anti-Bush News Archives of Bush Treason and Treachery

On Accordingly Conducting A Presidency, or George Bush on How His Giant Crap Sandwich Doesn't Stink

2011-11-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush gave a speech in Wichita, in which he said that he "conducted [his] Presidency accordingly."

Indeed.

Congress agreed to attack Iraq because they were lied to by Bush and Dick "deficits don't matter" Cheney. The UN voted on that resolution to use force because they were lied to by Colon Powell, who at least had the good sense to apologize.

Anyone willing to defend the Iraq war (which will cost us trillions once we've paid for all the wounded soldier's health care) at this point is an ass. George W. Bush will die believing his own bullshit.

Of course, the Iraq war is just a symptom of the Imperial Bush Presidency and it's massive expansion of unitary executive power, which, of course, no president wants to give up once it's been grabbed. So blaming Obama for using tools that Bush left behind completely ignores the fact that it was Bush who expanded the powers. Or, more realistically, Cheney.

Also, as an Obama voter who will vote strategically for him again, if only to stop people like Bush and Cheney from doing more damage, I'm most upset by the fact that there have been no prosecutions of the Bush Cabal for their admitted ordering of torture in violation of US and International law.

Bush and Cheney had a unique way of ignoring anything awful that might happen, especially if there was some way for their side (the plutocrats) to profit from it. They ignored warnings about Bin Laden before 9-11, and their friends and donors got rich building up the Industrial Military/Intelligence/Security Complex that, of course, can't be cut by a Democrat lest they look weak on defense. So, talk about your extortion.

They ignored the housing bubble (after complaining bitterly about the busted tech bubble Clinton left them with), and in fact fed it steroids by staffing regulatory and enforcement agencies with vampires in charge of the blood banks, and then they bailed all their buddies out with TARP and huge, practically no-interest loans from the Fed.

Bush ignored Katrina. He ignored the environment. He ignored or exacerbated problems in the economy, education, the environment, infrastructure, and just about everything else.

In short, Bush was a disaster. Which, of course works great for the disaster capitalist class that cleans up by taking something that works perfectly well, screwing it up, and selling off the pieces, then tapping pension funds to finance their own golden parachutes. The fact that Bush can speak anywhere without occupy protesters showing up just proves how Republicans taking a big crap on the National Mall and then blaming Obama for it has played out just fine in Wichita.

Bush was a Bigger Spender and Borrower than Obama

2011-07-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

Republicans hate facts. That's why they ignore things like this.

Federal spending ('outlays' in budget jargon) is expected to equal 24.1 percent of the nation's gross domestic product in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. The figure was 25 percent in fiscal year 2009, highest since 1945.

The U.S. is borrowing about 36 cents of every dollar spent so far this year. It borrowed 37 cents on the dollar last year, and 40 cents in fiscal 2009.

Fiscal 2009, in case you're factually challenged, was George W. Bush's budget.

George W. Bush Has a Rich History of Symbolic Gestures

2011-07-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

I can't think of a better metaphor (for their unwavering feeling of self-satisfaction despite 8 years of disaster capitalism that Cheney, Inc., unleashed on America) than George W Bush, along with thousands of his fellow Texans, setting the world record for most people wearing sunglasses at night.

Every senior member of the warmongering, economy wrecking, environment poisoning "administration" that ran amok after Cheney's coronation--by the five crooked conservative justices of the Supreme Court--should be arrested and sitting in the Hague for war crimes. That their deranged, vicious mascot can sit in the dark and surround himself with more dark is testament to his will to spend every last day of his life not feeling guilty for this shit.

Anyone who has not yet apologized for their support of George W. Bush should be ashamed of themselves. I'm sure you'll trip over something (WMD?) in that self-imposed darkness soon enough.

Reasoning in Public

2011-06-18T11:37:00.000-07:00

Ret'd. CIA Official Alleges Bush White House Used Agency to "Get" Cole:

"After the Valerie Plame affair, it seemed clear that there was nothing those people wouldn’t stoop to. You wonder how many critics were effectively “destroyed.” It is sad that a politics of personal destruction was the response by the Bush White House to an attempt of a citizen to reason in public about a matter of great public interest."

Reasoning in public is the one thing the Republicans are most scared of.

The Rapture is Coming! The Rapture is Coming!

2011-05-14T16:41:00.001-07:00

How can we run a country when 42%, including the last president, believe there's no point in investing in the future?

in reference to: Will Christ return May 21? | ajc.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

9-11 Happened Because George W Bush Let It

2011-05-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

Daily Kos: A tale of two presidents: Bush, Obama and Osama bin Laden

I'm going to copy and paste a huge chunk of that post from Daily Kos. Any Republican who ever says Bush and Cheney were tough on terror should be held down and forced to listen to these points, although being forced to listen to the truth about their hero president might constitute torture, which I am against. The bottom line: Bush could have prevented 9-11, but didn't. The Bush administration's laziness and incompetence allowed the attack to happen.

Just a month before the 9/11 attacks, while on a month long vacation, Bush was personally handed a presidential daily briefing entitled:
Bin Laden determined to strike in US.
With characteristic intelligence and class, Bush responded with the words:
All right. You've covered your ass, now.
And went fishing.
But Bush wasn't the only member of his administration to blow off warnings, and ignore the threat of terrorism. Indeed, his Attorney General, John Ashcroft, revealed his own lack of concern just a day before the attacks:
In his final budget request for the fiscal year 2003 submitted on Sept. 10 to the budget director, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the attorney general called for spending increases in 68 programs, none of which directly involved counterterrorism. Upgrading the F.B.I.'s computer system, one of the areas in which he sought an increase, is relevant to combating terrorism, though Mr. Ashcroft did not defend it on that ground.
But in his Sept. 10 submission to the budget office, Mr. Ashcroft did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators.
Mr. Ashcroft proposed cuts in 14 programs. One proposed $65 million cut was for a program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants for equipment, including radios and decontamination suits and training to localities for counterterrorism preparedness.
And Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reacted similarly, less than a week before that:
When Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who was then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, sought to transfer money to counterterrorism from the missile defense program, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sent a letter on Sept. 6, 2001, saying he would urge Mr. Bush to veto the measure. Mr. Levin nonetheless pushed the measure through the next day on a party-line vote.
And former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke had this to say about National Security AdviserCondoleezza Rice:
...I believe it was, George Tenet called me and said, "I don't think we're getting the message through. These people aren't acting the way the Clinton people did under similar circumstances." And I suggested to Tenet that he come down and personally brief Condi Rice, that he bring his terrorism team with him. And we sat in the national security adviser's office. And I've used the phrase in the book to describe George Tenet's warnings as "He had his hair on fire." He was about as excited as I'd ever seen him. And he said, "Something is going to happen."
Now, when he said that in December 1999 to the national security adviser, at the time Sandy Berger, Sandy Berger then held daily meetings throughout December 1999 in the White House Situation Room, with the FBI director, the attorney general, the head of the CIA, the head of the Defense Department, and they shook out of their bureaucracies every last piece of information to prevent the attacks. And we did prevent the attacks in December 1999. Dr. Rice chose not to do that.
Indeed:
We know, for example, that then National Security Adviser Rice was warned repeatedly in 2001 about an imminent al-Qaeda attack against the U.S., but, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, she simply didn't believe that a cave dweller like Osama bin Laden could be that much of a threat. She was warned by the outgoing Clintonite Sandy Berger, in January 2001. She was warned by the White House counterterrorism scold Richard Clarke. And now, with Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, and subsequent Washington Post reports, we've been reminded that cia Director George Tenet warned Rice on July 10, 2001, that "the system was blinking red," meaning that there could be "multiple, simultaneous" al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. interests in the coming weeks or months.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and even Bush himself later made it clear:
The former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Hugh Shelton, said the Bush administration pushed terrorism "farther to the back burner". And in a sympathetic portrait of the young administration, Bush at War, the president himself told the author, Bob Woodward, that he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about going after Osama bin Laden.
It was clear just a month into the Bush Presidency:
But when it comes to fighting terrorism, administration officials say the United States has no new initiatives to offer. Top antiterrorism officials in the U.S. government tell NEWSWEEK that Bush and his lieutenants have yet to put forth a counterterrorism plan. So far at least, the Bush team has kept on Clinton's counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke.
There had been explicit warnings even during the transition:
One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. With some bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had been helped by the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to avoid a repeat of that experience, he had set up a series of 10 briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.
Berger attended only one of the briefings—the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. "I'm coming to this briefing," he says he told Rice, "to underscore how important I think this subject is." Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject."
But the Bush team was so obliviously sanguine that:
Though Predator drones spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000, the Bush administration did not fly the unmanned planes over Afghanistan during its first eight months and was still refining a plan to use one armed with missiles to kill the al-Qaida leader when Sept. 11 unfolded, current and former U.S. officials say.
And as for Cheney himself:
Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the recommendations issued in the January report by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism -- which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying -- while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.
The Hart-Rudman Commission had specifically recommended that the issue of terrorism was such a threat it needed far more than FEMA's attention.
Before the White House decided to go in its own direction, Congress seemed to be taking the commission's suggestions seriously, according to Hart and Rudman. "Frankly, the White House shut it down," Hart says. "The president said 'Please wait, we're going to turn this over to the vice president. We believe FEMA is competent to coordinate this effort.' And so Congress moved on to other things, like tax cuts and the issue of the day."
"We predicted it," Hart says of Tuesday's horrific events. "We said Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers -- that's a quote (from the commission's Phase One Report) from the fall of 1999."
Let's highlight that:
Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism -- which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying -- while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.
The Hart-Rudman Commission had specifically recommended that the issue of terrorism was such a threat it needed far more than FEMA's attention.
Not only did the entire Bush Administration ignore multiple screaming warnings, but Cheney himself was tasked with studying the risk of domestic terrorism! And even though Bush himself said he'd periodically review the issue:
Neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place.
Bush and Cheney. Both. Both given specific warnings. Both claiming they would study the risks. Neither doing so. Their entire administration failing in every possible way, despite numerous specific and personal warnings. Despite numerous specific and personal warnings that kept coming, right up until the days before the September 11 attacks. And after the attacks we had this:
The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.
And as Meteor Blades pointed out, last week, just half a year later, we had Bush saying this:
And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.

Playing the Asshole Card

2011-05-07T13:04:00.001-07:00

Andrew Card is, of course, a Republican. Which means he's an asshole and a hypocrite. To suggest that Obama has "pounded his chest a little too much" when, in fact, Obama has been cool as a cucumber through this whole thing, is just preposterous. Strapping on a cod piece and a flight suit, landing on an aircraft carrier, and strutting around in front of a "mission accomplished" banner is what I would call chest thumping extraordinaire.

Going to ground zero to lay a wreath (note the lack of bullhorn or even a speech), meeting with first responders, and going to thank the troops that did the mission: all restrained and fitting things for a commander in chief to do. Not chest pounding.

Claiming that you're going to get bin Laden "dead or alive" and then giving up on him to the point of shutting down the CIA unit that was chasing him, well, that's the kind of strutting hypocrisy that only George W. Bush and his sycophants could manage.

in reference to:

"SPIEGEL: But now President Obama is the big winner… Card: I think he has pounded his chest a little too much. He can take pride in it, but he does not need to show it so much."
- Interview with Former Bush Adviser Andrew Card: 'Obama Has Pounded His Chest a Little Too Much' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International (view on Google Sidewiki)

Deflating the Manichean Paranoia Egos

2011-05-07T09:05:00.001-07:00

This right wing egotistical tough-guy fetish applies to more than just torture. From unilateral invasions to massive tax cuts for the rich, the Bushies were all about being the tough guys who could do what needed to be done, while liberals were cowering wimps who just wanted to let gay people marry.

This all fits into the whole Manichean Paranoia that afflicts the right. Their John Wayne mentality infects their every thought process, and leads to some really awful results, which they then, of course, deny had anything to do with them.

You're either with us, or against us, and laws and facts don't matter. In fact, laws and facts are for sissies.

Nobody lays out the truth of this right wing mentality better than Steven Colbert. Without him I would have lost the ability to pay attention to their giant, destructive egos years ago.

And nobody proves that pragmatism and nuance is the better methodology for a country than Obama. He proves that the world is not just black or white in a way that deflates their egos and, frankly, that makes them crazy with Obama Derangement Syndrome.

in reference to:

"From day one of the War on Terror (TM), it was clear that the Bush people reveled in the notion that they were tough guys, willing to Do What Needs to be Done. They were all wannabe Kiefer Sutherlands. Far from showing qualms about suspending the rule of law and using torture to extract information, they obviously enjoyed the idea that they were willing to go all the way, unlike those wimpy liberals."
- Shadow of the Torturers - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

The Bush Administration Let bin Laden Get Away on Purpose

2011-05-04T11:35:00.001-07:00

Now here's a great article full of facts that, of course, won't matter to Republicans. Not only did senior level Bush Administration officials like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney ignore warnings that could have prevented 9-11, they actually allowed bin Laden to get out of Afghanistan. They had no plan for cutting off his escape routes, Bush himself turned down offers from the Taliban for having bin Laden turned over to us, and the Bushies just let bin Laden walk away from Tora Bora.

Why? Because from the moment Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court, all the Bushies cared about was attacking Iraq.

Facts didn't matter to the Bushies then, and they still don't now. And to hear all these Republicans today claiming that Bush deserves credit for bin Laden's killing is sickening. The exact opposite is true. Bush deserves the blame for not stopping 9-11 in the first place, and for letting bin Laden get away afterwards. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

Facts matter.

in reference to:

"Rumsfeld and the second-ranking official at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, had dismissed CIA warnings of an al Qaeda terrorist attack against the United States in the summer of 2001, and even after 9/11 had continued to question the CIA's conclusion that bin Laden and al Qaeda were behind the attacks. Cheney and Rumsfeld were determined not to allow a focus on bin Laden to interfere with their plan for a U.S. invasion of Iraq to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime."
- U.S. Refusal of 2001 Taliban Offer Gave bin Laden a Free Pass - IPS ipsnews.net (view on Google Sidewiki)

GWB on UBL: "I am truly not that concerned about him."—3/13/02

2011-05-02T10:15:00.001-07:00

George Bush let UBL get away at Tora Bora. He failed to find him for the rest of his Presidency. John McCain said he would not unilaterally attack in Pakistan. Obama said he would. Credit here goes to Obama, and Republican liars can suck on that.

The Washington Times is a bullshit organization that lies for Republicans. They are, of course, going to try to credit George Bush for getting Usama Bin Laden. The facts, which Republicans don't care about, are that GW Bush blew the chance to get Usama, and then just blew it off for the rest of his presidency. Here are some quotes from Bush himself on the matter:

"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him." — 9/13/01

"I want justice...There's an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive,'" —9/17/01

"...Secondly, he is not escaping us. This is a guy, who, three months ago, was in control of a county [sic]. Now he's maybe in control of a cave. He's on the run. Listen, a while ago I said to the American people, our objective is more than bin Laden. But one of the things for certain is we're going to get him running and keep him running, and bring him to justice. And that's what's happening. He's on the run, if he's running at all. So we don't know whether he's in cave with the door shut, or a cave with the door open -- we just don't know...."—Crawford TX, 12/28/01

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."—3/13/02

"I am truly not that concerned about him."—3/13/02

"I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."—3/13/02

"Uhh—Gosh, I —don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those, uhh, exaggerations." — Tempe, AZ, 10/13/2004

So, yeah. George W. Bush did not make "getting Bin Laden a top priority." The Washington Times, as usual, is full of shit.

in reference to:

"Former President George W. Bush, who made getting bin Laden a top priority of his U.S.-led war on terrorism said in a statement: “The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.”"
- Getting bin Laden was top U.S. goal since 9/11 - Washington Times (view on Google Sidewiki)

Mostly Bush's Debt

2011-05-01T16:36:00.001-07:00

Furthermore, Obama's share of the debt wouldn't exist if Bush hadn't ruined the economy.

in reference to:

"All told, Obama-era choices account for about $1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for more than $7 trillion and are a major contributor to the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate."
- Running in the red: How the U.S., on the road to surplus, detoured to massive debt - The Washington Post (view on Google Sidewiki)

Karl Rove is a Traitor and a Hypocrite

2011-04-21T11:03:00.001-07:00

He outed an undercover CIA officer and never had to pay a price for that crime. But these days, Karl is busy spreading his bullshit in another area where he is a blatant hypocrite: government debt.

