Saturday, October 2, 2010

Countdown - Keith Olbermann - Tea Party throws caution to the wind

Obama says Fox News is bad, bad, bad

[AP photo from the Huffington Post]

And it's about time!

I don't think Faux (Fox) News should be shut down. The people that run this miserable excuse for a "news" station have the same free speech rights as do the rest of us. But that shouldn't mean they are free from criticism, or their perfidy go unremarked, nor should the fact that they have become the equivalent of a country crushing bulldozer...all in pursuit of the almighty dollar...be ignored.

It was in Rolling Stone that President Obama noted that the point of view promoted by Faux News "is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world."

That was, in my opinion, a very mild criticism, and I'm sure Mr. Obama felt a certain constraint when making his comment. He could have said much more. He could have said that not only in Faux News not "fair and balanced" as they love to claim, but the outlet is nothing more than a propaganda machine for the vilest and craziest politicos in our country. Day after day they do nothing but spew garbage all of which is geared toward one goal - bringing down Obama and the Democratic Party.

Perhaps other progressives and sane people still able to reason will follow Obama's example and begin to call Faux News what it really is and put a stop to its menacing steamroller of lies and destruction!

Godwin

Please click on cartoon to embiggen.

Thanks to Atheist Cartoons.

Internet freedom and you

Why is it that the dipshits we elect to Congress think they have the right to limit our freedoms?

I'm not referring to the kinds of things the teapot crackpots get all worked up about, such as not having to pay their fair share of taxes or insisting that the very rich get huge tax breaks, or that Obama is a Muslim and trying to impose Sharia law in this country, or that we should have people who believe in Jesus in charge, blah, blah, blah.

I'm talking about the tendency of the "freedom-loving" right-wingers on both sides of the aisle to mess around with our personal lives via disallowing abortions or gay marriage (and at least one of the teapot crackpots looking to become a senator thinks everyone in the USA should refrain from having sex at all [Christine O'Donnell], and to tear up the Constitution by giving the government the right to wiretap our conversations, photograph our driving methods, build huge data banks on every citizen in the country (for what purpose?), etc.

And now these same Congressional morons (on both sides of the aisle) have come up with something called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). What this would do, according to an AlterNet article by David Segal and Aaron Swarz, is "vastly expand the government's power to censor the Internet."

Read all about it here.

Michael Moore on who controls the military

[Photo of Michael Moore from here]

In a review of Bob Woodward's most recent literary exercise, Michael Moore concludes that good old Ike was right on when he warned us of the dangers inherent in a "military-industrial" complex.

While the United States is supposed to operate on the much-vaunted principle that the military is under civilian control, it actually doesn't operate that way at all, but the reverse.

Moore says that you may have "thought you voted for change when you cast a ballot for Barack Obama" ... but actually that isn't and will not be true "when it comes to America occupying countries that don't begin with a 'U' and an 'S.'"

In other words, it doesn't matter what Obama thinks or wants, because "The only people really making the decisions about America's wars are across the river from Washington in the Pentagon. They wear uniforms. They have lots of weapons they bought from the corporations they will work for when they retire."

Moore continues: "It matters not whom we elect. The Pentagon and the military contractors call the shots. The title 'Commander in Chief' is ceremonial, like 'Employee of the Month' at your local Burger King."

The president of the United States is beholden to and under the control of the military! Moore explains that it doesn't matter what's written in the Constitution because "the Constitution's just a piece of paper." In the real world, the president cannot fire all of his top military people to stop a war. A president who tried to do so "would be ruined before you could say 'bloodless coup.'"

And you thought Obama was reneging on his promise!

Read the Moore piece in its entirety here (especially the last paragraph or two!)

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Jon Stewart - The Daily Show - Indecision 2010

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Indecision 2010 - Taliban Dan & Boo-Gate
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorRally to Restore Sanity

Christine O'Donnell is certifiably insane

Let's cut the crap. People like Christine O'Donnell who actually believe that some fantasy figure in the sky is guiding them and directing them to run for the United States Senate are just plain insane.

You just can't get much crazier than that!

Sharron Angle is also insane!

Monday, September 27, 2010

Countdown - Keith Olbermann - Will actions speak louder than words for Democrats?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rachel Maddow on the Repugnican "Pledge"


From Crooks & Liars:

MADDOW: Now, in politics, of course, whenever you‘re making one of your sacred pledges, you also, you know, want it to seem—you always want to seem like that God beamed this down to you and you were just the spokesperson, just the mouthpiece for the Almighty. It wasn‘t authored so much as it was delivered.

Well, in this case, the right click trick shows that this document the GOP pledged for this year is less of a delivery from the Almighty and more of a delivery from AIG and ExxonMobil and Pfizer and Comcast. The magic of right clicking the PDF revealed today that the listed author of the Republican Party‘s new “Pledge to America” is a fellow named Brian Wild, a staffer for John Boehner, who is also a former lobbyist for all of the aforementioned companies and more.

