengali military and keep the border area tense. The Chakmas used to embarrass the Bangladesh government especially when the latter protested over Indian policy on the sharing of waters’ issue (http://www. defencejournal. com/jan99/ rawfacts. htm).

RAW’s involvement in Chittagong Hill Ttacts : some admissions

The Chakma guerrillas had closely assisted RAW operatives. They were assisted during and after the liberation War. The Chakmas, after the change of govt in 1975, contacted the RAW. The Chakmas offered to infiltrate among the Mizo rebels and pass on information to the Indian govt in lieu of assylum. This offer was accepted ( Inside RAW : The Story of India’s Secret Service, Asoka Raina, Vikas Publishers, New Delhi, 1981, pp.86-87 ).

In 1975, the RAW was instructed to assist the Chakma rebels with arms, supplies , bases and training. Training was conducted in the border camps in Tripura but specialized training was imparted at Chakrata near Dehra Doon. Shantu Larma’s Shanti Bahini members were flown to Chakrata and then sent back to Tripura to infiltrate into Chittagong Hill Tracts. A RAW office and its operatives at Agartala monitored the progress of the trainees. In 1976, the Shanti Bahini launched its first attack on the Bangladesh force. A new insurgency had been born and India’s secret war in the hills of Bangladesh had begun ( South Asia’s Fractured Frontier, Binalaksmi Nepram, Mittal Pablishers, New Delhi, 2002, pp-153 ).

The RAW was involved in training rebels of Chakma tribes and Shanti Bahini to carry out subversive activities in Bangladesh ( RAW’s role in Furthering India’s Foreign Policy, The New Nation, Dhaka, 31 August 1994 ).

The Indian intelligence had collaborated the armed rebels of Chittagong Hill Tracts to destabilise the region ( Indo-Bangladesh Relation, Motiur Rahman, daily Prothom Alo, 10 December 2002).

The creation of Bangladesh was masterminded by RAW in complicity with KGB under the covert clauses of Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation (adopted as 25-year Indo-Bangladesh Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation in 1972).RAW retained a keen interest in Bangladesh even after its independence. Mr. Subramaniam Swamy, Janata Dal MP, a close associate of Morarji Desai said that Rameswar Nath Kao, former Chief of RAW, and Shankaran Nair upset about Sheikh Mujib’s assassination chalked a plot to kill General Ziaur Rahman. However, when Morarji Desai came into power in 1977 he was indignant at RAW’s role in Bangladesh and ordered operations in Bangladesh to be called off; but by then RAW had already gone too far. General Zia continued to be in power for quite some time but he was assassinated after Indira Gandhi returned to power, though she denied her involvement in his assassination ( Weekly Sunday, Calcutta,18 September, 1988 ).

It has also unleashed a well-organized plan of psychological warfare, creation of polarisation among the armed forces, propaganda by false allegations of use of Bangladesh territory by ISI, creation of dissension’s among the political parties and religious sects, control of media, denial of river waters, and propping up a host of disputes in order to keep Bangladesh under a constant political and socio-economic pressure ( “RAW and Bangladesh” by Mohammad Zainal Abedin, November 1995, RAW In Bangladesh: Portrait of an Aggressive Intelligence, by Abu Rushd, Dhaka ).

RAW and Ford Foundation

Jaideep Saikia, an outward analyst, but virtually an Indian intelligence operative, hailing from Assam, abruptly tunes to India’s anti-Bangladesh campaign that the demography of Assam is being rapidly changed due to the alleged infiltration of the Bangladeshi Muslims into Northeast India, particularly in Assam in his recent book, “Terror sans frontiers: Islamist militancy in Northeast India”.

Educated, better to say trained, in school at the Rashtriya Indian Military College in Dehra Dun, Saikia recently researched on so-called Islamic Militancy in North East India under the aegis of a Ford Foundation fellowship, which was awarded for the year 2003. The research was conducted at the Program in ‘Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security’(ACDIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is an astonishing and utter folly how ‘For Foundation’ could sponsor and allow Saikia to use his fellowship on such an issue, which is not only controversial, but also baseless and false and a part of India’s anti-Bangladesh media campaign.

Saikia’s effort cannot be termed as research work, as this type of stories is written almost daily in India. India’s electronic and print media, including websites, are poured with such fabricated anti-Bangladesh items. It is assumed that Indian intelligence outfit RAW(Research & Analysis Wing) managed and possibly financed ‘Ford Foundation’ to award fellowship to Saikia, which he used not only to defame Bangladesh, but also to prepare a ground for India to invade Bangladesh.

Without deep and careful study it can easily be questioned, how Saikia, being a researcher could write, like his all other fellow-Indians, an essay having minimal statistics and historical facts, which he on the other hand, distorted in every possible ways. He tuning to his mentors in New Delhi chorused that Bangladeshis deliberately infiltrate into Assam to change the demography of the state either to form a new Muslim state out of Assam or merge the Muslim majority areas of the state with Bangladesh. To justify his claim, Saikia says, “The Muslims now constitute more than 70 per cent of the population of Dhubri district of Assam. But Saikia did not mention from which source he collected this religion-based demographic information, as the Indian census of 2001, did not enumerate its citizens on the basis of religion.

Secondly, he should know that at least five districts of Assam adjoining Sylhet had Muslim majority in 1947, when the subcontinent was partitioned. These districts were Goalpara, Hilakandi, Cacher, Dhubri and Karimganj subdivision of Sylhet. For this reason, the Muslims constitute about 30 per cent of the population of Assam. So whatever might be the percentage of the Muslims in any district of Assam it cannot be termed as a threat to Assam or India.

Thirdly, Assam or any other state is not richer than Bangladesh, rather many states of India, not to speak of Assam lag far behind Bangladesh to a great extent. So why should the Bangladeshis leave for a poorer region to lead a poorest life.It is to be mentioned that Assam Gano Parishad, (AGP) is the prophet of anti-immigration crusade in Assam. But during its 2-term rules, AGP government under Prafulla Kumar Mahanto could identify few Muslims as illegal infiltrators in Assam. Even the current Congress Chief Minister Tarun Gagoi and Former Chief Minister late Hiteshar Saikia officially acknowledged that there is no illegal infiltration of the Muslims in Assam.

Meanwhile, the Ahoms, including the mainstream secessionist outfit ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam), comprehended the design of RAW to divide the people of Assam into several antagonistic groups and crush them using one against the other mainly to frustrate the freedom struggle of Assam.

Realising the duplicity of Indian government, ULFA in July 1992 publicly declared the Bengali speaking migrants, which also include the Muslims, as friends. In a publication addressed to the ‘East Bengal migrants’ ULFA stated: “East Bengal migrants are considered Assamese. Without these exploited lot, ULFA cannot be successful. These are people who are educationally, economically backward. They cannot be our enemies.

These hardworking people are ULFA’s protection shield. Their contribution to the national income is immense. They can produce essential things from a small piece of land, sell without any profit, work hard for the betterment of Assam, sacrificing them for the future of the state. They are our real well wishers, our friends, better than the Indians. (’The Revolution Comes Full Circle: Bibhu Prasad Routray.)

In the same publication, ULFA went on to define the term ‘Bidekhi’(foreigner). “Those who do not regard this state as their own, accept it as their motherland, are not ready to sacrifice their lives for the sake of this country, are aliens, ‘Bidekhis for us.” Saikia should have read this statement of ULFA. He should also know that the Bengali Muslims accepted Assamese as their mother tongue and identify them as Ahoms not as Bengalis. The new generations of the Muslim Ahoms even do not know Bengali. They are not antagonistic to the interest of Assam. All these factors prompted ULFA not to brand the Muslims as foreigners.

Being failed to brand the Muslims as infiltrators or outsiders, very recently India floated another allegations that Bangladesh designs to secede the Muslim majority districts of Assam either to merge with her territory or create an independent Muslim state in Assam. Virtually, the campaign is made to create anti-Muslim sentiment among the Ahoms so that the unity among communities becomes far a cry.

Saikia and other Indians not only floated the allegation of infiltration of the Bangladeshi Muslims to Assam, but also allege that Bangladesh in one of the mentors of the decades old secessionist militancy in Northeast. According to the allegation, which Saikia also did not forget to forefront in his book, Bangladesh provides shelter, training and even arms to different militant groups of the region, particularly ULFA, ATTF (All Tripura Tiger Forces), etc.

But being an Ahom and above all a researcher, Saikia should know that secessionist insurgency in Northeast when India got its independence from Britain in 1947, well before the birth of Bangladesh. People of this region do not feel them as Indians. They are fighting to end what they call, “Indian occupation.” Previously India blamed China, Burma (Now Myanmar), Pakistan and even America. But they shortened their list over the years and ascribe the allegation on Bangladesh and Pakistan. Some of the Indians now consider Bangladesh more dangerous for northeast than Pakistan. This allegation against Bangladesh was brought to the forefront, because it will be easier to squeeze weaker Bangladesh than any other country that India blames

But India could never prove any of her allegations against Bangladesh. India officially challenged that there are 195 camps or training centres of the Northeast insurgents in Bangladesh and supplied a list mentioning their whereabouts. According to the list, training centres and camps are situated in hospitals, police stations, residential colonies, government offices, playgrounds, etc. Bangladesh repeatedly requested India to come and show on-spot the existence of these camps and centres. But India never accepted the offer, as Indian policymakers know that there is not even single such centre or camp of the northeast militants, not to speak of 195.

