modus operandi

1) Massive media build-up to new Wikileaks concerning bank$ter crime.

2) Leaks contain previously known data that the entire 'Merikan financial industry is a group of fraudulent criminals and your cash ain't nuthin' but trash.

3) Main$tream has fits about how Assange is attacking the basis of the 'Merikan way of Life, even though nothing really new is revealed... just like all the other Wikileaks.

4) Rinse brainwash and repeat about something else those who would rule you are successfully desensitizing you about.

only on a need-to-know basis

Despite all the hand-wringing Those Who Would Rule are going through, those who would read are undergoing a decided sense of deja vu about pretty much everything we're reading.

So the Saudi's fund the lion's share of the budget of Al-Qaeda. This is news?

No. This is a massive Company psychological operation.

even a stopped clock is right once a day

...and suggested here yesterday before they weighed in on it, Iran called this right:

TEHRAN — In Iran’s first official reaction to leaked State Department cables quoting Arab leaders as urging the United States to bomb Tehran’s nuclear facilities, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed the documents as American psychological warfare that would not affect his country’s relations with other nations, news reports said...

Of course, now that The New york Pravda quotes it from Iran, it must be Iranian propaganda. It says so right there on the label.

Yes, I am sure the Company led the cyber attack on Wikileaks over the weekend. Yes, I am sure they would lock Julian Assange in the pen if they had a chance. Yes, I am very sure Wikileaks is now a made site for D.o'D. psychological operations.

I suspect Assange is only reporting what the Company wants you to hear.

I can not be certain if he realizes it.

There is absolutely nothing in the last couple of rounds of leaks that wasn't already known by people who pay attention. Spying on the U.N. is news? Every Sunni muslim nation wants us to take out Shiite Iran is news?

So you have a quasi-illegal website that leaks information widely known as fact. The Afghani government is corrupt. We murder civilians. We spy on the Brits. Israel wants us to nuke Iran, and have a plan of their own for Iranian regime change. Really?

Then the Company gets a chance to advocate closing down websites and jailing anyone who says what many already know.

It's a really sweet scam, and the main$tream has fallen for it, since they stand to profit nicely from it.

top dis secret

The latest round of Wikileaks is released to the world, despite somebody hacking the website in a denial of service attack.

The Guardian is quick to announce their embarrassing contents to the world, and surprise! the hot potato that Uncle Sam is so worried about is that, by golly, Iran really wants a nuke, and the Israeli and Saudi and Egyptian and UAE governments are united in their desire to have us bomb 'em back to the stone age.

Oh, and we spy on our allies, too, if you can imagine that.

I find such a revelation touching, somewhere. Kind of like a TSA groin grope, I suppose. It's about as surprising as learning the Army is spying on the Navy, or the CIA is spying on the NSA, which spies on everyone else including you and me.

Yes, I am sure b'rer Sam does not want anyone to hear dis information.

can't get no satisfaction

The FBI successfully thwarts its own Terrorist plot.

I think the bit about keeping him in the Homeland and keeping him from getting a job, and then having undercover agents paying his rent and buying his groceries for him for a few months is particularly cute.

One wonders what happens when the Feds do not successfully thwart their own plots.

Perhaps someone should ask Osama bin Laden about that...

mythconstrued Hope and the changeling

Krugman notes that there's a consistent lack of reality in the worldview of the realist-in-chief:

...More and more, it’s becoming clear that progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion. Once you got past the soaring rhetoric you noticed, if you actually paid attention to what he said, that he largely accepted the conservative storyline, a view of the world, including a mythological history, that bears little resemblance to the facts.

And confronted with a situation utterly at odds with that storyline … he stayed with the myth.

This is a theme Krugman keeps returning to write about:

...In retrospect, the roots of current Democratic despond go all the way back to the way Mr. Obama ran for president. Again and again, he defined America’s problem as one of process, not substance — we were in trouble not because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas, but because partisan divisions and politics as usual had prevented men and women of good will from coming together to solve our problems. And he promised to transcend those partisan divisions.

...But the real question was whether Mr. Obama could change his tune when he ran into the partisan firestorm everyone who remembered the 1990s knew was coming. He could do uplift — but could he fight?

So far the answer has been no.

Right at the beginning of his administration, what Mr. Obama needed to do, above all, was fight for an economic plan commensurate with the scale of the crisis. Instead, he negotiated with himself before he ever got around to negotiating with Congress, proposing a plan that was clearly, grossly inadequate — then allowed that plan to be scaled back even further without protest. And the failure to act forcefully on the economy, more than anything else, accounts for the midterm “shellacking.”

Even given the economy’s troubles, however, the administration’s efforts to limit the political damage were amazingly weak. There were no catchy slogans, no clear statements of principle; the administration’s political messaging was not so much ineffective as invisible. How many voters even noticed the ever-changing campaign themes — does anyone remember the “Summer of Recovery” — that were rolled out as catastrophe loomed?

And things haven’t improved since the election. Consider Mr. Obama’s recent remarks on two fronts.

At the predictably unproductive G-20 summit meeting in South Korea, the president faced demands from China and Germany that the Federal Reserve stop its policy of “quantitative easing” — which is, given Republican obstructionism, one of the few tools available to promote U.S. economic recovery. What Mr. Obama should have said is that nations’ running huge trade surpluses — and in China’s case, doing so thanks to currency manipulation on a scale unprecedented in world history — have no business telling the United States that it can’t act to help its own economy.

But what he actually said was “From everything I can see, this decision was not one designed to have an impact on the currency, on the dollar.” Fighting words!

And then there’s the tax-cut issue. Mr. Obama could and should be hammering Republicans for trying to hold the middle class hostage to secure tax cuts for the wealthy. He could be pointing out that making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent is a huge budget issue — over the next 75 years it would cost as much as the entire Social Security shortfall. Instead, however, he is once again negotiating with himself, long before he actually gets to the table with the G.O.P.

But even his fighting words are an obvious lie. They're total disinformation, or worse, an indication that the One has no Clue about the consequences of economic policy. You can not improve the American economy without effecting the strength of the dollar.

But the Laureate knew that. He was just hoping to take the heat off.

