When General Dynamics put the money up to groom and run Obama, they knew that we'd be arguing about race. That our side would be divided.
And, as I said, another faction had Hillary put up for the same reasons.
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When I voted for Obama, my hope didn't seem entirely naive- I thought that at the very worst, he'd turn out to be a slight improvement, and at best a fairly decent improvement.
I was wrong.
And, then at first I came to the conclusion that he was the same as Bush--but now it's clear to me at least that he's in fact been much worse.
Here's my list.
Better than Bush:
1. Israel. Arguably, slightly better on Israel/Palestine.
2. Supreme Court. I don't like Sotomayer at all, but she's better than a Bush nominee would have been.
Same as Bush:
1. Iraq
2. Torture, renditions, Gitmo--all ongoing.
3. Personal freedoms, Patriot Act, TSA, and Homeland (in)Security Dept--the apparatus of a fascist state in the making.
4. Handouts to corporate America--Goldman Sachs and other robber barons.
5. Honduras. We can't really know for sure what Bush would have done here, but Hillary's been yelling 'get over it' to countries that were against the coup, so I'll assume no difference here.
6. Iran.
7. 'Clean' coal.
8. Endangered species. This one surprises me--that he's been this bad.
9. Outsourcing.
10. Environment: he's been putting industry lobbyists in charge, just like Bush.
Worse than Bush:
1. Afghanistan--Bush was pulling out, Obama has expanded this with no end in sight.
2. Health Care 'Reform'- Bush could never have pulled off this travesty, which is an attack on personal freedom, and the first salvo of the attack on SS/medicare. (see 3)
3. The attack on Social Security and Medicare - Bush wanted to do this, but never could have politically. Ten years from now there will be no SS, and no or greatly reduced medicare --and Obama will be the culprit.
4. Militarism of the schools. This seems to be a pet Obama project from his Chicago days.
5. Pakistan. One of Obama's first actions was drone strikes (some killing civilians) inside of Pakistan's borders.
6. Nuclear power resurgence. Bush couldn't have gone there.
It seems like everywhere you look these days, someone's trying to spread...The Fear.
All around us...in every town...on every corner...a massive Army Of Fear is standing by, according to the Messengers, ready at a moment's notice to obey the dictates of some unappointed Czar or another.
Just ask Glenn Beck: concentration camps for the white people, jackbooted stormtroopers ready to snatch the guns from your cold dead fingers...Socialist Government-Controlled Healthcare That Threatens Your Not Socialist Medicare...it's all coming, my friends-and unless we organize, as a community, to return to the values of the Founding Fathers, The Government, meaning that awful Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and George Soros and all the other Evil Community Organizers, will win.
There's no government, we're told, like no government.
You know who would find all of this fear of self-government just entirely bizarre?
The Founding Fathers.
In today's conversation we'll consider the fundamentals of American patriotism, we'll ask one of those Founding Fathers how he saw the role of Government-and we'll toss in a few words from Abraham Lincoln, just for good measure.
A Rhode Island school board fired all the teachers in a school, in a dispute over working more hours without any more pay, and Obama says, that's just great, while the right wing applauds.
To get a share of the $3.5 billion in what are known as School Improvement Grants, school officials can choose to transform the learning environments in failing schools by extending instructional hours and making other changes, converting them to charter schools, closing them entirely or replacing the principal and at least half the staff.
The Central Falls superintendent, Frances Gallo, initially chose the first option this year, but after a dispute arose with the union over extra pay for adding 25 minutes to the school day, she broke off negotiations. Backed by the local school board, she announced the firings on Feb. 23. Last Monday, Mr. Obama supported the board's action in a speech to a dropout prevention group.
Of course, it's just fine to militarize the schools:
Disturbing as well is the prominence of Duncan's belief in offering a key role in public education to the military. Chicago's school system is currently the most militarized in the country, boasting five military academies, nearly three dozen smaller Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs within existing high schools, and numerous middle school Junior ROTC programs. More troubling yet, the military academies he's started are nearly all located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. This merging of military training and education naturally raises concerns about whether such academies will be not just education centers, but recruitment centers as well....
