Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justices Should Stay If They're Able To Work

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Some liberals have recently called on Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire so that President Barack Obama can choose her replacement. At 80, she is the oldest justice on the court. Some fear that if she chooses to stay, a Republican succesor to Obama might nominate another A. Scalia. God help us! But Justice Ginsburg believes that Supreme Court justices should not be influenced by political assessments of a party's future prospects with respect to the court.

One of Ginsburg's shining moments came with the dubious ascension of one George W. BUsh to the White House. With respect to Bush v Gore, Ginsberg's decision was the best, better even than those who agreed with her. Scalia's decision was poorly written, his conclusions wrong and wrong-headed.
Not only that --Ginsberg was, I believe, outraged that the case had been "dumped" on SCOTUS. At the end of her decsion, she wrote simply: I DISSENT --not "I respectfully dissent" as is normally the practice.
Rarely has this Court rejected outright an interpretation of state law by a state high court. ...The extraordinary setting of this case has obscured the ordinary principle that dictates its proper resolution: Federal courts defer to state high courts' interpretations of their state's own law. This principle reflects the core of federalism, on which all agree. ...Notably, the Florida Supreme Court has produced two substantial opinions within 29 hours of oral argument. In sum, the Court's conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court's own judgment will not allow to be tested. Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States.I dissent.
--Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Justice, U.S. Supreme Court (Bush v Gore)

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Social Security Should not be CUT by so Much as a Dime!

By Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

SS should not be CUT --it should be strengthened! If there is a shortfall, send the bill to the 'ruling elite' which has gotten filthy rich with all sorts of 'tax' avoidance schemes that the middle and poorer classes could only dream about! Elite money winds up offshore; but SS is a boon to the economy.

What's up? Has no one bothered to read John Maynard Keynes?

Cutting SS would plunge the nation into depression as a result of the LOST PURCHASING POWER of seniors who will be reduced to penury! Many have already been reduced to shopping at Wal-Mart, that retail 'agent' of China! What's next? A caning by J.P. Morgan?

Sorry --Obama this whole thing sounds like an EVIL GOP plot to me.
"Social Security a moral institution, Democratic strategist James Carville said.
The program has brought the rate of poverty amongst the elderly down from 30% in 1965 to 9.5%, despite a recession.
          “That is the act of a just and moral nation,” Carville said on Tuesday's The Rachel Maddow                  Show. “That about two-thirds the number of old people in this country who go to bed cold or              hungry has been reduced.”
Rebuilding the middle class by strengthening social programs and cutting health care and education costs is crucial to the upcoming election, Carville said, and many in the Beltway just don't get it.
The middle class won't vote for candidates who want to cut their Social Security to fund wars and bank bailouts, he argued.
          --James Carville: Social Security 'is the act of a just and moral nation'

Social Security is a BOON to the economy. Has no one bothered to read John Maynard Keynes? Cutting SS would plunge the nation into depression as a result of the LOST PURCHASING POWER of seniors who will be reduced to penury!

Does anyone believe that the milllions, billions, trillions that the elites have squirreled away offshore is --in any way whatsoever --driving or stimulating this economy? Sad but true --the RULING ELITES have simply exploited the failure of this nation to provide everyone graduating high school with anything more than a smattering of 'Economics' background!

Sorry --Obama this whole thing STINKS! If the budget needs to be 'balanced' take it out of the TRILLIONS that have been warehoused offshore where it does NO ONE any good! I smell a GOP RAT!


Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Why the GOP Occupied Texas II

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Though Texas is now thought of as a 'red' state, it was not always so. From January 15, 1874 to January 16, 1979 every Texas governor was Democratic. Moreover, most of them could be described as 'progressive Democrats'.

This topic has come up as Texas is now thought of as GOP occupied territory, i.e, a 'red' state. If this is, indeed, the case, the GOP had best be kind to Texas. A cursory survey of the red-blue map of the U.S. indicates that Texas is the only state among GOP/red states to have electoral votes in two digits. As a result, Texas may be essential to the GOP which seems hell-bent on self-destruction, courting irrelevance, skirting eventual oblivion.

Under the Constitution, the office of President is supposed to represent the 'people'. If that is the case, then WHY are Presidents elected by states and appointed 'electors'? The final 'vote count' is watered down to the extent it may be irrelevant.
There are several remedies but one is most urgent: the abolition of a relic called the Electoral College! What IS it good for? Absolutely NOTHING! (apologies to Edwin Starr)

There are, in fact, various methods by which a popular vote could and would allow the people to elect their representatives directly, thus cutting out the middle man. The office of President is, under the Constitution, responsible directly to the people --not the states. It is, therefore, absurd that the holder of that office be elected by any method other than a direct election of the people to whom the President is ultimately responsible.

That, of course, is why the GOP will oppose this proposal!

The question is: how responsive is the government to the will of the people? It is self-evident that public officials should achieve public office by way of elections that most accurately reflect the will of the people. Otherwise --why have elections? The most egregious outrages against this principle include election thefts as, in fact, happened in Florida. That is, in itself, an outrage. It might have been predicted that the only beneficiary of this outrage --George W. Bush --turned out to have been among the very worst Presidents in U.S. history. That alone is outrageous and even more so as it followed Bush v Gore, the very worst SCOTUS decision in U.S. history.

Questions remain; solutions are scarce. Nevertheless, there must be a better way. The good news is: there is a better way: the President could be elected directly by the people. Party machines capable of 'stealing' elections may be bypassed, made irrelevant. An election can be made scientific, the tabulation of votes made accurate and the casting of votes themselves made more representative of the 'will of the people'.

I have in mind a direct election of the office of President by all of the people. This has the advantage of getting powerful 'state machines' out of the 'national election' business save for the primaries. The office of President --responsible directly to the people --should, therefore, be elected by the people, not the States. The 'electoral college; should, therefore, be abolished and good riddance!

Why was Texas targeted for occupation by the GOP?

That's easy, covered in 'Election Grabbing 101', first semester! With 38 electoral votes, Texas is, by far the plum in the GOP bag o' dirty tricks. If Texas should turn blue, the GOP is FINISHED. Look at the other 'red' states with electoral votes ranging from 3 to 16. I will put it this way --the GOP needs Texas a hell of a lot more than Texas needs the fucking carpetbaggers of the GOP.

Under the current system, some votes are worth more than others. For example, a single vote in a state having very few electoral votes (Rhode Island with 3 electoral votes) is not worth nor should be worth as much as a single vote in a large state like Texas with some 38 electoral votes or California with 55. At last, 'Southern Strategy' EXPLOITS the present system and is in fact, a huge argument in favor of the kind of reforms I propose.

ALL the people!

Currently, typically minorities are inadequately represented. That's the point behind direct elections. Cut out the middle man; stop 'watering down' the vote. Prior to re-districting by one Tom DeLay, Texas had not been the solid 'red state' that millions now believe it to be. For a period of some 100 years, for example, EVERY TX governor had been Democratic. Some --like the Furgusons --were VERY PROGRESSIVE. It was a better state for it.

Friday, October 05, 2012

The Price We Paid for the GOP's Free Lunch with Ruling Elites

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

I am in a cranky mood!

C'mon Obama! Take the gloves off! Obama did not mention several issues that may be found in his own ads. Why not hit Romney with the infamous '47 percent'? Obama could have beaten Romney with his own words. Obama could have held Romney to his his own failed 'standard'.
Obama might have, could have disproved the utter and often meaningless crap that passes for speech these days. Obama might have hit Romney on the issue of the many jobs Romney cut at Bain. Will Democrats never learn this lesson: put the GOP on the ropes or let them hang themselves with GOP absurdities, lies and significant omissions?

Whomever really 'won' the first debate no longer matters. The issue is about the effect it's had on Romney's billionaire buddies who are now prepared to BUY the office for a moron and co-conspirator.
Romney is reported to be collecting money from his millionaire donors "hand over fist". Unless Democrats reach down deep, the race could turn around and elect an UN-ABASHED SHILL for the ruling elites. Latest polls put Romney within one point in Florida (47-46) and just two in Virginia (48-46s).