So now we're facing down the Chinese economically, and with North Korea firing, perhaps militarily, too. But the Laureate will not face that, because he has Petraeus Caesar to do that for him. Good luck with that...

fracking typical

Main$tream actors working for the environment get put on the Terra watchlist.



Only because they knew their names...

made men

Via the Guardian, we are once again convinced ensnaring terrorists demands creativity... to the point of creating them:

A Somali-born teenager has been arrested on suspicion of trying to detonate a car bomb in the United States.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction after he tried yesterday to blow up what he thought was an explosives-laden van at an annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon, the justice department said.

But the bomb was a fake and had been provided to Mohamud as part of a long-term sting by undercover FBI agents...

One gets the impression much of the world as we know it is a long-term sting. Stephan Salisbury:

Informers have by now become our first line of defense in our battles with the evildoers, the go-to guys in the never-ending domestic war on terror. They regularly do the dirty work -- suggesting and encouraging the plots, laboring as bag men to move the money, fashioning the bombs, and eliciting the flamboyant dialogue, even while following the scripts of their handlers to the letter. They have attended to all the little details that make for the successful and now familiar arrests, criminal complaints, trials, and (for the most part) convictions in the ever-distracting war against... what? Al-Qaeda? Terror? Muslims? The inept? The poor?

The Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four -- each has had their fear-filled day in the sun. None of these plots ever came close to happening. How could they? All were bogus from the get-go: money to buy missiles or cell phones or shoes and fancy duds -- provided by the authorities; plans for how to use the missiles and bombs and cell phones -- provided by authorities; cars for transport and demolition -- issued by the authorities; facilities for carrying out the transactions -- leased by those same authorities. Played out on landscapes manufactured by federal imagineers, the climax of each drama was foreordained. The failure of the plots would then be touted as the success of the investigations and prosecutions.

A band of virtually homeless and penniless men in Florida, we were told, were planning to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. They just needed the right combat boots to pull it off, and a little free money.

A cell of New Jersey roofers, handymen, and cab drivers was scheming to use a laminated pizza delivery map to guide them through a devastating attack on Fort Dix, the enormous military base in Burlington County, south of Trenton.

Ex-cons in Detroit, mostly known for patronizing a weekly soup kitchen to stave off hunger, were also planning to set up their own country in Michigan under Islamic law.

And a band of Orange County New York parolees and former drug peddlers placed bombs at two Bronx synagogues and was preparing to launch missile attacks on military cargo planes at Stewart National Guard Air Base in Newburgh.

In the Liberty City Seven case, which revolved around two informants paid in excess of $130,000 for their services, the government tried the hapless defendants three times before finally wresting a conviction from a jury. One defendant was acquitted at the first trial, another in the third, and five were eventually convicted of at least some terrorism-related charges. In the Fort Dix case, jurors were shown horrific films said to be on a computer owned by one of the defendants, who claimed an FBI informant demanded more and more videos for viewing.

Another defendant actually called the Philadelphia police, mid-plot, and said he was being pressured to commit radical acts by what turned out to be an FBI informer. Prosecutors dismissed this as an obvious decoy maneuver. The key informer in that case -- the FBI eventually paid two people to spy on the group -- an Egyptian on probation, received $236,000 for his services.

Most recently, this duplicitous landscape of war-on-terror "success" has been illuminated yet again by the case of four alleged Newburgh, New York, conspirators -- the Newburgh Four -- and in the botched arrest and fatal shooting (a first for federal authorities) of an African American imam in Detroit, leader of the so-called Ummah Conspiracy. As the details have slowly emerged, these two cases offer vivid examples of how government-scripted many of the terror plots "uncovered" in the U.S. in recent years have turned out to be. Each case, in fact, offers a window onto a stark world in which nothing is what it seems to be...

Kind of makes you wonder about the sophisticated parcel-bombs regularly showing up and being intercepted on airplanes that don't normally screen for such things, doesn't it?

be thankful

...that Those Who Would Rule Us are really a bunch of idiots, or we'd be in worse trouble than we already are.

hostage syndrome

Shorter Ruth Marcus: Learn to love Big Brother.

Jane Hamsher's of a different take: trying to get progressives to sign petitions against the TSA.

At least she's got clear enough vision to see where it's all heading. But maybe she should listen to some of her own posters. We're all listed as domestic extremists now, at least those of us that use their own names.

Me? I'm sticking with my alias, and not signing my real name to anything Uncle Sugar can stick into his database.

It's that bad, people, and it not only can happen here, it's happening here and now.

bend over and smile

Obviously body-scanners and pat-downs couldn't catch this: Juan Cole

...Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, used PETN, as did Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the crotch bomber, last year this time over Detroit. PETN was in the HP cartridges sent by a Yemeni terrorist in cargo planes recently. And, a suicide bomber put some up his anus and used it in an attempt to assassinate the son of the Saudi minister of the interior (which does counter-terrorism). Yes, he was the first ass bomber, and he missed his target, though he no longer cares about that, what with being dead and all...

Yes, we might all long for the good old days of the groin grope as we're getting anal probes before we're allowed to board.

survival of the finest

it's in your genes



unfortunately, some would try to channel all that



Remember, something that might give you an edge makes the scions of Poppy work harder.

the fleecing of the lambs

So if you don't like either the x-rays or the grope guess what?

Soon you can buy your way past the $ecurity checkpoints.

shekissesfrogs:

...Chertoff is going to make a killing from more than one new security measure being put in place at American airports.

Not only did he make money as a lobbyist in order to obtain stimulus money to be spent on possibly unsafe xray porno scans, he is also going to reap profits from a biometric verified ID system that will whisk you past long lines and undignified checks reserved for the unwashed peasants for the low price of $179.00.

He’s one of the investors that picked up the bankrupt company “Clear” at auction. This system appears to be already up and running in Orlando and is slated to open in Denver in Nov 2010. Perhaps by Thanksgiving?

Well, not likely everywhere, but hey, word gets around, no? Sooner or later the chumps will be clamoring for RealID and their own biometric chip implants.

asking a question but talking around the answer

There are a lot of complaints right now about x-ray scanners that people are being subjected to, or the anal probe pat-downs those who opt out are getting.

Predictably, the tea cracker Republicans are making the most noise, and the most vocal main$tream Obama apologists (I'm looking at you, Jon Stewart and Lewis Black, you shameless shills) are trying to tell us don't worry, be happy.

