The Wild Wild Left - Obama

Wild Wild Left Radio #79 Perma-War, Perma-Disasters, & Perma-Gov

Diane G — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:01:09 GMT

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Obama vs Social Security trial balloon is up!

fairleft — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:03:54 GMT

Summary: President Obama's Social Security cutbacks are being trial ballooned today, with little resistance shown by the official left. Obama wants us not to notice those plans, while animatedly (since 2007) nodding and winking to the financial and economic elite. The U.S. Democratic Party are no help, of course, so what strategy do the rest of us need in order to successfully protect Social Security?

According to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, U.S. Voters Want to Soak the Rich in order to fight the deficit. Matthew Yglesias writes that the only measures a majority of voters supported were

lower Medicare benefits for the rich, higher Social Security taxes for the rich, higher income taxes for the rich, higher corporate income tax, and lower Medicare payment rates. That's pretty much an aggressively leveling agenda.

(Like Yglesias I'll note in passing that the WSJ headlined their 'editorial pretending to be news' on the poll "Voters Back Tough Steps to Reduce Budget Deficit.")

But, unfortunately for all but the ruling elite, for President Obama (through his appointed commission) the way to cut the deficit is to soak the old by cutting Social Security:

In addition to raising the retirement age, which is now set to reach age 67 in 2027, specific cuts under consideration include lowering benefits for wealthier retires and trimming annual cost-of-living increases, perhaps only for wealthier retirees, people familiar with the talks said.
On the tax side, the leading idea is to increase the share of earned income that is subject to Social Security taxes, officials said. Under current law, income beyond $106,000 is exempt. Another idea is to increase the tax rate itself, said a Democrat on the commission.

The next paragraph of the WSJ piece is the 'get a clue' one for those who still don't 'get' Obama:

Even before the commission settles on a plan, many liberals are vowing to block any cut in retirement benefits. But the White House [that's Obama] and the powerful senior group AARP appear open to a deal.

This simply reminds us of what we long should have known about Obama. Alan Nasser's excellent "The Neoliberal Attack on Social Security" points out (emphasis added):

Reduced benefits and a shorter retirement are the favored starting points, in the name of reducing the deficit. But the Obama boys are too smart to talk about the coming blows to workers. Even as they are in the process of effecting the "reforms", they'd have you worry about the Republicans. . . . Obama's neoliberalism is his own, not a response to external pressure. He made it clear before his election that he holds the New Deal and the Great Society in derision, and regards Ronald Reagan as America's most prophetic post-War president.

Yes, of course Obama is a 'Social Security Crisis' neoliberal, as anyone who read "Obama's 3 Right-Wing Economists" long ago should've realized. But, probably not a particularly entrenched one, as the second sentence below indicates:

It's probably important to remember that Obama is both a member of the ruling elite and 100% a lawyer, and the basic approach in that industry is serving clients' needs regardless of your own personal beliefs. I'm sure he has personal beliefs on [financial and health care reform], but they're very general/flexible and not particularly important to his job. His job is to survive politically while serving his clients, a word he (like all mainstream politicians) interprets as meaning 'campaign contribution heavy hitters'. And those clients' fundamental demand is to write most of the specifics of laws, including 'reforms', directed at their industries.

To draw optimism from the above, "His job is to survive politically . . ." is the key. It's fairly simple: Obama will do all he can for his clients but damn well wants 2010 not to be catastrophic and wants a second term in 2012. So there's a way for the left, or just those that don't want Social Security to be cut, to get to Obama. But the problem now is that the organized left utterly refuses to do so. We must threaten what Obama holds dear and now, when he is floating the cutbacks trial balloon in the WSJ, but the bureaucratic left continues to act as his mouthpiece on the issue. For example, writes Nasser, observe MoveOn, which

apparently wants you to know that there is a political movement among elites to assault Social Security, but you are to associate this threat with Republicans only. Not a word about alerting the electorate to Obama and his deficit reduction panel. No suggestion that the Democratic faithful announce that the president will lose their vote if he supports the recommendations of the panel.

And how will the Obama's deficit commission's new openness on planned Social Security cutbacks affect the Democratic Party? How should it affect the Democratic Party? Well, of course, Democratic Party Social Security mealy-mouthing and in fact anti-populism certainly right now is shedding voters. The people listen carefully, and do not hear "no cuts."

But client wants trump popular need if you can get away with it, and maybe Obama will. After all, there still is no alternative to the two-party monopoly, nor is there within the Democratic Party any insurgent anti-neoliberal movement to challenge Obama. This despite 10% plus real unemployment, flat-lined economy, a continued two-front war in the Middle East, capitulations to the health care and financial industries on 'their' legislation, failed labor law reform, and now open trial ballooning of 'cut Social Security.'

Broadly, what we need to learn is that populist anger is the mark of a real left and an indication that politicians and activist bureaucrats (like those at MoveOn) are serious, or have been scared by voter anger into being serious, about this fundamental fight between big money and the rest of us. As I've said:

Solution: When the right does its fear thing, a real left should do its anger thing. Anger at the unfairness and the economic elites. This leads directly to appeals for populism, egalitarianism, and social democracy, which most people of the largest classes have a natural, reflexive attraction to. That the official left can't even say, loudly, the words "populism, egalitarianism, and social democracy" tells you all you need to know: they're really on the same side as the right, but want to carve out a space as the party of 'slightly more charitable and empathetic rightists.' Screw them and that.

Find the anger, be the anti-Obama anger, that protects and improves Social Security and the economic welfare of the rest of us.

P.S. -- Look here for a group honestly trying to preserve and advance the best legacy of FDR rather than the immediate strategies of neoliberal Democrats. Listen to James Galbraith and NCPSSM's Barbara Kennelly here on the recent Social Security facts and politics.

Part Tinker Bell, Part Predator Drone: The Fantasy of the Presidency as Deus ex Machina

Phil Rockstroh — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:37:56 GMT

The devices employed in US election cycles and its national politics, in general, are akin to the dramatic conventions of children's theatre. Every two to four years, voters are instructed to clap their hands and believe in Tinker Bell. "Children, you have to believe -- you really, really have to believe in Tinker Bell." But behind the stagecraft is oligarchy. President Obama took millions from Goldman Sachs, et al. If there is a Captain Hook in this show, it is those Wall Street pirates who threw the global economy to the crocodiles for their ill-gotten gains.

Of course, this is a tired, old show, riddled with shopworn devices, performed by a rotating cast of hacks. Ronald Reagan set the fool's gold standard of a president playacting the role of populist, matinee hero -- Clinton, Bush, and Obama all learned from him -- as, all the while, he, in reality, went about the business of protecting and enhancing the holdings of the moneyed elite.

In Reagan's case, this con game was both an act of inspired career advancement and banal casuistry. Reagan, b-grade actor that he was, was never deep enough to harbor any belief he wasn't paid to evince. By professional necessity, he convinced himself he believed those bright and shining lies and polished platitudes he pitched to a public of credulous marks; for this is the mode of mind of effective salesmen and good showmen ... having the ability to conflate shallow self interest with the good of all.

Such self-deception -- played out as public legerdemain and state stagecraft -- is now the modus operandi of media age presidencies. The effect of this transformation, from executive gravitas to virtual playacting, has been somewhat less than salubrious for the health of the republic. When, for example, an American city drowns in floodwater and Americans are drowning in economic woes, US presidents know how to act like a president -- but not act as president. The soundbites make the man; not the man makes the soundbites.

Thus far, Obama's role has been to front the status quo. Whose interest do you think he had in mind when he picked Larry Summers and Tim Geithner as his top economic advisors? Hint: not those who clutch a subway strap nor sit stranded in freeway traffic, in bank-financed motor vehicles, on their daily commute to and from work.

Presidents, as is the case with all people, internalize the social and cultural architecture of their times. Reagan, the actor, had to find a way to believe what movie industry scriptwriters and film directors wanted from him insofar as the creation of character -- and, during the cold war and McCarthy era witchhunts, when G.E. and other defense industry giants started writing his checks (after his movie career died a lackluster death) he performed his role as resolute cold warrior as requested. And he, as has every president since, became a shill and enabler of the national security state.

Barack Obama's transformation from progressive hope-monger to status quo water-carrier should not come as a shock. It would be nearly impossible for the US populace, chief executives included, not to have internalized the tenets of the corporate capitalist/consumer empire. This corporate structure is as pervasive internally as it is extant. It exists as both outer architecture and inner psychological imprinting. Therefore, corporatism is as real to us as the deep forests and its woodland gods were to European pagans and The Church and its dogma was to the peasants of the Dark and Middle Ages.

The circumstances of the present era, like the ancient belief in the acts of self-involved gods whose doings were heedless to the fate of mere mortals, are larger than us and will not cede to our demands to behave with compassion or even sanity. To name but one example: The earth's oceans are suffering, many oceanographers say dying, due to the death cult calculus of runaway capitalism. In essence, we are confronted by a situation in which we experience abject powerlessness. An aura of unease and anomie prevails.

This unease contributes to a desperate fantasy of the presidency as deus ex machina. The right's deification of Reagan cast the fantasy into the realm of bughouse raving: The dead president as savior zombie. The belief that Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union with 1940's era movie jibes and bromides is such a preposterous fantasy ... that it evokes one of my own: Ronald Reagan, endlessly imprisoned in a soundbite loop in Hell, throwing back his shoulders, doing that portrayal of manly resolve he wore out during his time in office ... then bandying into the indifference of eternity, this variation of his patented platitude, "Mr. Devil, tear down this wall of fire."

What is the emotional toil taken by the reality that in life, unlike theatre, there will be no sudden plot reversal brought about by a device of deus ex machina? In these desperate imaginings, we demand our president both lay on hands to heal the wounds inflicted by capitalism and smite our perceived enemies abroad. We insist he be not only a steely eyed warrior-king but our collective killer Christ.

Democratic presidents, and their handlers and advisers, become possessed of this errant archetype as well. Hence, according to the fantasy, to be viable as commander-in-chief, they are driven to prove their toughness, preferably, in some he-man display of resolute stupidity. They must prove they have a pair of killer/redeemer god balls -- which might be termed, Christesticles -- by bombing somebody -- anybody. At present, it appears this fraternity of hubris-blinded killer clowns has Iran in their cross hairs.

The act of imagining enemies serves as distraction from the angst arising from the vast economic inequities of life in the contemporary US. This is the good versus evil, dramatic conventions of the children's theatre of our politics: We boo the villains -- and are instructed to clap our hands to bring about an intervention by supernatural forces ... In this case, in the form of an action hero/magical being to do our killing: a deity -- who is part Tinker Bell, part predator drone.

But our situation is closer to that of the flawed protagonists in Waiting For Godot -- Samuel Becket's brilliant take on the self-deception at work within the alienated hearts of those who believe their suffering will be assuaged by the arrival of a god-like being. The last lines and final stage instructions of the play are emblematic of the Obama presidency:

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?

ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.

(Stage direction: They do not move.)

Obama and the Democrats do not move. They do not act. They do not govern. They do not serve their constituents.

Although, in reality, they do serve their true constituents ... the corporate elite -- the forces behind the rising level of authoritarian control over the lives of the people of the nation, both of ordinary citizens and the political class.

In situations of veiled coercion, where unspoken threats to one's economic security and social standing are the primary motivating factors determining an individual's response to an exploitive system, there is no need to threaten potential dissenters with crude, old school totalitarian methods of repression such as forced deportment to labor and reeducation camps. In the class stratified, debt shackled US work force, where the personal consequences of financial upheaval are devastating, the implicit threat of being cast into the nation's urban gulag archipelago of homelessness coerces most into compliance with the dictates of the corporate oligarchs.

The effects are insidious. In such an environment, there is no call for the Sturm und Drang of mass spectacle, replete with blazing torches and blown banners hoisted by serried ranks of jut jawed, jack-booted ubermensch: corporatism establishes an authoritarian order by way of a series of overt bribes and tacit threats. This social and cultural criteria causes an individual to become cautious. A Triumph of the bland reigns. Obama's bland, non-threatening charm was cultivated in this hybrid, corporate soil.

As is the case with Obama, corporatism demands employees (and Obama is first among us underlings) render themselves fecklessly pleasant. This is the mandatory mode of being demanded of corporate hires -- self-annihilation by habitual amiability. And Barack Obama has perfected the form.

In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama stated that he learned early: Never scare old, white people ... that is a good description of how he has dealt with BP and the banksters, and all the other old white men in their perches of privilege and power.

Obama, as was the case with Bill Clinton, will not challenge the corporate oligarchs. Both he and Clinton are gifted, intelligent men, but are products of their time. They are men of, what was once termed, "modest birth" who -- out necessity to rise past the circumstances of their origins -- studied, internalized, and made allegiance to the corporate structure. Why? Because, in the age of corporate oligarchy, they knew the only way to rise to power would be to serve its interests. In contrast, FDR came from the ruling class; he knew their ways ... wasn't tempted by the rewards and adulation that come with privilege. He was born into it, could never lose its advantages, and it held no novelty for him.

