I used to think that Obama was, at the very least, a very intelligent human being.

Now I’m starting to wonder.

How smart is it when the people you listen to are all Goldman Sacks employees or ex-employees (which means future employees)?

Sure, if you’re at Goldman Sachs, things are just ROSY.

For everybody else?   Well, is he fucking BLIND?

US President Barack Obama defended his administration’s response to the economic crisis over the last six months, declaring: “The fire is now out.”

“I think that we have stepped back from the abyss. I think we’ve put out the fire,” he said in an interview with PBS, according to a transcript released by the TV station.

No, Obama, you’re either a liar or a bonehead (or both).  

The fire is most certainly not “out”.  It’s more like one of those coal seam fires in coal country, those fires that burn and smoulder for years and years, and nobody ever knows how to put the damn things out.   I mean, do you think we’re gonna go back to “home loans for all my friends!” and CDO’s and McMansions and Cadillac Escalades and cheap gas?  No, of course we’re not going to.  And you damn well know it.  The new economy has yet to be built.   You wasting billions, TRILLIONS of goddamn dollars by handing it over to your Goldman Sacks buddies and giving it to your Pentagon buddies so we can keep slaughtering our own troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and slaughtering civilians in distant countries, well that is one of the big reasons WHY we do not, and WILL NOT, have a “new economy” here.

And when your own Fed Reserve Chairman doesn’t even know where half a trillion dollars went, and who he fucking GAVE IT TO, well that doesn’t exactly bode well.

But, Barry, if you really want to go with the “fire is out” metaphor, fine.   But we’re on a ship.  And the fire is out.  But the ship is sinking.  

You’re like the captain of the Titanic saying “well at least we’re not smashing into that damn iceberg any more!  Things are looking up!”

Obama, you expect to have any credibility after this bullshit remark?

Well, you don’t.  Not any more.

You’re either a lying dumbass, or you think we’re all just fucking stupid.

Well we’re not.

We know when we’re being lied to, and you’re absolutely fucking lying to us right now.

In these insane years, the only people making sense, and the only people with what appears to be what used to be called “common sense” are those who are now labelled “extreme left”.   You know, Democracy Now, Dennis Kucinich, etc.

Well, Kucinich now can’t help but wonder if the Federal Reserve isn’t paying banks to NOT make loans.

It makes a lot of sense.

http://rawstory.com/08/news/20…

Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich wants to know: “If [the Troubled Asset Relief Program] isn’t about keeping people in their homes or providing credit to businesses, what is it for?”

Expressing his frustration before the Government and Oversight Committee, the two-time presidential candidate suggested that the Federal Reserve may be paying banks to hoard money and avoid making loans.

Banks make loans in order to make money.   If they don’t make loans, then what are they in business for?   Why would they quit making loans?

For those of you who claim that the media is anything other than owned by the right-wing and the corporatocracy, I give you this:

I found this story at Cryptogon, but it originated at ComputerWorld:

The NSA Wiretapping Story Nobody Wanted

This demonstrates, yet again, how incestuous is the relationship between the corporate-owned Big Brother government and its Mouthpiece Media:

I was most worried at the time when the LA Times was killing my story, but at the same time the LA Times showed it to the government. Then I really was panicking because that meant that the government knew everything and probably knew my name, but I didn’t have any publicity.

IDGNS: The media merit a full chapter (entitled: ‘Going Public vs. Media Chickens’) in your book. What happened there?

Klein: The LA Times was particularly egregious because they were planning a front-page spread. They were the first entity I’d given all the documents to. Then they talked to the government about it, and it turned out they were talking to not only the NSA director, but the director of national intelligence, who was John Negroponte at the time. So that meant the government knew it. And then a few weeks later the LA Times killed the story. So the only thing you can read into is that basically the government squashed the story. [The LA Times’ editor in early 2006, Dean Baquet, said the government had nothing to do with the decision. ‘We did not have a story, that we could not figure out what was going on,’ he told ABC News — ed.]

IDGNS: How long did they have the story?

Klein: I started dealing with them in late January 2006, and in February they showed it to the government, and then they started wobbling. By the end of March 2006, they officially told me the story was killed.

IDGNS: Did they cover it in April, after it became public?

Klein: No that was funny. After it finally hit the news everywhere else, The LA Times didn’t run with the stuff I’d given them. They’d squashed the whole thing.

We’re supposed to believe this shit?:

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

GASP!  Dick Cheney as trying to kill Al Queda leaders!   Because he was really trying to protect the United States.  He’s just like Jack Bauer!  

No.  I don’t think so.   This is crap, and it’s crap for several reasons:

A.  Anyone who has been paying attention already knew that the U.S. was already doing this years ago.

B.  There are instances of this, revealed to the public, of this already being implemented.  Like, a long time ago.

C.  The people telling us this are ex-CIA.   These sources are automatically suspect.

Here is the story, from Time Magazine in 2002, where this was publicly acknowledged to be occurring:

Yemen Strike Opens New Chapter in War on Terror

The officially unacknowledged CIA missile strike that killed a key al-Qaeda leader on Sunday is a major tactical victory in the U.S. war on terrorism – a war whose rules and terms are quite unlike any America has ever known. Indeed, the assassination by Predator drone of Ali Qaed Sinan al-Harthi in the wilds of northern Yemen encapsulates much about the new war – one of covert actions, sometimes in murky circumstances, designed to disrupt the terrorists’ efforts to regroup far from erstwhile sanctuaries in Afghanistan. And it shows the U.S. is plainly now open to assassination as a means of eliminating terror threats.

