I know I haven’t posted in sometime now…..but I wanted to take some time to discuss what’s happening in the Gulf.

The past decade saw an increase in the thought that government, in any form, was a bad idea. Why let the government fix education, lets give it to private contractors (no child left behind). Lets privatize Social Security….the government can’t do it! Lets privatize the war effort, this got to a point that there were more private contractors then soldiers in Iraq. There’s no need to regulate the markets, it’ll correct itself! So on and so on and so on…..

Well, look what this got us? We now have a government that is being put back together, piece by piece because the GOP and all their fuckin idiotic followers, ya Tea Party…that includes you, decided they’d follow a monkey who resided in the White House. Now this monkey, who had already had a shitty track record in Texas…was allowed to trample a lot of safety measures that were put into place to avoid the bullshit we’re now experiencing.

I look back on the 2008 campaign and remember the chants of “drill baby drill”. And how that ditz Palin was screaming daily why we should drill off the coasts…and how safe it was. Now…you look at what states went to the GOP in that election, and guess what, a lot of them are on the Gulf Coast.

For years, we have been telling people who read NT that for a majority of Republicans….they actually vote against their own best interests. Here is just another example!

My message to Republican and those fucking morons who have tea bags hanging off of their hats at these rallys: OPEN UP A BOOK, READ A MAGAZINE, READ INDEPENDENT THINKERS WHO WRITE ON REAL DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN TOPICS, TURN OFF FOX NEWS, ACTUALLY, TURN OFF THE TV. IT’S ALL GARBAGE! TURN OFF THE CONSERVATIVE RADIO. THEY MAKE MAD $$$$ OFF OF YOUR STUPIDITY! WAKE UP AND REALIZE THAT YOU ARE BEING SCREWED!

If you’re one of those folks who says: I don’t know where to start! Well, I know we don’t post as much as we should, but go through our archives. Read about what happened over the last 6 years. Learn how the GOP and the Dems divided this country and then conquered us…which allowed them to put through legislation that was only good for the rich and elite…and fucked over the rest of us. As one of our founders of this country said:

This Nation was founded on the hope that the people would always question the government

–Thomas Jefferson

side note: Anyone surprised? Mr. gay-hater himself, Roy Ashburn, was caught leaving a gay nightclub….I’m sure he was there for research purposes only! These piece-of-shit Republicans, who usually use the cover of religion to make their “Traditional Family Values” pleas when it’s clear they are just plain old bigots……are the people who, b/c they grew up in a strict religious household……usually have to bury the fact that what they are is exactly what their religious leaders are saying they’re going to hell for.

TalkingPointsMemo has a good slide show of these ” I hate gay people” politicians/religious leaders who are gay themselves, or who are just plain hypocrites.…..must be hard to fall asleep at night knowing what you are and knowing you going to wake up the following day and bash that same lifestyle.

On another side note…..”SHOCKER”: Vatican gets hit with it’s own gay scandal….paying more then $2000 for each male prostitute.

I’m starting to think that most people who bash on gay people….are probably sick to their stomach b/c they have gay tendencies themselves. Here’s a study that actually proved this to be true:

Matt Taibbi has a new article in the latest Rolling Stone issue that paints the real picture of our current economic situation and where this country is headed. When President Bush came on TV in September of 2008 and insisted that the economy was in a tailspin, and that we needed to bailout the banks…..I saw red flags pop up all over the place. It didn’t help that this guy had lied about virtually everything in his 8 years as head of this country. But something didn’t seem right……Bear Stearns had collapsed back in March of 2008 and the world didn’t come to a halt. Lehman Brothers failed and Earth didn’t stop rotating. So why this need to bailout a few institutions?

Well folks….the answer to that question is another question:
What happens when Wall Street and the Government come together in a “lets fuck over everyone” romance?

Read Taibbi’s article….then head over to your bank and move your money from those greedy, piece of shit financial institutions that don’t care about ethics or this country.

side note: One of my favorite channels has allowed the creator of 24, Joel Surnow, who is a bit of a right-winger, but none-the-less, has created a good show for FOX….they’ve allowed him to write a Kennedy miniseries that has been completely taken apart and called fiction by historians who both like and hate the Kennedy family. If they want to throw this bullshit on FX or FOX…that’s fine, that’s where this crap belongs….but the History Channel? No Way! Sign the petition to keep this crap off one of our most highly regarded education channels.