Still the propagandists in New Delhi deliberately continue their fabricated allegations against Bangladesh, whose brief ulterior reasons I have mentioned earlier. I really feel pity for Saikia as well as Ford Foundation for being used as the tools of RAW. How Ford Foundation could accept such a baseless research work which goes against a country, which is a main target of Indian expansionist design. I would request Ford Foundation to send a ‘fact finding mission’ to Assam and Bangladesh as well to inspect the ground realities. Such mission will surely find that all the allegations that Saikia mentioned against Bangladesh in his so-called research work are the products of exaggeration and misinformation. Ford Foundation, to uphold its neutrality and worldwide reputation and acceptability, should consider my suggestion and act accordingly( http://banglades h-web.com/ view.php? hidDate=2005- 04-26&hidType=HIG&hidRecord=000000000 0000000042370)

August 17 Blasts: Is there external linkage?

The controversy over Tarique Zia’s seemingly misquoted comment in the BBC interview that al-Qaeda ‘may’ have been involved in the August 17 serial blasts notwithstanding, despondency is bound to set in as the investigators have not yet unearthed any significant leads to the attacks’ masterminds (and their political goals) despite over 300 arrestees’ testimony having been recorded and a slew of clues found.

Such uncertainty does give rise to an obvious concern: Is there an external link to the blasts and, if so, who could have pulled the strings from behind the nation’s borders, and why?

A study of the post-blast behaviour of the Indian media and the intelligence apparatuses can go a long way toward understanding why terrorist incidents in Bangladesh seem to matter so much to our neighbour. Since the attacks, the Indian media has launched a virtual crusade against Bangladesh, spearheaded by the Telegraph that wrote, ‘Delhi should urge major donors to impose economic sanctions on Bangladesh.’ The paper also reported that Indian security agencies had advised the central government to ‘force Khaleda Zia to clamp down on Islamic fundamentalist outfits’.

The government of Bangladesh did respond earnestly to such pressures and diatribes and conducted a virtual witch-hunt in the preceding weeks against Islamists of suspicious hues, although the end result of the ongoing manhunt seems destined to be as much a failure as the previous ones.

Meanwhile, a just concluded study of Bangladesh’s post-blast security situation by major Indian intelligence outfits pointed the finger of suspicion for the August 17 blasts at familiar groups like the Jagrata Muslim Janata and the Jamaatul Mujahideen, which are, says the study, ‘banned, and are known to have fanned anti-Indian sentiments’. Coincidentally, the police in Dhaka say the same thing but cannot trace the attacks’ elusive masterminds.

The masterminds of a series of such attacks over the years not having been traced, one cannot resist the temptation of being suspicious about the latest attacks’ genesis and the ultimate motivation of the masterminds.

The Indian intelligence bodies’ study, however, has made some interesting observations. ‘There were 370 explosions in 63 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts. The kind of explosives used and the impact of each blast were similar to that on August 13 at a Muslim shrine in Akhaura in which one person was killed and 30 others were injured…There are insinuations that an earlier blast in August 2004 was suspected to have been inspired by India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). It is possible that efforts will be on to malign India again by pointing fingers at Delhi,’ the study opined.

In conclusion, the study noted that ‘the outfits were emboldened because of the lack of tangible action by the Khaleda government… The blasts are intended to be a message to Dhaka and to discourage the government from succumbing to international pressure to clamp down on the outfits.’

Reportedly a separate detailed study, circulated among the top echelons of the Indian security establishment, says, ‘Delhi should actively consider economic measures against Bangladesh.’

The tirades of the Indian media and comments of the intelligence agencies aside, everyone knows that the Jamaatul Mujahideen had left leaflets on the sites of bombing and many of the arrestees have reportedly confessed to having carried out the attacks at its behest. Yet BNP Deputy Minister Ruhul Quddus Talukder (also an MP) had a different view of the events. He had said earlier, ‘I don’t think they (the JM) have such a strong network. Awami League must have done this, using fake leaflets, to blacken Bangladesh’s image internationally.’ Does the Minister know something that others don’t?

RAW: An Instrument of Indian Expansionism (2)

A somewhat similar claim came from Mufti Fazlul Haq Amini, chairman of the Amini faction of the Islami Oikya Jote and a constituent member of the ruling four-party alliance. He said on August 19, ‘Swearing upon Allah, I say the 14-party alliance of Awami League and left parties launched the bomb attacks in a planned way to uproot the Islamic forces, but Islamic forces can never be eliminated.’

To confound confusion further, both India and Israel were whisked into the scene by the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Amir and Industries Minister Matiur Rahman Nizami. He blamed India’s external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), and Israel’s Mossad for ‘playing an important role’ in the August 17 attacks. He added, ‘They are the patrons of the serial blasts as they don’t want good relations between Bangladesh and China. That’s why the incident occurred when Prime Minister Khaleda Zia was on a visit to Beijing.’

Juxtapose the above with the embedded Indian concerns over Bangladesh’s political developments over the years. The copy of a 2004 RAW report obtained by this author reads, ‘Pakistani intelligence officers in Dhaka are becoming increasingly active in espionage against India. In 2002, three modules (sic) being run by them from Dhaka, and using some Bangladeshi operatives, were busted. A large number of secret documents and photographs of sensitive defence locations were recovered from one Ziauddin Ahmed Biswas (resident of Murshidabad in West Bengal), arrested on November 17, 2002. Later, the arrest (December 2002 in Lucknow, UP) of Bangladeshi national, Mohammad Mamunur Rasheed, led to the recovery of fake travel documents and also incriminating documents indicating a plan to recruit Indian Muslim youths for training in Bangladesh and Pakistan for subversive activities within India.’

Another RAW report of 2004 implicates the Dhaka regime more directly. It says, ‘It is hardly any secret that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan has close links with Bangladesh’s Directorate- General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) and operates openly and freely in that country. It (ISI) not only helps coordinate the activities of al-Qaeda and fundamentalist Islamic militant groups through the DGFI, but backs a Bangladeshi Taliban group named HUJI that runs six training camps for ULFA terrorists in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.’

A West Bengal intelligence outfit goes a step further: ‘While ULFA training camps have been organised by the sector headquarters of the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR), training camps of the CNLF have been organised partly by 103 and 105 infantry brigades of the Bangladesh Army at Khagrachhari and Rangamati,’ the report claims.

From hindsight, the pattern of such accusations seems a corollary to many such reports circulated in the past. For instance, prominent security experts of India have been crying wolf since the late 1990s (long before the incidents of 9/11 that acted as a harbinger to the global hunts for Islamist terrorists) that activities in Bangladesh posed a serious danger to India’s security and national interests.

Particularly, Assam Governor Lt Gen (retd) SK Sinha wrote in his report to the central government in March 1998, ‘The long cherished design of Greater Bangladesh, making inroads into the strategic land link of Assam with the rest of India, can lead to severing the entire land mass of the North East from the rest of the country.’ In another report submitted to the President of India in November 1998, Sinha wrote, ‘Continued silent demographic invasion of the North East poses a great threat both to the identity of the Assamese people and to our national security.’ Influenced by such reports, India decided to fence the entire Indo-Bangladesh border at a cost of over $500 million and nearly 70% of border fencing was completed by mid-2005. The Indian Border Security Force also killed more than 500 innocent Bangladeshis over the years since General Sinha filed his first report.

India now claims that since 1990, Assam has seen the birth of 9 Muslim militant outfits owing allegiance to Harkat ul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Toiba, the groups that run ferocious operations against Indian forces in Indian-occupied Kashmir. Indian intelligence outfits believe the groups have their rear bases inside Bangladesh. Is India looking for a pretext to launch pre-emptive military assaults on Bangladesh at some point in the future, based on such reports? Policy-makers in Dhaka must mull over this prospect seriously.

Coming to the August 17 blasts in particular, one wonders why the Islamists, whose ‘profound’ aim is to create a ‘Greater Bangladesh’ by creating demographic imbalance in the neighbouring Indian states of Assam and Tripura in particular (according to Indian reports), should resort to blasting of ‘innocuous’ bombs inside Bangladesh and leave behind signatures for identification? How is the mission of creating a greater Bangladesh served by such blasts?

Isn’t it more plausible that, in the absence of any verifiable and authentic conclusion, the blasts have occurred to prove to the world that Bangladesh is infested with Islamist Jihadis determined to take on India by using Bangladesh as a launching pad? At the least, such a hypothesis does mesh well with the embedded Indian perceptions of Bangladesh, as has been learnt from the intelligence reports quoted above.

