The UltraRich

White Southern Radicals In The GOP Since Nixon's "Moral Majority"

Robert Reich: Why the Republican Crackup is Bad For America
Posted: 12/21/11

Modernizing Conservatism

Out Of Africa And Into Iowa - Maureen Dowd

Empire - The End Of The American Republic

David Frum's Discontent With The GOP

Australia's Climate Nightmare

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/climate-change-and-the-end-of-australia-20111003?print=true

How The GOP Became The Party Of The Rich - Rolling Stone

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109?print=true

A Few Hours' Reading For A Rainy Day

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic: Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/05/nearly-100-fantastic-pieces-of-journalism/238230/

Government Of The Rest Of Us By The Rich, For The Rich

Sorry, no time to straighten this out. Great article on Daily Kos I wanted to preserve.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/09/1034935/-Open-thread-for-night-owls:-Government-by-the-rich,-for-the-rich?via=blog_1

Take The Test!

Where do you fit in on a right/left/authoritarian/libertarian grid? Find out at:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/test

Evolution Of The "Republican Establishment" Since Goldwater

A long but worthwhile article on the evolution of the "Republican establishment" since the Goldwater years entitled Does Anyone Have A Grip On The G.O.P.?"

Who Are The 47%?

Who Are The 47%? is the name of a posting by digby at Hullabaloo.

The zero-tax filers will be largely low-income. Indeed, 75 percent of them will earn less than $20,000 per year and 97 percent will earn less than $40,000. Fewer than 1 percent will earn more than $75,000 per year – a group comprised largely of business owners whose tax liabilities will be erased due to business losses, carry-overs from prior year AMT payments, or foreign tax credits.

Lightning Round!

The Essential Eric Cantor

Eric Cantor's America, New York magazine.  Important article that I don't have time to get into it right now. But it shows what a dangerous political performer Eric Cantor is.

Model Airplanes Ain't What They Used To Be!

AMAZING! Incredible video of a model SR-71 Air Force reconnaissance jet (Blackbird).

Notable Quotes

James Madison on perpetual war:

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
— Political Observations, 1795
********************
Friedrich Nietzsche in “Beyond Good and Evil”:

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

********************
John Jay Gould: a robber baron connected with many of the largest railway financial operations in the United States from 1868-1888. During the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 he hired strikebreakers; according to labor unionists, he said at the time, "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."
********************
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming:”

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Remind you at all of today's political situation and the Republican race?
********************
John Kenneth Galbraith (Canadian-born administrator & economist,
1908 - 2006):

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

********************
Anatole France (1844 - 1924):

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

********************
 

Amazon Sweatshop - Books, Not Brazil

This is a link to an article titled Inside Amazon's Warehouse on a site called The Morning Call, linked to by the right-wing site Hot Air. Strange to find this article there, since it describes third-world sweatshop conditions in the Amazon warehouse in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A race to the bottom for assembly-line employees, while corporate profits grow exponentially.

Elmer Goris spent a year working in Amazon.com's Lehigh Valley warehouse, where books, CDs and various other products are packed and shipped to customers who order from the world's largest online retailer.

The 34-year-old Allentown resident, who has worked in warehouses for more than 10 years, said he quit in July because he was frustrated with the heat and demands that he work mandatory overtime. Working conditions at the warehouse got worse earlier this year, especially during summer heat waves when heat in the warehouse soared above 100 degrees, he said.

He got light-headed, he said, and his legs cramped, symptoms he never experienced in previous warehouse jobs. One hot day, Goris said, he saw a co-worker pass out at the water fountain. On other hot days, he saw paramedics bring people out of the warehouse in wheelchairs and on stretchers.

Comments On Breitbart's "Big Government" Site

Comments to a post on Big Government entitled Allen West: ‘Marxist’ Obama Intentionally Destroying Economy


mustafamonde September 28th, 2011 - 9:29 am

Spot on! No one could be as epically incompetent as to think the plan they tried before would work a second time in even worse economic conditions. America has dangers from without, but almost nothing rivals this particular danger from within. The committed communist and chief has to go in 2012. He is the first and only anti-American president. If they want epically incompetent, I'd refer them to the Carter administration. The result looks the same, but Obama's excellence at tanking the economy can only be the result of deliberate economic sabotage.
Richie_Rich_ September 28th, 2011 - 9:33 am

Right on Allen.

Thanks for having the guts to say what we all know. You will be attacked mercilessly for saying this, and I admire your guts. 2016 is coming up – and it's not too early to start preparing now, just in case the Marxists in our society ballot-box stuff and Black Panther nightstick into another 4 yrs of their Marxist ruler in the White House.
Navy Gentleman September 28th, 2011 - 9:34 am

Obama campaigns while his administration plunders.
Lindsay57 September 28th, 2011 - 9:34 am

Agreed.
Deusexmachina September 28th, 2011 - 9:35 am


This is the most petty, vindictive, divisive, anti-business, big government growing, power grabbing, childish, unvetted, ill-prepared, stubborn, invasive, patronizing, misguided, deluded, amateur, socialist, overseeing, overreaching, tax hungry, spending crazy, enemy pandering, ally insulting…somebody help me out here…reckless, union thuggery encouraging, cry baby, thin skinned, complaining, blaming others, controlling administration, that I have ever witnessed in my 52 years!
TreatyofTripoli September 28th, 2011 - 9:37 am

Obama's a class warrior, for the middle class. That means for all you poor folk writing from your trailers here.
yeahyouright September 28th, 2011 - 9:38 am

wait, this is the most transparent Administration in history.

it's true in a certain perverse way, no?

Thank you Col. West for helping the near-blind see exactly what this fiend is doing to our great land.
mustafamonde September 28th, 2011 - 9:38 am

Obama is the problem. If he is not removed, we will have riots in the streets. He is through and through a Marxist…and you and I knew that, West knows it, and the MSM and the left covered that up and sold him as something else. He is a dangerous man, and all like him need to get the boot.
NewRiverPatriot September 28th, 2011 - 9:39 am


Are you out of your f'n mind you retread? Class clown maybe, but no warrior. That POS has never got his hands dirty, much less "fight" for any class other than himself and that was probably through half-a$$ed litigation.
NewRiverPatriot September 28th, 2011 - 9:40 am


How about one day….President West
Libs_R_Wrong September 28th, 2011 - 9:43 am

Tell it like it is, Allen! Courageous and well done! Now, if only someone would have the cajones to flat-out call Hussein a damn liar on a nationwide broadcast. Cop-outs like "not truthful", "Innacurate" or "Just saying" don't carry the necessary fortitude.
Strays September 28th, 2011 - 9:43 am

Allen West, prepare for flack from the Congressional Black Caucus …

… because the President not only believes in the separation of classes, but also intentionally fuels race-hatred and race-separation in order to balkanize this Country, thereby weaken it and making it fall to Communism. This is also the same thing the Congressional Black Caucus believes in.

A Country that knows no class system or race separation is a very powerful Country — one that will not yield to Obama's attempt at throwing this Country into civil war — like Kenya.
oxnardcalif September 28th, 2011 - 9:43 am


GO LTCOL WEST GO! Take it to the tyrant!


