Showing posts with label CHENEY. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

HAS HOWDY DOODY LEFT THE BUILDING?

When Bush became President, I called my mother and told her that I thought the American people had elected “Howdy Doody” … yep, that’s right, you heard what I said … I said that the American people had elected a puppet.

Well, we now know that to be somewhat true. He was groomed for his role.*

Dick Cheney and George W. Bush however, we're co-presidents.**

**[Update 2010: Note: Shirley Anne Warshaw (Professor Political Science, Gettysburg College) did extensive research ... She called Bush and Cheney Co-Presidents.
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C-SPAN had Professor Warshaw on their program as a political science guest panelist discussing her research and at that time soon to be released book (originally aired November 22, 2008, and again 2009) ... I forgot to update this post]. Click HERE for the C-SPAN video.
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Fast forward, the American people fed up with the Bush/Cheney regime … were wooed by CHANGE and thought with the election of Barack Obama they got change.

Did we just get a "Howdy Doody"; is this the Obama/Emanuel administration with Rahm [or Geithner] being the person running the financial/business arm of the administration (just like Cheney)? How about who is running the social arm of the administration … who could that be? What about Commander in Chief ... we know it's the President, but who is whispering in the President's ear (the CIA perhaps)?

The American people hate Wall Street … that is not a small number of Americans, it’s most Americans. They are tired of living off refi’s and credit cards in order to live. So, instead of letting that old guard die, we reengage the status quo, give lip service to reform, and that’s it; and get this … the American people [who hate Wall Street] helped them; well, … not really, … we had no choice.

WALKING AWAY FROM CREDIT CARDS by Jim Kavanagh

HOMEOWNERSHIP, SHELTER OR BURDEN – the Economist
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OBAMA PLEDGES MORE BANK BAILOUTS, CUTS IN SOCIAL PROGRAMS by Tom Eley
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A.I.G. BALKS AT CLAIMS FROM JET DITCHING IN HUDSON by Mary Williams Walsh

It will be interesting to see if GM CEO pick, Edward Whitacre Jr. [former "old-school" AT&T executive, innovator and engineer] will turn GM into just a hybrid car producer, or will he diversify into something more innovative and a game-changer ... hi-speed rail, wind turbines and solar products. Most important, will the worker be the majority or near majority owner (the union workers), or will the rich and powerful get away with screwing the American Middle Class worker one more time).

The vast majority of young people, our future leaders, voted for CHANGE. These young people grew up not caring if you’re African American, Asian, Caucasian or whatever (well, there still is tension between "street Hispanics" and "street Blacks"). These young people could care less if you’re Gay or straight or Gays getting married (and for that matter, most Americans could care less if you’re Gay or straight; and I believe, most Americans don't care if Gays marry or serve openly in the military). So what does the social arm of the administration do? They defend the marriage act … yep, they defend "DOMA" and don't undo "DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL".

WIKI- DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE ACT

OBAMA’S DOMA DEFENSE UNACCEPTABLE by Paul Hogarth

Everyone in the world knows that the Bush/Cheney administration detained people indefinitely, in secret and tortured. The pictures, letters, etc have been around since 2003. We became a pariah and we helped the extremists recruit. So, what does the Obama/Rahm/Holder administration do … yep, they do a cover-up of the crooks … the very crooks that the world spit upon, that the world, and now most of the American people, abhor and want brought to justice.

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TORTURING DEMOCRACY –produced by Sherry Jones

TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE
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Maybe I'm misreading everything. Could there be something different brewing beneath what appears apparent? Maybe President Obama is making it look like he's business as usual with a liberal twist every now and then, or again I ask ... is there just the appearance of business as usual, and is his true CHANGE agenda coming soon? Maybe he just wants to get through HEALTH CARE REFORM first. Should we give him the benefit of the doubt?

