Town Hall Meeting

With all the talk about health care, don’t forget there are U.S. military troops fighting or ready to fight all over the world. The question we should all ask is why?

Thanks G for the links!

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told a House Panel today that intelligence agencies have the authority to kill Americans if they are considered a terrorist threat. Blair is infamously known for giving aid to Indonesian military officers who led the 1999 Liquica Church Massacre, while commander of U.S. Pacific Command.

We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community, if … we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.

Whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American has — is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved.” Blair explained. “We don’t target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans.

“American Dad” and “The Cleveland Show” take a whack at the CIA and Blackwater…

This cracks me up, even though it’s sick on so many levels. It boils down the “war on terra” to a nice, little, easy to understand nub.

Memo to Doocy…it’s not just Muslims upset by the “Jesus Rifles,” it’s pretty much everybody with a brain or a conscience.

Of course this post is about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who allegedly hid chemicals in his underwear that “could have, if all went as planned, effected an explosion that might have at least disabled or even downed the plane,” a Delta Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Thus, the crotch bomber.

All this lame talk about Obama not connecting the dots to catch the crotch bomber, how about this one from 3 years ago!

Wouldn’t it be bad to have the perfect police state anyway? The entire interview, from June 19, 2006, is hilarious, by the way…

From the Inauguration, to Newspapers crumbling, to the Peace Prize, to Democrats. 2010 really is the Year of the Tiger!

Goodbye to 2009, Hello to 2010: Year of the Tiger

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN of Counter Punch

Once again hands are raised in stupefaction. How could they have missed him – meaning in this case Umar Abdulmutallab the Nigerian bomber on that flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Why, his own father – one of the most powerful bankers in Africa – gave the US embassy in Lagos a warning! He was on the US master computer list of potential terrorists but never made it on to the watch list.

The Truthers reject the obvious answers – caution, bureaucratic inertia, buck-passing, turf fights – and say it was a plot. Obama joins Bush and Cheney in the big conspiracy. It won’t be long before David Griffin rushes out a book on the affair.

Personally, I’m not at all dismayed at evidence that intelligence gathering networks are flawed, that bureaucrats pass the buck. Hyper-efficiency in these matters indicates we have arrived at the perfect police state.

Of course there is room for common sense and elementary vigilance. In the case of the Virginia Tech killer there was plenty of evidence that Cho Seung-hui was a time bomb waiting to explode. Students talked about him as a possible shooter and refused to take classes with him. His essays so disturbed one of his teachers with their violent ravings that she arranged a secret signal in case she needed security during her tutorials.

And then was there was proof positive that the time bomb had exploded and the mass murder session began in the engineering building, the police state proved all too human in actual performance. The police cowered behind their cruisers until Cho Seung-hui finished off the last batch of his 32 victims, then killed himself. Then the police bravely rushed in and started sticking their guns in the faces of the traumatised students, screaming at them to freeze or be shot.

Read the rest here

This is based on Zinn’s book “A People’s history of the United States: 1492-present” and the actual words of the people in the book, such as Helen Keller and Frederick Douglass. It’s going to appear on the “History Channel” on Sunday, December 13 at 8pm (7pm CT). Check it out, you will be amazed by the U.S. history you may have missed.

Bring back the draft. An all volunteer military is one of the worst ideas I can think of. It naturally leads to the whole idea of “the troops are better than us” stuff because only a certain type of person would go to war voluntarily. This idea is backed up by rhetoric from almost everyone in the media. Which then must make the troops wonder at some point, why am I dying for people who are just sitting at home drinking and having a good time, when I’m the better person? A draft democratizes war, and it helps ensure that a majority of Americans are in favor of it because they are the ones that will be fighting and dying for it.

The new season of the PBS show “Frontline” began and check out the 2nd episode. It goes into the economic debacle, started on Wall Street and built on the idea that the economy should not be regulated or subject to democratic principles – leave “the market” alone. Sort of a religious view, of blind faith, oddly enough. All must bow at the altar of the free market! The first few minutes is very interesting showing how Alan Greenspan ran the economy for so long and his very close relationship as a disciple of Ayn Rand.