I'm not positing Clinton was simply a shallow narcissist, as was a fashionable invective aimed at his hulking frame and over-sized persona during his tenure as POTUS ... such palaver was so much shadow projection on the part of the vampiric careerists of the Washington-New York nexus of blood-sucking media undead. Rather, Clinton was a big talent. He was Byronic in his expansive nature. And like Byron he could claim, in all honesty, he could love a thousand women (and not only women, but varieties of constituents) in a thousand different ways, all at once. He was a romantic at heart in an age of crackpot realists. He was a large presence in a small-minded time. And this is how his trouble in the 1990s, and ours, in the present time, began.

When the Cold War ended, and the arrogant fantasies of neoliberal capitalism were ascendant, virtuoso of the zeitgeist that Clinton was, his prodigious wings caught those heady updrafts and he took the nation on an Icarian flight of Reaganesque economic deregulation, that would, later, contribute to the spiraling fall -- known, at present, as "the economic downturn."

Clinton could have used some saturnine apprehension regarding the dark side of capitalism, rather than the intoxication gained from the provisional, mutually serving alliances he made with his Wall Street bubble salesmen buddies, Rubin, Summers, and Geithner.

Clinton's periodic, erotic contretemps were not the problem; it was his and his advisor's flights of economic fancy that had real consequences for those of us who live at ground level among the debris and ash resultant from the inevitable fiery crash of their vanity and cupidity.

Enter Obama when the bubble burst. The stage is set for sweeping reform. Instead, we have received faux populist bromides, as all the while, behind the scenes, he has gone about the business of accommodation, capitulation, and general lickspittle boot-buffing of the corporate class.

If you listen closely, you might hear, all the way from the realm of the damned below, Ronald Reagan cackling in glee over it with his lower order demon companions from within their eternal prison of flames.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

The Mosque: Courage, Truth and the Law

bobhiggins — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:01:53 GMT

The current hoo-hah over President Obama's public statement of the obvious, that Muslims have the same rights as everyone else, to worship, to speak, to petition the government for redress, to get jiggy, and just about whatever, Dude, has had the media, the Republicans and a few chicken shit Democrats obsessing through the weekend and deep into today, with no end in sight.

This is, as usual, being driven by the same gang of Republicans who really don't give a damn about the siting of this Islamic cultural center but do care deeply about sticking a knife in every vulnerable patch of flesh that the President and his party expose to their efforts.

They hope only to drive a wedge between the electorate, at least the fraction of it that cares about this sort of nonsense and the Prez and Democrats in general.

It is also, of course, being fanned by the completely irresponsible news media whose only concerns are notoriety, ratings, advertising dollars and maintaining a shallow pretext of objectivity.

This sort of behavior is a constant with Republicans, creating a large issue out of nothing, finding a mountain where all that exists is a molehill and wasting the public's time picking fly shit out of pepper.

As a personal matter I don't give a damn where mosques, churches, temples or other religious shrines and symbols are built as long as they don't tear down decent saloons in the process.

To me, some things are more sacred than any of this religiosity.
Tim McVeigh, you remember Tim, the self identified Christian and follower of Richard Butler's Aryan Nation and Neo Nazi aligned Christian Identity movement? I'm not sure Jesus Christ would have taken much pride in that outfit.

After McVeigh, the Identity Christian and certifiable patriot blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City there was no outcry to get Christian churches away from that hallowed ground.

We don't bar Japanese tourists from visiting the USS Arizona Memorial although 1102 of our Sailors are entombed there, having been dispatched to the bottom of the harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy.

There is a large statue of Robert E Lee overlooking the graves of the dead of the Grand Army of the Republic as well as his own rebellious troops at Gettysburg. The dead don't seem to care whose statues the pigeons defile.

I understand the objections expressed by many of the families of the victims of the al Qaeda attack but even among the families there is no unanimity on this issue, many of them welcome this project and have no objections to it.

I read Obama's brief comments as a thoroughly responsible statement by a President seeking to uphold the law and the principles of the Constitution. By making an unequivocal statement on the legality and constitutional issues of the proposed construction, in the face of reprehensible and inflammatory commentary from the right, he performed an act of personal political courage.

For those who say that he walked the statement back a day later and waffled by saying that he did not, and would not speak to the wisdom of placing the Islamic cultural center at "Ground Zero," that is a stance that he is required to take under the strictures of the establishment clause. He is not allowed to pick religious favorites before the law, nor is any one else in the government of the United States.

Attend the church of your choice but don't try to sell it around here, on company time, is the damn rule, it was penned by James Madison 233 years ago.

The nutcase right, driven like a "B" movie lynch mob by ill intentioned ideologues Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, John Cornyn, Sharron Angle and others of that "ilk" and abetted by acts of cowardice from a few Democrats, is once again being used as a tool to create yet another red herring to distract from the fact that they are without solutions, vision, ideas and simply suck at governance.

Their only message over the last three decades has been "cut taxes on the wealthy," while working overtime to divide the electorate into manageable factions and keep them warring against each other.

Have a border problem; amend the Constitution, someone burns a flag, rewrite the Constitution, Civil rights inconvenient, trample them, disagree with someone's method of prayer, change the law, make it illegal to be different, that guy got a free tuna sandwich, take to the streets for God, country and the American way. Lock them up, throw away the key... cue Superman theme.

In my primitive studies of history and in my time on this tortured and often ridiculous planet I've encountered no force more destructive to human life, to peace and harmony between peoples than religion and its various true believers.

For more than six decades, from the Suez Crisis and the eternal struggle in the Middle East in my childhood, through the burning Buddhists in Saigon as a young man, down to the present, where the fire of sectarian zeal burns as brightly as ever, I have found little to admire in any of the world's religions.

I quit looking a long time ago.

You might be wondering about the apparent incongruity of the photograph attached to this piece but there is method afoot.

In the middle of this mosque deal, Obama spent a few days in the Gulf with his family in a combination mini vacation and Gulf coast cheer leading photo-op. While there he took his youngest daughter Sasha for a swim in the Gulf, off Alligator Point in St Andrews Bay just southeast of Panama City, Florida.

I've read a dozen mentions in the press of the fact that this is not in the "actual" Gulf of Mexico but an arm of it. The "event," for those who would make an "event" out of a dip in the bay with one's child, was photographed only by the White House photographer.

The president's swim happened out of sight of the news media. The White House released an official photo, but The Associated Press does not publish such handout images. According to the White House, the Obamas swam off Alligator Point, which is in Saint Andrews Bay, not the Gulf. From: Julie Pace, Associated Press - Obamas take boat ride during Gulf vacation

The photograph is a screen capture from Google Earth and shows the proximity of Alligator Point and the "Actual Gulf of Mexico," and the quarter mile wide inlet which connects the "two." Click on the picture for a larger version and you will see that they share the same water, the same tides, the same fish and boats, and, now, the same oil and toxic Corexit. It looks to be about a half mile boat ride from Alligator Point to the "actual" Gulf.

Other reports from more rational sources are that rip tides kept the Obamas from the "actual" Gulf exposing them to further pettiness and more steely knives.
Bob Higgins

Related stories:
The Constitution and the Mosque

President Obama and Sasha Swim in the Gulf

With mosque remarks, Obama purposefully walks against the traffic

Secrecy is Transparency, Poverty is Wealth

gottlieb — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:48:57 GMT

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.
Samuel Johnson

In America, it is no mystery our Society of Secrets began a long time ago. And our Vice and Roguery is in full bloom.

A New York Times article Saturday notes, "In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions."

This is the same Obama who promised to put all Health Care Reform deal-making on CSPAN so The People could see the sausage making and hold their politicians and special interest lobbying to account. He promised transparency.

Of course, what occurred in reality was nothing of the sort. Back room deals, quid pro quo bribes and the People sold down the river of predatory profiteer-ism.

Same with Financial Reform. Same with colluding with BP to keep the apocalyptic severity of the oil gusher secret from the American people for as long as possible.

So it is no wonder Obama goes aggressively after whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on governmental corruption, criminality and cowardice. Obama has gone out of his way to protect the two-headed crime against humanity called Bush/Cheney. And he'll do what he has to do to protect his own war-criminal ridden regime.

Politicians will say anything to get elected and do anything to get reelected. Obama is a classic example. I did have not sex with that Hope for Change. Obama has proven his loyalties lie with corporations and the current insidious form of government which is nothing more than a bribe factory and criminal conspiracy of the rich against the poor.

Recently an American Hero wearing the uniform of the United States 'leaked' rather embarrassing stuff to Wikileaks. And now the government has arrested the whistle-blowing hero and sent an assassination squad on the trail of the Wikileaks founder.

Prove they haven't.

Recalling that he himself had been the intended target of a CIA hit squad in 1972, Ellsberg suggested, "As I look at Assange's case, their worry that he will reveal current threats, I would have to say, puts his well-being, his physical life, in some danger. And I say that with anguish. ... I think Assange would do well to keep his whereabouts unknown."

But this is just par for the course for Obama, the winner of the Nobel War is Peace Prize. Secret detentions, torture, assassination squads, secret wars, wars of aggression based upon lies, illegal surveillance, PR instead of truth, secrecy instead of transparency.

Obama is not the least bit interested in Truth, but in Managing Perception.

Perception Management is achieved not by transparency but by propaganda. It's about the release of selected and limited information with an attached spin. It's storytelling to children at bedtime - something to make one go to sleep.

The Economy is recovering. The Oil Spill is under control. The wars are necessary and vital. You are in danger and we will make you safe no matter what it costs. Our enemies will stop at nothing to attack us. It's better to be safe than sorry. If you have nothing to hide, then what it does it matter we open your mail, listen to your calls, pinpoint your location and peep into your bedroom?

But the truth: Obama is but the latest happy, shiny face on a darkening landscape of Security State oppression, economic warfare of the rich against the poor and environmental destruction of the planet for the sake of greed.

When the Economy collapses again, and for real this time, and because Banksters are the true Dark Overlords of this planet and must be repaid all the debt they have enslaved us with through unsustainable Bubble Economics, we'll see the true face of Happy Face Dictatorship.

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
Thomas Jefferson

And when we all wake up homeless and all hell breaks loose, Obama will be the happy, shiny face of martial law. Bank on it. It's not about Freedom, it's about Authority.

And this is the crux of everything. Doesn't the quote above make Jefferson a greater prophet than either Marx or Orwell. Didn't the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 do precisely what Jefferson warned against? Didn't we abdicate our Constitutionally mandated sovereignty of our own monetary policy?

And now the United States of America, the greatest country in the history of the world, the world's oldest 'democracy' is nothing more than a ruthless financial oligarchy, backed by a Military Junta and protected in Law by the wholly-owned subsidiary of Bankster Inc. - The US Government. A Government of Lawn Jockeys for the Cabal of International Banks.

We should take our country back from the Tyranny of Private Banking Cartels. This is our only enemy and every other narrative of internal and external enemies is nothing but the smoke and mirrors of divide and conquer.

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) -- The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week's congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

What does it mean something called The Federal Reserve, a private corporation, positioned above the law, above accountability, controls the very fabric of American life through secret market manipulation, currency manipulation, policy manipulation and the manipulation of public perception?

It means the United States of America is a myth. It means The People are second class citizens to corporations. It means your destiny is in the hands of others. It means you are a slave.

The Western World has been brought to its knees by Debt Slavery to Private Central Banks. The goal is a world at war which is coming, helpless populations which is here and the Totalitarianism of The Money Power.

"The powers of financial capitalism had [a] far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands, able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope

There is a conspiracy amongst us of the rich against the poor and it is not a conspiracy theory to say so. It's a conspiracy of secrets where truth and transparency are its enemy. It's a conspiracy to monopolize and control governments, populations and circumstances. And in the minds of the conspirators, as in the words of Goldman Sachs' chief, Lloyd Blankfein, they are doing God's work.

All I can say is, God Help Us All.

Kick Your Own Ass Mr. President

gottlieb — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:37:28 GMT

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama said Monday he's been talking closely to Gulf Coast fishermen and various experts on BP's catastrophic oil spill not for lofty academic reasons but "so I know whose ass to kick."

Ooh. You scared yet? Obama's going to kick some ass. You know how he does. You know how he kicked those insurance and pharmaceutical company asses to get us all Universal healthcare. How he kicked those Bankster asses of Goldman Sachs et al to regulate casino capitalism and bring the Looters to justice. How he kicks the collective ass of the Military-Industrial-Complex to stop the siphoning of trillions from the treasury better spent on the health and wealth of America and stop the illegal, immoral and irresponsible war crimes of aggression. And on and on...

Frankly, Obama's ability to kick ass is limited to a game of horse against an oil-soaked pelican.

Kick some ass. It's Obama who has had his ass handed to him on every policy initiative he's attempted.

