January 29, 2010 archive

Senate takes another hit off Greenspan’s bong.

Seventy-seven members of the U.S. Senate broke into the neighbor’s house while the neighbors were on vacation in Disneyland.  They didn’t intend to thrash the place.  They just wanted a warm, comfortable place to party on.

According to Orrin Hatch, “We were just looking for a place to get baked.”  

Said John Kerry, “We didn’t mean to drink all the booze, but I’ve never been so trashed in my life.  We were drinking triples ’til we were seeing double and feeling single.”  

Seeking to moderate the tone of his colleagues, Chris Dodd added that, “Greenspan turned us on to some righteous Tokyo Bokyo and started giving rising supers in the kitchen after everyone hyperventilated.  Then Bernanke would come up behind us when our lungs were still full of smoke and squeeze us real tight until we passed out on the floor.  What a fucking rush.  I woke up doing the Australian crawl on the linoleum.  Totally.  Spaced.  Out!”

The extent of the damages has yet to be determined, as fires continue to spread, engulfing the entire subdivision.  The Justice Department has not indicated what, if any charges will be pursued.  

In related news, President Barack Obama spent the entire previous evening huffing glue made from unicorn hooves.

Overnight Caption Contest

Obama’s SOTU Rhetoric .vs. Governing

Obama sure looked good last night.

He was poised, articulate, even more forceful than aloof at various times.  He sure seemed like he really cared. I certaintly wouldn’t mind getting the chance to talk with him. He seems like such a well intentioned guy.

The only problem is Obama outright lied in several places, and his wonderful rhetoric is in great conflict with his actual governing decisions and priorities. For example:

1. Obama assured us again that he was “Ending the Iraq War”.  First he said that he would have all our “combat” troops out by August.  Then a few sentences later he claimed that “all our troops” (unqualified) would be out of Iraq. But the reality is that this is the man who brought back George W. Bush’s outgoing War Secretary, Robert Gates (CIA-IRAN-CONTRA crook) to run his War Policies. Gates and Obama and Hillary Clinton (also a WarHawk) are all in agreement that at least 50,000 troops will remain permanently in Iraq, and of course, the 17 unwelcome U.S. Military Bases will also be there permanently.  The private contractors Halliburton and Blackwater (which operates under another name now), will all continue to remain as well.  Obama’s claim to end the Iraq War in August 2010 has about as much validity as his claim to end Guantanimo within 1 year. The crooked Oil Contracts, the Corporations, the Military Bases, the huge multi-hundred million dollar U.S. Embassy, and at least 50,000 troops to protect all of that — ain’t going nowhere.  

Whether the people that are stuck there are classified as being “combat” troops or not, is hardly relevant. The War and the Foreign Occupation has not ended, is not ending, and will not end. The vow to end the Iraq War is another empty promise from President Obama, and until and unless he stops listening and empowering the likes of Robert Gates – no meaningful change to this corrupt War policy will truthfully occur.  We have over 1.5 million dead Iraqis, over 2 million Iraqi refugees, over 5,500 dead Americans, over 75,000 wounded or disabled Americans, and have wasted of some 3-Trillion of the taxpayers dollars.  Clearly our Foreign Policy does far more damage to our own Country (as well as to the World) then anything any terrorist could ever dream up.  Obama’s patty-cake policy on confronting the tragedy of the U.S. Iraq intervention is sadly insufficient.  

Moreover, he is expanding our excessive American Militarism and violence to the far corners of the Earth even more by tripling the troop exposure in Afghanistan, starting War with Pakistan, killing civilians with cowardly CIA-run, unmanned Drones equiped with Hellfire bombs, threatening Iran, Yemen, and Venezuela (via Columbia). He has embraced the illegitmate Bush-era policies of detaining people with no charges, and no rights. And he has kept torture sites such as Bagram, Gitmo, and Abu Grahib open for business, while additionally directly outsourcing human torture through the disgraceful secret program of CIA renditions to Foreign prisons.  And let us never forget that the Obama Military budget far exceeds any of the Miltary budgets submitted under Bush & Cheney.  While the words sounded good, the governing remains a shameful tragedy, and a bankrupt wasteland of corruption and unnecessary human carnage, and bloodshed.

2. Obama also spoke about the plight of the middle-class and winning their trust.  He said: “To close that credibility gap we must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; and to give our people the government they deserve.”  It is hard to take him seriously however when his administration has empowered and promoted the very special interests that were responsible for the Financial meltdown, such as Timothy Giethner, Lawerence Summers, Ben Bernanke, and unabashed GOP-Lite Corporatists like Rahm Emanuel. If Obama wants to help the middle-class, why are the crooked Banking/WallStreet elites hand chosen by him to run his policies? Why does he want to give the Federal Reserve even more power, instead of audit them?

Saudi Arabia to use Citizens United to interfere in US politics thanks to NeoCon SCOTUS treason

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Thanks to the Supreme Council Court, meet your new Corporate Masters!

Say hello to Saudi Arabia!

Saudi Arabia has already signaled that the progressive effort to build a clean energy American economy is its “biggest threat”:

   Saudi Arabia’s economy depends on oil exports so stands to be one of the biggest losers in any pact that curbs oil demand by penalizing carbon emissions. “It’s one of the biggest threats that we are facing,” said Muhammed al-Sabban, head of the Saudi delegation to U.N. talks on climate change and a senior economic adviser to the Saudi oil ministry. […] Climate talks posed a bigger threat, Sabban said, and subsidies for the development of renewable energy were distorting market economics in the sector, he said.

ThinkProgress.org

It’s good to be the King of Saudi Arabia!

More below the fold

“Give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union”

Give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union

By David Swanson, January 28, 2010

Those are the words used in Article II Section 3 of the US Constitution. The president is also to “recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” Why does this not come up in Article I with all the other supreme powers of our Commander in Chief? Well, because only the military has one of those, and Article I is devoted to the most powerful branch of our government, the Congress.

The president is supposed to inform Congress on how things are going in his work of executing the laws they pass. We didn’t hear much of that on Wednesday. President Obama did not mention his ban on prosecuting torture, his advisors’ claims that he has the power to torture, his use of rendition, his removal from the Constitution of the right to habeas corpus, his list of Americans to be assassinated, his warrantless spying, his protection of Bush, Cheney, and gang from exposure or prosecution, his continuation of illegal wars, his use of unmanned drones to assassinate and slaughter, or his assertion of the power of aggressive war in a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. All of that went without saying.

And how’s the bailing out of Wall Street billionaires going?  Obama asserted that he hated it but was doing it because it needed to be done even if unpopular.  He bragged more than once through the speech about doing unpopular things, as though democratic representation was the new enemy.  Thankfully, there wasn’t the same level of fear mongering about Terrorists that we’d grown used to in these speeches from Bush.  But Congress cheered for the president ignoring the public and even cheered for the president unconstitutionally ignoring Congress.  The whole room cheered when Obama said this:

“[T]he cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will continue to skyrocket. That’s why I’ve called for a bipartisan, Fiscal Commission, modeled on a proposal by Republican Judd Gregg and Democrat Kent Conrad. This can’t be one of those Washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem. The Commission will have to provide a specific set of solutions by a certain deadline. Yesterday, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission. So I will issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward, because I refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of Americans.”

Y

I write for myself.  Sorry to be selfish and self-centered.

You think, perhaps, the Left is good and the Right is bad.

So vote for LBJ in 1964.  Goldwater was terrible.

But at least LBJ gave you the Vietnam war.

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