A Cold November Rain

"Our national problem isn't that we honorably disagree over two equally respectable philosophies of governance and therefore don't get along because we're all such good citizens that our passionate commitment to the public as we each see it best pursued leads us to be occasionally intemperate. No. Our problem is that there is a group of elite raptors who are seeking to vacuum every ounce of wealth out of the pockets of the other 99 percent of us and scoop it into their own pockets instead, and that they've employed a set of politician stooges who have in the last several decades jettisoned all meaningful behavioral limitations on what they're willing to do to achieve those ends...........It is precisely what we should expect to have happened. It is precisely the product of three decades of Atwater/Gingrich/Rove style politics.

"These people cannot be negotiated with, because they are not interested in public policy-making that is in the national interest. That's not their mission, and only a naive fool or someone who had spent the last thirty years underground excavating the seventh moon of Jupiter would fail to understand that."

David Michael Green, "'I Have a Dream' 2010 Version"

Prof. Green is simply stating the obvious.  It tweaks the mind trying to figure out how part of the nation can be so propagandized and caught up in all of the delusional rhetoric of socialism, communism, the forged birth certificate of a Kenyan-born Muslim President, government takeovers and the rest of the rot being spewed by the morally insane "right."

              -----------------------------------------------------------

Which segways us to my next bit of recommended reading, this one being a new entry from one of my favorite independent writers, Robert Parry, who "broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980's for the Associated Press and Newsweek."  His website is consortiumnews.com.

"America's Decoupling From Reality" is a short, historical bit about the rise of the "neocons" during the Reagan administration.  The neocons are the foreign policy idealists and propagandists who successfully politicized the CIA and who used "fear, exaggeration and outright lying to get the American people behind Reagan's support for brutal military regimes" in Central America.  The success of these programs led to the greater build-up of the radical, right-wing media that we've seen over the last decade in AM talk radio and at Fox network.

"With only a few exceptions, the U.S. news media let itself become silly putty in the hands of the neocons, who had returned to power under Bush-43 with a much broader foreign policy portfolio than Reagan had ever given them. Whereas Reagan confined them mostly to Central America, Bush-43 gave them the strategically vital Middle East.                                    

"Not surprisingly, the neocons reprised their old strategy of perception management, stoking excessive fears of Iraq’s mythical WMD programs and stomping out any counter embers of doubt. For millions of Americans, the WMD lies became truth as they were repeated everywhere, from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times."

                  --------------------------------------------------------

Holy cow!!  Is #18 a man or a bear?  A Manbear?  I had no idea Tea Partiers that got bus'd in to disrupt townhall meetings do the same for NFL games too.  Check that.....thing out.

Carrot-Top as a middle-age maniac?

Sean White's Mom?

Sean White's Dad?

Oh America, why oh why are you so angry all the time?

                    ----------------------------------------------------------

This was copied from the wall of a CA friends' Facebook page this past week:

"I, _________, do solemnly swear or affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. That I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, risking my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor, so help me God." 

I've been seeing a lot of Yahoo article comments lately as well that invoke the Constitution, folks from the Beck and Tea Party flock who swear that "I will fight and die for the Constitution", etc.  Noble and admirable sure, yet never do any of these posters ever reference our two illegal, un-Constitutional and undeclared "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan.  You know, those "wars" that eat up a huge chunk of your federal tax money?  Or the unquestionably, un-Constitutional Patriot Act.  Or the Supreme Court's ridiculously un-Constitutional and corporatist, judicial activism of the last decade.

Why is that and what are you defending the Constitution against then?

            -----------------------------------------------------------

So Larry Summers has resigned as chairman of the President's National Economic Council, or better known as Obama's "economic guru."  That's only twelve years too late and won't be newsworthy until he is posthumously chastized to-the-bone by history for the destructive deregulation of financial derivatives, the mega-trillion dollar hidden market, that he was instrumental in ushering in.  Don't believe for a minute that bad mortgages and Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac's malfeasance resulted in the trillion dollar Wall Street bailouts that continue to this day.  That was a result of unregulated MBSs fraudulantly layered on top of the same securities over and over and packaged as AAA-investments, then insured by trillions in CDOs that had no underlying assets to collateralize.  If it sounds like an unintelligible scam, then it surely is.  Only this one resulted in the largest transfer of tax-payer money to the robber-baron elite ever seen, all created by "a man of Larry's brilliance" and others like him such as Robert Rubin and Phil Gramm.

Not many deserve a short retirement as much as this guy.

             --------------------------------------------------------

Who is calling Obama anti-business? The same Wall Street guys who robbed us of billions (some would argue trillions), continue to do so and are hatching ways to permenantly do so?  Why would anyone continue to listen to those guys?  Because they haven't figured out yet that the corporate-owned media has the same boardmembers and major shareholders as does Wall Street I suppose.  The last sentence just defined "Foxbot" I believe.

The entire manufacturing sector and its' jobs are gone, homes are being foreclosed and money for college education, health care and retirement is drying up.  Amazingly, "conservatives" say that we've had it too good and that things like Social Security and unemployment insurance support laziness.  Meanwhile, we're told by the big-corporate-owned media that corporate fat cats and Wall Street banksters require more tax breaks and subsidies, which would supposedly be beneficial for the country, that old "trickle-down" theory.  The establishment elite on both sides of the political aisle are bent on cutting Social Security while letting the Pentagon keep increasing their budget for foreign occupations.

I am 47-years old and have been paying into Social Security for 31 years.  I've never collected SS or unemployment benefits in my life.  SS had better freakin' be there come my retirement time.  If you buy into the rotten propaganda that the SS program requires cuts rather than better regulation, while at the same time tax breaks for the extreme-wealthy should be extended, I'd like to hear from you and hear your reasoning.

       --------------------------------------------------------

I'll end this rant with some Matt Taibbi, from his blog at Rolling Stone.com.  And thank goodness for Rolling Stone though what does it say about the sad, sad state of American media when you have to wade through magazine covers of a near-naked Lady Gaga or a stoned-out Russell Brand in order to get to the best, "mainstream" political writings?

"There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites."

"The Fox/Rush/Savage crowd in the last 18 months has taken the anti-Muslim fervor that launched a phony war in Iraq, carried George Bush to re-election, and pushed through the Patriot Act, and re-directed that anger at a domestic nonwhite enemy. In doing so they’ve achieved a perfect storm of political cross-purposes: they’ve almost completely succeeded in distracting the public from the real causes of their economic misfortune (i.e. Wall Street corruption), they’ve re-energized a Republican party that was devastated by eight years of Bush-era corruption and incompetence, and, as usual, they’ve made Rupert Murdoch a shitload of money........ It’s just our bad luck that driving frustrated/broke white suburbanites into a race-hatred frenzy happens to be good business for these folks. And all of this is race-baiting-for-cash is borne out of the same short-term, indifferent-to-consequence thinking that we saw from the Wall Street guys in recent years -- who created mountains of deadly leverage capable of destroying the global financial system for the sake of a few one-year bonuses."

"The fact that Fox and co. are doing what they do for these dreary commercial reasons makes it even worse, of course; at least Hitler really hated Jewish people.  But that also means there's a bright side.  To me that indicates that if Fox and Glenn Beck can be induced to jerk off to some perhaps similarly profitable but less toxic hate-fantasy.....it won’t have us steaming toward widespread racial violence like we are now."