08.18.09
Quick clips
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05.18.09
A few more thoughts on The Legacy(tm)
Maybe not really, not a lot of thoughts. Saturday Night Live did the definitive sketch on it, with George Bush giving advice to Dick Cheney on how he should handle the situation. There’s not much more a person can say about it, at least not if they have a real sense of humor, which nobody ever accused the real Dick Cheney of having.
And after you’re done with that, you can take a look at the coversheets that Donald Rumsfeld made for his daily reports to Bush after the invasion, to keep his spirits up by keeping him focused on the “religious crusade” aspect of the war.
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04.07.09
The Ted Stevens prosecution: the sequel
Last week, when the case against Ted Stevens was dropped for prosecutorial mishandling, we heard about evidence that was withheld from the defense. It happens all the time, but rarely is it so severe that anything comes of it, at least not influencing the disposition of the case.
As in the Coleman/Franken case, the judge usually finds out about it and chews out the lawyers. Occasionally the judge will throw out a case.
Now if you were one of those defendants who doesn’t have a lot of money for expensive lawyers, you’d never even know it happened to you. They’d probably get away with it every time, which obviously is not the way the justice system is supposed to work in this country.
But for the case to be completely dropped, rather than merely seeking a retrial of some sort had to mean that the case was so ‘poisoned’ by whatever had been done that it could not be retried.
There was even speculation that the Bush administration was responsible for making sure that the case would inevitably be thrown out on appeal, thus being an embarrassment for everyone involved, except of course Ted Stevens, who is claiming that this is proof he never did any of the things that they said he did.
Not hardly.
Well, of course we assumed that maybe somebody would get a slap on the wrist, or some Bush appointee would get pushed out of their job a bit early and end up getting wealthy writing slanted books rewriting history as fiction and giving interviews on hate radio claiming persecution by liberal fascists.
Not so. It seems that we really will find out wtf was happening.
“In nearly 25 years on the bench, I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case,” U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said.
And then he appointed a special prosecutor to figure out exactly what happened and bring the criminals in the department to justice.
YES!
In case there is any confusion about what “justice” might mean in a case like this, they are looking at disbarment and prison time.
The word is that the Bush administration has salted the employment rolls of the current administration with hangovers who are ‘moles’, undercover operatives waiting to take orders from Bush, Cheney, Rove, and the Republican caucus and sabotage whatever the Obama adminstration tries to do.
Let’s get the criminals out of there. Now.
Stevens case closed, case against prosecutors open
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03.30.09
Preparation for economic collapse
In this lecture given Dec 4 2006, Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US, Dmitry Orlov compares the US infrastructure, economic system, etc. of 2006 with comparable Soviet systems of the time just prior to their economic collapse.
The article is long and filled with slides. Just to sum up, he feels the US is in much worse shape and highly unlikely to recover anytime soon from what he saw at that time as its inevitable economic collapse.
The solution? As he sees it, there is nothing anyone can do to prevent it. The majority of systems in this country are geared toward providing profit to business at the expense of infrastructure, transportation, health, and agricultural stability. Politicians have nothing to gain by fixing the system. They feed off it and are rewarded not by making the sort of really hard decisions that have not even been considered yet, but by focusing on trivialities and irrelevancies.
So what can we do? His surprising recommendation is that we as individuals should start hunkering down. We should do whatever it takes to remove ourselves to the margins of society and become accustomed to a low but sustainable standard of living. We should remove our money from financial institutions and put it into durable goods.
We should definitely grow our own food, as best we are able.
Pretty scary stuff, and so prescient. It rather reminds me of a ’50′s era cookbook and survivalist guide I once read, whose mission was getting people through the coming nuclear holocaust. The method for achieving wealth when money became valueless due to hyperinflation or the necessity of barter for survival? Lay in a supply of tobacco. When the chips are down, you will be able to charge whatever you want.
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01.14.09
The Bush Legacy Project
Many thanks to The Onion for this great video.
Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency
Bush and his Legacy Triage Team™ have been hitting The Bush Legacy™ really hard lately. The crack Historical Revision Writing Team™ has been hard at work rewriting history, what else? Sorry guys, you can’t have it both ways. Of course history will judge him somewhat differently, at least partly based on what we’re going to find when the whole, filthy, corrupt, venial facts come out. The Bush Legacy Triage Project™ attempt to control debate right now is necessary because any unbiased review of the events of the past eight years makes him look worse. The assumption that somehow people will forgive, forget, or somehow discount as unimportant the criminal things that the current administration has been responsible for is laughable wishful thinking.
Put another way, demanding that we reserve judgment on the effectiveness of the Failed Bush Presidency™ while insisting that we declare the escalation surge a success right now, before the escalation surge and/or war is over and certainly before we can see if it had any effect on a lasting peace in the country… The notion is absurd.
Getting real now, here’s a little story from last week based on a friendly little interview of Dick Cheney in a Wyoming newspaper, where he claimed 1.) he never pays attention to polls and 2.) he doesn’t understand why people hate him.
Now the fact that 2.) would indicate he really does know what the polls are saying, meaning 1.) is a lie. Yeah, we’re all flabbergasted, but go ahead and enjoy the article.
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11.22.08
The new Ozymandias
…or Ozymandias illustrated. Perfect.
Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
Link
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10.26.08
Your tax dollars at…play?
No John McCain today. Or at least not very much John McCain. Though he certainly played a role in the financial mess that’s been building up for a long time, he’s not a central character in the meltdown. He’s got more blame than some, but less than many others.