In his article today in Murdoch's WSJ, Rove advocates encumbering a debt ceiling increase with "tough spending and deficit caps." Of course, when his hero GW Bush, who blew the surplus and created most of the debt we have today, needed to have the debt ceiling increased, there were no such encumberences. In fact, the GOP voted to raise the debt ceiling 19 times under Bush.

Why didn't they encumber those debt ceiling raises with spending and deficit caps? Because Karl Rove is a hypocrite. And a traitor.

in reference to:

"For this fight, President Barack Obama's strategy is three-fold. First, warn of catastrophic consequences if the debt ceiling isn't raised by early July when the Treasury Department runs out of fiscal tricks to keep from breaching the limit. Second, demand a "clean" debt ceiling increase, unencumbered by the tough spending and deficit caps that some congressional Republicans want to strap on the measure. Finally, blame the GOP for holding our economy hostage as often as possible."
- Karl Rove: How Republicans Can Win the Debt Limit Fight - WSJ.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Bush discusses economy at Dallas conference - BusinessWeek

2011-04-13T11:12:00.000-07:00

Bush discusses economy at Dallas conference - BusinessWeek: "The George W. Bush Institute has cited reaching 4 percent as one of its top goals. The U.S. economy has grown an average of about 3.5 percent a year since the 1950s."

US average GDP during Bush's presidency was 2.5%. Now he's talking about how the magic of tax cuts for the rich can get us to 4% growth! He left the economy in shambles. Job creation under Bush was dismal. The deficit exploded.

The U.S. national debt grew significantly from 2001 to 2008, both in dollars terms and relative to the size of the economy (GDP),[1] due to a combination of tax cuts and wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Anyone who would attend a conference to listen to GW Bush talk about the economy is an idiot. Tax cuts! Magic Ponies! Bust unions! Trickle down!

The only thing that trickles down from these Galtian overlords is the piss they're spraying on the poor and middle class. Take that, you dirty fucking hippies!

No Apologies

2011-02-08T14:37:00.001-08:00

Mass murderers are rarely remorseful.

in reference to:

"Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld continued his reappearance to the media world for his new book Known or Unknown: A Memoir. And he continued to defend his decisions on Iraq with little to no regrets."
- Rumsfeld: Still No Apologies For Iraq | TPMDC (view on Google Sidewiki)

What's the penalty for an American who openly admits to torture?

2011-02-06T12:46:00.001-08:00

Travel restrictions.

in reference to:

"Former President George W. Bush has canceled a visit to Switzerland, where he was to address a Jewish charity gala, due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture, rights groups said on Saturday."
- Bush's Swiss visit off after complaints on torture | Reuters (view on Google Sidewiki)

Lift rug, sweep under

2011-01-24T16:13:00.000-08:00

Via:

A 118-page report issued Monday by the little-known Office of Special Counsel cites numerous violations of the Hatch Act by the Bush-era White House Office of Political Affairs. The report concludes that federal taxpayers footed the bill for improper activities that were intended to advance Republican political candidates.

A Big Negative for the Supreme Court

2011-01-21T09:09:00.001-08:00

As far as negatives for the Supreme Court go, it's hard to beat the appointment of George W. Bush as President. Allowing unlimited money into political races (Citizens United) comes in a close second. Compared to these, having the Court's right wing not attend the SOU Address is barely a blip on the wingnut radar.

Maybe Scalia will go hunting with Dick Cheney instead... And Alito can stay home and mouth off to the television.

in reference to:

"“If things devolve to where it looks like an implicit indication of support or non-support for whoever the current president may be, that’s a big negative for the court.”"
- Roberts Decision on Attending Obama `Pep Rally' to Send Message - Bloomberg (view on Google Sidewiki)

A choice about how to live...

2011-01-18T07:42:00.001-08:00

I'm sure the families of the thousands of people who died because Dick Cheney wanted to attack Iraq would love to have the choices about extending life that Dick Cheney has.

Just the thought that he could someday take a heart ahead of someone who truly deserves it sickens me.

in reference to:

"So I'll have to make a decision at some point whether or not I want to go for a transplant."
- Cheney may some day need heart transplant - The Oval: Tracking the Obama presidency (view on Google Sidewiki)

Bird Hunting Lawyers Beware

2011-01-04T20:20:00.001-08:00

Lookout, Cheney's hunting again!

in reference to:

"Mr. Cheney, as he did at several holiday receptions in Washington, chatted about his new pump. At one cocktail party, he even opened his coat jacket to show it off. While Mr. Cheney is noticeably thinner — his trademark stiff, one-sided grin now shows up on a markedly leaner face — he is returning, associates say, to his old life, including hunting and socializing."
- With New Heart Pump, Cheney Slowly Resumes Old Life - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

All you Bush lovers should suck on this

2010-12-29T06:54:00.001-08:00

This is by far the best take down of Decision Points I've seen. If you're a Bush lover, this might just be too much truth to take all at once. You might want to go to bed early. If, like me, you realize that Bush was a disaster of historic proportions, you'll want to cherish every word of this, even though it will bring back that slight nausea you felt for 8 years.

in reference to:

"A pup in a valley of alpha males, inadequate compared to Dad, humiliated by Mother, he classically became a bully to compensate: an ass-brander, noted for what he calls verbal ‘needling’; a boss who cussed out his subordinates and invented demeaning nicknames for everyone around him; a president who taunted terrorists, most of them imaginary, and challenged them to ‘bring it on’."
- LRB · Eliot Weinberger · ‘Damn right,’ I said (view on Google Sidewiki)

Bush blows it again

2010-11-18T11:13:00.001-08:00

The Ghailani verdict proves that GW Bush was a bungling idiot who followed Cheney's lead, which led to us being unable to use evidence against a terrorist. Had this been done right from the start, we would have gotten more convictions on this guy. Instead we had a bunch of people who thought they were above the law--that they could torture people and get away with it. Oh, wait, they did. But now we have to pay the price.

Rule of law, folks.

in reference to:

"there was a lag of over six years between Ghailani’s apprehension and his trial—that resulted from a political decision. During that time, two key witnesses for the government died, undermining their case. So it’s clear this case was not handled in the best or most efficient way, but the blame for that rests with the Bush team and not their successors."
- The Verdict on Ghailani—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine) (view on Google Sidewiki)

Talk about your takedowns

2010-11-10T08:26:00.001-08:00

Like a slow-motion car wreck, I just can't take my eyes off the fabulous take-downs of GW Bush that have been scorching the presses since Decision Points came out. This piece, though, really hits the dry drunk on the nose.

His obliviousness to the contradictions in his own logic--if one can really call it that--make me want to scream in his face, but what could I scream that he would understand? He wouldn't get it if you branded it on his ass.

Maybe that's the ultimate insult from this man. You could make him read this critique and he would just sit there with a blank stare, not really understanding any of it. It's like trying to be mad at a retarded child.

in reference to:

"His paramount distress over Iraq is not over the loss of life, civilian and military, but how that banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" on the aircraft carrier came to make him look naive and vainglorious. He reveals his shallowness and vapidity with these reflections in the most crystalline of clarity, and hasn't a notion he is doing so."
- Matthew Norman: How did this wastrel ever find his way to the White House? - Matthew Norman, Commentators - The Independent (view on Google Sidewiki)

Bush Wrote a Book!

2010-11-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

I've been sickened by Bush for years now, and here he is again to put me off food for weeks. First he admits to committing a war crime ("Damn right") when ordering waterboarding. Then he calls Scooter Libby a loyal American (outing CIA agents used to be called treason). And now he says, hey, Olmert wanted me to bomb Syria but I said no. Small favors.

So, I'd been thinking of ways to encourage people to deal with Bush's book, and today I stumbled on Bill's Cheers and Jeers, which hits the nail on the head.

A Brief Publisher's Message

Dear Reader,
Tomorrow, November 9, 2010, we are officially releasing former president George W. Bush's new book, Decision Points, and we would like to make the following request:
> Please do not take copies off the shelf, open them to a random page, insert a quantity of spit, nasal discharge or chewing gum, slam them shut and put them back on the shelf.
> Please do not draw horns on Mr. Bush's head---be they a ram's, a goat's or Satan's. Please also no forked tails or thought-bubbles that say "Heckuva Job."
> Please do not throw the book to the ground and stomp on it while yelling, "You suck!"
> Please do not knock over the bookcase on which Decision Points is displayed, as this could result in a domino effect on the other bookcases and cause damage and/or injury to other customers.
> Please do not attempt to move copies of the book from the Non-fiction section of the store to the Humor or Fantasy sections.
> Please do not whip out a Sharpie and add "Awesome book---if properly shredded" to the list of testimonial blurbs on the back cover.
We know you're upset at how badly he screwed you over, but please: let's be civil.
Thank you,
Your Friends at Crown Publishing
P.S. Democrats, this letter applies to you, too.

Do these people even know about Pat Tillman?

2010-10-17T15:11:00.001-07:00

I don't think the Republicans who glorify Tillman even know about the man, much less the shame behind his death: Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld covered up the facts surrounding Tillman's death, and yet Republicans keep milking Tillman's patriotism for every last dollar and vote they can get. This is particularly galling when they mix war and God.

in reference to:

"“He’s not with God, he’s fucking dead,” asserted Mr Tillman. “Thanks for your thoughts but he’s fucking dead.” Mr Tillman, who has a low tolerance for lies was clearly offended by the sentiments, stating that his deceased brother “was not religious.”"
- Propaganda Tool Sarah Palin Uses Pat Tillman to Glorify War (view on Google Sidewiki)

So many weren't

2010-10-14T08:12:00.001-07:00

Can't help but think of all the people that weren't so lucky as to survive Dick Cheney's attack. This is why I don't say the pledge; there is no justice for all.

in reference to:

"The lawyer shot five years ago by then vice-president Dick Cheney told the The Washington Post Thursday that his injuries from the hunting accident were more extensive than revealed at the time."
- Man shot by Cheney 'lucky' to escape death - U.S. news - Life - msnbc.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

The Pro-Bush Supreme Court Strikes Again

2010-10-12T11:27:00.001-07:00

I remember hearing Republicans say that this is a pro-speech court. Ha. Apparently it's only free speech if you're a corporation.

The Bush Five still have their lips planted firmly on Bush's flight-suit pants.

in reference to: Justices Turn Down Appeal Over Speech Ejections - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Bush Did Not Support The Troops

2010-09-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

Laurence Lewis created this handy list that proves that, contrary to Obama's statement that George W Bush supported the troops, he did not...

Overused and over-extended.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: By the middle of 2005, Stop-Loss policy had prevented at least 50,000 troops from leaving the military when their service was scheduled to end.
USA Today: Multiple deployments were adding to the troops' stress.
CNN: In April 2007, tours of duty were extended from 12 to 15 months.
New York Times: Republicans killed Democratic Senator Jim Webb's attempt to give troops more down time between deployments.
Associated Press: Deployed single parents were having to fight to retain custody of their children.
International Herald Tribune: The bipartisan National Governors Association warned Bush that use of National Guard troops for his Iraq escalation was overburdening already overburdened units, and undermined the Guard's ability "to respond to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, forest fires and other emergencies."
CBS News: To accommodate Bush's Iraq escalation schedule, two Army combat brigades had to skip their planned desert training.
Agence France-Presse: Nearly two-thirds of polled veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars considered the military over-extended.
Inadequately protected and inadequately cared for.
New York Times: A 2006 study showed that 80 percent of marines killed from upper body wounds would have survived, if they'd had adequate body armor.
Newsweek: Troops were forced to improvise their own vehicle armor because the military wasn't providing the real thing.
Washington Post: Even as the Iraq escalation began, thousands of Army Humvees still lacked FRAG Kit 5 armor protection.
TXCN News: Soldiers were provided such inadequate supplies of water on the battlefield that it was literally making them ill.
Salon: The Veterans Administration knew as early as 2004 that there were serious problems with the conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center- and did nothing.
Salon: The Department of Defense also knew about the problems long before public exposure, and the resulting outcry forced them actually to do something about it.
NPR: Veterans were receiving fewer medical disability benefits than before the war
MSNBC: Up to 20 percent of Iraq vets may have been suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Washington Post: A Pentagon task force concluded that the available medical care for those troops suffering psychological problems was "woefully inadequate."
Salon: Wounded soldiers classified as medically unfit for battle were being reclassified as fit so they could be sent back into battle.
Salon: These reclassifications were done to provide enough manpower for Bush's escalation.
Salon: Even soldiers with acute Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder were being sent back to Iraq.
Understandably, morale deteriorated
Spiegel Online: Troops stationed in Germany were increasingly going AWOL rather than be used as cannon fodder for Bush's insanity.
New York Times: The army had to revise upwards its understated desertion rate.
Boston Globe: West Point graduates were leaving the military at the highest rate in three decades, as repeated tours of Iraq drove out some of the army's best young officers.
Associated Press: The Army had its highest desertion rate since 1980.
Psychological trauma and suicide.
Associated Press: By July 2007, some "38 percent of soldiers and 31 percent of Marines report psychological conditions such as brain injury and PTSD after returning from deployment. Among members of the National Guard, the figure is much higher — 49 percent — with numbers expected to grow because of repeated and extended deployments."
Journal of the American Medical Association:
The prevalence of reporting a mental health problem was 19.1% among service members returning from Iraq compared with 11.3% after returning from Afghanistan and 8.5% after returning from other locations (P<.001). Mental health problems reported on the postdeployment assessment were significantly associated with combat experiences, mental health care referral and utilization, and attrition from military service. Thirty-five percent of Iraq war veterans accessed mental health services in the year after returning home; 12% per year were diagnosed with a mental health problem. More than 50% of those referred for a mental health reason were documented to receive follow-up care although less than 10% of all service members who received mental health treatment were referred through the screening program.
Stacy Bannerman in Foreign Policy In Focus:
Soldiers who have served -- or are serving -- in Iraq are killing themselves at higher percentages than in any other war where such figures have been tracked.
Associated Press: The Army experienced the highest suicide rate in 26 years.
New York Times: By January 2008, traumatized Iraq veterans were leaving "a trail of death and heartbreak in U.S."
Washington Post: Suicides among active-duty soldiers had reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records.
Washington Post: In April 2008, 300,000 veterans of the Bush wars were reported to be suffering from PTSD or major depression.
The Oregonian: In July 2009, a report showed a dramatic jump in the rate of mental illness, among veterans of the Bush wars.
Boston Globe: By July 2009, homelessness was rising among female veterans of the Bush wars. Many are single parents.
Science Daily: By November 2009, the rate of PTSD among Iraq troops was reported to be as high as 35 percent.
San Francisco Chronicle: Homelessness, overall, was rising among veterans of the Bush wars.

Shove that in the face of anyone who tells you that Bush, or Republicans in General, support the troops.

Oh, what a shame, we lost those emails...

2010-08-30T08:19:00.000-07:00

More evidence of massive covering up at the Bush White House has me convinced that what we don't know about must have been really bad, since what we do know about is so blatantly awful. While they were supposed to be finding and preserving their email, they were losing it, and they didn't care. Of course, this was a direct violation of the law. Of course this was a blatant attempt, especially in the case of the Plame affair, to cover up and protect senior members of the administration.

And, of course, nothing will be done about it.

Job losses pre- and post-Obama policies

2010-08-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

Via Ezra, nuff said.

Creating More Stateless Refugees

2010-08-04T11:16:00.001-07:00

This is what the xenophobic right wants to create: a country that denies citizenship to people born here. This will create stateless refugees--people with no nation, no rights, no protection of law, and no place to call home.

I'm sure this doesn't matter one bit to the people who want to deny birthright citizenship. Would they give a damn, I wonder, about Palestinians or even Jews and Gypsies under Hitler? Do they care about huddled masses yearning to breathe free?

But, hey, people who want to mess with the 14th amendment won't bother reading this Wikipedia page because they're convinced we should deny citizenship to people born here. Wouldn't want to cloud up your world view on citizenship with these kind of unintended consequences.

The right will just ignore the facts, or make up their own (like, is there really an invasion of pregnant Mexican women struggling through miles of hot desert to have their babies here?). They will plow on into this like they did with Iraq, unintended consequences be damned.