side note: This was something I was worried about when President Dubya announced that we had to bail out the banks, we had to flood our financial institutions with money or the sky was going to fall. Then Henry Paulson goes to Congress with a one page proposal for $700 million dollars, and then Bloomberg news announced they have uncovered that the Federal Reserve used their emergency powers to loan $2 trillion, yes trillion dollars, to unknown entities…on top of the $700 million they were asking for. What raises red flags in my head is that during the entire Bush years…..they used fear tactics to push their agenda through Congress….the American people…whomever they needed to convince. And here they were, once again…following the same script. We know that the neo-cons want to privatize everything….they want to “shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub”. Now…a few years later, we see that no President is going to be able to push their domestic agenda through…b/c there’s no money available, from the below NYTimes article: “there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors.” Do I know for sure that the bailout was bullshit? Nope…not an economics guy myself….but how can these guys do everything wrong, or right if you’re part of the elite in this country…and then suddenly get something correct……just doesn’t add up.

By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.

The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.

But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded. (more…)

side note: Here we go again….just another lie put into motion by the criminals who ran our government the last time around! Isn’t it unbelievable that they put a lie in motion, and then justify their actions around that lie. Saddam has WMD’s…..we must go into Iraq. They leak that story to the press, and then go on national tv and say “look, even the press knows about it! Didn’t you read the NYTimes today?!?!” Al-Qaeda has ties with Iraq….we must go to Iraq. The story about the aluminum tubes that that discredited journalist wrote about for the NYTimes…..yep, another reason we had to go into Iraq. Or hey…we know that our country has had the torture debate in the past…we even helped prosecute other people based on that policy. But we want to do it now…so lets have a bunch of lawyers come up with some legal mumbo-jumbo and we’ll be able to do it to! Or the Downing Street Memos that were discovered…….or they pay off journalists to promote their agenda, remember that? And now this…..the guy that “proved” that waterboarding worked….well, he wasn’t even there! This piece of shit should be charged with a crime…..for allowing other criminals to cover up their crimes. He’s a traitor in my eyes……nothing like being angry at 9am!

BY JEFF STEIN
Foreign Policy
A study in “enhanced reporting techniques.”

Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

No matter that Kiriakou wearily said he shared the anguish of millions of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, over the CIA’s application of the medieval confession technique.

The point was that it worked. And the pro-torture camp was quick to pick up on Kiriakou’s claim.

“It works, is the bottom line,” conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the day after Kiriakou’s ABC interview. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”

A cascade of similar acclamations followed, muffling — to this day — the later revelation that Zubaydah had in fact been waterboarded at least 83 times. (more…)

side note: WTF? Does anyone else feel like there’s no hope at times? How can I compete with a multi-billion dollar company? I give 50 dollars….they give 50 thousand! Who would you listen to if you were an elected official? We need to get those pieces of shit, Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas off the Supreme court…..they are contributing to downfall of our country. I go back to the 2004 election….and how people said it wasn’t a big deal……

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that corporations may spend as freely as they like to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on business efforts to influence federal campaigns.

By a 5-4 vote, the court overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said companies can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to produce and run their own campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

It leaves in place a prohibition on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions.

Critics of the stricter limits have argued that they amount to an unconstitutional restraint of free speech, and the court majority agreed.

”The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion, joined by his four more conservative colleagues.

Strongly disagreeing, Justice John Paul Stevens said in his dissent, ”The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.”

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Stevens’ dissent, parts of which he read aloud in the courtroom.

The justices also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns. (more…)

side note: could not have said it better myself.

Drew Westen
Psychologist and neuroscientist; Emory University Professor
Huffingtonpost.com

You can blame a bad candidate, bad organization, bad timing of a vacation — choose your rationalization. But the reality is that voters in Massachusetts were reacting to the same foul mist coming off Boston Harbor that New Jersey Voters smelled coming off the Hudson and Virginia voters off the Chesapeake.

What they all understood was that the source lay on the shores of the Potomac.

It is a truly remarkable feat, in just one year’s time, to turn the fear and anger voters felt in 2006 and 2008 at a Republican Party that had destroyed the economy, redistributed massive amounts of wealth from the middle class to the richest of the rich and the biggest of big businesses, and waged a trillion-dollar war in the wrong country, into populist rage at whatever Democrat voters can cast their ballot against.

All of this was completely predictable. And it was predicted. I wrote about it for the first time here on the sixth day of Obama’s presidency, and many of us have written about it in the intervening year.