It would not be this close but for the money factor. Until that issue is addressed, Americans must live under an oligarchy at best, a dictatorship of the 1 percent at the very worst.

While the GOP, kowtowing to the desires of the ruling 1 percent of its creation, poses a clear and present danger to the rule of law, the rights enumerated in our Bill of Rights, the rights of everyone who must, of necessity, work for a living, the rights of those would dissent and protest the right wing destruction of the values of our founding.

The rights of those who wish to work honestly for their living are likewise threatened by the documentable export of jobs during every GOP administration, the export of jobs that are, in fact, the RESULT of GOP policies. And --no --assertions that there are no differences between the parties is (politely) uninformed; and less politely, it's stupid. Democrats who stay at home believing Obama is at fault might as well wait in vain for a Messiah to come again or a Klaato to beam down out of a space craft. Rather than waiting for a 'bailout', I urge Democrats and/or progressives to assume some responsibility and, at the very least, show some initiative.
This is, in a nutshell, the core problem facing liberals. Those who wish to become activists need to direct their energies to dismantling the corporate special interest system and restoring greater equality of income.

--Steve Kangas, The Origins of the Overclass
If the GOP did not invent the sellout, this ongoing auction of the U.S. to the ruling elites, they might as well have. This 'sellout' has enslaved U.S. citizens and, at the same time expects them to pick up the tab for their military adventures on behalf of the obscenely wealthy.

In the meantime, the American people are brainwashed by big media. That's by design. Why do you suppose the Reagan administration worked tirelessly to abolish, perhaps erase the memory of the FAIRNESS DOCTRINE?

Why do you suppose that the ownership of media is concentrated in the hands of some five or six huge conglomerates? Was this decreed by God? Is this the result of 'natural selection', good genes, or is it a product of the Big Bang. No --it was the planned result of the Reagan attack on the Fairness Doctrine specifically and, in general, every provision of the Communications Act of 1934.
The internet has proven NOT to have been effective in countering the well-oiled, well-heeled right wing money and propaganda MACHINES.


Monday, April 12, 2010

Viet Nam Redux

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

It may be too late for America to avoid falling into a trap like the one that embroiled several U.S. administrations in Southeast Asia for decades. The parallels are frightening. Just as JFK/LBJ had inherited what had been given the Orwellian name 'presence' in S.E. Asia, President Barack Obama risks getting stuck in an Afghanistan quagmire.

President Obama has received a military report requesting as many as forty thousand additional troops in Afghanistan though the objectives are increasingly vague, perhaps because both the Pentagon and the 'hawks' wish to avoid calling it what it is: nation building!

Since 911, the U.S. has bogged down in this new 'Viet Nam', failing every stated objective because: 1) objectives may be framed for 'public consumption' for the P.R. value; 2) because the Pentagon prefers to hide the fact that it is almost always wrong about anything more complex than lobbing a big bomb on a little village! The Pentagon is filled with gung ho grunts!

Again, the U.S. fights the wrong war, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons. Nothing was learned from Viet Nam, the war crime from which Viet Nam did not begin to rebuild until we were gone! Clearly --the Military-Industrial Complex is unconcerned. The M.I.C is simply doing what it seemed intended to do and that is enrich the defense contractors who make up the Military-Industrial complex.

It seems that every Democratic president gets stuck with the false paradigm: be tough or be wimp! I submit that it is a 'tough' President who repudiates the bullshit left him by predecessors. It is the 'tough' President who levels with the American people. It is the 'tough' President who exposes the heinous nature of the war left him by George W. Bush who lied about 911 in order to start it. It is a 'tough' President who just says 'no': we will no longer compound the many crimes of George W. Bush!
Vietnam became a war of attrition. Johnson would regularly characterize his decisions as taking the middle ground. He would not "pull out" as the "doves" and "nervous Nellies" suggested nor would he go "all out" as the "hawkish" military advisors recommended.

Fighting a war with limited and political objectives had an added liability. It was difficult to define and convey the idea of "progress" to the public. There were few set piece or conventional battles and American objectives were not defined in geographical terms (e.g., Berlin and Tokyo). Instead, the administration was forced to create and essentially sell indicators of progress to the public. Herein lies the origin of such commonly used terms as "pacification zones" and "kill ratios.

Questioners, critics, and opponents to Johnson quickly arose. Perhaps the most prominent establishment figure was J. William Fulbright, the Democrat from Arkansas, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright was a one-time friend and ally of Lyndon Johnson and had, ironically, served as floor manager of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. He broke with Lyndon Johnson over the war in Vietnam and, in February 1966, led the Foreign Relations Committee through six days of televised hearings on the conduct of the war. To divert public attention from the hearings, Lyndon Johnson traveled to Honolulu to meet with South Vietnamese President Thieu. The Senate Committee would again hold hearings in August 1966 and in October-November of 1967.

--Conventional 'Warfare' in the Nuclear Age
Rory Stewart is the Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights. My first exposure to his thinking dates to his BBC interview of about two years ago. Stewart does not merely think outside the box, he denies its existence. The first conclusion is that the U.S. is in Afghanistan for all the wrong reasons; secondly, the recent military report given Obama has effectively changed the original U.S. objective. Instead of the eradication al Qaeda, the U.S. is now committed to defeating the Taliban and rebuilding a nation in 'our' image. Once again, the U.S. is suckered with stated 'goals' that are vague, imperial, grandiose, ill-framed and ill-considered.

At last, any intelligent 'enemy' should be expected to resist a foreign power, a foreign enemy. An enemy in Afghanistan knows the 'lay of the land'. We are fighting on their turf. We are the newbies. For all our flashy, high-tech, game-boy tech, we are just city slickers in the back country. We will never know Afghanistan as it is known by the Afghans.

This crisis for Obama is literally a dangerous opportunity. He can be suckered down a long road for which he will be remembered as LBJ is most often remembered --NOT for his 'Great Society' but for the escalation of hostilities in Viet Nam; or Obama can be remembered for having refused to be suckered by the merchants of death--the Military-Industrial complex and the sycophantic blood suckers on K-Street! We can bog America down in a long and ruinous war or we can break out of the trap that the seems always laid for Democrats by wars already begun and screwed up but left to a Democrat to clean up, a Democrat whose name will inevitably be stuck on it as LBJ's name is forever stuck on Viet Nam!


Rory Stewart on Bill Moyers Journal
Why I moderate comments

  • SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
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Also see: Published Articles on Buzzflash.net


Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, Global Issues, Updated: January 02, 2009

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Sunday, February 28, 2010

Shoveling Shit in Louisiana?

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The mantra du jour is that Obama hasn't undone 'Bush'. Ergo --Obama is just as evil as is Bush, or Bush Sr, or Ronald Reagan. Not so and not possible! The false analogy misses the point, a strategy designed to deflect attention from the endemic corruption of the right wing party --the GOP; It is a false analogy that might have been tested in a focus group on K-Street. It has certainly caught on as have many another 'successful' mantra, slogan, or buzzword. And it's just as worthless!

One of my recent critics had clearly caught the 'but Obama is just as bad as Bush' virus and posted the following comment:
I used to really enjoy your blog when W was in the White house - most of your commentary was spot on (except for the part about Bush being an idiot - I don't give damn who his father is, the USAF does NOT let morons fly jet fighter planes)
Flying an airplane is not evidence of political genius. I have known lots of pilots and would not trust one of them to run the nation, supervise a federal budget or negotiate a peace with a nuclear power. The idea that Bush was smart enough to be prez because he could fly a plane is idiotic.

A 'Democrat' is in the White House! But WHAT has changed? Are we out of Iraq? Is the government no longer owned by the Axis of K-Street and the M.I.C.? Did anyone suspect that the mere election of someone whose campaign was financed by the ruling elite of just one percent of the nation would suddenly decide, upon his election, to release their choke hold?

Where can I can find that press release to that effect.
Yes, they're criminals, but O has continued virtually every criminal republican policy instituted by W. And anyone failing to hold the current president accountable, is no better than the GOP slime who enabled Bush to get away with murder.
At last, I am sick and tired of trying to explain to people that Democrats are just another wing of a single right wing party --the capitalist party aka the fat cat party! It's the only party in the U.S. that wins elections. The system is so skewed that their bets are covered whomever wins the election. Get a clue, folk!