It is under such contexts that one must compare the Indian mindset with the comments made by some Bangladeshi politicians after the August 17 blasts (quoted above), and try to guess the ‘untold’ reasons behind the authorities’ inability to reach any conclusion with respect to the attacks’ masterminds. Meanwhile, with each passing day, the tone of reports in the media of the two neighbours will keep confounding the conundrum instead of decoding the hidden secrets(http: //www.weeklyholi day.net/front. html#top) .

Sikkim and Bhutan

Sikkim was the easiest and most docile prey for RAW. Indira Gandhi annexed the Kingdom of Sikkim in mid-1970s, to be an integral part of India. The deposed King Chogyal Tenzig Wangehuck was closely followed by RAW’s agents until his death in 1992. Bhutan, like Nepal and Sikkim, is a land-locked country, totally dependent on India. RAW has developed links with members of the royal family as well as top bureaucrats to implements its policies. It has cultivated its agents amongst Nepalese settlers and is in a position to create difficulties for the Government of Bhutan. In fact, the King of Bhutan has been reduced to the position of merely acquiescing into New Delhi’s decisions and go by its dictates in the international arena.

Sri Lanka

Post- independence Sri Lanka, inspire of having a multi-sectoral population was a peaceful country till 1971 and was following

independent foreign policy. During 1971 Indo-Pakistan war despite of heavy pressure from India, Sri Lanka allowed Pakistan’s civil and military aircraft and ships to stage through its air and sea ports with unhindered re-fueling facilities. It also had permitted Israel to establish a nominal presence of its intelligence training set up. It permitted the installation of high powered transmitter by Voice of America (VOA) on its territory, which was resented by India.

It was because of these ‘irritants’ in the Indo-Sri Lanka relations that Mrs Indira Gandhi planned to bring Sri Lanka into the fold of the so-called Indira Doctrine (India Doctrine) Kao was told by Gandhi to repeat their Bangladesh success. RAW went looking for militants it could train to destabilize the regime. Camps were set up in Tamil Nadu and old RAW guerrillas trainers were dug out of retirement. RAW began arming the Tamil Tigers and training them at centers such as Gunda and Gorakhpur. As a sequel to this ploy, Sri Lanka was forced into Indianpower- web when Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987 was singed and Indian Peace-Keeping- Force (IPKF) landed in Sri Lanka.

Up to the mid-seventies the Sri Lankan government had kept India happy by following policies which followed the Indian line – domestically and externally. The trouble began in 1977 when the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) lost power to the Jayewardene- led United National Party in elections. He moved towards a more cooperative policy with the United States and Sri Lanka chose to oppose the Indian demand for the withdrawal of all foreign naval forces from the Indian Ocean. Mrs. Gandhi had already been irked by Sri Lanka’s support to Pakistan during the 1971 war when it allowed landing and fuelling facilities to Pakistan’s East-West commercial flights. So RAW saw a perfect opportunity to exploit within the prevailing dispute between the Sinhalese majority (74 percent) and Tamil minority (14 percent) over distribution of economic and social spoils of independence. Before the two sides could work out a compromise, India, through its RAW, managed to polarise the two sides as well as militarise this essentially political conflict. On the Mukti Bahini model, RAW built up terrorist training camps in India for a number of Tamil terrorist organisations, while India suddenly began orchestrating a public campaign feigning concern because of the links the Tamils had with the 50 million Indian Tamils of Tamil Nadu state – which was separated from Sri Lanka by the Palk Straits. It was only a matter of time before the militants trained in India began sidelining the moderate Tamils and instead demanding complete independence – Ealam. Ironically, the presence of Tamil training camps in Tamil Nadu often created a law and order situation when large arms were captured by the state police. The surprise for the state government came when New Delhi ordered that such captured material be returned.

According to Rohan Gunaratna, in his book Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka, RAW waged a secret war in India beginning 1983 so that when the Sri Lankan armed forces launched a major offensive against the Tamil militancy in 1987, the Indian government had already ensured that the Tamils were well supplied and were able to conduct terrorist acts that brought the war closer to Colombo. Tamil Nadu had become the sanctuary for the Tamil terrorists in their hit-and-run tactics. Already, a year prior to this offensive, that is by 1986, there were over 20,000 Indian trained and financed Tamils and India forced Sri Lanka through this militant pressure to alter its foreign policy. But even more crucial, India by now was systematically destabilising Sri Lanka. Being unable to resist the temptation to now intervene directly, India used the Sri Lankan offensive against the Tamil terrorists to force Sri Lanka to accept India’s armed intervention ostensibly to save ‘ innocent Tamil civilians’. Unfortunately for India, the controversial Indo-Sri Lankan Accord of July 1987 proved to be as much of a failure as India’s policy of direct intervention. The result was India’s massively assisted LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) turned on its benefactor and declared war against the Indian forces in Sri Lanka. All in all, this Indian adventure killed 60,000 men, women and children and forced the Indians to withdraw their forces without successfully completing their mission. The price has been steep for both India and Sri Lanka and even today Sri Lanka is paying the price for this Indian-initiated and RAW inspired polarised conflict. The extent of RAW’s role in this affair has been painstakingly documented by Gunaratna in his book on the Indian intervention( http://www. defencejournal. com/jan99/ rawfacts. htm)

The Ministry of External Affairs was also upset at RAW’s role in Sri Lanka as they felt that RAW was still continuing negotiations with the Tamil Tiger leader Parabhakran in contravention to the Indian government’s foreign policy. According to R Swaminathan, (former Special Secretary of RAW) it was this outfit which was used as the intermediary between Rajib Gandhi and Tamil leader Parabhakaran. The former Indian High Commissioner in Sri Lanka, J.N. Dixit even accused RAW of having given Rs. five corore to the LTTE. At a later stage, RAW built up the EPRLF and ENDLF to fight against the LTTE which turned the situation in Sri Lanka highly volatile and uncertain later on.(Rohan Gunaratna and J N Dixit ).

Maldives

Under a well-orchestrated RAW plan, on November 30 1988 a 300 to 400-strong well trained force of mercenaries, armed with automatic weapons, initially said to be of unknown origin, infiltrated in boats and stormed the capital of Maldives. They resorted to indiscriminate shooting and took high-level government officials as hostages. At the Presidential Palace, the small contingent of loyal national guards offered stiff resistance, which enabled President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom to shift to a safe place from where he issued urgent appeals for help from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Britain and the United States.

The Indian Prime Ministe Rajiv Gandhi reacted promptly and about 1600 combat troops belonging to 50 Independent Para-Brigade in conjunction with Indian Naval units landed at Male under the code-name Operation Cactus. A number of IAF transport aircraft, escorted by fighters, were used for landing personnel, heavy equipment and supplies. Within hours of landing, the Indian troops flushed out the attackers form the streets and hideouts. Some of them surrendered to Indian troops, and many were captured by Indian Naval units while trying to escape along with their hostages in a Maldivian ship, Progress Light. Most of the 30 hostages including Ahmed Majtaba, Maldives Minister of Transport, were released. The Indian Government announced the success of the Operation Cactus and complimented the armed forces for a good job done.

The Indian Defense Minister while addressing IAF personnel at Bangalore claimed that the country’s prestige has gone high because of the peace-keeping role played by the Indian forces in Maldives. The International Community in general and the South Asian states in particular, however, viewed with suspicious the over-all concept and motives of the operation. The western media described it as a display of newly-acquired military muscle by India and its growing role as a regional police. Although the apparent identification of the two Maldivian nationals could be a sufficient reason, at its face value, to link it with the previous such attempts by the mercenaries, yet other converging factors, indicative of involvement of external hand, could hardly be ignored. Sailing of the mercenaries from Manar and Kankasanturai in Sri Lanka, which were in complete control of IPKF, and the timing and speed of the Indian intervention proved their involvement beyond any doubt.

Nepal

Ever since the partition of the sub-continent India has been openly meddling in Nepal’s internal affairs by contriving internal strife and conflicts through RAW to destabilize the successive legitimate governments and prop up puppet regimes which would be more amenable Indian machinations. Armed insurrections were sponsored and abetted by RAW and later requests for military assistance to control these were managed through pro-India leaders. India has been aiding and inciting the Nepalese dissidents to collaborate with the Nepali Congress. For this they were supplied arms whenever the King or the Nepalese Government appeared to be drifting away from the Indian dictates and impinging on Indian hegemonic designs in the region. In fact, under the garb of the so-called democratization measures, the Maoists were actively encouraged to collect arms to resort to open rebellion against the legitimate Nepalese governments. The contrived rebellions provided India an opportunity to intervene militarily in Nepal, ostensibly to control the insurrections which were masterminded by the RAW itself. It was an active replay of the Indian performance in Sri Lanka and Maldives a few years earlier. RAW is particularly aiding the people of the Indian-origin and has been providing them with arms and ammunition.

RAW’s gameplan for Sikkimization of Nepal

An interesting new insight has been provided into the current thinking of the Maoist leadership by Baburam Bhattarai, one of its leading lights, via a write-up which seeks to explain what he terms as a “gameplan” for Nepal’s “Sikkimization” and its nexus with the rationale of the “People’s War”.