The President’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge that we have a two-party system, his insistence on making destructive concessions to the same party voters he had sent packing twice in a row in the name of “bipartisanship,” and his refusal ever to utter the words “I am a Democrat” and to articulate what that means, are not among his virtues. We have competing ideas in a democracy — and hence competing parties — for a reason. To paper them over and pretend they do not exist, particularly when the ideology of one of the parties has proven so devastating to the lives of everyday Americans, is not a virtue. It is an abdication of responsibility. (more…)

side note: I used to watch Washington Journal on CSPAN every morning…they used to have some real good moderators…..then something happened and they got this new woman who is a nutjob righty who hides behind her nice clothes and pretty face…but from time to time that righty side of hers comes screaming out. Which you’ll see in the video below, she doesn’t even flinch at the callers question/comments….and either does that piece of shit Senator John Barrasso from Wyoming. As Bob Cesca said on his blog: “This is jaw-droppingly creepy and awful. Even for teabaggers.”

side note: Another great article from Matt Taibbi…read this over lunch, and even though I knew some this stuff, it was filled with tidbits that blew my mind. This has been my biggest issue with President Obama. He either doesn’t understand economics, which I don’t think is correct…..or, after a few years in DC…he has fallen prey to the establishment. I highly recommend you head over to Rolling Stone’s site and check out the article there…has some links and people have already posted comments. Plus…it’s a really cool site with tons of content. We need President Obama to wake up and realize that he needs to deal with the criminals who are currently implementing their economic ideology…which is to continue to fund the rich and fuck the middle class and poor.

by MATT TAIBBI
RollingStone.com

Watch Matt Taibbi discuss “The Big Sellout” in a video on his blog, Taibblog.

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Whatever the president’s real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial “reforms” that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street’s political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer’s role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama’s top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals. (more…)

side note: You god damn right I refer to those nimwits watching fox as idiots…..they’re lucky I’m in a good mood, b/c they deserve a lot worse!

side note: An awesome article from Vanity Fair, check out their site b/c they have quite a few links backing up some of the facts in this story. I’m a bit torn on this….on one side, I agree with Prince that if he was truly a CIA asset, then he should have the same legal protections as Valerie Plame did….granted her cover was blown based upon politics and he never mentioned this in the article. On the other side of the coin, I’m a true believer in our laws…and that we are governed by those laws and even in times of crisis, we shouldn’t abandon them. Erik Prince is/was a mercenary that broke countless US and international laws. If he does it with the consent of the sitting government……does he get a pass? I don’t believe so…..but that’s just my opinion. What frightens me the most about Blackwater is they were not just working for the US government….they can be contracted by any foreign government as well. To me, that’s a conflict of interest. In addition….he’s someone who clearly sits with the right-wing croud, and I truly believe they have let the American people down by trampling our Constitution that believes in the seperation of powers…..and a host of other illegal acts they have committed to further their agenda.

BY ADAM CIRALSKY
Vanity Fair
JANUARY 2010
Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.

I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.

Erik Prince has an image problem—the kind that’s impervious to a Madison Avenue makeover. The 40-year-old heir to a Michigan auto-parts fortune, and a former navy seal, he has had the distinction of being vilified recently both in life and in art. In Washington, Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq—though Blackwater’s own deeds have also come in for withering criticism. Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. His employees have been repeatedly accused of using excessive, even deadly force in Iraq; many Iraqis, in fact, have died during encounters with Blackwater. And in November, as a North Carolina grand jury was considering a raft of charges against the company, as a half-dozen civil suits were brewing in Virginia, and as five former Blackwater staffers were preparing for trial for their roles in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, The New York Times reported in a page-one story that Prince’s firm, in the aftermath of the tragedy, had sought to bribe Iraqi officials for their compliance, charges which Prince calls “lies … undocumented, unsubstantiated [and] anonymous.” (So infamous is the Blackwater brand that even the Taliban have floated far-fetched conspiracy theories, accusing the company of engaging in suicide bombings in Pakistan.) (more…)

side note: The problem with most Americans is that they have no friggin memory! This is why politicians can get away with the same bullshit over and over and over again. How many times did we hear from a high ranking general that “next year we should be able to start pulling troops out of Iraq”? You wanna know how many? Count up the number of years we were in Iraq under Bush….there’s your answer! This is one reason I left the Democratic party…..they would say similar things to the public and then they’d wait for our dumbass populace to forget, and then repeat. I do think President Obama has done some good in cleaning up DC, he isn’t God, so to change the culture in a town like that is one tough task…..he is getting rid of lobbyists that help create policy that benefits their corporations….but he promised us he’d do more during his campaign, and you know what, I expect it!
BTW..this article at Salon’s site has tons of external links siting sources, check em’ out.

Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
The “new” approach to Afghanistan touted by White House officials seems quite old

In order to prepare Americans for Obama’s Afghanistan escalation speech tonight at West Point (at least he’s not wearing a fighter pilot costume), White House officials have been dispatched to speak to the media (anonymously, of course) to preview all of the new and exciting aspects of the President’s plan. As a result, media accounts are filled with claims that there are major changes ordered by Obama that will transform our approach there.

But to anyone with a memory that extends back for more than a few weeks, all of this seems anything but new. In December, 2007, George Bush delivered a speech to the nation announcing his escalation in Iraq — that one only 20,000 troops, compared to the 30,000-40,000 Obama has ordered for Afghanistan. It’s worthwhile to compare what Obama officials are excitedly featuring as new and innovative ideas with what Bush said; I’m not comparing the Iraq and Afghan escalations: only the rhetoric used to justify them.

ABC News: “While tomorrow night’s speech will have many audiences … a senior administration official tells ABC News one key message will resonate with all of them: ‘The era of the blank check for President Karzai is over. . . The president will talk about, this not being ‘an open ended commitment’…” Bush:

I have made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq’s other leaders that America’s commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people — and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act.
(more…)

side note: Another great article by the folks at TNR. I have been sick of the “Common Sense” argument for years…and frankly, I don’t know what the hell it means when tools like Beck, Hannity and Limbaugh use. They wouldn’t know common sense if it jumped up and bit them in the face.

by Damon Linker
The New Republic

Conservatives would have us believe that they hold a monopoly on common sense. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and many other right-wing rabble-rousers regularly portray themselves as defenders of the good, old-fashioned common sense of average Americans against an out-of-touch liberal elite. A growing cadre of ambitious politicians likewise aims to lead a crusade in the name of “commonsense conservatism [1].” Glenn Beck has even gone so far as to publish a runaway bestseller [2] that explicitly piggybacks on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to argue against the danger of “out-of-control government” and the forces of organized foolishness that would foist it on the American people.

The unanimity is impressive. But it is also ridiculous. The fact is that the right’s appeal to common sense is nonsense. Unfortunately, though, it is a form of nonsense with deep roots in the American past and a very long history of political potency. Whether it continues to prove effective in the future will depend in no small measure on how cogently the rest of America responds.

The United States is a nation founded on an egalitarian creed—on the supposedly self-evident (commonsensical?) truths that all men are created equal and that all legitimate government is based on the consent of the governed. In such a nation, public appeals to authority would be much less persuasive than they had been throughout most of human history. Tradition, the divine right of kings, the will of God as interpreted by his designated clerical representatives—in America none of these authorities would benefit from the deference they have typically enjoyed in other times and places. Add in the ever-increasing social pluralism of modern life, and it becomes perfectly understandable why political actors and commentators in the United States would seek to win public disputes by appeal to the only authority still available—the authority of the people and their common sense. Whether such appeals are coherent is another matter.

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine famously inaugurated the American tradition of attempting to win contentious public arguments by praising the good judgment of average citizens. When Paine’s incendiary pamphlet first appeared, in January 1776, the colonies were divided about whether to declare their independence, with many colonists still loyal to the crown. Those on both sides of the issue recognized that taking up arms against the King of England demanded justification. Those who favored revolution did so for complicated reasons flowing from the ineptness of George III’s rule, which was increasingly viewed as arbitrary, dictatorial, and contrary to the economic interests of the colonies. A few, including Thomas Jefferson and Paine himself, went further, to supplement their case with abstract philosophical arguments about natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. But regardless of the rationale, it was almost universally acknowledged that proposing insurrection against British rule was a profoundly radical act—one involving a dramatic break from precedent and tradition. And yet Paine chose to portray the case for rebellion as transparently obvious—based, in fact, on nothing more than “simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.” Today Paine’s tract is thought to have done more than any other piece of writing to foment the American Revolution. (more…)

side note: A few things as I just wrapped up watching this video…..first and foremost, well done to the folks at New Left Media. Second, for those fuckin twits out there, FOX news in the #1 news source on TV…..they are the main stream media people! That’s why we have so many fuckin idiots in this country. Third…..speaking of FOX news…..watch an evening of that garbage, and then watch this video…..these people, like robots, repeat the talking points they here on such shows as Beck, Hannity and O’Reilly. They are like little talking FOX parrots…….except this time around, Polly needs a friggin brain!