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At my confession my spiritual advisor said that America and Americans will continue to feel pain and suffering until they return to God. MAKE NO MISTAKE THE ANSWER FOR A BETTER WORLD IS OUR RETURNING TO GOD!!!
As my cousin said to me, "We came in at the right time and we are leaving at the right time."
Personally upon dying I will be leaving a country that is a hell-hole, a rat-hole, and a shit-hole.
@2950-10K, thank you for the information on "It's the evil thing." The Kochs are so insulated and isolated from the real world that nothing will ever have an affect on them. The Kochs, like OBL, are the real terrorists in our world.
Hey, has anyone seen the KochBlocked.com- You Tube- "I'd like to buy the Kochs a world so they would leave ours alone ........" ? Check it out, it's really great! Let's put it this way, this Koch-a -Kola commercial will not be aired on Fox network!
www.youtube.com -"it's the evil thing" http//Kochblocked.com
Let me refresh in your mind what is the Anti-Christ in our country - MONEY, NUCLEAR WEAPONS, AND FALSE PROPHETS!!!
http://original.antiwar.com/pilger/2011/05/27/welcome-to-the-violent-world-of-mr-hopey-changey/
A violent world compliments of the Anti-Christ!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/24/obama-cameron-break-addiction-to-war
Are the US and the UK addicted to war?
http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2011-05-26.asp
Bush and Obama have the same DNA in terms of war dictatorship!!!
War is a narcotic.
War is a narcotic. War gives certain people a high. Bush is a drug addict who says he has recovered but the Iraq war is an addictive narcotic that gives Bush his daily high. He says that he has recovered but you never recover from an addictive personality. The longer a war lasts the more power goes to the government.
We start hating through language and from language we start to want to kill people. War gives the addictive personality meaning. Bush cannot exist without war. The state begins to define our being. The state must control us in order for us to kill. We cannot look at another person as part of humanity. Friends do not want war. You must, in war, want to kill and a person cannot be a friend to a person whom he is out to kill. People become intoxicated in war toward killing. You lose yourself and your identity as a human person in war.
If you oppose war, you court physical violence to yourself by the nationalists who desire and crave killing and war. You need moral courage to oppose war in America, a land that is overrun by nationalists who want killing and war.
Human beings do not want to kill other human beings. Bush and Cheney are not human beings because they want to kill human beings. Bush and Cheney turned away from people who had empathy for us after 9/11. We had an opportunity to build friendships but we became racists.
The Republican Party possesses extremists who are doing great damage to our relations in the world. Once you become violent, you hang onto and remain violent because you cannot behave any other way. Violence comes back to haunt a country. Our violence to other countries will come back to haunt us. We do not have the right to control other people.
WHEN LEADERS FAIL TO CARRY ON DIALOGUE, SUCH AS IN DIPLOMACY, WAR WILL ALWAYS COMMENCE WAR IS A BREAKDOWN IN DIPLOMACY. WHEN MURDEROUS LEADERS GO BEFORE GOD IN JUDGMENT, THEY WILL RECEIVE A FIRST HAND EXAMPLE OF THEIR SINS IN REFUSING TO PROVIDE DIALOGUE THAT WILL AVOID WAR!!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUjUvoynGMM&feature=related
I'll keep it simple... pressure the U.S. Congress and the President of the United States to GET RID of the "Patriot" Act!
It's time has come and gone.
I personally believe that this has little to do with being able to counteract terrorism. Many years ago the FBI, CIA etc. were able to take down the entire organized crime syndicate and all without the benefit of "Warrentless" wiretaps or any of the modern day electronic tools current available. It is just another way to intimidate and control US citizens all without their knowledge or permission and to further erode our constitutional rights.
Quote from ProVote America soliciting for petitioners: "ProVote America is helping organize a statewide petition for Americans Elect. This is good-paying and personally rewarding work to better our country. Like other companies, we are paying $1.25 per signature."
What is ProVote America?