Both parties are financed by the same capitalists, a ruling one percent of the total population, a group --in fact --created and enriched by right wing GOP policies --not Democratic policies. While both parties line up for monies from the same source, Democrats get less. It is but a sop!

Many whine about O. But where is the revolution? Who is going to do anything about it? Who is going to put up or shut up?

NO ONE!

Many have missed the REAMS of cold hard stats that prove that of the two, the GOP is endemically evil while the Dems reduced to sloppy seconds, merely tolerated for appearances. Who is going to do anything about that?

NO ONE!

Wealth and power are concentrated in America, a trend begun, in earnest, with the end of the Civil War. Labor lost its most important battle in 1910 in Los Angeles. It lost a FINAL battle under Ronald Reagan --a Republican whose administration must bear the responsibility for the most recent trend of income and wealth disparities. That record is available to anyone willing to search the archives of the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department-B.E.A. But --who is going to do anything about that?

NO ONE!

A 'progressive history' is obviously neglected in public school curricula. So-called modern 'progressives' in name only come up with a whiny: "...but Obama hasn't changed anything!" My response to them is: well, what the fuck have you done lately?

In the early days of the 20th Century, real progressives were willing to fight for what they believed in and many suffered head cracks and broken bodies because of it. Modern progressives will whine about Obama but none --I daresay --are wiling to pay the price required to effect a real change. And no one in the 'Obama is just as bad' camp has a plan, a strategy, a frickin' clue! No one wants to get his/her head cracked, or shot to death as was the case at Kent State in the 60s. I'm not happy with Obama but wasting time and energy blasting Obama while the 'real killers' maintain power over every aspect of our lives is just plain stupid. I have no respect for and would never go into battle with any S.O.B. who is not smart enough to know who the real enemy is!

Bloggers may be forgiven their impatience when no one seems to pay attention, when the MSM gets thousands of 'gross rating points' with a single airing of just 30 seconds on prime time and every blogger I know (myself included) gets but a fraction of that over a period of eight years or more. That's how long it took to be rid of Bush and --still --the message has not gotten through. Fact is, we failed! Bush served out his term and has not yet been tried for 911, Abu Ghraib, or war crimes and crimes against humanity throughout the Middle East and Afghanistan. I wonder, how much good has blogging done but for the 'feel good' factor among bloggers and those who read them.

Who created this situation? Democrats??? No --the concentration of media in the hands of just four or five major corporations is the result of Ronald Reagan policies and I can prove it. And Ronald Reagan --last time I checked --was not a Democrat at the time he was Prez. Reagan was, in fact, a Democrat but only before his official corruption. The concentration of wealth among a ruling elite of just one percent began with Ronald Reagan and his policies. I have proven this with the government's own stats time and again over the last ten years or more. Yet another article may be read by a few, perhaps hundreds or even a thousand. Fox will reach that many in a less than a minute and that many again in another minute. In the course of one hour, the Fox audience of millions will have 'turned over' many times. Each turn-over is called a 'cume'; it's measurable.

Of my 'critic', I ask: what do you want to hear? What do you want me to write or say? What makes you feel better about yourself? What makes you feel better about living in the fall of empire --a fall that is directly the result of right wing policies! Not Democratic ones.

It is symptomatic that only two Democratic candidates espoused anything resembling a 'progressive' platform: Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich. That's because Democrats must raise even more money than GOP incumbents if they wish to unseat them --monies that come from the same well-heeled sources. Such monies finding their way into a Democratic coffer are a hedged bet. It is not really intended to win him/her the seat! Think of it as insurance.

Neither Gravel or Kucinich had a chance of becoming President and I took heat --liberal (progressive) heat --because I dared say so. I was misunderstood. I was not criticizing either Gravel or Kucinich but the evil, corrupt system that kept either man out of the White House. I was, rather, pointing up the inequities, the built-in institutionalized unfairness. I was damning a skewed and phony hologram of right wing creation!

Raising the kind of money it takes to win the Presidency requires a sell-out, a Faustian bargain, the sale of souls to the Axis of K-street and the MIC, a sacrifice to Moloch. So --sure --Obama is compromised. It goes without saying! That he 'won' is evidence of it. That's what we've come to; that's what our nation has become: a periodic auction of the offices of government! But it is not Obama's fault. It is an endemic evil that must be addressed and changed and carping about Obama 'ain't' making it. Carping about Obama utterly misses the point! I suggest 'progressives' read Shakespeare and, by doing, prove to conservatives that a progressive education is money well spent:
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
Does anyone really think that these BIG BUCKS come from the grassroots? Haven't the American people figured out by now that the ruling elite of just one percent --created by the policies of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr primarily --is not going to fund a progressive like Mike Gravel or Dennis Kucinich --both smart, honest men? Personal attacks on Obama are, therefore, stupid and counter-productive and help ensure that the system that kept kept Kucinich and/or Gravel out of contention will maintain the crooked status quo. And if either Kucinich or Gravel had won, what would they have done, what could they have done that Obama has not? What miracles might have occurred that would have undone an accretion of bureaucratic infrastructure spanning some 50 years or more?

Of my critic, I asked: would it make you feel better if I said the Axis of K-Street/MIC no longer existed? Would it make you feel better about yourself if I scolded Obama for having been bought by the same cabal that bought Bush JR? Would it make you feel better if I raised some other strawman, some other distraction while the real crooks finish off the rape of Iraq, Afghanistan or --for that matter --the rape of the American people by robber barons and an elite of just 1 percent of the total population?

Would it make you feel better about yourself if I lied and wrote --in the spirit of equal time --that the MIC was created by Obama? It was not!

Would it make you feel better if I lied and said that Obama was as stupid as Bush JR? He is not! And I won't say that he is!

Would it make you feel better about yourself if I lied and stated that it was really Democrats or Obama who plotted with Dick Cheney to carve up the oil fields of Iraq?

Would you feel better about living in the last days of American empire if I wrote that Obama had sat in on GOP planning sessions in which he conspired with them to transfer wealth to just one percent of the U.S. population? Clue: he didn't! And I will not lie and say he did! So --just get off this 'Obama is just as bad' shit!

I don't buy it!

But Ronald Reagan may have and if he didn't his evil minions did, the same evil minions who sold out to the Axis of K-street/MIC, the modern Moloch, the system! His tax cut of 1982 enriched only the upper quintile and everyone else lost ground. It was a payoff to Reagan's base, later Bush's base. The same guys. Am I supposed to lie about that in the interest of 'equal time'? Am I supposed to say that The Democrats were just as bad as Reagan in spite of the fact that the trend that was thus begun reversed in the Clinton administration and, clearly, as a result of Clinton's democratic policies?

Did it ever occur to Clinton's progressive critics, that it was the GOP who ramrodded his impeachment; it was the GOP who told every lie and pulled off every dirty trick to get him OUT of the White House? Would the GOP have bothered to do that had he failed? Would the GOP have bothered if Clinton were really no different than the crooks of the GOP? Would the GOP have bothered if Clinton had really been doing their bidding? Would the GOP have bothered if Clinton had been a GOP plant as is often said of Obama because he's black? And why have so many said that Clinton was 'America's first black President?' I am convinced that it was floated up by a GOP consulting firm whose focus group results discovered that closet bigots thought it funny! I say that based upon my experiences 'inside' GOP consulting firms. I learned how the sonsobitches think!

I used to think goppers were stupid! Lately, whenever I heard the 'dems are just as bad' argument that I begin to understand how the GOP always manages to outsmart the progressives. Hence my advice to progressives: quit being stupid! Learn to identify catch phrases and slogans --memes --that most certainly originate in GOP right wing think tanks and focus groups! Unless you do, you will ensure the election of another GOP, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon and you will regret it for the rest of your sorry fucking lives!

