Tag: failure

Schwarzenegger the Destroyer

If there is one thing that is certain the former Governator was all braun and no brains. Holding the office of the eighth largest economy in the world and treating it as an action movie. In his life it was a two hour thrill ride yet for the rest of us it was seven years of endless destruction and counting.

Is Voinovich just the first brick to Fall from GOP’s Stonewalling Rhetoric?

There is a crack daylight, that may topple the Republican’s Wall of Inaction.

Voinovich breaks with GOP to push for small-business incentives

Lori Montgomery, Washington Post Staff — Sept 10, 2010

Retiring Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) said he plans to help push a package of small-business incentives through the Senate next week, a move that would give President Obama and congressional Democrats a key victory on the economy in the final weeks before the November midterm elections.

In an interview, Voinovich said he could no longer support Republican efforts to delay the measure in hopes of winning the right to offer additional amendments. Most of the proposed GOP amendments “didn’t have anything to do with the bill” anyway, Voinovich said, and amounted merely to partisan “messaging.”

“We don’t have time for messaging,” Voinovich said. “We don’t have time anymore. This country is really hurting.”

Finally a Republican Senator with some Integrity, who is willing work for the folks, that Voted him into Office  (instead of working against their interests, for his own gain …)

Pure greed not motivated by altruism only.

My hypothesis is that some men have no stigma attached to failure due to pure solid stupidity.  

If true, it follows that if hot plasma stupidity could be contained, cooled and compressed through the states of matter to form a perfectly arranged crystalline structure at absolute zero, solid diamond stupid should look like this:

America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can’t be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.

 – Tom Friedman, The Secret From Our Sauce, March 7, 2004

How solid is that?

Guess What? He’s a Terrible President

Original article, by David Michael Green, via counterpunch.com:

Warning: If you like Obama, you won’t like the article.

The abdonment of the 50-state strategy may be the opening needed for third parties.

Cross-posted from Progressive Independence.

A while back I linked to a blog entry that reported on the abandonment of Howard Dean’s fifty-state strategy that put Democrats back in real political power after sixteen years in favor of what’s shaping up to be the DLC’s preferred method of losing elections by ignoring everything but the so-called “swing states.”  This horrendously bad decision is bound to cost the party dearly next year, especially as voter dissatisfaction with the current dictator’s failed economic policies and ever-more-fascistic behavior grows.  As early as January, prominent Democrats voiced their concerns over the dismantling of a successful electoral strategy:

(Full story reproduced below the fold.)

Two good articles at Socialist Appeal (UK)!

The first, Top Economic Strategist warns of ‘Catastrophe and Revolution’ by Rob Sewell looks at warnings from a leading strategist of capitalism in the City:

We are facing the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Despite all the efforts to bail out the banking system, the economic crisis has only just started to bite. How deep or long the crisis will last is difficult to estimate, but given the financial house of cards built up in the last world boom, the capitalist system has entered unprecedented times, in which a depression cannot be ruled out.

US told to increase nuclear arsenal as China threat looms

The US must increase its nuclear arsenal in response to China’s growing military might, according to a State Department report.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new…

Domestic Terrorists Strike Inside US Against Children and Mothers Engaged in Prayer

Hat-tip Chris Rodda for this story; his her piece is currently sitting at the top of the Recommended list over there.  Please help get the traditional media to cover this story, and make sure they call it what it is: domestic terrorism.

Terrorists have struck on US soil again.  All the bluff and bluster of “we’re fighting them there so we won’t have to fight them here” — along with all the idiotic, illegal and unconstitutional surveillance, searches and seizures, have finally been put to the test and found ridiculously wanting.

The attack was by domestic terrorists, the most insidious kind.

They struck, as if on some unholy jihad, against children.1

An open letter to Barack Obama

Mr. Obama:

  As one of the relatively few people in this country who saw through your act early on, and for the right reasons, let me first say how utterly ashamed I am to call myself a registered Democrat.  You are a disgrace not only to the party at large, but to the thousands — perhaps, dare I say — even millions of Americans who were and remain so desperate for someone to come and rescue our once-great nation from the fascists that they placed their hope and faith in you.  Hang your head in shame, and then look me straight in the eye and don’t turn away until I’m done.

  According to an article in New York Magazine, the electorate has had about enough of you.  A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has you running in a statistical dead heat with Republican John McCain, FiveThirtyEight.com’s poll doesn’t look good for your chances either, and Zogby has your GOP counterpart five points ahead.  Are you trying to blow this election for us?!?  Because it sure as hell seems as though you are.

