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Obviously, another attempt to make sure Obama gets nothing out of this presidency except the bad reputation the Republicans are determined to give him. And by inviting Netenyahu, who has been stating the same warnings about Iran for at least the last 20 years, and has only a political opinion, (not one of knowledge, expertise, or any other factual information) regarding Iran's nuclear program, Boehner is making sure Congress and the American people are only hearing the side the Republicans want to be heard. Obviously, the war hawks in the GOP want another bloody interference with the goal of obtaining yet more oil.
What the American public will hear is a scare campaign to get us to support a new war in Iran, whether a shooting war or one of restrictions doesn't matter. What they will NEVER hear is that Iran's nuclear program was STARTED with the help of the US under the Atoms for Peace Program. After we overthrew Mossadeg and installed the brutal Shah as our puppet, we CONTINUED to supply the Shah with nuclear energy technology (notice I said "energy"), which we wanted Iran to use while we extracted the oil for use and profit on the part of the West. So, in Iran, it was "Nukes for Oil" before it was "Arms for Hostages." The Ayatollah ended the nuclear program when he came to power - considering such weapons "sinful". Iran has signed 3 treaties/conventions repudiating weapons of mass distruction (how many has Israel signed?) Iran still would like to depend more on nuclear ENERGY and be able to sell its crude oil on the world market. It cannot refine its own oil due to the deteriorated condition of its refineries (it was unable to get parts for repairs). For a long time now it has had to ship its crude out to be refined into gasoline elsewhere, then re-import it at a loss, then subsidize it so its citizens can afford it. This is, of course, ruining its economy. We would love to ruin Iran's economy to the point that the mullahs fall from power and we can access that oil ourselves, leaving little to maintain the needs of the Iranians. Of course, who will govern Iran once the mullahs are gone? Our hand-picked puppet? A dictator from an opposite faction? We have a very poor record of stabilizing countries once we ruin them. But the GOP is still on the empire-building path, and they couldn't care less.
"Bibi the Butcher of Gaza" signs, or maybe a slide show presentation on that blank screen at the Capital might make the point.
The GOP as a party has in the past years has past legislation knowing that it would harm the USA and Average Americans. These people are the true enemies of this countryand they practice "Domestic Terrorism" whenecver they can. Whether on the Federal,State or County level of Government. The GOP tries to destroy! Wake up people and end this GOP reighn of terrorism.
Thom. I agree that if a Democrat had done.this, Republicans would.over-react and call for all sorts of.ridiculous actions. But we are Democrats. We are better then that. I also agree that it was phenomenally disrespectful but what else.is new for Boehner? But what.I find most.disturbing is how such a discussion gives rise to antisemitic comments. First not all Muslims hate us. Second, support of our.only true ally in the region is not why extremists hate us. And finally Netanyahu is not Israel. Nor does he necessarily reflect the views of the majority of Jews in that country or in this one
Remove this drunken fucker from office and hang his Fucking ass in the Rotunda for all to see.
Sorry Thom! Republicans are NEVER GUILTY! Laws are for lesser beings that don't share the ideaology of never being wrong! No matter what your lieing eyes can tell you! But HOW CAN ANYONE DENY THAT ISRAEL IS RUNNING OUR MID-EASTERN FORIEGN POLICY! No freaking wonder Muslims hate us ! We're TOTALLY full of it!
Thank you for pointing out the distinction between "inalienable constitutional rights" and "legal statutory rights." That "what if the FBI waltzed in and seized your corporation's computers" is one of the classic Conservative "Red Herrings" when it comes to Citizens United.
Follow up to NOTHINGS CHANGED , a comment about SIRIUS SATELITE pulling the plug on PROGRESSIVE radio here in CANADA. Well i've rebounded from my doldrums , i've fired Sirius Satellite Radio here in Canada, they no longer will be part of my news source AND I've taken the money that i would normally have paid SIRIUS SATELLITE and I've bought podcast subscriptions to ALL of my favourites on left wing Liberal radio. Now i can listen to them each day when it's convenient for me, so i stay abreast of the true news, the real news, not the corporate media circus that dress themselves up as news.
Thom,
Good show yesterday. Couldn't help noticing the familiar graphic that was used!
I can't post the image here, but see:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0700619917/ref=pe_180020_123389790_em_1...