Beginning with the “so-called” India Today’s “Nepal gameplan” report, a product of RAW (India’s external, super secret intelligence agency), the Maoist stalwart (who incidentally holds a Ph.D degree from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi) concludes with an appeal to all “patriotic” forces “to come together and, through a united front, confront all external expansionist forces” operating against Nepal.

The said write-up appears in the latest issue of Maoist-friendly vernacular weekly Jana Ahwan. Bhattarai says that against the chain of events starting with the “neo-colonialist 1950 Treaty and including the Kosi-Gandak- Mahakali agreements, the Kalapani problem, the Laxmanpur barrage and the recent bill to amend the citizenship act”, it is abundantly clear that the “process for the Sikkimization of Nepal has accelerated and has greatly advanced.” He also makes the point that the RAW-inspired India Today “Nepal Gameplan” report makes it obvious how deeply RAW, and other Indian intelligence agencies, have penetrated Nepal.

He then rhetorically asks: “If the intelligence agency of a country which does not border Nepal and whose political, economic, cultural relations and interest in Nepal is negligible in comparison with India’s has as extensive and high level connections as is made out, how much more profound would the hold of India’s intelligence agencies be, considering that Nepal is surrounded on three sides by an India which has immeasurably greater political, economic, and cultural stakes in Nepal than any other country in the world.”

To underscore that salient point, the erudite Maoist leader says that if penetration by the intelligence agency of a country whose embassy has just 25 staffers is as extensive as claimed, how much greater would that be by intelligence agencies of a country whose embassy has 300 personnel?

Recalling events leading to the “merger” of Sikkim with India, including propaganda about “China” and a “CIA” threat, Bhattarai says it is not difficult to understand the motivation behind the hue and cry about alleged ISI activities today. He then angrily refutes allegations made in a report said to be provided to the Nepal police by the Indian Embassy (disclosed in Himal magazine, 1-7 Asar, 2057 issue) charging that Timila Yami, sister of Yisila Yami (Bhattarai’s wife) has been used by the ISI for contacts with Nepalese Maoists.

Moving on, Bhattarai claims that the ruling class in India has sought support from “Hindu fascists” as it is reeling against the impact of “national liberation movements from Kashmir to Tamilandu, from Punjab to Nagaland” and the struggle against “Indian expansionism in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan” in South Asia. In particular, he claims the Indian ruling class has become unbalanced seeing the impact of the People’s War in Nepal which aims not only at “class liberation” but also at “national liberation.”

What is particularly sad, he maintains, is that Nepal’s mainstream political parties and other political forces have fallen into the Indian “trap” vis-a-vis the Maoists’ struggle. Significantly, he also declares that, today, forces supportive of and against “Indian expansionism” in Nepal can be found in “the palace, Congress, RPP, UML and even in other small groupings.”

Equally meaningful is Bhattarai’s reference to an observation by nominated Upper House member Ramesh Nath Pandey who has been quoted (vide Kantipur, 16 Jestha 2057) as having said: “In my opinion, Maoists will not precipitate a national calamity; rather, it should be preserved for safeguarding the nation in case of a calamity.”

RAW has also infiltrated the ethnic Nepali refugees whohave been extradited by Bhutan and have taken refuge in the eastern Nepal. RAW can exploit its links with these refugees in either thatare against the Indian interest. Besides the Nepalese economy istotally controlled by the Indian money lenders, financiers andbusiness mafia ( RAW’s Machination In South Asia by Shastra Dutta Pant, Kathmandu, 2003).

RAW: An Instrument of Indian Expansionism (3)

Afghanistan

Since December 1979, throughout Afghan War, KGB, KHAD (WAD) (former Afghan intelligence outfit) and RAW stepped up their efforts to concentrate on influencing and covert exploitation of the tribes on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanista n border. There was intimate co-ordination between the three intelligence agencies not only in Afghanistan but in destabilization of Pakistan through subversion and sabotage plan related to Afghan refugees and mujahideen, the tribal belt and inside Pakistan. They jointly organized spotting and recruitment of hostile tribesmen and their training in guerrilla warfare, infiltration, subversion, sabotage and establishment of saboteur force/terrorist organizations in the pro-Afghan tribes of Pakistan in order to carry out bomb explosions in Afghan refugee camps in NWFP and Baluchistan to threaten and pressurize them to return to Afghanistan. They also carried out bomb blasts in populated areas deep inside Pakistan to create panic and hatred in the minds of locals against Afghan refugee mujahideen for pressurizing Pakistan to change its policies on Afghanistan.

Pakistan

Pakistan’s size, strength and potential have always overawed the Indians. It, therefore, always considers her main opponent in her expansionist doctrine. India’s animosity towards Pakistan is psychologically and ideologically deep-rooted and unassailable. India’s war with Pakistan in 1965 over Kashmir and in 1971 which resulted in the dismemberment of Pakistan and creation of Bangladesh are just two examples.

Raw considers Sindh as Pakistan’s soft under-belly. It has, therefore, made it the prime target for sabotage and subversion. RAW has enrolled and extensive network of agents and anti-government elements, and is convinced that with a little push restless Sindh will revolt. Taking fullest advantage of the agitation in Sindh in 1983 and the ethnic riots, which have continued till today, RAW has deeply penetrated and cultivated dissidents and secessionists, thereby creating hard-liners unlikely to allow peace to return to Sindh. Raw is also involved similarly in Balochistan.

RAW has an extensive network of agents and anti-government elements within Pakistan, including dissident elements.Pakistan’s size, strength, and potential have always overawed India.It has always considered Pakistan to be the main opponent to its expansionist doctrine.India’s animosity toward Pakistan is psychologically and ideologically deep-rooted and unassailable.

India’s 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan over Kashmir, which resulted in the dismemberment of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh, is just two examples.Pakistan remains RAW’s primary concern.It runs thousands of agents and spends millions of rupees in its operations against Pakistan.It has made a three-pronged attack against Pakistan in an attempt to destabilize it,Propaganda, Espionage, and Subversion. RAW is totally committed on all these three fronts and is engaged in launching covert operations in consonance with India’s hostile foreign policy.All aspects of Pakistani activities, economic, military, industrial and cultural receive a close scrutiny of RAW. It goes to its credit that it has accomplished or at least continued in a motivated manner its assigned objectives.The Indian government spelling out the task for RAW in this regard has stated,’Pakistan should be so destabilized internally that it could not support the ‘Kashmir cause even morally, diplomatically or politically’.

Whenever and wherever there is a kidnapping, a bank robbery, a financial scandal, a bomb blast, or what have you, the I.S.I. is deemed to have.Ashok A Biswas, a Delhi-based research scholar, in his recently compiled study RAW – An Unobstructive Instrument of India’s Foreign Policy, (as quoted by Pakistan Observer in ‘A RAW deal for South Asia, 03 May, 1998) states that ‘the aim of RAW is to keep internal disturbances flaring up and the ISI preoccupied so that Pakistan can lend no worthwhile resistance to Indian designs in the region.’ He concludes, ‘RAW over the years has admirably fulfilled its task of destabilizing target states through unbridled export for terrorism had a hand in it.Reference: ( “R.A.W.: Global and Regional Ambitions” edited by Rashid Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Saleem, Islamabad Policy Research Institute, Asia Printers, Islamabad, 2005).

RAW is also being blamed for confusing the ground situation is Kashmir so as to keep the world attention away from the gross human rights violations by India in India occupied Kashmir. ISI being almost 20 years older than RAW and having acquired much higher standard of efficiency in its functioning , has become the prime target of RAW’s designs, ISI is considered to be a stumbling block in RAW’s operations, and has, therefore, been made a target of all kinds of massive misinformation and propaganda campaign. The tirade against ISI continues unabated. The idea is to keep ISI on the defensive by fictionalising and alleging its hand is supporting Kashmiri Mujahideen and Sikhs in Punjab. RAW’S fixation against ISI has taken the shape of ISI-phobia, as in India everyone traces down the origin of all happenings and shortcomings to the ISI . Be it an abduction at Banglaore or a student’s kidnapping at Cochin, be it a bank robbery at Calcutta or a financial scandal in Bombay, be it a bomb blast at Bombay or Bangladesh, they find an ISI hand in it ( RAW :Global and Regional Ambitions” Edited by Rashid Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Saleem, Published by Islamabad Policy Research Institute, Asia Printers, Islamabad, 2005 ).

RAW over the years has admirably fulfilled its tasks of destabilising target states through unbridled export of terrorism. The India Doctrine spelt out a difficult and onerous role for RAW. It goes to its credit that it has accomplished its assigned objectives due to the endemic weakness in the state apparatus of those nations and failure of their leaders.

BY: I Khan

[Via http://siyasipakistan.wordpress.com]

Fox News creates its own controversy - FP Trading Desk

Obama political arm under fire

2010-01-14T03:44:00.000+02:00

Alex Isenstadt, Ben Smith Alex Isenstadt, Ben Smith – Wed Jan 13, 12:33 am ET

Barack Obama came to town a year ago to change the way politics worked, and Organizing for America was to be his instrument. The successor to his campaign organization, with the largest e-mail list in America, was poised — many observers thought at the time — to bring the campaign’s movement fervor and Web-centric tactics to pushing Obama’s legislative agenda through Congress

545 PEOPLE

2010-01-12T11:47:00.000+02:00

545 vs. 300,000,000Every Citizen Needs To Read This And Think About What This Journalist Has Scripted In This Message. Read It And Then Really Think About Our Current Political Debacle.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.