Yeah, Obama's on a listening tour of the Gulf to hear whose ass he needs to kick. Holy Crap he can't even keep the attention of high-schoolers during their graduation commencement speech a he moralizes about the bright future they're all going to have going off to fight wars of Empire. Kick some ass.

Obama's facing a "natural" disaster which makes Katrina look like an April Shower and he brays about being in charge and giving marching orders to BP as he participates in a corporate cover-up about the magnitude of the catastrophe and denies the underwater plumes which are undeniable.

You've got an ocean of death Mr. President and you're telling old BP not to nickel and dime the victims while you have nickel and dimed the American people and promised to pay trillions back to private banks with taxpayer debt which can never be repaid guaranteeing it is only a matter of time before disaster capitalism comes to American which will make Greece, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Portugal, England and a bunch of other countries look like an ice cream social.

What happened to all those green jobs and rebuilt infrastructure with our economic stimulus, Mr. President? We've got Depression Era numbers for unemployment. Our debt is soon to be bigger than our GDP. We got folks squatting in their own houses. We've got an underclass of the underemployed living off potato chip fumes and prayer. We've got fellow citizens with no hope, no change in sight and no idea how they are going to make it to tomorrow. More and more working poor. More and more malnutrition. And bigger and bigger economic injustice vis a vis the rich and poor.

And you don't know whose ass to kick?

Did someone just tell you to go off, get pissed, to show how frustrated you are as just another calculated scene in kabuki politics? The injuns are getting restless Mr. President, time to show em whose boss.

You have a real stern look Mr. President. Show em how serious you can be between "pop nights" with McCartney and Clarkson.

Let's stop pretending Mr. President. Stop the charade of righteous indignation, not to mention simple competence.

There is only one person who needs his ass kicked.

You, Mr. President.

Perhaps you should kick your own ass.

Bull from the China Shop

Jeff Huber — Wed, 26 May 2010 13:57:47 GMT

As counterinsurgency (COIN) marches into the expanding ranks of failed U.S. military doctrines, the military-industrial-congressional complex casts about for a new raison d'être. Since manpower-centric, generational occupations of broken countries we can't fix have finally fallen out of favor as our foreign policy tool of choice, the American warmongery is back to championing a high-price, high-tech force posture reminiscent of the Cold War days.

The "China Shop," my label for an ad hoc cell within the neoconservative think-tankery, is consuming swaths of bandwidth in an attempt to make Americans believe an expanded, modernized Chinese navy is about to grab control of the world's oceans and make us all work in laundries and restaurants for sub-minimum wages or something equally implausible but nonetheless horrifying to the rank and file of the insentient Right. A May 20 article by Human Events columnist Robert McGinnis warns us of "China's High Seas Aggression." A Wall Street Journal op-ed piece from the same date by Michael Auslin of the infamous American Enterprise Institute sends chills up our spine with haunting tales of "Asia's Troubled Waters." An ad placeholder at Military.com's Defense Tech blubbers, "It's Springtime for China's Blue Water Navy." Swim away! Swim away!

At the heart of this latest wave of Sinophobia is a pair of recent articles by U.S. Navy Commander James Kraska, a judge advocate general (AKA "lawyer") who frames himself as the next coming of Ray Spruance. Kraska is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), one of the oldest right-wing think-tanks in the country. Contributors to FPRI publications constitute a pogues gallery of neoconservatism: Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Donald and Fred Kagan, James Woolsey, and more. Kraska is also on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College, which is a de facto neocon think-tank. (Professor Mackubin Thomas Owens, an associate dean of academics at the college, was co-author of the neocon manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses. He is a regular National Reviewonline contributor and is also, by sheer coincidence I'm sure, a senior fellow at FPRI.)
Kraska follows the playbook used by nearly all pseudo-intellectual war peddlers, which prescribes specious emotional arguments based on flimsy premises and propped up with false assumptions, facetious analogies, contrived facts, and references to the unsupported claims of one's neo-cronies.

In "China Set for Naval Hegemony," a May 6 article for The Diplomat, Kraska blames China's maritime force buildup on Bill Clinton, blames the Chinese navy for something two commercial cargo ships did, and infers that China spends more on its navy than we spend on our Navy when in fact China's entire defense budget is roughly 10 percent of ours at the very most. But Kraska saved his wackiest shenanigans for an article in the winter 2010 edition of FPRI's Orbis magazine (which just happens to be edited by Mackubin Thomas Owens) titled "How the United States Lost the Naval War of 2015."

In this hallucinatory glimpse at a bizarro future war, Kraska fractures history to an extent that the head of Orwell's Ministry of Truth would balk at. "Over the past five hundred years all of the world's foremost powers achieved their position of leadership through reliance on unsurpassed naval capabilities," Kraska claims. Even "Russia reached the apex of its standing on the global stage through naval power."

Author Kraska and editor Owens, both instructors in an accredited, graduate-level program of military theory and history, should know that all three of those statements are bunkum of the nth magnitude. Neither Napoleon nor Fredrick the Great nor Adolf Hitler had any naval power worth writing Mom about. Russia became a superpower when the Red Army repelled Nazi Germany's Heer in World War II. Cold War Soviet naval forces were never designed to do more than intercept U.S. carrier forces a maximum of 1,000 miles from the Russian coasts, and their consistently abysmal material readiness made even that modest goal unrealistic.

This is pure parochial tall-tale telling, but it goes over big with Kreska's bosses at the Naval War College, so it's full blurt ahead and damn the realities.

It's in that vein that Kraska asserts the Army can fail "as it did in Vietnam" and America will survive, but the Navy can "never fail." News flash, Jim Bob: America's reign as global hegemon is taking a jackknife into an empty pool because the Army has failed to defeat a foe that doesn't even have an army, yet the Navy is failing to defeat a fistful of teenage pirates from Somalia and nobody is batting an eye patch.

Kraska's crowning achievement is his description of how the Chinese manage to sink the carrier USS George Washington with a ballistic missile and make it look like theGW put itself on the bottom by accident. Nobody believes incontrovertible evidence that the Chinese sank the carrier, which is somehow Colin Powell's fault, and the whole affair comes about as a result of globalization and environmentalists and (again) Bill Clinton, and the usual assortment of hand-wringing sheet soakers who have "forgotten that the history of international security and freedom of the seas was a story intimately woven into the material of world politics, forming the basis for an Anglo-American world order." He really said that. Seriously. Not in the middle of the piece where you might accidentally skip over it, but at the very end where nobody could miss it.

Kraska's scenario reflects an abject ignorance, even for a JAG officer, of air and naval combat capabilities, and it sketches a political-strategic plotline that wouldn't even be plausible in one of those young-adult fiction books Tom Clancy writes.

Lamentably, as laughable as the likes of Kraska and Owens are, movers and shakers in our capital take them seriously. These two highbrow hooligans teach at the nation's most prestigious war college (the only one that confers a master of arts degree). They and entirely too many like them play influential advisory roles in the highest levels of our executive and legislative branches, yet the only thing they really know is how to ingratiate themselves in the halls of power. When called upon to provide expert opinion on whatever subjects they pretend to have mastery of, they seldom know what the hell they're talking about, but that's okay because the people posing the questions never know what the hell they're asking about.

And so it is that when our nation's decision-makers dredge the Capital's intellectual sewers to discover what American needs to keep itself safe, Kraska and Owens and Boot and Cohen and the rest of them will say we need more naval carrier strike groups because the 10 we have are stretched thin by too many global commitments.

The truth is that 10 carriers are more than we really need. Eight would be more than sufficient. Two could begin putting the Chinese navy on the bottom right after lunch and be done in plenty of time for midrats. If the Navy is stretched thin it's because it keeps signing on for missions it isn't really designed to perform (like helping the Air Force and the CIA bomb the bejeebus out of Muslim weddings) to justify its bloated budget to Congress.

Giving the Navy more ships would merely be giving it more ships to get sunk. What the Navy needs are systems capable of defending the ships it already has from mines and torpedoes and anti-ship missiles, relatively low-tech weapons they been vulnerable to for decades.

But Congress won't hear that message from ideology-driven fools like Commander James Kraska.

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com.

Obama Oil Spill Response: Swift And Decisive

wilberforce — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:14:31 GMT

Excellent News !!!

No Effort Has Been Spared in Massive Operation !

The USS Gravely (DDG-107) an arleigh burk-class guided missile destroyer sits in the Port of Pascagoula, Mississippi surrounded by oil containment booms to prevent oil from the Deepwater Horizon from reaching it's hull while in port. Deepwater Horizon was an ultra-deepwater oil rig that sank April 22, causing an oil spill threatening the waters near the U.S. Gulf Coast. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class (EXW/SW) Corey Truax/Released)

The USS Gravely is Safe !

Safe I tell you.

What could be better.
Yes, this really is what the government / corporations are claiming as their big success on the website they started. Although even this is a little convoluted. The Coast Guard and BP --together-- have hired a company called "Pier Systems"--not to help in the recovery--but to 'manage public information'

US Coast Guard and BP Using PIER to Manage Media and Public Information for Deepwater Horizon Response
The Deepwater Horizon Response site is a virtual Joint Information Center (JIC) involving the USCG, BP, Department of the Interior, MMS and over 20 other organizations. When used to support a JIC, PIER enables various response organizations to collaborate on information management. According to Chris O'Neil, media relations chief for the US Coast Guard, 61 federal managers from numerous agencies including the Defense Department, FEMA and NOAA have utilized the JIC to share information.
PIER Systems, Inc. has worked with the U.S. Coast Guard for more than 9 years, and with BP for more than 8, supplying each with the PIER communication platform and assisting with developing effective crisis communication strategies.

(and, though there's no real response to the crisis at all-- they also started a facebook page, a twitter, and a myspace site--so I guess y'all will just have to 'friend' them now)

http://www.deepwaterhorizonres...

http://www.piersystems.com/go/...

Meanwhile Greenpeace reports that they have laid booms, but there are no skimmers. Booms do nothing without skimmers. It's theatre. There is no oil spill response.

Super Hero Fail

gottlieb — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:02:32 GMT

Well, it looks like the National Enquirer who brought us the live burial of John Edwards has finally got the goods on Barack Obama. It's not enough Obama is an African Nationalist, Muslim Communist and Political Promise Breaker. Not enough he is a shiny-happy war criminal and smooth talking flim-flam man. Not enough Obama swings both ways while he lectures black daddies to take care of their birthing and babies.

President Obama is a philanderer. Our Tiger Woods President.

They say power corrupts but the truth is the corrupt seek power. Same as it ever was.

And, if true, is it really so surprising? Isn't Obama just following in the footsteps of countless other men of power who say one thing and do another? Isn't temptation just another word for succumb?

Another 'hero' bites the dust. Another myth shattered. Another reason to shake the head and gnash the teeth of disillusion.

Yet, it doesn't matter Obama did or didn't have an affair six years ago or is having one now. What's more important is Obama wages Bush's wars with Bush's lies as their justification. What's more important is Obama plays Pyramid Scheme Politics and reverse Robin Hood voodoo economics just like Republicans. Trickle up a few trillion to the banks in hopes they trickle some down to ease the credit crunch for the common man brought on by a Usury-centric finance system which seeks to enslave, smother and beat you into submission.

It doesn't matter Obama smokes cigarettes, crack or super-glue and admits to nothing like Israel and her nukes. What matters is he says one thing and does another like Guantanamo, DADT, Renditions, Health Care Reform, Transparency and Accountability. What matters is his pious affected black preacher drawl in the pulpit moralizing to the families of dead coal miners while he sends drones to kill non-existent enemies and murder countless innocents in the name of a crime which has never been properly investigated and the blame for which has never been proven beyond the accusations of known liars, war criminals and profiteers.

What matters is not his possible amorality but his subservience to entrenched elite interests while he wags the tongue of populist propaganda in support of the common man. What matters is not his supposed succumbing to temptation but his worship of the military-industrial-complex and his sophomoric Bushist view of the world: His American Exceptionalism as America elevates itself to global monster. His glib arrogance in the face of serious questions. His complete disregard for the liberals who elected him.

Barack Obama is a poseur, a pretender, an imposter. He is not self-made but a created product of Mad Men brought to you by FIRE, Energy and War Mongers. He is the 21st Century poster boy for egregious profit and unbridled greed. He is spokesperson for the status-quo of the few against the many. He is a shill, a tool; a co-opted politician owned and operated by those who shovel double-speak into both sides of his mouth and expect triple digit returns on their investment.

Many people still "buy" Obama and don't want to hear about his imperfections. Indeed, Tiger Woods was well received by the galleries at The Masters. We love Tiger because he is a genius at his game not because he is a duplicitous, hypocritical sex addict who's career and endorsement empire was built upon a squeaky clean sparkling smile of home and hearth. So many folks give Obama the benefit of doubt and say he does all he can in the face of 'power'. But Obama is the opposite of Horton the Elephant who says what he means and means what he says. If Dr. Seuss can bring ethics in a nutshell to elementary school children why is it so hard for so many adults to walk the walk instead of talk the walk - say one thing and do another. Indeed, isn't that the adult lesson so many children hear? Do as I say, not as I do.