But what I'm not hearing anywhere is this. Jacqueline Marcus:

...It's amazing what our government has forced us to accept in the name of "security". They've bankrupted our treasury to chase down a hundred or so Islamic extremists hiding in the mountainous caves of Afghanistan. The reasoning for this insanity is that "We must get them before they get us." In the last year alone, the military tab came to $100 billion dollars to find 50 or 100 extremists or "insurgents" who are fighting because they don't want the U.S. oil companies to steal their oil. We don't know how many people have died from our government's illegal, pre-emptive invasions in the name of security, but it's estimated over a million victims, fathers, mothers and children were killed, and hundreds of thousands of victims are maimed for life, including our soldiers. Meanwhile, weapon contactors profit by the billions on selling weapons for an unnecessary occupation while our government officials tell us that we "must sacrifice by cutting Social Security for the elderly," which is far more frightening to those dependent on that income than an extremist hiding in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan.

Now our deeply concerned government officials are forcing every law-abiding citizen to experience the humiliating treatment of entering a prison at the airports. We are forced to stand inside a whirling radiating scanner while images of our naked bodies are examined by strangers; and if we refuse, then we must be subjected to offensively intrusive pat-downs exactly like criminal prisoners on the verge of entering prisons instead of commercial airliners. And if you refuse both and decide to go home, TSA guards will chase you down and charge you an $11,000 dollar fine.

The pilots association this month instructed members to refuse body-scanner screening, out of concern that frequent exposure to the machines would subject them to health risks. Passengers are equally concerned for the same reason. Inspectors near the machines are also worried that radiation exposure is subjecting them to health risks.

These changes didn't take place because the searches prior to the body scanner machines and intrusive pat-downs weren't working: they were working extremely well. No, these changes happened because "the former Head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, had an ulterior motive in promoting the Airport security scanning machines that people are objecting to so strongly. The company that makes the machine is now one of Chertoff's clients but in the past under the Bush administration Chertoff was selling these machines to the government and to the Obama administration and they bought it hook, line and sinker...Michael Chertoff has been the leading promoter-sales pitch man for All body Scanners."

And note, that last quote is from the Republican-oriented Politico.

takeover bid

Babs and Poppy don't like her.

But multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch sure does:

...Palin needn’t join standard-issue rivals like Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty in groveling before donors and primary-state operatives to dutifully check all the boxes of a traditional Republican campaign. Palin not only has TLC in her camp but, better still, Murdoch. Other potential 2012 candidates are also on the Fox News payroll, but Palin is the only one, as Alessandra Stanley wrote in The Times, whose every appearance is “announced with the kind of advance teasing and clip montages that talk shows use to introduce major movie stars.” Pity poor Mike Huckabee, relegated to a graveyard time slot, with the ratings to match.

The Fox spotlight is only part of Murdoch’s largess. As her publisher, he will foot the bill for the coming “book tour” whose itinerary disproportionately dotes on the primary states of Iowa and South Carolina. The editorial page of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is also on board, recently praising Palin for her transparently ghost-written critique of the Federal Reserve’s use of quantitative easing. “Mrs. Palin is way ahead of her potential presidential competitors on this policy point,” The Journal wrote, and “shows a talent for putting a technical subject in language that average Americans can understand.”

With Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity on her side, Palin hardly needs the grandees of the so-called Republican establishment. They know it and flail at her constantly. Politico reported just before Election Day that unnamed “party elders” were nearly united in wanting to stop her, out of fear that she’d win the nomination and then be crushed by Obama. Their complaints are seconded daily by Bush White House alumni like Karl Rove, Michael Gerson, and Mark McKinnon, who said recently that Palin’s “stock is falling and pretty rapidly now” and that “if she’s smart, she does not run.”

This is either denial or wishful thinking. The same criticisms that the Bushies fling at Palin were those once aimed at Bush: a slender résumé, a lack of intellectual curiosity and foreign travel, a lazy inclination to favor from-the-gut improvisation over cracking the briefing books. These spitballs are no more likely to derail Palin within the G.O.P. than they did him...

It's not enough that Murdoch and the Koch brothers are successfully trying to buy Congress.

They're more than a little willing to use their major propaganda organ to attack the Company's own disinformation machine.

most war criminals agree

...global thermonuclear war would put a real dent in their wallets.



It's two Laureate mass murderers, a Fixer, and the guy who washes his Grand Am in the White House lawn trying to convince the Tea and Cracker Party about priorities.

The Russian crime Family seems to be ready to agree to limits, and the last thing the American crime Family wants is some local yokels to sour the deal.

Two heavy hitting DINOcrats and two really big Reptiles can come together on that. The Cracker Party had better listen- or stay out of small airplanes. It seems that some Tea Partiers haven't quite figured out where they fit in the scheme of things. That's the problem with crackers, they lack the wider view.

The Company has ways of handling that. Michelle Bachman, you of all people should remember Paul Wellstone.

You see, Poppy's getting a Medal of Freedom from his Bipartisan Laureate. The Laureate is working out just fine: doing everything Poppy would have done where ever it matters. The Laureate knows his place: he'll likely just step aside in 2012 if Jebbie's ready to run.

The last thing the Owners of the Family Business want is some knucklehead picciotti mucking up things and making a real run for the Oval Office. The bully boys and girls are supposed to convince the public of the need for protection, not piss off the other Families. The last thing the doge want is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Global thermonuclear war is bad for the Business.

"Liberal Progressives have got to realize Obama is NOT on our side"

Via Avedon, please listen:



She linked to this, too, which is pretty vital you understand:

..."And that doesn't begin to touch what Dave Dayen calls the 'killer app' in the proposal - 'Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P.' That would kill progressive government, one that 'promotes the general welfare,' forever. A revolutionary force at work, implacable and relentless."

Every time I hear someone saying it will take "a long time" or "years" or "a generation" to undo the mess we're in, I think, "Have you no understanding of history?" It was a miracle the Founders created what they did, and it took unique circumstances and thousands of years to get to that point. You think you're gonna come back from this? Unless something stops this train-wreck now - and I don't see anything like that happening - you can kiss it good-bye. Forever.

An understanding of history? In the United States of Amnesia? In the midst of economic shock therapy designed to make people hand over all their civil rights and money to their betters?

