Jul 21 2011
it seems that every time I want to bitch, even the cost of bitching goes up. Just in terms of the energy it takes to repeat the ever-increasing litany of lies and abuses from Obama, doubling exponentially in real time.
It’s not that I don’t have the evidence against Obama, it’s that I can’t keep up.
And people say that Palin is a grifter. Whoo boy.
Mr. Obama, I hope you get eaten by starving cape hunting dogs as your cell phone fizzles company accidentally decides your credit sucks.
Jul 18 2011
http://socialistworker.org/201…
Glenn Greenwald’s speech from Socialism 2011. Highly reccomended. If you haven’t been paying attention, Obama belongs in jail, as does Bush, as do their cronies who are implementing this.
Jul 12 2011
1. Because I like cheese.
I suspect Democrats eat more cheese than republicans do. Republicans probably prefer chicken fried steak (whatever that is) , and they came up with the phrase ‘cheese eating surrender monkey’ –besmirching cheese by association with the socialist French.
2. Because it feels better somehow, when Democrats kill off social security, and medicare, and through us all in jail for not paying our mandated insurance premiums, than when Republicans do it.
3. Because I like Ronald Reagan a whole bunch, and Obama likes him too, so it’s all good. I especially liked the bit where Reagans’ goons raped and killed nuns in Central America–I’m sure glad Obama is funding lots of School Of The America’s goons to do the same thing all over. (why limit the fun to Central America?)
4. Trickle down economics: Love It ! (See #3 above)
5. Endless wars? I’ve come to love these now. (Not so much in 2008)
6. Nuclear Power: Safe, clean, energy. (what I can’t see, can’t kill me, or anyone else)
7. Drone Attacks against anyone muslim!! In any country. Anywhere. Take that you f’ing f*ckers !!
And THAT !! And THAT !!!!!
8. JOBS! Lots of ’em. If you’re a banker, stock trader, a military contractor, a drone pilot, or an undertaker in another country (now that’s some REAL foreign aid–get rid of those damn foreigners before they can even think about coming here and taking MY damn job at Burger King! Yeah!)
9. The TSA. Luv gettin’ groped. Luv getting nuked too. (see #6 above)
10. Offshore oil drilling. Good stuff, that. And putting BP in total charge of the GOM (that’s military speak for ‘Gulf of Oil’) , and of the EPA, Coast Guard, and a whole bunch of other agencies I can’t remember the names of, was DAMN brilliant.
Jul 09 2011
By now you have heard that President Obama has chosen to throw Social Security and the Medicare and Medicaid Programs over the side of his proverbial fishing boat as bait to see if he can get Republicans to give him another really lousy compromise, much as he did last December when he gave up billions upon billions of deficit reduction in order to help Republicans preserve tax cuts for billionaires.
And it looks like the President doesn’t really lose if you or I get hurt here: in fact, it seems that, in his eyes, it’s to his advantage to fight against his own base as he seeks to be “the adult in the room” in the runup to the ’12 election.
So we’re going to have to find a way to put The Fear on this guy – and I think I’ve got a plan to force this President to listen.
And it works like this: if this President ain’t gonna be moved by our message…we do it by holding the rest of his Party hostage.
Jul 06 2011
I’ve given some thought to what Armando said about re-electing Barack Obama for the sake of the Supreme Court, i.e., women’s reproductive rights. I am a complete advocate of women’s reproductive rights. To my mind, women quite obviously “own” pregnancy. End of conversation. Goodbye. Click.
Had we carried on beyond the click, suffice it to say that when men get pregnant and carry offspring to term, and be bound to the little curtain climbers for life, then I’ll take more interest in men’s stupid f****** opinions and moral authority with respect to women’s reproductive rights. Until then, men are hardly worthy to discuss it, AND they are genetically conflicted and selfish to boot, which has life-threatening consequences for women, both during pregnancy and not.
