Tag: corruption

The Minerals and Mining Service (MMS) has been outed as not only corrupt, but most probably criminal as well.  This is the branch of government that is supposed to regulate mining drilling for energy, but its influence actually goes much further.

This agency has been, until a few days ago, responsible for regulating the extraction of ores, energy, and many other things from United States controlled property.  Unfortunately, it is worse than useless.

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me.

In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you.

Republicans have a Tambourine Man.  His name is Limbaugh.  He’s a psychopath, but that doesn’t bother Republicans, they admire psychopaths.   Democrats have a Tambourine Man.  His name is Obama.   He panders to psychopaths every chance he gets, but that doesn’t bother Democrats, pandering to psychopaths is what they do.  They call it Centrism.

I remember Election Night 2008, I remember the hope so many progressives had that evening, but that evening’s empire of hope has turned into sand, vanished from our hands, left us blindly here to stand but still not sleeping.  Who can sleep?  Who can sleep when war crimes won’t be prosecuted, when Gitmo won’t be closed, when there’ll be no withdrawal from Iraq, when the war in Afghanistan will go on and on and on, when we’re all on a one way trip on Wall Street’s magic swirling ship, when our senses have all been stripped, when our hands can’t feel to grip, when our feet are too numb to step, when there’s nothing left to do but watch the boot heels of Karma grind what’s left of this country into dust.    

My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet.  I have no one to meet, and this ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming . . .

Independence Hall is just a relic from America’s forgotten past.  Democracy is gone, it’s vanished into the foggy ruins of time.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::

John Sherffius, Comics.com (Boulder Daily Camera)

Crossposted at Daily Kos

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::

Bill Day, Comics.com (Memphis Commercial-Appeal)

And the Reason for War, especially of Choice!!

Growing findings of Huge War Profiteering for their Blood Money on the Sacrifices of our Soldiers and their Families!!

    As a young man I read Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Convenent series. Convenant, a leprosy victim, experiences brief, periodic meetings with a character he refers to as the harbinger. These events always presage his transition from an ill, socially isolated man in the mundane world into a healthy anti-hero catapulted into The Land, a place of magic and mystery.

   I’ve seen these creatures in my own life; the shapes of men, silent and strange. The harbinger, he’s an outsider’s outsider, alone on the path, even when in a crowd.

  I encountered another one today and the experience has left me a bit shaken.

The plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty used to say, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Now it says, “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.”

Why did everything go to Hell so fast?    

driftglass knows why, we ll know why . . .

We got the Bush Regime, arguably the most incompetent, corrupt and outright-treasonous Administration in American history. A regime so reckless, savage and gleefully bestial that it made the career-Nixon-hating Hunter Thompson actually pine for the good old days of Tricky Dick: “I miss Nixon.  Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal.”

And, like Nixon, it is more than likely that not a single one of the smirking traitors who nearly wrecked this country will ever spend a day in jail.  Instead they remain lodged in our flesh like so many ricin pellets, oozing their poison into our national bloodstream, waddle from one fawning audience to another, worming their way into major media outlets, or dispatching their degenerate children and underlings out into the world the keep their poison pumping.

They soiled our good name, bankrupted the country, shredded the Constitution and kicked the crutches out from under the global economy on their way out the door, and while it is sometimes hard to focus on them through the flames of the world they set on fire, we must.

America could have had justice.

But America didn’t get justice.  

America got Hopey McChange, who said he wants to look forward, not backward.  Who said there must be no “retribution”, no “vengeance”, no “payback”, who said the era of “divisive partisanship” must end.  

Four score and twenty betrayals ago, when Barack Obama was posturing as a transformational leader, when he was promising government of the people, by the people, and for the people, he spoke of the core values progressives have always believed in as the solution to America’s problems . . .  

That spirit of looking out for one another, that core value that says I am my brothers keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, that spirit is most evident during times of great hardship, but that spirit can’t just be restricted to moments of great catastrophe.  Because as I stand here and look out at the thousands of folks who have gathered here today, I know that there’s some folks who are going through their own quiet storms.

Hurricane Ike had just hit the gulf coast of Texas, Wall Street was about to implode, the foundations of the economy were crumbling, Americans everywhere were losing their jobs, their homes, their last remnants of trust in the government . . .

All across America there are quiet storms taking place.  There are lives of quiet desperation. People who need just a little bit of help.  Now, Americans are a self-reliant people, we’re an independent people.  We don’t like asking somebody else to do what we can do ourselves, but you know what we understand is that every once in awhile, somebody’s going to get knocked down.

Every once in awhile . . .

Yes, and every once in awhile, the sun comes up.  Then, every once in awhile, it goes down again.  

Low income Americans get knocked down every day, middle class Americans get knocked down every day, seniors on fixed incomes get knocked down every day.  Republicans knocked them down for 30 years, and now Barack Obama and that gang of corporate enforcers that used to be the Democratic Party are doing it.  A punch in the face is a punch in the face.  Analyze that, Beltway Republicrats.  When Americans are flat on their back all the time, they don’t give a damn whether the fist that knocked them down was a Republican fist or a Democratic fist.  A corporate fist is a corporate fist.  Whistle past that graveyard, Obamabots.  Have an “ideologue” diary contest, fill that wreck list of yours with “ideologue” ravings and let’s all see who can clap the loudest.