545 PEOPLE

By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The president does.

You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don’t write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don’t control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall.. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? Nancy Pelosi. She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts — of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red.

If the Army &Marines are in IRAQ, it’s because they want them in IRAQ.

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it’s because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like “the economy,” “inflation,” or “politics” that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.

Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees.

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper.

What you do with this article now that you have read it………. Is up to you.

This might be funny if it weren’t so darned true.

Be sure to read all the way to the end:

Tax his land,

Tax his bed,

Tax the table

At which he’s fed.

Tax his tractor,

Tax his mule,

Teach him taxes

Are the rule.

Tax his work,

Tax his pay,

He works for peanuts

Anyway!

Tax his cow,

Tax his goat,

Tax his pants,

Tax his coat.

Tax his ties,

Tax his shirt,

Tax his work,

Tax his dirt.

Tax his tobacco,

Tax his drink,

Tax him if he

Tries to think.

Tax his cigars,

Tax his beers,

If he cries

Tax his tears.

Tax his car,

Tax his gas,

Find other ways

To tax his ass.

Tax all he has

Then let him know

That you won’t be done

Till he has no dough.

When he screams and hollers;

Then tax him some more,

Tax him till

He’s good and sore.

Then tax his coffin,

Tax his grave,

Tax the sod in

Which he’s laid.

Put these words

Upon his tomb,

Taxes drove me

to my doom…’

When he’s gone,

Do not relax,

Its time to apply

The inheritance tax.

Accounts Receivable Tax

Building Permit Tax

CDL license Tax

Cigarette Tax

Corporate Income Tax

Dog License Tax

Excise Taxes

Federal Income Tax

Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)

Fishing License Tax

Food License Tax

Fuel Permit Tax

Gasoline Tax (currently 44.75 cents per gallon)

Gross Receipts Tax

Hunting License Tax

Inheritance Tax

Inventory Tax

IRS Interest Charges IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)

Liquor Tax

Luxury Taxes

Marriage License Tax

Medicare Tax

Personal Property Tax

Property Tax

Real Estate Tax

Service Charge T ax

Social Security Tax

Road Usage Tax

Sales Tax

Recreational Vehicle Tax

School Tax

State Income Tax

State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)

Telephone Federal Excise Tax

Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax

Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes

Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge=20Tax

Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax

Telephone State and Local Tax

Telephone Usage Charge Tax

Utility Taxes

Vehicle License Registration Tax

Vehicle Sales Tax

Watercraft Registration Tax

Well Permit Tax

Workers Compensation Tax

STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY? Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, and our nation was the most prosperous in the world.

We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

What in the hell happened? Can you spell ‘politicians?’

And I still have to ‘press 1′ for English!?

I hope this goes around THE USA at least 100 times!!! YOU can help it get there!!!

GO AHEAD – – – BE AN AMERICAN!!!

Gordon Kuhn

“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government” Thomas Jefferson

www.Cloudweavers.com OR www.GordonWrites.com

[Via http://gordonwrites.com]

Lotsa Locals Making Big News - The Detroit Blog - TIME.com

Guantanamo Detainees Flounder as Europe Averts its Gaze

2010-01-12T03:47:00.000+02:00

Being committed to your values is easier said than done. I am all for being green, but when the supermarket charges for recycled shopping bags, I’m tempted to stick with plastic. My decision to work in an anti-death penalty law office in the South was solely driven by my commitment to the abolition of the death penalty. But when I encounter a case involving a horrific crime, I find it hard to imagine the task of attorneys in my office who must dedicate themselves to representing the one who perpetrated it. In the case of capital punishment, though, a defense attorney’s queasiness at their client’s crime is easily reconciled with their queasiness at the state’s desired penalty – in both cases, the taking of life is abhorrent. But what happens when our commitment to our values leads us down an undesirable path with unsettling consequences?

It is eight years today since Guantanamo Bay was first used as a detention center for suspected terrorists. At present, 200 prisoners remain in Guantanamo – the vast majority of whom have never been charged. On this anniversary, it is tempting to point the finger at the United States and ask why Obama’s call for a speedy closure of the facility is taking such a long time. But Amnesty International is asking a different question. What happened to Europe?

On 16 June 2009, the EU-US Joint Statement on the Closure of Guantanamo Bay was issued which expressed the readiness of some EU Member States to receive former detainees on a case-by-case basis. Amnesty purports that while some European states are volunteering to take in Guantanamo detainees, a number of those states that once fiercely argued for the closure of Guantanamo Bay are now disappointingly silent.

Many European governments have condemned the ongoing detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Now they can do something about it… Actions really do speak louder than words in this case; it’s time to turn the rhetoric into reality and get Guantánamo closed as soon as possible” said Clive Stafford Smith, Director of Reprieve.

Both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch state that other countries must take in detainees that will be tortured, subjected to further detention without charge and other human rights abuses should they be involuntarily repatriated to their country of origin. But nearly seven months since the EU-US statement was issued, only seven former detainees have been accepted by Europe as free men – 50 more await help.

If the worldwide refugee crisis has shown us nothing else, it is that when it comes to international human rights, actions cost much more than words. It is not difficult to see why governments would rather not take in Guantanamo detainees, but their inaction means these men will likely be relocated to once again be held without charge, only this time in a less visible setting.

At the root of the idea of ‘human rights’ is the idea that universal rights should be afforded to all people no matter which state they belong to. The ideal is universal; therefore the burden is international. Those states which once called for the closure of Guantanamo Bay may now realize their objective, but only if they are prepared to back their words with action. Henry David Thoreau’s quote serves as a useful check for us self-righteous moralists whose eyes quickly divert from the paper bag to the plastic when we think no one is looking: “Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”

[Via http://acriminalenterprise.wordpress.com]

Shure shows SE425 and SE535 earphones | iLounge News

Harry Reid on Obama: He has no discernable “Negro” dialect

2010-01-10T11:00:00.000+02:00

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) is busy fending off charges of racism after privately confiding that Obama had a good chance of winning the presidential contest because he was “light skinned” and spoke with no discernable “Negro dialect”. He’s currently on an “apology” tour and is apologizing to Obama, Al Sharpton, Donna Brazille, Julian Bond and others.

Ultimately, this speaks more to Reid’s lack of exposure to African-Americans, even though there are plenty in the congress. I’d venture to suggest that lack of exposure is somewhat self imposed as there’s often a tendency for the majority culture to look at us while not really “seeing us”. So it’s entirely conceivable that Reid could be in the congress for the length of time he has and never really step out of his mental confines to “see” a host of articulate African-Americans in the congress or in DC in general. The stereotypical images are too powerful for him to accept any other imagery that might offer another definition of African-Americans.

Quite frankly, there’s not an accomplished African-American who has not been subjected to the sort of thing where someone is amazed that you speak or write well or even have an education to begin with. This usually surfaces in situations when one doesn’t expect it. A few weeks ago, this occurred with me once again as I was visiting a new dentist to get a root canal. As I’m sitting in the chair, the dentist starts to engage me in a conversation and queries me as to what I do for a living. When I tell him, he begins asking another series of questions revolving where I went to school and grew up. At some point, it became apparent that he was trying to reconcile what he had supposedly learned about black men versus the obvious contradiction sitting in the chair. This particular gentleman was Asian, but was laboring under the stereotypes around African-American males.

The problem is that the pervasive perception of black men is one of being some sort of irresponsible baby making “playa” who’s in between jail sentences and unfortunately, too many black men reinforce that stereotype by actually behaving that way which results in folks like me being considered the “exception”.

In any event, I’ve resolved to not overly concern myself with the self imposed limits that others have when it comes to looking at us but really not “seeing us” and I’m certainly not going to waste time and emotions over their sight issues or seek meaningless apologies. I’m my own self reference point, hence not requiring an approval stamp other than my own, so it’s inconsequential to me what someone thinks of me. It’s far more important what I think of me. However, I will say that we’re basically invisible; the same sort of invisibility that Ralph Ellison narrated in his famous novel The Invisible Man. Ellison concluded that invisibility can be advantageous sometimes and I agree.

[Via http://africanamericanclarioncall.wordpress.com]

» Obama Nazifies Christmas - Blogger News Network

Democrat Mass-Manipulation

2010-01-10T03:47:00.000+02:00

Massachusetts has been a hot bed of manipulation as of late.

In 2004, Ted Kennedy, for partisan reasons, orchestrated a change in the law to change the replacement process from a gubernatorial appointment to a special election. At the time, John “Lurch” Kerry was running for President (with his three purple hearts) and Kennedy didn’t want the then-Governor Mitt Romney to exercise his power and appoint a Republican to the seat. So, at the behest of the Swimmer of Chappaquiddick, the law was amended and Mitt Romney could not appoint a fill in senator to fill Lurch’s seat. Kerry lost but at least the seat was safe, had Lurch pulled it off.

