The U.S. today charged Bradley Manning with a variety of crimes relating to his alleged leaks of classified material to WikiLeaks, most prominently including the Apache attack video that spawned worldwide debate over the American occupation.
The only "weapon" visible in this video is a camera carried by Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, who was 22 years old when he was murdered by the American occupation of Iraq.
Namir Noor-Eldeen
Greenwald also provides a handy summary of the "rule of law" in America today.
If you torture people or eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law, you receive Look-Forward Imperial Immunity.
* If you shoot and kill unarmed rescuers of the wounded while occupying their country and severely wound their unarmed children sitting in a van -- or if you authorize that conduct -- your actions are commended.
* If you help wreck the world economy with fraud and cause hundreds of millions of people untold suffering, you collect tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.
* If you disclose to the world evidence of war crimes, government lawbreaking, or serious corruption, or otherwise embarrass the U.S., you will be swiftly prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and face decades in prison.
Namir Noor-Eldeen worked very close to the reality of our genocidal occupation of Iraq, and maybe the video-game idiot who killed him wasn't entirely wrong when he "identified" Namir's camera as a weapon...
But it was only a weapon against murder and endless war.
For a brief and shining moment, well more or less just July 1 & 2, a major mainstream political leader told the truth everyone knows about Afghanistan: it's unwinnable. And he even held his ground for, like, a day. As a consequence, Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele was attacked without mercy by both parties and all of official Washington. That's even though we all know Steele is right, and we all know our first priority, saving Afghan lives, and second priority, saving foreign soldier lives, mean we need to get international military forces quickly removed from Afghanistan. Here's Steele, taboo busting:
This was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in. . . .
It was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan.
Wow, refreshing, a normal person might at first react. Admittedly, you could question the beginning of the statement, since we all know Bush started the Afghan war; but it is also true that after deposing the Taliban Bush kept the war on low or simmer for the rest of his time in office. And Obama has turned the heat way up, doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan (and unleashing McChrystal's assassination squads there, btw). In that reasonable benefit-of-the-doubt context, Steele's first two sentences above are accurate. But oh, what a second paragraph: right on Mr. Steele, and take that, warmongers!
As you'd expect, military-industrial complex and warmonger Republicans are on the anti-Steele warpath. And the other war party, the Democrats, are also attacking Steele, nearly accusing him of treason (yup, that soundsBush-erafamiliar). As if we haven't known it for awhile, the party and President swooped into office by peacenik votes is also the other'support the war or it'll make the troops feel bad' party:
An angry President Obama summoned his top commander in Afghanistan to Washington on Tuesday after a magazine article portrayed the general and his staff as openly contemptuous of some senior members of the Obama administration.
The author of the article -- Michael Hastings, a freelance journalist -- appears to have been granted intimate access to General McChrystal's inner circle. Most of the comments seem to have been uttered during unguarded moments, in places like bars and restaurants where the general and his aides gathered to unwind.
A McChrystal aide is quoted saying of Mr. Holbrooke: "The Boss says he's like a wounded animal. Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he's going to be fired, so that makes him dangerous."
The article also describes a conversation in which General McChrystal and an aide talk about Mr. Biden. "Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" General McChrystal jokes.
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say 'Bite me?' "
In a parallel universe, where Planet Earth is inhabited by intelligent life-forms, Obama would say...
"Soldiers have been grousing about higher-ups for at least 5000 years, and only a shit-head of a reporter like Michael Hastings would repeat what soldiers say among themselves off-duty in a bar, and only a shitty "life-style" magazine like Rolling Stone would print it."
But on our stupid branch of the multi-universe, on Planet Stupid, where shit-heads rule...
This story is a very big deal.
(And if you think I'm a cheerleader for McChrystal, read this.)
On one side we have two brilliant strategists and great team leaders, and on the other side there's a telegenic spokes-model and a semi-senile dinosaur.
And unfortunately for all of us, the great leaders are competing for bragging rights about a kids' game, while the bozos are fumbling and bumbling and humbugging our world into oblivion.
The Lakers draft Kobe Bryant. McCain drafts Sarah Palin. Obama drafts Larry Summers.
Harharharhar!!!
McCain and Obama are idiots!