NOTHINGS CHANGED
Back in Sept of 2014 SIRIUS SATELLITE abruptly pulled the plug on PROGESSIVE RADIO in CANADA , yes SIRIUS SATELLITE RADIO , one day decided to mute the voice of THOM HARTMANN, Stephanie Miller, Bill Press, Mike Malloy and the rest. No rythme or reason was given for this , just one day i woke up , turned on my Sirius Satellite radio and POOF they were gone. I called the Siruius people here in CANADA and the person Canadian polite as usual , told me it was a business decision by Sirius Satellite.
As a real far leftist I wish that Obama was moving to the far left but he's only moving to the left-center, which makes me happier - although I would be happiest if he and Congress and would go far left.
It would be good for America but Republicans are showing what they know, that Americans are afraid of a word, "socialism".
Survey research has shown that if the public is asked their opinion on each item of the socialist agenda individually, i.e., universal healthcare and education, full employment at fair pay and with power for workers, power for working people in governance of society, etc., they will overwhelmingly support it. But, if you at any time in that questionnaire mention the word, " socialism ", it's all over, they'll be against all of it.
TARGET pulls out of CANADA and NOW we are left with WALMART
Walmart owned by the Walton family of the US, who have more wealth than 140 million Americans combined and run a BUSINESS MODEL that PAYS POVERTY WAGES , that shifts the weight of these poorly paid employees onto the shoulders of our social programs. Then this same FAMILY who create worker poverty , use their right wing conservative toadies , to scream WELFARE STATE, and further cut and thrash our safety net , so they can further justify corporate and personal tax cuts.
only fools (clueless ideologs) fault him for the fact that his proposals won't pass a gop-led congress. realists understand that he puts the ideas out there, inviting sniping from the right. his proposals, if not "passable,' appeal to majority of voters. absolutists and simplists of left or right are doomed to be wrong on most things.
tho o'care falls short, the precedent is promising. whenever we emerge from this anti-gov, anti-reg mania, we'll be better off recognizing the social value of universal health care.
If President Obama had given his 2015 State of the Union Address (but excluding his dishonest endorsement of the TPP and TTIP initiatives) in his 2014 State of the Union Address and our Democrats in Congress had boldly sought to implement all of those proposals last year, Democrats would now control BOTH houses of Congress. But it required a severe beating in the November 2014 elections to convince President Obama and many of those remaining Democrats in Congress to STOP SUCKING UP TO THE RICH AT THE EXEPNSE OF EVERYONE ELSE!
[strikethrough isn't working] Colorado had a female majority in the State Assembly recently. [/strikethrough]
Correction: In 2011, Colorado had 41% of the legislative seats filled by women, the highest of any state legislature ever.
Thom,
I'm a 62-year-old, lifelong Republican voter, living in Portland, Oregon. Actually, after voting against President Obama in 2012 (thus cancelling out the vote I gave him in 2008), I re-registered as an independent.
I don't believe Mr. Obama is "far-Left" either. But I'm going to defer commenting on the psychopathology of our president (as I see it) in hopes of engaging you on a matter I believe is far more important.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Mr. Obama asserted that climate change is the greatest single threat to the security of our nation we face today. While I agree climate change is a serious problem, it's not (IMHO) the greatest threat we face here and now. Our most serious threat is twofold:
1. Failure of the global community of developed nations (primarily, the US and China) to take direct responsibility, and begin collaborating on the containment of the ongoing environmental disaster in Fukushima, Japan.
2. The failure of the President, and both the Democrat and Republican parties, along with the national news media -- to acknowledge the malignancy of our conventional nuclear power industry, and begin decommissioning nuclear power plants in this country, not extending their licenses, as the Obama administration has been doing.
I would qualify item 2 by saying, I do believe we need to give advocates of liquid-salt, Thorium based nuclear power a chance to demonstrate a low-waste, intrinsically safe design which would enable us to utilize that variant of nuclear power generation in the future. But that option may never have a chance to prove itself, given the entrenched crony-corporate interests which generate $billions in profits selling enriched Uranium fuel to existing nuclear facilities. And no segment of our crony-private-sector is more thoroughly protected by Democratic party power-brokers -- the Clintons and Obama being the prime examples.
Having studied the aftermath of Chernobyl, and having monitored the massive amount of factual information, and opinion by credible members of the scientific community on the subject of Fukushima, it's clear to me that disaster-in-progress is, for all intents, out of control. And, it is clear that Hawaii, British Columbia, and the west coast of the United States face a clear and present danger from the continued uncontrolled release of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean.