I guess it's just so hard to be an adult in the real world. We can't live up to childhood ideals. We can't measure up to storybook heroes and fairytale morality. We sell out our dreams for food on the table and jettison our beliefs in the name of getting along to go along. 80% of folks are unhappy with the way things are and 90% of them are paralyzed with fear, frozen with perceived impotence of usurped power. We have raised bitching, moaning and whining to an art, but we have forgotten how to organize, mobilize and actualize.

Cynicism has replaced confidence. A long time ago we sent men to the moon and now we just go around in circles and do high school science experiments. A long time ago we set ourselves free from millennial servitude only to piss it all away to Private Banks who own us just as sure as antebellum plantation owners clamped chains on slaves and traded them like baseball cards.

But isn't it understandable cynicism reigns at the height of civilization because humanity has proven itself incapable of Good (not to mention self-governance)? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse run rampant over the landscape. Diseases are created in laboratories and spread to populations for pharmaceutical companies to profit. Wars are created for fun and profit by arms merchants and loan sharks. Starvation and poverty is the breakfast of champions for billions of our brothers and sisters who we regard as feckless losers because they can't pull themselves up by the bootstraps out of hell. A plague of proverbial locusts contaminate our water, air and soil. Maybe God didn't rest on the Seventh Day because creation was good, but went into hiding for the shame of humanity.

Our Soviet-style elected leaders of our two-sides-of-the-same-coin political system suck up bribes from corporations like vampires drink the blood of anything that moves in order to survive. Congress builds moats instead of bridges and politicians cower instead of engage. The people are sheep or cogs or units of measure but are never human unless it serves the purpose of a politician to pretend when the natives get restless and the sheep begin to look up and need the somnolent of rhetorical cliche and feel-good sweet-nothings.

So, who cares if our personages of respected authority are nothing but walking, talking blow-up sex dolls? Hell, all of us are addicted to something to assuage the misery of modern civilization. Sex, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, shopping, over-eating, gambling and incessant channel surfing are all indicative of people running from the past, afraid of the future and unable to deal with the now.

The point here is to understand our heroes are human and very likely frauds built up by PR media machines to turn a profit or get a vote. And just because one is flawed does not mean one isn't effective. If Obama is a cad it doesn't mean he can't be a good President. What makes him a lousy President is not his shallow character but his old-fashioned, out-of-date, neo-liberal, colonial policies Time and time again people who thirst for the salvation of leadership turn the leader into a super-hero and forget the promised land we're hopefully led to. Obama swore to the Promised Land of Change and delivered the swampy-quagmire-quicksand of business-as-usual. More war, more corporatacracy, more disenfranchisement of citizenry. And in time this hero worship morphs into dogmatic belief-systems as long dead heroes are embodied by present-day charlatans. So we have hate-mongers for Jesus. Hate-mongers for Mohammad. Hate-mongers for Zion. Hate-mongers for Krishna. Hate-mongers for every cult figure to come down the pike.

And thus we have apologists for Obama. Apologists for Clinton. Apologists for Reagan. Apologists for Disaster Capitalism. Apologists for evil.

We have Coneheads and Stupids fomenting rebellion. We have Simpletons for Creation Science. We have Democrats for Fascism. And Republicans for Hell on Earth.

We have a whirling dervish of opposing opinions; a cacophony of sound and fury of absolute certainties all signifying utter ignorance of the truth. We have henny-penny-chicken-littles running around the proverbial barnyard with heads cut off shouting about the falling sky and who is to blame.

But, what we don't have is a modicum of self-reflection about why humanity as a whole is a failed system responsible for ALL it laments. Western Civilization is in the last throes of death by a thousand cuts. We are in a dark age of quickly creeping totalitarianism. Man's aspiration is now nothing more than to survive the day without losing more than has already been taken away from him. Keep the head down, keep the line straight, keep it moving forward in an orderly way. Tote the barge, lift the bale, push the paper, serve the master. Shuffle along until the last breath makes you a trifling footnote.

Shakespeare said all the world was a stage and we are players upon it. But, in reality, most of us are not players because we have lost the ability to control our destiny and create our world. We react to circumstances and don't make them.

In order for the bleak picture painted here to turn around and renew and rebuild human endeavor with the joy of the human spirit and intelligence of creative mind, we, all of us, every one of us, must stop watching the world go by in an addictive stupor of numb complacency and denial and each become the hero of our own drama and discover new worlds of understanding, cooperation and purpose.

The hero is not someone else. The hero is each and every one of us.

Ladies, Time to Stock up on Wire Hangers!

Elián Maricón — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:47:37 GMT

Certainly Not News (CNN) has been insisting, along with the Obama administration, that his proposed executive order to coax anti-choice Dems into voting for the HCR bill simply reiterates existing law regarding federal funding of abortion.

I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that this executive order will be a de facto insertion of the Stupak Amendment into the bill after it becomes law. It will prohibit the so-called insurance exchange--from which the uninsured will be required by law to purchase private health insurance coverage--from including plans that provide family planning services.

Are there any lawyers out there who can correct me if I've misinterpreted the ramifications of this proposed executive decree? The full text of the executive order is below the jump.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" (approved March __, 2010), I hereby order as follows:
Section 1. Policy.
Following the recent passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("the Act"), it is necessary to establish an adequate enforcement mechanism to ensure that Federal funds are not used for abortion services (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered), consistent with a longstanding Federal statutory restriction that is commonly known as the Hyde Amendment. The purpose of this Executive Order is to establish a comprehensive, government-wide set of policies and procedures to achieve this goal and to make certain that all relevant actors-Federal officials, state officials (including insurance regulators) and health care providers-are aware of their responsibilities, new and old.
The Act maintains current Hyde Amendment restrictions governing abortion policy and extends those restrictions to the newly-created health insurance exchanges. Under the Act, longstanding Federal laws to protect conscience (such as the Church Amendment, 42 U.S.C. §300a-7, and the Weldon Amendment, Pub. L. No. 111-8, §508(d)(1) (2009)) remain intact and new protections prohibit discrimination against health care facilities and health care providers because of an unwillingness to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.
Numerous executive agencies have a role in ensuring that these restrictions are enforced, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
Section 2. Strict Compliance with Prohibitions on Abortion Funding in Health Insurance Exchanges. The Act specifically prohibits the use of tax credits and cost-sharing reduction payments to pay for abortion services (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered) in the health insurance exchanges that will be operational in 2014. The Act also imposes strict payment and accounting requirements to ensure that Federal funds are not used for abortion services in exchange plans (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered) and requires state health insurance commissioners to ensure that exchange plan funds are segregated by insurance companies in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, OMB funds management circulars, and accounting guidance provided by the Government Accountability Office.
I hereby direct the Director of OMB and the Secretary of HHS to develop, within 180 days of the date of this Executive Order, a model set of segregation guidelines for state health insurance commissioners to use when determining whether exchange plans are complying with the Act's segregation requirements, established in Section 1303 of the Act, for enrollees receiving Federal financial assistance. The guidelines shall also offer technical information that states should follow to conduct independent regular audits of insurance companies that participate in the health insurance exchanges. In developing these model guidelines, the Director of OMB and the Secretary of HHS shall consult with executive agencies and offices that have relevant expertise in accounting principles, including, but not limited to, the Department of the Treasury, and with the Government Accountability Office. Upon completion of those model guidelines, the Secretary of HHS should promptly initiate a rulemaking to issue regulations, which will have the force of law, to interpret the Act's segregation requirements, and shall provide guidance to state health insurance commissioners on how to comply with the model guidelines.
Section 3. Community Health Center Program.
The Act establishes a new Community Health Center (CHC) Fund within HHS, which provides additional Federal funds for the community health center program. Existing law prohibits these centers from using federal funds to provide abortion services (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered), as a result of both the Hyde Amendment and longstanding regulations containing the Hyde language. Under the Act, the Hyde language shall apply to the authorization and appropriations of funds for Community Health Centers under section 10503 and all other relevant provisions. I hereby direct the Secretary of HHS to ensure that program administrators and recipients of Federal funds are aware of and comply with the limitations on abortion services imposed on CHCs by existing law. Such actions should include, but are not limited to, updating Grant Policy Statements that accompany CHC grants and issuing new interpretive rules.
Section 4. General Provisions.
(a) Nothing in this Executive Order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect: (i) authority granted by law or presidential directive to an agency, or the head thereof; or (ii) functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This Executive Order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This Executive Order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity against the United States, its departments, agencies, entities, officers, employees or agents, or any other person.
THE WHITE HOUSE

Dennis Iscariot and the Magic Hamster Wheel

Elián Maricón — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:36:24 GMT

The progressive blogosphere has worked itself up into quite a lather following Dennis Kucinich's "betrayal" on health "care" reform. His sudden decision to back Obama's efforts to bail out the beleaguered health insurance industry has left many progressives feeling understandably confused and pissed.

I can sympathize with the rage and despair that many of you on the real left feel as a result of Denny-boy's decision to take the cock of Hope™ up his ass balls deep. Despite being an ardent capitalist (the theme of one of his last two presidential campaigns was "Saving Capitalism" or something like that) and a Democrat, Kucinich has nevertheless been the closest thing resembling a leftist that Congress has had during my lifetime. I have personally admired many of his seemingly principled stands on behalf of the poor and the working class, and I found his vocal opposition to Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama's endless wars to be a much-needed breath of fresh air. Like many of you, I once desperately wanted to believe that he would eventually emerge as a powerful progressive force capable of actually redressing social injustice instead of merely paying lip service to a few leftist values while raping an indigenous South American child and fellating Aetna. I wanted to believe in a "people's politician", if you will.

I stopped having that dream a long time ago. It wasn't easy. From time to time, I still catch myself fantasizing about the Utopian society that would inevitably follow in the wake of a Kucinich or Nader administration. But I now recognize such mental meanderings for what they are: fantasies.

With few exceptions, I've generally remained silent when people here at WWL have made statements to the effect that the left needs to come together to get Kucinich elected President. I was a huge fan of Kucinich at one time myself, and I can understand why many on the real left have revered the man. Compared to his colleagues, he is practically the Congressional version of Che or Ho Chi Minh--albeit a much mousier version and sans the army fatigues.

I am not going to presume I can divine his motives for entering politics. From what I have read, I am even willing to concede that his motives were pure and his heart was in the right place. However, I concluded a number of years ago (perhaps incorrectly...only time will tell) that in the extraordinarily unlikely event that Kucinich (or Nader or McKinney etc.) managed to come within a few thousand light-years of the Oval Office, they would still wind up perpetuating the status quo. Call me a cynic if you like--goddess knows I've been called worse--but please hear me out.

The problem with a potential Kucinich presidency or a Nader presidency or a [insert your favorite progressive/radical candidate here] presidency does not necessarily lie within the politician himself/herself. Your dream president may therefore very well be a genuine and ardent proponent of a boldly progressive agenda with the courage to fight for a measure of social justice in our capitalist Gomorrah. Unfortunately, the content of your dream president's character and the substance of his or her convictions matter not one whit.
The U.S. constitution is a vile, blood-soaked creation of the slave-owning plutocracy designed intentionally to prevent any fundamental change in the existing class structure. It was also brilliantly crafted to be a stumbling block disguised as a legitimate roadmap for actualizing meaningful change to the existing social order.

The aristocrats who penned the abomination thus effectively neutralized the efforts of us plebes who yearn for a more just society by indoctrinating us (starting in kindergarten) to view the constitution as divine writ--an infallible document on par with papal decrees spoken ex cathedra that dictates precisely how such changes to the existing social order can be legitimately achieved. However, the aristocrats who wrote the constitution made damn sure that by following its prescribed remedies, the rabble would eventually grow weary of the fight because that filthy piece of trash offers nothing more than the "tranquilizing drug of gradualism". Consequently, so-called "victories" by oppressed groups that have for the most part resulted in changes of little-to-no consequence are memorialized in history texts as examples of the "genius" of our "founding fathers" and their constitution. In Amerikkka, the proposition that the constitution is a benevolent document concerned with establishing and perpetuating true democracy and equality is considered self-evident, although even a cursory reading of history proves that this proposition is a bald-faced lie.

The constitution is the foundation of the US system of government. Therefore, any remedies it provides for redressing societal wrongs--like voting for senators, representatives & presidents--are doomed to failure. At best all one will achieve by acting within its constraints is reform that is chimerical and symbolic. Skeptical? Well, here are some quotes by our so-called founding fathers--some you may have heard, other you may not be aware of:

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community....
If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed. Let me add that it is the great desideratum by which this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind...
The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States...A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.
In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.
-James Madison arguing for a representative democracy to be enshrined in the constitution (and aren't we just thrilled his arguments won instead of arguments for more direct democracy?)