"ProVote America describes itself on its LinkedIn profile as a company working “on behalf of conservative central committees” that refuses offer its services when that 'would compete with our other clients':"
http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/category/unity08/
"As Americans Elect readies itself for a public launch in the Spring of 2011, some people may say to themselves, “Boy, this sounds more than little bit like the old Unity08.” There’s a reason for that: Americans Elect is a continuation of the the old Unity08. Although the two groups have different names, there is an explicit line of historical continuity connecting Americans Elect to Unity 08. In both corporate records and its stable of leaders, Americans Elect and Unity08 overlap. Continuity in Corporate Records The corporate address reported by Unity08 in the first half of 2009: 1775 Pennsylvania Avenue Suite 1212, Washington DC 20006 The corporate address reported by the Unity12 Task Force in the second quarter of 2010: 1775 Pennsylvania Avenue Suite 1212, Washington DC 20006 The corporate address reported by the renamed Americans Elect in the third quarter of 2010: 1775 Pennsylvania Avenue Suite 1212, Washington DC 20006 This continuity should come as no surprise. In a lawsuit to win it the right to take contributions of unlimited amounts under looser rules of public disclosure, Peter Ackerman sat for a deposition in which he declared it the intention of Unity08 to operate as Unity12 in the 2012 Presidential Election: If Unity08 is successful in this litigation, Unity08 has a clear and definite intent to resume its activities — renamed “Unity12″ — for the 2012 presidential election. The “Unity” mission remains as critical today for the 2012 presidential election as it was in 2006 for the 2008 presidential election." The only development unanticipated by Peter Ackerman’s declaration is the change of name from Unity12 to Americans Elect. Chairman Peter Ackerman Peter Ackerman, co-chair of the Unity08 Rules Committee that never got around to issuing a final set of rules, is the head of the new Unity12 Task Force (more recently renamed Americans Elect). A member of the Council on Foreign Relations with a history of corporate leadership at wealth investment firm Rockport Capital and junk bond firm Drexel Burnham Lambert. According to BusinessWeek, Ackerman is currently managing director of the Crown Capital Group, another investment firm specializing in leveraged buyouts. Ackerman is a past member of the Board of Directors of the Cato Institute and a project advisor to the Cato Institute’s “Project on Social Security Choice,” an effort to privatize Social Security and turn management of Social Security funds over to Wall Street investment firm managers. Chief Operating Officer Kahlil J. Byrd Kahlil Byrd, a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard University, is also a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A past appointments director for Democratic Governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick, Byrd left that position to work on the campaign of Republican Senate candidate Jeff Beatty. He runs Sung Media Ventures, a Boston political consulting firm. He is also Senior Associate for Global Communications at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. In the past year, Byrd has contributed to the campaigns of Republican congressional candidate Michael Allegretti and Republican candidate for Massachusetts Governor Charles D. Baker. Byrd is the director for the Rhode Island gubernatorial campaign of Moderate Party leader (and past contributor to Republican Lincoln Chafee) Ken Block. Director Thomas W. Richardson Thomas W. Richardson is a partner at the Washington, DC law firm Arnold & Porter, LLP where he specializes in wealth-transfer strategies for the Americans with sizeable estates. Arnold & Porter LLP lobbied the federal government for 30 corporate clients in the year 2009. In their work to get their candidate for President of the United States elected, whose interests will they represent? http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/category/unity08/
Thom, As you know Madison and Jefferson led the opposition against the "federalist tyranny" created by the alien and sedition acts, and they are most certainly "somewhere" shaking their heads in disbelief over the extension of the patriot act. Dolly is probably shaking her fist.
Last year I read a book by David O. Stewart, The Summer of 1787, and indeed Madison without question is father of the constitution, but I can't help but think all of the founders, given their monumental efforts at setting up the worlds first constitutional democracy, would be deeply disappointed with both the erosion of freedom , and the selling off of representative govt. to the highest bidder.To add more insult in many cases, the highest bidder gets "representation without taxation", that was a good one from one of your callers, if I heard right on my radio free america AM station.
We all have a lot to think about this memorial day weekend.
At the end of the day, when the corporations have won, they will sell the USA brand worldwide, make billions of dollars and screw the populace! Getting closer by the minute... that day.
Wolves prefer small government and freedom to eat as many sheep as they want.
Sheep prefer prefer regulations to prevent lions from eating them.
Americans must come to the new norm - unemployment!
http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/112786/unemployment-new-norm-fins
Whether the natural unemployment rate is 5.2% or much higher, the real unemployment rate is still 9%, meaning that there are more than four people on average competing for each job opening.
I believe the unemployment percentage will rise until it reaches at least forty percent. That percentage will be the new norm for our Anti-Christ nation.
The irony in Thom's comments lie in that he talks of reigning in the power of the federal government, and how quickly our freedoms can be eroded when it comes to items of national security, but federal, state and local debt, as well as complete reliance on federal and state programs doesn't appear to impact his sense of government power and lost liberties.