So no, this is classic “old news”.  Are people’s memories REALLY that short?

There’s simply no WAY that this is The Big Ugly Scary Secret that Dick Cheney was pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes about.  

This is just another propaganda tactic designed to make us think that “you’ve gotta usurp the Constitution and the rule of law to protect Americans, and Dick Cheney was just the guy to do it”.  

Yet everybody’s falling for it, and I mean everybody.  

“I saw it on CNN!  It must be true!   I read it in the NY Times!   It must be true!   And even “I read it on Dailykos!  It must be true.”

No.  It doesn’t even BEGIN to pass the “smell test”.

Please spread this around.   I’m banned at Dailykos, so I can’t post it there, but somebody needs to, because that crap is all over the place there.  

I used to go to Thinkprogress.org at least once a day.  They were a fantastic source of news you wouldn’t get anywhere else.

Since Obama has been elected, however, they’ve become, frankly, pathetic.

Almost every single story over there now is about Republicans.  

It’s almost like they didn’t notice that Republicans are out of power now.  

Hello, guys, those fools lost the election.  They are no longer in power.  They like to make a lot of noise to DISTRACT YOU.

Why is a place as smart as thinkprogress taking that bait?

Here is a list of the stories there right now:

Right Wing Concocts False Claim That Obama Is Steering Stimulus Money To Areas That Backed Him

Right winger’s argument against a right to health care: ‘Should food be a basic human right?’

Aspiring philosopher Palin quotes ‘Plato.’

Jeb Bush: ‘I don’t know’ if Obama is a socialist.

Palin’s key reason for resigning was inflated.

King’s New Rationale For Voting Against Slave Labor Resolution: It Wasn’t ‘A Balanced Depiction Of History’

Steele dismisses Palin as ‘old school’: ‘That’s not the generation of candidates I’m trying to groom.’ (Updated)

All of this is completely irrelevant.  NOBODY CARES about any of this bullshit.   Not even the Repubs believe their own bullshit except for the TRUE idiots like Michelle Bachman.  

How about some stories like this one:

AIG seeks clearance to give $235 million in bonuses.

Or about how Obama’s new Vietnam is killing American servicemen every damn day.

How about some real news?

I think it’s sad.  And disturbing.  

Conspiracies aren’t theories.   They happen all the time.  All it takes for a conspiracy to occur is for a few people to get together and decide to do something.

Which is what the Bush administration was all about.

It is now no secret that Enron, for example, along with some other energy companies, conspired to cause the California “energy crisis” in 2001.   Bush and Cheney should have been impeached for that alone, and would have been, had not 9/11 come along to “change everything”.     You can read about that here if you’d like.

It’s also quite well known that Cheney never did, and never would, release the minutes of his big energy “task force” right after they took power in 2001.   They would have had to pry his cold dead fingers off that thing to find out who was there, and what was discussed.

Well it turns out that as many of us have long suspected, what oil industry executives advocated was an invasion of Iraq, to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s control of Iraq’s oil.

Barack Obama bombed this baby.  This baby is one of the lucky ones, seeing as how it’s not dead.

Why did Obama maim this baby, when General Petraus has told us that there are ‘No more Al Queda in Afghanistan’?

I guess we just like to bomb babies for the sheer rollicking hell of it.   Gotta use all those weapons we bought for something.  You know, so we can order more, and keep the economy moving.  Keep the Corporate Welfare money going out to Raytheon and the other War Profiteers, no?

I’m becoming a huge fan of Jeremy Scahill.  The man speaks truth to power better than anyone I’ve seen in a good long time.  

Seeing some of these people online turning their profile pictures green “for Iran” makes me want to create a Facebook and Twitter application that turns profile pictures blood red, in solidarity with all of the Afghans and Iraqis and Pakistanis being killed by US wars today; wars that people in the US failed to stop and whose representatives continue to fund to the tune of $100s of billions.-Jeremy Scahill

Here is Scahill in an interview:

What people, I think, misunderstand about Barack Obama is that this is a man who is a brilliant supporter of empire–who has figured out a way to essentially trick a lot of people into believing they’re supporting radical change, when in effect what they’re doing is supporting a radical expansion of the U.S. empire.

(snip)

What we see with Obama’s policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the broader Arab and Muslim world, as well as his global economic policies, are a continuation of the most devastating and violent policies of the Bush administration–while placing a face on it that makes it easier to expand the iron fist of U.S. militarism and the hidden hand of the free market in a way that Republicans, I think, would have been unable to do at this point in history.

That, in so many words, is why Barack Obama is President.

Scahill has a blog, here:

http://rebelreports.com/

Gotta love this one:

“The Responsible Left:” Funding Obama’s Expanding Wars $100 Billion a Vote

The cowardly Democrats who checked their spines at the door to Congress when they voted Tuesday try to defend their flip-flop on war funding. Frankly, it is embarrassing.