Thus far I have considered the circumstances which point out the necessity of a well-constructed Senate only as they relate to the representatives of the people. To a people as little blinded by prejudice or corrupted by flattery as those whom I address, I shall not scruple to add, that such an institution may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions. As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.
It may be suggested, that a people spread over an extensive region cannot, like the crowded inhabitants of a small district, be subject to the infection of violent passions, or to the danger of combining in pursuit of unjust measures. I am far from denying that this is a distinction of peculiar importance. I have, on the contrary, endeavored in a former paper to show, that it is one of the principal recommendations of a confederated republic.
-James Madison, Federalist Paper #63

"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well born; the other, the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second; and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they will therefore maintain good government." -Alexander Hamilton

This I can venture to advance from a thorough knowledge of him, that there are few men to be found, of his age, who has a more general knowledge than he possesses, and none whose Soul is more firmly engaged in the cause, or who exceeds him in probity and Sterling virtue.
-George Washington (1781)

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If 'Thou shalt not covet' and 'Thou shalt not steal' were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free." - John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 1787

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. -Benjamin Franklin

"Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government. I am mortified beyond expression
when I view the clouds that have spread over the brightest morn that ever dawned upon any Country."- George Washington

Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees to countenance the majority into dividing all the property among them....-John Adams

"Inequality would exist as long as liberty existed..., it would unavoidably result from that very liberty
itself..... Inequality of property constituted the great and fundamental distinction in Society."- John Adams

The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate is...an...obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results, and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the
respective proprietors, ensues a division of society into different interests and parties. -James Madison

And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Yes, these are the fuckers who wrote and/or shaped the U.S. constitution and thus created the sanctioned paths to social change and reform (i.e., voting for representatives, senators etc). The ruling class explicitly crafted our republican form of government for the expressed purpose of rendering us impotent and ineffective while giving us the illusion of power. I am sure they get a good laugh every time "we the people" raise our fists at them in anger and then "punish" them by leaping furiously into the hamster wheel that they created to distract and divide us (i.e., elections). I imagine they think it is quite a hoot that we believe we might actually change something by obediently using that hamster wheel, which they somehow convinced us was the only legitimate and effective route for attaining social and economic justice.

At Queers Against Obama, I wrote the following statement in a post about health "care" reform:

[O]ur collective efforts to facilitate change will amount to nothing as long as we remain trapped in the billowy vice grip of hope. In order to be truly free, we must all experience the death of hope--cognitively,viscerally and spiritually.
I submit that gnawing off a foot to escape the comforting trap of hope only solves half of the problem. We must also euthanize whatever vestiges of trust we still have in the assumptions, principles, practices and institutions that comprise the fetid carrion of our liberal capitalist "democracy". Once we shed the beautiful delusions of hope and trust, we will know true freedom. We will at last have unfettered cognitive and emotional access to the full repertoire of resistance strategies.
When we stop hoping that capitalism--a system that is overtly based on greed-- can somehow be reformed to benefit the working class, we are no longer limited to thinking purely in terms of reform. When we stop trusting the saccharine myth that the sanctioned paths for achieving such reforms in our divinely-inspired constitution were ever intended to be successful, we can start thinking beyond the boundaries of legally-sanctioned remedies (i.e., voting for a political savior, peaceful protests, boycotts, candlelight vigils, etc). Once hope and trust are dead, we have the potential to be effective.

I would add that once this baseless hope and trust die, there will be room for a new form of hope to sprout and grow, a hope that might lead to solidarity, retaliation and true rebellion--an idealistic yet paradoxically more realistic hope (if I may be so bold).

So yeah, fuck Kucinich for the years of foreplay and then leaving the left with nothing but blue balls as it is forced to do the walk of shame out of his apartment. But if it is any consolation, Kucinich was just another chimera that buttressed many people's faith in the efficacy of the magic hamster wheel of change. Perhaps his recent action will cause many people on the left to finally lose their religion--the religion that is the US system of government, with its holy book known as the US constitution.

I bet a lot of free-thinkers on the left will be shocked to discover they belong to this religion and that they are in fact people of faith. I certainly was shocked when it happened to me (and I continue to be shocked whenever I discover something I view as objective reality turns out to be as rational as worshiping the Egyptian god Horus). Fortunately, real leftists tend to be rather intelligent folks who instinctively recoil when they hear the word "faith"--a natural response for anyone with a vocabulary comprised of multi-syllabic words--and they are usually quick to abandon it.

Obama Supports Firing Union Teachers

wilberforce — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:30:32 GMT

A Rhode Island school board fired all the teachers in a school, in a dispute over working more hours without any more pay, and Obama says, that's just great, while the right wing applauds.

To get a share of the $3.5 billion in what are known as School Improvement Grants, school officials can choose to transform the learning environments in failing schools by extending instructional hours and making other changes, converting them to charter schools, closing them entirely or replacing the principal and at least half the staff.
The Central Falls superintendent, Frances Gallo, initially chose the first option this year, but after a dispute arose with the union over extra pay for adding 25 minutes to the school day, she broke off negotiations. Backed by the local school board, she announced the firings on Feb. 23. Last Monday, Mr. Obama supported the board's action in a speech to a dropout prevention group.

NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03...

Of course, it's just fine to militarize the schools:

Disturbing as well is the prominence of Duncan's belief in offering a key role in public education to the military. Chicago's school system is currently the most militarized in the country, boasting five military academies, nearly three dozen smaller Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs within existing high schools, and numerous middle school Junior ROTC programs. More troubling yet, the military academies he's started are nearly all located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. This merging of military training and education naturally raises concerns about whether such academies will be not just education centers, but recruitment centers as well....

The battle for America's future is being played out in the schools, charter schools, and Texas-approved textbooks, and the left just doesn't seem to care. For 30 years, the right is pushing the schools ever further right, although they don't plan to send their own kids their-- many have pulled their own kids out- for those that can afford it to expensive private schools, and those that can't, to homeschooling (82% of home-schoolers are Christian right) .

Accountability NOW! now w NYT links

Sally Panic — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:11:41 GMT

Yah.

... for Teachers.

War Criminal Torture Champions roam free, teach Law, and show up as guest/experts on the Sunday Talk Shows, but failing to teach all those brown kids to pass those tests is just ... wrong!

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - President Barack Obama says a Rhode Island school that recently fired all its educators is an example of how there needs to be accountability.
He made the comments Monday in Washington at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He called for "accountability" if a school continually fails its students without improvement.
He said that is what happened at Central Falls High School, where the school district's board of trustees voted last week to fire 93 teachers, administrators and other staff. No more than half could be hired back under federal law.
Obama pointed out that just 7 percent of students at the high school have tested proficient in math.

Right. That'll fix it. Fire them. Just fire them all.
Don't question the method, or the curriculum design, or the numerous extra-curricular factors that impact the students and their families. That might help us understand WHY or maybe HOW this happens. Just toss out the teachers. It must be their fault. Don't doubt the frikkin NCLB Teach to the Test way of .... teaching... that is imposed on the teachers by Administrators etc.

"There's got to be a sense of accountability," Obama said in announcing his latest get-tough school proposal at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The president's plan would seek to help 5,000 of the nation's lowest-performing schools over the next five years.
"In this kind of knowledge economy, giving up on your education and dropping out of school means not only giving up on your future, but it's also giving up on your family's future," Obama said. "It's giving up on your country."
more

This is so stupid I can't stand it. Okay, I'll calm down and actually go read the rest of it now. I promise I'll let you know if it gets any better. It's possible ya know. I'm so impatient.
:-/

To get a share of the new money, states and school districts must adopt one of four approaches to fix their struggling schools:
* Turnaround Model: The school district must replace the principal and at least half of the school staff, adopt a new governance structure for the school, and implement a new or revised instructional program.
* Restart Model: The school district must close and reopen the school under the management of a charter school operator, a charter management organization or an educational management organization. A restarted school would be required to enroll, within the grades it serves, former students who wish to attend.
* School Closure: The school district must close the failing school and enroll the students in other, higher-achieving schools in the district.
* Transformational Model: The school must address four areas, including teacher effectiveness, instruction, learning and teacher planning time, and operational flexibility.

Oy.

Guess I better go check out the America's Promise Alliance site.

sigh. Remind me again... Didn't we elect a Democrat POTUS?

Tuesday morning UPDATE: h/t to commondreams.org again: NYT article has a little more & the response from the AFT:

The president's comments incensed the leadership of the American Federation of Teachers, which criticized Mr. Obama for "condoning the mass firing" of teachers at the Rhode Island school.
"We know it is tempting for people in Washington to score political points by scapegoating teachers, but it does nothing to give our students and teachers the tools they need to succeed," the president of the union, Randi Weingarten, said in a statement.
In their efforts to overhaul failing public schools, Mr. Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have frequently drawn the ire of teachers' unions.

and... this tasty little morsel:

Mr. Obama is seeking to use federal money as an incentive for local schools to improve their standards. The initiatives his administration is pursuing are similar to those of the Bush administration. At the event on Monday, Mr. Obama recognized Margaret Spellings, a secretary of education under President George W. Bush, who was seated in the front row.

Niiiice.

More to read in this short NYT Editorial, dated Jan 16, 2010, entitled: Walking the Walk on School Reform.

Ms. Weingarten called for a new collaboration between schools and unions that would replace this "perfunctory waste of time." She called on the states to adopt basic professional teaching standards that would spell out what teachers should know and be able to do.
She rightly warned against using test scores in crude, statistically invalid ways, and proposed a sophisticated analysis to determine if students were showing real growth under a given teacher. Just as important, Ms. Weingarten said districts that so often take a sink-or-swim approach to teaching should develop support and mentoring programs that both improve teachers' abilities and keep them from leaving the profession.

Crap. I honestly don't have time for this, but let me just mention that, of COURSE, there's a lot more to all this. The NYT editorial linked above has a few more links to follow which gives more of the lead up and back story.... I need to catch up on that but it will simply have to wait.

This whole thing really pushed my buttons, on so many levels. Among other things, I have worked in a (county) bureaucracy and I know first hand how intensely flawed that culture can be. I also worked in a small non-profit drop-out prevention outfit that was a different kind of mess. Sigh.

03/02/10: crossposted from docudharma

I Took a Strong Hit From the Money Machine

Elián Maricón — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:49:07 GMT

(NOTE: updated to better video quality- not so blurry now, so you can really get a good look at the dead kids!)

This is not a typical post.

Instead of writing a blog post and further destroying my wrists in the process, I thought I'd try something a little different.

Below you'll find a video that I cobbled together from pictures I found online and designs created by my partner. I am not a film director, nor do I desire to be one. It shows.

The song, however, is one that I think many people here will enjoy. It's called "Money Machine", and it was recorded live at Eddie's Attic in Atlanta. The album is entitled Jeff's Last Dance, by Kahler & Mullins. I was at this show. It's just two guys singing, one of whom plays the hell out of the congas. I suppose my affinity for this song results from the fact that I do possess an inner hippie (shhh!). The song is all about corporate greed & US militarism, but it actually manages to not be cheesy. IMO. it happens to rock. I hope you enjoy my amateurish iMovie editing, which was intended to convey visually the sentiments expressed in the lyrics (with a bit of snarkiness). Even if you dislike the editing, I hope you'll enjoy the tune.

Open Thoughts

Edger — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:06:54 GMT

From a commenter at reddit, on the subject of Associate Attorney General David Margolis, with Holder's approval, reducing the conclusion of the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility report on Yoo and Bybee's Torture Memos to Bush to say that they showed only "poor judgment":

If Obama's 'Justice Department' had conducted the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, all of the Nazis would have gone free - 'Merely Poor Judgement, the Holocaust was just a policy mistake'!

There is a road, no simple highway,
Between the dawn and the dark of night,
And if you go no one may follow,
That path is for your steps alone...

In April 2007 scribe, one of the lawyers who comments and diaries regularly at Talkleft wrote a short diary on impeachment, and in one of his own comments to that diary in reply to another commenter had this to say, that I think applies strongly here if not nails the crux of the matter. He was discussing the legal concept of "eternal precedent":

What we do, and what we vote and say, today, will ring down through the centuries. And those who stand with Bush and Cheney, or oppose removing them, will do so at the peril of being on the wrong side of history.
I wonder what it will be like to live, say a century or two in the future, when people may well look back at these days, shake their head and wonder "what ever possessed them, that they discarded all the rights they'd won, defended, and brought into other nations, merely for the illusory promise of 'security'?"
Every now and again, when I listen to Austrian radio, I'll hear them refer to the "Grossdeutsche Wahn*" - that's the mass hysteria which accompanied the bullsh*t Hitler and his cronies sold the German-speaking (and a lot of the rest of the) world. Sixty years on, they're still shaking their heads wondering "what the hell were we thinking".
*"Wahn" means, roughly, "Craziness", "insanity" or "Hysteria".
On the other hand, in a century or two, torture, degradation and authoritarianism may, because of Bush, Cheney and their henchmen, be as normal and accepted as breathing, eating and drinking. After all, in ancient Rome, not only were there multitudes of slaves, but a slave could not testify without having been tortured first. And everyone thought that normal.
The paradigm for the future - for the descendents of those who may have kids today - is what the choices made today will decide. And that is why the precedent we set today is eternal. Once that choice is made, or ducked, it's done and the alternative path now available, is gone and can't be gotten back.
Kapish?