Obama is a thief, robbing the middle class and destroying our incomes and our small businesses. If he were doing it on purpose he could not be doing a better job of destroying everything that kaes our country great. He call industry and corporations the enemy. He despises freedom. He hates free economies. He is facist ruining our energy sources and using the NLRB and the EPA to destroy our jobs and chase them overseas. Never vote for leftism. We must take his boot off our necks.
Indiepalin September 28th, 2011 - 9:45 am


Obama's "war on wealth" has resulted in a massive expansion of the poor with the overarching goal of turning America into a two class system. The socialist ruling class, to whom rules don't apply, and the peon class who have to suck up whatever crap the ruling class tells them too. TofT, as usual your point is inaccurate, inane and little more than what we'd expect for a George Soros boiler room astroturfer. Your feeble march continues on…
Grace656 September 28th, 2011 - 9:45 am


Create an economic collapse. Demonize people based on race and economic status. The dems and other communists have used hard economic times this for a hundred years to institute quick changes in governments (ie Stalin, FDR). Poverty is a friend of the dem party, and the more poverty they generate the more votes they get in elections. And it's easy to turn poverty into class warfare on mostly the white middle class and upper middle class.
Richie_Rich_ September 28th, 2011 - 9:47 am

Obama's an Islamic warrior, supporting all that is evil. That means for all you folk smoking crack in the hood, keep on smoking that crap. I'll be looking forward to when you go rioting on the day after election day next yr. Please come by my house, please do. Clip holds ten rounds, and I qualified as US Army Expert sharpshooter. I am looking forward to the fun!
Libs_R_Wrong September 28th, 2011 - 9:48 am


The list of Big Libs leaving the Obama camp grows ever larger: Maureen Dowd, Michael Moore, Salon magazine, Gloria Estefan, Tina Brown… they see what the Obama-loving trolls on this site can't see: That he is an absolute failure and is taking down the entire Democrat Party.
Geldistgut September 28th, 2011 - 9:54 am


The Gop candidate should refuse to debate Obama stating that it is useless to debate an INVETERATE LIAR ! Yes he's a maxist, all wrapped up in muslim garb !!
clarityinla September 28th, 2011 - 9:58 am

Hey dopey, you better check your left-wing talking points. Yesterdays stats show that the Dumbocrats supporting Obama are a strange coalition between the very rich (who live off the lower tax rate of capital gains and dividends) and the entitlement soaked poor. The middle class is abandoning him because they still hope to get RICH someday.

I certainly don't want this statist President representing me, as a middle class person, because he wants to take the fruits of MY labor and my investment, and just give it to the govt. The poor receive a tiny share of that money. Most of it goes to government bureaucrats, dummy!
bowzer September 28th, 2011 - 9:59 am


Lt. Col. Allen West was forced to leave the military because he held a pistol to an Iraqi policeman's head in order to get information about an assassination plot. No political correctness here (thankfully) and I respect him greatly for protecting American soldiers at all cost. He knew it would cost him his military career and did it anyway. This is the type of president we need…willing to do whatever it takes for the good of the country UNLIKE the snake we have in the WH now. I would be honored to vote for Allen West. However, the left will attack him similar to the torture sympathies at GITMO.
Roger September 28th, 2011 - 10:03 am


Indeed he is. Indeed all the liberals and demobrats have taken root in the Marxist camp. Their intent is to destroy the country as it exists as a Republic today and from the ashes will rise their Socialist/Communist/Marxist Utopia. It's the same BS that built all of the Socialist/Communist Empires that today are in ruin .. or soon to be.
huskergramps September 28th, 2011 - 10:04 am


The word must be spread from every rooftop across the land. This man must be defeated, and it MUST BE a landslide. We need to send a message to progressives, Marxists, and Communists everywhere: We the People are coming, and we're pissed.
Goo September 28th, 2011 - 10:05 am


As a dedicated Communist, Obama has redistributed America's wealth overseas, primarily to her enemies which are his friends.

Rebellion to Tyrants is Obediance to God!!!
Goo September 28th, 2011 - 10:06 am


We already have had riots. Madison and New York. It is planned, and it will spread. Be prepared. We cannpot allow the enemies of freedom to destroy this nation, from the top or the bottom. It's Cloward and Piven.
Goo September 28th, 2011 - 10:08 am


@mustafa-

"…Obama's excellence at tanking the economy can only be the result of deliberate economic sabotage."

It's always seemed that way to me, too.
Dirtt September 28th, 2011 - 10:13 am


West is walking on egg shells the ooh soo safe definition of the Chimp as a Marxist for God Sakes have some B@lls a Marxist???
thats a Sick @ss Joke that would be like circa 1942 calling Adolf Hitler an Extremist…..the Chimp in Chief sitting in the Rat Infested
Fortress like white house is a Red Chinese Run Spy I Know West your out of a American Army so Castrated by Political Communist
Speech Codes are Ingrained in You, and Your out Now for a Money Making Career……a Marxist??? thats a Sick @ss Cowardly
Joke…..You Should get a National Talk Show like the other Phony Punks and Call Every Rat a……"Good American"….
Goo September 28th, 2011 - 10:19 am


Well.. I don't think Obama wants to destroy the economy. I think he wants to remake it and doesn't understand economics 101. I think he does believe that the rich have "stolen" their wealth off the backs of the poor and I also think he has animus for white folks. He HAS to if he spent 20 years in Jeremiah Wright's church.


Obama is just plain unqualified for his job. He is ignorant of economics and the REAL history of not only this country, but the world. Mix that in with the belief that America is a "damn mean country" and you've got his baseline. The results are evident. He's a disaster.
HoR_Emperor September 28th, 2011 - 10:28 am

Col. Lawrence Wilkinson On Dick Cheney

This is a link to a transcript of an interview of Col. Lawrence Wilkinson by Amy Goodman on democracynow.org, with Glenn Greenwald contributing as well.

Former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Wilkierson said he would be willing to testify if Dick Cheney is put on trial for war crimes.

Click here for video or audio of the interview.

CREW Report - Most Corrupt Congressmen, 2011

Click for an article entitled CREW's Most Corrupt Report 2011.

"CREW" stands for "Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington." It seems nonpartisan, enumerating in great detail criminal, civil, and ethical offenses committed by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Here's their list, Most Corrupt 2011:

Rep. Charles Bass (R-NH)
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL)
Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN)
Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY)
Rep. Frank Guinta (R-NH)
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY)
Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV)
Rep. Laura Richardson (D-CA)
Rep. David Rivera (R-FL)
Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY)
Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH)
Sen. David Vitter (R-LA)
Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL)
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)

Dishonorable Mention:
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX)
Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV)
Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-GA)
Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA)
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX)

At the link above, click on Read the Full Report, where you can view a 92-page PDF describing the instances of corruption in excruciating detail. As it says in relation to its methodology:

To create this report, CREW reviewed media articles, Federal Election Commission reports, court documents and members’ personal financial and travel disclosure forms. We then analyzed that information in light of federal laws and regulations as well as congressional ethics rules.

Well Done, Vancouver - Cheney Book Tour

After Vancouver, Cheney traveled to Calgary, where he no doubt got a warmer welcome.



Here's a website comment:

Under the Convention Against Torture, which Canada ratified in 1987, there is universal jurisdiction in cases of torture, and a obligation on countries that have ratified the Convention to prosecute offenders, as I pointed out to the PM in this edited text of a message sent this morning.

°°°°°°°

To: Prime Minister S. Harper
Re: No Safe Haven in Canada for Torturers; Arrest the Self-Confessed Torturer Dick Cheney

Mr. Harper,

Canada has apparently become a safe haven for torturers like disgraced former U.S. Vice-President Richard Cheney, whom you failed to arrest when he was on Canadian soil Monday and Tuesday this week.

Canada ratified the Convention against Torture in 1987, and its provisions were incorporated into the Canadian criminal code. Arrest and prosecution of torturers is the law of the land. It is not an option for political leaders like you to simply disregard Canadian and international laws that you find it inconvenient to enforce.

The law is the law, and Cheney is a torturer by his own admission. He must be arrested and prosecuted at the earliest opportunity. He could and should have been arrested on arrival in Vancouver on September 26 or in Calgary the following day, but you allowed this vile criminal to get away.

What makes this dereliction of duty by your PMO and Justice Ministry particularly egregious is that you have allowed a man to escape Canadian justice this week who is perhaps more than anyone else responsible for transforming his once-law-abiding nation into a failed state that tortures, violates international law and spies on its own citizens.

I support the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, when he says, “Canada should make clear that torture is a crime, not a policy option. The best way to do that is to show that Canada is not a safe haven for torturers.”

You and your government must be seen to act effectively and in accordance with your responsibilities under the Convention against Torture or you risk becoming a criminal yourself, Mr. Harper, for aiding and abetting these heinous crimes against humanity. You will not control the Justice Department forever, you might wish to remember.

Yours, Des McMurchy, Sointula, BC

Conservative Myths Debunked

From Cheers and Jeers, Daily Kos, by Bill In Portland, Maine.

Rick Perry: Bad Lipreading

Gingrich For President?