This is Rome, and the Visigoths are currently fighting our wars, not for us, but for those who would rule us. The day will come when we can not or will not pay our mercenaries what they feel they're due. That will precipitate the inevitable consequences of the road we're on.

"...The audacity of hope seems to have turned into a readiness to choke."

The neighbors are starting to notice.

...there is something crushingly disappointing about reports last week that the U.S. president is likely to retreat from his promise to cancel George W. Bush's tax cuts for the rich.

Such a capitulation to the Republicans would concede defeat before the battle to achieve greater equality and to "spread the wealth around" is even waged. The audacity of hope seems to have turned into a readiness to choke.

Obama's promise was a modest one -- to push the top marginal tax rate from 35 per cent back up to its Clinton-era level of 39 per cent.

Obama's reluctance to go further, to advocate restoring the serious progressive taxation that existed in the U.S. (and Canada) prior to the Reagan revolution, reveals much about the timidity and self-imposed limits of progressive politics today.

North American capitalism has changed dramatically in the last few decades. While a tiny elite always dominated, the benefits of economic growth were much more widely shared prior to 1980.

Whereas the top 1 per cent captured 9 per cent of the U.S. national income a few decades ago, today they capture an astonishing 24 per cent...

...while progressives argue for a better deal for the poor and middle class, they increasingly shy away from directly challenging the growing wealth concentration at the top and the ferocious political forces supporting that privileged elite.

But extreme wealth concentration isn't just a side issue; it's the root of the problem. Such wealth confers enormous political clout, giving the super-rich the power to block income redistribution efforts and to knock down financial regulations, opening the door to disastrous Wall Street crashes like the recent one we're still reeling from.

Indeed, such concentrated economic power undermines democracy itself. As the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted: "We can have democracy . . . or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. We cannot have both."

What is urgently needed is a powerful campaign challenging the moral legitimacy of a small faction having such a large share of society's resources, and with it, undue control over society.

Can't our progressive leaders today be at least as radical as Republican president Theodore Roosevelt was in 1906 when he called for a tax "whose primary objective should be to put a constantly increasing burden on the inheritance of swollen fortunes, which it is certainly of no benefit to this country to perpetuate."

I'm sure they would, if we had any.

planned obsolescence

The world will run out of oil around 100 years before replacement energy sources are available if oil use and development of new fuels continue at the current pace, a US study warns.

In the study, researchers at the University of California, Davis (UC-Davis) used the current share prices of oil companies and alternative energy companies to predict when replacement fuels will be ready to fill the gap left when oil runs dry.

And the findings weren't very good for the oil-hungry world.

If the world's oil reserves were the 1.332 trillion barrels they were estimated to be in 2008 and oil consumption was some 85.22 million barrels a day and growing at 1.3 percent a year, oil would be depleted by 2041, says the study published online last week in Environmental Science and Technology.

But by plugging current stock market prices into a complex equation, UC-Davis engineering professor Debbie Niemeier and postdoctoral researcher Nataliya Malyshkina calculated that a viable alternative fuel to oil won't be available before the middle of next century...

"To assess the time until a considerable fraction of oil is likely to be replaced by alternatives, we used advanced pricing equations to make sense of the large discrepancy between the market capitalization of traditional oil companies and the market capitalization of alternative-energy companies," Malyshkina told AFP.

The answer they came up with was that there would not be a widely available replacement for oil-based fuels before 2140, which, even if the more optimistic date of 2054 for oil depletion is retained, would mean there could be a nearly 90-year gap when it might be difficult to run a motor vehicle...

But these aren't linear extrapolations.

Investment in alternative energy will greatly increase when the invisible hand of the market is ready to push it along, and when the invisible player of the market (yeah, you vampire squid, I'm looking at you) is satisfied it's wrung about as much out the earth and the consumer as it can.

By that point, of course, the stars will have finished changing, the old ones will rule all, and post-industrial neo-feudalism will be the status quo.

ask a silly question

Are Obama and Congress Set To Screw American Counties, Homeowners and Give Wall Street Mortgage Banksters a Retroactive Immunity Bailout?

Why, yes indeed.

Fracking Peaked

Been there, done that. Now, apparently plateauing as long as it holds out.

...The agency does not see energy doom on the horizon, however. By its estimation, after a short dip in production, crude production will reach an “undulating plateau” of about 68 million barrels per day between 2020 and 2035.

Yet strong demand growth from China, which the report estimates is now the world’s largest energy user, and elsewhere will require liquid energy supplies to not just hold steady, but to climb by more than 20 percent.

Meeting that additional demand will fall entirely on unconventional oil sources like Canada’s tar sands as well as increased production of natural gas liquids. A major boost in these energy sources should be able to meet demand, but that is far from certain, Nobuo Tanaka, the agency’s executive director, told reporters in London, according to the Associated Press...

Fracking right! If you people can't let the patriots at Halliburton and their bank$ter owners do what's patriotically right, you deserve what's coming to you. And if you do let them do it they will doubtless make the case you deserve what you get, too.

hiding and hoarding a Ring of Power

James Russel Ruel was right in more ways than one about peoples' reactions to Sauron's jewelry.

WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades...



Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.

The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials...

But larger than 9,000, huh?

...In chronicling the cases of Nazis who were aided by American intelligence officials, the report cites help that C.I.A. officials provided in 1954 to Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolph Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans “to purge Germany of the Jews” and who later worked for the C.I.A. in the United States. In a chain of memos, C.I.A. officials debated what to do if Von Bolschwing were confronted about his past — whether to deny any Nazi affiliation or “explain it away on the basis of extenuating circumstances,” the report said.

The Justice Department, after learning of Von Bolschwing’s Nazi ties, sought to deport him in 1981. He died that year at age 72.

The report also examines the case of Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to the United States in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise under Operation Paperclip, an American program that recruited scientists who had worked in Nazi Germany. (Rudolph has been honored by NASA and is credited as the father of the Saturn V rocket.)

The report cites a 1949 memo from the Justice Department’s No. 2 official urging immigration officers to let Rudolph back in the country after a stay in Mexico, saying that a failure to do so “would be to the detriment of the national interest.”

Justice Department investigators later found evidence that Rudolph was much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the report says.