The battle for America's future is being played out in the schools, charter schools, and Texas-approved textbooks, and the left just doesn't seem to care. For 30 years, the right is pushing the schools ever further right, although they don't plan to send their own kids their-- many have pulled their own kids out- for those that can afford it to expensive private schools, and those that can't, to homeschooling (82% of home-schoolers are Christian right) .
President Obama has proposed a whopping $54 billion in loan guarantees for the construction of new nuclear power plants.
What does that mean? If the costly new nuclear plants aren't finished, then taxpayers cover the huge financial loss.
If they are built, then we're stuck with power plants that generate overpriced electricity and create deadly radioactive waste that will remain toxic for thousands of years.
Either way, the nuclear industry wins, and we lose.
Nuclear power creates deadly radioactive waste, from the mining process onwards. It's got a scary history: think Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
Just recently, a nuclear plant in Vermont was ordered shut down after radioactive tritium, which is linked to cancer, leaked from the plant into local water supplies.
Nuclear power is so financially risky that even Wall Street won't bet on it. It's a public health and financial disaster waiting to happen.
Instead, our government should promote energy efficiency and a decentralized power system based on safe, clean, renewable energy.
I'd like for you to try a little experiment for me.
It's a very simple experiment, one that doesn't involve stoichiometry, Bunsen burners, p values, test tubes, or access to hydrochloric acid. It'll be fun, I swear.
Instead of writing a blog post and further destroying my wrists in the process, I figured I'd try something a little different.
Below you'll find a video that I cobbled together from pictures I found online and designs created by my partner, a talented graphic designer who was kind enough to take a few moments to indulge me. I am not a film director, nor do I desire to be one. It shows.
The song, however, is one that I think many people here will enjoy. It's called "Money Machine", and it was recorded live at Eddie's Attic in Atlanta. The album is entitled Jeff's Last Dance, by Kahler & Mullins. I was at this show. It's just two guys singing, one of whom plays the hell out of the congas. I suppose my affinity for this song results from the fact that I do possess an inner hippie (shhh!). The song is all about corporate greed & US militarism, but it actually manages to not sound cheesy. In fact, it happens to rock. I hope you enjoy my amateurish iMovie editing, which was intended to convey visually the sentiments expressed in the lyrics (with a bit of snarkiness). Even if you dislike the editing, I hope you'll enjoy the tune.
War Criminal Torture Champions roam free, teach Law, and show up as guest/experts on the Sunday Talk Shows, but failing to teach all those brown kids to pass those tests is just ... wrong!
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - President Barack Obama says a Rhode Island school that recently fired all its educators is an example of how there needs to be accountability.
He made the comments Monday in Washington at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He called for "accountability" if a school continually fails its students without improvement.
He said that is what happened at Central Falls High School, where the school district's board of trustees voted last week to fire 93 teachers, administrators and other staff. No more than half could be hired back under federal law.
Obama pointed out that just 7 percent of students at the high school have tested proficient in math.
Right. That'll fix it. Fire them. Just fire them all.
LANGUAGE WARNING: Today's story is uncharacteristically blunt, and from this moment forward we will be using lots of inappropriate language in making our points.
It is by now fairly well known that Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's White House Chief of Staff, had a bit of a blow-up with liberals who were ready to start running ads against "blue dog" Democrats who were working very hard to shut down the health care reform effort.
Now we're not gonna get in the middle of that argument today; instead, since we're finally getting a chance to talk, I figured me and Rahm could get a few other things out of the way that have been on everyone's mind for the past year or so.
A whole pile of people know that it is Obama and the Democrats that refuse to support medicare for all the public option, despite the fact that is what a most of the country wants. If mandates, a middle class tax, fines, medicare cuts, and no public option is the best Obama and the Democrats can do with a mandate and a solid majority, they deserve to lose their jobs.