Fox News polled 70,000 Fox viewers after the Fox/Google Republican debated. After a few hours, they pulled the results off their website, apparently because they weren't too happy with the results:

Ron Paul: 39%
Mitt Romney: 23%
Rick Perry: 13%
Herman Cain: 11%
Newt Gingrich: 7%
Michele Bachmann: 2.25%
Gary Johnson: 1.95%
Jon Huntsman: 1.59%
Rick Santorum: 1.44%

Herman Cain subsequently won a meaningless straw poll in Florida with 37%, far outpacing Perry (15%) and Romney (14%).

Well, the Republican race is heating up (melting down?).

Right-wing sites are pledging everlasting enmity to the vile Romney. But the same sites are lamenting the terrible debate performances of Rick Perry. He rode into the scene on a white horse, six-guns blazing; but now that people have had a look at him, his original popularity is dropping like a stone. Michele Bachmann, who earlier led the pack based on a strong showing in the (meaningless) Ames, Iowa, poll, has dropped to the unelectable 2% range as people are coming to realize her shallowness and fanaticism.

Strange things can happen in politics, but I really can't see one of the 1 percenters - Johnson, Huntsman, or Santorum - making the enormous gains they need to make to become viable.

That leaves us with Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and Herman Cain.

I've long maintained, and still do, that Ron Paul is unelectable. He's a man of principle - though I think some of his principles are goofy - and he won't pander to either the Republican establishment or the tea party extremists. Without the support of one of those groups, he has no hope.

Gingrich v. Cain! Is that what the Republican party has come to?

The Republicans have a deeply racist base. They'll froth at the mouth and rave that that's not true, but it is. What prominent black Republicans can they point to? Colin Powell, who seemed to dance on the Republican/Democratic border? Clarence Thomas, who sits silent on the Supreme Court bench, seething with hatred? Michael Steele, once the token leader of the Republican national association? Short list.

It's interesting that there are 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus; that's all the black members of the House of Representatives, because since Barack Obama (D-Illinois) resigned his seat, there are no black senators from either party. I once saw a Republican claim in an interview that the Democrats were racist because they had a Congressional Black Caucus but the Republicans didn't, because the Republicans weren't race-oriented. Interesting, in view of the fact that at that time, there were 42 black members of Congress, all of them Democrats. It would have been tough to have a Republican black caucus without any members. Since the elections last November, the 43-member CBC includes House member Allen West (R - Florida).

Cain can't win. And that leaves the Republicans with that disgusting toad, Newt Gingrich

RedState's Moe Lane Excoriates (?) Elizabeth Warren.

Well, maybe not so much. Lane posted a video of Warren (Dem candidate for next year's election in Ted Kennedy's old Massachusetts senate seat, currently held by on-again/off-again tea party favorite Scott Brown) that he thinks puts her in an unfavorable light. Have a look, and see what you think:




So, is this a bad thing, and Republicans should want everyone in the country to see it to demonstrate Warren's radical socialism? Well, I'm all in favor! I hope everyone in the country does see it! It's available lots of places on the Web under titles such as "Elizabeth Warren Electrifies Democratic Base!"

Lane, however, goes on to try to paint this clip in a bad light:

This interpretation ... of what Warren was trying to say takes into account the minor detail that making our current tax system more ‘fair’ will first require us to go out and tell the 45% of American households not paying income tax that they need to start paying income tax. Elizabeth Warren’s too afraid to do that, of course – heck, she wouldn’t even show the elementary courage needed to support Obama’s dead-on-arrival jobs bill – so I did her a favor by putting up the video. Because, really, it’s very responsible of her to take the position that taxes need to be raised – gathered – on people making less than fifty grand a year. Pure political suicide, but responsible.

Of course, there are also alternative opinions about Warren’s meaning. For example, Mark Hemingway thinks that this is a straw man argument, and that Warren is busily trying to class warfare her way out of the rhetorical trap that the Left has busily created for itself over the need for government. Ramesh Ponnuru takes the argument to its ultimate extreme, and finds a mandate for permanent agricultural subsidies (the Monsanto megacorp is going to love that one). Me? …Well, I did do the (above) video ... but I have to admit that the default option of Elizabeth Warren is dumber than a sackful of hammers has a certain ring to it. If only because it’d mean that she has that special stupidity that’s only available to technically bright people who bubble themselves away from the real world because it’s just too damn scary for words. I enjoy seeing that kind of stupidity in the opposition party: it tends to eventually self-destruct in an entertaining fashion.

Unintelligible word salad in an attempt to blunt Warren's forceful message. I'd pay money to see Elizabeth Warren debate Moe Lane. Anyone too stupid to realize she's talking about millionaires and billionaires, not tax leeches working two jobs to support children on $20,000 a year, is too stupid to bother debating with.

Ron Paul Wins Google/Fox News Debate

Here's a link to an article, Fox News Poll: Ron Paul Wins Orlando Debate.

Fox apparently didn't like it much, though, because they pulled it from their site within hours. By then, of course, it had been copied and made available in other places. Remember, the Intrawebs are forever! The article shows the graph, but here are the results (I've rounded the big ones off; the minnows need decimals to tell them apart):

Ron Paul: 39%
Mitt Romney: 23%
Rick Perry: 13%
Herman Cain: 11%
Newt Gingrich: 7%
Michele Bachmann: 2.25%
Gary Johnson: 1.95%
Jon Huntsman: 1.59%
Rick Santorum: 1.44%

I've read that Fox favors the establishment candidate, Romney, although they're prepared to go with Rick Perry if necessary. They aren't overtly anti-Perry because they don't want to anger their tea party fans. But 40% to Ron Paul, well ahead of Romney and tripling Perry? This must not stand. Presto - the results of their own poll of their own debate - more than 70,000 Fox viewers - are scrubbed.

A.W.R. Hawkins, at Breitbart's Big Government, has an article entitled House Republicans Warn: Obama Is Trying To Turn Us Into A Regulation Nation!


The article is pretty straightforward nonsense, but here are some of the replies:

Remember how he went to Europe during his phony campaign in 2008 to campaign! You should have seen the handwriting on the wall then America…but you did not!

You have warnings and signs of others Bilderbergs waiting in the wings…will you listen now?

*****

OBAMA IS JUST ONE OF THEIR PUPPETS THERE ARE MORE…LIKE BILDERBERG PERRY ON THE RIGHT…AND/OR ‘STAND BY HER MAN’ CLINTON…ON THE LEFT!

*****

"while Obama’s been pushing for more spending and government growth, he has also been pushing for new regulations that are GUARANTEED to cause Americans to lose, rather than gain, more jobs in the months and years to come."

Obama knows exactly what he is doing, he knows the damage he is causing and he plans on doing as much of it as he can before he is literally kicked out of office.

Then he will go around the world telling the world how he is the worlds best friend because he "stuck it to America, the land of the arrogant consumer and global warming denier"

***** 

The man is the worst thing that ever happened to America and quite frankly I have no sympathy for all those jobless voters who voted him into office…They are getting what they deserve. But Obama is the best thing that ever happened to the conservative movement. He has awakened the sleeping giant and that giant is going to get bigger and bigger until there is nothing left of the corupacrat.

*****

Communism…pure and simple. There is only one thing he cannot regulate and thats my soul, my patriotism and my total and unsuppressed anger to what he's doing to our country.

*****
As much damage to this Nation that this current POSPOTUS, his administration, his executive orders and strangulation regulation by the alphabet agencies have caused, I believe that history will reflect that the Fed's actions have done significantly more to bring about America's demise. Greenspan was no angel, but Bernanke is pure evil.

*****

We should regulate that no more commie, muslim-centric pr!cks be allowed to run for POTUS.

*****

Obummer has fizzled out in every aspect of being a leader…I guess you could say he just sucks and he's a piece of sh!t.

*****

Obama and the government under his control is the enemy of any one who believes in self determination, individual freedom and liberty and OUR Constitution.
I personally am armed against these Nazi/Marxist Thugs. I have no delusions that they can kill me at their will and do so all the time world wide but, armed I am as that is the primary reason for the second amendment and they represent everything that I have resisted and fought against since my early awakening to Tyranny and Slavery in mid 1943.

*****
ALSO CALLED A DICTATORSHIP…BUT THIS FALSE MESSIAH OF THE NATION OF ISLAM DOES NOT ONLY WANT TO RULE AMERICA…HE HAS ALWAYS WANTED TO 'RULE THE WORLD'!
*****
Remember how he went to Europe during his phony campaign in 2008 to campaign! You should have seen the handwriting on the wall then America…but you did not!