Dick Cheney Proves There Is No God

gottlieb — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:07:39 GMT

Instead of getting Sunday talk-show gigs, Dick Cheney should be put up against a wall and shot as the war criminal he is - no charges, no trial, just BLAM! If it's good enough for the 'terrorists' it's good enough for evil incarnate; Dick Cheney.

The fact Dick Cheney not only lives but is free to spread his evil is proof God is Dead.

Because if there was God, at the very least, some huge chunk of space junk would 'accidentally' fall on his head. Dick Cheney is one of the top ten most evil, vile, inhumane specimens of black magick in the history of the world. And that's saying something.

And just because God is dead doesn't mean I don't pray daily for Cheney's gory violent demise. Natural causes would also prove God is dead. Torture is too good for this creep. Tearing out his fingernails, water-boarding and electric shock to the nuts is too lenient for Dick Cheney. He'd probably just laugh in the face of his "interrogators." That's what evil does - it laughs in the face of evil.

Now, having said that; wishing, praying, dreaming and working as hard as I psychically can to bring about a gruesome end to a gruesome man, makes me a threat to Dick Cheney. It makes me a terrorist. It also makes me a candidate for extra-judicial murder by my own government. That's right, unless you have had your head stuck up your ass watching Tiger Woods's balls and American Idol, you know the United States has a policy of murdering its own citizens if deemed "a threat." Now, they say they won't kill us for "free speech" but this is more than free speech. I have a very strong mind and even though I have been wishing, dreaming and working as hard as I can psychically for YEARS on end for the earthly obliteration of Dick Cheney to no avail, I have faith that very soon my work and the work of the international organization of Psychics Against War Criminals will pay off.

And it's not that Dick Cheney allowed 911 to happen or was responsible for the torture of thousands of innocent people or the death of millions. It's not that he hates humanity. It's not that he drinks the blood of vampire bats or dreams of skull-fucking dead people.

What cripes me about Dick Cheney is him saying Obama is soft on terrorists.

This is an outrageous lie. Why is Dick Cheney given a platform on national TV to spread such vicious lies.

Barack Obama is not soft on terrorism. In his short year in office he has authorized more drone attacks in Pakistan than Bush did in eight years in office. He is expanding war EVERYWHERE! Obama is racking up the collateral damage in Afghanistan and Pakistan every bit as much as Bush. At the time of this writing his surge in Afghanistan is killing untold numbers of innocent people and causing untold amount of needless damage and creating untold legions of new resistors who hate the guts of every American on the planet. He's investing in new nukes and sci-fi lasers to fight against the invisibly ubiquitous wily terrorist scourge which lives and breathes to blow itself up in our faces.

Why, his well known penchant and genius for string-theory chess allowed the underpants bomber to enter the US on purpose so we can track down the nefarious and invisible international network of terror which Bush and Cheney couldn't find in eight years, trillions of bullets and the aforementioned millions of dead people. They turned over every stone but the right one. So, Obama continues the hunt like a bloodhound on crack.

Obama has continued all the Bush/Cheney policies of wars of aggression, blame games against "Islamofascism," secret prisons, rendition, torture, murder, disrespect for the rule of law, civil rights and human decency. Obama kills folks daily without charge, trial or verdict. Obama has a policy of killing American citizens if he believes they are a threat. People like me; powerful psychics who want to bring down war criminals like Dick Cheney. Just because the strength of Dick Cheney's inner Satan has proved more powerful than an army of angelic parapsychologists does not mean we aren't a threat. One success and we'll have them shaking in their boots. And the list is long. And now includes the current president.

So, fuck you Dick Cheney! Obama is every bit the evil-doer you are. He's just better looking and glibber. That's it.

There. I've said my piece. Now it's back to candles, pentagrams and invocations.: Die Dick Cheney, Die!

But no! He won't die. Because God is dead and Universal Justice along with Her.

Karma Schmarma.

The Fallen Dreams of Escape

gottlieb — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:06:14 GMT

The classic Ambrose Bierce short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has a man being hung and miraculously the rope breaks and he escapes and has an adventure only to find in the end the rope didn't break and his escape was a dying dream of desperation. In the end the man hangs from a stiff rope, dead of a broken neck.

Barack Obama is our dying dream of the desperate.

When he was elected after eight years of twisted fascism, Orwellian diktat, military evil and economic madness, the United States of America was at the end of its rope, hung by its own petard. American Empire, much like any empire, conquered in the name of exceptional pride, fought cruel wars of genocide in the name of peace and ground up its citizenry and treasure in the name of self-preservation. We became what we despised and traded our promise of enlightenment for dark age ignorance. We jettisoned reasoned principle and pursuit of wisdom for irrational fear and embrace of ugly hate.

Our political system was morphed, over decades, from the idealism of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to the cynicism of Let's Make a Smoke-filled, Back-Room Deal Where Mr. Politician Gets Rich and We The People Get Screwed. We went from Disney to Political Pornography.

The People were left to dog-eat-dog it in a Darwinian nightmare while Corporations were crowned King, Neo-Liberalism made religion and citizens of the 'greatest democracy in the history of the world' made wage-slaves, debt-serfs, peons, cogs and widgets. Humanity was made a number and wisdom reduced to the least common denominator.

America no longer held the promise of the shining city on the hill but was found a garbage dump.

America was desperate for a savior after the Nero/Caligula regime and we settled for a happy, shiny knight riding the trusty steed of hope, change and the best ideals of human aspiration. He was swept to power on a rising tide of optimism twinged with desperation.

Facing endless and escalating wars, savage economic depression created by inhumane fat-cats and the systematic shredding and dismantling of Constitutional protections, trashing of human rights and a vicious program of divide and conquer, the election of Barack Obama was the snap and let loose of our noose and an escape to freedom; the chance for survival in the face impending and inevitable doom.

But the euphoria of release and relief was tainted soon after as the knight removed his shiny armor and helmeted visor to reveal his counselors and advisers as the very architects and enablers of the doom we fought so hard to escape. Bankers were brought in to steal the people's loot and give it to the bankers, the very greed-mongers who orchestrated economic collapse on the backs of ordinary people. Military Officers who hadn't won a war in 60 years were promoted and put in charge of commissions of war crimes, genocide, the devastation of peoples and the desolation of souls, creating, like despotic gods, legions of broken hearts bent upon eternal revenge against the evil American empire.

The knight left the care and feeding of hurting, diseased and desperate citizens in the hands of amoral corporations whose only mandate is profit at the expense of people. He called himself a leader but he was nothing but an appeaser. He called himself a man of principle but he was nothing but a back-room dealer. He called himself a man of peace but he was nothing short of a Machiavellian prince of death and destruction. He called himself a man of faith but he was nothing but a cynical charlatan flim-flam man who talks out of both sides of his mouth without moving his lips. The plausible deniability of political ventriloquism.

And so now we see the truth. The charade is over. The dream is over. The escape is over. Life is over.

As we, too late, hear the snap of our neck.

Obama okays assassinations of U.S. citizens, so STFU!?

fairleft — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:37:40 GMT

(H/t to Stu Piddy.) Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair on Wednesday confirmed that President Obama can and does authorize assassinations of U.S. citizens, if those citizens are overseas. Are we all OK with this? Why no protest from progressive leaders within the Democratic Party? Progressives, leaders, within the Democratic Party? How can anyone still sane and moral in this country not agree with Glenn Greenwald (emphasis added):

Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?

And yet, the fact is, there is complete silence, by Democrats, Republicans, and the mainstream media (in fact the first exposure of the policy was buried deep inside an article on something else). Well, not complete silence. Apparently one representative at that Blair Congressional hearing, embarrassing as it is for Democrats a Republican, Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), sort of maybe 'criticized' the 'Citizen Assassinations ROK' policy, specifically over CIA involvement in the 2001 assassination of Christian missionaries (mistaken for drug exporters) in Peru:

"The targeting of Americans -- it's a very sensitive issue, but again there's been more information in the public domain than what has been shared with this committee. There is no clarity...what is the legal framework?"

To explain Hoekstra's concern dismissively, apparently FOX is going large on the wholesome, white Christian Bowers family, and how tragic it was that two of them were assassinated (*and it certainly was*), but of course the general policy of assassinations, well, FOX hit show '24' okays that if 'swarthy' actors play the bad guys.

I won't recap the case Glenn Greenwald has ably presented, the argument (obviously true) that assassinations of U.S. citizens, whether at home or abroad, solely on the President's authority violates U.S. law, the Constitution, international law, and just about everything legally progressive since 1215.

My focus is on the lack of any discernable left or progressive concrete reaction to this revelation. Uh, is there any place I can go on the net that is organizing protests, even civil disobedience against, this policy's people and symbols? What does it say about us and our 'democracy' that the answer is 'NO, not really'?

P.S. & BTW -- Jonathan Turley asks a couple of good questions:

If a president can kill U.S. citizens abroad, why not within the United States? What is the limiting principle beyond the practicalities?

Answers: Why not? There ain't one.

Pancakes, Prayer & Genocide: Obama & Uganda's "Final Solution" for the Queer Problem (Redux)

Elián Maricón — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:54:58 GMT

I'd like for you to try a little experiment for me.

It's a very simple experiment, one that doesn't involve stoichiometry, Bunsen burners, p values, test tubes, or access to hydrochloric acid. It'll be fun, I swear.

Ready?

Fantastic! Let's begin.

Step 1:
Think of five "liberal" or "progressive" Obama supporters you know. Try to include as many queer and transgender Obama supporters in that list as possible. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with a list of ardent queer and transgender Obama supporters in the wake of the Pope of Hope's hope-inducing HRC speech, not to mention his current--and sudden--almost deafening screeching about his plans to overturn "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (which is in no way a cynical effort to shift the national debate away from his "failed" "attempt" at health care reform, nor is it a strategy to prevent "progressives" from starting to notice that over the past year he has fought--with a Democratic super-majority in Congress--to advance a hawkish neo-liberal agenda that is breathtaking in its scope; and no, it has nothing to do with the U.S. military's inability to recruit and retain enough prospective corpses for his ongoing wars of aggression).

Step 2:
Call each of the Obamaniacs on your list and read the following statement to them:

"Obama has been President for one year now, during which time the Democrats have had a super-majority in Congress. Candidate Obama presented himself as a harbinger of change: the anti-Bush, if you will. Yet over the past year, Obama has (1) continued and/or strengthened a range of the very Bush administration policies that, as a "liberal/progressive", you once ardently opposed; (2) Enacted (or threatened to champion) paleoconservative policies that, had they been enacted by Bush, would have pissed you off so much that you just might have snapped and thrown down the gauntlet by attending a peaceful protest or a candlelight vigil. Here are just a few examples:

(a) Obama extended and strengthened the Patriot Act, including key provisions of the Act that infuriated you (and which candidate Hope and Change claimed to oppose) when Bush shoved them through Congress post-9/11. To wit,

Obama extended the provision allowing the government to obtain private information about civilians through warrantless wiretapping of phone calls and emails

Obama extended the provision giving the government unfettered access to your personal information from credit reporting companies, banks, internet service providers and libraries.

Obama actually loosened the Bush administration's conditions under which someone can be accused of providing "material support" to terrorists. I guess he thought ol' Dubya was a bit of a softie on civil liberties.