Some intelligence officials objected when the Justice Department sought to deport him in 1983, but the O.S.I. considered the deportation of someone of Rudolph’s prominence as an affirmation of “the depth of the government’s commitment to the Nazi prosecution program,” according to internal memos.

The Justice Department itself sometimes concealed what American officials knew about Nazis in this country, the report found...



The full report disclosed that the Justice Department found “a smoking gun” in 1997 establishing with “definitive proof” that Switzerland had bought gold from the Nazis that had been taken from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But these references are deleted, as are disputes between the Justice and State Departments over Switzerland’s culpability in the months leading up to a major report on the issue...

The full length report is here.

Better yet, someone explain to me why Switzerland, floating in a continent of Nazis and Fascists, was allowed by the Nazis to remain "neutral," with authorized air traffic passing in and out from the West even in the depths of the war.

But there's nothing deader than an 80 year old conspiracy theory.



Still, there you have it. The CIA scarfed up Hitler's finest after the war. The Ring of Power still resides in a secret bunker in Langely. Or maybe, Kennebunkport. But most certainly it is not worn by an inhabitant of the White House.

Anything a preznit might wear is a cheap orcish knock-off but doubtless controlled entirely by the real deal.

Because, count on it, the One is never shared or passed to another.

now it all makes sense

Quantitative easing explained, via Jane Hamsher, who is going to lose her opinion slots on MSNBC doubtless soon anyway.

Baiting the Switch

Krugman detests the results of the the Laureate's catfood commission.

...We’ve known for a long time, then, that nothing good would come from the commission. But on Wednesday, when the co-chairmen released a PowerPoint outlining their proposal, it was even worse than the cynics expected.

Start with the declaration of “Our Guiding Principles and Values.” Among them is, “Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P.” This is a guiding principle? And why is a commission charged with finding every possible route to a balanced budget setting an upper (but not lower) limit on revenue?

Matters become clearer once you reach the section on tax reform. The goals of reform, as Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson see them, are presented in the form of seven bullet points. “Lower Rates” is the first point; “Reduce the Deficit” is the seventh.

So how, exactly, did a deficit-cutting commission become a commission whose first priority is cutting tax rates, with deficit reduction literally at the bottom of the list?

Actually, though, what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans — the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest — and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.

It will take time to crunch the numbers here, but this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans. And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction?

Krugman is no liberal. What you have to remember is once again an effective response to the economic crisis is the FDR liberal one. An effective response to reality creates a liberal bias, but the catfood commission clearly has a Company one. Krugman's Carlyle-affiliated editors at The New York Pravda are trying to rally support for the bipartisan commission in spirit, which should make for some interesting discussions with Krugthulhu.

This is evidenced by a front page "news" piece that lumps liberal opposition to the findings of the catfood commission with the tea party, glorifying the bipartisan plunderers in the middle.

starstuff

we are

The Laureate Switch

Peacekeeping is now set to go on at least until 2014.

Politically correct leaders like Kissinger and Obama win the dynamite prize, simply so they won't have peace-making nukes flyin'. Kissinger talked Nixon into taking his hand off the button. Obama got Cheney away from the football. One supposes that's worth something.

But maybe a prison cell in the Netherlands with a view would be a better reward for war crimes.

Of course, it's never to late to fry. But for you home boys and girls it's the slow deep frier. No Social Security or Medicare for you, or tax cuts for the wealthy, count on it.

Why Destroy the RIng of Power?

So says the voice and the moustache of Sauron.

Why, indeed.



After all, it's in the interests of national security to destroy every last one in the sunlit world.

nothing to see here

"it wasn't our missile"



nothing you need to worry about

we have it- and you- all under control



move along, move along

one dream to rule them all

...one dream to find them
one dream to catch them all
forever more to bind them

[with apologies to a certain author who felt if the real world paralleled his, the Allies would have destroyed their Ring of Power]

Bob Herbert keeps almost figuring it out:

...People traveling in the real world understand that the federal budget deficits are sky high because of the Bush-era tax cuts, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the spending that was needed to keep the Great Recession from spiraling into another Great Depression.

Even if deficit reduction right now were a good idea — which it is not, given the sorry state of the economy and the vast legions of the unemployed — the deficit zealots have no viable plan for getting their misguided mission accomplished.

What’s needed now is the same thing that has been needed for the past two years and more, a bold plan to put millions of Americans back to work and paying taxes, and a careful, thoughtful, strategic but unequivocal withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

If we don’t engage these two issues effectively, there is little hope of getting to the other enormous challenges facing the country, including the metastasizing presence of poverty, the worsening problems facing already chronically underperforming public schools, and the deteriorating economic and social conditions that have drained the vitality of so many cities, rust-belt communities and rural areas.

The golden doors of opportunity are closing on America’s young. The United States, once the world’s leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, is now a sorry 12th among 36 developed nations, according to the College Board.

As a society, we’ve lost our way, and there is no chance of getting reoriented if we can’t find the courage to make some really tough decisions about warfare, taxes, public investment, the crying need to educate all young people, and the paramount importance of gainful employment as the cornerstone of a revitalized America.

Great sacrifices will have to be made if the U.S. is to get its act together, and those sacrifices will have to be shared. We can start now, or we can wait and continue to fantasize about an eventual triumph in Afghanistan, or about cutting budgets with some magic cleaver until they’re finally balanced and all’s right with the world, or whatever other impossible dream is floated by the chronically dissembling political class to blind us to the real world.

Well, yes, the operative term in this being if the U.S. is to get its act together. Given his level of insight, I suspect even Mr. Herbert is beginning to realize getting the act together is the last thing the money behind it all really wants. Many more widely read people are beginning to call what's really being sought for what it is: neofeudalism.

The author mentioned in the opening would recognize this situation too.

After a respite, the Shadow always grows from another shape...

Just a Mystery

The Preznitial Commission investigating why the oil rig exploded just can't imagine why it happened:

WASHINGTON — The lead investigator for the presidential panel delving into the BP oil spill said on Monday that he had found no evidence that anyone involved in drilling the doomed well had taken safety shortcuts to save money.



Fred H. Bartlit Jr., a prominent trial lawyer hired to lead the panel’s inquiry, disputed the findings of other investigators, including plaintiffs’ lawyers and members of Congress, who have charged that BP and its main partners, Transocean and Halliburton, had cut corners to speed completion of the well, which cost $1.5 million a day to drill.