You have warnings and signs of others Bilderbergs waiting in the wings…will you listen now?

*****
OBAMA IS JUST ONE OF THEIR PUPPETS THERE ARE MORE…LIKE BILDERBERG PERRY ON THE RIGHT…AND/OR ‘STAND BY HER MAN’ CLINTON…ON THE LEFT!
*****

To be fair, that's 12 responses picked out of 42. Some of them were more moderate, some of them were protesting against the premise of the article.

"Soldier Of Fortune" - The Delightful World Of Mercenaries And Hit Men

Click the link for Soldier Boy - NRA Board Member Robert Brown Is Still Making A Killing
, by David Holthouse at Media Matters.

Robert Brown established Soldier of Fortune magazine in 1975 (one notable subscriber - Timothy McVeigh). . The magazine has been instrumental in recruiting and employing mercenaries and hitmen all over the world. An interesting view of murder for hire.

Throughout the 1980s, a second poster hanging in the Soldier of Fortune offices (incongruously located in Boulder, Colorado, a liberal college town) depicted a vulture with the slogan, "Killing is our business, and business is good."

That certainly held true for hit men who advertised in Soldier of Fortune. One of them, Knoxville, Tennessee nightclub operator and former prison guard Richard Michael Savage, said that he received 30 to 40 calls a week after he placed this ad in the June 1985 issue of the magazine: "GUN FOR HIRE: 37-year-old professional mercenary desires jobs. Vietnam veteran. Discrete and very private. Body guard, courier, and other special skills. All jobs considered."

One called wanting to recruit a small army to raid a gold mine in Alaska, one of Savage's hitman associates told People magazine in 1986; another floated a plot to steal an army payroll in South America.

Based on its interview with the Savage associate, People magazine reported in 1986:

Yet another wanted to raid Nicaragua and promised to supply guns, camouflage clothing, rubber boats and $50,000 for each mercenary when the raid was completed. Savage...was enthusiastic about every harebrained scheme he heard, but ultimately was persuaded to concentrate on murder. So, if the caller sounded discreet, Savage would ask for a round-trip airline ticket and $1,000; the two would meet face-to-face, then feel each other out in a minuet of death, until each was certain of the other's credentials.

Two of the respondents Savage contacted were business associates of suburban Atlanta resident Richard Braun. Not long after the ad was published, Savage and two associates ambushed Braun and his 16-year-old son in the driveway of their home. Triggerman Sean Trevor Doutre stepped in front of the car and fired a MAC 11 assault pistol. Braun was shot and killed; his son was wounded.

Four months later, Savage subcontracted the murder of Palm Beach, Florida resident Anita Spearman, who was clubbed to death by Doutre while she slept. The victim's husband contracted her murder for $20,000 after reading Savage's ad in Soldier of Fortune.

Another hit man, Texas long haul trucker John Hearn, said "If I had never run an ad in Soldier of Fortune I would have never killed anyone." Hearn's 1984 ad, which ran in four issues of the magazine, solicited "High risk assignments, U.S. or overseas." After it was published, Hearn said, he was so deluged with phone calls that he was forced to hire an answering service. He estimated that 90 percent of the callers wanted to pay him to commit a crime, including bombings, jailbreaks, and assaults, and that he received three-to-five contract murder offers per day.

In February 1985 Hearn shot to death Sandra Black in a hit arranged by her husband for $10,000. Later that year he committed a double murder in Florida after being hired by another Soldier of Fortune reader.

Brown stopping running gun-for-hire ads in 1986 after the Savage killings came to light, though he and his staff denied any responsibility for the murders. "We're as culpable as any newspaper which accepts an ad from a used-car salesman and doesn't go out to check the condition of his brakes," said Executive Editor Bill Guthrie.

Boehner Is A Socialist! (Says A Tea Partier Running Against Him.)

This from a tea partier who is mounting a primary challenge to Boehner. He wants to abolish all social programs -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps. Maybe the right is a tad out of control?

The Alternative Vote vs. First Past The Post

Late-Night Political Comics

Late-Night Political Jokes at about.com.

Letterman, Leno, Stewart,Colbert, Kimmel, Ferguson.

Tax Cuts: Obama v. Bush

The following is a post on Daily Kos by brooklynbadboy entitled Obama Bigger Tax Cutter Than Bush. And yet it's a common Republican claim that Obama has raised taxes.

The Center for American Progress crunched the numbers and discovered:

With the huge Recovery Act tax cuts and the enormous December 2010 tax cuts combined, President Obama has already signed into law tax cuts amounting to more than $900 billion from 2009 through 2012. Even after accounting for legislation that the president signed that increased revenue during that period, President Obama has cut taxes by more than $850 billion in his first term, or approximately 1.5 percent of GDP.

That is compared to the $474 billion in tax cuts enacted by George W. Bush in his first term. If the latest tax cuts included in President Obama's American Jobs Act are passed, he will be the biggest tax cutter of the modern era. Bigger than Reagan. Bigger than Bush. That's saying something!

Yet, despite this fact, we've seen poll after poll indicate that people still believe President Obama has raised their taxes.

Two things:
1. The idea that tax cuts bring economic growth should be thoroughly debunked by now. But it isn't.
2. It has to be political injustice of the worst order to be the biggest tax cutter ever and not get any credit.

A Fascinating Study Of "The Political Brain"

On 24 January 2006, Emory University released the findings of a study of the 2004 presidential campaign entitled Emory Study Lights Up The Political Brain.

"When it comes to forming opinions and making judgments on hot political issues, partisans of both parties don't let facts get in the way of their decision-making, according to a new Emory University study. The research sheds light on why staunch Democrats and Republicans can hear the same information, but walk away with opposite conclusions."

As Eliot Daley said in a HuffPo article entitled American Voters Are Killing The American Dream:

"What made the researchers' work so stunning was how they electronically monitored the subjects' brains during their evaluating the two sets of statements: it revealed that the areas of the brain that process rational thought were flat-lined, dead as a doornail, while the emotional regions were sparkling like Fourth of July fireworks."

Fahrenheit 9/11 - The Full Movie

The full movie was uploaded to YouTube with Michael Moore's approval.

John Birch Society

This is a link to an article on HuffPo by Andrew Reinbach entitled The John Birch Society's Reality.

It's pretty scary stuff. Barry Goldwater considered the JBS too extreme; William F. Buckley Jr., a conservative icon, effectively pushed them to the political sidelines with an article in The National Review pronouncing them beyond the pale.

JBS founder Robert W. Welch Jr. published an essay in 1996 entitled The Truth in Time, which enunciated the society's principles, and it's a frightening mishmash of far-right paranoia that is becoming increasingly mainstream conservative thought today.

The article linked above contains a 110-minute video of Welch presenting his ideas (I don't think that's going to get too many viewers). But he also presents a short summary of The Truth in Time that is instructive.

"The one great job left for the Communists is the subjugation of the people of the United States," wrote Welch. "So their exhaustive strategy for achieving their final goal includes the following methods.

(a) The deliberate and insidious breaking down of all morality and of every sound sense of values;

(b) the distortion and destruction of religious influences, especially on the lives of the young;

(c) the constant indoctrination of young and old alike, through our educational system, and through our communications and entertainment media, in a preference for "welfare" and "security" against responsibility and opportunity;

(d) making an ever larger and larger percentage of American industry, commerce, agriculture, education, and individuals accustomed to receiving, and dependent on, government checks;

(e) a constant increase in legislation, taxation, and bureaucracy, leading directly towards one hundred percent government;

(f) the gradual conversion by judicial fiat of our republic into a democracy, as the one best legalistic road to a mobocratic dictatorship;

(g) the creation of riots and the semblance of revolution under the guise and excuse of promoting "civil rights";

(h) developing this "Negro Revolutionary Movement," as the Communists describe it, into a broader "proletarian revolution" of the "have-nots" against the "haves";

(i) destroying the power of local police forces to preserve law and order;

(j) carrying on and steadily "escalating" a completely phony foreign war in Vietnam (because the Communists are actually running both sides of it), as an excuse for gradually establishing more and tighter government controls over every detail of our dally lives;

(k) under carefully contrived conditions of famine and the threat of starvation, using ration cards as leverage to bribe and coerce the heads of families to submit to a Communist regime....