And since it's pointless to ask how we could convert American politics into something more like the NBA, with brilliant leaders instead of clowns in charge, because we all know that isn't going to happen...
We might as well ask how to convert the NBA into something more like American politics, and that would be simpler than you might imagine, because...
All we have to do is make sucking up to the fans the only qualification for coaching, with the proviso that none of the candidates has any kind of record as a coach, or even as a player.
"You/We are the ones we/you were waiting for!"
"I love your values!"
And if you subtracted sucking up to the fans from McCain and Obama, both those clowns would disappear, like smoke blown away from a mirror.
President Obama, speaking from Louisiana today, criticized BP for spending big money on television advertising and shareholder dividends, suggesting the company was prioritizing its own interests over those of Gulf residents.
Every day it's something different! Yesterday it was TV ads, last week it was crime!
"We have an obligation to investigate what went wrong," Obama said."If our laws were broken, leading to this death and destruction, my solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice."
In 2009, the British-based company paid $87.43 million for a single Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violation for willful negligence that led to the deaths of 15 workers in a 2005 explosion at a Texas refinery. BP handed over $50 million to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for the same crime.
BP paid Obama a couple of fines for the criminally negligent homicide of 15 workers, and the $137 million total of those fines amounted to BP's profits for two whole days, at $6 billion per quarter, $2 billion per month, $66 million per day!
So Barack Obama isn't exactly a hanging judge when it comes to punishing corporate criminals,even for homicide, and I guess it isn't suprising that all he does is bitch, bitch, bitch, while the Gulf of Mexico fills up with oil.
But wasn't this a perfect time to turn around the Republican meme that the federal government is always the problem, and never the solution for any problem?
Wasn't this a perfect time to put the best and brightest in one big room, and keep them locked up until they solved this goddamned problem?
The federal government of the United States put a man on the moon!
And now all Obama can do is bitch, bitch, bitch?
The federal government of the United States defeated two enormous industrial and military powers in WWII!
Most of the cops I know don't use language from the Book of Revelation to describe a crime scene, but P.J. Hahn, a candidate for Chief of Police in Kenner, Louisiana and currently director of coastal zone management for Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish, somehow rose to the occasion as an enormous orange slick washed up on his local beach.
"In Revelations it says the water will turn to blood," said P.J. Hahn, director of coastal zone management for Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish. "That's what it looks like out here - like the Gulf is bleeding. This is going to choke the life out of everything."
And meanwhile in Afghanistan, let me introduce you to Matiullah Khan!
Mr. Matiullah is one of several semiofficial warlords who have emerged across Afghanistan in recent months, as American and NATO officers try to bolster - and sometimes even supplant - ineffective regular Afghan forces in their battle against the Taliban insurgency.
His main effort - and his biggest money maker - is securing the chaotic highway linking Kandahar to Tirin Kot for NATO convoys. His company charges each NATO cargo truck $1,200 for safe passage, or $800 for smaller ones, his aides say. His income, according to one of his aides, is $2.5 million a month, an astronomical sum in a country as impoverished as this one.
In some cases, these strongmen have restored order, though at the price of undermining the very institutions Americans are seeking to build: government structures like police forces and provincial administrations that one day are supposed to be strong enough to allow the Americans and other troops to leave.
This is a full-tilt protection racket, on the model of Al Capone's "safe streets" in Cicero Illinois, where nobody would mess with you, as long as you played ball with Big Al.
A protection racket is an extortion scheme whereby a criminal group or individual coerces other less powerful entities to pay money, allegedly for protection services against external threats (usually violence or property damage, and sometimes perpetrated by the racketeers themselves).
In this case, the "other less powerful entities" include NATO and the United States.
On Thursday, U.S. Geological Survey director Marcia McNutt announced that the Flow Rate Technical Group -- a panel of scientists from government and academia -- had determined that the overall best initial estimate for the rate of flow from the leak was between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels of oil per day.
But it was impossible for members of the team that analyzed the oil plume video to estimate the upper boundary of the oil spilled, according to the Ira Leifer, a researcher at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Steven Wereley, a researcher at Purdue University.