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Is this the time to show who is boss? Is it Rahm, Holder or whoever, or is it President Obama? Just who is running the show ... or should we wait a while longer for "the benefit of the doubt"?
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*LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: THE REAL GEORGE W. BUSH by Stephen Pizzo, October 27, 2005

** "The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney" [Stanford Politics and Policy] by Shirley Anne Warshaw

Friday, May 22, 2009

THE RULE OF LAW AND MAKING VS POSING A THREAT

Yesterday I listened to the President’s address and some of Cheney’s address. The President was eloquent and addressed many of the concerns that Americans have regarding the detainees in GITMO.

Dick Cheney reiterated the lies he’s been trying to sell to the American people. He’s good at it … he’s done it for years.

Now comes the hard part … what President Obama didn’t do.
He said he would not put a stop to indefinitely holding people suspected (and I did say suspected) of crimes or being members of organizations that vow to kill Americans. The reason why they could not be brought to trial … the evidence was tainted or there simply was no evidence to prosecute them; but, we swear (cause intelligence – who never makes a mistake) say these people are a real threat to Americans.

I got to thinking. A husband hates his wife and her family; he tells his wife he is going to kill her, her mother, her father, her neighbors, her children … and everybody knows how he feels.
He even has a record of violence.

The wife and family go to the police and tell them what was said by the husband. Do we lock this guy up? And if we could, for how long?

A known pedophile gets out of jail. He says he still has urges; we tell him he can’t hang around children, but can we lock him up indefinitely?

The KKK hates Jews, Blacks, (probably Hispanics now) and wishes they were removed from the face of this earth. They have a history of torture and killing. They spew their venom as often as they can and they write books about why these racial groups must be removed from the face of the earth or at least the United States of America. Do we lock all these KKK members up?

How about the National Guard being sent in to take these KKK guys out? Do we do that?

A group of guys in another country hate Americans, wish they were dead and removed from the face of the earth and everybody knows it. Some have even killed Americans right here on our soil. Do we leave the United States and go to another country where we think this group is and lock up a bunch of people that may be part of this group? How about we torture and/or kill a few that we think is part of the group, and, by the way, a thousand or so innocent people who happen to be in the same vicinity get killed. Well, so what … that’s the cost of getting these guys who hate Americans and vow to kill Americans.

None of this is funny or to be taken lightly. These are serious discussions. They involve rights and liberties and rules of law. Is the "threat of violence" enough to detain you, and if so for how long?

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

DETAINEE TREATMENT ACT

Obama Endorses Indefinite Detention Without Trial for Some

Koh vs. Obama Administration on Indefinite Detention?

REPAIRING OUR HUMAN RIGHTS REPUTATION

MAKING VERSUS POSING A THREAT

CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS

OLBERMANN COMMENTS ON THE MAY 21, 2009 PRESIDENT'S AND CHENEY'S ADDRESS TO THE NATION

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY: A PARTY ENGAGED IN TREASONOUS BEHAVIOR OR JUST A PARTY OF "NO IDEAS", RADICALS AND INSTIGATORS?

The REPUBLICAN PARTY is still the Party of "NO"; the Party of CHENEY; the Party of RUSH; the Party of PALIN; the Party of BACHMANN; the Party of Rick Perry; and now the Party of "TEA", and where it has sunk (where it began with Nixon), the right-wing Party of Racists, radicals and dangerous people.

I could name a lot more "racist" or “demented” right-wing Republicans, but I don't want to spend my entire afternoon on Wikipedia and "Fixed" News (that's right, I said "Fixed"). I was going to name Bill O'Reilly ... but I really don't need him or his goons showing up at my door.

The Republican Party (whose current leadership is almost largely right-wing) was just about buried after the 2008 election.* What was never buried was the racist, hate-filled, conspiracy driven Republican playbook that was documented in Robert Parry’s February 25, 2009 article, “The GOP’s Anti-Obama Propaganda” (which I posted here on March 1, 2009)

Now racist people are in both the Republican and Democratic Party; however, one need only look at the Party membership to see that the Republican Party lacks diversity and inclusion. That kind of representation was ever prominent during the 2008 Republican campaign and convention.