We are a nation of immigrants. We give chances to people who don't otherwise have them. In this case, we ruined small subsistence farming in Mexico with NAFTA and Monstanto, we have a whole bunch of businesses here that love the cheap illegal labor and hardly ever get busted for it, so what do we expect but a bunch of displaced people looking for work? Until we solve the problems of small farmers in Mexico and start punishing the companies that hire illegals here in the US, we will never stop or slow illegal immigration.

If the Xenophobes on the right get their way, we'll just create more problems, like statelessness, and never get to the core problem of poverty and joblessness that drives the immigration engine. Even George W Bush understood that.

"...when men are desperate no one can stand up to them." --Xenophon

in reference to: 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (view on Google Sidewiki)

The Electoral College is Tried and True

2010-07-28T07:50:00.001-07:00

Well, of course some Republican would say that. They love George W. Bush. If enough states had passed this bill before 2000, we wouldn't be in this mess. As I point out at on my web site, people in Massachusetts had, in 2000, a vote that counted for about half of what the people of Wyoming have.

And if you really delve into it, you'll see why Republicans love the un-democratic method of choosing an executive: The little states that get a vote bonus are almost all Republican.

At its heart, though, this is an issue of fairness. If we keep using the Electoral College, then we are not democratically electing our Presidents. Simple as that.

So, whine away Republicans. This idea is going to win, and you'll just have to live with it.

in reference to:

"Senate minority leader Richard Tisei said the state was meddling with a system that was "tried and true" since the founding of the country."
- Mass. Legislature approves plan to bypass Electoral College - Local News Updates - MetroDesk - The Boston Globe (view on Google Sidewiki)

Indict Bush and Cheney

2010-07-13T08:57:00.001-07:00

And the rest of their Junta. I thought all you fucking Republicans were for law and order?

IOKIYAR...

But, wait. This was on Fox? Huh? I guess none of the drooling hordes looking for what they're supposed to think were actually watching this particular program.

in reference to:

"Nader: What should be the sanctions? Napolitano: They should have been indicted. They absolutely should have been indicted for torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants. I'd like to say they should be indicted for lying but believe it or not, unless you're under oath, lying is not a crime. At least not an indictable crime. It's a moral crime."
- Andrew Napolitano: Bush and Cheney Should Have Been Indicted for Torturing, for Spying and Arresting Without Warrants | Video Cafe (view on Google Sidewiki)

The woman Dick Cheney wanted

2010-07-10T11:13:00.001-07:00

More proof that these fucks didn't give a damn about the environment, future generations, or anything else but profit. This Cheney crony set up the MMS to be a rubber stamp on anything the oil industry wanted. And now they have it, and the disaster capitalists will profit from the spill, and all will be right in Cheney world.

And any fucking Republican who says this is Obama's fault can shove it.

in reference to:

"Burton was in charge during the development of the offshore drilling plan that expanded drilling to the site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster."
- Bush MMS director defends tenure: “When I was there it seemed to work well” « Climate Progress (view on Google Sidewiki)

Damn Right It Is Bush's Fault!

2010-07-05T12:17:00.001-07:00

More evidence that this oil gusher is Bush and Cheney's fondest wish (drill, baby, drill) come back to bite them on the ass. Of course, to the 29% of Americans who aren't sure if the President is an American, this won't matter one bit. The earth is 6000 years old, we did not evolve, we faked the moon landing, global warming is a hoax, Iraq had WMD, and the oil spill is Obama's fault...

in reference to:

"The Bush administration agency charged with assessing the impact of new deepwater drilling on endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico based its 2007 conclusion that expanded drilling was "not likely" to "destroy or adversely modify designated critical habitat" on a worst-case scenario that a single spill would dump no more than 630,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf."
- Daily Kos: In 2007 review, Federal agency vastly underestimated deepwater spill risk (view on Google Sidewiki)

When something burrows in my garden...

2010-06-29T10:35:00.001-07:00

I put out traps and catch the little fuckers.

This is one more example of the kind of crap Cheney and Bush were doing that is improper, unethical, and possibly illegal. And yet Republicans go around claiming the moral authority crown, and beating hippies with it.

in reference to:

"In one of seven cases where the GAO found improper burrowing, a special assistant in the Office of Congressional & Legislative Affairs of the Department of Veterans Affairs -- who worked in that position from January 2001 to May 2007 -- became a program analyst in the Office of Information and Technology, despite "limited qualifications and experience.""
- GAO Study Finds Improper Burrowing During Bush Years | TPMMuckraker (view on Google Sidewiki)

Damn right it's still Bush's fault...

2010-06-28T15:39:00.000-07:00

source

It's Water Weight You Bastard!

2010-06-27T08:56:00.000-07:00

This news on raggedy-Dick:

Cheney was admitted to George Washington University Hospital on Friday as a result of "progressive retention of fluid related to his coronary artery disease," Cheney's office said.

If he blew up like Violet Beauregard and had to be rolled by the ghosts of dead Iraqi civilians to the juicing room, it wouldn't be enough to make up for all the horrific trail of shit that's spewed out of Dick "Last Throes" Cheney.

Set Yourself on Fire

2010-06-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

David Weigel lost his job because he said Drudge should "handle his emotional problems more responsibly and set himself on fire." Wow. If right wingers lost their job because they advocated violence in private emails, none of them would have jobs. Shit, just look at the kind of stuff they say in public ("Nuke them all, let God sort it out" kind of sums it up).

My problem with Weigel is that he didn't go far enough. I think Drudge should light himself on fire while standing next to a kerosene soaked Dick Cheney, while both of them are in the Fox News control room, with tape running, so all the relatives of the people who died because of Dick Cheney can watch.

Then I hear this morning that Dick's in the hospital again, where apparently the molten mass of lead they call his heart is acting up again. Oh, the tirade I could go on about how dying of a heart attack is too fucking good for the likes of this monstrosity of a human, but then I would sound like all the fuckers who have sent me hate mail over the years (inevitably involving decapitation and the shoving of something down the neck hole). While I love the Rude Pundit, I just can't generate enough trash talk to ever come close to what Deadeye Dick deserves. So I'll just wait to hear that his latest "heart" attack was painful, extremely so, and that will have to do.

Someone's Been Misunderestimating the Size of This Thing

2010-06-23T14:22:00.000-07:00

Where the hell is Dick Cheney? I have some questions.

George Bush's Giant Balls Have Damaged His Brain

2010-06-22T10:50:00.001-07:00

If ever there was a man who should just shut the fuck up...

Here we have GW, in the kind of massive irony (that could only be topped if he was giving this speech in the Gulf of Mexico) that only he could muster, lecturing someone (albeit deservedly in this case) for wasting resources while millions of gallons of the precious crude is being wasted in the gulf because he and Dick Cheney didn't give a shit about regulation or oversight. Wonder how much all the oil is worth, Dumbya?

Here we have GW lecturing on wasting resources while the fish, shrimp, crabs and other valuable life in the Gulf are lost, perhaps forever, because of his administration's greed and blatant preference for oil companies over life, jobs, and nature.

Here we have a man whose whole raison de etre is the mindless destruction of America's bounty for the profit of a few, extremely wealthy plutocrats, and he has the balls to lecture some petty dictator over "wasting" resources. George Fucking W Bush wasted more resources to help Halliburton in one day than the Dear Leader could waste in a year.

I was glad to see that someone had the guts to point out that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at the very least not exactly "Christian." I hesitate to think how many resources were wasted in Iraq over Bush's bullshit lies. We can't even accurately count how many people died...

George W Bush is the last man on earth who should be talking about wasting resources.

in reference to:

"But some local Christian organisations, including the Christian Alliance for Church Reform, criticised Bush's presence at a time when cross-border tensions are high."It is just nonsense to bring to the Korean War prayer meeting the former US President Bush, who started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and have him give testimony," they said in a joint statement."
- AFP: Bush blasts N.Korea's Kim for wasting resources (view on Google Sidewiki)

Miss Me Yet?

2010-06-19T07:37:00.000-07:00

Good thing I haven't seen one of the Bush "Miss Me" T-shirts. I'd go off on any idiot who would wear such an expression of stupidity. I have a lot of pent up anti-Bushness left, especially after watching the result of foxes guarding hen houses for eight years.

My reply to anyone wearing such a travesty of fashion?

"Hell no, I don't miss him yet! He's still with us!"

Watch the oil wash ashore all along the gulf coast. Realize that the oil under the water is even more abundant, sucking oxygen out of the water, killing everything in it's path, and converting the entire gulf into a dead zone. Then realize that the agency that was our last line of protection against this, the Minerals Management Service in the Interior Department (under Bush, a subsidiary of the oil industry), and realize that this whole mess could have been stopped had it not been for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Sissy boys afraid to take credit for their positions

2010-06-17T08:57:00.001-07:00

These little-penis-compensators want to be able to run ads saying whatever they want, funded by whomever they want, but they don't want to stand up and say, "Yes, I said this."

That means they're chicken shits. They got their big fucking guns, but they don't have the balls to take credit for their arguments. They have their ammo, but they're afraid to openly debate the merits of their positions.

What a bunch of pussies. Yeah, you, you bum-fuck dumbasses. I'm willing to state my name when I state my positions. Why aren't you?

What's the matter? You afraid if people know who's behind your bullshit lying ad campaigns then they'll vote for the other person/position?

Chicken shits.

in reference to:

"Erick Erickson of Red State also accused the NRA of selling out, saying that, like Van Cleave, he supports the Gun Owners of America instead. That group opposes the DISCLOSE Act, calling it a "free speech gag bill.""
- Friendly Fire: Gun Rights Advocates In Shootout Over Campaign Finance Bill | TPMDC (view on Google Sidewiki)

It's the abortion deficit, stupid.

2010-06-13T12:48:00.000-07:00

Brooklynbadboy at the KOS:

Republican Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana has ticked off social conservatives by declaring that the next Republican president will "have to call a truce on the so-called social issues." Tony Perkins of the FRC responds:

"Nothing is more fiscally responsible than ending the taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion promotion."

Right. Abortion is causing the deficit. These people are completely insane, folks.

Here we are past the trillion dollar mark on Bush's wars to get the people who knocked those buildings down: hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are dead; Bin Laden is still free; our military is stretched so thin that soldiers are doing multiple tours with no end in sight; the costs to the VA for caring for all the injured vets are just starting to come in; George W. Bush goes around bragging about torturing people; millions more hate us for our heavy-handed and bloated military adventures; and Tony Fucking Perkins thinks ending abortion is the best fiscal restraint we can come up with.

These people aren't insane; they're vicious, lying mother fuckers who want the world to hate us so much that Armageddon comes in their lifetimes. And any fucker who agrees with them or votes for them deserves the lake of fire they think will go only to those who don't believe like they do.

Good thing so many of the Family Research Council's friends are into homosexual sex. No need for birth control or abortions there!

Torture Research

2010-06-07T09:33:00.001-07:00

More evidence of how sick and violent Republicans, especially Bush and Cheney, are. This is also evidence that they knew they were guilty of war crimes and were in CYA mode.

The fact that Obama is not prosecuting these crimes, or even investigating them, is also a travesty of justice.

in reference to:

"Perhaps the most astonishing and perverse fact about the CIA’s human guinea pig program is that it was set up on the advice of the Department of Justice as a tactic for evading accountability for other crimes. Once again, we see strong evidence that the Bush Justice Department counseled other actors in the government to commit serious crimes and assured them that they would face no threat of prosecution for their criminal conduct."
- Bush-era CIA Human Experimentation Program Revealed—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine) (view on Google Sidewiki)

The American People

2010-06-03T13:43:00.000-07:00

“The American people don’t elect somebody who can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”--Robert Gibbs, denying that the oil spill had paralyzed the Obama White House, leaving it to us to remember that George W Bush was not "elected."

Dick Cheney's Katrina

2010-06-02T14:19:00.001-07:00

Make no mistake about who's to blame for this mess: BP and the GOP, especially Bush/Cheney.

Anyone voting for Republicans is a complete buffoon. They got us here, and now the grown-ups have to get us out.

in reference to:

"The following timeline outlines the administration’s direction, consequent legislative steps and missteps, and the resulting circumstances that provided advantages to Big Oil companies and led to the establishment of a regulatory system that created the BP oil disaster."
- BP oil disaster is Cheney’s Katrina « Climate Progress (view on Google Sidewiki)

When Corporations Rule, Thanks to Bush/Cheney

2010-06-01T14:52:00.001-07:00

BP even got a Dick Cheney aide as spokeswoman.

in reference to:

"The fatal disasters at the Upper Big Branch Mine and Deepwater Horizon are fresh evidence the Bush-Cheney corporate culture continues in some federal agencies charged with overseeing industry. President Obama needs to change that culture fast. Bill Becker, a regular CP contributor and Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), explains what Obama needs to do."
- When corporations rule « Climate Progress (view on Google Sidewiki)

Too bad his Daddy didn't get him in the National Guard

2010-05-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

"I've bled for my country, I've sweated for my country, I've cried myself to sleep for my country -- which is a lot more than some people who are passing judgment on me have done. I would rather go sit in prison than go to Iraq." /Patrick Hart, U.S. Army sergeant with almost 10 years on active duty, who went to Canada rather than face a second deployment to Iraq. /(USA Today)

George Bush Ruined this Country

2010-05-14T13:27:00.001-07:00

How can anyone possibly argue that Republican Economic Theory, that great supply-side pie in the sky, works? Oh, I know... George Bush wasn't conservative enough...

Anyone who can make that argument with a straight face should be left alone; they might be dangerous.

"If the economy produces jobs over the next eight months at the same pace as it did over the past four months, the nation will have created more jobs in 2010 alone than it did over the entire eight years of George W. Bush's presidency."

The stimulus worked. Supply side economics doesn't even deserve a nice garbage can. Best to burn it and compost the ashes. Don't even bother trying to argue with anyone who wants to save it. They will be a waste of your time.

in reference to:

"In only eight of Bush's 96 months did the economy create as many jobs as the 290,000 it did last month."
- National Journal Magazine - Repairing The Job Machine (view on Google Sidewiki)

Timothy McVeigh Wannabes

2010-04-01T14:38:00.000-07:00

No foolin' here.

I usually don't give a fuck what Sean Hannity has to say, but this, from Markos, is just too much. Follow the link for the video.

Is it terrorism yet?

Sean Hannity praises teabaggers as "Tim McVeigh wannabees":

HANNITY: When you think about the vast majorities that they have in Congress and they had to bribe, backroom deals, corruption, that’s all because the tea party movement, the people — all these Tim McVeigh wannabes here.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

Tim McVeigh's handywork:

And no, this isn't an April Fool's Day joke. We actually verified with the transcript, thinking this was too absurd to be real.

I want to hear some tea bag loser explain how some liberal edited the video to make it look like that's what he's saying. How long before FOX changes the official transcript?

When lyin asshowes pass email makes me look bigger idjut

2010-03-31T13:28:00.001-07:00

She added: "I'm peeved,,, when people in this country is getting kicked out of there homes everyday and our government passes a bill to spend more then 20 billion dollars to bring Hamas here and supplies them with food and homes that just wrong."

It's pretty clear that Stone got these bogus ideas about H.R. 1388 from a chain email that has been thoroughly debunked by factcheck.org.

--------

Hey, when the hell have facts ever mattered to people like this? Or the people who started that email? They make shit up... it's what they do. Call them out on it! Stand up to these idiots, cuz, you know, people is getting kicked out of there homes and all. Not that GW had anything to do with that, its all Clinton's fault.

in reference to: Hutaree Member Angered By Fake Hamas Resettlement Bill | TPMMuckraker (view on Google Sidewiki)

Right Wing Violence is Chicken Shittery

2010-03-26T10:22:00.000-07:00

When the Bush Junta was in the White House, waging total war on the whole damn world, I drove around a very Republican area of southern California with the bumper stickers you see here.

One crazy bitch tried to run me over when she saw me walking back to the car (we wound up on Judge Joe Brown for that one, when she sued be for an imaginary dent in her hood--I won). Another guy flagged me down, walked up to my open window, and sucker punched me in the face (I got out and kicked him in the nuts, and left him there writhing). I was flipped off, swerved at, threatened, pushed, and attacked on a regular basis for exercising my free speech. Despite the fact that I thought Bush was an illegal president, that he had broken many laws, and was, indeed, committing treason, not once did I ever physically attack any of his many supporters I came in contact with everyday.