Wereley and Leifer were both members of that team, and Leifer participated in the satellite image analysis as well. Both researchers say that the seven minutes of video that BP provided to the plume team was not sufficient to estimate the upper boundary of the amount of oil -- only to give a lower-end estimate.
"What everyone on the panel agreed was that due to the low-quality data BP provided to us, it would be irresponsible and unscientific to estimate an upper bound to the emission," said Leifer. "So what we presented in the [plume team] report is a range of expert opinions on what the lower bound is."
Wereley said he was surprised to see the estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels and was "disappointed" with the way that the press release was phrased.
"I was really confused when I read the press release yesterday," he said. "I had to read it several times."
So the figures which are quoted all over the media with the phony appearance of upper and lower bounds, "between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels of oil per day," really only apply to the lower bound, and the best independent estimate of the upper bound remains the figure which Professor Steve Werely provided for NPR on May 20:
100,000 barrels per day, and at 42 gallons per barrel, that's....
4,000,000 gallons per day.
If we split the difference between that upper bound and the lower bound from the USGS, we arrive at a middle-of-the-road estimate...
60,000 barrels per day, and that's...
2,400,000 gallons per day.
And that produces a middle-of-the-road estimate that the total amount of oil which Deepwater Horizon has already dumped into the Gulf of Mexico in 42 days is about...
100,000,000 gallons already!
That's almost ten times as much as the Exxon Valdez, but what the heck!
What is striking about today's debate about oil and water mixing in the Gulf of Mexico is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s - in arguments that go back forty years or more.
In the early years of the environmental movement and opposition to the offshore drilling, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of Big Oil of being hippy tree-huggers.
Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of corporate America itself - by defacing Exxon signs; by blaming Shell Oil for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor the CEO's who enrich us all by enriching themselves.
Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views - these caricatures of left and right. Most Americans understood that concern for the environment does not make you a hippy tree-hugger, and that there is nothing smart or sophisticated about a cynical disregard for America's corporate hierarchy.
And yet the anger and turmoil of that period never entirely drained away. All too often our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments - a fact most evident during our recent debates about oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, when those who opposed offshore drilling were tagged by some as eco-freaks, and a corporation providing its full resources to shut down the leak was accused of criminal negligence.
Given the enormous challenges that lie before us, we can no longer afford these sorts of divisions.
And on the previous page were the names of Pvt. Grant A. Cotting and Spc. Matthew M. Pollini, the first and second American soldiers killed in action after the inauguration of Barack Obama.
Twenty-one-year-old Spc. Matthew Pollini was serving with the 772nd Military Police Company, an Army National Guard unit from Taunton. Flags flew at half-staff in Rockland and the town posted a memorial notice.
Erica Pollini told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy her brother "was a talented, loyal person" who joined the National Guard two or three years ago. She said his unit was activated last fall and he was due home in October. Joseph Pollini told WBZ-TV his older brother "was a hero, a hands-down hero," and said he followed his brother into the same Guard unit, a dream of service they shared.
Pollini's 20-year-old wife Sarah, whom he married Dec. 22, told The Patriot Ledger, "we had lots of plans."
And wouldn't the Democrats be screaming bloody murder if George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had personally intervened to make 9/11 possible!
But after Ken Salazar personally intervened in federal court to overturn an injunction against offshore drilling, specifically for the catastrophic well at Mississippi Canyon Block 252...
Democrats just grinned their usual shit-eating grins, and blamed everybody else except Barack Obama.
The actual exploratory drilling was approved by the Obama administration on April 6, 2009.
Within days of the 2009 approval, the Center for Biological Diversity and its allies won a court order vacating the Bush Five-Year Offshore Drilling Plan. Rather than use the court order as a timeout on new offshore oil drilling to develop a new plan, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar filed a special motion with the court to exempt approved oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He specifically identified BP's operation as one that should be released from the vacature.
So the system actually worked, and offshore drilling had been shut down around Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, but then...
Obama/Salazar intervened in court to start drilling again, in April 2009, without further evironmental review, exactly where Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank.
And just because this is exactly the aspect of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that so many Democrats want to forget, I'll connect those two dots one more time.
1. The federal courts shut down offshore drilling in April 2009.
2. Obama/Salazar intervened to get BP a permit to drill its famous goddamned well.
So why aren't the Democrats outraged about Obama's catastrophic irresponsibility?