(b) Obama extended Blackwater's contract to allow that company of fundamentalist Christian war profiteers to remain in Iraq indefinitely.
(c) Despite pledging to end the Iraq war, Obama has actually escalated it by increasing the number of "troops" in Iraq--he simply replaced US troops with so-called "private contractors", otherwise known as mercenaries.
(d) Under Obama, the number of "private contractors" in Afghanistan has increased exponentially, and they outnumber US troops. In fact, the Obama administration is responsible for increasing the number of private contractors in Afghanistan to the highest recorded percentage of contractors used for any conflict in US history.
(e) The government has been secretive about amount of money it is spending to pay for these private mercenaries in Obama's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the cost may well exceed $1 billion for Iraq alone.
(f) It is understandable if you do not recall Obama signing a bill to authorize spending money to escalate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (by hiring Blackwater and friends), but you likely watched him sign it on tv. The name of the bill was the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Well, actually its official name was, "To authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2010 for military activities of the Department of Defense, for military construction, and for defense activities of the Department of Energy, to prescribe military personnel strengths for such fiscal year, to provide special pays and allowances to certain members of the Armed Forces, expand concurrent receipt of military retirement and VA disability benefits to disabled military retirees, and for other purposes". But the other name made it sound like the DaliObama was finally proving his progressive street creds, which helped pacify puzzled "progressives" who were finding the new emerging discipline of Obama Apologetics increasingly difficult to master. Plus, it was much easier to say.
(g) Obama increased amount of taxpayer funds for the Wall Street bailouts that began in the final months of the Bush administration. He also bragged that he was going to convince a furious American public to go along with the largest theft and transfer of wealth in recorded human history (i.e., from most of us to the top .01%) by "rebranding the program". This is one reason why the media stopped discussing the bailouts. There were no more bailouts, you see, because they were replaced by the Troubled Assets Relief Program (or TARP).
(h) Obama publicly stated that he was eager to sign a bill into law that would have enacted a de facto ban on abortion for most women.
(i) The Obama administration vigorously defended DOMA, a law you despise, when it was challenged in court. Twice. The first time, the Obama administration argued that same-sex relationships were comparable to incest and child rape.
(j) It is very likely that Obama never intended to "reform" health care to benefit the average American (see this article , as well as this rant, and this rant)
I could go on if you like, but let's leave it at that for now. Since Obama has proven his presidency is little more than Bush's third term at best, why do you continue to support him if you hated Bush so much?"

Step 3:
Record the Obamaniac's answers.

Quite straightforward, no?

As with any experiment, however, one should have a set of hypotheses about its outcome. Here are my hypotheses about how the Obamaniacs will respond to the above script (please note the rules that follow each hypothesis--they are for your own safety):

H1: The Obamaniac will not answer the question. Instead, s/he will become enraged and either start yelling incoherently and/or reply with some variant of "Well McCain/Palin would have been worse."

(Note: Remain silent! Do not antagonize this brand of Obamaniac under any circumstances)

H2: The Obamaniac will not answer the question. Instead, s/he will pretend s/he didn't hear a word you said, and s/he will respond with some version of the irrelevant yet popular liberal retort, "My god, what is wrong with you? The man has only been in office for one year! Cut him some slack! What, did you really expect him to come in, wave his Obama wand, and magically fix everything overnight?"

(Note: Calmly say, "I agree that 1 year isn't much time. But he's actually accomplished a lot in 1 year." Then re-read the above script. Proceed with extreme caution.)

H3: The Obamaniac will concede that Obama "has been disappointing in certain respects". S/he will then begin to lecture you about the powerful symbolic value of his election and its implications for race-relations in the US. Then, s/he will taunt you and defy you to deny the symbolic value of his presidency (note: Obamaniacs generally start to display a trademark smirk when making this evasive and irrelevant argument. They view Identity Politics(c) as their trump card, and they believe that you share their belief that this "argument" entitles them to declare "Checkmate!")

(Note: Just nod and smile)

Most likely, you will receive a mix of 1 or more of the above responses. I am primarily interested in H2 and H3, but I will focus mostly on H3. As for responses that conform to H2, I have grown weary--no, make that "sick and fucking tired"--of the "only one year in office" argument. I thus felt it necessary to demonstrate how much Obama has managed to accomplish in "only one year"...and I barely scratched the surface. For example, I could have talked about his policy towards Cuba, his hyper-Zionist stance on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, etc., ad nauseum.

My particular interest in the response posed in H3 stems from the way that many liberals and "progressives" reacted to the strongly-worded objections that I made over a year ago when Obama decided to kick-off his presidency by honoring Rick Warren, a major financial backer of the anti-queer forces in Uganda that are trying to legalize the extermination of queer people in that nation. Warren classified the massive donations he knowingly sent to support their cause as part of his megachurch's "AIDS ministries" (you can find links to sources by conducting a search of QAO - I am getting sleepy and will add links later). Warren recently issued a belated and perfunctory statement saying he thought it was "bad" to execute all queers (although he reiterated that he doesn't "support homosexuality") in an effort to disassociate himself from his foot soldiers in the fight to ignite the Ugandan genocide. He only did so after a prolonged (and mostly ignored) outcry from some sectors of the US public roused the corporate media from its coma long enough to make it roll over and angrily hit the snooze button (i.e., mentioning Uganda in a footnote somewhere in the recesses of that commie liberal rag called the New York Times). Apparently, even genocidal zealots like Warren fear the possibility of a minor backlash and/or slight public humiliation. After all, they are cowards by nature.

Liberals and "progressives" paid little attention when those of us on the queer and transgender "left lunatic fringe" tried to get someone--anyone--to understand that the DaliObama had chosen to symbolize the beginning of his presidency by bestowing one of the highest honors upon a man with known financial ties to people who were--and are--actively trying to carryout the genocide of LGBT people in Uganda, thereby conferring an aura of legitimacy upon such sentiments and efforts. I mean, Obama has the fucking Secret Service at his disposal, and he won't even blink without consulting his advisors on the relative political fallout from blinking versus not blinking. There is no way he could have not known what the Fuhrer of Saddleback had been up to over the past decade. No matter what we said about why we were angry, liberals and "progressives" told us that we were actually angry because Warren opposed gay marriage. I lost count of the number of heteros who felt the need to "educate" me by lecturing me on how Obama had stated his opposition to gay marriage throughout the campaign , so it was factually inaccurate for me to call him a "hypocrite". It was cute how they always rushed through that part to "inform" me that His O'ness does support civil unions, though, which would be the equivalent of marriage, "just with a different name".

Apparently, they thought I gave a fuck.

It still amazes (and saddens) me how my "allies" mysteriously and consistently went deaf whenever I replied that a man who campaigned as a "fierce advocate" of LGBT people while chilling with his "ex-gay" and anti-gay posse and who later gave one of the most powerful bully pulpits in history to the Christofascist financier of a "final solution" to the "queer problem" was by definition a "hypocrite". That is, unless I missed the part where Obie said he was a fierce advocate of curing or killing us.

Of the few people who bothered to pay attention to our outcry, the most vitriolic attacks came from the Amerikkkan gaysbien homotocracy. Where else?

What's the big deal? Obama is just trying to show that there is room for everyone under his big tent. Yeah, it sucks he chose to honor Rick Warren, that evil opponent of gay marriage, but it doesn't really matter because it is just a symbolic gesture to the Christian right. You are going to judge him based on nothing more than this symbolic action? What the fuck is wrong with you? He is the fucking gay Moses, dumbass! Give the man a year, and you'll see...we'll be getting married, joining the Marines to help kill ragheads without having to suffer the indignity of the closet, and Obama will have declared Harvey Milk Day a national holiday. You clearly have the intelligence of a potted cactus if you are unable to see that Obama is just being strategic! When Obama finally reveals his inner Che Guevara, you're gonna have a lot of egg on your face. Now fuck off so I can do my bump of crystal and get back to the circuit party which, I'll have you know, is donating a portion of its proceeds to AIDS charities or shelters for homeless gay teens in Darfur or Haiti or something!

I almost....almost...feel sorry for them. Most HRC-sexuals still sing the Obama administration's praises even after he showed up and gave a witty--and let's not forget "hopeful"--speech ("ohmygod he like, totally referenced Lady GaGa") at their pricey little din-din. Then, after he managed to escape the building where they were hosting their gala for blueblooded cornholers and carpetmunchers with his man-hymen still intact, he turned around and mocked them. Repeatedly. First, one of his errand boys referred to those painfully assimilationist asshats who took part in the big gay equality march on Washington (aka "the million moron march") as "the Internet left fringe...[just] bloggers who need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult." That statement deeply offended me, because I thought I had won the "gay left fringe" title fair and square. But alas, it turns out that Pam Spaulding is the real lunatic with delusions of being a general in the gay Symbionese Liberation Army. Then, he openly ridiculed a contingent of pro-gay marriage-military-adoption-priesthood demonstrators in a speech he delivered in LA (click on that link--the video is hilarious). The Pope of Hope clearly got a little miffed when some fag (a student at a Lutheran seminary on a military scholarship no doubt) yelled at him to "keep your promises". So during his speech, the DaliObama quipped, "One of them said, 'Obama keep your promise. I thought, ok that's fair. I don't know which promise he was talking about...'" The audience howled with laughter. Finally, in an act clearly intended to be a less than subtle way of saying "fuck off already, can't you see that you people make me sick", Obama made a huge production out of granting the same-sex partners of federal employees certain benefits (minor things like health care were excluded)...benefits they already had. I would beg them to stop humiliating themselves, but I am having way too much fun watching them act even more surprised with each successive insult.

I do believe, as our hypothetical circuit-party queen who tweaks for gay Haitian orphans (or whatever) stated, that one should focus on substance over symbolism, especially when one has no reason to believe that the symbol stands for something nefarious like, oh, let's say...malevolent intent towards an entire class of people. For example, most reasonably well-informed individuals would have very different reactions if they encountered any of the following people sporting a swastika: (1) a Tibetan Buddhist monk; (2) a devout Jain; (3) an Indian devotee of the creator-god Brahma; (4) a recent ex-con with "Rahowa!" tattooed on his shaved head, complete with combat boots, "white power" t-shirt, a tendency to scream "seig heil" every 10 minutes, and a dog-eared copy of Mein Kampf. Notice they are all brandishing the same symbol, but that symbol has a very unique (and I think it is safe to say "nefarious") meaning when our neo-Nazi is displaying it. Virtually anyone (especially racial/ethnic/sexual minorities) could tell you why it would be fucked up--not to mention terrifying--to run into him and his swastika flag at a rest stop in the middle of the night somewhere in rural Illinois.

Before you have a PC heart attack, NO, I am not calling Obama a neo-Nazi, nor am I comparing him to a member of Aryan Nation. That would be stupid. I mean, they wouldn't even allow him to join their group. He's not qualified. snort

My point is that if there is an objective record of someone consistently expressing a genuine affinity for a particular referent (e.g., by attending numerous NASCAR races, desperately sending out applications for employment in a pit crew, attending town council meetings to argue passionately that the council members should issue a permit for the construction of a super speedway, or donating money to whatever charity Dale Earnhardt Jr. happens to be promoting at the moment), then it is reasonable to make certain inferences about that person's beliefs, attitudes, motivations, and/or likely future behaviors when s/he repeatedly produces something that symbolizes the referent. The symbol may take the form of an object (a Dale Earnhardt baseball cap?) or behaviors intended to demonstrate affinity for the referent (e.g., drunkenly firing your rifle at the tv after your 29th can of PBR because your guy drove around in circles too slow, or making a very public donation to the local chapter of the Dale Earnhardt Jr. Fan Club). Either way, it would be justifiable to conclude that our hypothetical NASCAR fanatic's symbolic displays of all things NASCAR are indicative of a passion that runs very deep. Furthermore, it would be quite reasonable to predict s/he (a) plans to attend NASCAR races in the future; (b) devotes a portion of his or her disposable income to purchasing NASCAR memorabilia; (c) may even do something extreme to promote NASCAR if s/he was in a position of power, such as issuing a decree to make NASCAR the official national sport.

Conversely, if I showed up at your dinner party with a mullet and a temporary NASCAR tattoo on my forearm and, upon being asked how I was doing, I replied in an exquisitely snuff-drenched Southern accent that, "I was feelin' finer than a frog hair split four ways 'til that 32 car got sent off to the daggum' Big Red Trailer not even 3 fuckin' laps after the boogity boogity boogity on account of they suspected him of illegal weight jacking", you'd probably laugh or have me committed. In the unlikely event that someone at your party knew anything whatsoever about NASCAR, they would instantly intuit that I must have googled "NASCAR slang" only to mangle it beyond recognition. Hell, I don't even know what "weight jacking" is, nor do I have a clue if it can be used to violate NASCAR rules.

My actions could still be viewed as symbolic depending upon the context, but the symbolism would differ dramatically from the symbolism of our die-hard NASCAR fan. If I showed up at a sports bar in the South to watch the "big race" with my fresh mullet and my NASCAR-to-English Dictionary and started talking about my undying love for NASCAR, the regulars would be skeptical about my motives, and rightfully so. I fucking hate NASCAR and most NASCAR fans, and my thinly-veiled derision would be apparent for a couple of reasons. First, the bar happens to serve free beer from 5pm to 6pm to NASCAR fans whenever there is a big race. As much as I dislike NASCAR, my love for free beer is stronger than my disdain for that "sport" and its fans. Oddly, I only seem to come around to the bar to proclaim my love for the races during the hour on those days when they happen to be serving free beer. Second, the more I talk, the clearer it becomes to the other patrons that I don't know--nor do I care to know--jack shit about NASCAR. But I sure do chug a shitload of beers during that hour and I almost never glance at the tv. My words and behavior were designed to symbolize a (non-existent) love for NASCAR to (hopefully) appease the bartenders just long enough for me to get my drunk on. When I no longer have any use for them, I leave feeling disgusted by their NASCAR cooties yet slightly superior to them because they bought--or pretended to buy--my hollow symbolic gestures and I got what I wanted from them.