  The NY Magazine article gives several reasons for your pathetic performance thus far, but it left out the most obvious: not only your consistent refusal to fight back against the smears of the far right and its tired old champion for this election cycle, but, most importantly, your deliberate alienation of your own political party’s base.  Time and again, you have demonstrated that you do not represent Americans on any issue of importance, and voters realize this.  Long before you secured the Democratic Party nomination to be the ringer candidate against the election sham’s already-chosen victor, you were taking positions including (but in no way limited to):

  That’s just off the top of my head, nor is it the most worrisome reason for your refusal to campaign like someone who wants to win.  I have a friend named Dave who has worked on numerous Democratic political campaigns, including yours.  He is witness to the stupid things you’ve got your people in critical states such as Ohio doing, such as:

  • Failing to even install a working telephone system in your Lakewood, Ohio, campaign office,
  • Sending your people out to register voters — REPUBLICAN-leaning ones at that — whom you MUST know will NEVER vote for you, and
  • Deliberately avoiding mentioning that it was under the presidency of Bill Clinton that average American incomes were higher, while it was under the shrub that those same incomes fell.

  This isn’t rocket science, Obama; it’s politics.  You’ve been in the proverbial game long enough to know this.  You seem hellbent on losing this election, and you need to explain why to those who placed their faith and hopes in you before you dash them just a little over two months from now.  It’s that, or pull your head out of your rear orifice and start trying to win this thing.  This race has never been, nor shall it ever be, about you; it’s about this country and the people in it, and turning back from the precipice of fascist empire your predecessors have brought us all to.

  That’s all I have to say to you, Obama.  You have your choice to make, though I am certain you made it long ago.  Just know this: no matter what happens in November, you’ll still be comfortably employed, while the rest of us will have to continue suffering the conservative policies you support.

Sincerely,

Archangel M

The War Party

The Republicans have backed themselves into a corner, ideologically. So far no one in the Merde Stream Media seems to have noticed.

They are reduced to two themes, which are blatantly paradoxical, in the world of logic. Too bad that that world has so few inhabitants these days. And yet they cannot back away from either of them without losing their base(s) and without repudiating their own ideological philosophy. Which as any thinking person can see after 8 years of unopposed (unless you count Congress, hahaha) rule by the War party, is a complete and utter failure on all levels.

The first theme is of course,  War. The second hearkens back to Bush Sr’s “read my lying lips” moment that cost him a second term….thank the Goddess. McCain cannot in any way shape or form even suggest increases. Even as the national debt soars towards ten trillion dollars

and the budget deficit FOR JULY tops $100 billion as the administration bails out failed (due to Republican policies) banks and mortgage lenders, which have caused an international credit crisis that is devaluing the dollar and making it much, much harder to pay off the money that we are borrowing from China, the Arab states, and Russia …..the current target of McCain’s macho posturing. The Pentagon is requesting a record budget of over $600 billion, in addition to the supplementals for Iraq….which are now up to what the entire Vietnam War cost. But we cannot raise taxes to actually PAY for the Republican policy of endless war…so we just print more money, which devalues the dollar, making it harder and harder to pay off the money ….that we are borrowing hand over fist from our ostensible global enemies, so we can wage war against them! What a scam!

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Words To Live By, And For A Nation, Die By

Posted simultaneously on ePluribus Media, DailyKos, Docudharma and Below Boston.

There are words that comprise paper tigers and those which ignite fires; some words are worth fighting to protect, others are not.

Some words forge new nations and ideals amid the forge-fires of conflict, while others are relegated to the dustbins of history as naught but a footnote at most.

There are words, on the page following, which have worth that appears to vary across the depth and breadth of the nation today.  Once — long ago, perhaps — they were words that could inspire and entice the people of a nation to do great things. Now, however, their fate appears uncertain.  I ask, fellow Netizens, just one simple question: Whither the words necessary to marshal a hue and cry of outrage and demand for restoration, restitution and accountability?

Let’s not forget the Neocons are also losing Afghanistan

One of my favorite quotes from Mahatma Ghandi equates violence with evil:

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

The war in Afghanistan proves Ghandi’s point. Seven years of war under Bush and Cheney dislodged the Taliban from power, but has failed to bring peace, rebuild the war-torn infrastructure, foster human rights, or create a viable economy. To date, 491 American and 295 NATO soldiers have given their life in Afghanistan. The civilian and military toll among the Afghanis is uncounted. The American taxpayer is now paying 100 million dollars a day in Afghanistan. The only viable economic options in Afghanistan are growing opium and carrying a gun for the Taliban or a war lord. Education and health care are non-existent. In fact, Iraq is more stable than Afghanistan, a clear sign of failure.

A recent article in the Guardian shows why the American neocons cannot win a war and create a lasting peace with the most powerful military force in the world. Bush and friends live by the following credo:

I love violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the opportunities for corruption and exploitation are endless.

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