President Obama previewed a new national security strategy rooted in diplomatic engagement and international alliances on Saturday as he essentially repudiated his predecessor's emphasis on unilateral American power and the right to wage preemptive war.
A Pakistani tribesman stands beside his family members, who were injured in an overnight suspected U.S. missile strike, at a local hospital in Miran Shah, main town of North Waziristan.
There was a massive drone attack in Pakistan today - one involving multiple unmanned aircraft and "up to 18 American missiles," according to the Associated Press. 14 people are dead.
This second robotic strike in three days is the latest sign that the American drone war in Pakistan has reached a new peak. There have been 34 reported attacks in Pakistan in the first 19 weeks on 2010. That's almost as many as the 36 strikes carried out in all of 2008. And these strikes are no longer against specific, named terrorists. Signs of militant activity are enough to bring in the drones.
U.S. casualties in Afghanistan hit 1,000 with massive Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul.
An Army colonel based in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., was among five U.S. soldiers killed by the powerful blast in Kabul on Tuesday, Pentagon officials have confirmed. Two lieutenant colonels from Fort Drum, N.Y., and two Germany-based enlisted soldiers also died when a vehicle loaded with explosives hit a NATO convoy near government buildings.
Col. John M. McHugh, 46, of New Jersey, is the second colonel to die in combat in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon. He had been in the country for a short time with representatives of the 10th Mountain Division, helping that unit prepare to deploy.
Also identified were Lt. Col. Paul R. Bartz, 43, of Waterloo, Wis., and Lt. Col. Thomas P. Belkofer, 44, of Perrysburg, Ohio, both assigned to headquarters of the 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry), Fort Drum.
Based in Germany were Staff Sgt. Richard J. Tieman, 28, of Waynesboro, Pa., and Spc. Joshua A. Tomlinson, 24, of Dubberly, La., who were assigned to Special Troops Battalion, V Corps, Heidelberg. Tomlinson was based in Kaiserslautern.
Tom Friedman thinks that George W. Bush should have responded to 9/11 by imposing a $1 tax on gasoline at the pump, and the idea of regressive taxes as a tool of environmental policy would obviously appeal to a tool for globalization like Tom, oscillating between his 11,400 square-foot cottage in Bethesda and after-dinner speeches @ $50,000 for his corporate clientele.
Now Friedman has identified the Deepwater Horizon oil-spill as "Obama's 9/11," and likewise re-evaluated the rest of recent American history into a never-ending demonstration of...
The genius of Tom Friedman!
President Bush's greatest failure was not Iraq, Afghanistan or Katrina. It was his failure of imagination after 9/11 to mobilize the country to get behind a really big initiative for nation-building in America.
I suggested a $1-a-gallon "Patriot Tax" on gasoline that could have simultaneously reduced our deficit, funded basic science research, diminished our dependence on oil imported from the very countries whose citizens carried out 9/11, strengthened the dollar, stimulated energy efficiency and renewable power and slowed climate change.
Ethnic cleansing in New Orleans and genocide in Iraq could have been mere footnotes to the brilliant Bush/Friedman gas tax, which would have simultaneously solved almost every problem in America and the world today!
And all for one regressive tax, which millionaire shills for globalization like Tom Friedman wouldn't even notice at the pump.
"Well, if there's any doubt about the leadership that our military is showing, you just need to look at this F-18 fighter and the light-armored vehicle behind me. The Army and Marine Corps have been testing this vehicle on a mixture of biofuels. And this Navy fighter jet -- appropriately called the Green Hornet -- will be flown for the first time in just a few days, on Earth Day."
When the neo-con-man Barack Obama opens millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere for offshore drilling, he isn't really an anti-environmental shit-head like George W. Bush.
He's only appeasing "moderate Republicans," who may vote for his ridiculously weak climate bill.
And when the neo-con-man Barack Obama intensifies our hopeless war in Afghanistan, he isn't really a chicken-hawk mass-murderer like George W. Bush.
He's only making peace by making more war, or withdrawing our brave soldiers from Afghanistan by sending in tens of thousands more of them, or some other self-contradictory bullshit!