Last year, the Swimmer became gravely ill from brain cancer, and, seeing his own “MENE MENE TEKEL PERES” as he inched closer to the veil, prompted the legislature to change the rule back to a gubernatorial appointment, since the office is now occupied by a Democrat – at least temporarily until the special election happened. This would prevent the Dems from losing their 60-vote bloc and the subsequent derailing of the health debate.

The thing is, the legacy of Ted Kennedy here is irrelevant. With all due respect, the man is dead and if he wasn’t saved by the blood of Christ, he’s in hell, burning. Meanwhile, what is important is not whether the folks In Massachusetts preserve Kennedy’s wish to see the Health Deform bill go through, but to do what the people in Massachusetts want. But there seems to be this overwhelming push about what Kennedy “would have wanted”. I say, “so what?”. Let the people decide.

But the Democrats don’t care so much about what the people say. As we know, this health debate is all about pushing a piece-of-junk pile of horse dung through and onto the American people. Despite the majority of Americans that don’t want this bill, the Dems are willing to shovel it onto us anyway.

So with the special election coming up, there’s talk that the GOP candidate may just pull this off and take the seat back to the right side of the aisle. This would put a hex on the entire debate, since Scott Brown has already pledged to fight the bill if he is able to do so. This is a huge threat to Democrats as his one vote could cause the debate to come apart.

To prevent that from happening, the Dems are willing to stall Brown’s swearing-in appointment until long after the State of the Union address, where Obama will be able to tout this as a victory for Americans (actually, it’s just for Progressives – Americans lose big if this passes).

What’s funny is that the Dems couldn’t get Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Lowell) to the US House fast enough. Two days after the special election, Tsongas was sworn in my Pelosi in order to help overthrow President Bush’s veto of expansion of the SCHIP program, back in October 2007.

But now, the Democrats are willing to hold up the senatorial swear-in of Scott Brown until after the Health Deform is done and passed, to prevent the debate from getting derailed if they lose their 60-vote filibuster-proof majority. I sure as heck can guarantee you, if Martha Coakley wins the election, they will whisk her off to Washington, tout de suite and put her on the party line.

What does this mean? Well it means that the Democrats care very little about the will of the people of Massachusetts, so long as it achieves their objectives. They follow the drumbeat of the Democrat machine, pushed by the very liberal progressive agenda. Massachusetts has already shown that the people don’t want the bill, but that won’t stop John “Lurch” Kerry from voting for it.

I leave you with this very poignant quote from Bob Hope.

[Via http://rabidconservative.ws]

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: This is Great News! For ...

Una ejecución retrasada

2010-01-09T11:50:00.000+02:00

Bismilah al rahmán y rahim

Los referentes se desplazan rápidos hacia terrenos desconcertantes. Rafael Reig, que perdió su sitio en Público, se recoloca en el suplemento de libros de ABC, que siempre fue un oasis de inteligencia en dicho periódico, pero aun así es una sorpresa. Máximo, que tanto me influyó de pequeño en El País, se deja llevar por la islamofobia imperante en el ABC y publica hoy una viñeta típica de los agitadores de Eurabia, dibujando una Europa cruzada por Al-Andalus. Americanizándonos. Italia, patria de Gramsci y Pasolini, impone límites de 30 % de extranjeros en las escuelas, y sus políticos alientan la caza de negros en las calles. Francia, patria de la laicidad, decide multar la vestimenta de las mujeres fundamentalistas del pudor, fomentando la segregación definitiva. No hay una solución fácil para atraer a las mujeres fundamentalistas de tradición islámica hacia el terreno pluralista de las ropas ligeras, pero por el camino de la multa solamente se conseguirá levantar un muro de desconfianza mutuo. La cultura del respeto se desvanece en Europa a un velocidad vertiginosa. Quizás nunca existió, y nos engañaron de pequeños, y la criminalización de Greenpeace y pronto de Amnistía Internacional no es más que la ejecución retrasada del programa supremacista que siempre ha latido en las pseudolegitimidades del saqueo colonialista. Europa ya no me recuerda a Picasso. Europa es cada vez más un cuadro de Mondrian, con fronteras negras muy marcadas, y espacios blancos para los sin-nombre, sin-papeles, sin-techo, sin-Estado, sin-derechos. El blanco desnudo de la vulnerabilidad legalizada.

[Via http://abenyusuf.wordpress.com]

Steele Lashes Out: Critics Should 'Get a Life,' 'Shut Up,' 'Fire ...

New Bogus Study from UCLA Claims Amnesty Will Make Us Prosperous

2010-01-09T03:35:00.000+02:00

January 08, 2010

Last Ditch Pitch Reveals Desperation of Amnesty Proponents

http://www.steinreport.com/archives/013096.html

By Bob Dane, FAIR Communications Director

This week, the Center for American Progress released a “study” done by Dr. Paul Hinojosa-Ojeda, a radical open-borders activist-professor at UCLA. In it, amnesty is heralded as an economic nirvana because the legalization of 13 million illegal aliens will cause the gross domestic product (GDP) to rise $1.5 trillion dollars over the next ten years.

This report is a mathematical fantasy that defies common sense and years of research. It’s being used by the far left political elite as a last ditch pitch to sell their amnesty agenda, but we’re not buying it. Amnesty proponents understand they have a limited window until midterm elections to accomplish their agenda and they can clearly see that public support for amnesty has no pulse given 10% unemployment and massive government spending. In a desperate final propaganda push they’re peddling amnesty as the new Economic Stimulus Package. It’s not. It’s the next massive bailout – this time to benefit 13 million illegal aliens, and a wholesale sell out of American workers. The fact that this Administration is entertaining the notion of amnesty in this economy should be an affront to every American. Just because 13 million illegal aliens could be administratively converted from illegal to legal status doesn’t change the fact that most are poorly skilled, undereducated and heavily government dependent. That dependency will continue if they’re made legal – in fact it gets worse because they’d get more in tax credits than they put in. Moreover, since they would have legal status, they’d be eligible for even more government benefits than they already have at the federal, state and local levels. Taxpayers will suffer. Flooding the market with more cheap labor and adding millions of government-dependent people is no way to fix our economy.

The report focuses almost exclusively on the broad GDP – the total sum of all goods and services produced – not on the plight of real people with real needs. The study claims that there would be a $792 billion rise in GDP over ten years, yet the Heritage Foundation finds that Obama’s planned amnesty will give illegal immigrants not merely health care benefits, but full access to the massive U.S. welfare system comprising over 70 separate aid programs at a cost of around $700 billion per year.

Yes, our GDP could rise if we add 13 million people to the economy but that doesn’t mean the per-person share of the GDP will rise. The abstract economic metric really means nothing for John Q. Public. It doesn’t get him a job (in fact it reduces his chances because amnesty would add 13 million more legal workers into the economy all competing legally for the scare jobs he needs), it doesn’t increase his wages and it certainly won’t reduce his taxes. The winners are companies who get to keep their cheap labor supply, immigrants themselves, and the political parties who will add millions of new citizens, most of whom will vote for the party that gives them the biggest handout.

The report claims that amnesty will cause wages to rise. For whom – the illegal workers who get rewarded with citizenship and get a few more dollars per hour? Despite their claim that wages rose after the 1986 amnesty, the fact is that when properly adjusted for inflation, real wages for low-wage American workers have not increased since 1986, and since 1965 have actually decreased. Amnesty will not magically grant illegal aliens an education, better job skills, or higher earning potential. It only grants them access to taxpayer funded programs. Their wages levels may rise marginally overall, but not enough to make illegal aliens net contributors as taxpayers.

What has increased since 1986 is the amount of people coming to US expecting yet another round – their personal round – of amnesty. Granting amnesty just creates the incentive to come here illegally and perpetuates the cheap illegal labor addiction of business and keeps wages low.

A century ago, poorly-educated immigrants were needed for low value-added, mass production work. Their care generally fell on family members or private charities. Today their care falls on the public by way of massive entitlement programs. Unless immigrants can generate the “value added” to cover their costs associated with being here, their recruitment generates reduced wage costs for employers but far higher taxes for the rest of us. What made sense at one time no longer makes sense. What once was can no longer be.

Finally, converting 13 million illegal aliens into instant citizens doesn’t stop the cost of illegal immigration because it just encourages more. We’ll have the staggering cost of adding millions of new low-income government dependent citizens, and we’ll continue to incur the cost of the next round of illegal aliens.