After the election of President Obama, gun and ammunition sales exploded, and “hate-groups” went from 602 in year 2000 to 926 in 2008.**

Though the number of Republican Party members has dwindled, let us not take that group for granted.

Let’s fast forward to the “Tea Parties” and observe the context of those rallies. Very few if any people of color were at the “Tea Parties”.

There were radical, irrational rantings and signs about “socialism” [code for welfare] and President Obama’s citizenship [code for Muslim terrorist].

Since the President fulfilled his campaign promise to lower taxes for 95% of Americans, the Tea Party idea was always extremely suspect; and we need only look at the people pushing these “Tea parties” to see that it comes from the conservative right-wing who always vote Republican.

Further, we saw racist depictions of President Obama (on the Republican side) both before and after the election.

Rick Perry and other "so-called" prominent Texans want to secede from the United States which is absurd; and unlike “Armadillo Joe” who thinks we should let Texas secede; do we really want a bunch of radicals to go unchecked within our own borders? http://broadwaycarl.blogspot.com/2009/04/racism.html

See also article on Sarah Palin's husband , Todd: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26524024/

Maps of the 2008 US presidential election results:
*http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/

The Year in Hate: by David Holthouse:
**http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=1027
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Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

http://clevelandssecretclub.blogspot.com/2009/01/other-day-i-sent-email-to-boehner-or.html

http://www.theonion.com/content/infograph/fox_news_racism_intentional

http://www.blackstarnews.com/?c=135&a=4676

http://www.jackandjillpolitics.com/2009/04/the-rotting-racist-underbelly-of-the-tea-party-protests/

Thursday, March 26, 2009

CNN TRYING TO GRAB HEADLINES AND STIR UP TROUBLE WHILE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS STILL THE PARTY OF NO

CNN's viewership must be off, because why would they try to stir up trouble by saying America's patience may be wearing thin with President Obama? His administration has been around, what, about 65 days. Come on CNN do you really think Americans are buying into your ridiculous rantings?

Another headline for everyone .... Guess what? .... come on guess ..... ok I'll tell you

The REPUBLICAN PARTY is still the Party of "NO"; and now it's the Party of RUSH; the Party of CHENEY; and the Party AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

Bipartisanship? Forgive me, but who keeps saying "NO" to the President's very popular agenda and THE AMERICAN PEOPLE? Yep, you've got it ... the REPUBLICAN PARTY!

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GAP WIDENS BETWEEN THE HAVES AND HAVE NOTS

"72,000,000+ Americans (over half) earn $25,000 or less a year. Another 34,000,000+ earn between $25,000 and $45,000. The notion that everyone is feeling the pain of this recession equally is completely deceptive. Working and middle class Americans are feeling the brunt of this recession. You would think that after the worst crisis since the Great Depression things would be different today in Q1 of 2011. Yet nothing has changed and in fact, we have invigorated the too big to fail with our current government policies. This is a government built by Wall Street banks and for Wall Street banks. Don’t be surprised when the next crisis hits because nothing has changed."

From MyBudget360 :Source "Social Security" -

What "Free Trade" Has Cost The World | OurFuture.org, by Dave Johnson, March 14, 2011

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Excerpt: "Income VS Wealth

There are a few people who make hundreds of millions of income in a single year. Some people make more than $1 billion in a year But that is in a single year. If you make vast sums every year, after a while it starts to add up. (And then there is the story of inherited wealth, passed down and growing for generation after generation...)

Top 1% owns more than 90% of us combined. "In 2007, the latest year for which figures are available from the Federal Reserve Board, the richest 1% of U.S. households owned 33.8% of the nation’s private wealth. That’s more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent." (Also from the Working Group on Extreme Inequality)

400 people have as much wealth as half of our population. The combined net worth of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans in 2007: $1.5 trillion. The combined net worth of the poorest 50% of American households: $1.6 trillion."