They gave pharma and the insurance companies almost as good a deal as Wall Street got. Free access to our money with no strings attached.
From a commenter at reddit, on the subject of Associate Attorney General David Margolis, with Holder's approval, reducing the conclusion of the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility report on Yoo and Bybee's Torture Memos to Bush to say that they showed only "poor judgment":
If Obama's 'Justice Department' had conducted the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, all of the Nazis would have gone free - 'Merely Poor Judgement, the Holocaust was just a policy mistake'!
There is a road, no simple highway,
Between the dawn and the dark of night,
And if you go no one may follow,
That path is for your steps alone...
Instead of getting Sunday talk-show gigs, Dick Cheney should be put up against a wall and shot as the war criminal he is - no charges, no trial, just BLAM! If it's good enough for the 'terrorists' it's good enough for evil incarnate; Dick Cheney.
The fact Dick Cheney not only lives but is free to spread his evil is proof God is Dead.
The classic Ambrose Bierce short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has a man being hung and miraculously the rope breaks and he escapes and has an adventure only to find in the end the rope didn't break and his escape was a dying dream of desperation. In the end the man hangs from a stiff rope, dead of a broken neck.
At what point do progressives stop being Democrats' whipped dogs and start acting like a movement capable of putting the Dems in their proper place as the party of the people? David Sirota wrote today about Obama's latest call to increase war spending beyond its already ludicrous proportions.
How many of the extreme right-wing and criminal policies of Bush-Cheney has Obama adopted? How many of those extreme right-wing policies has he exceeded? Last month, knowledge that Obama has gone a step further than Bush, authorizing the executive branch to murder American citizens on the flimsiest of rationales. This sh__ has GOT to end.
MSNBC's Ed Schultz talking at the AM950 Blue State Bash on Saturday night to a crowd of progressive talk radio fans in Minnesota lets go with both barrels at Robert Gibbs, at Barack Obama, at the "people who have infiltrated the Democratic progressive movement", and at the whole delusional idea of bipartisanship.
"I told him he was full of sh*t is what I told him," Schultz said. "And then he gave me the Dick Cheney f-bomb the same way Senator Leahy got it on the Senate floor. I told Robert Gibbs, I said, 'I'm sorry you're swearing at me, but I'm just trying to help you out."
"I'm telling you, you're losing your base," he continued. "Do you understand that you're losing your base? And that the American people don't want public option, the American people want single-payer!?'"
In only one short year, Democrats have managed to redirect away from the Republicans and at the Democrats the rage voters felt at Bush, Cheney and Republicans for destroying our economy and our country .
In only one short year, Democrats drove up deficits to bailout Wall Street and fund two wars nobody wants but Republicans. They couldn't manage to reinstate usury laws or Glass-Steagall, but they sure as hell could pass bankruptcy reform just in time for the meltdown. Only tone deaf, elitist Democrats living in Washington's bubble could possibly blow blue MA and lose Ted Kennedy's seat.
Democrats ran on change and proceeded to deliver Bush and Clinton's third terms. And if they think people are angry at them now, just wait until they use deficit reduction to cut Social Security and Medicare instead of raising taxes on the rich and corporations.
By surrounding Obama with Clinton and Goldman Sachs' reruns, the idiots in charge of this Party managed to make a liar out of Obama the reform candidate, a hypocrite out of President Obama and destroy the party and country's desperately needed opportunity for real, fundamental reform. Instead of a New Deal, a Fair Deal, they gave all of their supporters a raw deal.
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 20, 2010
Filed at 9:44 a.m. ET
MUMBAI, India (AP) -- India's top three outsourcing companies are ramping up hiring and increasing pay as global corporations, mainly from the U.S., send more work offshore to cut costs as they emerge from the downturn.
Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro expanded their global workforces by an average of 5.1 percent last quarter, together adding 16,701 employees, company documents show -- an early sign that the Great Recession may ultimately benefit India as cost-conscious companies outsource more work, just as they did after the dot-com bus....
Heck of a job there, O.
Contrast the US response /stim to France:
Ghosn was summoned to meet Sarkozy after France's second- largest carmaker floated the idea of shifting production of the next Clio compact car to its plant in Bursa, Turkey. The suggestion came after France spent about 600 million euros to boost car sales and provided Renault with 3 billion euros of aid in the face of the worst recession since World War II.
"We haven't invested all this money supporting our carmakers just to see all the factories moved overseas," Sarkozy told lawmakers in the National Assembly Jan. 13. The French state is also Renault's biggest shareholder with a 15 percent stake.
The Democratic reaction to losing Kennedy's seat will be to do exactly what voters were punishing them for.
From a perspective of operant conditioning or other theories of what constitutes rational behavior i.e., the theory of learning to "earn rewards" and "avoid punishments," the behavior of Democrats is what behavioral learning theorists refer to as "misbehavior," because it doesn't fit their theory of what rational behavior should be like, dammit!, assuming, of course, that behavior is rational in the first place. In plainer, descriptive language this behavior might more simply be called "working for pain" or "earning pain." Earning pain is a real phenomenon in both rats and humans. And can be downright amusing to watch in the human case.
Struggling against a sea of troubles, a once-in-a-lifetime president having a once-in-a-lifetime mandate for real change, Barack Obama, has made the counter-intuitive and unpopular decision to stay the course.
On war, health care, the economy, on justice and accountability, on the rule of law itself, Barack Obama, and Democrats more generally, have opted to stay the course. They view staying the course as the safe option. Freeze when Republicans are in power, and run to electoral safety when they are out. Just like rats irrationally yet repeatedly running between electrified grids and freezing after each shock, in various states and fits of fear, if I may deign to notice.
Following an epidemic of fraud, a tsunami of foreclosures (with a second tsunami in short order), and record gambling losses transferred to the public balance sheet, former Fed vice-chairman Alan Blinder is scared:
My fear is that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a sturdier and safer financial system is slipping away.
There will be no consumer protection legislation. No clawbacks of ill-gotten gains. No regulation of on- or off-balance sheet financial instruments. And no prosecutions of fraud.
Barack Obama will not be content to simply re-arrange the deck chairs, he'll say. Americans do not run from their troubles, but take them head-on, he'll say. What he means is,
It's a big, bad, nasty dangerous world out there. Full of fanatical killers who hate you because you're free. You got to make sure you're safe. That's the most important thing, right?
Everything else ain't worth sh*t without you're safe and secure, right?
Right. No question.
I heard on the news today that they're closer now. In my town.
Sh*t. Now what? I've got it! I'll put up a steel fence around the house. To be safe and secure.
Barack promised change -- and sure enough, things changed for the worse
-Joe Bageant
To Hell with the 'left'! I am finished, done, disillusioned and over it, the divorce papers have been filed and are now finalized and I am not going back. As of this day, I will no longer allow myself to be affiliated or endorse the 'left' in any way, shape or form. So long folks, it was real and it was fun but in the end it was unfulfilling and dare I say, a waste of time and effort. Is this overly harsh? Perhaps it is but the break had to be made and it can no longer be put off. I assure you, this was no hasty decision but rather something that has been a slow and agonizing process, a steady drip...drip...drip.., like Chinese water torture and suddenly the mind goes, the spirit breaks and the ugly reality of the situation cannot be denied or disguised. So to all of my good friends on the left I wish you the very best but I am no longer one of you and maybe I never was, it was never dogma to me only a desire for some sort of social fairness and a fair shot but the American left being a shell of it's former self with labor broken and the DLC corporatists having taken over the Democratic party it has been reduced to shills for the Democrats and squabbling identity groups each with an agenda that prevents any sort of unity necessary for a mass movement for real change. Sucks but that is just the way it has to be.
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