"The destabilizers are clever marketers. They choose their words carefully. They draw on the reputation of nonviolent resistance, popularized in the United States by the civil rights struggle led by Martin Luther King Jr. And they repeat the words “democracy” and “dictator” endlessly. It’s all part of a clever marketing campaign, one that has deceived more than a few leftists in the Western countries whose financial and corporate elite profit from NVR. But then, you have to be clever to take on the former CIA function of destabilizing foreign governments, make it seem progressive, and get away with it. Let’s be clear on what NVR is, what its goals are, and who’s behind it. It’s not nonviolence as a moral or ethical position; it’s a form of warfare, aimed at taking political power in other people’s countries. (or one's own) And while it’s based on nonviolence, it has, in its reliance on sanctions and financial isolation as an integral part of alienating people from target governments, devastating consequences, as real as those violence produces. It’s not used by grassroots organizations in the West to force their own governments to change reactionary policies, or to take political power at home. Instead, it is invariably aimed at foreign governments that have resisted integration into the U.S. imperial orbit. The major proponents of NVR are not independent grassroots organizers, socialists or anarchists. They are, instead, members of the U.S. financial and foreign policy establishment, or are linked to them in subordinate roles through organizational and funding ties. NVR is hardly progressive; it is an imperialist project whose only redeeming feature is the possibility that it may stimulate Western leftists to think about how they too might use the destabilizers’ techniques to take power in their own country to win the authentic battle for democracy." http://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/overthrow-inc-peter-ackerman%E2%8...
I am horrified by and disappointed in Sen. Amy Klobuchar's vote in support of the patriot Act (I live in MN), the single worst piece of Federal legislation since the Alien and Sedition Acts. I've complained to her office and on FB. Coupled with her vote supporting extension of the Bush tax cuts, I'm losing confidence in her. I'd love for some progressive to primary her, but I doubt it will work.
I think we need to raise hell on votes like these. Democratic lawmakers need to know we're paying attention and not at all content with the status quo. We're tired of government of, for and by the corporations and their rich masters. We're tired of government policies based on or designed to promulgate fear.
Who is Peter Ackerman? Ackerman is the managing director of Rockport Capital Incorporated, a private investment firm. He was chairman of the board of Freedom House and sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, along with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, and various other war criminals, CEOs, investment bankers, and highly placed media people. As part of his Council on Foreign Relations role, Ackerman not too long ago participated in a task force headed by former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA Director and current U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The goal: to craft a new approach to Iran. [60] He is also a member of the U.S. Advisory Council of the United States Institute for Peace, a phoney U.S. government peace outfit headed by the U.S. secretaries of defense and state. And when he’s not hobnobbing with the U.S. foreign policy establishment and managing his investment firm, he’s building an Imperialist International through the offices of the ICNC, of which he is the founding chair. Ackerman made his fortune working alongside junk-bond king Michael Milken. His “Prada parka and winter tan remind you that you’re not in tattered NGO-land anymore. You’re in the presence of wealth.” [61] After graduating from Colgate, he joined the graduate program at Tufts University Fletcher School, where he met Gene Sharp. “Ackerman spent eight on-and-off years at Tuft’s refining Sharp’s thesis.” [62] After obtaining a PhD in 1976, he joined investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, where, according to James B. Stewart’s Den of Thieves, he had his head so far up his boss’s ass, he was known as “the Sniff”. [63] Recruited by Milken to work as one of Drexel’s traders, Ackerman soon became the junk bond king’s highest-paid subordinate. In 1988, he made $165 million, after putting together the $26 billion KKR leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. One year later, his net worth having soared to about $500 million, he quit finance and turned to whittling down his 1,100 page PhD dissertation into a book, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict. [64] It should come as no surprise that a man who reeks of wealth, heads a private investment firm, and sits on the board of the premier U.S. establishment think-tank, defines a central element of democracy as protecting “property rights.” [65] Indeed, the promotion of this central tenet of capitalist ideology is the reason Freedom House, the organization he formerly headed, exists. “You can’t,” Ackerman insists, “have government constantly expropriating the fruits of the labor of its citizens.” [66] Which citizens? Since property rights, in the words of Ackerman and other owners of productive property, are the rights of ownership to what other people have produced, Ackerman equates democracy with capitalism. What he really wants to protect is the right of investors (himself included) to expropriate the fruits of other peoples’ labor. That might explain why he thinks the United States, the world’s premier champion of capitalist exploitation, “has an awful lot to teach people around the world.” [67] http://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/overthrow-inc-peter-ackerman%E2%8...