I can hear you thinking, "Okay, make your damn point already." So here goes...

As far as I am concerned, candidate Obama's history of fraternizing with leaders of the so-called "ex-gay" movement counted as an objective record of his affinity for a specific referent: a hatred of queer and transgender people (read all about it here, and here and here and here). This symbolic behavior seemed to genuinely represent a deep hatred of queer and transgender people precisely because of how unnecessary it was for him to win the election. Some may argue that this is objective data, but thin objective data. I'll concede that point because I don't feel like providing a content-analysis of every ad that the Obama campaign used to flood the LGBT community. In my view, that analysis combined with his love for all things "ex-gay" is rather solid objective evidence. However, when president-elect Obama chose to follow up this behavior by dropping the symbolic bombshell of Rick Warren (and remember...the argument that Obama was unaware of Warren's goals for Ugandan queers doesn't pass the laugh test considering how thoroughly the bastards in power at that level vet everyone and everything and how deep they are capable of digging into someone's past), I think it is perfectly legitimate to at least, I dunno, start paying attention to a set of actions and behaviors of a powerful man that now clearly symbolize disdain and perhaps even malevolent intent towards a specific class of people: namely fags, dykes, and trannies.

Over the past year, Obama has also made a number of symbolic overtures to the mainstream gaysbien community, but there has been no substance to indicate that those overtures were anything more than acts of hollow symbolism. Quite the opposite, actually. In addition to his "incest and child rape" argument while defending DOMA, we now know that Obama has an inner circle of spiritual advisers comprised of protestant preachers who are outspoken homophobes and ardent proponents of the so-called "ex-gay" movement. Much like how I would tell NASCAR fans what they want to hear for an hour to get what I want out of them (beer), Obama only slithers up to the gaysbien homotocracy and makes symbolic yet substantively empty gestures when there is something he wants...usually he just wants them to shut up for awhile and go away, and since they are not as sharp as the average NASCAR fan, they not only comply...they become giddy about it. Occasionally, he needs to use them as a distraction or a wedge issue just like his predecessor did. The difference is that Joe Solomnese and other white self-appointed "leaders" of the LGBT "community", both nationally and locally, are willing to fight each other to the death to be HomophObama's pawn of choice, regardless of how low he sinks.

I have two words for anyone who still believes that Obama's behavior towards the Christofascists who want to see all of us queers executed is nothing more than strategic and hollow symbolism: pancakes and prayer.

It seems Obama--my "fierce advocate"--just cannot stomach the thought of cutting ties with his good friends who are working tirelessly to legally mandate the extermination of queers in Uganda. Either that, or this particular group just makes some damn good pancakes. Yesterday, CNN reluctantly posted the story that Obama would attend the prayer breakfast despite objections from an ethics group that thought it was, er, unethical for the POTUS and other government officials to be attending a prayer breakfast sponsored by a cult that is praying (and more importantly donating a lot of money and effort) for the chance to legally exterminate queers in Uganda and presumably around the world. The "journalists" at CNN have since made a big deal over Obama's characterization of the death penalty for the crime of being queer as "odious".

Gee, thanks Barry. It's nice to hear that you think it is "odious" for a nation to pass a law requiring the execution of people like me and my partner. I just have a few questions:

(1) If you find the government-mandated extermination of queers to be so "odious", why the fuck did you even show up at a prayer meeting sponsored by a cult that is working so hard to actualize such an "odious" reality? You are the President, so you could have gotten away with simply not showing up, thereby sending a weak indication that you actually do think what they are doing is odious. I mean, dude, I love free beers, and I fucking hate NASCAR, but I wouldn't describe NASCAR as odious. Creepy, odd, dull, and profoundly mindnumbing perhaps. But NASCAR fans aren't trying to orchestrate genocide, for fuck's sake. If, however, I was showing up at a bar that had a "free beer for rapists" night and going along with the program ("Dude, it was so hot, she was like, asking for it or whatever, can I have another beer?") until the media was forced to do a story on it, I doubt many people would look kindly on me if I continued to show up for the free beers while more or less going along with the program except to qualify my support for the event by saying that I thought rape was "odious". They wouldn't have to worry about it though, because unlike you, I wouldn't knowingly attend and support an event orchestrated by an organization working towards a goal I actually thought was odious, such as legalizing rape. If you think the extermination of queer and transgender people is so abhorrent, why did you show up, pray with the fuckers, and give an underwhelming sermon where you actually fucking said God's grace is revealed in American troops. Tell that to the orphans in Afghanistan who saw God's grace shatter their father's sternum with bullets. Also, is God's grace revealed in the tens of thousands of private mercenaries you've hired from companies including the company formerly known as Blackwater? If not, maybe you should use our taxes to pay to have all of their rifle sights inscribed with a Bible verse. That ought to do it. Just make sure you leave out that one verse that says something like "thou shalt not kill". That would be such a buzz kill.

(2) Why wasn't the execution of queers in Uganda "odious" to you back when you gave Rick Warren a presidential hand job of appreciation at your inauguration? Oh, right...the mainstream media wasn't reporting that connection, so you didn't have to pretend it bothered you. Dumb question. Just one more...

(3) Would you have shown up at a prayer meeting sponsored by Holocaust deniers or a cult of anti-Semites who are trying to pass legislation in....well, any country....to finish where Hitler left off? No? How come? I mean, you could always show up, denounce the group's goal as "odious", and then proceed to participate in the festivities. You seem to be getting a pass for doing just that when it comes to queer and transgender people. I think I know why you can bring yourself to tolerate the "odiousness" of a group that is fighting for the right to commit genocide against queers, while you couldn't do the same for a group that supported finishing off the Jews. I bet it has something to do with symbolism and which of your statements and actions symbolize the real Barry vs. which of your statements and actions are calculated, hollow symbols designed to get what you want.

There he is folks. Change you can fucking believe in.

Believe it.

Ok, I am too fucking tired to write anymore. Sorry if this was meandering and incoherent. Will edit it later.

123 civilians, 3 al Qaeda DRONED in January, 17 more dead today

fairleft — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:46:09 GMT

If the new administration is keenly interested in reversing the misfortunes of that region, it has to understand the uniqueness of every country and appreciate the untold harm inflicted on civilians by the US and other militaries. Only dialogue and truly respecting the sovereignty of Afghanistan and Pakistan can begin to stabilise the fractious situation.
-- Ramzy Baroud, May 14, 2009

U.S. drones killed 123 Pakistani civilians and three al Qaeda in January, the largest death toll ever for a single month. 17 more died today, some low-level militants, most civilians. Apparently the sharp increase in drone attacks is motivated by revenge, for the late December suicide attack that killed seven CIA drone-targeting experts in Afghanistan. All this in the context of the just-released Pentagon budget, which features a 75% increase in funding for drone production and operations.

What a moral low America has reached, to be doing what we are doing to Pakistan's innocent civilians. But the perp country's people and media ignore the crime because, after all, no Americans are dying. Admittedly, we seemingly have no control, so what is the point of protesting? So a quiet but ugly war guided by the lowest of motives, simple revenge, takes over, bullies against bullies, civilians be damned.

US drones killed 123 civilians, three al-Qaeda men in January
Monday, February 01, 2010
By Amir Mir
LAHORE: Afghanistan-based US predators carried out a record number of 12 deadly missile strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan in January 2010, of which 10 went wrong and failed to hit their targets, killing 123 innocent Pakistanis. The remaining two successful drone strikes killed three al-Qaeda leaders, wanted by the Americans.

more . . .

The rapid increase in the US drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan can be gauged from the fact that only two such strikes were carried out in January 2009, which killed 36 people. The highest number of drone attacks carried out in a single month in 2009 was six, which were conducted in December last year. . . .
The unprecedented rise in the predator strikes with the beginning of the year 2010 is being attributed to December 30, 2009 suicide bombing in the Khost area of Afghanistan bordering North Waziristan, which killed seven CIA agents. . . .

Today's toll is 17, from a massive attack on obscure, impoverished villages. Again, revenge seemed to be the motive, for shooting down a drone a few days ago. Imagine that, the audacity of shooting down a missile that is seeking to kill you?

17 die as drones rain 18 missiles on NWA
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
By Malik Mumtaz & Mushtaq Yusufzai
MIRAMSHAH/PESHAWAR: In the biggest attack so far by the American spy planes in the Pakistani tribal areas, the US drones on Tuesday rained a barrage of missiles on different locations of Dattakhel Tehsil of North Waziristan Agency (NWA), killing 17 people, including militants, and injuring several others.
Government officials in Miramshah, the main town of North Waziristan, said nine spy planes took part in the brazen attack, firing 18 missiles and causing heavy human loss.
They feared the death toll could rise as rescue work could not be started in some of the places due to fear of more missile strikes by the unmanned spy aircraft. Besides the militants, several villagers were said to be among the victims. The villagers came under attack from the drones while approaching the spot to help retrieve the bodies and the injured from the rubble of the collapsed houses. . . .
An intelligence official said on condition of anonymity that the drones mostly targeted small posts set up by the militants. He said it appeared the US forces in Afghanistan wanted to avenge the loss of their drone, which the militants had allegedly shot down in the same area a few days ago.
He said initial reports indicated that most of the people killed in Tuesday's missile strikes were either low-level militants or poor villagers. "I did not hear that any big name had died," he claimed. It was the biggest missile attack by the CIA-operated spy planes in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

Baroud in the quote at the top of this diary is right. And so is John Arquilla. The drone war is creating more war and hatred in Pakistan, plain and simple, and Obama has learned nothing except avoid American casualties from his predecessor.

. . . John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School who frequently advises the military, said, "The more the drone campaign works, the more it fails - as increased attacks only make the Pakistanis angrier at the collateral damage and sustained violation of their sovereignty."
If the United States expands the drone strikes beyond the lawless tribal areas to neighboring Baluchistan, as is under discussion, the backlash "might even spark a social revolution in Pakistan," Mr. Arquilla said.

And it will only get much worse. . . .

US plans 75% increase in drone operations
By Anwar Iqbal
Wednesday, 03 Feb, 2010
WASHINGTON: The US defence budget for 2011 seeks more funds to enhance drone operations by 75 per cent, citing its success in targeting militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal belt.
"With this funding, we will increase the unmanned Predator and Reaper orbits from 37 to 65, while enhancing our ability to process, exploit and disseminate information gathered by this game-changing technology," said Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen. . . .
On Monday afternoon, the Pentagon sent a $708 billion defence budget proposal to Congress, reflecting a shift in the US military strategy from conventional wars to counter-insurgency. . . .
Although the $3.8 trillion budget President Obama announced on Monday is the third budget in a row with a deficit of more than $1 trillion, it boosts the defence outlay by 3.4 per cent over the 2010 enacted level.

The following report indicates the Obama administration wants to double production of drones:

Obama's Budget Calls for Billions in New Spending for Drones
Tuesday 02 February 2010
by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report
. . . Aside from the size of the defense budget, another controversial aspect of it is what it will fund. More than $2 billion will be used to purchase unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, which the Obama administration has used increasingly over the past year to target suspected terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The drones, which the administration wants to double in production, have been blamed for a significant rise in civilian casualties. . . .
For the first time, according to The Los Angeles Times, the Air Force is proposing the purchase of more drones than combat aircraft and will double the production of the MQ-9 Reaper, "a bigger, more heavily armed version of the Predator drone, to 48. The Army will also buy 26 extended-range Predators."
"The expansion will allow the military to increase unmanned patrols - the number of planes in the air at once - to 65, up from its current limit of 37," The Los Angeles Times noted.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters Monday that the use of drones will continue to increase "even as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan eventually wind down."
"The more we have used them, the more we have identified their potential in a broader and broader set of circumstances," Gates said.
Spending on the Predator and Reaper drones will jump from $877.5 million in 2010 to $1.4 billion next year.

BTW, drone strikes had already set a record in 2009, Obama's first year a huge increase over the number of attacks in 2008. Change We Believe In?

US Killed 700 Civilians in Pakistan Drone Strikes in 2009
by Jason Ditz, January 02, 2010
On January 1, 2009, a US drone strike killed two senior al-Qaeda leaders, the first in what then President-elect Barack Obama had said would be a dramatic escalation of the aerial bombardment of Pakistan's tribal area.
And escalate it did. The US launched 44 distinct drone strikes in Pakistan in 2009, far more than in previous years. The pinnacle of America's drone achievements was in August, when they killed Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leader Baitullah Mehsud.
Much has been made of the successes, but while the strikes have been regular and they almost always are presented by Pakistan's intelligence community as having killed "suspects," the actual successes are few and far between, with only five confirmed kills of real militant leaders, and a handful of unconfirmed claims that usually haven't panned out.
The vast majority of the deaths, around 700 according to one estimate, have been innocent civilians. With such a massive civilian toll and so little to show for it, it is no wonder that Pakistani people have been up in arms over the continued strikes.