Mr. Wild worked for the Nichols Group, a lobbying firm that was paid more than $740,000 to lobby for AIG, more than $1.3 million to lobby for ExxonMobil, more than $625,000 to lobby for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer.

The reason that is particularly awkward for this particular political document is because Republicans went out of their way with this thing to make this particular pledge seem like it was just the voice of the people.

Republican Congressman Mike Pence said the effort would prove that “the Democratic majority isn‘t listening, but House Republicans will.” House Republicans will, not like those rats.

House Republicans will listen and then we‘ll have an Exxon lobbyist write it down.

As part of that “we‘re listening to you” spin, the whole basis of the Republican campaign pledge was their big “America Speaking Out” Web site—giving the impression to anybody visiting that Web site, that whatever suggestion got the most thumbs-up votes on the Web site would become part of this Republican agenda. Republicans were merely a vessel for the desires of the American people.

But it turns out the desires of the American people as expressed at AmericaSpeakingOut.com with those little thumbs-up, they were for legalizing pot and ending the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries. Those are some of the things that turned out to be the most popular ideas, the most thumbs-up on the “America Speaking Out” Web site.

But those stated desires of the American people, that Americans weren‘t going to ignore like that Democrat majority does, those desires were not, in fact, beamed directly from AmericaSpeakingOut.com through the larynxes of the Republican leaders today and back out to the American people when these Republican leaders gather to unveil their new agenda. Legalizing pot, for example, shockingly, is nowhere to be found in the Republican‘s new “Pledge to America.”

And Republicans say nothing at all about that other very popular idea of trying to stop the outsourcing of American jobs, which would seem to suggest two things. One, who they say they‘re listening to doesn‘t seem to be nearly as important as who they actually let the write the thing. And two, next time Republicans decide to come up with a pledge or contract or manifesto, wouldn‘t it be awesome if the pot lobby got a lobbyist on the inside who could secretly author the whole thing? That I would pay to see in a full-page ad in TV guide. That I would tear out and put up on the fridge.

And sometimes y


Please click on cartoon to enlarge.

Thanks to Atheist Cartoons.

Obama slams GOP pledge as 'irresponsible'

Bushit to remember before November


The Repugnicans are looking forward to a big win in November which will put them, at the very least, in control of the House of Representatives. This, says Newt Gingrich, the serial adulterer and compulsive liar, will be the only way that we can stop the Obama secular, socialist agenda from destroying our country.

Maybe a more accurate prognostication would be to say that if the Repugs win big, we can look forward to a House full of extremist dumb-asses who have no understanding of our Constitution; care nothing for ethical or moral behavior; believe the Christianist Bible has the answer to all of our problems; owe their allegiance, not to the people, but to the corporations that bought them; and because most of them (especially the teapot crackpot Tea Partiers) would be much more comfortable living in 16th-century Europe, intend to turn back the clock when it comes to race relations, religion in government, sexual behavior, education, and science, among other things.

The new Repugnican "pledge" is a joke, the Party's masturbatory essay promising massive misery for the general population. The rich will get richer, the Repugnican powers-that-be will become more powerful, and the rest of us will be flushed down the toilet. That's the real promise of Reagan's "voodoo" economics -- known as the trickle down effect -- that the Repugs want to reinstate.

It's a return to the good old days of Georgi W. Bushki when everything was turned on its head, You remember George, the man whose career Garrison Keillor once said "had been based on creating low expectations and then meeting them. He was the slacker child who flubbed his way through college and flopped in business and was propped up by family and friends."

George, you may recall, promised in his 2000 campaign, to be "a uniter, not a divider." He promised to limit CO2 emissions, to forgo "nation-building" and establish a "humble foreign policy." In that campaign, so long forgotten, Bushki promised to "strengthen Social Security." He promised many other things, including an effort to provide every family with "access to affordable health insurance."

He didn't mean any of this, as we know, and reneged on all of these promises. In that, he was typically Repugnican. Lie, lie, and lie some more. The only thing that matters is to gain power and retain power!

Somehow the reality of George W. Bush never got through to the American people. All the skeletons in his closet were brushed aside by a corporate media much more concerned with the foibles and antics of dipsy Hollywood starlets than the failings of a man who might become president of the U.S. Thus, Bush's failings were, to a large extent, ignored. The press also ignored "and even minimized his grim accomplishments as governor of Texas -- vast poverty, an endless carnival of executions, toxic fogbanks of pollution -- while keeping mum about his kinship with the theocratic right."

Also somehow forgotten were the truths "that Bush was not elected, that he blew a hefty surplus, failed to properly arm our troops, and named extremists to the federal bench, etc." Even worse, as Keillor points out, was the fact that Bush was as close to a dictator as we have ever seen. Consider the "Military Commissions Act that legalized torture, suspended habeas corpus and constructed a loose web of law by which you and I could be hung by our ankles in a meat locker for as long as somebody deemed necessary. 'Any person is punishable' the law stated, 'who knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States.' And when it comes to deciding what 'knowingly and intentionally' might mean or who is the enemy that would be for a military commission to decide in secret, with or without you present. No Fifth Amendment, hearsay evidence admissible, no judicial review. ... It's such a Gestapo world the White House tried to establish ... the Military Commissions Act was in fact reminiscent of Germany in 1933, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act to give the Chancellor the power of summary arrest and imprisonment."