Sarah Palin? Forget her. She knows nothing. She thinks progressive taxation is Marxist and Obama’s going to come and take your house right after he lets those tax cuts for the rich expire. I’ll bet she even thinks she’s rich, but she certainly won’t after the tax bill comes in on that $150,000 wardrobe the RNC gifted her.
Hint to Sarah Palin: Use somebody other than H&R block this time. They didn’t give you good advice on that per diem and family travel thing last year. This year better just start with a tax lawyer.
Remember when a bank or two failed, the market crashed, another bank or two failed, and the next thing you knew there was Paulson with a bailout plan in his hands, saying that Congress had to enact this immediately OR ELSE? When asked how long he had had to put it together, he said that it had been months in the making, but Congress needed to read it overnight and act immediately.
Congress balked when their constituents got upset that bankers were going to get huge salaries, bonuses, and golden parachutes from this. So to sweeten the pot, Paulson announced that the money would not be spent on compensation packages for executives. And the FBI announced that they were starting an investigation into the possibility of fraud by employees of failed financial institutions.
Fast forward. Almost immediately, the FBI drops the investigation. There never was one. Large sums of money have been spent on compensation packages and all kinds of perks. AIG keeps sending its top executives to spas and resorts for “meetings”. They’re back at the till with their hands out, and guess what? They have not created a single job. They have lad off loads of people, and now the banks are planning on using the money to buy up other banks for pennies on the dollar and improve their profitability.
They are not going to lend out a dime of the money. But they want lots more of it.
Here’s the issue, as I see it. This is not just a case of suddenly the market failing. Remember, they had been working on that plan for “months”. How many months? They’re not saying. But notice that the sum total of the plan is to give money to rich people. They came up with a plan that did nothing to remedy the causes of he problem (bad loans packaged into bad investments and relabeled as good). The only thing it is doing is throwing money at rich people a/k/a “supply side economics”, “trickle down economics”, or “voodoo economics”. Needless to say, supply side economics has been completely discredited, but here we are, proving yet again that when you give money to rich people, they get richer. They don’t put it all into new employment. Doesn’t happen.
So if they started months ago, how many month ago? When might somebody have seen this coming?
Let me suggest November of 2004, right after Bush “won” the election. I had said all along that he was planning on bankrupting the country in order to eliminate the future feasibility of a social safety net. Now it appears that with his friends Bernanke and Paulson, he is planning on emptying out the Treasury as a gift to his ultra-wealthy friends. The market crash was planned. Through pulling strings and making crucial transactions, Bush and Co. managed to bring down the market so we would be “forced” to give them whatever they wanted. There was no long-term loss to them. The market will recover and they will get their losses covered many times over. And they will keep asking for money until we tell them no.
This is the biggest redisribution of wealth in history, from the poor to the rich. It will push many middle class people into poverty, and one of the purposes of this whole operation is to bankrupt the country so no one can help. The Republicans in the Senate will filibuster over and over again, then blame the problems on the Democrats.
Failure to act on a serious issue they were aware of is reckless irresponsibility. Trying to destroy the economy and loot the Treasury, the only word that comes to mind is “Treason”.
So what do we do? Find the crooks. Throw the book at them. We’ve got laws, let’s use them.
Just this week Bush said in a speech that “this moment” would be the moment we looked back to and realized that the program is working. I think not.
It’s time to for some serious reckoning.
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09.22.08
If McCain/Palin=Bush/Cheney…
I don’t know what happened… Well actually, I do know. I was looking at these more or less random free graphics software download thingies, and all of a sudden I had the irresistable urge to morph something more meaningful than the line drawing smilies I saw in the little demo on the web.
Whew! I know I’m preaching to the choir, but here it is.
Does she really, really want us to think of her as a “pit bull with lipstick”? I’ve done the research and it’s .not.flattering.at.all.
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09.20.08
Charts and graphs
To demonstrate the effect of “fiscal conservatism”, here’s a graph showing what happens to the National Debt when Republicans are in charge.
It looks like “fiscal conservatism” is actually referring strictly to slicing out entitlement programs for the people on the bottom, since it doesn’t apply to anything else. Entitlement programs for the rich and ultra-rich seem to be untouched.
While I believe that the Democrats in Congress have been shirking their Constitutional duties by not kicking the bums out of office, their options are not as great as many people seem to feel they are.
Now we all know how Dubya ran for office saying he was going to be the “Great Uniter”. Somehow he just kind of figured that everybody was going to do as he said, and this would unite them all. Hmm, that one seems to have gone down with the “One Thousand Points of Light”. His entire strategy has been to divide and conquer.
So now let’s take a look at how well the Republicans have been playing with others in Congress.
Looks like they set a record, eh? Kind of like the guy who pulls into the intersection even though he knows he’s not going to be able to clear it and will end up blocking all traffic in any direction. If he can’t have his way, then ain’t nobody gonna go.
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Campaign ads, video and tv
I blame it on Firefox. What happens is that when I open up a link in digg.com, it opens a new tab. If it looks like it’s interesting enough to blog up, I leave the tab open and go back and look for more stories. Sometime later I have so many tabs open that the idea of blogging all these important stories—even just to drop in the links—starts to become burdensome.
I will try.
Here’s a good one: Palin forgets the answer to her “National security experience” question the first time it is asked publicly.
McCain on health care
Note the part about how he assumes that the employee is going to receive enough money from his employer to buy a cheaper individual policy that pays more benefits, just because he wants it to happen.
Mccain celebrating his birthday with Charles Keating, just in case anybody has forgotten about his role in the last big financial collapse in this country.
This I believe, by a vet who returned to find out what his government really thinks of returning vets.
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