And when the Harry-and-Louise-lovin' con-man Obama takes single-payer off the table before debate about healthcare reform even begins, because it would be impossible to override a filibuster of single-payer, and Democrats would have to resort to passing single-payer by "reconciliation," and then...
During the Bush years, in the wake of the NSA scandal, I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct. But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush's term (though several were threatened). It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Thomas Drake.
Think about to whose interests the Obama DOJ is devoted given that -- while they protect the most profound Bush crimes based on the Presidential decree of "Look Forward, Not Backward" -- they chose this whistle-blower to prosecute (and Drake, incidentally, is apparently impoverished, as he's been assigned a Public Defender to represent him).
In the process, of course, the Obama DOJ also intimidates and deters future whistle-blowers from exposing what they know, thus further suffocating one of the very few remaining mechanisms Americans have to learn about what takes place behind the virtually impenetrable Wall of Secrecy surrounding the Surveillance State -- a Wall of Secrecy which the Obama administration, through its promiscuous use of "state secrets" and immunity claims, has relentlessly fortified and expanded.
"But we (me and George W. Bush) have supported you anyway, and killed everybody who got in your way!"
"We made you the over-boss of all of Jersey!"
"And how do you pay us back? You let some penny-ante election fraud get all over my media! You're making me look bad, Tony! You gotta clean up your act!"
"Big Pauly should sleep with the fishes!"
And Tony Soprano replied...
"Big Pauly is a made man, Mr. President, and that means that Big Pauly can fuck with anybody, and nobody can fuck with Big Pauly."
Anybody who ever reflected on the evidence for as much as a minute knows that Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all smoked pot. Obama admitted it, Bush never really denied it, and Clinton (ha ha!) "didn't inhale."
So if smoking pot doesn't mess you up too much to be President, then what's the problem with pot?
The problem is shameles and hypocritical politicians sucking up to tight-assed low-IQ no-info hoodoos in Alabama and South Dakota, who fear that their little Barbies and Kens will end up in the gutter if they sample the demon weed, although...
Since 1992, your chance of getting elected President without a whole lotta preliminary tokin' has been zero.
But while Obama is prancing around the Oval Office and laughing at the net-roots because they made legalizing marijuana and ending the "War on Drugs" #1 and #2 on Obama's own bullshit website Ideas for Change in America...
While Obama is prancing around the Oval Office and enforcing even the very few drug-laws that he promised not to enforce...
Meanwhile the "War on Drugs" continues to decimate black communities, as described in a excellent new book by legal scholar Michelle Alexander...
AMY GOODMAN: Nearly half of America's young black men are behind bars or have been labeled felons for life? That's an astounding figure. Also, what does it mean in terms of their rights for the rest of their lives?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, thanks largely to the war on drugs, a war that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. The war on drugs waged in these ghetto communities has managed to brand as felons millions of people of color for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. And once branded a felon, they're ushered into a permanent second-class status, not unlike the one we supposedly left behind. Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and my be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.
In fact, in 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession. Only one out of five were for sales.
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, I just wanted to bring it up to President Obama, because this piece you wrote, very interesting, at tomdispatch.com called "The Age of Obama as Racial Nightmare." Explain.
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: What is the system designed to do? The system is designed to send you right back to prison, which is, in fact, what happens to the vast majority of people who are released. About 70 percent of former prisoners are returned within three years. And the majority of those who are returned are returned within three months, because the obstacles, the legal barriers to just surviving on the outside, are so great. I'm often-you know, people often say to me, "Well, I know somebody who is a felon and who managed to get a job. You know, it's possible to get a job," they say.
Well, it may be possible, but what kind of job? Why is it that, you know, our young kids, young black and brown kids, are expected to be locked into low-wage jobs for life, if they're lucky enough to get them, but kids in other communities are given the opportunity to go on to college, to compete for a full range of job opportunities? During the Jim Crow era, the problem wasn't that black people couldn't get jobs; it was that they were locked permanently in a lower tier of jobs. And that's the reality.
Considering the shameless hypocrisy and downright idiocy of politics in America, maybe it isn't surprising that after 40 years of failure, the "War on Drugs" is still fully funded and still destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of black Americans...
But how many people who voted for "Hope and Change" with Barack Obama foresaw that they were only electing a new Enforcer-in-Chief of the new Jim Crow?