In one sense, we were fortunate that Bush was as dumb as he is. A smarter president might have used his "powers" to halt the elections in 2008, on the pretext that the country was still under a terrorist threat and only Buski could handle the problem. A Repugnican Congress would doubtless have fallen in line just as they did for every other illegal and unconstitutional act Bush promoted during his eight years of infamy.

The reason I'm spending so much time on this miserable excuse for a human being is that the Repugnican Party of 2010 is looking to return to the good old days, to reinstall the failed policies promoted by Repugs over the past 30 years. The Party leaders don't want to talk much about Bush but he remains their hero. As someone else said, underneath all the lies and political witchraft and "pledges" to the American people, Bush and his cohorts were and continue to be all about "making the rich richer, and the poor poorer, the prisons bigger, and America more like own worst enemies."


Here's some Bushit spoken by the mentally-challenged former prezident. What's scary is that these same words could come out of the mouth of most any Repugnican politician in the country today!

"I do know I'm ready for the job. And, if not, that's just the way it goes." - 8/21/00

"One of the greatest things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures." - 1/3/00

"There are pledges all the time." - 1/23/00 - Bush explaining why he broke his campaign promise not to support a sales tax as governor of Texas.

"I will swear to not, to uphold the laws of the land." - 10/27/00

"There's no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead." - 5/11/01

"It was amazing I won. I was running against peace and prosperity and incumbency." - 6/14/01

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace." - 6/18/02

"Sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures." - 7/8/02

"We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage." - 2/6/04

"Recession means that people''s incomes at the employer level, are going down, basically, relative to costs, people are getting laid off." - 2/19/04


The Repugnican leaders of today are part and parcel of the legacy left the country by Georgi W. Bushki. Inspired by the fact he could do so much damage in eight years, they are demanding the right to do even more damage again.

Consider the issue of retaining the Bush tax cuts, rather than letting them expire. President Obama wants to retain only that portion of the cuts which would benefit those making less than $250,000 per year. The Repugs are screaming bloody murder that he would dare "hurt" the very rich among us.

Give the Repugs the power, the tax cuts for the rich will be sustained; the deficit will grow; the middle-class and the poor will be screwed.

It was a bold play from the beginning. Bush and his cohorts had no compunction about tax breaks for the rich. They kept saying that cutting the taxes on the rich would lead to more jobs because the rich would use that money to create companies and hire people to work for them. Hah! They just kept filling their pockets! The notion that tax cuts for the rich create more jobs is malarkey and has been proven false over and over again.

On July 14, 2003, the Washington Post reported that "Almost all of the top Bush fundraisers are in the top 1 percent of the nation's incomes [and consequently] are among those who benefit the most from administration legislation reducing the top income rate, the capital gains rate and the elimination of taxation on dividend income."

A brazen ploy by the Bushites to enrich the rich who put them in office!

Today's Repugs are just as brazen. In their "pledge," they say they will keep Bush's tax cuts to favor the rich. They will work to repeal the health care law. They will "protect" traditional marriage and faith-based institutions. They will go back to the pre-Stimulus days, even as a growing number of economists say the problem with the Stimulus was that it wasn't big enough, and thus the Repugs willingly flirt with Depression! The Pentagon and the war machine will get everything it wants and more even though the Pentagon's budget is currently larger than the total budget of most nations in the world!

On August 5, 2004, Georgi W. Bushki said, "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

That is a description of today's Repugnican Party, held hostage by the teapot crackpot Tea Partiers and the Christianist Right! They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country. For two years their only goal has been to bring down the president of the United States and regain power. They will do and say absolutely anything to achieve that goal.

Unfortunately, the Repugnicans and teapot crackpots have proven themselves to collectively be the enemy of all that is right and good in our country!

If you dismiss that statement as hyperbole, please read carefully information about the backgrounds of people such as Sharron Angle or Christine O'Donnell ... read carefully their beliefs about the Constitution, religion, sex, health care, war, etc. Sharron Angle, for example, has said that to rely on the government for anything is to break the First Commandment; the American people must rely only on her Christianist god! O'Donnell once stated that she wanted to disallow anyone in this country to have sex. One can only despair that such bigoted, ignorant morons actually have a chance to get elected to the U.S. Congress. Even more despairing is that there are many more just like them.

Please vote in November and do what you can to get other normal, sane, rational people to their polling place!


[Note: Much of the information in this essay came from "Misunderestimated & Overunderappreciated - The George W. Bush Administration as Seen Through the Eyes of the Tribune's Syndicated Editorial Cartoonists," Metro Books, New York, 2007]