I did fight back when attacked.

I gave the ones who just yelled a piece of my mind, and not once did a Bush supporter try to reason with me, or argue any kind of valid point. Almost every one of them said Saddam Hussein was in on 9-11. Many of them said we should nuke the whole Middle East. Almost all of them said I was a traitor for not supporting the president. Almost all of them threatened me with physical violence.

That is what they do. They make shit up and threaten people.

These are not good people. They have grown up in a macho world of testosterone driven debates in which might makes right. When they inevitably cannot argue with a well-reasoned argument, they get spit-spewing angry, they reach into the name calling talking points they started learning as children and kept getting fed by Dick Cheney, et al.

Dirty fucking hippy haters.

So, when I heard about the fellow in Tennessee yesterday, who had his car rammed by some wingnut fuck with tiny little steroid-soaked balls, a wave of sympathy for the guy surged through my fight impulse. I remembered the adreneline rush I got from those fights, and I wished I'd have been there, even in my diminished state from arthritis, to drag the mother fucker out of his SUV and kick his ass. It would be worth the subsequent week of pain to plant a well-clenched fist into his fascist mouth.

Now some folks say that fighting is always wrong, but I'm not that kind of liberal. I think that when you're attacked, you gotta fight back. Pacifism is for pussies. I respect the position, I just don't agree with it. And if any motherfucker wants to ram my car, kid in it or not, they're going to have to put up or shut up, because I have never, and will never, put up with assault. At the very least, I'd have the fuck arrested for his attempted murder, or assault with a deadly weapon, pick your charge.

But defend yourself and your kid first.

I was done trying to reason with these fuckers a long time ago. They cannot be reasoned with.

Anybody that is a global-warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up their ass I’m not sure they could hear me.--James Cameron

This applies to all of them, not matter what the subject. Their ears are all stopped up with shit that the irresponsible heads of their "party" have been feeding them about socialism and government takeovers of the economy (like the TARP funds by that noted socialist GW Bush). They cannot be reasoned with. Hell, I'd bet most of them have been guilty of terroristic threatening at least once in the miserable lives. How do you reason with that kind of chicken-shittery?

So, what's the answer? Well, ignore them when you can. Kick their asses when you have to. Keep speaking the truth to them loudly when you can, as other people around will see who the reasonable person is and lean toward the side of reason.

And reason, be it from the right or left, is the only thing that can lead us to answers. All the rest is just bullshit.

George W Bush Citizen's Arrest Attempt Trial

2010-03-16T13:47:00.001-07:00

Splitting the Sky is getting their day in court after being arrested for trying to Citizen's arrest George W Bush when he was in Canada last year.

Seems the group has some Canadian Court opinions on its side as to whether the US, and particularly GW Bush, committed war crimes when they tortured prisoners.

And, I assume the Canadian Courts take precedence a little more seriously than the activist right wing nut jobs on our highest courts now.

in reference to:

"A court case concerning an attempted arrest of Bush in Canada gets about as politically charged as it can get:"
- Evidence of Bush War Crimes Entered Into Court Records | ePluribus Media (view on Google Sidewiki)

Kid's gotta mouth like my boy!

2010-03-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

By Mr. Fish

Anti-Bush Video Game Nixed

2010-02-27T14:16:00.001-08:00

Sony poached most of the developers for this game--where the Chinese invaded the mainland US as a result of some bad Pretzel-dent'n on W's part. Maybe they'll all come back to this intriguing FPS after the "more important project." Because, you know, making bad Presidential decisions is so, like, yesterday.

Perhaps Sylvie Barak would like to tell us what the "more important" project was. And, honestly, for an article that breaks its back bending over backwards to piss on the anti-Bushness of a video game, it really misses a chance to hit those good ol' talking points about fighting them over there so we don't have to burn to death in Chinese gasoline over here.

in reference to:

"With a veritable wealth of video games in existence, one doesn’t often spare a thought to those that didn’t quite make it, but a recent interview with game developer David Jaffe provides some insight into what could have been a highly controversial first person shooter based on George W. Bush's polices abroad."
- Anti Bush video game nixed | TG Daily (view on Google Sidewiki)

George Bush blames Jimmy Cater for His Miserable Life

2010-02-27T08:17:00.000-08:00

JAFR (just another fucking republican) alert! Here's Dumbya, as quoted by CBS news today, referring to Jimmy Carter calling his handling of the war a "flat out disaster."

"I have no desire to see myself on television. I don't want to be a panel of formers instructing the currents on what to do... I'm trying to regain a sense of anonymity. I didn't like it when a certain former president -- and it wasn't 41 or 42 -- made my life miserable."

Because, yeah, it's all Carter's fault that you're a miserable failure. And I love the way he reveals that he thinks of himself as a whole panel. Get all the classic Bush quotes here.

George Bush: the gift that keeps on giving...

2010-02-26T09:19:00.000-08:00

New quote for the George Bush quotes page:

"This is going to come as quite a shock to people up here that I can write a book, much less read one."--Former President George W. Bush, 2-26-2010, addressing the Bush-Cheney reunion breakfast. Bush's "memoir" is due in November.

Eat Shit Cheney Lovers

2010-02-22T13:01:00.000-08:00

Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.-- George Washington

Via Attackerman, on the stuff the right wing leaves out about General Washington.

For All You Bush Lovers, Here's a Handy Visual Aid

2010-02-06T05:59:00.000-08:00

It must be hard to admit that the economic theories that you've had most of your life aren't just wrong, they're dangerously wrong. After all, if you've spent most of your adult life trying to tell people that cutting taxes leads to trickle down effects that include jobs, higher wages, and better benefits for those in the middle and the bottom, then any facts that are contrary to that handy fiction are best left unmentioned, or, better yet, attacked.

Well, get out your big guns, boys, because here's a fact that proves that the only thing that trickles down is the shit down your legs.

Racist Jesus

2010-01-31T14:08:00.001-08:00

Sounds like the Lt. Governor of South Carolina.

http://supak.blogspot.com/2010/01/dont-let-them-eat-cake-or-theyll-breed.html

in reference to:

"15:22 And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. (15:22-26) "And cast it to the dogs" Jesus refuses to heal the Canaanite woman's possessed daughter, saying "it is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to the dogs." 15:23 But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth after us. 15:24 But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Should the gospel be preached to everyone? Canaanite Dogs 15:25 Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me. 15:26 But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs."
- Matthew , Chapter 15 (view on Google Sidewiki)

Too Big to Fail

2010-01-24T15:08:00.001-08:00

At least Bob got to see this Supreme Court ruling he most certainly would have loved.

in reference to:

"Appointed to head the Commerce Department, Mr. Mosbacher said he aimed to develop closer ties between government and industry, perhaps, he hoped, with the aid of relaxed antitrust laws, so that United States factories could better compete in high technology."
- Robert A. Mosbacher, Former Secretary of Commerce, Dies at 82 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Compare and Contrast: GWB v BHO

2010-01-20T14:03:00.000-08:00

Everybody's talking about the enormous amount of time Obama spent communicating with people during his first year and the worst depression since the last one, as compared to the much lesser amount of time that, say, W spent on TV.

See, when you're in charge of a White House where Obama is the President, during a national disaster that was the rubble left after 8 years of W, the first thing you want to do is get him out there talking. If you're in charge of the George Dumbya Bush White House, not so much.

Then there is, of course, the matter of total debt added under your watch. Over 8 years for W, it's 5 trillion. Despite Karl Rove's complete and utter I-dare-you-to-look-it-up declaration that Obama has already added more to the debt in one year than Bush did in 8, the debt has gone up 1.693 trillion in Obama's first year. So, yeah, fuck you Karl, you lying scum.

To me the telling stat in Bush vs. Obama is the vacation time, which I cover in this Side-wiki post on Obama's first year numbers.

It's bad enough you gave us Bush...

2010-01-15T13:45:00.001-08:00

Of course, when will you ever see anyone get in Karl Rove's face about this? Will some media person ask him this? Or will we all be disappointed when Jon Stewart is the only guy to ever say something, and then Karl weasels out of it, like John Yoo did?

It's great that Axelrod calls him out on it, but, honestly. The kind of people who vote for Bush, watch Fox, and believe in the book of Revelations literally are not going to believe any of the facts Axelrod hands them, no matter how true they are.

Fact is, if someone was stupid, greedy, ignorant, bigoted, or whatever enough to vote for Bush twice and has yet to apologize, then they're just going to make up whatever they want to make up, as long as it's convenient to their argument at that exact moment. They don't care if people can actually "look things up" or "check the facts." They just want Jesus to come burn all the heathens in a lake of fire, and the sooner the better.

in reference to:

"To put the breathtaking scope of this irresponsibility in perspective, the Bush administration's swing from surpluses to deficits added more debt in its eight years than all the previous administrations in the history of our republic combined. And its spending spree is the unwelcome gift that keeps on giving: Going forward, these unpaid-for policies will continue to add trillions to our deficit."
- David Axelrod - What Karl Rove got wrong on the U.S. deficit - washingtonpost.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Lying Bigots Can't Even Get the Names Straight

2010-01-13T11:36:00.001-08:00

It's bad enough these bigots think they have some sort of God-given right to make everyone else behave like them, but they can't even keep the names of important players straight within their own paragraphs.

So, in this fun little list of bigotry's biggest hits, they have listed me, although they were obviously talking about Rep. Bart Stupak, as being a US representative and anti-choice. Both of those propositions are laughably wrong, although I do represent a majority of Americans on these matters, just not officially.

Not only that, but I'm anti-religion, especially the hateful crap coming from Baptists. I grew up with Baptists, who bribed me with "God Bucks" to ride the bus to Grand Avenue Baptist in Hot Springs Arkansas. Once I got the bike from the God store, I stopped going.

Now is the time we dance.

in reference to:

"Supak says he and 10 or 11 other representatives could vote against a final bill that doesn’t meet his criteria concerning abortion."
- The Baptist Bulletin » World News: Jan. 13, 2010 (view on Google Sidewiki)

"...comfort to our enemies..."

2010-01-13T11:22:00.001-08:00

While the most recent "terror attack" has succeeded, through failure, to cost us billions in additional security (an example of super-empowerment as John Robb of Global Guerrillas calls it), it has also, thanks to the likes of Liz and Dick Cheney, succeeded in spreading terror.

But is it treason? Well, as treason is, by constitutional definition, giving "aid and comfort" to the enemy, then the exaggerated news coverage and commentary is halfway there.

From the NY Times: “We give comfort to our enemies,” said Charles E. Allen, a 40-year C.I.A. veteran who served as the top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security from 2007 to early last year. Exaggerated news coverage and commentary, he said, “creates an atmosphere of tension and fear, and to me that’s exactly the wrong way to go.”

So all you "conservatives" (too ashamed to call themselves Republicans anymore?) out there hyping up this threat should realize you're almost there on the treason scale. The real threat is fear itself, and you're trying to create more of it.

Guess that makes Dick and Liz (et al) terrorists, too.

And, in the case of the former Vice President, who played a large part in ignoring threats before 9-11, and in the strategy that let Bin Laden get away from Tora Bora, it certainly looks like he was aiding the terrorists.

So, there's your aid and comfort, Dick, you multi-tentacled, fear-mongering, terror loving traitor.

in reference to:

"“We give comfort to our enemies,” said Charles E. Allen, a 40-year C.I.A. veteran who served as the top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security from 2007 to early last year. Exaggerated news coverage and commentary, he said, “creates an atmosphere of tension and fear, and to me that’s exactly the wrong way to go.”"
- News Analysis - Terrorist Plots in U.S. in 2009 Are Called Amateurish and Unconnected - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

What I Miss About Television

2009-12-31T13:53:00.000-08:00

Anything we miss from the highly over-priced cable TV we're not getting anymore, we can make up for by having friends tape stuff, watching Daily KOS TV, or with Netflix. The following is a Rachel Maddow highlight. And I do mean highlight. Because this goes way beyond telling Dick Cheney to shove his bullshit up his own ass with a shotgun. This is about telling the truth, and how the Republican party just doesn't give a shit about The Truth. Or the country for that matter. They put their party Uber Alles, and Rachel intelligently and comprehensively puts them in their place. Watch the whole thing for a nice bonus dig on the idiots who call themselves the media who perpetuate the lies.

We Were Just Out of Schlitz

2009-12-20T07:53:00.001-08:00

Maureen Dowd manages to get to the heart of the matter of Bush Treason in her column today, which draws on the Peter Bergen article in this month's New Republic. I haven't read the Bergen article, but if I feel like my blood pressure is dropping, maybe I will.

Dowd cuts to the chase via her conversation with Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, while flying over the mountains of Afghanistan where Bin Laden was cornered. She notes that right in the middle of the show down at Tora Bora, Donald Rumsfeld asks Gen. Tommy Franks to "freshen up" an Iraq invasion plan.

Odd, that? Or is it? Are we supposed to believe that these neo-con geniuses of the Bush administration had the world's number one terrorist--who they often blamed Clinton for not killing or capturing as a defense for their own lack of diligence before 9-11--cornered in some mountains and they bungled it?

Please.

They were busy getting ready for Iraq, and now Gates wants to buy the idea that that is why we couldn't send a few hundred Army Rangers into kill Bin Laden?

Gates tells Dowd: "“Afghanistan was a vastly underresourced operation because, as some of the generals say in the Pentagon, we were just out of Schlitz. We didn’t have any more troops to send.”

What a crock. This wasn't screwed up. This is the kind of thing that we are good at, as we proved later in Iraq when we caught Saddam, and when we killed his sons. Once all the intelligence and surveillance work has worked, we send in the crack squads, and we finish the job.

The Tora Bora episode failed to get Bin Laden because George W. Bush and his minions decided to let him go. It's the only explanation that makes sense. To suggest that the greatest military force in the world, led by the Army Rangers--perhaps the best fighting force in history--shouldn't be sent into some mountains to get the guy that just orchestrated the most devastating attack on America in our short history is just crap.

To suggest that we didn't have the resources in Afghanistan is crap. We had thousands of troops there, including the Rangers. We had bombed the caves Bin Laden was in with bunker busters for days. The cratered landscape was ripe for a crack force which was ready to go, and the President of the United States decided not to.

George W. Bush provided aid and comfort to Usama Bin Laden. He had him cornered and he decided--perhaps because it's always good to have a bogey man around--to let him go.

And that is the definition of treason.

in reference to:

"“Afghanistan was a vastly underresourced operation because, as some of the generals say in the Pentagon, we were just out of Schlitz,” Gates said. “We didn’t have any more troops to send.”"
- Op-Ed Columnist - Blunder on the Mountain - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Aid and Comfort to the Enemy

2009-11-29T10:44:00.000-08:00

Via the New York Times, yet another report confirms the thesis of this blog: that the Bush Administration committed treason, the definition of which, is in Article Three of the US Constitution:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

From the above linked NYT story, a new Senate report adds more proof to the case against the Bush Administration, especially Donald Rumsfeld. They let Bin Laden go when they had him cornered in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December, 2001.

The report, based in part on a little-noticed 2007 history of the Tora Bora episode by the military’s Special Operations Command, asserts that the consequences of not sending American troops in 2001 to block Mr. bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan are still being felt.

The report blames the lapse for “laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.”

George Bush stood on top of the rubble of the WTC and said we'd get those guys, but when it came time to actually get them, the order came down, from the Administration, to let our enemies get away. The Whitehouse ordered US troops not to finish the job.

I can think of many ways to aid our enemies. Short of actually plotting an attack with them, letting them get away with it, especially when you actually have them cornered and then let them go, is nothing short of treason. It would be hard to aid and comfort an enemy more than letting them walk away from justice.

In legal terms, this is known as accessory after the fact. Helping a mass murderer escape prosecution is, at the very least, a felony, and, without much effort at all, easy to define as treason.

Now that we know how the Bush administration worked, taking the politics of everything into account, is it such a leap to conclude that the Karl Rove mentality of making everything political, played a part in the decision to let our enemies walk away from Tora Bora? When people in top positions at the White House make decisions to let our enemies simply pack up and walk off through the mountains, doesn't that at least deserve investigation? Doesn't that at least deserve outrage from those who supposedly cherish our National Security above all else?