If I could reverse the GOP trend of wealth upward, I would happily procure blow jobs for Clinton! I frankly don't gave a damn and have no interest in what he does with his wang on his own time. It was another distraction that kept 'progressives' and 'Dems' occupied while GOP power brokers plotted to steal Iraqi oil as soon as they could get 'their man' in the White House. Now --I know a thing or two about the oil business. There is not a Democrat to be found in the executive offices of any of them. If you think you know one, please send me his email address or phone number. I would like to know why he has turned down all the offers he must have gotten for his very soul! Everyone else has sold out long ago!

There are no articles to be written about 'lessers' of two evils and I am not inspired to write one. Obama is neither the creator of the frickin' disaster he inherited nor --sadly, realistically --will he be the savior that undoes it all. That's just the way it is. So --I ask my critic --does it make you feel better about yourself and the Kafkaesque situation in which you have found yourself awakened as a cockroach to take it out on a blogger who has not made a goddamned dime on this blog nor taken a goddamned dime from the MIC/K-STREET axis? No one owns me! And if you had brain, you would focus your misplaced frustration on 1) someone who gives a shit what you think; and 2) some one who could do something about it from inside the DC bureaucracy. Clearly --if I were in a position to wave a wand, I would have done so years ago and spared myself the grief.

What makes you feel better about yourself?

Perhaps, I should write some crap about how Obama is just as stupid as Bush Jr! Forget it! If that's what makes you feel better, you're outta luck cause I will not sacrifice an ounce of intellectual integrity to assuage a fragile, progressive ego.

In the meantime, it would help if the American people would could break out of their matrix. Just turn off the stupid TV! READ! Throw a rock through Big Bro's telescreen! Just say NO! Turn off FOX! Turn off CNN! Stop repeating the stale, stock phrases that pass for analysis! Wake the fuck up! De-hynotize yourself! Get a brain!

And then --when the empire falls, you will have at least learned the source of your demise. Or --to paraphrase Gen Patton to his troops --when your grand children ask you what you did during the fall of the 'great' American Empire, you won't have to say 'Well, I shoveled shit in Louisiana!"

Right about now --a lot of Obama detractors are just shoveling shit and totally missing the point!

See: For the GOP If You're Not in the Top One Percent You Can Drop Dead!


Bill 0'Reilly's 19th Nervous Break Down Rapped (What an Idiot!!)
Why I moderate comments

  • SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
  • Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!



Monday, August 17, 2009

Liars, Crooks and Idiots: Who Wants Obama to Fail and Why

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

In the wake of Bush's utter failures, lies, and crimes, the left-wing, by rights, should be tucking tail and seeking cover! Not so --Rush Limbaugh, to be expected of a crooked idiot, has said he hopes Obama fails. Others have picked up the mantra!

It has been my experience in life, journalism and politics that two things among all others makes one miserable: 1) just wanting to stay alive, and 2) wishing failure or hardship upon someone else upon one's on evil, vile motives. My response: the GOP does not deserve to survive as a party, and, secondly, the GOP rose upon the backs of all those people for whom the GOP wished and, in fact, inflicted hardships.

The GOP shares this much with Nazis and other parties totalitarian inclined: the GOP cannot tell the truth that it does not represent the electorate but a shrinking elite which amounts --last time I checked --to just 1 percent of the entire population and shrinking. They make up the rest by lying about their real intentions. Even then, they are a minority of about 30 to 40 percent hardcore who share two characteristics:
  • They are unintelligent and/or uninformed of the fact that the GOP does not really represent them, lies to them and takes their support for granted!
  • This group is most certainly the 30 percent of any population referred to by Carl Jung who identified another distinguishing characteristic of them: their utter psychopathy
This is a 'class' of wannabes obvious for their lack of empathy, their disregard for every other group --the poor, the black, the Hispanic, anyone not a member of a country club or dubious or occultist fraternity! This group cheered the Bush attack on Iraq though Iraq had nothing to do with 911 and informed intelligent folk knew this to be the case at the time. Another sub-set was just a part of the fraud. This sub-set knew it was a fraud and supported it anyway. Both groups stayed onboard the Bush bandwagon even when it was clear that there were no WMD to be found. This group's support of Bush persisted despite the fact that it had been proven that not only were the memos dodgy, Bushco committed high treason by outing an agent of the US in the performance of her duty: Valerie Plame. Both facts meant nothing to this group of 'hard core' traitors!

A Man Who Does Not Know the Truth is Just an Idiot!

Bertolt Brecht said: 'A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook! Moderates were and remain stupid --falling for Bush's transparent lies. They are just idiots! 'He meant well', they say! But Bush qualifies for 'crookhood'! He did not mean well. He knew he was lying and he did so upon the very worst motives: he wished to enrich what he called his 'base'. They would engineer the commission of atrocities, war crimes and aggressions to satisfy their appetites. Moderates will claim that 'Bush believed what he did was right'. Utter nonsense! Bush did not and does care what is right. Bush's motives were as evil as his actions.

In the past, there were an albeit dwindling number of Republicans who may have been wrong but wrong in 'good faith'. Since the rise of Ronald Reagan, this group has become as scarce as hen's teeth! A growing number of GOP today are wrong and, if proven wrong, don't care! Being right means nothing! Winning is everything! This group will lie --knowing that it is a lie --if it gets them votes.

'Corporate fat cats' are a sub-set of this group! Nothing said by a corporation can be believed; they are 'artificial people' to whom laws and morality do not apply. An individual held responsible for the disaster at Bhopal, for example, might have been found guilty and sentenced for mass murder. Dow et al got only a slap on the wrist. A corporation is a 'legal abstraction', a mere piece of paper with a seal on it! The principles of ethics and morality mean nothing to them.

Was Mencken Right When He Said Most Americans Were 'Idiots'?

There remains a rapidly vanishing 'left wing' including what is derisively called the 'ideologically pure left'! The opposition of this ideological left vs the 'leave no crime uncommitted' right wing creates someone right of center in a yawning gulf of the near non-political 'un-washed' who failed to grasp the legal significance of Bush v Gore, has but a hazy notion of 'habeas corpus', and whose political views are an unholy amalgam of CNN and FOX! H.L. Mencken believed the people --the vast majority of Americans --to be 'idiots'!

It is fashionable to say that Bush did not fail. This position is not without merit. Certainly --like Reagan before him --he succeeded admirably in transferring vast amounts of wealth upward to the near infinitesimal 'base' which alone benefited. Among members of this group, Bush is a hero!

I consider Bush to have been a traitor to the US Constitution and the people. That he is celebrated by this ever shrinking group tells me that they have no allegiance to the Constitution, the principles of Democracy, the rule of law! The group becomes a power apart, a new oligopoly for whom you slave! If you believe otherwise, you have been lied to. Believe it, and remain deluded! If you are but a mere millionaire, you are NOT of this group and probably never will be! The Bush family's rise to prominence among this group, you can be sure, was an on-going Faustian bargain.

Bush Jr told us that terrorists 'attacked us' because 'they jest hate freedom'', but Bush should have added: 'I hate you because you are free but you will not be for long.' Moderates look at Bush's torture policy, and try to justify it ex post facto. They desperately seek an end to justify the torture means! The end, rather, is nothing less than the roll back of the Bill of Rights, the establishment of a right wing dictatorship. The means by which this is achieved are endless wars based on lies; the means are getting rid of the Clinton surpluses, getting rid of the economy, getting rid of the American standard of living. The 'end' is the more Authoritarian, perhaps totalitarian society!

The Result of Fascism/Nazism: A Nation of Slaves and Elites

This brings us to the ideological underpinnings of the GOP. A clue be found among what Bush himself called his 'base', specifically the richest one percent of the nation. How do they rationalize their positions of privilege and entitlement? A careful study --if it were possible --might reveal a panoply of claptrap from half-baked Hegel/Nietzche where the 'superman' meets the 'absolute state'. If one believes the state absolute, it is but a quantum leap to eugenics, concentration camps, genocide! It is but a quantum leap to dictatorship and aggressive wars!

The American industrialists who supported and who joined I.G. Farben, Fritz Thysen in bankrolling Hitler did so because they agreed with Hitler's agenda for Germany and the world. Many of these companies endorsed George W. Bush for same or similar reasons. Hitler would 'out-source' the murder of jews and might have seized the oil fields of the Middle East had he directed Rommel to forget about North Africa and attack east of the Suez.
Like Nixon, George Bush was deeply involved with supporting the Nazis in the Republican's closet. In fact, support for the Nazis was a Bush family tradition which goes back more than six decades and, once again, to Allen Dulles.