(1), eventually bringing about "peace" -- a few years from now -- by surrendering all remaining American sovereignty to the United Nations, and enabling that Communist one-world government to "police" our country with foreign troops and mercilessly suppress all opposition, with exactly the same cruelties and terror that have already been used in dozens of other countries.

The summary is a wild rant that explains a lot of present-day wingnuttery, culminating with this little gem:

"Most important of all of these gigantic reversals of the truth, in the realm of strategy, has been the cruel pretense, all over the world and to the American people, that the United States was the one great enemy of Communism. The fact has been exactly the opposite. Since early in 1945 the most powerful single force in promoting Communism everywhere, and in turning one nation after another over to Communist tyranny... has been the help of the United States Government to that end."

As Reinbach says, "Bet you didn't know that."

Bush Statue

He Needed 7 More Minutes To Finish "My Pet Goat:

Bill Maher on Morning Joe in 2007 discussing Bush's infamous "7 minutes."

Huey Long Must Die - How Could Today's Republicans And Plutocrats Think Otherwise?

Huey Long Died 76 Years Ago, by Darrel Plant at darrelplant.com, shows how Huey Long was a true populist. Here's what he proposed in 1933 as "The Long Plan," in chapter 37 of  Every Man a King: The Autobiography of Huey P. Long by Huey P. Long:

1. A capital levy tax on the property owned by any one person of 1% of all over $1,000,000 [dp: $15,716,000 in 2010 dollars]; 2% of all over $2,000,000 [$31,433,000] etc., until, when it reaches fortunes of over $100,000,000 [$1,571,600,000], the government takes all above that figure; which means a limit on the size of any one man's forture to something like $50,000,000 [$785,820,000]—the balance to go to the government to spread out in its work among all the people.

2. An inheritance tax which does not allow one man to make more than $5,000,000 [$78,582,000] in a lifetime without working for it, all over that amount to go to the government to be spread among the people for its work.

3. An income tax which does not allow any one man to make more than $1,000,000 [$15,716,000] in one year, exclusive of taxes, the balance to go to the United States for general work among the people.

I'm curious to know how much revenue Long's plan would raise if applied today.

Herman Cain's Campaign Video - And There's 14 Months To Go

(Though Cain won't stay in the race for that long -- and yes, that's the great man himself singing.)

Should Poor People Be Allowed To Vote? Right-Wingers Say No.

video: Thom Hartmann v. Matthew Vadum: Is Registering The Poor To Vote UnAmerican?

Vadun says:

"It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote,"

Boot - Or Bust! (Lenovo Commercial)

Hit the "Replay" button in the upper left, if necessary, or just the "Play" arrow in the center otherwise.

Neocons' PNAC - Project for a New American City - Foiled By Bin Laden

At Common Dreams, Jim Lobe has an article entitled "9/11: Al Qaeda's Project for Ending the American Century Succeeded"

Led within the administration by Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and their mostly neo-conservative aides and supporters, the hawks had four years before joined the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The letter-head organization was co- founded by neo-conservative ideologues William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who, in an important 1996 article, called for the U.S. to preserve its post-Cold War "hegemony as far into the future as possible."

Excerpts:

So, instead of focusing on capturing bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and providing the kind of security and material assistance needed to pacify and begin rebuilding Afghanistan, Bush turned his attention -- and diverted U.S. military and intelligence resources -- to preparing for war against Iraq.

That decision is now seen universally -- with the exception of Cheney and his die-hard PNAC supporters -- as perhaps the single most disastrous foreign policy decision by a U.S. president in the past decade, if not the past century.

Part of a 2004 recording from Bin Laden:

"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," he said in a 2004 video-tape describing what he called a "war of attrition."

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," he added. "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'Al Qaeda', in order to make generals race there and to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," he went on.

And while the U.S. military remains by far the strongest in the world, its veil of invincibility has been irreparably pierced by the success with which rag-tag groups of guerrillas have defied and frustrated it. The result, according to conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has been "a steady erosion of America's position in the world," which Obama has so far been unable to reverse.

I've long maintained that on that night of "shock and awe" in Baghdad in 2003, the happiest man on the planet was Osama bin Laden.

Right-Wing Wisdom From The Washington Times

(Don't Mistake the Washington Times for the Washington Post.) Here's an article in the former by Jeffrey T. Kuhner entitled "Obama and the lunatic left: President and his followers intend to end America’s greatness."

Selected quotes:

President Obama is politically insane. This is the real meaning of his speech Thursday night in front of a joint session of Congress. Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. By that definition, Mr. Obama is a lunatic leftist.

Contrary to popular myth, liberalism is not politics committed to science or rational thought. It is a substitute religion - a secular philosophy similar to Marxism that seeks to replace Christianity and provide believers with existential meaning. Hence, it must be defended at all costs, even in the face of irrefutable evidence or logic. Mr. Obama is not an anomaly among progressives. They share his stubbornness. Reassessment is not possible. If Mr. Obama truly were to tack to the center, it would represent a fatal admission of error. The liberal faith would collapse.

"... liberals are now left with only two options: lie about Mr. Obama’s record or engage in dangerous demagoguery. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is more of a cheap propagandist than a serious party spokesperson."

"Mrs. Wasserman Schultz is the equivalent of a Stalinist-era hack jabbering about the Soviet economic miracle. No one believes her -- not even her staunchest supporters."

"Mr. Obama is a man of the hard left. He deeply loathes everything America stands for -- capitalism, limited government, individual freedom and Christian civilization. In particular, he despises our exceptionalism. His stated goal is to create a “post-American world” where the United States is simply one of many countries - no bigger, better or stronger. He exhibits a form of madness, a self-loathing, reminiscent of the late pop singer Amy Winehouse. Mr. Obama keeps injecting the heroin of class warfare and socialism into our national bloodstream. And he can continue to play on the biggest stage and boast a huge audience. In the end, however, it leads to the same result: insanity and death."

Okay, Jeffrey. Thanks for your helpful contribution.

Demonization of your opponent makes cooperation impossible. If Jeffrey's characterization of Obama is correct, how can Republicans possibly come to any compromise with someone who is deranged and anti-American? Of course, they can't. And I think that's a big part of Republican obstructionism. The people who watch Fox News, or who listen to Rush Limbaugh, or Michael Savage, or Glenn Beck, are bombarded 24/7 with this hatred.

If you listen to only one side and come to believe this inflammatory stuff, it's easy to see how you can become radicalized and pressure your elected representatives to resist anything your anti-Christ opponent proposes. (Yes, you can find lefties who commit the same offense, and that's wrong too; but the difference in degree is several orders of magnitude.)

Democrats v. Bush - Just As Bad as Republicans v. Obama?

"The GOP’s One-Sided War on Dems" is a very interesting article in The Daily Beast by Michael Tomasky. He chose four big pieces of litigation initiated by George W. Bush and by Obama and examined Democratic and Republican support for them in the House and Senate. The bills he chose were:

Bush:

• The first big tax cut
• No Child Left Behind
• The invasion of Iraq
• Medicare prescription-drug bill

Obama:

• The stimulus
• The health-care vote
• The Dodd-Frank financial reform
• The “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal.

Perhaps Democratic opposition to Bush's bills was just as strong as Republican opposition to Obama's? Nope; not even close. Tomasky goes into detail on each point, but he summarizes the results as follows:

Here’s how it all adds up:

• Average Democratic Senate support for Bush: 45.5%
• Average Democratic House support for Bush: 36.8%
• Average combined Democratic support for Bush: 41.1%
• Average Republican Senate support for Obama: 8.8%
• Average Republican House support for Obama: 2.7%
• Average combined Republican support for Obama: 5.75%.

Tomasky says:

What does this history tell us? It tells us plainly that one side is usually against the other guy, but within bounds that are to be expected, while the other side is blind with rage against the other guy.

Golden Eye Skdiving Motorcycle-To-Plane Transfer

Movie footage - Goldeneye:




Commentary by Goldeneye parachute stunt coordinator B.J. Worth:

Republican Agenda: A 28-Year Republican Staffer Speaks Out

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult.

Saturday 3 September 2011
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout

Here are what Lofgren describes as the three guiding principles of the Republican party:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. Self-explanatory.
2. They worship at the altar of Mars. Perpetual war.
3. Give me that old-time religion. The influence of the religious right.

Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"

Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten -- how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests -- no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachmann (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel -- how prudent is that? -- in order to strong-arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might -- the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

There's a lot more; it's a long article. Click on the link at the top.

Change To Win

Robert Reich Rebuffed

Robert Reich's latest piece on HuffPo, The Zero Economy, presents the Keynesian argument for stimulus spending. The comments are about 90% hostile.

Is The Sky Falling? Two Views

If you need a fix of doom and gloom, here's where to go: an August 25 CounterPunch article by Mike Whitney, The Dumbest Rally Of All Time. Everything's bad, Obama is doing exactly the wrong things, the eurozone is toast.

The recovery was stimulus. Absent the stimulus, there is no recovery. Credit is not expanding, households are still deleveraging, business investment is way off, and aggregate demand is weak. In other words, the economy is dead-in-the-water. Without sustained government spending to shore up the flagging economy, recession is inevitable. But policymakers—led by Obama–refuse to budge. They remain fully committed to their bad ideas.

The real problem is political, and it is profound. Unless we can unseat the class that sees the world only through its portfolios, they may well take us all the way down. Unfortunately, no one seems to have a clue how such a revolution can be engineered in a modern, complex, transnational economy. (“It’s the Political Economy, Stupid!”, Peter Dorman, Econospeak) 

If you'd prefer a forecast that's a little less bleak (based on the premise that economic forecasters might as well consult tea leaves or chicken bones, and that things are so bad already they can't get much worse), there's Why The Double-Dippers Are Wrong, by Dean Baker, also at CounterPunch. But it isn't rosy:

However, the fact that a double-dip is not likely does not mean that we have good economic news on the horizon. All the signs point to several years of weak growth. At best the economy is growing at the 2.5 percent rate needed to keep pace with the growth of the labor force, and it may be growing more slowly. This would mean that the unemployment rate will rise from its current 9.1 percent rate.

This is in fact a truly awful picture. After severe downturns in the 70s and 80s the economy came roaring back, growing at 7-8 percent annual rates in peak quarters. This is the sort of growth that is necessary to quickly bring the unemployment rate down to more tolerable levels. 

Pentagon To Undergo An Audit -- In 2017? Maybe?

Click here for an article entitled Calls Grow for Pentagon Audit at Defense Industry Daily: Military Purchasing News For Defense Procurement Managers And Contractors.

It’s not that the US Department of Defense fails audits. The problem is more fundamental: it is not currently possible to audit it, and any comprehensive audit would be a first-ever event in modern times.

Thieves of the Pentagon, by Saul Landau at CounterPunch, details an astonishing amount of waste and fraud by the American military establishment. Edited for brevity, emphasis added:

The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) ... concluded that 8 and 1/2 years of US fighting and occupation of Iraq has achieved neither success nor sustainability. Indeed, “Iraq remains an extraordinarily dangerous place,” concluded the Job-inspired Inspector. (Michael Shank, Guardian, August 6, 2011)

SIGIR also reports that financial abuses have abounded ... the once fiscally frugal Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned that defense cuts would weaken the country. Leave us open to an attack from Mars?

One SIGIR example sites Anham, a company that charges the government $4,500 for a $183 circuit breaker (at an appliance store) and $900 for a $7 control switch. (Shank) We can relate to these figures as opposed to billions of dollars spent on R & D for new weapons systems, super stealth jets and ever more lethal bombers. (How else to defend against 19 Saudi suicidal maniacs with box cutters?)

The shenanigans began long before those wars. A March 2000 Inspector General report concluded that the Pentagon could not trace nearly one third of the accounting entries in its $7.6 billion budget. Not traceable, the Pentagon reported.

In 2005, Congress “fixed” the problem by excusing the Defense Department from spending money on an audit -— until the Defense Secretary submitted a plan to improve financial management. Congress gave the Pentagon until 2017 to finish its audit, but in 2010, “Pentagon officials stated that meeting the 2017 timeline may not be realistic and the agency may need more money from Congress to achieve full auditability.”

In July, the House included [Congressman, D-OR) DeFazio’s “audit the Pentagon” amendment in the Defense appropriation bill. “The Pentagon has spent more than $10 trillion since 1990 and will spend over $4 trillion over the next four years without ever passing an audit,” said DeFazio. “There is no reason that the largest and most expensive agency in the federal government should hide its financial books from scrutiny.”

On August 31, AP ran the following: “As much as $60 billion in U.S. funds has been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade through lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and corruption, an independent panel investigating U.S. wartime spending estimates.”

Job Creation With A Republican House

Jed Lewison at Daily Kos has an article entitled Mission accomplished: Tea party Republicans took the economy hostage and killed job growth.

It has an interesting graph -- that I can't seem to import. Click on the article name above.

He also has a good followup article entitled Suddenly, Republicans stop taking credit for jobs reports.

The Republicans took over the House in January. Although they didn't introduce a single jobs-related bill, job numbers grew substantially in February, March, and April, and the Republicans were eager to take the credit for that -- a surge of confidence now that the GOP were in charge! (He cites an April 14 tweet from Eric Cantor: Over 478,000 Jobs Created Since January.) Then in April, Cantor and his crew threatened government shutdown unless there were major spending cuts -- and the number of new jobs fell off the cliff.

Job creation was abysmal in May, June, and July -- and then zeroed out in August -- as the debt-ceiling hostage crisis played out. Suddenly they're silent about responsibility for the jobs situation.

Cut taxes (on corporations and the rich), cut spending (on social programs and infrastructure), and cut regulations (on pollution and worker safety), and the free market will be unleashed to work its wonders! Yeah, that's the ticket!

Don't Sugar-Coat It, Roger

As reported by Ryan J. Reilly at TalkingPointsMemo, Roger Vadum, in an article in The American Thinker entitled Columnist: Registering Poor To Vote 'Like Handing Out Burglary Tools To Criminals', says:

"It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote" ...

"Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers."

As the TPM article point out, conservative efforts to suppress the ability to vote of the poor, blacks, immigrants, and students -- voting blocs which skew heavily Democratic -- are usually presented as aimed at preventing voter fraud (even though proven incidents of voter fraud are virtually nonexistent in the U.S. in any place, at any time). But Vadum doesn't pussyfoot around the reason: Poor people shouldn't have the vote.

As Alex Pareene says at Salon.com:

Two days after Rolling Stone posted Ari Berman's very good piece on how the GOP campaign against ACORN and "voter fraud" is actually just part of a coordinated effort to stop minorities and poor people from voting at all, right-wing "investigative journalist" Matthew Vadum has now explicitly endorsed disenfranchising poor people for the sole reason that they're poor and will vote for people who will do things to alleviate their poverty. It is positively Swiftian, if Jonathan Swift had been an actual cannibal.

Pareene also says:

When you write that you actually just oppose letting poor people vote, you're giving the game away. You're never supposed to openly state the goals of the conservative movement, because no one but a small cadre of sociopaths actually supports them. (This is why Frank Luntz was invented.)

Mathew Vadum is so incredibly dumb that he probably should not be allowed to vote.

Here's a link to that article, Right-wing hack says helping poor people vote is criminal.

And here's a link to another Vadum article, Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American.

The Gospel According To Glenn

LET US NOW PRAY: That these religious fanatics never get in control of the U.S. government.

If you can stand it, here's Glenn:



You've gotta hand it to the guy. He may be a charlatan, but he's a showman.

Bill Maher And The Death Of "Politically Incorrect"

I was overseas and never received ABC when Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher was in production, so I never saw the show. But I was aware that the program was cancelled and Maher was attacked and reviled after 9/11 over comments that he made. Here's a link to an article entitled Politically Incorrect: A Eulogy at thebigstory.org that explains Maher's downfall.

In the weeks after September 11, critics wondered how late-night talk shows would change. Predictably, Leno and Letterman told fewer and safer jokes, mostly at the expense of easy targets like the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart was so shaken he cried. [Note: Stewart's Manhattan apartment, where he lived with his wife and children, was blocks from the World Trade Center.] But Politically Incorrect, true to form, crashed the somber late-night party. Appearing on Sept. 17 for the first show since the attacks, Maher made it starkly clear his show would live up to its name.