I can't wait to see the drivel from these Bush cheerleaders dismissing this story as politically motivated Bush bashing from the deranged left. It will be just another example of how these hacks put the well-being of the Republican party above the safety of US citizens, and above the ideal of justice for mass murderers.

Message to Republicans: Please Nominate Cheney!

2009-11-28T11:10:00.000-08:00

The one thing I was worried about for 2012?

Dick Cheney for President.

Brought to you by people who should be shot in the face with bird shot.

On the Definition of Treason

2009-11-18T11:34:00.000-08:00

I sometimes cross post what I write here at the Daily Kos, where I'm sure to get a few comments anytime I bring up the T word. I enjoy the smart comments there, as the dKos readers are some of the smartest on the net. It's why I'm a longtime member there.

Regarding my last post about why I call it Bush Treason, I got a response that laments the dilution of the term.

Because the Constitution, which I remember even if Dick Cheney tried to shred it, actually defines treason:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

That is a high standard to attain.

Did the Bush administration actually invade the United States? No. Did they actually help the terrorists in their plot? No.

No treason. There are a variety of reasons to consider the Bush administration the worst ever, but debasing the word treason does not help.

My response:

Did they actually help the terrorists with their plot? Well, could the plot have been carried out if they had done their job? Would the plot have been carried out if Bush had read the PDB and done something about it? Would the plot have been carried out if Ashcroft hadn't told people to stop telling him about terrorism?

...adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

Is it that much of a stretch to say that we created Osama, and that the neo-cons (especially Cheney) funded him, supported him, and basically created him? Same with Saddam... These people were not exactly friendly to the US, but in the neo-con zeal to fight the USSR, Cheney et al certainly gave Aid and Comfort to future enemies.

But, say, OK, but they weren't our enemies at the time. Well, then when they got reports about imminent terror attacks and chose to ignore them, isn't that aid and comfort? When Ashcroft said he didn't want to hear anymore about terror, that's willful ignorance which led to our enemies operating without any kind of Justice Department effort to stop them.

But, again, I'll go with you and say, no, ignoring a threat is not the same as helping someone attack us. Even then, when you come out after the attack and lie about what you did to stop it... When you lie to make yourself look more heroic, when you cover up what went wrong, when you attack someone who had nothing to do with it thereby sucking resources away from the good fight, are you not helping the enemy get away with it? When you have the guy who did it cornered in Tora Bora and you let him get away, isn't that being an accessory after the fact?

I could go on and on. To me, I am not debasing the word treason because I don't limit it's definition. I'm trying to say that there's a whole series of actions by Dick Cheney et al which actually did give aid and comfort to our enemies. Just because Dick wasn't on a plane with a box cutter doesn't mean that he didn't do his damndest to make sure we got ourselves a Pearl Harbor Type Event. All he had to do was not do his job.

Further, I haven't even delved into a possible alternative explanation of the definition of enemies. Since the P and VP are sworn to protect and defend the constitution, and by extension US Law, then by torturing, wiretapping, and who knows what all, they actually became the enemy!

I do see your point, but I don't understand why sticking to such a narrow definition of treason is so important. By sending this country into an illegal war based on bullshit and lies, they essentially declared war on the US. They helped those who are truly our enemies with recruiting, with milking us dry economically (think the trillion dollars we will spend on Iraq is going to help us economically?), and by taking our focus away from the people who really attacked us. To me, that's treason.

Why Do I Call It Bush Treason?

2009-11-14T11:44:00.000-08:00

Maybe the better question is why don't more people call it treason. George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and most of the administration ignored warnings about Al Qaeda, were incompetent (My Pet Goat is just the tip of the iceberg) in the response to defend the nation, and then lied about it.

The following is from Jacob Heilbrunn's book review in today's NYT of John Farmer's The Ground Truth:

Preoccupied with building a costly missile defense system to counter a spurious menace from Russia and with maintaining “full spectrum dominance” over the rest of the globe, most Bush administration officials blithely ignored the danger emanating from the caves of Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and his acolytes plotted against America. Confronted by a small group of mostly Saudi nationals armed with box cutters, the central nervous system of the country’s defense agencies went into a state of cataleptic shock. The only decisive action taken on 9/11 came not from the military, but from the courageous passengers who stormed the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93, leading the hijackers to crash the plane over Pennsylvania farmland before it could reach its intended target in Washington.

That's bad enough, of course, but then, like dirty little boys lying to their mother that they hadn't been playing in the mud, they claimed everything was just fine. I'm sure someone idiot will claim this lie was heroic, for stopping the spread of panic over their own incompetence, but to me, it's further evidence of treason. They knew they had fucked up, and they'd never get re-elected if everyone knew it, so they lied about it. Heilbrunn:

[...] Farmer superbly renders the knuckle-biting tension and confusion engendered by the hijackings, and says the leadership of the F.A.A. and the Defense Department “would remain largely irrelevant to the critical decision making and unaware of the evolving situation ‘on the ground’ until the attacks were completed” — thereby making it close to impossible for the military to intercept any aircraft.

Yet both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, Farmer says, provided palpably false versions that touted the military’s readiness to shoot down United 93 before it could hit Washington. Planes were never in place to intercept it. By the time the Northeast Air Defense Sector had been informed of the hijacking, United 93 had already crashed. Farmer scrutinizes F.A.A. and Norad records to provide irrefragable evidence that a day after a Sept. 17 White House briefing, both agencies suddenly altered their chronologies to produce a coherent timeline and story that “fit together nicely with the account provided publicly by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Vice President Cheney.”

Farmer further observes that the Bush administration wrongly asserted that the chain of command functioned on 9/11; that President Bush issued an authorization to shoot down hijacked commercial flights; and that top officials at F.A.A. headquarters coordinated their actions with the military. Farmer’s verdict: “History should record that whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks.”

Of course, misleading people after such a shocking event proved easy enough, so they just kept doing it. The lies just kept piling up. Pat Tillman comes to mind. So does Iraq (you know, the place Fox News doesn't seem to remember).

It's just too much. You don't have to be a genius to see why so many conspiracy theories have formed around the attacks. The picture that is becoming more and more clear is that the Bush Administration ignored repeated warnings and signs of attack, told officials to stop telling them about it (Ashcroft), spent all their time on other things (planning to invade Iraq, spend billions of missile defense boondoggles, and suck cash away from the poor with massive tax cuts to the rich while drowning non-rich-corporation-subsidization domestic programs in a bathtub), fucked up their response to the attack, and then lied about it to make themselves seem more heroic.

How can anyone possibly call that anything other than treason?

You Go, Girl!

2009-11-14T08:10:00.000-08:00

From Wanda Sykes' new show:

I went to sleep, and when I woke up people were mad at Obama. And I thought, 'Did I miss something? Did Obama start an illegal war? Did he fly over a flood zone and just wave? Did he torture detainees in a secret prison? Did he start illegally tapping phones? Did he alienate the world and squander a surplus? Because if he did any of that, we need to impeach that jackass.'

Bush Administration Officials Cashing In On Iraq

2009-11-11T09:56:00.000-08:00

I'm shocked. Shocked to hear that former Bush administration officials are profiteering in Iraq.

In 2008, Tim Shorrock reported for Salon that while “working inside America’s ’shadow’ spy industry, George Tenet, Richard Armitage, Cofer Black and others are cashing in big on Iraq and the war on terror.” Now, the Financial Times reports today that even more Bush administration officials are eyeing profits in Iraq:

[...]
Senior Bush administration figures including Zalmay Khalilzad, former US ambassador to Baghdad, and Jay Garner, the retired general who led reconstruction efforts immediately after the war, are leading a new business push into Iraq.

Seth and Amy should have done this, instead of the Goldman Sachs thing. Because rich people getting better health care than the rest of us isn't really that much of a really, but starting a war to make your buddies rich, well, that only happens every now and then in America.

Epic Fail: The Bush [Criminal] Record

2009-09-18T15:01:00.000-07:00

The reverse Robin Hood crime syndicate known as the Cheney Cabal never hid the fact that they wanted to put more money in the hands of the richest, based on the twisted theory that once they had more, the rich would invest, create jobs, and more money would magically appear everywhere.

Right.

The hopeless idiots who voted for these crooks, meaning all the working class fools who hate hippies from the sixties so much that they still vote for the fascists who will beat them up on the news, are now trying to blame their new President for the full latrine hole in which they now find themselves. They're not going to pay attention to the latest proof that they were used by the cynical politics of KKKarl Rove in order to steal a lot of money, followed by a last minute bail out (Bush's TARP) of all the rich people who were standing around saying "We don't know where all the money went."

Maybe they thought that the war on poverty they inherited meant they were supposed to kill poor people? What other excuse could there be for the draconian policies of tax cuts for the rich, spending cuts for the poor, and bailouts for the ultra-rich? Looking back, they were so successful at screwing poor people that it must've been a plan from the get-go, since the only things these people were successful at were things they had planned from the start, like starting war in Iraq.

Of course, they were good at planning the starts of things. Not so good at the rest. How's that ownership society going now? The ultimate pottery barn rule: Bush broke everything, now we own it, and it's worthless.

If only we were really Closing The Book On The Bush Legacy:

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked.

The one success story? The rich got much, much richer.

Since poverty is the lagging indicator, we're going to be seeing numbers like this go up for a while yet, and we're going to see the treasonous apologists for these war criminals try to blame the new guy, just like they tried to blame Clinton for 9/11, despite the warnings that OBL was determined to strike IN the US.

Thousands died that day because the Bushies were asleep at the National Security wheel. Or drunk. Or choking on pretzels. Or just didn't care, since, as the PNAC (project for a new american century) said late in the Clinton years, they'd need a new Pearl Harbor to really get involved in the Middle East. Now, since they got what they wanted (don't the spoiled frat brats always?), I'm assuming they, at the very least, did nothing to stop what they were hoping for. So, they used the same kind of indifference on programs that actually helped people get out of poverty, or get affordable health insurance, or a mortgage within the means of which they could live.

Say, for example, you want to milk all the money you can out of people at the bottom, and make sure it goes to the top. Obviously, you'd cut taxes on the wealthy and cut programs for the poor. But there's plenty of other things you can do. Ignore hurricanes that hit black people, for example. Make sure you decrease funding into things that might protect black neighborhoods: levees, for one. Or cut superfund sites funding, since a disproportionate share of minorities live near those sites. Or, you could string out a costly racket known as the Iraq war, sucking money up into the military industrial complex, lining Halliburton pockets, while running up a deficit designed to starve "a beast" that you're trying to shrink to a size that you can drown in a bath-tub, although Grover Norquist's bathtub must be a little bigger than most. Or, speaking of water, you could just not prosecute clean water act violations. Millions "saved." Unless by millions, you mean people...

If you really wanted to be a vicious bastard, you could sue states that tried to let people who were suffering die with dignity (no big end-of-life bucks for the HMOs), you could make sure teen pregnancies skyrocket, (don't make me look up the Freakonomics on the chains of poverty in which pregnant teens and their kids get locked), and you could arrest cancer patients for smoking pot (no money for big pharma in an easy-to-grow plant).

All good plans, if you're looking to put money back into the hands of those who need it least. Of course, if you believe the Reagan lie that government is bad, then you probably love what Bush did. It's hard to go to church and explain to people how Jesus would have approved of more people in poverty, more children going to bed hungry, more people dying due to lack of adequate health care... But, fuck that, eh? Just make shit up!

"It's not my fault they're poor!" How about "The Lord helps those who help themselves"? Maybe "I shouldn't have to pay to help lazy bums or their kids"? That's a great one. Or, how about the biblical version of let them eat cake?

And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man.--Ezekiel 4:12

Never mind Mark 10:25. Everything can be explained away with the ultimate bumper-sticker legacy of the Book of Reagan (1:1):

I got mine, fuck you.

Of course, if you think government is always bad, you're wrong. But, like trying to convince you that the earth is 4 billion years old and we evolved from lower life forms, that our carbon blanket is warming us up, that the earth goes around the sun, that the government's not going to pull the plug on your Grandma, that our president was born in Hawaii, or that Hawaii is a US State, you're not going to believe me. You think what you think, and then there's the truth, and never the twain shall meet.

Good luck with that. And thanks for the shit sandwich.

When Has Dick Cheney Ever Been Right?

2009-09-02T14:24:00.000-07:00

Rethuglicans Just Makin' Shit Up (as usual)

2009-08-15T07:55:00.000-07:00

I'm so sick of all this shit from the racist right. Under GW, we were much more fascist, if you actually care to look at the definition of fascism.

...a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

What we have right now is corporatism. It's like fascism, except the corporation, not the state, is really in control of everything. There is no racial or religious (left out of this definition, but most fascist movements come with religious bigotry as well) component (unless you want to make the argument that they worship money)...

We can take little bites out of corporate control here and there, nibble around the edges like rabbits, but the tasty vegies deep in the garden are for the corporate elite. When they're in trouble, we bail them out. When we're in trouble and try to use the democratic tools of our elected government to help us, we're fascists because, well, because they create the connotations and the definitions. We're fascist because they say so. Fuck the facts. Fuck the dictionary. Fuck reality. Just show up and shout over everyone: protect the companies from the fascists in Washington!

By letting our elected representatives craft a bill that keeps insurance companies honest, Obama is a Centralized Autocratic Dictatorial Leader? In what fucked up Universe does that logic work? Oh, right.... Guess that means Kim Jong Il is a socialist? If you say so...

I'm so sick of these idiots that I'm not even going to bother listing the fascist bullshit that GW Bush did to this country. Compare their warrior hero prezteldent with Obama on the fascist scale, and you break the fucking scale.

Anyone Still A Republican After Today is Officially a Fucking Idiot

2009-08-08T09:48:00.001-07:00

Sarah Fucking Palin:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

The America I know and love doesn't exist anymore. If it did, lying scumbag idiot torture apologists who promote the agenda of racist violence whores who respond to collateral damage with shrugs and smirks would be rounded up and jailed, when a conviction was achieved from a Jury of their peers (if there is such a thing), and sued for slander when a conviction is not achieved, and laughed out of town in all the other cases. They certainly wouldn't be given a bigger soap box, a following of brainwashed bigots who couldn't find the truth if you rammed it up their collective retentive asses, and a war chest of millions of dollars from the lunatic asylum masquerading as a news organization and a supposedly legitimate political party that now represents the south, the Mormon corridor, and Maine (for some insane reason I have yet to figure out).

But just for a moment, I'm going to stop typing, chase the squirrel away from the bird feeder again, and fantasize about a society in which we all get to vote on Sarah Palin's "level of productivity in society" and, based on our vote, determine that she should have to spend the rest of her years in seclusion, in some sort of God-forsaken hell-hole where news cameras never go, where health care is only for the very rich or very poor or very old or very incarcerated, and where her monthly check from the government is the majority of her income, where she has to live, with her whole damn genetically challenged family and unmarried teenage mother daughter, on $600 in food stamps a month, while borrowing money from friends and family to pay the rent...

Ah, fantasy...

Where in the World is Fox News?

2009-07-30T14:51:00.000-07:00

Would You Like Crabcakes With Your Humble Pie?

2009-07-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

Things have gotten so bad for us that we've stopped paying all but the bare essentials because we just can't afford it. Actually, we can't afford the bare essentials either, but that's all we can borrow to pay for. So, we don't have TV now.

No beer and no TV make Homer something something...

But back in our pre-Tivo days, Robin recorded our favorite shows for me when I was at work, and we kept all those tapes--moved across country with many boxes of VHS tapes that Robin assured me we'd be happy to have.

Once again, she was right.

Last night we stumbled across the West Wing Episode, The Midterms, from 2000, which contains this fairly famous clip:

What we hadn't noticed before, because we didn't know it, was that the Bible also says not to eat shell fish, and the delicious food they were serving at this talk radio reception was Alaskan Crab Cakes.

Nice the way they slipped that in without hitting you upside the head with it.

Time Bombs and Tortured Testicles

2009-05-05T09:47:00.000-07:00

In a variation on the if-torture-is-OK-then-what-about-child-torture argument, Andrew Sullivan follows the Rape And "Enhanced Interrogation" logic to it's logical conclusion: that rape, in order to get information that saves lives, is OK. That's the thing about Manichean Paranoia: once you do bad things to save good people, you're just another bad person.