“To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,” Mr. Bartlit said...

He indicated that a number of the contributing causes of the explosion might remain a mystery...

No evidence whatsoever, and for that matter, he's not sure it ever really happened.

Hope and Changeling, Tea Party Style

Rand Paul, that maverick libertarian who thinks B.P. should bring as much oil as it wants to dump to your shores, does the old bait-and-switcheroo before they can even swear him in:

...Senator-elect Rand Paul (R-KY), jumped on the anti-earmark bandwagon early, making “a ban on wasteful earmark spending in Washington D.C. one of the key points of his campaign” in March. Lambasting lawmakers who opt for “photo-ops with oversized fake cardboard checks,” Paul vowed to “dismantle the culture of professional politicians” even if he “ruffled a lot of establishment feathers” while doing it.

But after joining the GOP flock on Election Day, Paul is singing a different tune. In a Wall Street Journal profile this weekend, Paul signaled an about-face on his earmark position, committing to “fight for Kentucky’s share of earmarks and federal pork...”

Now that's a Congresscritter that's going places, but probably not before they catch him in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

The Triangulation of Changeling

The One is talking about beating the Republicans by being worse than the Republicans.

Again.

...the test is gonna be what happens over the next several years, when it’s not just an abstraction, but we have to start making serious choices. I’ve got a deficit commission that I’ve put forward that is gonna be releasing recommendations for how we can start reducing the deficit. And I don’t know yet what they’re gonna say, but I do know what the federal budget looks like. And if you eliminate all the earmarks. If you eliminate all the foreign aid. If you eliminate all the waste and abuse that people, you know, talk about eliminating — you’re still confronted with a fact that the vast majority of the federal budget are things that people really think are important. Like Social Security and Medicare and defense.

And so, you then have to start making some tough decisions about how do we pay for those things that we think are important? And you know, we’re not gonna be able to balance the budget just by slashing the National Parks budget, even if you didn’t think that was a proper function of government. We’re not gonna be able to balance the budget by, you know, eliminating the National Weather Service.

I mean, we’re gonna have to, you know, tackle some big issues like entitlements that, you know, when you listen to the Tea Party or you listen to Republican candidates they promise we’re not gonna touch...

Yes, the Republicans have always wanted to can Social Security, but they're not stupid brave enough to override the wishes of the American people and an eliminate a government program that more or less works.

Not the One though! The Changeling-in-Chief's got the Mendacity of Hope that carries him through your darkest hours.

breakfast of chumpians

Like there's a choice.

Rescind all the Bu$h era tax cuts. Use that $4 trillion on rebuilding infrastructure, on the environment, on green energy, and on health related research. I didn't notice a cure for Alzheimer's, cancer, or cardiovascular disease exactly on the shelves of the drugstore yet.

All of that would make jobs, increase manufacturing, clean the world, and end most of the problems of our own making.

Of course, ending the Endless War would help with all that, too.

Of course, none of that will be done, because either ending the tax cuts, financing a Recovery, or ending the Endless War would halt the 50-year plan to make us a post-industrial, neo-feudal society, and that won't be done.

"...- like 1850s America, when a strange vacuum of thought occupied the heart of political life"

-James Howard Kuntsler

... It's really too late for both parties. They're unreformable. They've squandered their legitimacy just as the US enters the fat heart of the long emergency. Neither of them have a plan, or even a single idea that isn't a dodge or a grift. Both parties tout a "recovery" that is just a cover story for accounting chicanery and statistical lies aimed at concealing the criminally-engineered national bankruptcy that they presided over in split shifts. Both parties are overwhelmingly made up of bagmen for the companies that looted America.
Alas, the damage is now so pervasive in money matters that the federal government could be toast as a viable enterprise, even if a new party or two spontaneously rose up out of the ruins of a plundered democracy. Anyway, one of them will not be the Tea Party, with its incoherent agenda and moron cadres who seek to put Jesus back in the US constitution, where he never was in the first place - though they don't know that.
Nor is there any party on the left or even in the center with a clue or a moral compass. Its just one of those tragic moments in history - like 1850s America, when a strange vacuum of thought occupied the heart of political life, and the scene was cluttered up with mere place-holders like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. (Can you state a single idea or position, these political ciphers advanced?)
Where we stand now is on the cusp of another giant step into the abyss, since the latest storm of Foreclosure-Gate suggests pretty strongly that mega-tons of mortgage-backed securities are assured of blowing up, as well as the sundry derivatives of these things (CDOs, CDOs-squared, plus the massive fetid matter infesting the alternative cosmos of credit default swaps). If you follow the media-of-record like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, you would have to conclude that there is no extant plausible notion among financial leaders as to how the fiasco of botched mortgage-and-title documentation can be resolved. After three weeks of emerging events around this debacle, the consensus among the power brokers is to pretend that there's no problem, that the issue of missing, forged, post-dated, trashed, or non-existent paper related to claims on property can just be put aside, brushed under the rug, glossed over, ignored...

Something wicked this way comes, and like Mr. Kuntsler, I suspect it will involve generals and violence as those who professionally ignore reality have the reality of ignorance handed back to them.

"...There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor..."

There is no factual basis for your words, either, Rand boyo.

Although, it's nice some have some appreciation of what they're plundering and what they're willing to do to feed their needs, and others have an appreciation of why they're plundering it.

Of course, the older, more experienced, hedge fund manager types have their trophy wives, their bloodlines, and pious lifestyles to consider... these all help them make even more money to feed their more mature vices.

Mustn't tell the kids...

And if you vocally don't appreciate the plunder? Why, at the very least you'll end up like Olbermann, hammered by his bosses for giving to the Democrats a fraction of what they gave to the Republicans. But you have to understand: our betters don't have to obey the same rules we do.

sunny weather

via

biting the hand that feeds us to the sharks

I have to disagree with Athenae. Krugman recapitulates the capitulation today, too but also attributes it to the wrong motivation, I think.

...Mr. Obama’s problem wasn’t lack of focus; it was lack of audacity. At the start of his administration he settled for an economic plan that was far too weak. He compounded this original sin both by pretending that everything was on track and by adopting the rhetoric of his enemies.