Fukushima is not a theoretical, statistically debatable threat. It's an empirically verifiable, lethal health-hazard to millions of people in the western hemisphere. Worse, it threatens to destabilize the oceanic biosphere around the world, by disrupting the evolutionary balance of every species of organism in our oceans. Even if we may not be able to detect radioactive contamination in species of fish we depend upon for food, at some level of saturation, background levels of radiation in sea water will affect the rapidly growing populations of micro-plankton and algae upon which the entire ocean-based food chain depends. It also threatens to cause mutations in pathogens against which higher species have no evolved immunity, leading to pandemics which devastate, and create a domino-effect on mutually dependent forms of sea-life.
The Japanese government has already acknowledged their inability to contain this disaster by their repeated pleas for help from larger developed nations. And yet, our political leadership, and our news media, refuse to acknowledge the existence of this crisis. Instead, they implicitly ignore it, by focusing exclusively (and very occasionally) on failures by Tepco to "fulfil it's obligation to clean up the mess".
In order to understand the absurdity of this myopia, one need only study the aftermath of Chernobyl, and the monumentally difficult decisions Gorbachev had to make in order to (partially) contain it. I assume you're aware that Chernobyl is by no means fully contained, and is in fact approaching a new crisis point as the original "sarcophagus" continues to deteriorate. Bottom-line: Gorbachev called Chernobyl "a war we must fight and win". And tens of thousands of Soviet citizens lost their lives fighting that war. That western leaders (ours in particular) choose to hide behind the notion that a private electrical utility should be delegated full responsibility for this task, simply testifies to their hypocrisy and political cowardice.
It is also yet another example of a president who poses as a "Progressive", while operating as de-facto "Chairman of the Board" of a conglomerate of crony-capitalists, which include: organized labor, the financial-services industry (racket), the so-called "health insurance" industry, and the conventional nuclear power industry (General Electric in particular).
12 years ago, after studying the facts, and recognizing the incompetence and malfeasance in office of George W. Bush, I vocally and relentlessly opposed him, even though he was the guy I voted for in 2000, and his stated political views generally coincided with mine. Part of that opposition led me to vote for Obama in 2008. When, after several months in office, I recognized that Senator Obama had run his campaign on a fabric of lies, I have opposed him too. What has surprised me (a little) is the fact that so many people in the media (like you), who are intellectually capable of considering the same factual evidence, and recognizing the same demagoguery this man has demonstrated from the day he took office, continue to support him.
That said, since I have noticed your efforts to draw attention to Fukushima, and you do seem to understand the magnitude of the global risks it poses, I hope you will continue to use your influence in the media to elevate this story to the level it requires. And I believe Mr. Obama's assertion on the threat posed by climate change, requires someone on the liberal side of the aisle to call him out for his utterly ineffective actions on that issue, while ignoring the ongoing threat of ecological destruction posed by Fukushima.
In my view: we need a major intervention by the US Army Corps of Engineers, in concert with China (which has significant experience and resources in this area of engineering) to:
1. Contain contaminated ground water by installing a massive coffer dam around the harbor side of the reactors, to prevent further outflow into the Pacific ocean, and route that water into a decontamination facility.
2. Build a ground water diversion structure well behind the damaged reactors, to permanently prevent ground-water from passing through an area of this planet which will, for all intents, be permanently uninhabitable.
What I am suggesting is no more radical than the initiatives taken by the Soviet Union in response to Chernobyl. They did so, because their leader recognized they had no choice. And he accepted the fact that, as in a war, some of the soldiers fighting that war would die. The truth, being painfully demonstrated by the failures taking place in Fukushima, is this:
Unless human beings are willing to either volunteer or be conscripted, to risk their lives repairing a nuclear power facility, no government, nor any electorate, has the moral right to authorize their construction.
It is absolutely unconscionable that western democracies, particularly the one which built the nuclear reactors in Fukushima, has chosen to disavow it's obligation to act in response to this threat, which has the theoretical potential to become an extinction event for mankind. We created this industry, and I find now that what I was told when I was young, and our government was approving these facilities, specifically:
"...that you could shut down a nuclear reactor in seconds, simply by dropping control-rods into the core."