I've heard this argument from Scott Horton and others ("Is it OK to crush the testicles of the child of the person who knows about the bomb," for example) and it's a good one. What I haven't heard is the obvious conclusion that Republicans have, at least in this argument, succumbed to one of the left's worst traits: relativistic ethics.

The purist right was always telling us, from high upon their law-and-order perches, that they were the holders of the absolutist flame. They were the protectors of the kind of ethics that make some things always right, and some always wrong. Before 9-11, you'd have been hard pressed to find any self-respecting sufferer of Bush Adoration Syndrome say that there is ever a case where raping someone is justified. They would have thought you were some commie-dirty-fucking-hippie-druggie-degenerate if you suggested that there might be a time when torturing a child is OK.

And yet, here we are, listening day in and out as one after another sufferer of Bush Apologist Syndrome suggests that, since we're the good guys, nothing we do is bad. I'm surprised I haven't heard more about how the mighty absolutists have slipped into the muck, munched some bad acid, and are wailing around slinging feces-laced chunks of "debate" out of their logical spiral into a Very Dark place indeed.

Since there seems to be a sizable chunk of America that thinks Keifer Southerland is keeping them safe, perhaps we'd all be better off relying on the system that many wise men devised for dealing with ethical quandaries: The Law. We call breaking a law one believes to be immoral civil disobedience. I hear from the Christian Torture lovers (q.v. this study: Churchgoers More Likely To See Torture As Justifiable) that they should stand up for this country and do what it takes to protect us.

Since privatization is the answer to everything, I suggest that one of you potential child rapists buy yourself a small army, a prison in a foreign country, an intelligence gathering operation, and go pick up a few targets, torture them (or torture their children--whatever it takes), and see what kind of intelligence you can get. Then, we'll prosecute, and you heroes can go to prison for a while, like all the other people who have practiced civil disobedience as a protest against laws they don't like. Be warned: most people are ethical absolutists when it comes to child rape.

If you happen to be Dick Cheney, and you've already completed the above assignment (although, maybe you didn't actually rape or torture any terrorist's children--they were just mangled and killed as collateral damage in that other ethical absolutist's high ground you took in Iraq), then you should expect to have to complete your civil disobedience assignment and spend a few years paying for your law-breaking. I'm sure Thoreau would approve.

Torture Memos are Evidence of Conspiracy to Commit Torture

2009-04-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

The conspiracy to commit torture, which took place at the highest levels of government in the Bush ~~corporo-fascist regime~~ administration, now has enough public evidence, thanks to the recently releases memos, to warrant prosecution.

But before we go down the criminal prosecution road, we should see the immediate impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee. For the legal angles of this travesty of American national security, American reputation, and American authority, I turn to Scott Horton of Harpers who writes today in The Torture Tango:

The memo-writer and the person soliciting the memo both understood perfectly that their role was to get interrogators out in the field to go ahead and use the techniques against which reservations were being expressed. They understood that, if the memos were issued, individuals would in fact be subjected to the torture techniques they were approving. They also fully understood that it was likely that individuals would be killed or would suffer lasting impairment as a result of their decision to give the greenlight. This satisfies the prerequisites for a criminal charge against the memo writer under section 2340A, conspiracy to torture. The preparation and issuance of these memoranda were criminal acts, and the relevant level of mens rea likely emerges from the dialogue surrounding their issuance.

What do you call it when you have evidence of a crime and you don't prosecute? Is that prosecutorial discretion? Or misconduct?

Cheney Covering up His War Crimes

2009-04-05T09:26:00.000-07:00

Using his burrowed shadow government of friends and proteges in the National Security Apparatus that he has controlled for so long now (since Plan B lied about Soviet capabilities), Dick Cheney is continuing to cover up his war crimes, using insiders to help him. That's treason.

Scott Horton's post today, In Brennan, Cheney has a Friend, drills into the lame arguments against making these documents public, arguments which include possible shame and embarrassment of the agents involved.

Let's review. You're an agent for your country. You have a prisoner. You've been told to torture him. You a) follow orders, or b) refuse to follow illegal orders. If you choose the illegal route, do you get to claim possible embarrassment and shame as reasons why the court should not see the evidence brought against you?

I'm pretty sure the national security state secrets arguments, first set forth by the US Government in US v Reynolds, just don't apply here. We're not talking about super-secret spy software that could actually be used to protect this country. We're talking about a thug administration, suffering from Manichean Paranoia Syndrome, torturing people, and thereby actually making this country less safe. Endangering the country with illegal acts. Sounds like treason to me.

What to do with that 401k...

2009-03-23T15:03:00.000-07:00

You are the steward of your 401k. After Enron, I warned everyone I knew that these people were playing fast and loose with the rules. Sure, Phil Gramm got a few things through in the late 90's but once the Bush free marketeers got into it, it was just nuts. I think Goldman Sachs was leveraged 33 to one for god's sake. Hank Paulson him self got the SEC to change the rules that he took advantage of, and then when he became treasury secretary, basically bailed himself out.

You don't have to be a genius to know if you pile up a bunch of money and don't pay anyone to guard it, it will disappear. The Bushies did this with cold hard cash they sent to Baghdad on pallets! Billions if cash right from the US Treasury. Then, they did it 1000 times bigger with credit default swaps and unregulated insurance instruments. The average 401k guy gets told to buy and hold, the long run is good, stay in stocks if you're young, yada yada yada... Meanwhile, they're pocketing your money, buying jets and private islands in countries with no extradition, no income tax, and no minimum wage.

Just imagine what would have happened if we fed this GOP genetic mutation our social security funds.

So, is the 401k a bad thing? Should you be buying in right now? Well, you can get some good stuff cheap right now. But the next time you smell a bubble, put it in a money market fund. I wish people had the option of just going into an index fund with no fees. In the long run, that's better than all that damn day trading anyway. But who knows... It could be Mad Max world soon, in which case you'll want to invest in sharp boomerangs and gasoline.

Conservative Catharsis: Blame Deregulation and Privatization

2009-03-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

George W Bush broke the world. It was pretty fucked up to begin with, after years of laissez-faire economics practiced by all American presidents since FDR, but much more so since Reagan. The conservative philosophy was corrupted by deregulators who's belief in the free market completely left out the fact that most people are greedy bastards who will steal everything that's not tied down.

Now this upper class of well-to-do Reaganites, many of them in the Democratic party, have drained the wealth of this country into their walled communities and private security forces, while they whine about their portfolios being worthless. What did they think when they were doing everything Phil Graham suggested? Did they think we could just trust the robber baron class not to be robber barons?

The profit motive works just fine in a regulated market, where everyone has their cards above the table, and we all play by the same rules, which we can all understand. Old timey conservatives were for stringent regulations, especially capital requirements on banks and the like. To be a fiscal conservative meant, literally, to not take crazy risks. A little risk for a decent return, but nothing crazy.

Well, you guys had your chance and you blew it. But what's funny about it is that Karl Marx basically predicted it. It's not hedge fund science, you know. If you have a bunch of money in one place, and you loosen the rules that protect it, someone will steal it. Human nature--GREED--is not good in a market because the greedy will take down the rest of us in that inter-dependent system.

So, now we're going to try something else. It's kind of like what FDR tried, at least in the sense of the largess, the investment in infrastructure and people, and the like. But it's also like FDR in the sense that he realized that everyone deserves some basic floor to stand on: a starting place so that we are all, indeed, created equal when we become a member of The Class of US Taxpayers. Now some of us might get more out of that system than we paid in, but the ones at the top will still get something out of it. They'll have clean dishes to eat cooked food on in restaurants. They'll have firemen and cops and teachers and those people will have the basic dignity of health coverage, affordable housing and utilities, and the like. If the private enterprise system refuses to charge enough for the products and services so that those people can be paid enough to buy their own coverage, then it is we the people, the government, who must force them to, through taxation.

And if you don't believe that, then your option is to have a whole class of people who are broke, unhealthy, and damn angry about it. In this country, those people vote for someone who will make the playing field fair again. In the current view of the dominant conservative voices, those people can just crawl off and die somewhere. Or wind up in prison where we subsidize their everything.

There will be people at the top who pay for it. That is populism. That is the price you pay for living in a country where we pay people who stock shelves at Wal Mart so little that they qualify for government subsidized health care. I'm sure most free market conservatives would prefer to have Wal Mart take care of their employees. But then how could they be the low price leader?

It's still a free country, and there's going to be a free market for practically anything (including things that are illegal). There will be a free market for health care and those of you who can afford it are more than welcome to sink your dollars into a system that profits from your sickness on one end (the HMOs) and profits from your minimal care on the other (the insurance companies who don't want to pay, they just want to collect). I ask you, which force will drive doctor salaries lower? A government that tries to enforce fairness, no matter how cumbersome a bureaucracy that develops in order to implement that fairness (and, again, medicare does it with amazingly low administrative costs compared to private companies), or a private insurance company that is trying desperately to keep outlays down because raising premiums is just making them lose customers?

I'm all for personal responsibility. I grow a lot of my own food. I own my own small business and work for a lot less than minimum wage. I would require more stringent food requirements on Food Stamp recipients, like me, to eat healthy foods and support local, small, and organic farmers. But when it comes to something as complex as health care, I just don't trust the greedy bastards to run it anywhere but into the ground.

I lived in LA for 20 years. I remember the Enron fiasco during the electricity crisis. We had been sold a bill of goods about privatizing and deregulating the electricity markets that turned out to be worse than a load of horse shit (which is at least good fertilizer). It is a perfect example of how unfettered markets only serve as suet to a bunch of hungry birds like Ken Lay who fly away with the whole chunk if they can.

At that point, I started looking into co-ops, public ownership of utilities, community supported agriculture, and credit unions. I like employee owned companies and try to support them when I can. Guess what all those examples are? Communist! They take the assets, the factories, the power lines, the loan portfolios, and they collectively own them among all the members. Where I live now, we have an electric co-op (a remnant of FDR's Rural Electrification Association). It's great. All the people who get the cheap power own the assets of the power company collectively. There is no profit, but the guys who cut the tree branches out of the way get paid well, get health insurance and other benefits. So does the nice lady who answers the phone. Because we, the owners, have decided that's a good thing to do. There's no profit for any corporation, but there is enough to make sure everyone gets paid what they're worth. If those employees had a government health plan they could choose, and pay for with a tax on their paychecks, then as a co-owner of the co-op, I would be more than happy to give them a raise with the money the co-op saved by not having to pay for their health care.

I'm pretty sure GM would like that too.

Why should health care be any different than the co-op itself? Why can we not use the medicare paycheck tax to pay into a fund that is then used to pay our dues for a medical co-op that fairly and equitably distributes care on a triage basis, and puts a premium on prevention, even to the point of rewarding people who do the right thing for their health (thereby being less of a burden to the rest of the co-op)?

Now a lot of people will say it's a red commie flag there, but if you really think about it, and look back over American history at the collective good that has developed as a ethic in this country, it's conservative. It says YOU have a stake, YOU have a responsibility, and if you do well, you will be rewarded. The fact that we are all owners makes it the ownership society for real. And the fact that it is controlled by a bureaucracy that is built to make it as fair as possible takes it out of the realm of Stalin or other totalitarian philosophies, and puts it squarely in the hands of voters who get tho choose the head of the federal government every four years.

I worked my ass off for big entertainment companies for 20 years. They made plenty of money off my labor: more than I did, in fact. And when that work caused the degenerative disease I have in my big load bearing joints, those company's insurance companies denied that they had caused it, and tossed me out like any old broken cog. In your world, it's toughsky shitsky for Scotty because they have to profit. In my world, the money I put into the co-op would come back to me from the co-op when I needed it. Some guy who profited more from my work might have to pay a little more tax now to fund it, but I'll never get back all the profit I helped him make. That's fine. But when he tries to say he has no responsibility for my care, now that I'm broken down and can't do the physical labor that I spent 20 years turning into a career, I say he's full of it.

But when he says, well, I don't really want to pay into a system where a bunch of jet-setting insurance company executives and HMO executives milk every last dime out of everything in order to feed their Myopic vision of next quarter's stock price, then he has a point. I don't want him to pay them either. I want him to pay my doctor, with as little administrative or other overhead as possible. In fact, less overhead means more for my doctor.

So that's my long and winding explanation of why I want medical care to be non-profit and universal. And I'd like to thank the Ron Paul Republican who's been rattling a few cages around here for setting me off on what was a comment, but turned into a diary. So much for banging out a quick answer and getting back to work!

And thanks to Hunter today for firing up my populist, anti-Randian roots. Sometimes I forget why I hang out here, and then Hunter posts something that makes me feel like writing again.

Conservative Catharsis: Don't Blame Obama

2009-03-05T08:40:00.001-08:00

There are no principles left on the right, only tactics and bluster, as if John Bolton himself has taken over the GOP diplomacy wing. At this point, looking back on all the facts I collected at this site, which proves conclusively that the entire Bush administration committed treason, repeatedly: I don't really care what they say. When you say as much shit as the right wing has said in the last few decades, it renders your speech meaningless. We are for x except when we're not. We're against y except when we're not. Now we're going to do that which we told you not to. Then we're going to tell you not to again.

I often tell myself I could be a better conservative than them. It wouldn't be hard. I have libertarian bones, like most Americans. We want the government to protect us and leave us alone, that delicate balancing act that, in a world of nanotechnology, is going to get harder and harder to perform. But it's really not that tricky. Conservatives should be reality based, do what would actually make us safer (which is more like Ron Paul's position than John Bolton's).

They should not be afraid of logic which leads to a conclusion similar to Dennis Kucinich. The liberal left and the reasonable right have much more in common than most of them would care to admit. If the Nationalist Times could get over its racism, they'd have some decent solutions about some things, like keeping government out of medical decisions, a position long held by the libertarian liberals on issues like abortion, medical marijuana, and euthanasia.

But first, the conservatives of the US need a catharsis: George W Bush ruined this country. Rush Limbaugh may be hoping Obama fails at big-government rescue, but it's really too late. George W. Bush (aided amply by Dick Cheney and Rush) drove this country right off a cliff, and Obama is trying to stitch together a big enough parachute to save the whole car. It's probably too late to save the car. But it is not too late to save those occupants who are willing to start stitching their own little parachutes, and we can wind up falling a little slower with a contraption that's going to look a little like the seagulls James lassoed to carry his giant peach.

We'll probably still have a hard landing, but maybe we can slow it all down enough to not break our legs when we hit. All the "conservatives" -- and I would argue that there really aren't many any more -- who can't realize that they were wrong about Bush, wrong about Iraq, wrong about Cheney, wrong about trickle down economics, and wrong about practically every social issue from Terry Schiavo to Sodomy, are going to have to crash. Continuing on at this point as if George Bush wasn't the worst president ever, as if Dick Cheney doesn't belong in prison, as if Donald Rumsfeld doesn't deserve to be "sleep deprived" for days, is the intellectual equivalent of a quivering bowl of decomposed fruit with ditto head flies swarming around it.

If I were a conservative right now (and in many ways I am), I would be encouraging bigger investment in infrastructure that will make our communities more resilient. I would be encouraging micro-loans to the poor to help them start small local businesses. I would demand that food stamp programs only get increases if the recipients can use that money at farmer's markets and on community supported agriculture programs. I would strongly encourage small, local power producers, and companies that create on site energy creation, especially in rural areas.

If I were a conservative right now, I would strongly encourage people to grow their own food in organic victory gardens or urban rooftop gardens, or community gardens on empty lots, like they're doing in Detroit now. The roots of the conservative philosophy lie in independence. This disaster brought on by the insolent teenager of a president and his Dr. Strangelove sidekick offers a chance for conservatives to get back to their roots and encourage the people of this country to become independent, to help each other, and to reward behavior that makes things better, while punishing those who make it worse.

Today's LA Times has a great story about the Mad Maxing that's going on right now, in this case at abandoned construction projects around southern California.

At its Oakland site, structures dating to World War II were to have been demolished by now to make way for 1,000 homes and a shopping center.

But workers walked off the job when their payments stopped, leaving behind piles of debris. A nine-story hospital the developers planned to raze was invaded by squatters.