"What frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We cannot wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about their opponent - a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of well-qualified public servants should not be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual Senators. Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game."
Does Obama really believe it's "Washington" that shuts down Congress every time "Washington" has 41 votes in the Senate?
Has Obama been unconscious since 2006, while 41 Republican votes in the Senate turned into a de facto veto of any and all legislation? While appeasing two or three Republican swing votes eviscerated healthcare reform and Obama's feeble "stimulus?"
Was Obama out to lunch while Democrats rubber-stamped Bush/Cheney's insane foreign policy, reactionary domestic agenda, and ultra-right-wing appointments to the Supreme Court?
Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can.
Neither party? Have Democrats delayed or obstructed every bill just because they can?
But Obama wasn't really talking about Democrats and Republicans, or "Washington," or jobs and unemployment, or healthcare, or war and peace or global warming or immigration or financial reform.
Jon Walker over at Fire Dog Lake makes a very effective argument about why learning the wrong lesson from the defeat of Martha Coakley in yesterday's Massachusetts Senate race will lead to disaster.
Not only will Democrats lose badly if they adopt this strategy, but they will be laughed at. Republicans never had 59 Senate seats, and that did not stop them from passing the legislation they wanted. Trying to explain to the American people how, despite controlling everything, Democrats cannot do anything, because a mean minority of 41 Republican senators won't let them, is a message that will go over like a lead balloon. If you try to use that excuse, people will think elected Democrats are liars, wimps, idiots, or an ineffectual combination of all three.
I didn't believe Brown would beat Coakley for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts until two days before the election, when this story popped out of the internet noise.
Twitter Followers: Brown (9,679), Coakley (3,385)
YouTube Video Views: Brown (578,271), Coakley (51,173)
Facebook Fans: Brown (70,800), Coakley (13,529)
Gaaaa gaaaa Oh la laaa-aaa!!!
Read those numbers and weep, Democrats! Republicans are winning in the Age of Minimal Information, politics played with micro-tweets...
Hope and Change!
Gaaaa gaaaa Oh la laaa-aaa!!!
But now it's...
"Independent Voice!"
"Brown will be an Independent Voice in Washington!"
Gaaaa gaaaa Oh la laaa-aaa!!!
I watched dozens of voters mouth this brain-dead noise on Boston TV, and this is only the beginning!
John Bolton has posted a rant on the Wall Street Journal, ostensibly criticizing the US intelligence "community" on the basis of his non-existent expertise, but also indirectly urging even more violence in Southwest Asia than Obama and his playmates now plan, and I rehabilitated my almost forgotten account on that rag to ask a simple question.
Does it matter that John Bolton is a coward?
He promoted the War in Vietnam but enlisted in a non-combat unit of the Maryland National Guard for the duration. Now he promotes other wars, and as long as John Bolton's candy a*ss is safe at home, John Bolton is happy to send any number of young Americans out to die. But...
Does it matter that John Bolton is a coward?
Does it matter that Cheney and George W. Bush likewise ran away from the war they promoted, when the time came for them to risk their lives in combat?
And now Cheney prances around the networks again, and he's nauseatingly eager to send young Americans out to die, from his bunker at an undisclosed location, surrounded by the Secret Service.
It's still too soon in the old familiar process of panicking Congress and the media for Cheney and Bush and Bolton to start chanting "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran," or "bomb, bomb, bomb North Korea," but every day they edge a little closer, and Bolton's silly survey of US intel agencies concludes with an expectably loaded question.
Finally, the real debatable issue is often not intelligence or analysis, but the inescapably political judgment of how much risk to our national security we are willing to tolerate. Today, the Obama administration's level of risk tolerance for potential terrorists and proliferators is far too high. Changing that doesn't just mean fixing the IC. It means fixing the White House.
How much risk to our national security are we willing to tolerate?
And the answer is zero, as long as John Bolton and Cheney and Bush can stay out of the combat zone.
But it's also worth asking a couple of questions about Barack Obama, and his life-and-death commitment to bombing primitive tribesmen in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and God only knows where else.
