July 10, 2009 archive

The Family: The Old Boys Club Meets Jesus and Militancy.

What do Hillary Clinton, John Ensign, Mark Sanford, Bill Nelson, and Tom Coburn have in common?  

They are either members or friends of the Elitist Christian Right group The Family. The family holds weekly prayer meetings or “advisory” meetings where members discuss their problems, both personal and political, and give each other veto power over each others lives.

The Family has operated under various names since its formation in 1935. They have gone under the names:

National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, the National Leadership Council, Fellowship House, the Fellowship Foundation, the National Fellowship Council, the International Foundation

They hold their prayer meetings at the Defense Department, the Pentagon and have their own little cul de sac of houses called Ivanwald where they groom future leaders. They also have a house in Washington where senators and congressmen live called C street. Residents of the C street house include Brownback, Coburn and Ensgin, including both Democrats and Republicans. The Family has connections to the CIA as well as to governments around the world including the former Suharto dictatorship, the current dictator in Uganda,Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, the former president of Honduras, Ricardo Marudo and The Family has been involved with coups in Fiji, of all places.

 

Contest – Prosecute Bush/Cheney diary logo

UPDATE! So far Edgar is in the lead with the only submission to today’s Bring Bush/Cheney to justice contest. That means the odds of your submission being just as good are already 50/50 (no offense Edgar! LOL)

    Make your submission to our logo contest today. In a democracy ideas should compete with one another, unless this is a dictatorship, in which case I am cool with it, as long as I get to be the dictator.

Cheers

    Good afternoon, good denizens of Docudharmia.

    I am here today to solicit any help you may have in creating a logo for our upcoming action/diary series focusing on the Investigation and Prosecution of the Bush/Cheney Regime, and the roll back of illegal warrantless wiretapping, the Patriot Act, torture and other High crimes and War Crimes committed under their reign.

So, who wants to storm the gates with me?

Petition Badge
Get Badge

    We already have an excellent tool in the Petition to Prosecute that Docudharma already sponsors, but we can always find new visual aides that will help reader identify with this series and the effort behind it.

    Submissions can be anything form press pics, graphic designs, personal pics, ANYTHING that will grab the attention of the average reader and let them know that we ignore the over-reaching of our Executive branch and the Government at large to our own peril.

    Currently, a bill demanding just such an investigation is being reviewed by the House Rules Committee. You can read the bill here at Govtrack.com

    Again, any and all help is appreciated in this combined effort to restore the Rule of Law to it’s pre-Bush/Cheney criminal state.

    Any and all suggestions on any matter of this effort is, as always, very appreciated.

    You may contact me at [email protected]

Thank you, MoT

Four at Four

  1. McClatchy reports the U.S. military didn’t want to release Iranians held in Iraq. “The U.S. military on Thursday reluctantly turned over to Iraq five Iranians it had accused of fomenting violence in Iraq”, but “said the United States had no choice but to free the five men under the terms of last year’s Status of Forces Agreement, which requires the United States eventually to transfer the more than 10,000 Iraqi and third-country detainees it now holds.” The five Iranians were “invited them to meet Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and then released them to Iranian custody.”

  2. The CS Monitor reports that Once an empire, Britain faces big military cuts. “The global recession is causing Britain to face hard choices about its future military role in the world – putting at risk plans to build new aircraft carriers and heralding consequences for everything from operations alongside the US in Afghanistan to whether the UK remains nuclear-armed.”

    “The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), warned that the UK cannot afford much of the defense equipment it plans to buy, questioned the value of renewing the submarine-launched Trident nuclear deterrent, and said it was ‘delusional’ to think the UK could act alone without closer European defense cooperation.”

    Meanwhile, The Guardian reports the Afghan conflict has now claimed lives of as many British servicemen and women as that in Iraq. ‘Ten servicemen have died within the last nine days and the casualty rate is as high as at any point since Afghanistan was invaded in 2001… The latest casualty – the third to be announced today – was a soldier from the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment… The death is likely to intensify the debate about whether the Afghanistan operation is worthwhile.”