Jun 27 2011
http://socialistworker.org/blo…
This is a good read about the current President of the good ol’ US of A. The only question remaining is are we going to have a moderate Republican warmonger as President after 2012, or will we have a reactionary Republican warmonger as President? The only one running who’s even close to decent is Ron Paul, and I don’t trust anybody who calls themselves a libertarian (think Capitalism with no restraints). It’s sad that no Democrat from what is whistfully called the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party is willing to stand up and run against Obama. At least then we’d have a possibility of someone who’s not concerned about lining their pockets as President.
May 27 2011
During the debate, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a member of the Intelligence Committee, said that the executive branch had come up with a secret legal theory about what it could collect under a provision of the Patriot Act that did not seem to dovetail with a plain reading of the text. “I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry,” Mr. Wyden said. He invoked the public’s reaction to the illegal domestic spying that came to light in the mid-1970s, the Iran-contra affair, and the Bush administration’s program of surveillance without warrants.
Another member of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, backed Mr. Wyden’s account, saying, “Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.”
The Obama administration declined to explain what the senators were talking about. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said that Congressional oversight committees and a special panel of national security judges – known as the FISA Court – were aware of how the executive branch was interpreting and using surveillance laws.
“These authorities are also subject to extensive oversight from the FISA Court, from Congress, from the executive branch,” Mr. Boyd said.
Mr. Wyden has long denounced the idea of “secret law” – classified memorandums and rulings about the meaning of surveillance law developed by executive branch officials and the FISA Court. He and Mr. Udall had proposed requiring the Justice Department to make public its official interpretation of what the Patriot Act means. The chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, agreed to hold a hearing on their concerns next month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05…
Of course, this information comes from the libertarians.
Oh wait, it doesn’t.
May 19 2011
I will first refer to Chris Hedges’ book The Death of the Liberal Class. His analysis of the Americna left’s turning it’s back on the very values it professes is beautifully presented. I will not re-capture his argument here. There are YouTube videos of him giving talks on the subject that I urge you to listen to if you are unfamiliar with his POV. Suffice it to say that what it left of the left is fairly isolated and so far-outside the mainstream that most Americans don’t even know it exists. What the right, for example, terms as “the left” is largely fantasy and projection based on the bizarre idea that Obama is a socialist despite the fact that even rhetorically he is, by Euro standards solidly center-right politically, if not on the right.
The left, in terms of function, today is mainly made up of the extreme right-that is, it is on the right that you see real commitment to revolutionary and fundamental change since the liberals and progressives seemed to have abandoned much interest in the working-class. The militant masses have gone right not left and the most fertile ground for the left is on the libertarian right particularly those gathered around Ron Paul. Paul represents a critical interest that should be first and foremost on any real leftist’s mind. That concern is structural and procedural. How do we re-establish Constitutional rule (in case you haven’t heard it has, in many ways, been suspended) and basic rule-of-law. Honest law, honest law-enforcement, honest courts, and so on are essential. The left cannot succeed at anything if the oligarchs can jail us, torture us, kill us, seize our property, watch us, enter our homes without a warrant often without any reason. Lettres de cachet are now mainstream law. War is carried out on “terror” which is impossible no matter the definition you have of the word-you can have war on France or even a criminal gang but you cannot have a war on terror. Yet this Orwellian term is accepted by the mainstream without any sense of irony, without any question as if it was all perfectly sensible-well it is not in any way sensible. And if you accept that “war” then you accept nonsense and illogic.
It is the libertarian right that is on the forefront of talking about civil liberties, about clearly illegal wars and the growing power of the federal government. As a social democrat it is difficult for me to say “government is the problem” but today I will say that government is the problem. It is the problem because, in most situations and in most of the government, it is acting in the interests of the oligarch class and not the majority of people and furthermore is so constructed that it is furthering an anti-Constitutional, anti-liberty, and anti-human agenda that the libertarian right-wing condemns and the left seems to be ambivalent about. Nothing the government does can be trusted to be anything other than some form of racketeering just as nothing that is said in the mainstream media can be believed even if some of what is said is true. The government is now in service of a criminal class and the right notes that more than the left which seems stunned and hypnotized by the magician Obama.