In the Sacramento River Delta area of Contra Costa County at SunCal's planned Delta Coves housing development, blowing sand is filling in a new lagoon, and crucial water pumping systems are unmonitored.

Eight years of robber barons in charge has left us in a world we are much more equipped to deal with than many think. One of the facts (I know, conservatives, it's hard to get used to the idea that there are facts to be found outside of Fox News) that LA Times story touches on is that the thieves who show up in these abandoned construction projects are there to take copper wire and other commodities that are valuable. These people have been watching the robber barons do this to the whole country for the last 8 years. They are watching now as they all get away with it. And while there may not be a Wall Street worth plundering ever again, there will be things that aren't tied down. And unless those things are protected by armed guards, they will be stolen. In the Mad Max world Bush has left us with, people are left on their own to survive with whatever they can find.

We have the know-how and where-with-all to create resilient communities that produce their own power, grow their own food, and live sustainably without oil or coal. We just have to get used to the idea that we've been robbed. We have to start over, from scratch, with very little to help us besides government and abandoned industries to supply scraps. To what extent a federal government will be able to help a system that needs a lot of independent nodes, we will see. One reason I've chosen to not become a conservative is that I believe the government can help.

But it's going to need some basic conservative help, or it can easily get out of control. Hopefully, there are some conservatives willing to step up to a podium, admit that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Limbaugh conservatism is over. Bombastic, disagreeable, authoritarian, top-down, imperialistic, interventionist assholes are going to have to step aside and shut the hell up for a while. They had 8 years to do what they assured us was the absolute right thing to do, and it turned out they were lying, torturing thieves who literally stole billions of dollars (in deregulated Ponzi schemes, or by taking pallets of cash directly out of the US Mint and flying it to Baghdad where it disappeared). Any talk of government spending being out of control is just more of the same shit that trickled down their legs since Reagan. This government is going to spend on infrastructure and people, and the most the conservatives can hope to do is direct some of it in ways that they prefer.

The conservative in me would like to see the investments lead to more independence and less centralization. Is there any principal more important to conservative philosophy? At this point, it seems more likely that President Obama will preserve that principle more than the GOP will.

Epitaph for the Bush Years

2009-01-27T15:58:00.000-08:00

As usual, Scott Horton sends the nail deep into the wood with one blow.

If it does not do justice, what is the government but a great criminal enterprise? For what are gangs of criminals but petty little governments?--Augustine

The Only Thing That Could Be Worse

2009-01-17T07:49:00.000-08:00

would be not prosecuting the murdering mother fuckers who did all this.

Eight Years In Eight Minutes

Here's the transcript, courtesy of this comment by TrueBlueMajority at the KOS.

George Walker Bush.
43rd president of the United States.
first ever with a criminal record.
our third story tonight,
his presidency: eight years in eight minutes.

early in 2001 the U.S. fingered Al Qaeda
for the bombing of the USS Cole
Bush counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke
had a plan to take down Al Qaeda.
instead by February the NSC
had already discussed invading Iraq,
and had a plan for post-Saddam Iraq.

by March 5 Bush had a map ready for Iraqi oil exploration
and a list of companies.
Al Qaeda?
Rice told Clarke not to give Bush a lot of long memos.
not a big reader.

August 6, 2001
a CIA analyst briefs Bush on vacation:
"Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S."
Bush takes no action tells the briefer—quote
all right, you've covered your ass now.

next month Clarke requests
using new predator drones to kill Bin Laden
the Pentagon and CIA
say no.

September 11th
Bush remains seated for several minutes
to avoid scaring school children
by getting up and leaving.
he then flies around the country
and promises quote a full scale investigation to find
those folks who did it

Rumsfeld says Afghanistan does not have enough targets
we've got to do Iraq.
when the CIA traps Bin Laden at Tora Bora
it asks for 800 rangers to cut off his escape
Bush outsources the job to Pakistanis
sympathetic to the Taliban
Bin Laden
gets away

in February General Tommy Franks tells a visiting Senator
Bush is moving equipment out of Afghanistan
so he can invade Iraq.
one of the men who prepped Rice for her testimony
that Bush did not ignore pre 9-11 warnings
later explains quote we cherry picked things
to make it look like the president
had been actually concerned about Al Qaeda
they didn't give a bleep about Al Qaeda

July and Britain's intel chief says Bush is
fixing intelligence and facts around the policy to take out Saddam
January 03
Bush and Blair agree to invade in March
Mr. Bush still telling us he has not decided
telling Blair they should paint an airplane in UN colors
fly it over Iraq and provoke a response
a pretext for invasion

the man who said it would take several hundred thousand troops
fired
the man who said it would cost more than a hundred billion
fired
the man who revealed Bush's yellowcake lie
smeared
his wife's covert status
exposed
the White House liars who did it
and covered it up
not fired
one convicted
Bush commutes his sentence

then in Iraq, stuff happens:
Iraq's army, disbanded
the government de-Baathified
200,000 weapons, billions of dollars just
lost
foreign mercenaries immunized from justice
political hacks run the Green Zone
religious cleansing forcing one out of six Iraqis from their homes
Abu Ghraib
the insurgency
Al Qaeda in Iraq

other stuff does not happen:
WMD
post-war planning
body armor
vehicular armor

the payoff?
oil
and billions for Halliburton, Blackwater and other companies
while Mr. Bush denies VA healthcare to 450,000 veterans
tries to raise their healthcare fees
blocks the new G.I. Bill
and increases his own power with the USA PATRIOT Act
with the Military Commissions Act
public orders exempting himself from a thousand laws
and secretly from the Presidential Records Act
The Geneva Conventions
FISA
sparking a mass rebellion at the Justice Department

secret star chambers for terrorism suspects,
overturned by Hamdan v Rumsfeld.
denying habeas corpus,
overturned by Boumediene v Bush.
200 renditionings
sleep deprivation
abuse

Rumsfeld warned in 2002 that he was torturing
that it would jeopardize convictions
out of 550 at Gitmo
hundreds ultimately go free with no charges
dozens are tortured
eight fatally
three are convicted

on U.S. soil twelve hundred immigrants rounded up
without due process
without bail
without court dates
without a single charge of terrorism

it wasn't just Mr. Bush no longer subject to the rule of law
he slashed regulations on everyone from banks to mining companies
appointed 98 lobbyists to oversee their own industries
weakening emission standards for mercury
and 650 different toxic chemicals
regulators shared drugs
and their beds
with industry reps
the Crandall Canyon mine owner told inspectors to back up
because his buddy, Republican Mitch McConnell
was sleeping with their boss
McConnell's wife is Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao
her agency overruled engineer concerns about Crandall Canyon
and was found negligent
after nine miners died in the collapse there

Mr. Bush's hands off
as Enron blacks out California
doubling electric bills
after months of rejecting price caps Mr. Bush bows to pressure

the blackouts end

Mr. Bush further deregulates commodity futures
midwifing the birth of unregulated oil markets
which just like Enron jack up prices to an all time high
until Congress and both presidential candidates call for regulations

and the prices fall

deregulating financial services and lax enforcement of remaining rules
created a housing bubble
creating the mortgage crisis
creating then a credit crisis
devastating industries that rely on credit
from student loans to car dealers

firms that had survived the Great Depression could not survive Bush
those that did got
seven hundred billion dollars
no strings, no transparency
no idea whether it worked

unlike the auto bailout
which cut workers' salaries.
a GOP memo called it
a chance to punish unions

but Bush failed even when his party and his patrons
did not stand to profit
investigators blamed management cost cutting communication
for missed warnings about Columbia
Bush administration convicts include
sex offenders at Homeland Security
convicted liars
every kind of thief in the calendar
and if you count things that were not prosecuted
the vice president of the United States actually
shot a man in the face

the man apologized.

Mr. Bush faked the truth
with paid propaganda in Iraq
on his education policy

tried to silence the truth about global warming
rocket fuel in our water
industry influence on energy policy

politicized the truth of science at NASA, the EPA,
the National Cancer Institute, Fish and Wildlife
and the FDA

his lies
exposed by whistleblowers from the cabinet down
"complete BS" the treasury secretary said
of Mr. Bush on his tax cuts.

Rice's mushroom cloud
Powell's mobile labs
Iraq and 9-11
Jack Abramoff
Jessica Lynch

Pat Tillman
Pat Tillman again
Pat Tillman, again.

the air at Ground Zero
most responders still suffering respiratory problems.

global warming
carbon emissions
a Clear Skies initiative lowering air quality standards
the Healthy Forests initiative increasing logging
faith based initiatives
the cost of medicare reform
fired US attorneys
politically synchronized terror alerts

the surge causing insurgents to switch sides
that abortion causes breast cancer
that his first recession began under Clinton
that he did not wiretap without warrants
that we do not torture.

that American citizen John Walker Lindh's rights
were not violated
that he refused the right to counsel

heckuva job Brownie
some survivors still in trailers
New Orleans still at just two-thirds its usual population

the lie that no one could have predicted the economic crisis
except
the economists who did
no one could have predicted 9-11 except
one ass-covering CIA analyst
or thirty
no one could have predicted the levee breach
except literally
Mr. Bill
in a PSA that aired on TV a year before Katrina

Bush actually admitted that he lied about not firing Rumsfeld
because he did not want to tell the truth.
look it up.

all of it
all of it and more leaving us with
ten trillion in debt
to pay for 31% more in discretionary spending
the Iraq War
a 1.3 trillion dollar tax cut

median income down two thousand dollars
three-quarters of all income gains under Bush
going to the richest one percent
unemployment up from 4.2 to 7.2 percent

the Dow, down from ten thousand five hundred eighty seven
to eighty two hundred seventy seven
six million now more in poverty
seven million more now without health care

buying toxic goods from China
deadly cribs
outsourcing security to Dubai
still unsecure in our ports
and at our nuclear plants
more dependent on foreign oil
out of the international criminal court
off the anti ballistic missle treaty
military readiness and standards down

with two unfinished wars
a nuclear North Korea
disengaged from the Palestinian problem
destabilizing eastern european diplomacy with
anti missile plans
and unable to keep Russia out of Georgia

2000 miles of Appalachian streams
destroyed by rubble from mountaintop mining
at his last G-8 summit,
he actually bid farewell to other world leaders
saying quote—goodbye from the world's greatest polluter

consistently undermining historic American reverence
for the institutions that empower us
education, now "academic elites"
and the law, "activist judges"
capping jury awards

and Bin Laden?
living today unmolested in a Pakistani safe haven
created by a truce endorsed and defended by George W. Bush

and among all the gifts he gave to Bin Laden
the most awful, the most damaging not just to America
but to the American ideal
was to further Bin Laden's goal
by making us act out of fear rather than fortitude

leaving us with precious little to cling to tonight
save the one thing that might yet suffice:

hope.

We Were Warned

2009-01-16T10:59:00.000-08:00

When President Eisenhower told us, in his 1961 farewell address, to beware of the Military Industrial complex, America ignored him, and built the most powerful group of private corporations ever to supply a military.

But way before Ike did his best to tell us what was going to happen if we weren't careful, another president gave a farewell address that warned us about George Bush:

Political parties serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

That's from George Washington's farewell address (h/t Scott Horton). Did you have to be a George Washington to figure this out: "...unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people..." I was physically attacked, made fun of, blacklisted by Republican co-workers who spread the word not to hire me, called a traitor and a commie, all because I tried to warn people, before he was even appointed by the Supreme Court, that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were unprincipled men who would subvert the power of the people.

Washington even tried to warn us that these men would start dangerous wars of choice with their out-of-control military. He prayed that we would...

...avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. In this sense it is that your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.

If my union is the main prop of my liberty, then shouldn't I protect my union from another Bush/Cheney "administration" in order to preserve my liberty? Shouldn't we, as patriotic Americans aware of our history and the admonishments of past presidents, work to avoid the necessity of an overgrown military establishment which is inauspicious to liberty? Do we not have a duty to past Americans who have fought and died for our rights to fight for the liberty of our descendants?

What would be the best way to stop future presidents from usurping the power of the people? Should we move on and not bog ourselves down in the bickering that would accompany trials of war criminals from the highest echelons of government? Will we signal to future presidents that they will be considered above the law as long as their partisans promise to bicker and complain that the prosecution is not deserved because it is being controlled by someone from a different faction?

If fear of political harm prevents the prosecution of criminals, then wouldn't criminals simply threaten political division and wrangling in order to avoid prosecution? Has political calculation won over an executive's duty to uphold the law and the constitution?

Listen carefully to the oath of office on Tuesday. The promise that President Elect Obama makes will be:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

This oath does not mention protecting Americans from terrorists no matter what the cost to liberty. It doesn't say anything about letting people avoid prosecution because it would be divisive or distracting. It doesn't even say anything about getting God's help. It says to protect and defend the Constitution, to the best of your ability. I know that the best of Obama'a ability is pretty damn good. I heard what his Attorney General Designate said about torture. I heard Obama say no one is above the law. He is capable of heeding the warnings of Eisenhower, Washington, and many other presidents.

As for how we managed to get to this place, it seems we just don't listen, do we? America has a long, rich history that we will be doomed to repeat if we don't study it, and prosecute those responsible for usurping the power of the people and ignoring the rule of law.

A Brief History of a Joke

2009-01-14T19:08:00.000-08:00

Sometime's it's fun to follow the conversation that leads to a funny joke. But the joke has to stand alone:

My moat is frozen. Hopefully the assholes can't ice-skate.
--Me

From Bush's Last Press Conference (as pResident)

2009-01-13T10:29:00.000-08:00

And so, I view those who get angry and yell and say bad things and, you know, all that kind of stuff, it's just a very few people in the country. I don't know why they get angry. I don't know why they get hostile.—GW Bush

I can only answer with another quote, from his Vice pResident:

Go fuck yourself.—Dick Cheney

Not an Utter Failure for Rich Cronies

2009-01-05T05:25:00.000-08:00

From the January Harper's Index: A retrospective of the Bush era:

Portion of all U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the top 1 percent of earners: 3/4

Increase since 2000 in the number of Americans living at less than half the federal poverty level: 3,500,000

Percentage change since 2001 in the average amount U.S. workers spend on out-of-pocket medical expenses: +172

Estimated percentage by which Social Security benefits would have declined if Bush’s privatization plan had passed: –15 ...

Portion of the $3.3 billion in federal Hurricane Katrina relief spent by Mississippi that has benefited poor residents: 1/4

No Elaborating on Utter Failure

2009-01-04T14:18:00.000-08:00

No! You can go back to your, what do you call it, your Google, and you figure out all that.

-- Former President George H.W. Bush, when asked to elaborate on some of his son's failures as president.

Justice After Bush, Prosecuting an outlaw administration

2008-12-20T12:10:00.000-08:00

Scott Horton wrote in the December, 2008 issue of Harper's Magazine:

No prior administration has been so systematically or so brazenly lawless. Yet it is no simple matter to prosecute a former president or his senior officers. There is no precedent for such a prosecution, and even if there was, the very breadth and audacity of the administration’s activities would make the process so complex as to defy systems of justice far less fragmented than our own. But that only means choices must be made. Indeed, in weighing the enormity of the administration’s transgressions against the realistic prospect of justice, it is possible to determine not only the crime that calls most clearly for prosecution but also the crime that is most likely to be successfully prosecuted. In both cases, that crime is torture.

Anyone who thinks I'm some nutcase for wanting to prosecute the entire Bush "administration" for war crimes should read what Scott Horton has to say. I dare any wing nut Republican to argue any of it.

Who is Scott Horton?

A New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Horton lectures at Columbia Law School. A life-long human rights advocate, Scott served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union. He is a co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, and has been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the Central Eurasian region. Scott recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired several committees, including, most recently, the Committee on International Law. He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association.

Step on up, wing nuts.

Bush Should Have Signed This Guy with the Rangers

2008-12-14T15:52:00.000-08:00

"This is a gift from the Iraqis. This is the farewell kiss, you dog. This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."--Muntather Zaidi

My Vote for Illinois Senator

2008-12-11T17:40:00.000-08:00

Carol Mosely Braun helps solve some of the seniority problem...