"I do not relinquish - nor should any of you - the right to criticize, even as we support, our government," Maher said. "This is still a democracy and they're still politicians, so we need to let our government know that we can't afford a lot of things that we used to be able to afford. Like a missile shield that will never work for an enemy that doesn't exist. We can't afford to be fighting wrong and silly wars. The cold war. The drug war. The culture war."

What he said later in the show was what caused all the fuss:

Panelist Dinesh D'Souza [God, I'd never heard of this guy before his ridiculous book, The Roots Of Obama's Rage, was published in 2010; turns out he's a longtime influential member of the religious right] mentioned that he didn't think the terrorists were "cowards," as George Bush had described them. Maher replied: "We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly. You're right."

This was in the week following 9/11, and as the linked article says, Maher's was the one and only dissenting voice in the talkshow world at the time that expressed anything negative about the U.S. government, when opinion polls swung to 96% for George W. Bush.

Debt Graph

Link to deficit graph.

Best Movie Car Chases! Ronin, To Live And Die In L.A., Bullitt

All three of these are magnificent -- car chases at their finest. They'll never do another one, because computer-enhanced stuff has taken over. They will never again risk the lives of stunt men, let alone stars, in an orchestrated car chase. When you watch these, bear in mind that these are real people driving these cars (Steve McQueen did a lot of his own driving in the Bullitt clip.) The Ronin clip jumps straight into the action, but the other two seem kind of slow-moving and unexceptional at first. Keep watching!

#1: Ronin. This is a marvellous clip -- the best car chase ever. You can't help but think of Princess Diana's death during the amazing high-speed Paris tunnel scenes. Imagine this mix including a drunken Henri Paul piloting a heavy Mercedes sedan at 130 mph! Unfortunately, it's recorded at a low volume level -- roaring motors and screaming tires are muted. Use the volume control on the screen to jack it up, but it's still not high enough. Headphones help. And let's hope that wonderful beautiful double-clutching cop-ramming wrong-way-driving blonde lady lives!

This scene from John Frankenheimer's post-Cold War action thriller "Ronin" has everything you want in a chase: wild action, precision driving, filmmaking chops and an overpowering sense of physical reality. Frankenheimer was adamant about that last part: A classic-car buff and race car driver throughout most of his life, he said he directed "Ronin" mainly to have an excuse to shoot a bunch of thrillingly ridiculous but physically believable car chases with a bit of plot sandwiched in between. (The script -- written by J.D. Zeik and rewritten by an uncredited David Mamet -- is much better than it needed to be.) Although the cuts are super-fast, you always get a clear sense of action and reaction: Just before Natascha McElhone's Deirdre makes an evasive skid, for instance, you see a quick close-up of her shifting into neutral and yanking up the parking brake. Throughout this sequence, you get the sense that Frankenheimer is consciously trying to invoke and outdo classic chase scenes from earlier movies (particularly "Bullitt," "The French Connection" and "To Live and Die in L.A."). Amazingly, he pulls it off. This might be the last classically directed analog chase scene in big-budget Hollywood movies. Frankenheimer amped up the sense of fear by towing the actors at speeds matching that of the drivers in their stunt cars. In a couple of shots, you can see the fear in the stars' eyes, and there's one closeup where you can practically hear Robert De Niro thinking, "What the f--- did I get myself into?"

#2: To Live And Die In L.A.

"There's a minor tie-up on the North Long Beach, right near Henry Ford ..."

"WHAT'RE WE GONNA DO?" (John Pankow, anguish pumped up to the max.)

"We're going to an auto parts store, get a new window." (Petersen is the coolest guy who ever lived.)

I love this one because it's one of William Petersen's early movies -- and I think William Petersen was terribly underrated until CSI -- and because of the Wang Chung soundtrack. It starts with two rogue cops who think they've gotten away with something -- well, the Petersen character thought so; the John Pankow character is unconvinced -- and then all of a sudden they're being pursued and everyone on the sidelines is shooting at them. I particularly like the semi that jack-knifes on a crowded freeway.

The cuts that seem not to make any sense are from Petersen's character bungie-jumping off an L.A. bridge at the start of the movie.

Director William Friedkin's enthusiastically scuzzy 1985 thriller builds toward the most nerve-racking car chase in movies. FBI agents Chance (William L. Petersen) and Vukovich (John Pankow) are fleeing the disastrous shakedown of a stolen-jewelry dealer who turned out to be an FBI agent and eventually shake their pursuers by deliberately driving the wrong way on the Terminal Island Freeway near Wilmington, Calif. This is one of the great analog-era chase scenes. The fact that all the cars, people and locations are real adds immeasurably to the sense of imminent harm. Friedkin supposedly got the idea for a chase sequence going the wrong way on a freeway back in 1963, when he was returning home from a wedding in Chicago, fell asleep at the wheel, and awoke to find himself driving against traffic. He put this sequence in "L.A." partly because he'd spent the previous 14 years wondering if it was possible to top the chase he directed in "The French Connection." Mission accomplished.

#3: Bullitt: One of the best sequences ever shot. It opens with a shot of a lethal-looking black Dodge Charger. I love the double-take the bad guy does when he sees McQueen's Mustang pop up in his rear-view mirror. We already know the trench-coat guy in the passenger seat to be a hitman, and when the driver fastens his seatbelt, hang on!

That's Alcatraz in the Bay in one of the scenes, but who's watching the scenery?

I have some minor quibbles about reality. McQueen's Mustang would have been more nimble in the city, but on the highway, I think the Charger would have blown him away.

The car chase that started the 1970s car-chase craze, the high point of "Bullitt" still thrills -- a long, meticulously choreographed chase that pays close attention traffic patterns and the mentality of drivers. If you've never seen it before, you may be struck by the fact that the whole thing isn't relentlessly fast; there's a lot of cat-and-mouse action, with pursuers and pursued stalking through San Francisco's hilly streets like wild animals in the jungle, figuring out their next move.

Here's a comment on howstuffworks:

For three and a half minutes, Bullitt's Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang GT 390 fastback tags behind the big Dodge. While paused at a light the Charger's driver fastens his lap belt with sober deliberateness. The light flips, the driver stands on the Dodge's accelerator, and two celebrated American muscle cars show what they're made of. The chase -- seven glorious minutes' worth -- is on.

Two identical Mustangs and two matching Chargers were used in the Bullitt chase sequence. So that the four-speed Mustang could run more easily with the brawnier four-speed 440 Magnum Charger, Hollywood engineer Max Balchowsky installed a racing cam on both Fords, milled the heads, and modified the ignition and carburetion systems. Additionally, Balchowsky bulked up the suspensions of all four cars for improved strength, handling, and control. One Mustang and one Charger were fitted with a full roll cage.

The chase was shot at normal film speed; there would be no cranked-up footage to jazz audiences. The byword was reality.

Steve McQueen played San Francisco police Lt. Frank Bullitt, a man on a mission to take down the hit men who killed a government witness.

Bullitt captures legendary star McQueen at the apex of his popularity and puts him in a milieu he loved in his private life: auto racing. He owned many fast cars and had particular fondness for his barely streetable XKSS Jaguar, which he liked to pilot at breakneck speeds along Sunset and serpentine Mulholland Drive high above Los Angeles. He participated in Sports Car Club of America events, and was an enthusiastic motorcyclist, as well.

McQueen insisted on driving the Mustang during the carefully choreographed pursuit, but when he failed to make a turn after locking up his wheels he sealed the deal for pro driver Bud Ekins, who handled the Mustang during the jouncy maneuvers along San Francisco's famously hilly streets. Stunt driver/actor Bill Hickman piloted the Charger.

Veteran stunt coordinator Carey Loftin designed the chase, plotting a course along a variety of city avenues and landmarks: Clay & Taylor streets, York Street, Potrero Hill, Kansas Street, Russian Hill, and the bucolic Guadalupe Canyon Parkway. Longtime SF residents will see that the chase is not linear, i.e., the cars jump freely around town from cut to cut. Well, chalk that up to artistic license.

The sounds emitted by the Mustang suggest a lot of double-clutching -- something that would not have been needed with a '68 Ford transmission. McQueen confirmed that the sweet racket of the car's engine and transmission were overdubbed recordings of a Ford GT40 driven at full tilt.