Loftus and Aarons write: "The real story of George Bush starts well before he launched his own career. It goes back to the 1920s, when the Dulles brothers and the other pirates of Wall Street were making their deals with the Nazis.

. . .

THE BUSH-DULLES-NAZI CONNECTION

"George Bush's problems were inherited from his namesake and maternal grandfather, George Herbert 'Bert' Walker, a native of St. Louis, who founded the banking and investment firm of G. H. Walker and Company in 1900. Later the company shifted from St. Louis to the prestigious address of 1 Wall Street.

"Walker was one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States. The relationship went all the way back to 1924, when Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, was financing Hitler's infant Nazi party.

...

Randy Davis, Nazis in the attic
The "America First" movement in the US prominently included Charles Lindbergh but was, in fact, the very face of American 'fascism'. Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer. It must not be forgotten that Henry Ford's portrait occupied a place of 'honor' in Hitler's new Chancellery. Bush's grandfather led a failed coup attempt to unseat FDR. It was an act of treason!

A large and wealthy segment of the US did not wish a war with Hitler. Those who supported Hitler included William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Mellon and Irenee du Pont, a Hitler devotee who advocated a race of supermen. Major US companies had ties to Hitler. They aided and abetted the rise of the Third Reich. They included Alcoa, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Du Pont, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and many, many more.
WASHINGTON - After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking perative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his 'enemy national' partners.

"The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and FBI, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.

"Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial baron for nearly eight months after the U.S. entered the war.

--Nazi-Link Confirmed, John Buchanan, New Hampshire Gazette, Oct. 10, 2003
I have not been able to find on the net the famous picture of American Nazis at a funeral of German Hindenburg disaster victims. In procession by the caskets, they are all giving the departed the famous Nazi salute.
"Fascism is on the march today in America. Millionaires are marching to the tune. It will come in this country unless a strong defense is set up by all liberal and progressive forces... A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government, and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. Aboard ship a prominent executive of one of America's largest financial corporations told me point blank that if the progressive trend of the Roosevelt administration continued, he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism to America.

---William Dodd, US Ambassador to Germany, 1938
All in the Fascist Family

Prescott Bush, Bush Jr's grandfather, was made rich by the business he did with Hitler --a trade that continued well after the US had entered the war. The death biz made the Bush family fortune!

After the war, the Nazis changed neither stripes nor swastikas. Many came to the US where they had careers in business or in the government --namely the CIA and the space program. Many of them were rocket scientists including Dr. Werner von Braun --the father of the US Space Program. He was a card carrying Nazi.
Despite being under constant surveillance and enduring relentless attacks on his character, von Braun had nothing but praise for his adopted country. When one person wrote him, suggesting that severe measures be taken with people who opposed national interests, he wrote back, “Years of direct exposure to the Hitler regime, and its excesses, taught me a few unforgettable lessons and made me solidly opposed to any form of government which would deprive man of human dignity.”

...

In private, however, von Braun was willing to talk. When an acquaintance wrote him about the accusations, von Braun replied, “... yes, I was a member of the Nazi party and the SS. I would appreciate it if you would treat this as confidential ... for the sake of NASA.”

A high official at NASA offered his view. “We lied when we brought von Braun over here, and then told him to keep his mouth shut. Can you imagine him holding a press conference to explain why he joined the Nazi Party? That would have been the end of him and the space program. The poor S.O.B., didn‘t have a chance! He just had to stand there and take it. People say von Braun used us, but the truth is ... we used him.“

--The FBI Files of Werner von Braun
Journalist Russ Bellant investigated how the GOP recruited and with help from convicted Nazi war collaborator, Lazlo Pasztor, created a 'network' of ex-Nazis cum Republicans. Pasztor, founding chairman of the Republican Heritage Groups Council was connected with the Hungarian Arrow Cross '... a group that helped liquidate Hungary's Jews'. He served as adviser to Paul Weyrich.
Two months before the November 1988 presidential election, a small newspaper, Washington Jewish Week, disclosed that a coalition for the Bush campaign included a number of outspoken Nazis and anti-Semites. The article prompted six leaders of Bush's coalition to resign.

According to Russ Bellant, Nazi collaborators involved in the Republican Party included:

(1) Radi Slavoff, GOP Heritage Council's executive director, and head of "Bulgarians for Bush." Slavoff was a member of a Bulgarian fascist group, and he put together an event in Washington honoring Holocaust denier, Austin App.

(2) Florian Galdau, director of GOP outreach efforts among Romanians, and head of "Romanians for Bush." Galdau was once an Iron Guard recruiter, and he defended convicted Nazi war criminal Valerian Trifa.

(3) Nicholas Nazarenko, leader of a Cossack GOP ethnic unit. Nazarenko was an ex-Waffen SS officer.

(4) Method Balco, GOP activist. Balco organized yearly memorials for a Nazi puppet regime.

(5) Walter Melianovich, head of the GOP's Byelorussian unit. Melianovich worked closely with many Nazi groups.

(6) Bohdan Fedorak, leader of "Ukranians for Bush." Fedorak headed a Nazi group involved in anti-Jewish wartime pogroms.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article on the Bush team's inclusion of Nazis (David Lee Preston, "Fired Bush backer one of several with possible Nazi links," September 10, 1988.) The newspaper also ran an investigative series on Nazi members of the Bush coalition. The articles confirmed that the Bush team included members listed by Russ Bellant.

Journalist Martin A. Lee, has written for The Nation, Rolling Stone, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. In "The Beast Reawakens," Lee confirms that during both the Reagan and Bush years, the Republican Party's ethnic outreach arm recruited members from the Nazi ©migr© network.

Lee says that the Republican Party's ethnic outreach division had an outspoken hatred of President Jimmy Carter's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), an organization dedicated to tracking down and prosecuting Nazi war collaborators who entered this country illegally. Former Republican Pat Buchanan attacked Carter's OSI after it deported a few suspected Nazi war criminals.

--Carla Binion, Government Investigated Bush Family's Financing Of Hitler
Over sixty years ago the US was plunged into World War II, a war remembered as one in which the US defended "freedom" against the horrors of fascism and Nazism. We must ask ourselves how this period in our history will be remembered in sixty years? Will the US have opposed the Nazi specter abroad only to embrace it at home? Every Bush/GOP victim says we did precisely that!

Near the end of the Cold War, as the Soviet Union was about to self-destruct, Boris Yeltsin made a very revealing comment to the US government. He said, "We are going to do something very terrible to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy."

What did he mean? The 50-year long Cold War had proved extremely useful for both the Soviet and US elites. The "Soviet threat" justified gigantic military budgets and a world system of US military bases. It legitimized US attacks on popular revolutionary movements in Central America and Indochina and other places too numerous to mention and the installation of US client regimes by the CIA in Iran and Guatemala and elsewhere. The "Soviet threat" gave much-needed cover to repression in the US against militant trade unionists and against the early civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement. The Soviets, of course, used the "capitalist threat" in similar ways, to justify anti-democratic repression in Hungary and Poland and throughout Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself. If the Cold War had not existed, Soviet and US ruling elites would have had to invent it.

The use of war by ruling elites for social control is hardly new. In a recent article in Le Monde, Philip Golub says, "Indeed, every war has both a foreign and a domestic agenda; Aristotle [writing 2400 years ago] reminds us that a tyrant declares war 'to deny his subjects leisure and to impose on them the constant need for a leader.''

The US has needed a new Cold War to take the place of the Soviet threat for over ten years. Sure, the government tried to pump up Saddam Hussein as "worse than Hitler," but how seriously can you take an enemy which is defeated in a few weeks with fewer than 80 American battle deaths? The government tried to scare us with images of "rogue states" like North Korea, but North Korea is on life support. Not a very credible threat.

