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Isn't donkey a polite way to say Jackass.
It's more likely that a leopard will change its spots before Obama changes his. He voted like a corporatist when he was in the senate, and he has continued favoring corporations as president. How many disappointments will it take before Obama supporters realize that he is not planning to enact any policies that help the average American? He's great at giving speeches, though.
The French enjoy showing we ugly Americans the high road. But, they are right.
your closing rant...
very well said...thanks. We have a way to get those things done. Take a quick peek at our page when you have seven minutes, let us know what you think. http://shutupvotethebill.org/
while I think the donkey whisperer is pretty disgusting, it reminded me that Republicans have an appropriate animal representation. Donkeys were the hard workers that were the backbone of farming communities and more. So Donkey's - represent the backbone of workers in our nation - in the Democratic Party. Republicans have the elephant - a very strong animal that is very heavy, moves slowly and remembers lessons learned years earlier -- that it doesn't forget! Trying to get an elephant to accept a new idea is nearly impossible. Or, as today shows, the propaganda is accepted and no facts and truths will dislodge their brainwashing!
Hmmm.... I wonder when we are going to liberate & bring democracy to Saudi Arabia?
Libyan War Planned Right After 9/11 ... Or Before
Toppling Gaddafi was planned right after 9/11, or perhaps even before.
As American reporter Gareth Porter reported in 2008:
Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith's recently published account of the Iraq war decisions. Feith's account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders. Feith's book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states... *** General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia [and Lebanon]. *** When this writer asked Feith . . . which of the six regimes on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, "All of them." *** The Defense Department guidance document made it clear that US military aims in regard to those states would go well beyond any ties to terrorism. The document said the Defense Department would also seek to isolate and weaken those states and to "disrupt, damage or destroy" their military capacities - not necessarily limited to weapons of mass destruction (WMD)... Rumsfeld's paper was given to the White House only two weeks after Bush had approved a US military operation in Afghanistan directed against bin Laden and the Taliban regime. Despite that decision, Rumsfeld's proposal called explicitly for postponing indefinitely US airstrikes and the use of ground forces in support of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in order to try to catch bin Laden. Instead, the Rumsfeld paper argued that the US should target states that had supported anti-Israel forces such as Hezbollah and Hamas. *** A senior officer on the Joint Staff told State Department counter-terrorism director Sheehan he had heard terrorist strikes characterized more than once by colleagues as a "small price to pay for being a superpower".
General Clark added some details in 2007:
I had been through the Pentagon right after 9/11. About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, "Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second." I said, "Well, you’re too busy." He said, "No, no." He says, "We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq." This was on or about the 20th of September.
***
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it’s worse than that." He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, "I just got this down from upstairs" — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — "today." And he said, "This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran."
Obama is simply carrying out the Neocons' war plans created right after 9/11 ... if notbefore.
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/
More Soma, please.
Such an excuse - "I didn't mean to kill Oscar Grant, I just wanted to hurt him." Tasing a suspect who is already in custody and under control is torture.
Shutting off communication facilities in the BART tunnels creates a safety hazard.
These BART managers are a danger to life and public safety.
It's irrelevant whether Obama is corporate party re-installed or not.
The "progressives" are status-quo preserving useful regressives, with nuanced approaches. They simply seek to regain old thriving empire privileges, when the end to empires is needed for future human survival to be possible.
The "progressives" were the system's reaction to populist threats to the banker and industrialist dominated corporate-state product of the Civil War (the war between white farmers dependent upon rusty old metal chains enslaving black Africans and "enlightened" industrialists determined to use new and improved mental chains to more profitably enslave job seeking wage earners of any and every kind).
For near a century and a half now, generations of progressives have served as the best boots on the ground "grassroots" protection for the corporate-state, whenever any movement rises from the Left.
A progressive is an exceptionally dedicated liberal who earnestly endeavors to persuade people who need a revolution to instead become counter-revolutionaries.
It was Boomer "progressives" who persuaded equal rights seeking Blacks to support the Democrats who have bureaucratically maintained Black Americans in a permanent underclass... and prisons.
It was Boomer "progressives" who persuaded the Pentagon to make the empire's military voluntary, so that only poor people and sociopaths would be sent away to the wars that (D) liberals (under whatever label) kept (D) voting for.
It was Boomer "progressives" who turned antiwar demonstrations into GOTV drives for the corporate party Democrat faction's "necessary" and "humanitarian" wars.
It was Boomer "progressives" who persuaded women to support the corporate party's Democrats who won't ever provide them equal rights.