The highest compliment one can offer to Loftin and director Peter Yates is that the chase is completely believable. No "superhero" stunts, no impossible tricks -- just adrenaline-pumping speed, heightened by razor sharp cinematography (William Fraker) and Oscar-winning editing (Frank Keller), plus multiple points of view: drivers' eye, worm's eye, bird's eye, over the shoulder, close on McQueen and Hickman, and setups that suck us along inches behind the cars' back bumpers. Pat Houstis drove the camera car, which was built atop a Corvette chassis.

Dramatically, the chase works for a multitude of reasons, not least the human silence: neither Bullitt nor the hit men speak, not one syllable -- not when Bullitt's Mustang is momentarily blocked by oncoming traffic, not when the Charger nearly annihilates itself on a guardrail, not when assassin #2 (Paul Genge) loads his Winchester pump and pokes the barrel from the Charger's rear side window -- not even when Bullitt's windshield absorbs a blast of buckshot.

Instead, the soundtrack vibrates with the Charger's thrumming baritone and the hornet-like growl of the Mustang; the squeal of abused rubber; the deep, thudding thumps as the cars repeatedly bottom out on the city's hills; and the harsh reports of the Winchester. The mute concentration of the participants seems to underscore the chilly professionalism of Bullitt and the men he hunts. Deadly pursuit and flight, like rail-splitting or high-iron work, are masculine occupations best performed in silence.

The sequence did wonders for the Mustang mythos, of course, and didn't do Charger any harm, either. Ford offered a limited edition anniversary "Bullitt" Mustang for model-year 2001.

The chase altered the tone of cop films and upped the ante for writers and directors who felt obliged to attempt to surpass it. Some gems came later, notably in The French Connection and The Seven-Ups (both by Bill Hickman). Although the Bullitt chase is no longer the most kinetic in movie history, it almost certainly is still the best.

Obama's Presidency Accurately Foretold In January 2009

Audacity Without Ideology is an article published by E.J. Dionne Jr. in January of 2009, and it provides predictions of Obama's style of governing that are amazingly accurate.

It's excerpted in a piece by Digby at Hullabaloo entitled Hoping We Get Lucky, which seems to be the administration's current economic plan.

She further referenced an article by Brad DeLong entitled Grasping Reality With Both Hands, and includes this excerpt:

Back at the end of 2008, our questions (at least my questions) were: "What if the downturn is bigger than we currently think it will be? What if worries about a jobless recovery and the absence of labor-market mean-reversion turn out to be true? What if--as has happened in the past--this financial crisis turns into sovereign crises and the world economy gets hit by additional shocks? Then your polices will not be bold enough. What is Plan B?" And the answers were all along the lines of:

You are a pessimist. We are already doing unprecedented things to stabilize the economy--and odds are that in a year we will be worrying about inflation and unwinding the stimulus rather than about unemployment.

Obama is genuinely post-partisan, and won't have anything like the trouble Clinton had negotiating with Republicans: our policies will evolve as the situation evolves.

Back in the late summer of 2009, our questions (or at least my questions) were: "You aren't getting any cooperation from Republicans--they appear to have doubled down on the Gingrich-Dole strategy that you win the next election by making the Democratic President a failure. The economy really needs more stimulus. What are you going to do? Isn't it time to use the President's powers more aggressively--to use Fed appointment powers and the Treasury's TARP authority and Reconciliation to do major stimulus?" And the answers were:

We are doing all that we can.

This is really hard.

Things will probably still work out all right.

If worst comes to worst, we will trade long-run budget balance via a spending cut-heavy package of long-run spending cuts and tax increases for short-term stimulus to get us out of the short-term unemployment mess.

Hippie punching.

By the late summer of 2010, our questions (or at least my questions) were: "You are in a total war with the Republican Party. They aren't giving you anything. It is time to seriously push the envelope of executive authority to put policies in place that will reduce unemployment." And the answers were:

The best policy is to achieve long-run fiscal discipline so that the confidence fairy will show up.

Hippie punching.

And now it is the late summer of 2011. Our big question still is: how is Obama going to use executive branch authority to reduce unemployment? There are lots of options: adjourn congress and do some recess appointments to get the Federal Reserve more engaged in actually pursuing its dual mandate, quantitative easing via the Treasury Department, shifting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from their do-nothing position by giving them a microeconomic stabilization mission, talking about how a weak dollar is in America's interest.

And this time what I am hearing back is only:

Hippie punching.

It is difficult to read this in any way but as a group of people inside a bunker who (1) have been wrong about the situation, (2) are scared to use the powers they have to try to make things better, and (3) really do not like being reminded that they were wrong about the situation.

That seems to me to mean that the Obama administration right now has one and only one macroeconomic policy idea: hope that the country gets lucky.

Warren Buffett's Op-Ed

On August 14, the New York Times published Buffett's article, Stop Coddling The Super-Rich. Here's an excerpt:

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

I fear Warren's being somewhat disingenuous here, because a lot of his income was dividends from corporations that had already paid taxes on that money. But he still has a strong argument.

The Republican response: Let the coddling continue, or even increase!

Here's a link to an article by Charles Koch in response to Buffett, called Koch Responds To Buffet: ‘My Business And Non-Profit Investments Are Much More Beneficial To Society’

"His charitable foundation, which gives largely to right-wing organizations that support his politics and Koch Industries’ business interests, still only donates about $12 million a year — 0.05 percent of Koch’s net worth."

His non-profit investments include Americans for Prosperity, an important source of Tea Party funds, and other radical right-wing causes.

A New Favorite - Chris Weigant

I love Paul Krugman.

Well, not literally. But if I were a Nobel-winning economist who could write with skill and grace, I would write exactly what Paul Krugman does in his books and in his New York Times articles. We're political soulmates, and he's No. 1, but Robert Reich, Joseph Stiglitz, and recently Jared Bernstein are up there too. I've just added another favorite to the list: Chris Weigant. (Unlike the others, he's not an economist but a psychologist who practiced for 25 years. I'm starting to think that these damned pundits we rely on for our news should have 20-plus years' experience in some field other than talking and getting their hair blow-dried.)

I've been reading, and enjoying, Chris Weigant's articles for quite some time. But I've just come to appreciate his Weekly Talking Points column. This guy is brilliant. (And I love his cat picture: sleepy coiled menace. Don't mess with this pussy.)

I've read his most recent Talking Points article and am getting into some of the back issues. He's great, and he deserves a bookmark.

Obama Staffer Bashes Krugman, "Firebagger Lefty Blogosphere"

Amanda Terkel at HuffPo has an article entitled: Obama Campaign Staffer Sends Out Email Bashing Paul Krugman And The 'Firebagger Lefty Blogosphere'.

Here's a portion:

Paul Krugman is a political rookie. At least he is when compared to President Obama. That's why he unleashed a screed as soon as word came about the debt ceiling compromise between President Obama and Congressional leaders - to, you know, avert an economic 9/11. Joining the ideologue spheres' pure, fanatic, indomitable hysteria, Krugman declares the deal a disaster - both political and economic - of course providing no evidence for the latter, which I find curious for this Nobel winning economist. He rides the coattails of the simplistic argument that spending cuts - any spending cuts - are bad for a fragile economy, ignoring wholeheartedly his own revious cheerleading for cutting, say, defense spending. But that was back in the day - all the way back in April of this year. [...]

No, the loudest screeching noise you hear coming from Krugman and the ideologue Left is, of course, Medicare. Oh, no, the President is agreeing to a Medicare trigger!!! Oh noes!!! Everybody freak out right now! But let's look at the deal again, shall we? [...]

Now let's get to the fun part: the triggers. The more than half-a-trillion in defense and security spending cut "trigger" for the Republicans will hardly earn a mention on the Firebagger Lefty blogosphere. Hell, it's a trigger supposedly for the Republicans, and of course, there's always It'sNotEnough-ism to cover it.

"Firebagger Lefty" is apparently a reference to Jane Hamshere's FireDogLake, a lefty site that frequently takes Obama to task. And yes, it's pretty far out there. But Krugman is my political soulmate, and I wish Obama had surrounded himself with economic advisers like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, and Jared Bernstein, instead of Wall Street lackeys and refugees from Goldman Sachs like Summers, Geithner, and Daley.