--A New Democracy Editorial: 'Is it Realy a War on Terrorms?'
It should surprise no one that the likes of Rush Limbaugh want Obama to fail. Clinton was not impeached because he was crooked or incompetent but because he clearly was not! Clinton was targeted not because he failed but because he succeeded as NO GOP President had succeeded since World War II. The Limbaugh dominated GOP wants Obama to fail not because he might turn out to be a lousy President but a great one! A great Democratic President should, by rights, portend the demise of GOP bait and switch Nazism, stealth fascism, Trojan Horse dictatorships!

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

American politics: the choice between 'most bad' and 'not really very good'

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

A true democracy is the exercise of free choice among real alternatives. A recent US regime change means little to those daring to demand the truth about 911. That's because real power no longer rests with the office of 'President'. Real power resides with the axis of MIC/K-Street/CIA-NSA. This cabal has good motives for continuing to cover up 911 and suppressing the truth. This cabal is among those who benefited most from 911.

What was true of Rome is true of the US. Emperors could rarely be called 'good' --just 'less bad'. By that scale, Bush, like Caligula, is 'most bad', Obama 'much less bad' but not yet really 'good'. A spoon full of sugar does little to sweeten a thousand acres of sheep sour or smelly manure.

Unfortunately, the system by which our leaders are selected exploits this paradigm, the result of the raw power accrued to extremely wealthy and armed interventionists, the merchants of war and plunder. I had hoped the American people deserved a better choice than 'less bad Obama' vs 'most bad Bush'. We can expect surface changes but precious few fundamental reforms.

Nothing said by Bush about 911 is true. Everything said about 911 by the US government, most prominently the Bush administration, is but a part of the 'big lie'! The US required a real revolution but got the 'less bad' Obama. That's how the system works. The result is that the people are never adequately or honestly represented by government. It also follows that until 911 is fully investigated and those truly guilty brought to justice, no US government can claim to be legitimate.

The Obama administration will not bring George W. Bush to justice for the crimes of high treason and mass murder called '911'. The office of President is powerless against the entrenched and combined powers of the 'intelligence community', K-Street and the Military/Industrial Complex. The government, the nation no longer belong to the people. Our 'sovereignty', guaranteed us in the US Constitution, is mocked.

That nothing said by the Bush administration about the crimes called 911 is true is good reason to suspect Bushco of high treason and mass murder. That Bushco benefited from 911 is cause to suspect that 911 was an act of mass murder and high treason perpetrated upon the people by its own government! Bush, his administration and enablers had method, motive and opportunity to pull off the crime of the century.

A real revolution would make holding those responsible a high priority. A real revolution would bring them to justice. Tragically, Americans have neither the stomach for nor the means by which a revolution of any sort may be waged. The lesson is this: if you wish to commit mass murder for profit you must first seize control of the government.

1) Official Flight Data from the NTSB proves conclusively that Flight 77 could not possibly have crashed into the Pentagon. Flight 77 was at an altitude of 273 feet within less than two seconds of 'impact'. Source: NTSB, Pilots for 911 Truth, FOIA request, official computer data from NTSB.
The US State Department has a website to debunk conspiracy theories – not just about 9/11 but a whole range of stories circulating on the internet. But we found that simple requests, such as asking to see the plane wreckage of flight United 93 at Shanksville, or flight American Airlines 77 at the Pentagon, were refused after months of delay by the authorities. Yet if we had been able to film the wreckage from flight AA77 we would have had extremely strong evidence that a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon.

--BBC
The explanation is simple. The US government has NO evidence in support of the official story. If it had, it would release it and put this issue to rest once and for all.

2) No airliner crashed at the alleged site in PA. Flight 93, we are led to believe, managed to bury itself upon impact, a convenient lie designed to cover the fact that no airliner wreckage was ever visible at the alleged 'crash' site. This myth can be put to rest with a simple excavation. My challenge to officialdom is this: if you believe or wish me to believe that a 757 lies buried under the soil in PA, then go dig it up and prove it to me!

Otherwise --shut the fuck up and resign your pubic office! Show me the wreckage! Until that is done, I say that there was and is no wreckage because there was no crash. Magic tricks are easy to pull off when no one is looking and you have trillion dollar deficits with which to finance the lies and misdirection.

3) Purdue University 'modeled' a soft-bodied, aluminum airliner slicing through steel girders at WTC's Twin Towers. Nonsense! If aluminum could slice through steel, Switzerland would make army knives out of aluminum.

But --they don't!

I carry a Swiss Army Knife. The blades are made of hardened steel. Purdue University has made a Faustian bargain. By putting its name on this piece of crap, by practicing 'truth by animation', Purdue relinquishes any credibility it might have claimed as an 'institution of higher learning'. These days anyone can animate anything. You can do major motion picture quality work with a free download called 'Blender'. All it takes are a few working brain cells and some patience. Walt Disney animated a mouse but that does not make Mickey real. Purdue animated a bald faced lie. It does not make it true!

4) As David Ray Griffin and numerous experts and scholars have pointed out: steel has never melted at Kerosene fire temperatures. And, until the laws of physics are repealed, it never will. The towers of WTC collapsed as a result of a controlled demolition. There is no other explanation consistent with the science of physics. [See: David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor (PDF)]

5) Only a controlled demolition looks like a controlled demolition The collapse of WTC7 looks just like a controlled demolition because it was one. WTC 7 collapsed though no airliner struck it. Consider the implications: if WTC 7 was a controlled demolition, Silverstein and/or Bushco planted explosives prior to the attacks of 911. While all other official 'theories' merely raise more problems than they explain, the common sense conclusion is entirely consistent with Occam's Razor.

Larry Silverstein said that WTC 7 was pulled!

Later it was claimed by 'damage control' that Larry's use of the term 'pull it' really meant 'pull them' as in pull the firefighters out! Fire fighters are a 'them' --not an 'it'. Everyone else refers to 'firefighters' as 'firefighters', the 'unit' as a 'unit', they are not called 'it'! In fact, 'pull' --as Silverstein used the term in context --is commonly used by demolition experts to describe the professional demolition of buildings. One who is tasked with bringing about the controlled demolition of a building is said to 'pull it'. That's just the way it is, efforts to re-write history and common usage notwithstanding.

Just recently, a forty story steel frame building in Beijing was literally engulfed, totally involved in an horrific fire. Guess what! It did not collapse! And neither would WTC 7 which, of course, had help.

6) Clearly --anyone who commits a crime is most motivated to a) cover it up; b) lie about it about to protect the guilty. Who lied about 911? The most notable 911 liars are Bush himself and key members of his administration. Bush lied several times about having seen the crashes when, in fact, he could not possibly have seen them on TV at the time that he said he saw them. Perhaps the CIA had a arranged a non-network, 'closed circuit' set-up for him that he dare not reveal. Bush could not have seen the events 'live from New York' as he claimed unless someone in his administration knew precisely what was going to happen and when. Clearly --Bush and his 'players' were not ready for prime time. They fucked up and flopped!

Whoever that was, he/she/it might have gone to great lengths to arrange 'closed circuit' telemetry of the event for Bush's benefit. Certainly, there was no legitimate live coverage of the crash nor could there have been. Bush lied, revealing his complicity in the capital crimes of mass murder and high treason!

7) There were no Arab names on the official list of those autopsied from the Pentagon. The source for this is Dr. Olmsted, who filed an FOIA request. He had made the point that 'passenger lists' are just names someone types up on a piece of paper. It is not evidence. A coroner's report, however, is admissible in court. It's evidence. And, in this case, the coroner's report disproves Bush's official conspiracy theory of 911. There's nary a 'hijacker' nor an Arab name on the list.

8) The BBC interviewed several 'said' hijackers though they were said by Bush partisans to have died in the attacks. Dead men don't give interviews. Another fatal flaw in the official conspiracy theory.

9) Phone calls by Barbara Olson et al were most certainly faked. Her husband, Ted Olson, told two mutually exclusive stories. Even so, the best explanation, consistent with Occam's razor, is that the alleged phone calls did not occur.
In this video the distinguished research scholar and author, David Ray Griffin, reports to a conference at the European Parliament on an FBI court document revealing that Ted Olson did not receive any telephone calls from his wife, Barbara Olsen, on flight 77 on sept 11, 2001 as falsely reported CNN reporter Tim O'Brien in the hours following the attacks. Obrien's report provided an eye witness account of hijackers allegedly armed with box cutters. CNN has not yet commented.