...was a lie, pure and simple, promulgated by those who sought to profit by it. This is a seminal moment in the history of human civilization. And, as Abraham Lincoln wisely pointed out in 1862: "We cannot escape history."
Ted Thomas
Portland, Oregon
Right on Richard ! Considering that Obama smelled the coffee and, at the last minute, dumped his previous pledge to run with public financing in 08 and then in 12 accepted over a Billion Dollars in campaign funding from God knows who but we can take a pretty good guess. He successfully followed the Neo-Liberal Clintons who aggressively fought to advance the agendas of their Right Wing contributors by passing NAFTA, crippling existing public programs that helped single mothers work their way out of poverty, bungling an effort to pass Single Payer Healthcare Legislation, and signing off on the elimination of the Glass Steagall Act, a move that led to the collapse of the economy just seven years later. When Democrats attempted to take another run at Single Payer Healthcare Obama was their to knife certain Democrat supporters in the back and destroy their political careers with the help of certain GOP state party officials. With friends like Obama and Clinton, none of us need to be concerned about enemies !
No danger of a move to the Left here in Texas where The GOP has continued their dictatorial rule over the state replacing Tricky Ricky Perry with yet another GOP main stay in a wheel chair, I'm wondering if this was intentionally done to project a vision of Roosevelt in braces to Left leaning Texans. Fresh from a big Wing-Ding in Austin celebrating the return of the fascists, the majority Right Legislature dumped a decades old rule that gave the minority party legislators the ability to at least debate their points of view with their GOP brethren. Texas Democrats actually had to leave the state a few years back and take up residence in a hotel in neighboring Oklahoma to block a vote based on the number of remaining legislators being insufficient to meet minimal quorum requirements. This latest change removes any chance of that happening again. Considering the fact that Texas Democrats actually harpooned their best chance for electing a Democrat governor by their luke warm support of Windy Davis in the last election, one has to come to the conclusion that they are quite happy with their increasing minority role in state politics ! Unusual for a party who had maintained majority status in this state for over fifty years up until 1995 !
Thom your mom look so beautiful when she was a teenager. You have got the same eyes of your mother. The return of the good German school in America is a great news right. This is called as history of America. Fila basketball shoes
Bravo, Richard! And like Clinton, indeed.
What President O'bummer giveth (two years' free college tuition at community colleges, national childcare), President O'bummer taketh away.... with the Trans Pacific Pirate Ship!
Obama's entire speech was about political survival of the Democratic party 2016 with absolutely no substance. Obama is an empty suit with zero credibility left with the American people. Obama's hope, with his State of Union address, was to dazzle the "left" media into regurgitating his disingenuous rhetoric, and feed it back to the public as a "real" progressive message, and it looks like it was affective propaganda, because the media is out there selling this as Obama's return to the left.
Obama will only achieve the objectives he was sent to Washington to fulfill, and those are the objectives of the elite business community. He will be authorized by a Republican Congress with trade authority, and he, like Clinton in the 90's, will sell out the American people to elite business interest.
Dick Morris is exactly what his first name is. What he considers to be the far left is what the U.S. was before his oligarch fascist Neo-Republican party got hold of it, around the year 1980.
Actually, Congress makes the budget decisions, and a number of Dems in Congress are once again aiming at Social Security, specifically Social Security Disability. When Clinton slashed disability aid, liberals (with rare exception, including, Mr. Hartmannn, if I recall correctly) just weren't interested. President Obama was able to get Congress to restore disability benefits, but there have been several cuts since then. Today, it's all about/only about those still in the middle class, the better-off. Meanwhile, middle classers remain oblivious to how the New Deal itself is being cut away one piece at a time.
I think that both the right wing and middle classers would worry less if they are reminded that nothing in the president's speech addressed our poverty crisis. There are no plans whatsoever to aid our truly poor. In fact, a number of Democrats have already agreed to historic cuts in Social Security Disability, pushing the disabled, seriously ill and dying deeper into poverty. These proposed cuts make Bill Clinton's cuts to the disabled poor look very timid in comparison. Note that the president's "middle class economy" agenda is simply a rebranding of "trickle down economics." Nothing new there. One point that remains weird in the current discussion: What do people in general think "middle class" means? By definition, if you're still in the middle class, you're doing great! I know the middle class complained that those who were trying to get back on their feet on some $4k-$5k annual welfare aid were living "better than the middle class," so what constitutes a middle class income today?