The aftermath of major financial crises is almost always terrible: severe crises are typically followed by multiple years of very high unemployment. And when Mr. Obama took office, America had just suffered its worst financial crisis since the 1930s. What the nation needed, given this grim prospect, was a really ambitious recovery plan.

Could Mr. Obama actually have offered such a plan? He might not have been able to get a big plan through Congress, or at least not without using extraordinary political tactics. Still, he could have chosen to be bold — to make Plan A the passage of a truly adequate economic plan, with Plan B being to place blame for the economy’s troubles on Republicans if they succeeded in blocking such a plan.

But he chose a seemingly safer course: a medium-size stimulus package that was clearly not up to the task. And that’s not 20/20 hindsight. In early 2009, many economists, yours truly included, were more or less frantically warning that the administration’s proposals were nowhere near bold enough.

Worse, there was no Plan B. By late 2009, it was already obvious that the worriers had been right, that the program was much too small. Mr. Obama could have gone to the nation and said, “My predecessor left the economy in even worse shape than we realized, and we need further action.” But he didn’t. Instead, he and his officials continued to claim that their original plan was just right, damaging their credibility even further as the economy continued to fall short.

Meanwhile, the administration’s bank-friendly policies and rhetoric — dictated by fear of hurting financial confidence — ended up fueling populist anger, to the benefit of even more bank-friendly Republicans. Mr. Obama added to his problems by effectively conceding the argument over the role of government in a depressed economy.

I felt a sense of despair during Mr. Obama’s first State of the Union address, in which he declared that “families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.” Not only was this bad economics — right now the government must spend, because the private sector can’t or won’t — it was almost a verbatim repeat of what John Boehner, the soon-to-be House speaker, said when attacking the original stimulus. If the president won’t speak up for his own economic philosophy, who will?

So where, in this story, does “focus” come in? Lack of nerve? Yes. Lack of courage in one’s own convictions? Definitely. Lack of focus? No...

The problem was and is not a lack of courage in one's own convictions among the Democrats, the problem is a lack of real convictions.

Democrats weren't cowards, they were and are owned by a lot of the same people that own the Republicans.

Goldman-Sachs, beotches. So does $electing an ex-faculty member of the University of Chicago mean anything to you? This administration was designed to fail. Heckuva job, Larry.

And this sanity meme, really, now who owns Jon Stewart these days? One hears he's getting love letters from Timmeh Geithner. Or something.

So the One just goes belly-up and compromises more, for the next couple years. We will all be told by our DINOcrat betters how unSerious and how childish we are for bitching every time the One capitulates, because after all Resistance is Futile, right?

After all, if we let the Serious have their way, everything goes so Right. Take Iraq, where combat operations have ended, with an untold number of mercenaries still fighting in non-combat roles, our soldiers guarding the bases guarding the oil-fields, and billions going to bribe the Sunni not to fight us. Or Afghanistan, where we bankroll the warlords producing the opium that makes the heroin addicting more and more kids on the street.

But it's all our fault, us moonbats, because we refused to praise the wire that garrottes us.

No, the Democratic leadership believes in the real Progressive values it's constantly going on about in the same way the Republican leadership believes in the real Christian values it's constantly going on about.

That is, not at all.

Heckuva job, Larry

Mission accomplished, and the One is ready to compromise.

Of course, he started compromising before they'd even sworn him in...

Chris Floyd:

...History gives this proof: in almost every national election for the past two decades, we have seen a change in control of either one or both houses of Congress or the White House. This has happened in 1992, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2008, and now again in 2010. The pattern is very clear. And it is not because Americans “prefer divided government,” as the dim chewers of Beltway cud like to tell us; it’s because they can’t get anyone in the system to address their concerns.

Yet with every turnover in factional control, we see a rush of earnest, serious analysis telling us how the results represent a vast sea change in America’s politics, culture, society, soul, etc. But somehow, two years later, these momentously meaningful tidal waves ripple into nothing on the empty shore. And again, that’s because they don’t actually signify anything beyond the by-now perennial unease and dissatisfaction.

What is less heartening, of course, is the fact that the American electorate never quite grasps the obvious, glaring, brutal fact that neither of these factions is ever going to change the system one iota if they can help it; they are the system, they are its servants, its enablers, its enactors. Then again, we are dealing with, to borrow Gore Vidal’s deathless phrase, the United States of Amnesia, where history doesn’t exist (except in the form of feverishly distorted self-righteous myths about America’s eternal super-duper specialness), and every election is a tabula rasa . The only flickering historical awareness that seems to exist in the American electorate is a vague sense that the gang they voted in two years ago hasn’t changed anything; better try the other gang again … forgetting this is the same gang they threw out the time four years ago, for the same reason...

Meanwhile, the reptile they could not frogmarch is gloating to his ba$e:

...“Climate is gone,” said Rove, the keynote speaker on the opening day of a two-day shale-gas conference sponsored by Hart Energy Publishing L.L.P. And Rove told the trade show, “I don’t think you need to worry” the new Congress will consider proposed legislation to put the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing under federal rather than state regulation. The procedure, known as “fracking,” is responsible for the dramatic growth of shale-gas drilling in formations such as Pennsylvania’s vast Marcellus Shale...

And if you're presiding over the greatest mass extinction since the Mesozoic era, why not go all the way and recapitulate the Mesozoic?

the more things Change, the more they stay the strange

Chris Hedges on the Phantom Left:

The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for “moderation.” And while we waste our time talking nonsense, the engines of corporate power—masked, ruthless and unexamined—happily devour the state.

The loss of a radical left in American politics has been catastrophic. The left once harbored militant anarchist and communist labor unions, an independent, alternative press, social movements and politicians not tethered to corporate benefactors. But its disappearance, the result of long witch hunts for communists, post-industrialization and the silencing of those who did not sign on for the utopian vision of globalization, means that there is no counterforce to halt our slide into corporate neofeudalism. This harsh reality, however, is not palatable. So the corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.