And worse, it seems more common to see 9/11 skeptics on the right than on the left. The left seems to have swallowed the government/media story without any question–this is stunning in itself. I repeat, even most of the more radical left, including Hedges, accepts the government narrative without question–it is still forbidden on blogs like DKOS to suggest even a minor quibble about the events on 9/11. This to me stamps what is left of the left as dead. When you abandon reason, when you, as a leftist accept government proclamations without question, then how can you consider yourself on the left?
May 03 2011
Please?
I have a subpoena.
Really I do.
Also, I have a nice shiny drill.
But miss Bin Ladin, I have a subpoena.
No, scratch that, no need:
There is no Ms Bin Ladin, look wiki says he has all brothers.
But wait.
Look again.
It gets better.
Tissue samples taken from his corpse had provided virtually a “100 per cent” match with relations, including a sister who died from a brain tumour in a United States hospital, according to White House sources.
Now, all the papers says he has a sister, most report in Boston, whose name is ‘unknown,’ but that they retained her brain tissue, because you know, American hospitals have peoples brain tissue, even if they don’t know your name, and wiki says you don’t exist.
No worries there, though, a wiki edit is soon to happen.
Oh look:
Yahoo “Does Osama have a sister?
“this answer has been deleted”
5 minutes later:
Yes, he did. She had cancer and died. They took her DNA so if they caught Osama they could be sure that was him. He was the real Osama after they shot him in the head twice and tested his blood.
4 hours ago
Wait, wait, if this answer happened four hours ago, how come it changed 5 minutes ago?
In fact how come all the answers were posted ‘four hours ago’
May 01 2011
Just about 40 seconds after (Yes, He’s Actually The) President Barack Obama brought forth his Certificate of Live Birth unto the world Donald Trump was accusing Obama of somehow sneaking his way into some University or another.
If Trump’s to be believed, Obama was a terrible student at a College, and then he somehow snuck his way into a University; after that he basically grifted his way into becoming the President of the Harvard Law Review.
Trump would tell you that he’s a hustler, that Obama is, and we’ve got to do whatever it takes to figure out what kind of semi-illegal shenanigans Obama’s University experience was all about.
But here’s the thing: Donald Trump has his own history of semi-illegal University shenanigans-and it appears that some of his semi-illegal shenanigans continue to this very day.
Apr 24 2011
By Eóin Gilligan:
The recent election results and the demonstrations and public sector strikes of 2010 showed the willingness to struggle, only a leadership dedicated to taking over the major parts of industry and the banks under workers’ control can truly make the causes of Ireland and labour one. The events of 1916 marked a major development in the struggle for a socialist, united Ireland. We must finish what Connolly and the working people of Dublin began!
Good reading. There’s more about 1916 on Socialist Appeal’s front page.
I’ll add one point. Notice that the reaction of Labour (the party) is much the same as the reaction of the Dems in the US. They run and sound as if they support a Left platform, and then scurry to the right as soon as the votes are counted. The disillusionment with the Dems right now is because they, as a national party, have done this since 2008. Should they be successful in 2012, it is likely that they will do so again.
Apr 18 2011
If your view of politics is filtered by a lens marked “Progressive” or “Liberal”, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve been gnashing your teeth and pulling your hair in frustration over the “give away the store, then negotiate” approach professional Democrats have used when facing the challenges from the Tea Party last year, and all that’s come after.
Over and over and over people like me have written stories wondering why Democrats, starting with this President, don’t get out in a very public way and slam Republican policies, over and over and over-especially when most Americans hate the things Republicans seem to love to support.
Turning over Government to the highest bidder?
Not so popular.
Going back to a heathcare system run by, for, and of the insurance industry?
Again, not so much.
Jacking up taxes and healthcare costs for you and me in order to provide another trillion in tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires?
So unpopular pollsters hardly believe it.
But there is another way, and today’s story is in two parts: we’re going to talk about how hard it is to get Democrats, as a group, to get loud and get aggressive-and then we’re going to talk about Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, who is out there showing any reluctant Democrat just exactly how you can “grow the brand”.