9 Pictures That Expose This Country's Obscene Division of Wealth | Economy | AlterNet by Dave Johnson, February 13, 2011

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More GRITtv

Our Country Is Lost Believing in What It Sees on Screens, and We Are Going to Pay a Nasty Price for It

by Chris Hedges (article appeared on TruthDig "We do not shake ourselves awake quickly from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet. -

October 8, 2010 -

Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. She exacted divine punishment on arrogant mortals who believed they could defy the gods, turn themselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around them. The price of such hubris was almost always death.

Nemesis, related to the Greek word némein, means “to give what is due.” Our nemesis fast approaches. We will get what we are due. The staggering myopia of our corrupt political and economic elite, which plunder the nation’s wealth for financial speculation and endless war, the mass retreat of citizens into virtual hallucinations, the collapsing edifices around us, which include the ecosystem that sustains life, are ignored for a giddy self-worship. We stare into electronic screens just as Narcissus, besotted with his own reflection, stared into a pool of water until he wasted away and died.

We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We believe that money, rather than manufactured products and goods, is real. We believe in the myth of inevitable human moral and material progress. We believe that no matter how much damage we do to the Earth or our society, science and technology will save us. And as temperatures on the planet steadily rise, as droughts devastate cropland, as the bleaching of coral reefs threatens to wipe out 25 percent of all marine species, as countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh succumb to severe flooding, as we poison our food, air and water, as we refuse to confront our addiction to fossil fuels and coal, as we dismantle our manufacturing base and plunge tens of millions of Americans into a permanent and desperate underclass, we flick on a screen and are entranced.

We confuse the electronic image, a reflection back to us of ourselves, with the divine. We gawk at “reality” television, which of course is contrived reality, reveling in being the viewer and the viewed. True reality is obliterated from our consciousness. It is the electronic image that informs and defines us. It is the image that gives us our identity. It is the image that tells us what is attainable in the vast cult of the self, what we should desire, what we should seek to become and who we are. It is the image that tricks us into thinking we have become powerful—as the popularity of video games built around the themes of violence and war illustrates—while we have become enslaved and impoverished by the corporate state. The electronic image leads us back to the worship of ourselves. It is idolatry. Reality is replaced with electronic mechanisms for preening self-presentation—the core of social networking sites such as Facebook—and the illusion of self-fulfillment and self-empowerment. And in a world unmoored from the real, from human limitations and human potential, we inevitably embrace superstition and magic. This is what the worship of images is about. We retreat into a dark and irrational fear born out of a cavernous ignorance of the real. We enter an age of technological barbarism.

To those entranced by images, the world is a vast stage on which they are called to enact their dreams. It is a world of constant action, stimulation and personal advancement. It is a world of thrills and momentary ecstasy. It is a world of ceaseless movement. It makes a fetish of competition. It is a world where commercial products and electronic images serve as a pseudo-therapy that caters to feelings of alienation, inadequacy and powerlessness. We may be locked in dead-end jobs, have no meaningful relationships and be confused about our identities, but we can blast our way to power holding a little control panel while looking for hours at a screen. We can ridicule the poor, the ignorant and the weak all day long on trash-talk shows and reality television shows. We are skillfully made to feel that we have a personal relationship, a false communion, with the famous—look at the outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson. We have never met those we adore. We know only their manufactured image. They appear to us on screens. They are not, at least to us, real people. And yet we worship and seek to emulate them.

In this state of cultural illusion any description of actual reality, because it does not consist of the happy talk that pollutes the airwaves from National Public Radio to Oprah, is dismissed as “negative” or “pessimistic.” The beleaguered Jeremiahs who momentarily stumble into our consciousness and in a desperate frenzy seek to warn us of our impending self-destruction are derided because they do not lay out easy formulas that permit us to drift back into fantasy. We tell ourselves they are overreacting. If reality is a bummer, and if there are no easy solutions, we don’t want to hear about it. The facts of economic and environmental collapse, now incontrovertible, cannot be discussed unless they are turned into joking banter or come accompanied with a neat, pleasing solution, the kind we are fed at the conclusion of the movies, electronic games, talk shows and sitcoms, the kind that dulls our minds into passive and empty receptacles. We have been conditioned by electronic hallucinations to expect happy talk. We demand it.