It was Boomer "progressives" who persuaded young people existentially needing a sustainable planet to support the corporate party's Democrats whose answer to climate change is to continue the expansion of the extraction and consumption economy, while establishing a market for pollution swap credits, while the glaciers all melt and the methane release suppressing permafrost becomes impermanent.
The children of Boomers don't have 40 or 50 years of human habitable planet left to waste on reforming the highly evolved more sustainable fascist state that liberals created. Massive systemic change is soon required, or humans won't have a future.
Boomers have done enormous harm to their children, in having raised their children to love and respect My Generation parents who habitually resist the serious systemic changes that their children existentially need.
The systemic changes necessary for human and other most species to survive the existing unsustainable societal systems cannot and will not come from working within the systems that must be ended... with extreme prejudice.
www.chenangogreens.org
Did I miss something? Did the nuclear plant in Virginia melt down? The last word I heard was the fail safe system worked, and there is nothing to worry about.
The difference between France and the U.S.? The business leaders in France have a longer history to realize that if the middle class falls, so does the country. And they don't aspire to own the government for the pursuit of greed. We have a solution. http://www.shutupvotethebill.org/
Will an earthquake wake up the Goper's. Nah! They and the Dem blue coats are far to corrupt. There's lots of money to be had in the construction of a nuclear power plant. A great deal of it must come from the government coffers. They'll use our tax money to lower our net worth and raise their's. While the well greased Pres sits idly by and helps them. Screwed again!!
When they build these plants the public is assured that the chances of a melt down catastrophe are astronomically in favor of the safety of the plants. When catastrophes prove to beat these incredible odds the public is asked to believe that the more plants that beat the odds the less likely another one will occur. In other words , the chances of a melt down are so incredibly small that when one occurs the chances of another one becomes even more astronomically small.
Thanks, Steve.
Its time to send a message to the banksters, SEPT. 17 occupywallstreet.org. Our representative need to see that we do not approve of 10 banks owning 77% of American assets. Its time to MARCH ON WALL STREET!!!!
ghostofjefferson.blogspot.com
Barney Frank has also laid out the problems of means testing. One likelihood will be the legislative sausage that is called healthcare reform. The simplest way to enact the spirit of means testing, is count social security payments as earned income taxed at the highest marginal rate, thus the payout is only 61% to those with the means to not need it.
Reframe the virb.
Perhaps it's not about fighting ... as in having enemies. Maybe its about struggle as in working bone numbing hard with others with objectives that rule out needing to kill or wound others. How about some less violent more respectful perspective to this dialogue?
Them's fighten words!
Liberal? !!!
It's Progressive all the way and it transcends the traditional political spectrum that is no longer very useful.
It's setting an upper limit of income applicants can have outside the benefit.
Thom does try to control his rants though. Unlike the right wing ranters, Thom's rants don't have the intent of spreading fear. Thom instead spouts good ideas for working towards solutions, and factual data of how these solutions work elsewhere or in the past. Much like his rants on outsourcing, and its link to the gradual lowering of import tariffs.
I am attempting to start a grassroots effort to put pressure on our representitives to take action to stop outsourcing. This is an idea agreed on by the majority of Americans left and right. Please help me organize a campaign to combat this. Check out my blog to learn how.
americanjobspot.blogspot.com
I am attempting to start a grassroots effort to put pressure on our representitives to take action to stop outsourcing. This is an idea agreed on by the majority of Americans left and right. Please help me organize a campaign to combat this. Check out my blog to learn how.
americanjobspot.blogspot.com
So do you have any actual suggestions on how to fix the problem or are you just going to go off on tangents about how bad liberals are?
Thom I believe nothing will change these psycho fanatics hellbent for leather to see the US become a third world failed empire. As last summers oil spill demonstrates you can have multiple deaths, and vast areas of poisoned ecosystem and still not get real about preventing the corporations from an Open season on the Planet and its resources. NPK the Japanese PBS station continually reports on increasing levels of danger from contamination at Fukishima and surrounding prefectures with acres of land that are now a nuclear waste land for the next 2500 years and beyond. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. For those of you that feel so safe with unregulated corporations you should consider making lots on top of the earthen dams and then see if you can get Wall Street to put em in a bundle of derivatives so the Koch brothers can invest in your utopia. Follow it up with a good prayer rally cause if anything happens, there won't be any relief aid because you defunded the program. Free market your rescue services and out source your relief. Profit is your prophet. Don't be suprised when the truth comes out Frack is whack.
Any wake-up call that has implications regarding the GENERAL WELFARE OF THE PEOPLE, is too much like one of those, Govt. involvement, democratic socialist things, for the REPUBLICANS to give a damn or care about.