[Via http://randysright.wordpress.com]

L.A. Times sells out deadline news to WSJ - LA Observed

150,000 seniors leave AARP over ObamaCare support

2010-01-07T11:33:00.000+02:00

150,000 seniors leave AARP over ObamaCare support

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_J6Q-IiN6A

Merry Christmas from the United States Senate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g3RjpEt5To

Baucus Placed Gag Order On Medicare Companies Concerning Cuts

http://noworldsystem.com/2009/09/28/govt-places-gag-order-on-medicare-companies-concerning-cuts/

Coburn: The Elderly Need to Fear ObamaCare

http://noworldsystem.com/2009/12/06/the-elderly-need-to-fear-health-care-reform/

Obama Adviser: Old People Have to Die

http://noworldsystem.com/2009/10/13/obama-adviser-old-people-have-to-die/

ObamaCare: Deny Health Care To Elderly, Very Sick & Poor People

http://noworldsystem.com/2009/06/28/obama-wants-to-deny-health-care-to-elderly/

Deadly Doctors

http://www.nypost.com/seven/07242009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/deadly_doctors_180941.htm

[Via http://noworldsystem.com]

Monster intros iCarCharger 800 for iPod, iPhone | iLounge News

The Gettin after Lefty Show Jan 6th -The DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA-AGENTS OF CHANGE- Socialist indoctrination of our CHILDREN and our Nation-YELLOW SCHOOL BUSES TRANSPORTING OUR CHILDREN TO SOCIALIST INDOCTRINATION CLINICS

2010-01-07T03:32:00.000+02:00

AGENTS OF CHANGE

National Education Association indoctrination clinics

Texas teachers warned against being ‘heterosexist’

‘We must help people to become committed to social change’

((1938))

June 29: The New York Herald Tribune covering the NEA Convention in New York City reports:

Dr. Goodwin Watson, Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, begged the teachers of the nation to use their profession to indoctrinate children to overthrow ‘conservative reactionaries’ directing American government and industry. …

(He) declared that Soviet Russia was one of ‘the most notable international achievements of our

generation.’))

The corrupt state of U.S. colleges exposed

There it states that there are several focuses for such programs, including those that insist “on education change as part of a larger societal transformation in which we more closely explore and criticize the oppressive foundations of society and how education serves to maintain the status quo – foundations such as white supremacy, capitalism, global socioeconomic situations, and exploitation

NEA AGENTS OF CHANGE

information about ‘change-agent skills’ and ‘unfreezing, changing and refreezing’ attitudes.

move from an emphasis on skill training to ‘sensitivity training,’

[Via http://gettinafterlefty.wordpress.com]

Is Apple Planning A Free, Ad-Supported iPhone? - Podcasting News

Military-Industrial Complex Set To Make Billions From Body Scanners

2010-01-05T19:50:00.000+02:00

Steve Watson / Infowars.net - January 5, 2010

The rabid calls for co-ordinated implementation of naked body scanners in airports across the planet, in the wake of the failed underwear bombing, will result in huge profits for the military industrial complex.

The giant defense contractor L-3 Communications is first in line, having already landed a $165 million contract for body scanners from the Transportation Security Administration late last week.

The New York based company ranks among the world’s top contractors, with 81% of it’s total revenue being generated from defense spending in 2008 (see image below).

L-3 has supplied command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems and products to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and several other U.S. Government intelligence agencies.

Forty L-3 manufactured scanners are already in use at 19 U.S. airports, however that number is set to increase exponentially following the mass hysteria generated by the Christmas day incident.

“The contract last week isn’t an order for L-3 scanners, said Lauren Gaches, a TSA spokeswoman. It identified funding sources and set a ceiling for purchasing an unspecified number of units over an indefinite time period.”

Five other contractors are also said to be courting the TSA for certification of their body scanning technology.

Link to entire article below…

http://www.prisonplanet.com/military-industrial-complex-set-to-make-a-killing-from-body-scanners.html

[Via http://stevenjohnhibbs.wordpress.com]

Is Apple Planning A Free, Ad-Supported iPhone? - Podcasting News

Christmas Terrorist or Christmas Murderer?

2010-01-05T03:50:00.000+02:00

January 5, 2010

Political Columnist

WordPress

The statement, “But as we go forward, let us remember this: our adversaries are those who would attack our country, not our fellow Americans, not each other,” as said by President Obama in his weekly YouTube address, is by far the most powerful statement anyone could make concerning the said ‘war on terror.’ Yet in the eyes of the mainstream media and Mr. Cheney, President Obama’s statement is an attempt to thwart American security and give rights to our enemies. Contrary to the mainstream media and radio talking-head groupthink, Mr. Obama is restoring the American spirit of freedom and strength, while taking the mystic air from out under the feet of these said ‘terrorists.’

On December 7, 1941 America was victim to an attack from a real adversary, as it was in the attacks that occurred in 1812, 1861 and 1898 by the British, Confederacy and the Spanish respectively. In these instances, those adversaries reflected a key difference from the adversaries to which Mr. Cheney and the radio talking-heads speak.

The adversaries of 1941, 1812, 1861 and 1898 were worthy enough to bear the uniform of their banner. Moreover, in the instance of the Japanese attack in 1941, the soldiers that participated in that raid wore their uniforms proudly, and they could have easily expanded their attack to include inflicting merciless terror on the civilian population throughout the island territories of Hawaii, but they did not –they were men of honor. They were adversaries that did not cower behind the ruse of peaceful law-abiding civilians, neither did they choose to indiscriminately inflict terror on innocent people, but were adversaries worthy of being prisoners of war.

Unlike the said ‘terrorists,’ America’s former and real adversaries generally adhered to the rules of war and did not, in most instances, needlessly and randomly attack civilians. However, these ‘terrorists’ operate in a totally barbaric manner and without honor; they are no different than the teenaged boys that shot up Columbine High School or the maniac that blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. They are nothing more than murderers that attack innocent people and should be treated as such.

These said ‘terrorists’ are not superhuman. They are not worthy of being tried in a military tribunal, because they do not abide by any respectable code. They do not have what it takes to own up to their duty and sacrifice as our soldiers do, rather, as the soldiers of any nation. They are nothing but cold-blooded faceless cowards and they belong to go where we house cold-blooded faceless cowards – a federal penitentiary.

[Via http://keironjackman.wordpress.com]

Best TV of the '00s: News Events - TV Squad

An Example Of Typical Mainstream Media Spin

2010-01-03T11:20:00.000+02:00

Has the President Done It? Or Screwed the Pooch?. by Michael Wolff

I’m always exploring the media on the web. Most of it is ‘establishment’. Much of it is proudly rightwing. Much of it claims to be liberal or progressive. The Nation, for example, is liberal and would claim to be progressive. It’s not progressive.

Americans use the term ‘liberal’ to mean ‘leftwing’ or center-left, if I’m not mistaken. Certainly they use the term a lot. I’m guessing that that usage is going to continue to creep into Canadian conversations more until we are using it just as much as Americans do and in the same way.

What would the meaning of ‘liberal’, as used in the States, be? I believe that it’s users would say it means (something like) ‘tolerant’. In other words, Liberals believe in freedom, or liberty, for all. But then, What do you call those who actually have freedom, who would deny it to others? Yes, I’d call them Republicans. But you could also call them liberals, if the definition of ‘liberal’ is someone who believes in freedom. Republicans just don’t believe in freedom for everyone, even if they don’t always bluntly say so.

There’s another meaning to ‘liberal’ that the Right urges us to think about. The thing is, The Right is not altogether wrong about this. I often refer to the liberal-left-anything goes Left. Those are people who believe in moral (if I’m using a good term here) liberation, although they would not claim to be immoral. But their position would be that anything goes, as long as it doesn’t harm others. And politically, any position (lifestyle, ideology) should be tolerated, as long as it’s not harmful. It sounds good. But the real test is: Is there really that tolerance by liberals for all views and lifestyles, even when they are harmless?

How about the anti-religion streak on the Left? I think most religion – including evil Christian tv religion that pushes a rightwing ideology and rightwing propaganda, especially in regard to the U.S.-Israel association – is pernicious. But not absolutely everyone who is religious is brainwashed or evil. Also, There’s freedom and then there’s freedom. For example, We’d all love to be free from taxes, like (deficit-addicted) rich people. Does that make it right?

As the Christian Bible points out, ‘Wide and spacious is the road leading to destruction and many are those entering onto it. Whereas narrow and cramped is the road leading to life and few are those entering onto it’. With the wide and spacious road of anything goes, it may be just too tempting for those taking it to honestly admit that their morality is no good. But that’s the kind of behavior that human imperfection allows for. Imperfection doesn’t guarantee it, but it certainly allows for it. As for the narrow, cramped road leading to life (which is what ‘everyone’ wants) that few find, What those who enter onto it also find is rules. They can’t do this and they can’t do that, which cramps their lifestyles, if you like. But if the things they can’t do, if the freedom they’re denied, is actually for their benefit, then they will actually, eventually, find freedom. You have freedom if you have life the way the Creator meant us to have it.

I personally think the term ‘liberal’, as used in the States, is unhelpful if so many popular, successful organizations that claim to be liberal do things like push the idea that Democrats will save us from Republican evil. There just isn’t any real difference between the two parties. They are, as Noam Chomsky plainly states, both business parties supported by the same people and groups (with little variation) and supporting the same people and groups (with little variation). They come from and serve power and have no interest in taking that away from themselves and the special interests they are allied with and giving it to the people. And orgs like Newser and The Nation know that.