We confuse this happy talk with hope. But hope is not about a belief in progress. Hope is about protecting simple human decency and demanding justice. Hope is the belief, not necessarily grounded in the tangible, that those whose greed, stupidity and complacency have allowed us to be driven over a cliff shall one day be brought down. Hope is about existing in a perpetual state of rebellion, a constant antagonism to all centers of power. The great moral voices, George Orwell and Albert Camus being perhaps two of the finest examples, describe in moving detail the human suffering we ignore or excuse. They understand that the greatest instrument for moral good is the imagination. The ability to perceive the pain and suffering of another, to feel, as King Lear says, what wretches feel, is a more powerful social corrective than the shelves of turgid religious and philosophical treatises on human will. Those who change the world for the better, who offer us hope, have the capacity to make us step outside of ourselves and feel empathy.

A print-based culture, as writer Neil Postman pointed out, demands rationality. The sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” But our brave new world of images dispenses with these attributes because the images do not require them to be understood. Communication in the image-based culture is not about knowledge. It is about the corporate manipulation of emotions, something logic, order, nuance and context protect us against. Thinking, in short, is forbidden. Entertainment and spectacle have become the aim of all human endeavors, including politics, which is how Stephen Colbert, playing his television character, can be permitted to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Campaigns are built around the manufactured personal narratives of candidates, who function as political celebrities, rather than policies or ideas. News reports have become soap operas and mini-dramas revolving around the latest celebrity scandal.

Colleges and universities, which view students as customers and suck obscene tuition payments and loans out of them with the tantalizing promise of high-paying corporate jobs, have transformed themselves into resorts and theme parks. In this new system of education almost no one fails. Students become “brothers” or “sisters” in the atavistic, tribal embrace of eating clubs, fraternities or sororities. School spirit and school branding is paramount. Campus security keeps these isolated enclaves of privilege secure. And 90,000-seat football stadiums, along with their millionaire coaches, dominate the campus. It is moral leprosy.

The role of knowledge and art, as the ancient Greeks understood, is to create ekstasis, which means standing outside one’s self to give our individual life and struggle meaning and perspective. The role of art and scholarship is to transform us as individuals, not entertain us as a group. It is to nurture this capacity for understanding and empathy. Art and scholarship allow us to see the underlying structures and assumptions used to manipulate and control us. And this is why art, like intellectual endeavor, is feared by the corporate elite as subversive. This is why corporations have used their money to deform universities into vocational schools that spit out blinkered and illiterate systems managers. This is why the humanities are withering away.

The vast stage of entertainment that envelops our culture is intended to impart the opposite of ekstasis. Mass entertainment plays to the basest and crudest instincts of the crowd. It conditions us to have the same aspirations and desires. It forces us to speak in the same dead clichés and slogans. It homogenizes human experience. It wallows in a cloying nostalgia and sentimentalism that foster historical amnesia. It turns the Other into a cartoon or a stereotype. It prohibits empathy because it prohibits understanding. It denies human singularity and uniqueness. It assures us that we all have within us the ability, talent or luck to become famous and rich. It forms us into a lowing and compliant herd. We have been conditioned to believe—defying all the great moral and philosophical writers from Socrates to Orwell—that the aim of life is not to understand but to be entertained. If we do not shake ourselves awake from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet we will experience the awful and deadly retribution of the gods."

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Friday, May 22, 2009

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Thursday, March 26, 2009

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9/2012 VIDEO TAKES 30 SECONDS TO LOAD AFTER CLICKING ON THE PLAY ARROW - ALSO SEEN ON VIDEO SITE

BILL CLINTON AT DNC 2012

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TED NUGENT EXPOSED! DID EVERYTHING HE COULD NOT TO SERVE IN THE MILITARY

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GOP WAR ON WOMEN

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JOE SCARBOROUGH - RE: TAVIS SMILEY'S POVERTY TOUR SERIES -OCTOBER 10, 2011

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