Four at Four continues with Iraqi Kurds struggle with Baghdad over land and oil, the warrantless surveillance report, and Mars.

Sneak N’ Peek

My landlord has a history of sending people over to do work on the house without calling first, so the first inkling I will have that this is happening is the guy showing up. He does this primarily to be an asshole, but as you read on you will learn that there are also other reasons.

Most of the workers he sends over are hispanic and many either don’t speak English or pretend that they don’t. This represents more than a major inconvenience. My area has suffered from a lot of home invasions (an outgrowth of the CIA happily flooding it with heroin and cocaine traffic). There have been at least two instances of a guy just randomly showing up and climbing up on my deck with a ladder. The first time it happened I spent a nervous fifteen minutes standing in the kitchen with my Ruger ready to blast a tootsie off if it stepped where it didn’t belong.

Another time I came out to go to the store to find one of them blocking the car in the driveway with a lawnmower while he TOOK A NAP on the front lawn.

I am fully aware that during the Bush administration as well as possibly currently, a lot of these “workers” also were not quite who they were pretending to be. I have been very active with CodePink and Veterans for Peace, and I am quite sure this (along with my blogging) has earned me a dossier. I also have several exes who are still linked to the the military/industrial complex whose sanity and morality leave a lot to be desired, and a few of them have stalked me on and off since 1993.

Yesterday I went out to do some errands at around 2pm. I returned at 4:45pm and the door to my house was wide open. It is fortunate that at around 3:30 a family friend showed up and sat on the steps for about an hour because we’d miscommunicated about when and where we were going to meet. Nothing appeared to be missing, but it was pretty scary to both the friend and myself that this was done.

I was told that the worker “went to the house while I wasn’t there, saw something that made him nervous, and left.”

The next door neighbor who is a local police deputy, his wife, and several other right wing cluetards in the neighborhood (a percentage of whom also probably aren’t quite who they say they are) all seemed to find this very interesting and amusing.

The next door neighbor on the other side, who is the press secretary for my local (Democratic) Assemblyman, probably also heard the commotion because last night she very kindly left a house light on so that it would illuminate the front of our property. We have a motion detector light but the additional coverage was appreciated.

The worker was supposed to reschedule for the morning, but part of the whole “control freak” thing the landlord and/or his goons have going on is that I am expected to remain in a form of house arrest all day long waiting for these cluetards to show up. After it got to be 2pm I called the landlord and said he would now be expected Monday. He showed up 15 minutes later as I knew he would. When people play childish head games the best way to handle them is to return the favor, so when dealing with these infants, reverse psychology is my friend.

However, today was going to be even a little more different. I am tired of being harassed by possible wingnut SOA graduates and Hopeless Insecurity goons pretending to be immigrant day laborers. I am generally a shy person, for all that I am loud at the keyboard; when people put me down I tend to withdraw into myself and try to ignore the harasser. I am much better at defending other people than myself, in other words. However as the years have progressed it has not been lost on me that a lot of the same faces seem to be popping up over and over again when this type of harassment occurs.

Recently I was subjected to an especially foul sexist tirade from one of them and it’s really gone across a line here. I am 100% out of the shit taking business, and it’s time these jackasses got the memo.

So when the shithead showed up, I shot him.

With my camera. ;-7

Now I have his face. A security system is going in around my house Real Soon Now(tm). If this guy is anything more than a mere day laborer, and he comes sniffing around here again with doors mysteriously getting left open, he will be hunted down either by myself or… and this is something he REALLY doesn’t want… my husband.

This is going to happen to every single one of these assholes who come sniffing around my house in the future.

Because due to my background in a classified environment I happen to know that IF this creep is something other than what he says he is, the fact that I now have his photo is very, very, very bad for him, and very good for me.