The Penultimate Bush Quotes Update

2008-12-02T10:25:00.000-08:00

I haven't updated my Bush quotes page in a while, and man did I miss some doozies, like this one:

"And I, unfortunately, have been to too many disasters as president."—discussing flooding in the Midwest, Washington, D.C., June 17, 2008

Recently, the publishers of The War in Quotes sent me a copy of their book. It is horrifying! I wish I had read it before Halloween! It got me to thinking about how a lot of these quotes (not just Bush's) are actually windows that tell you exactly what these criminals are thinking! They're little Freudian slips of truthiness that tell you exactly what they're thinking.

Honestly, I'm so sick of the man that I might have just gone on without every touching that quote page again. But I've started to feel a tug toward forgiving this cruel, evil, spoiled little frat boy, and I just can't stand the thought of people saying "Oh, he meant well."

No he didn't. He meant to make a lot of money for himself and his friends in the military industrial complex. He meant to cripple the federal budget for years to come, and there's probably a whole bunch of shit he did, that he meant to do, that we will only learn about in the years to come.

And if he, and his cronies, aren't prosecuted, then it's proof that there is no justice, and this country is broken.

And we all know who broke it.

Rahmbo

2008-11-24T13:04:00.000-08:00

This is what happens when a Junta steals everything

2008-11-13T08:03:00.000-08:00

From Bloomberg:

Employers cut 240,000 jobs last month, for a total so far this year of 1.2 million jobs lost, while the total number of unemployed Americans jumped to 10.1 million, the highest level in a quarter century, according to last week's jobs report from the Labor Department.

The Bush Junta has spent 8 years robbing the US Treasury. From no-bid contracts, to pallets of cash "lost" in Iraq, to Wall Street getting "bailed out" (bailed out from what? robbing us blind?), the Bush cronies have stolen everything that's not nailed down. In fact, I think I can hear the pry bars and claw hammers working their way through the White House now.

Now the increased tax of paying off all this debt will fall on our grandchildren. And I still have people telling me I should be nice? A good friend of mine forwarded a typical right wing email full of crap about Pelosi, and I went off on the guy (who's email I got out of the forwarded mail)...

Well, my good friend was a little perturbed at me for attacking a long-time friend of his. Oh well. I refuse to apologize for treating this wing nuts like the idiots they are. They should be shamed and marginalized. Here's my reply to my friend, who suggested I play nice if I want to get people like that guy thinking....

I did send him a link. It carefully explained how there was no evidence that Pelosi owns stock in Star Kist.

However, the bigger point was that to dare to compare that one little thing, even if it was true, which it's not, to the long litany of disaster created by this president and his cronies, is the most specious of all their bad arguments. It's like a little kid going, yeah, I ruined your sandcastle and the entire beach with this oil spill, but you ruined my Popsicle with this tiny spec of sand.

I lost sleep over this last night, because I sure don't want to make you mad at me. And losing sleep is not something I need right now, as I have to take a shit load of drugs to make it through the pain and get any sleep at all.

But I will tell you that this isn't about left vs. right. This is about the fact that people like this guy supported this right wing junta that has ruined this country, that is busy robbing us and our grandchildren of trillions right now, and yet he, and people like him, continue this bullshit that is just sand in the eyes to stop us from seeing what is really going on.

This is about reality.

This crap goes back further than Gingrich. I don't really care about getting him thinking. His response to me was so condescending that I just wanted to piss him off. I hope I did. And I hope it sticks with him. Frankly, I've learned that pissing wing nuts off actually is what makes them think. Trying to play nice with them is just a waste of time. Their whole philosophy is confrontation and agitation. They really hate me because I'm very good at their silly game.

Honestly. Here we are on the brink of a depression and environmental ruin brought on by the Philosophy of people like that, and you're saying we should be nice to them and try to get them to think? I don't think it's possible to get them to think. They need to be shamed. They need to be shown, over and over again, the connection between their Laissez-Faire, Trickle-Down, economics and the current condition of this country, from the environment to the economy.

Besides, they are a small minority now. As long as we keep them marginalized and ridiculed, they will not be able to affect things any more. Their days are over, and they will have to re-invent themselves into something more reality based to come back. Honestly. We're talking about a whole political wing of this country that doesn't believe in evolution or global warming.

It's like with religion. If they would only admit that they don't know... If they would just admit to the reality that ideology spits out standard answers and prescriptions for action that are not based on facts. The right wing philosophy, like practically any religion, is simply not pragmatic. It used to be, but then it was taken over by the ideologues, mostly from Nixon and Reagan (like Cheney and the Neo-cons, and Bush, the Theo-con).

Now, if this guy wants to admit that this disaster is the direct result of a Wild West Deregulatory environment that festered in the Enron Accounting and Halliburton No-Bid contract petri dish in some right wing laboratory, then maybe we could all come to some Obamaesque understanding and cooperation. But do you think this person is reality based? When he just forwards whatever right wing talking points come through his machine?

Epic Fail

2008-11-10T10:35:00.000-08:00

Odd that the conservatives I occasionally hear from have gotten so quiet. Plotting the fascist overthrow of the newly elected government, or are you putting "country first" these days?

Well, at the risk of saying "I told you so" yet again about the Bush "administration" I'd like to point out that the looting of the US Treasury, of our children's and grandchildren's tax dollars, is going on at break neck pace in Washington. And all you Bush voters should be even more ashamed. This isn't capitalism. Hell, it's not even conservative. The fascist corporate right wing of America has taken control of your money, and I hear nary a peep out of you. Not one single, hey, that hard left liberal lunatic Supak was actually right about these Bushies! They're robbing us blind!

Ah, well, all the better to drown Obama's government in a bath tub. Where is Grover Norquist on this bailout issue? Where are the true conservatives who should be first in line demanding that there be transparency in the bail out?

Could it be that it was never conservatism that interested you? Could it be that you only care about pouring the next generation's tax dollars into paying off the credit card bills accrued during these heady days of Christo-Military-Corporo-fascism? As long as you get your private Blackwater armies and Halliburton support services paid for in perpetuity with stolen pallets of cash, right? As long as you hand out more free money to the CEOs who robbed their companies and their investors blind, right? As long as that fucking socialist Obama doesn't get to spend it on health care for a bunch of lazy welfare queens, right?

As I write this, the financial world is abuzz with this news:

The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration's request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.

But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.

..."Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no," said George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the nonpartisan congressional authority on taxes. "They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks."

And which banks specifically benefited from this centralized, fascist takeover of our financial system? None of your damn business, that's who.

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn't require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

I find it astounding that many of the conservatives who have insulted my over the last 8 years are sitting on their hands right now, lest they type something a little, shall we say unflattering, about their hero president?

Well, maybe this will help:

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Let’s say you were the chief risk officer of the former Bear Stearns Cos. in the two years preceding the bank’s collapse in March.

And let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that the postmortems revealed Bear to have had too much risk and too little management of it. The only way JPMorgan Chase & Co. would agree to acquire Bear was with a $29 billion sweetener from the Federal Reserve for some of the less-palatable assets.

Following the acquisition of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan, you would expect said chief risk officer to:

a) Retire quietly to his country home;

b) Open a "consulting" business, allowing him to deduct the costs of a home office at the country home;

c) Land a plum job offer from another Wall Street bank;

d) Land a job as a bank supervisor at the Federal Reserve.

If you picked a, b or c, you would be incorrect. The correct answer is d.

Michael Alix, chief risk officer at Bear Stearns from 2006 until its demise in March, was named senior vice president in the Bank Supervision Group of the New York Fed on Oct. 31.

It’s not unusual for Wall Street to reward its own, offering rogue traders -- the ones who escape criminal prosecution -- new jobs at different firms. But the Fed? At a time when its balance sheet is exploding with increasingly risky assets?

I'm not the least bit surprised by a lack of accountability in the Bush Jr. "administration." I am surprised that more conservatives aren't waving some torches and pitchforks right now, as this lack of transparency, lack of accountability, and apparent lack of competency (unless they are competent crooks) reveals the depths to which Bush and Cheney will sink in order to reward his cronies who have epically failed us all.

Saying Bush is Socialist While He Implements Fascism

2008-10-23T13:41:00.000-07:00

(or, Wasted Away Again in Frame-a-ritaville)

The Paulson Bailout happened so fast, who even noticed that while the "true conservatives" vituperated against this socialist move by the Bush administration, we all bought the political characterization. The negative connotation of Socialism immediately became the framing of the anti-Bush sentiment. We in the left, especially, were eager to tap the Schadenfreude of yet another chance to point out Bush's hypocrisy. Meanwhile, the conservatives call Obama socialist, and presto, they've associated Obama with Bush.

I had a Euripidean Revelation, then, when I stumbled across this nugget: Former Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Reagan and a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Paul Craig Roberts, made the case recently on Democracy Now that the Paulson plan is, in fact, fascist.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Craig Roberts, the piece you’ve written, one of them, asks, “Has deregulation sired fascism?” What do you mean?

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS: Well, the original Paulson plan was to give the Secretary of the Treasury $700 billion with no accountability and give him complete control over the financial system. And that, of course, is state capitalism or fascism. If you control the financial system, you control the economy. And so, that was my way of pointing out the dramatic sort of power that was said to be necessary to stem a crisis that, in my view, could be fixed just by refinancing mortgages, like they did during the Great Depression.

Of course, fascism has other necessary conditions, which I'll get to. But it's an important point that the concentration of power in the executive branch is, in and of itself, a fascist move. While the ultimate result of the nationalization of these financial firms might be socialistic (assuming we all share in the upside), the actual administrative move, approved by congress, is, in and of itself, fascist.

Moving on to further conditions that should set our fascism alarms blaring, we can see that the money, power, and control under this bailout is concentrated throughout the upper class, especially the lobbyist class that pulls the executive levers. They are using their power to perpetrate a crime, exhibiting a blatant disregard for the law. If they can't change a law they don't like, they just break it, and dare anyone to do anything about it. After all, what can we do to a runaway executive branch? Arrest them? Aren't they the cops? Don't they have the guns? Who's going to arrest the ones who are supposed to do the arresting?

AMY GOODMAN: Who is driving this? Who framed this bailout? And explain exactly who it is who benefits right now.

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS: Well, what the bailout does is it takes troubled financial instruments off the balance sheet of the banks and puts them on the balance sheet of the taxpayer at the US Treasury. So it’s a bailout of the financial institutions whose recklessness caused the problem. And as I’ve already said, it does not address the problem. It only addresses the problem of the banks. So the foreclosures and the defaulting mortgages will continue as the economy worsens, and yet nothing is being done to stabilize that default rate or to stop these foreclosures. So the money is essentially being poured into the coffers of Washington’s financial donor base.

This is not a complex problem. Follow the money. First you loosen it up. Then you swap it around. Then you say, "Don't worry!" Then you make it disappear. Then you ask for a refund. So exactly how do you steal the money the first time around?

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS: [...] In 1999, in the Clinton administration, they repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. This was the Depression-era legislation that separated commercial from investment banking. In 2000, they deregulated all derivatives. And in 2004, Hank Paulson, the current Treasury Secretary, who at the time was chairman of Goldman Sachs, he convinced the Securities and Exchange Commission to remove all capital requirements for investment banks, and thus they were able to drive up their profits by amazing leverage. For example, when Bear Stearns finally went under, it had $33 in debt for every dollar in equity. So this is an amazing leverage. And it’s amazing that all reserves against debt would have been removed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. So, the whole thing is reckless beyond imagination. Now, they claim that they had new mathematical models that assessed risk and that they didn’t need these reserves. Well, that was all a bunch of hooey, as we now see.

We were just conned out of yet another generation's taxes and we're supposed to settle for "oops"? Is this power grab more justified because they say it was an accident? We're supposed to think that after the systematic dismantling of regulations, starting in 1999 with the repeal of Glass-Steagall, that they were simply reckless? Asst. Secretary Roberts should be commended for his liberal view of the goodness of man. I don't share his forgiving nature. You don't have to be an expert on the Bush Administration to see what seems pretty clear: a federal prosecutor could make a career out of it. If something is "reckless beyond imagination," then it's likely to be illegal as well.

The religious component of pure corporate fascism is the God of the Market. Nothing rings the opening/church bells like the holy grail of 700 Billion Dollars. When searching for a definition to demonize for the Nationalization of Financial Institutions, the Republican Party once again associated "socialism" with "communism" while the opposite was true. This financial rein-seizing will do little to nothing for society as a whole. It will do everything for society at the Country Club. This is fascist plutocracy.

A unitary executive is one of the necessary conditions for fascism. Another is disregard for the rule of law. Another is hate. The "dirty-fucking-hippie" meme is being whipped up by the standard bearers of the Republican party right now, with their Christian Right zealots right behind, and you have the very model of a fascist system. Sprinkle in some racism, and they get their picture in the fascist textbook.

And yet we go on with the crude caricature that associates the Bush administration with leftist philosophy. Even worse, of course, is that all this framing takes our eye off the Ace in this game of political three card monty. While our heads spin with the dissonance of inaccurate name-calling and right-wing red meat keywords, they pass another trillion dollars in corporate welfare, concentrate more power into the executive branch, incite violence, ignore the law, and steal more money from our children. Anyone who dares to call what they're doing is singled out as a "hater" because they didn't mean to steal this money. They were just reckless.

The snake oil we've been sold was cranked out by computers, but it was just as slimy as what you could get off a wagon a hundred years ago. This isn't the first time that markets and the treasury have been gamed. And it won't be the first time that the guilty parties walk away, probably with presidential pardons.

Another of the right's favorite frames is "Who could have seen it coming?" As in, "Who could have predicted terrorists would fly planes into buildings?" Or, "Who could have predicted that Iraq didn't have WMD?" Or, "Who could have predicted that deregulation would lead to financial trickery?" In The Rise of the Machines, Richard Dooling points out that this latest crime was, of course, predicted.

“BEWARE of geeks bearing formulas.” So saith Warren Buffett, the Wizard of Omaha. Words to bear in mind as we bail out banks and buy up mortgages and tweak interest rates and nothing, nothing seems to make any difference on Wall Street or Main Street. Years ago, Mr. Buffett called derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction” — an apt metaphor considering that the Manhattan Project’s math and physics geeks bearing formulas brought us the original weapon of mass destruction, at Trinity in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

Dooling goes on to make the case that the entire scheme is essentially one giant computer crime. Keep in mind that Paulson, as chairman of Goldman Sachs, convinced the administration (of which he was about to become a cabinet member) to obliterate the capitalization rule, the lack of which helped create the "crisis." Then, as Treasury Secretary, he engineered a "bail out" that makes us all pay, again. What gall they have to even ask that he have total control of the $700 billion! Well-connected corporate directors perpetrated the fleecing of America by sending their insiders and lobbyists to run the White House, aiding and abetting the crime. Looking at the Bush Administration as a whole, wasn't it obvious where this was leading? When it was said foxes were guarding the hen house, did we trust them in spite of knowing that foxes eat chickens?

Dooling, again, uncovers the crime:

Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth.

Their was nothing imaginary about the cut of that wealth that the upper classes took out of the system during the last 8 years. Enron was simply foreshadowing. An executive branch already injecting the steroids of military industrial complex money and unchecked war making power forced us to purchase a seat on the board of their corrupt and broken corporation. There is nothing free about a market that can force the sale of failure to the taxpayer. These CEO's took over our government. They infused it with Religion and War. They created the United Corporations of America, aka the Bush Administration, and their chief export is war. It was heavily subsidized with tax cuts, defense spending, and corporate welfare. CEO pay inflated to the point that even astrophysicists object to calling the numbers astronomical. After all, there are only a hundred billion stars in the galaxy.

Now these unrepentant financial terrorists sip lattes on the porches of their devalued McMansions, hung-over from their drunken spending spree, and they want us to pay for it all? They complain that Obama wants to take away their Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. They scream about socialism as if it's some evil to which even George Bush has sold out. They propose more tax cuts for themselves, and tax increases on the middle class. They demand cuts in social programs, education, and infrastructure investments. They want the people who stole our future in charge of the justice that protects it? That isn't just fascism. That's an insult.

It was nice to hear Colin Powell stand up for reason and dignity when he endorsed Obama. But in his comments to the press after the endorsement, he said it was wrong to call Obama a socialist. It was a lot like hearing McCain say Obama's not an Arab, as if being an Arab was evil. I'm not sure if Powell understands that the point is not whether socialism is bad, but that after the fascism of George Bush, it's hard not to move to the left, if only because there's no room left on the right.