"Peter Ackerman, an immensely wealthy investor and board member of the premier U.S. foreign policy think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, [2] and Robert Helvey, a 30 year veteran of the U.S. Army [3] who served two tours of duty in Vietnam [4], are the principal proponents of a nonviolent alternative to military intervention in the pursuit of U.S. foreign policy goals. (And now Peter Ackerman has founded, funds, and is the chairman of American's Elect.) Ackerman and Helvey’s new type of mercenary are practitioners of what the CIA used to call destabilization. To escape the taint of its CIA past, destabilization has been rebranded as nonviolent resistance (NVR), shrewdly drawing upon the reputation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent struggles for black civil rights in the 1960s. But where King sought to bring about change within the system, and in the United States, NVR is strictly a foreign affair, seeking to overturn governments abroad that operate outside the system of U.S. imperial domination. NVR is not about pursuing social, economic and political justice at home. It’s about taking power overseas, in order to bring resistant countries into the U.S. imperial fold. To make itself appear to be squeaky clean, NVR explicitly rejects overt CIA and U.S. military sponsorship. That...doesn’t make NVR any different in its aims and content from the destabilization campaigns the CIA used to plan, sponsor and implement. Indeed, Ackerman and Helvey have simply taken over a CIA function, made it semi-overt, and created the illusion that it’s progressive. Ackerman defines NVR as “the shrewd use of strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience” [7] in addition to mass protests [8] and even nonviolent sabotage, to disrupt the functioning of government [9] and make “a country ungovernable.”[10] Since strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience are traditional leftist techniques, NVR campaigns often garner the support of a large number of left-leaning people. Antiwar activists will find no ideological soul mates in Ackerman, Helvey and Sharp, who are conditionally against the use of violence, not out of moral principle, but because they believe violence is often an ineffective method of achieving what political violence is normally intended to achieve: the seizure of power. Sharp’s (Gene Sharp [is] the author of a series of books on nonviolent conflict and mass civil disobedience) contribution to the peace movement is showing the U.S. ruling class it can achieve its imperialist goals by nonmilitary means. Sharp and his disciples Ackerman and Helvey aren’t progressives at all. Nor are they advocates of the moral superiority of nonviolence. They’re imperialists who believe violence isn’t always the best policy in achieving imperial goals. The antiwar activists who have been misled by this trio, and by their publicist within the progressive community, Stephen Zunes, should be clear that NVR is a military technique yoked to political goals that serve the ruling class interests of the United States. It is not a moral position. It is a form of warfare with imperial political content. Helvey calls it “nonviolent war.” [31] http://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/overthrow-inc-peter-ackerman%E2%8...
New faces are now petitioning in Malls for something that sounds like an alternative to the Republican/Democrat two party system which they hint will better represent "the people" rather than Wall Street. It initially sounded good and I got bit by signing the petition. After looking more into it I now see that just like the Koch brothers are financially backing the Tea Party, a wealthy Wall Streeter founded, and is chairman of "Americans Elect".
Another group calls itself "No Labels". "No Labels was created by a “Democratic powerhouse fundraiser Nancy Jacobson and Republican strategist Mark McKinnon, who were introduced to each other by Kevin Sheekey”, a political adviser of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. The mayor’s disdain for the two major parties are well known, as are his presidential aspirations."
Interestingly, both organizations claim they are not political parties while acting like political parties. No Labels has published its platform online and is in the process of mobilizing an electoral base of disaffected voters through its website and Facebook page. Americans Elect, with initial financing by Wall Street veteran Peter Ackerman (Americans Elect chairman), is in the process of acquiring ballot access in all 50 states. Its goal is to place “presidential and vice presidential nominees . . . on the ballot . . . [who] will be a competitive alternative to candidates put forward by the Democratic and Republican parties”.
Both groups, "No Labels" and "American's Elect" could band together to form a third party and......
...its candidates will ignore voters’ needs and flout their will as soon as they are in office, following in the footsteps of the large majority of Democratic and Republican representatives.
