Tag: Obama

So I want to share three stories with the people here, but I honestly can’t decide which one to post tonight.  So I’m doing all three.   Why not?  

First, the bad news.

Apparently, a “Thursday Night Massacre” in Afghanistan, where we blew up a tanker truck and killed at least 90 people and wounded more, almost all of whom were civilians, happened at 2:30 a.m. on the biggest party night of the week.

In short, it happened while everybody was blind stinking drunk.

Afghan alcohol ban after Nato staff were ‘too hungover’ to give explanation for airstrike that killed 70 civilians

There are seven bars on half-square mile Isaf compound. One insider told the Times: ‘Thursday nights are the big party nights, because Friday’s a ‘low-ops’ day. They even open a bar in the garden at headquarters.

‘There’s a ‘two can’ rule but people ignore it and hit it pretty hard.’

The airstrike occurred at 2.30am on Friday morning.

Although McChrystal is publicly saying that alcohol was not a factor in the strike itself (yeah right), check out the evidence to the contrary:

General Stanley McChrystal has banned alcohol at the International Forces in Afghanistan headquarters

Alcohol has been banned from Nato’s headquarters in Afghanistan in the wake of an airstrike that killed up to 70 civilians.

US General Stanley McChrystal, head of the International Forces in Afghanistan (Isaf), decided to bar boozing after launching an investigation into the bombing in northern Afghanistan.

Staff at the Kabul headquarters were ‘either drunk or too hungover’ to answer his questions.

Yeah it sounds like alcohol played no part whatsoever in the strike.   Sure, Stanley, we believe you.  

Crossposted at Daily Kos

The following video has been obtained by the MinistryOfTruth from an unconfirmed Republican party source that shall remain anonymous. In order to obtain this highly secret information, the MinistryOfTruth has been forced to do things no MinistryOfTruth should ever have to do.

Guard this information and use it well.

WARNING: Only those with Stupid RW MEME proof socialist issued protective goggles should view the following movies! VERY IMPORTANT!!!

To be played at American schools that refuse to air the socialist indoctrination speech of Hussein Obama

   

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!!!!!!

    More amazing details below the fold!

Original article, by David Corn, via motherjones.com:

“It had better be wrong.”

That was the response of Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) to Wednesday’s Politico story  that the Obama White House, as it retools its strategy for health care reform, has no intention of fighting for the inclusion of a public option that would offer government-run health insurance to companies and people who can’t obtain affordable coverage elsewhere. And Jacob Hacker, a health policy expert who can be called the godfather of the public option, says, “The White House…has to be told in no uncertain terms that dropping the public plan is stupid and premature.”

I just have to pass this along, from the Asia Times:

Bush’s third term? You’re living it

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can’t you just picture it?

There’s Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some “due process” even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn’t torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture “if needed”, and maintaining a prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for all US troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He’d surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new “surge” there. He’d probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan’s tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.

If Bush were still “the decider” he’d be employing mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be expanding the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable corporate executive types. You’d have somebody like John (“May I torture this one some more, please?”) Rizzo still serving, at least for a while, as general counsel at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The White House and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like former Alabama governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.

In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along – with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly have been re-appointed to run the Fed. And Bush’s third term would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around with the North American Free Trade Agreement that the Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in Bush’s third term, no significant new effort would have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.

If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he’d been talking to.

Glen Ford, Editor of Black Agenda Report wrote this radio commentary, published in BAR on 8/12/09.  I reprint the article here with the permission of Glen Ford.

I have sensed the difficulty we/some/who knows who/liberals who hoped — have had in criticizing Barack. It is evident in many areas, blogs, MSM, many places.  We had the audacity of hope and are trying to deal with the reality of now, of seven months since the inauguration.  And we are struggling with the disparity between our hopes and what is happening.

How do we balance our very real hope and our very real sense of hearing him speak the right words, the feeling that he understands the deep underbelly of this society— how do we balance that with the Faustian reality of the deal which must be made with the power elites, the corporate massahs, if there is to be any chance of ascending in the structure to the point where some modicum of righteous benefit might accrue to the people, might just be possible.  

We the people wanted to hear the truth. We were so painfully long overdue for the truth in 2008 that we soaked up the truth Obama spoke like dry sponges.  

The Ruling class, however, the corporate elites wanted him only to speak the truth; they were not about to tolerate the truth spoken to be carried into action.  And Obama, probably in good faith, tried to do the juggling act.  But it hasn’t worked.  It is not working.  And I think it is up to us.  Either we take our democracy back now or we agree to acqiesce into decades more of injustice.  Except, this time we don’t have the time to make any more mistakes in the evolution of the human race, human consciousness and the survival of the planet.  We need to see the reality and push Obama in the direction of survival, of evolution.

Glen Ford’s “Obama Kidnapped by Ruling Class” commentary is beyond the fold. Please come along….