“He Works For Goldman Sachs”

Wikipedia:

Paul Craig Roberts (born April 3, 1939, in Atlanta, Georgia) is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the “Father of Reaganomics”. He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He was a post-graduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States.

Max Keiser: “Does the US Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner work for the people or does he work for the banking system on Wall Street?”

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: “He works for Goldman Sachs.”

See also:

U.S. Banking Collapse Driven By “fraud”, Tim Geithner Covering Up Bank Insolvency

(video with Bill Moyers)

Obama’s Unintentional Marginalization of The Middle

From an electoral politics standpoint…you only need the middle. If you can unify and win the middle, you will win every election.

That is the overarching theory behind Obama’s brand of “bipartisanship,” and that is what he is trying to achieve. It is a flawless intellectual theory, especially from the purely electoral viewpoint.

It is however deeply flawed, right now, from the pragmatic viewpoint…..IF you are more interested in stuff like right and wrong, a healthy and well fed world, equality, freedom, justice, The Rule of Law and especially….right now…..economic equality and justice. Rather than ‘just’ winning elections.

If we were starting with a clean slate, say right after WW2, or in some utopian (instead of teetering dystopian) world, it would absolutely be the way to go. For the simple reason the the extremes that the theory seeks to marginalize would be more sane and less extreme.

The advantages of the theory of “Bi-partisan compromise” lies in taking the best of two equal, and equally right positions and combing them into a pleasing and agreeable Middle.

IF we had two equal, and equally right sides or positions to draw from it would be a grand and glorious way of governing. But we don’t.

Of THAT…..I am certain.

An Open Letter to MSNBC

Dear MSNBC,

First of all, let me thank you for having the journalistic integrity to allow Keith Olbermann to speak out about the abuses of the Cheney/Bush Whitehouse.  I had been completely disillusioned by the “news” reporting which basically parroted any and all Whitehouse press releases at that time and the only place that I had been able to get any real news was PBS.  Now, I watch your channel almost everyday.

Normalizing the Great Recession

It’s time to blog the future of our Great Recession, and it looks just beautiful. What America’s owners are coming to see is that our heavily narcotized population can be persuaded that 10% unemployment is the new normal, and that further concentration of wealth is just the new shape of economic recovery. As long as Goldman Sachs is breaking compensation and bonus records, our nation must be on the mend.

Proof of America’s pathological addiction to fantasy was the transformation of Michael Jackson, an emotionally disturbed sex offender who had been unemployed for 20 years, into “the greatest entertainer who ever lived” in an orgy of television revisionism that proved that the majority of the population will believe anything that is delivered with high TV production values.

Those who are curious about how the recession normalization process will work should look for these magical memes:

1. Unemployment “lags” the recovery, so we can have 20% of the population un- or under-employed for a few more years while the champagne flows on Wall Street. No worries.

2. People will help each other by taking in the children of relatives rather than having them go to homeless shelters. This is a great opportunity to celebrate America’s social conscience.

3. Military service is a wonderful way to earn a living while defending our great nation. Being a paycheck killer puts food on the table and dead insurgents in the ground.

4. Rich people are the best hope for America’s future. Their ability to prosper proves that our economy is strong, and if more people have to sink into poverty to feed money to the rich, then that is our patriotic duty.

5. Our government is doing the best that it can, and our President looks cool on TV. The First Lady is growing organic vegetables in the White House garden while negotiating her book deal. The Obamas share our pain.

6. If you are suffering economically, it is your fault. Working harder is the best way out of economic difficulty. As the Germans say: “Arbeit macht frei!”

Obama Admin Ends MTR Mining With A Name Change

The Obama administration is at least testing the waters of changing the name of mountaintop removal mining to “Appalachian surface coal mining” or ASCM.  This name change, which neutralizes the horrific visuals of MTR mining, may help Obama gain support for a new policy to reduce the harmful environmental impacts of MTR mining.  