If the No Labels and Americans Elect team up to create a major new third party that does not allow voters to set its agenda across the board transparently and democratically by choosing their preferences from all the well-established policy options open to them, and pick electoral candidates whose track records and commitments adhere to this agenda, than I predict that the nation is likely to end up with a far more fiscally conservative president and Congress in 2012 no more likely to adhere to the wishes of the electorate than the current president and Congress.
While I certainly think that both the Democrat and Republican parties should be dethrowned, at least long enough so that they come to their senses and start backing the people for a change rather than Banksters, Wall Streeters, and corporations, I also think that we have to watch out and not be fooled into backing these "faux the people" parties who pretend to be our friends but who are founded, backed, and funded by "the enemy".
http://my.firedoglake.com/nancy-bordier/2010/12/03/no-labelsamericans-el...
Excuse me, miss! We are from Homeland Security and we got some chatter that you have been selling lemonade without a license. You are going to have to come along with us now.
But, but, I am only 10 and I am trying to raise money for charity....I didn't know I was supposed to have a license!
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, miss! We cannot let these "terrorist" activities go on in this country....you'll put some major soft-drink corporation out of business....and that is terrorist activity!
But, where are you going to take me?
Have you ever been to Egypt?
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
The Anti-Christ is the real terrorist! The Anti-Christ is comprised of our fascist-Nazi government, the American transnational corporations, the American rich, and the Anti-Life Party, aka Republican Party. These terrorist groups play on people’s fears, such as terrorism, immigration, college students, race, minorities, older people, and non-Christian religions.
The Anti-Christ’s history of her 236 years of incessant wars reveals our lust in the killing of God’s children. With the Anti-Christ’s ongoing research regarding advanced technology and weaponry that kills God’s children Satan’s disciples must commence ongoing wars in order to determine whether or not the money used in advanced technology and weaponry is used for the specific purpose it has been granted. That means more of God’s children must be killed in order to have the new technology and weaponry be given the military-industrial complex’s seal of approval. These wars help complete certain phases of the ongoing research.
"Rights" are a tough thing to get a handle on. I for one don't believe "rights" are conferred by a deity, nor are they "granted" by man. I believe rights are "discovered." As humanity bumps along, trying to figure out what's "good," we come across concepts that "work" for us. By that I mean, they innure to the greater good, improving the overall human condition. Democracy seems to work well, but we had to discover that it works through experimentation. The Great Experiment has worked, and so we consider Democracy a human right. If it hadn't worked, no matter how high-falutin it sounds on paper, we would have abandoned it. Public education is just such a concept. Taken to its logical extreme (everyone gets a free, top-notch education through the highest grade possible), clearly humanity would enter a Golden Age. So it works. So it's good. So we call it a "right." Privilege takes up where "right" leaves off, where economics makes it impractical to grant everyone everything. Someone somewhere must feel that everyone should have the "right" to live in a house. Right now, due to sheer economics, that's gotta be called a privilege, at least in this country.
It is interesting that these Ayn Rand-inspired Republicans can not see the forest for the trees in appreciating their dogma. They are proud of their Capitalism - but why? It's has resulted in the worlds largest concentration of wealth in known history. So then what makes Capitalism so great? They have accomplished the same outcome of every other empire, kingdom, Stalinist dictatoriship, or fascist dictatorship ever accomplished.
It's the concentration of wealth that is the sole indicator of how well we are promoting the general welfare. And my allegiance is not to GE or ADM. Its to the general welfare. My brothers and sisters - citizens.
It is tragically ironic that Congress and Obama extended the Patriot Act right before we celebrate Memorial Day. It does our fallen servicemembers such a great disrespect to trample the constitution that they died to defend and protect. That we might be a little safer is not worth the sacrifice of liberties that they died for. Memorial Day only shows how unpatriotic the Patriot Act is.
The dummer we are the better for them. Texas is already changing our history in public school books, just think what the private schools will do. And the poor, who will not be able to afford school, will have FOX news to enlighten them!
Privatization is simply a scheme (that should be criminal) to funnel taxpayer money to rich people.. Since the voucher system hurts the public schools, because it bleeds money away, therefore it dovetails nicely with the religious right bloc that wants to force their prayer into all schools (and freedom of religion rules was stopping them in public schools).. A perfect example is in Chicago where the crooked politicians sold the parking rights to a private company.. Now it costs much more to park, and the city doesnt get any profit from it (a lose-lose.. unless you consider the 1 - 3 people getting rich because of this.. out of maybe 6 million people in the area)..