The Barbara Olson cell phone story is included in David Ray Griffin's new book: 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press.
.

--Video of David Ray Griffen, 911 Contradictions
Only the guilty tell deliberate lies about crimes, especially those lies having the effect of obstructing justice as Ted Olson's bald faced lie did. 911 was a crime of mass murder, possibly high treason. Ted's deliberate lie about this crime makes Ted liable for prosecution in Federal Courts as an accessory to the crimes of mass murder and high treason. At the very least it could be evidence that Olson was an accessory after the fact.

10) WTC steel was ordered destroyed, hauled away and sold! The willfull destruction of evidence is a crime; in this case, complicity and obstruction of justice. [See: Achitect and Engineers for 911 Truth]

11) Marvin Bush handled security for the WTC before and during 911. It would appear that he succeeded in doing the job for which he was planted. You can rest assured that he was rewarded when, in fact, he should have been arrested, charged and prosecuted for his complicity in the crimes of mass murder, high treason and domestic terrorism. Marvin Bush represents 'opportunity' among abundant method and motive.

12) Bush signed Executive Order 13292 which classifies 'a broad range of documents' and keeps them beyond the reach of citizens for 25 years. The EO also gave 'classification' powers to bunker Dick Cheney, VP at the time.

13) Though al Qaeda was blamed for 911, it is a matter of record that al Qaeda, the creation of the CIA, was founded at a mujahideen camp in Afghanistan in 1988, during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union.
It did, however, lay the groundwork for the expansion of power of the most extremist groups of the mujahideen and their allies from the Arab world, including the organization al-Qaeda, which was founded at a mujahideen camp in Afghanistan in 1988. The Soviet withdrawal and the end of the Afghan-Soviet war led not to peace but to new rounds of conflict. See also Islamic Fundamentalism.
Following the events of 911, Syria denied the very existence of al Qaeda. I am more inclined to believe Syria than anyone inside the US government. Certainly, the Bush administration gave us only propaganda and exploitation but no evidence. Al Qaeda became the label the admin attached to acts that the administration arbitrarily chalked up to 'terrorism'. 'Terrorism' itself is Orwellian. It is simply whatever those in power say that it is, or more accurately, whatever those in power believe they can most easily exploit. Dissent itself may be considered 'terrorism', especially any truth that might have the effect of discrediting or subverting the illegitimate exercise of power.

14) Though al Qaeda was blamed for 911, the US government insisted upon waging war on nations that most certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with 911. What, for example, did the Taleban government have to do with 911? The Taleban, it should be recalled, had visited UNOCAL officials in Sugar Land, TX, Tom DeLay's home district. The war in Afghanistan was about the 'failed pipeline' deal --not the 'terrorist' pretext that the media swallowed, regurgitated and then puked up for us. This sounds more like a drug (oil) deal gone bad! In fact, the US had threatened the Taleban with carpet bombing months before 911.

It's time to investigate this crime, round up the guilty, try them, sentence them and execute them.
Simon Polakowski said that if he believed the government's story on Sept. 11, 2001, he might as well believe the Earth is flat.

Polakowski produces an hour-long show with his friend Bob Martin called "9/11 Myth vs. Reality."

The show airs at 8 p.m. Mondays on public access channel 27.

He said that on Sept. 11, he was listening to the newscasts and thought to himself, "This is such bullshit."

He started the show more than one year ago to reach people who had similar doubts.

"From what I've been researching, there are millions of people who do not believe the official story and explanation," Polakowski said. "There are shows like this all across (the country). We get a lot of our material off of YouTube and off the Internet, and I am very thankful for all the people who are doing this research totally out-of-pocket."

The story of 19 hijackers led by "a man in a cave" is something Polakowski and Martin have a hard time believing.

"It was the most far-fetched story I have ever heard in my life," Polakowski said. "The most powerful nation on the face of the Earth, the most advanced military with over 30 intelligence agencies with over $40 billion in the annual budget to protect the nation, and they all failed?"

Martin was working as a doctor and living in New York on Sept. 11 and said he went to Ground Zero to help.

"One thing that bothered me was that we all noticed that the skies were quite empty, and there were no planes flying because there was a stop order," Martin said. "But they were really quiet. There were no military aircrafts over New York City for quite sometime, and somebody yelled out, 'Where the hell are the jets?' That question gnawed at me for the following year."

Martin said that as the day went on, there were more questions and concerns that popped up in his head.

"Another thing that gnawed at me was when I went down to Ground Zero, - it occurred to me that there was almost nothing left of these structures," Martin said. "I'm looking at girders that weigh anywhere from 4 to 300 tons. They were embedded in other skyscrapers like giant arrows. We're talking about distances upwards of 400 feet. Because this was allegedly a gravity-driven collapse, I found it very hard to reckon with what I saw."

Polakowski said 9/11 was a shock-and-awe maneuver that caught Americans completely off guard.

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt said there are no accidents in politics," Martin said. "It was the ultimate political act. People were suffering from PTSD in New York City, and that is what war does. It unbalances the human psyche, and when there is something of shock, they are much easier to manipulate."

Martin said the TV show explores possibilities of how and why 9/11 happened. Martin said many parts of the government's story do not hold up to scrutiny.

"The event 9/11 is a seminal event of the century that triggered this global War on Terror," Martin said. "It goes logically from what we're positive of - that the War on Terror is perhaps a hoax and is contrived. And that has its origins in intelligence agencies and major corporations in the Western world."

Martin said he uses the basic question of motive and benefit to come to his conclusion.

"When detectives come upon a murder scene, the first thing they ask themselves is, 'Who benefits from this?'" Martin said. "'Is it a crime of passion? Is there something that was put together and planned out?' This is the main question that should be asked about 9/11, is, 'Who benefits? Did the Arabs benefit?' No. So, who benefited from this?"

--9/11: A government story full of holes
The 'rats' desert the sinking ship. Even former Bushies dispute the lies still told us about 911.
A former chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush's first term now believes the official story about the collapse of the WTC is 'bogus,' saying it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

"If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling," said Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D, a former member of the Bush team who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX.

Reynolds, now a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, also believes it's 'next to impossible' that 19 Arab Terrorists alone outfoxed the mighty U.S. military, adding the scientific conclusions about the WTC collapse may hold the key to the entire mysterious plot behind 9/11.

"It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause(s) of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7," said Reynolds this week from his offices at Texas A&M. "If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.

"More importantly, momentous political and social consequences would follow if impartial observers concluded that professionals imploded the WTC. Meanwhile, the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis of 9/11 right."

However, Reynolds said "getting it right in today's security state' remains challenging because he claims explosives and structural experts have been intimidated in their analyses of the collapses of 9/11.

From the beginning, the Bush administration claimed that burning jet fuel caused the collapse of the towers. Although many independent investigators have disagreed, they have been hard pressed to disprove the government theory since most of the evidence was removed by FEMA prior to independent investigation.

Critics claim the Bush administration has tried to cover-up the evidence and the recent 9/11 Commission has failed to address the major evidence contradicting the official version of 9/11.

Some facts demonstrating the flaws in the government jet fuel theory include:
  • Photos showing people walking around in the hole in the North Tower where 10,000 gallons of jet fuel supposedly was burning..
  • When the South Tower was hit, most of the North Tower's flames had already vanished, burning for only 16 minutes, making it relatively easy to contain and control without a total collapse.
  • The fire did not grow over time, probably because it quickly ran out of fuel and was suffocating, indicating without added explosive devices the firs could have been easily controlled.
  • FDNY fire fighters still remain under a tight government gag order to not discuss the explosions they heard, felt and saw. FAA personnel are also under a similar 9/11 gag order.
  • Even the flawed 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that "none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible."
  • Fire had never before caused steel-frame buildings to collapse except for the three buildings on 9/11, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9/11.
  • The fires, especially in the South Tower and WTC-7, were relatively small.
  • WTC-7 was unharmed by an airplane and had only minor fires on the seventh and twelfth floors of this 47-story steel building yet it collapsed in less than 10 seconds.
  • WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams.
  • In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein, the WTC leaseholder, told the fire department commander on 9/11 about WTC-7 that. "may be the smartest thing to do is pull it," slang for demolish it.
  • It's difficult if not impossible for hydrocarbon fires like those fed by jet fuel (kerosene) to raise the temperature of steel close to melting. [or even weakening sufficiently to collapse]

Despite the numerous holes in the government story, the Bush administration has brushed aside or basically ignored any and all critics. Mainstream experts, speaking for the administration, offer a theory essentially arguing that an airplane impact weakened each structure and an intense fire thermally weakened structural components, causing buckling failures while allowing the upper floors to pancake onto the floors below.