The phantom left took a central role on the mall this weekend in Washington. It had performed admirably for Glenn Beck, who used it in his own rally as a lightning rod to instill anger and fear. And the phantom left proved equally useful for the comics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who spoke to the crowd wearing red-white-and-blue costumes. The two comics evoked the phantom left, as the liberal class always does, in defense of moderation, which might better be described as apathy. If the right wing is crazy and if the left wing is crazy, the argument goes, then we moderates will be reasonable. We will be nice. Exxon and Goldman Sachs, along with predatory banks and the arms industry, may be ripping the guts out of the country, our rights—including habeas corpus—may have been revoked, but don’t get mad. Don’t be shrill. Don’t be like the crazies on the left.

“Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?” Stewart asked. “We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is—on the brink of catastrophe—torn by polarizing hate, and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done. But the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don’t is here [in Washington] or on cable TV.”

The rally delivered a political message devoid of reality or content. The corruption of electoral politics by corporate funds and lobbyists, the naive belief that we can somehow vote ourselves back to democracy, was ignored for emotional catharsis. The right hates. The liberals laugh. And the country is taken hostage.

Fox News’ Beck and his allies on the far right can use hatred as a mobilizing force because there are tens of millions of Americans who have very good reason to hate. They have been betrayed by the elite who run the corporate state, by the two main political parties and by the liberal apologists, including those given public platforms on television, who keep counseling moderation as jobs disappear, wages drop and unemployment insurance runs out. As long as the liberal class speaks in the dead voice of moderation it will continue to fuel the right-wing backlash. Only when it appropriates this rage as its own, only when it stands up to established systems of power, including the Democratic Party, will we have any hope of holding off the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.

Wall Street’s looting of the Treasury, the curtailing of our civil liberties, the millions of fraudulent foreclosures, the long-term unemployment, the bankruptcies from medical bills, the endless wars in the Middle East and the amassing of trillions in debt that can never be repaid are pushing us toward a Hobbesian world of internal collapse. Being nice and moderate will not help. These are corporate forces that are intent on reconfiguring the United States into a system of neofeudalism. These corporate forces will not be halted by funny signs, comics dressed up like Captain America or nice words...

Besides, the Tony Starks co-opted that Captain America schtick a long time ago.

what is this "compromise" of which they speak?

Kinda hard to triangulate when the other side's trying to send you to the slammer before they even take their seats.

As expected, the main$tream and the DLC/ DNC are crying about how this means Obama's taken things too far left, when the real problem is he has only made baby steps that couldn't possibly have worked the way he claimed.

The real problem is that he's mostly been yet another bank$ter owned president. The bank$ters have turned against him because he wasn't quite a member of the club, University of Chicago faculty and Harvard education aside. Of course, that's the kind of thing the boys don't talk about outside the clubhouse.

The bank$ters aren't exactly fond of the too tea-partied either. Rand Paul won his race, but let's face it, any Southerner willing to say BP has the right to dump all the oil it wants into the Gulf isn't too tea'd off for the old boys.

A word to the wise, Barry: dump those CIA killers who think they give you the orders, hire some real brothers and sisters to cover you, and do a Roosevelt. People respect you for the kind of enemies you make. Make enemies of Goldman-Sachs. Prosecute some bank$ter butt, even if you can't survive prosecuting Poppy's boy.

If the Congresscritters throw a subpoena at you, throw 'em right back. They are on the average at least as dirty as you are, you likely know where the bodies are buried, and you have the advantage.

Use it, or lose it, sir.

the lunatics own more of the asylum

They haven't made off with it all, but you bet they're going to act like they did.

The $enate? Not the worst case scenario, but almost as bad: Reid the spineless casino shill remains in charge. Better than the asshat in charge of the House, better than the corrupt, sociopathic, psychotic and obtuse Angle, but corrupt and weak nonetheless.

Robert Scheer:

...Barack Obama deserved the rebuke he received at the polls for a failed economic policy that consisted of throwing trillions at Wall Street but getting nothing in return. His amen chorus in the media is quick to blame everyone but the president for his sharp reversal of fortunes. But it is not the fault of tea party Republicans that they responded to the rage out there over lost jobs and homes while the president remained indifferent to the many who are suffering.


At a time when, as a Washington Post poll reported last week, 53 percent of Americans fear they can’t make next month’s mortgage or rent payment, the president chirped inanely to Jon Stewart that his top economics adviser, Lawrence Summers, who was paid $8 million by Wall Street firms while advising candidate Obama, had done a “heckuva job” in helping avoid another Great Depression. What kind of consolation is that for the 50 million Americans who have lost their homes or are struggling to pay off mortgages that are “underwater”? The banks have been made whole by the Fed, providing virtually interest-free money while purchasing trillions of dollars of the banks’ toxic assets. Yet the financial industry response has been what Paul Volcker has called a “liquidity trap”—denying loans for business investment or the refinancing necessary to keep people in their homes...

While the One deserved the rebuke, we certainly don't deserve the asshat(s) now running Congress. You can only hope Barry O. resolves to show a little backbone- because otherwise Social Security is a gone. Unless, of course, that was an anticipated move in the n-dimensional chess game he's obsessed with, while Wall Street plays poker with your mortgage.

a clear choice

The choice is between a corrupt sociopathic government and a corrupt sociopathic government run by psychopaths.

I voted straight Democratic. Like there is a choice.

taking the long term view on the day of the dead

What happens to a world in Endless War?



Is it just part of the script?

Got yer Hope and Change right here

...Rather than us selecting who we want, they sense what we're going to want, and they provide it to us in the form of an imposter, an actor, someone who plays the part of what we want.

Then they write the script, telling us how we're feeling, what we want, and OH WOW LOOK here comes a guy who fits the bill. This guy remarkably finds the obstacles to office dissolving at his approach, then he's in.

We've done it!

Right now, the script is that Obama is bogged down, Americans are unhappy, they're gonna vote pretty much anybody into office as long as they're not the incumbent, and the Dems will control one branch, the Repubs the other.

That will take care of the stagnation, and no need for anyone to explain any more why nothing's really getting done (considering the Dems have majorities in both, and a Dem President). Now they can just say "well, it's gridlocked".

For two years there they really didn't have much of an excuse except Obama saying "gosh it's so HARD" and blaming the "Republican'ts".

A new script is being written right now, behind the scenes, and we will be presented with new false choices in 2012. And everybody will get all fired up about it, ridiculously emotional about it (considering the utter lack of power all of us actually have with our little "votes") and the script will be produced. The plan will be in place, as it has been for generations now....