Michael Wolff

My irreverant online comment in response to Michael Wolff’s spinny piece:

** “Here’s the puzzle: Does imminent passage of a health care bill, however sorely flawed, mean the president is a failure or a success?” Feel free to frame the question any you want Michael. Seriously, Are you suggesting that after all the blood that was spilled in Afghanistan (for profits), the cynical clampdown on torture in the U.S. but not elsewhere (via rendition and wonderful extraterroritarialtiy), the Honduran atrocity (ongoing), the great rape of Iraq (ongoing), that this additional evil may or may not make Obama a good guy?!!! **

[Via http://arrby.wordpress.com]

Fox News Airs Rush Limbaugh Press Conference As Breaking 'News ...

White House advisor briefed on 'underwear bomb' in October

2010-01-03T03:11:00.000+02:00

White House advisor briefed on ‘underwear bomb’ in October

Rick Moran

Newsweek follows up its story on Obama being informed of a Christmas terror plot with the story that White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan being briefed about the kind of bomb used during the holiday attack:

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan was briefed in October on an assassination attempt by Al Qaeda that investigators now believe used the same underwear bombing technique as the Nigerian suspect who tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, U.S. intelligence and administration officials tell NEWSWEEK.The briefing to Brennan was delivered at the White House by Muhammad bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s chief counterterrorism official. In late August, Nayef had survived an assassination attempt by an operative dispatched by the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda who was pretending to turn himself in. The operative had tried to kill the Saudi prince by detonating a bomb on his body, but stumbled on his way into the prince’s palace and blew himself up.

[...]

U.S. officials now suspect that Nayef’s attempted assassin and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian suspect aboard the Northwest flight, had the same bomb maker in Yemen, intelligence experts tell NEWSWEEK. At the briefing for Brennan, Nayef was concerned because “he didn’t think [U.S. officials] were paying enough attention” to the growing threat from Al Qaeda in Yemen, said a former U.S. intelligence official familiar with the briefing. (A senior Saudi official told NEWSWEEK Saturday that “we don’t have any concerns that the U.S. government isn’t sufficiently concerned about Yemen. In the latter part of the Bush administration and in this administration, the U.S. has been very focused on the dangers emanating from Yemen.”)

The more that dribbles out about the reaction of the administration to this threat, the more klutzy they look.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/01/white_house_advisor_briefed_on.html at January 02, 2010 – 10:10:11 PM EST

[Via http://bsimmons.wordpress.com]

The Press-Register's top local news stories of 2009 (with poll ...

GM for higher incentives to dealers to boost sales

2010-01-02T11:48:00.000+02:00

In order to hike up the sales, General Motors Company is offering higher incentives to its dealers. According to Wall Street Journal, General Motors is trying to dump the leftover stock from Pontiac and Saturn manufacturers in the market in order to increase the December sales of the particular car manufacturing brands. Wall Street Journal has also states that, General Motors has sent letter to its dealers stating that they are ready to pay $7000, every time a car manufactured by Saturn or Pontiac’s possession is transferred from their stock to that of rental-vehicle or service vehicle. These cars would be sold on second hand basis since these dealers are considered as owners of the car, hence the discounts availed on these cars will be high. This offer is going to last until the 4th of January since it is the last day for the General Motor Company to hike up their December car sales. General Motors will be booking the sales as fleet deliveries General Motors is planning to quit on Pontiac and Saturn and focus its attention on Hummers instead. General Motors’s contract to sell Saturn’s cars had collapsed in September, since then it has also pulled out of the contract to sell Opel by its European Unit. Currently its consignment of Hummers to a Chinese firm has been deferred and their deal with Saab cars is on a closure. This information has been provided by Reuters, but they were unable to get a comment from General Motors since it was past the US business hours.

[Via http://maguireautogroup.wordpress.com]

News From Across The Pond: Cate Deeley chose career over her ...

A commendable idea

2010-01-02T03:47:00.000+02:00

Cliff May wrote on 12/31/09 at NRO online:

A Bipartisan Proposal [Cliff May]

Step (1): Return all Gitmo detainees to Yemen.

Step (2): Use Predator missiles to strike the baggage-claim area 20 minutes after they arrive.

Just an idea.

Now, he’s only half kidding, I think. The Obama administration has set up a two-tier system of dealing with terrorists. The first way is to continue the Bush-era tactic of using extreme prejudice against terrorists attacking our military using Predator drones and Hellfire missiles. The One has had the military dispatch over 300 terrorists that way in the last year, sentenced to death without benefit of judge or jury.

Contrast that to what happens when the Obama Justice Department gets involved. The Christmas Bomber has now been given a lawyer and told of his right to remain silent, and I imagine we’ll soon see him punching a fist into the air in celebration of one of his Yemeni comrades pulling off an act of terrorism that he knew about. Individuals like this are ineligible for Geneva Convention protection and are subject to summary execution, but no, according to the flyblown logic of the witless wonders The One choses to surround himself with, they get the same treatment as US citizens under the Constitution. Thanks to the concern of the Obama administration, Lady Justice isn’t to be merely blind but a suicidal object of ridicule.

Add to that the Homeland Security doing everything except the practical, effective and obvious — in particular profiling, and listening to relatives when they try to make it known their kid intends us harm — and there doesn’t seem to be much hope of “going through the channels” working in the favor of the US public anytime soon.

So the only way it appears for the American People to get swift justice and an adequate defense against jihadis is to keep the terrorists as far away from the Obama Justice Department as possible.

[Via http://doiboy.wordpress.com]

Limbaugh Recovering In Honolulu Hospital - Politics News Story ...

Happy New Year - 2010 - The last decade in 7 minutes

2009-12-31T11:22:00.000+02:00

Happy New Year!

Take a look at this video summary of the last decade in 7 minutes. A lot has happened in those years… It has been a tough 10 years but a lot of good things happened also. Happy New Year to everyone.

Click here -- The Decade in Review in 7 minutes

[Via http://topofthethread.wordpress.com]

Apple tablet rumor party: Fox News, former Google China president ...

Violence NO MORE

2009-12-31T03:49:00.000+02:00

Today, I talked to a friend of mine who chose to allow her adult son of 28 assault her in her own home. She told me she didn’t understand why he treated her like that. I have tried for over four years to get her to see that people treat us the way we allow them to treat us. But she has chosen to be in denial at her responsibility in this occurrence. Her ex-husband treated her this way and that is the example her son has seen. He has been angry at his father for many years at the divorce and yet he is exactly like his father in the way he treats his mother. Oh, yes, he has been living in his mother’s home for almost a year and he thinks it is his home. Of course, she also has had other of her adult children living in her house, verbally abusing her and acting like children (one is a mother of 2 kids who are very immature and verbally abusive to others), and yet my friend is still in denial.

This woman who was so strong five years ago when I first met her but has had a difficult time working through relationships and understanding that when she STOPS her response and allowing this type of behavior occur then only will it stop.

It has also given me time to consider the victims in several high profile relationships this month that has seen more than the 15 minutes of media

attention – Tiger and Elin Woods and David Goldman and his custody battle for his son.

1. Violence is unacceptable in any form.

2. Angry people who show anger in business situations will be angry internally and show it in other ways – disrespect of the person, comments, and emotional expressions seen by others. Remember the times when Tiger was angry on the course.

2. Sociopaths who feel that they are not responsible for their actions nor the impact they have on others who like to control everything in their way are also angry internally and will show it in their lack of respect for the opposite gender and think so highly of themselves that it becomes a snobbish attitude that they exude.

3. Character is learned from those individuals who are in our environment. Tiger’s dad was a controlling individual who felt that his son could do no wrong and that he was the ultimate athlete. An individual whose performance in the course of sports business and in one’s personal life and community makes a great role model – not one who inflicts pain on others without assuming responsibility for one’s actions.

David Goldman is not the victim. His son Sean is the victim. A child who was kidnapped by his mother and not returned to his biological father and whose family members kept his from his father should not have any contact with him at all. They have turned their backs on what is right for the child, and only seeking their only selfish nature. Sean has a right to know his father and his father has a right to father his son. Again, child abuse and violence in a rare form.

It doesn’t matter what language it is done in. The violent actions of Sean’s maternal grandparents and a man who is not related to him are not positive in any nature. They need not to have access to the child until he is of legal age and then if he decides that is his choice.

A child of nine does not have the logic to determine where one wants to live, especially if one does not have the ability to get to know the other home he left and was not allowed to return to as a child.

I am happy that David Goldman has his son and hope that he does not give the former inlaws access to his son for at least 9 years. They don’t deserve it and cannot be trusted, not even on American soil.

Today, I found myself feeling happy and glad to be alive. Yet, in this world, I am sad that our government is lax on implementing rules about traveling and terrorism. It is when we become complacent that things happen. We must know and be conscious at all times. Our government is not conscious at the moment. When I hear about what details they missed, I wonder what and who went wrong. Why did they allow it to happen? Why are we not becoming more aggressive on our flights? Get awake and learn!

So, for today I find myself in prayer for those who are not at peace in their own hearts, ask for strength for those who see themselves with no confidence, for those who protect us around the world, and for a strong wake-up call for our President and government officials to become real again. What will it take?

[Via http://drbizwhiz.wordpress.com]

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