As far as I can determine from the gibberish Obama recited when he picked up the Nobel Peace Prize, it's a terrible threat to our national security for al Qaeda to operate training camps in Afghanistan. They might plan an attack on the USA!
In Afghanistan!
Where else can you learn how to light a fuse in your underpants, or threaten a stewardess with box-cutters? Where else but in the God-forsaken wilderness of Afghanistan?
But if learning to set your underpants on fire (in Afghanistan!) is a terrible threat to our national security, then what was Saddam Hussein marching hundreds of thousands of soldiers into Kuwait, and threatening to make himself master of (almost) all the petroleum in the world?
It looked like enough of a threat for Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to drop everything and run off to Israel to help the IDF.
Why didn't Obama go, too?
In August 1990, when the first Gulf War began, Obama was working as a summer intern for the law firm of Hopkins & Sutter. It wasn't exactly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it would be an unbearable understatement to say that a lot of National Guardsmen now serving in Iraq or Afghanistan gave up more than a summer internship to defend our national security.
So why didn't Obama sign up? He didn't have any family responsibilities, unlike so many National Guardsmen in Iraq and Afghanistan, who leave their jobs and families to struggle with severely reduced income and how to compensate for absent mothers and fathers.
But in the summer of 1990, a summer internship was much more important to Obama than protecting our national security, although now he is all-too-willing to sacrifice the lives of any number of young Americans and bomb primitive tribesmen here, there, and everywhere, for the transcendental purpose of... shutting down some hypothetical training camps.
What's the difference?
Why is a training camp for underpants bombers so fucking important that Obama yanks thousands of Guardsmen out of their lives and throws them into the shit-hole of Afghanistan? But when Obama had a chance to risk his own candy ass for national security...
Nearly four and a half years ago this nation experienced the two worst disasters of this past decade: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans' federal flood. Today many consider them old news, if not history, but they still are present in the lives of those who survived them.
Barack Obama has exactly as much justification for slaughtering primitive tribesmen in Afghanistan as Hitler for slaughtering Jews.
We are slaughtering primitive tribesmen who never attacked the United States or any American citizen or soldier until we invaded their country. Al Qaeda is gone. Our "enemy" is now the Taliban, primitive tribesmen who never attacked the United States or any American soldier or citizen until we invaded their country.
No torture which the Nazis inflicted on Jews was more prolonged or painful than what we inflict on primitive tribesmen who never attacked the United States or any American soldier or citizen before we invaded their country.
A bronze statue of a young Barack Obama in shorts and a T-shirt - and what appears to be a Nobel medal around his neck - has been erected at a park in Jakarta, Indonesia, near the school where the future U.S. president studied as a child...
Once upon a time, when Barack Obama was still a child in Indonesia, a magic butterfly landed on his thumb.
"I will grant you three wishes," said the butterfly.
"I want to be President of the United States and win the Nobel Prize," said Obama.
"Okay," said the butterfly, "and what do you want for your third wish? World peace? Human wisdom?"
My sock-puppet Jacob Freeze was slated to play my "conscience" in Obama 2012: The Sequel, and ever since Axelroddeleted that role, Jakie calls me a "stinking con-man" all over the internet.
Lately he's raving about Tajiks in the Afghan Army. "The sky is falling! Tajiks control the ANA!"
That means about as much to the average voter as "goo goo gah gah!" And then come the zingers like "70% of all kandaks are commanded by Tajiks!"
"Tajiki kandaki po-tay-to po-tah-to!" I didn't get elected by spouting gibberish!
Most of the principal advocates of the War in Vietnam have long ago admitted that their advocacy was based on calculations about domestic politics, but none of them, as far as I know, has expressed any shame about it.
As Jonathan Schell has elegantly demonstrated in a recent article for the Nation, almost exactly the same arguments which "justified" the War in Vietnam have been repeated to justify the American invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and again, none of the principal architects of those catastrophic misadventures has expressed any shame about them.
And now yet another shameless President is selling a bigger war in Afghanistan with almost exactly the same specious arguments as Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, and his shameless supporters will repeat those same specious arguments in Congress and in the press and on hundreds of political blogs.