Greg Szymanski – Artic Beacon June 12, 2005, Former Bush Team Member Says WTC Collapse Likely A Controlled Demolition And 'Inside Job'
It's too early to say that Obama will remembered as Marcus Aurelius --less bad, intelligent, thoughtful --or that Bush will be remembered as Caligula is remembered --a total waste of human DNA. A new paradigm is desperately needed, a paradigm that includes not merely the entire spectrum of political dissent but also the dimming hope that political morality might be electable and in some manner triumphant.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Mr. Obama, Bring Down the War Criminals!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Among several sticky tar babies Bush left Obama the worst are: Guantanamo, torture, capital war crimes! The clock is ticking for Obama. The time for 'good faith' is running out! Unless Obama moves to close Guantanamo now and end the practice of torture while bringing war crimes charges against Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney et al., he risks being so charged himself!
Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather than improving their people's lives. They worry obsessively over the one thing they can't control, what Orwell called "thoughtcrime" -contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.

Locking up people who haven't done anything wrong is worse than un-American and a violent attack on the most basic principles of Western jurisprudence. It is contrary to the most essential notion of human decency. That anyone has ever been subjected to "preventive detention" is an outrage.

--Ted Rall, Resign Now
One hundred days have come and gone! There is still no strongly worded condemnation of the practice of torture! There is still no support for the bringing of war crimes charges against Bushco! The 'closing of Guantanamo' is merely confused --not resolved!

As the New York Times noted: "... the unresolved eight year nightmare will continue raining down drip by drip, disrupting Obama's high ambitions". If torture had not been wrong, illegal, immoral, then why did Bush spend so much of his time denying it, lying about it, conning the American people and the world?

Bush lied about US policies of torture and other war crimes because Bush knew it was wrong and deliberately set about to 'fool' the people! He failed because he was and remains a lousy liar, a cretin, an ignorant ass wipe who did not win the White House fairly. His morally bankrupt party stole the White House in what Republicans themselves boasted was a coup d'tat! Bush and his party are likewise 'credited' with Reaganesque and outrageous deficits which coupled with astronomical transfers of wealth upward to the elite have brought the nation to the very edge of financial collapse! We expected more and we deserve more from the Democrats! We held them to a higher standard! Will Obama prove us wrong to have done so?

Obama reversed himself with a declaration that no more photos of torture will be released! Is this not an admission that there are --indeed --more photos that SHOULD be released? Is this not an admission that the practices of torture, some of which should have resulted in capital crimes charges against Bush himself, are still underway? If Bush's orders resulting in death make Bush culpable for the death penalty, then where is the clause that absolves Obama of the same crime?
(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

--US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441
This federal law is still on the books! It is still ignored by the office of President of the United States, the office that is empowered by the US Constitution with the authority to enforce and uphold the laws of the United States. Does this basic concept no longer mean anything to the people and, most importantly, to those who are sworn to uphold the law? I want ...no! I demand to know when the laws of the United States came to mean absolutely nothing.

I find it significant that both public immorality and disregard for the 'rule of law' have increased with the rise of the religious right, radical fundamentalism and 'religiosity' in general. I find significant that support for war crimes, state sponsored murder, death squads, torture and other Nazi-like atrocities was extremely strong among the religious right, devotees of Pat Robertson and similar ilk. As I have stated, the 'religious right' is not just wrong but dead wrong and immoral. Pat Robertson, it may be recalled, advocated 'death squads' and the murders of foreign leaders with whom he disagreed! This is just evil --pure and simple!
Ever since he was released from Guantanamo in February after six years of due-process-less detention and brutal torture, Binyam Mohamed has been attempting to obtain justice for what was done to him. But his torturers have been continuously protected, and Mohamed's quest for a day in court repeatedly thwarted, by one individual: Barack Obama. Today, there is new and graphic evidence of just how far the Obama administration is going to prevent evidence of the Bush administration's torture program from becoming public.

In February, Obama's DOJ demanded dismissal of Mohamed's lawsuit against the company which helped "render" him to be tortured on the ground that national security would be harmed if the lawsuit continued. Then, after a British High Court ruled that there was credible evidence that Mohamed was subjected to brutal torture and was entitled to obtain evidence in the possession of the British government which detailed the CIA's treatment of Mohamed, and after a formal police inquiry began into allegations that British agents collaborated in his torture, the British government cited threats from the U.S. government that it would no longer engage in intelligence-sharing with Britain -- i.e., it would no longer pass on information about terrorist threats aimed at British citizens -- if the British court disclosed the facts of Mohamed's torture.

--Glenn Greenwald, Obama administration threatens Britain to keep torture evidence concealed
I demand that those government officials in both administrations be arrested, charged and tried for the capital crimes that are specifically and unambiguously the subject of the above cited federal law --US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441!

If the laws do not apply to elected officials, then they do not apply to us!
Government may not have it one way! Those governments that presume to be above the law are, in fact, outlaw governments. They are illegitimate.
Despite the Obama order that no more photos be released, there are still more photos to be seen! Certainly --the photos are evidence that US Codes were and continue to be violated with impunity. Orders that the photos be suppressed are obstructions of justice and are, in themselves, prosecutable! I will support the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate this order! Clearly, however, any move to impeach Obama is transparently hypocritical if the same charges are not brought against the gang of heinous war criminals who dared call themselves the 'Bush administration'!

The photos will be released --eventually! And the order to suppress them will look foolish if not criminal! Some of them have already been leaked. I am not interested in rationalizations that we hoped had bit the dust along with the failed Bush administration, primarily the cop out that Al Qaeda will be angered! Fuck Al Qaeda! I doubt that they are half as angered as am I! Secondly, I doubt that Al Qaeda exists as anything other than the CIA 'shill' organization that they were in their inception, the CIA 'shill' organization that they most certainly continue to be.

Obama refuses to hold responsible and accountable the very people who authorized and utilized a heinous and un-American program of torture, perhaps murder! It is imperative that the US prove to the world that it take these issues seriously! The entire world takes them seriously and will forever dismiss the US, a waning 'superpower' in any case if it should not! The US has no moral choice but to:

  • expose and 'own up' to heinous practices of torture and state-sponsored murder!
  • bring specific charges against individuals who have issued specific orders in specific cases;
  • bring charges against the architects of these policies in both the Bush and the Obama administrations!
The country, the world is sick to death of talk, spin and propaganda! The world demands action! The world demands an immediate end to this bullshit!


Mr. Obama, TEAR DOWN THESE ILLEGAL PRISONS!

MR. OBAMA, BRING TORTURERS AND MURDERERS TO TRIAL!

MR. OBAMA, STOP THE WAR CRIMES, STOP THE MURDERS, STOP THE TORTURE! NOW!

A list of broken promises continues to grow! These crimes are but a continuation of Bush administration policies.

Mr. Obama --you were NOT elected to be Bush-lite!

You were elected to UNDO Bush's many failures!

You were elected to RIGHT the many wrongs that had been done by Bush!

You were elected to UPHOLD the rule of law!

You put your hand on a black book and swore to protect and defend the Constitution! That act meant nothing to Bush. We had hoped it meant more to you!

Mr. Obama, the commission of war crimes abroad is NOT authorized to any branch of the US government by the US Constitution! Either you will uphold the Constitution or you will not! If you will not, it is the moral responsibility of the US citizenry to remove you and replace you with someone who will.