The Obama administration is taking steps that are a “firm departure” from Bush who “failed to protect our communities, water, and wildlife in Appalachia.”  For the first time the government is acknowledging the adverse impacts of MTR mining and will, for example, review the “cumulative impact of valley fill permits on water quality and look at entire watersheds instead of isolated streams.”

However, the question is whether MTR mining should be limited to a policy of environmental impact relativity or do we insist that MTR mining be stopped in obvious recognition that MTR mining by definition violates the environmental rules of law?  

Today I Become A Statistic

Well, today the Dog became a statistic. After nine years at my company, after projects which returned over $4 million a year in bottom line dollars, the company decided that I was not valuable enough to keep around anymore. It is not like the Dog did not know things were bad, they were. Sales were off by 30% across the board and there had been a 10% reduction in workforce just three months ago.  

Wild Wild Left Radio # 26 Screws, Coups and Loose Screws

Join Gottlieb, Ed Encho and I tonight at 6pm EDT on Wild Wild Left Radio, via BlogtalkRadio.

Take a well earned week off, and boy, does the news pile up.

We are going to have an extra half hour available tonight, just to try and cover all the news! One week only 6-7:30!

Tonight we will be covering everything from the loose-screws of Palin and the Jackopalooza media blitz, to the Coups in Iran and the Honduras.

Then there is the total screw of Israel’s kidnapping of McKinney and human rights activists, followed by loose screw hoards of ultra conservative Jews in Israel attacking individuals for not following Sabbath rules in the streets.

There is the North Korea “cyber-attack” making news, too. True or mind-screw? With the new cyber czar and the “free” google OS coming (&google provides the govt info freely) one has to wonder.

We have the Health Care good cop/bad cop Rahm/Obama dance playing out, with the potential to screw us all out of viable options, while the Insurers agenda seems to always win. Will Franken as #60 make a difference?

Then on to the largest segment: Matt Taibbi’s Bubble piece and how Goldman Sachs has screwed us all!

I implore you all to view the five 2-3 minute segments below the fold, where Taibbi makes all this voodoo user friendly and blatantly clear.

The call in number is 646-929-1264

This is going to be a HUGE show, folks and the extra allotted time will make lots of room for interested callers to weigh in!

Listen to The Wild Wild Left on internet talk radio

The live chat link will be added around 5:15.

CHAT LINK:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/F…

Podesta OWNS Reid: “We can’t settle for less”

Q:     “So, what are we supposed to do when our own leadership is somewhat apathetic to what we voted for them for?

   

thinkprogress.com

    Push harder, YELL LOUDER, whatever it takes, Harry Reid. I think many of us in the Democratic party would agree. Now is the time, Harry, now. One or two rogue sell out Senators can not be a monkey wrench in the works, not on health care or EFCA or anything else that this Congress needs to do. That is why we elected you people, for action, not excuses.

   

PODESTA: And I think that – I suppose I have a little bit of sympathy for Sen. Reid, in the sense that I look around at his caucus and understand how hard his job is. But I don’t think you can settle for a statement like that. I think you have to call out the fact that we’re demanding serious change, and indeed, it is the job of the leadership to round up votes, to push legislation through, to try to get the kind of bold initiatives that the President is talking about passed, and to his desk, and signed. […]

   And that, I think, is what we should expect, that’s what we should demand, and that’s what we should put pressure on the members of their caucus to push back on their leadership. You just cannot settle for “What am I supposed to do? I’ve got one outlier who won’t vote for cloture.” We’ve got to both put pressure on the members who are not supporting a progressive agenda, but we’ve also have to put pressure on the leadership to come up with a strategy to find the votes to kind of get these things and move them forward. And we just can’t settle for less than that.

    The “statement like that” pointed out by Podesta refers to Reid’s recent statement that Democrats can’t “bulldoze anybody” because we all know that if the GOP had the White House, a filibuster proof Senate and a huge House majority they would never in a million years do that to us, right?

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