More than a year has passed since mobs of sickening nitwits drove anyone who dared to criticize Obama off the internet, or into some faraway corner of it, and now that banks have been infinitely enriched while millions of the rest of us lose our jobs and houses, and 25,000 or 30,000 or 35,000 more American soldiers are already committed to Afghanistan by the stinking con-man Obama...
It's worth remembering that we had alternatives to endless wars and unaccountable bailouts...
We Had Alternatives
Driven by fear we are moving quickly to pass a bill, which may produce a temporary uptick for the market, but nothing for millions of homeowners whose misfortunes are at the center of our economic woes. People do not have money to pay their mortgages. After this passes, they will still not have money to pay their mortgages. People will still lose their homes while Wall Street is bailed out.
The central flaw of this bill is that there are NO stronger protections for homeowners and NO changes in the language to ensure that the secretary has the authority to compel mortgage servicers to modify the terms of mortgages. And there are NO stronger regulatory changes to fix the circumstances that allowed this to happen.
We should have created a mechanism for our government to take a controlling interest in mortgage-backed securities and use our power to work out a new deal for the homeowners. We could have done this. We should have done this. But we didn't.
Now millions of Americans will face the threat of foreclosure without any help. And the numbers will soon rise for a number of reasons.
Now the government will have to borrow $700 billion from banks, with interest, to give banks a $700 billion bailout, and in return the taxpayers get $700 billion in toxic debt. The Senate "improved" the bailout by giving tax breaks to people in foreclosure. People in foreclosure need help paying their mortgage, they do not seek tax breaks.
It is not as though we had no choice but to pass the bill before us. We could have done this differently. We could have demanded language in the legislation that would have empowered the Treasury to compel mortgage servicers to rework the terms of mortgage loans so homeowners could avoid foreclosure. We could have put regulatory structures in place to protect investors. We could have stopped the speculators.
This bill represents an utter failure of the Democratic process. It represents the triumph of special interest over the triumph of the public interest. It represents the inability of government to defend the public interest in the face of great pressure from financial interests. We could have recognized the power of government to prime the pump of the economy to get money flowing through out society by creating jobs, health care, and major investments in green energy. What a lost opportunity!
Kucinich published this essay October 4, 2008, and it only looks better now.
We had alternatives. We could have elected an honest citizen like Kucinich instead of the stinking con-man Obama, and every time another family is foreclosed and evicted, and every time another American soldier or civilian in Afghanistan or Iraq is killed for nothing, the sickening nitwits who mobbed out almost all criticism of Obama on the internet deserve to be remembered.
Along with a gaggle of progressive news aggregators, I keep an RSS feed from the Wall Street Journal on my desktop for balance, but mostly it's just noise.
Today was slightly different, with a column from Scott Rasmussen, a national pollster whom liberals love to hate, but although his conclusions may skew to the right, he can't really afford to play too fast and loose with facts, and today he showcased a few surprising items... surprising at least to me, because my immersion in the progressive blogosphere and deeply-addicted news-junkie brain-style sometimes makes me forget who else is out there, in the blur of political impressionism.
Down the campaign homestretch, Mr. Obama's tax-cutting promise became his clearest policy position. Eventually he stole the tax issue from the Republicans. Heading into the election, 31% of voters thought that a President Obama would cut their taxes. Only 11% expected a tax cut from a McCain administration.
The last Democratic candidate to win the tax issue was also the last Democratic president -- Bill Clinton. In fact, the candidate who most credibly promises the lowest level of taxes has won every presidential election in at least the last 40 years.
It gets worse.
A Rasmussen survey conducted Oct. 2 found that 59% agreed with the sentiment expressed by Reagan in his first inaugural address: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Just 28% disagreed with this sentiment. That survey also found that 44% of Obama voters agreed with Reagan's assessment (40% did not).
59% to 28% Americans believe that "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem!"
FSZ - Free Speech Zone - www.freespeechzoneblog.com
All data and information provided on this site is for informational purposes only. Free Speech Zone makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information on this site and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries, or damages arising from its display or use. All information is provided on an as-is basis by individual diarists, independent journalists, and the views herein are those of the individual authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of the people who run this site. Free Speech Zone is a "common carrier" and the views presented herein
are in no way endorsed, condoned, or representative of
Free Speech Zone, its owners, or management.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
-First Amendment to the United States Constitution