Pres. Ford, Greenspan, and Rand in the White House

I hope the US news companies all air this speech in its entirety today. If you don’t painfully remember, the basic theme of the speech: give money to me so I can keep the powerful from losing all their money, otherwise we are taking you all down with us. Quotes below, in chronological order, are doozies:

“Most importantly, my administration is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets”

“democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised” (Did anyone ever get to vote for/against capitalism?!?! If not, how is it democratic exactly?)

“good luck losers, I’m retiring in two months!” (Okay, this last one was added by me)

The Israel/Palestine debacle can be confusing and nuanced. I highly recommend looking at a map anytime you are thinking about or discussing this issue. It is a great way to start a discussion from an honest place. In case there is yet another peace deal made, don’t buy into it unless you first see a map with clear borders, pointing to the settlements and Israel-only highways in the West Bank. I believe this is important not only because it will lead to justice, but because it is easier for the average person to understand.

The best place for maps of Israel and Palestine can be found at The Foundation For Middle East Peace. You can find all their maps here.

The most disturbing maps are of the West Bank. Check out a full screen view of the below West Bank Map here. The dotted green line is the internationally recognized border of the West Bank, written in 1949, the so-called “green line.” However, looking at a map, you can see just how aggressively Israel has usurped Palestinian land, beyond what they were given after World War 2.

This short video from American Friends Service Committee has a very enlightening set of maps of the West Bank that really tells you just how much land has been taken from Palestinians since 1948.

For more detailed information on Israel and Palestine and America’s involvement, watch this interview with Phillip Wilcox, President of the FMEP.

The PBS show Bill Moyers Journal (last Friday) started with an extremely enlightening discussion about Pakistan, with 2 people who have actually lived there (again, what a journalistic concept!). It seems most of the fear mongering is not true, sound familiar? For example, the “Taliban” in Pakistan are not really all Taliban. In reality there are a handful of different factions who do not all agree with each other that are being lumped in to the word “Taliban” by the US Establishment (mass media, political leaders, pundits). Then there are only about 4000 of these “bad guys,” vs about 550,000 Pakistani military forces. And the fact that Pakistan was able to get rid of a military dictator and demand free and fair elections and ended up electing the most popular candidate at the time (who has his own issues of corruption though), is considered a weak and unstable place!? What a propaganda job we are getting here in the good ‘ol US of A!

You may ask, “What is the motive for the fear-mongering?” The answer is the US wants Pakistan to do something it does not want to do, so threatening them and calling them unstable will force them to take action they would not otherwise take. In this case, the US wants them to militarily attack the northwest territories as a backstop for the US military’s efforts in Afghanistan.

Watch Moyers, Mufti, and Cole Discuss Pakistan

Amazing article by an excellent journalist Jeffrey St. Clair. It’s about a nuclear bomb that was lost off the coast of Savannah, GA in 1958 when two military planes accidentally hit each other. The government never recovered the bomb, so it sits there to this day. Instead they spent their time on a PR campaign in order to calm nerves in hopes to keep their precious nuclear program. Not to worry though, “We’ve looked into this particular issue from all angles and we’re very comfortable,” says the US Air Force. Your Department of Defense/War at work…

When We Almost Nuked Savannah
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, CounterPunch

Things go missing. It’s to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the military’s accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.

Those anomalies are bad enough. But what’s truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

Read the rest here

On a side note, if you haven’t read it yet, check out his book Whiteout which is part of our progressive library.

EXCERPTS:

“The US dollar will inevitably bear the full and ferocious brunt of the decidedly hyper-inflationary policies of Washington, notwithstanding the Federal Reserve’s empty promises to reverse such policies swiftly to protect the currency when inflation inevitably rears its ugly head again.”

“All the while, the strongest evidence indicates that when economic recovery finally arrives, it will be feeble at best for years to come. So the financial and economic sectors won’t be able to withstand any promised rapid reversal of Washington’s hyper-inflationary policies. But nor will the dollar be able to withstand the option of leaving such policies in place. Washington is therefore setting up the most colossal catch-22 imaginable for the dollar and for the US economy. The dollar cannot survive such a scenario intact.”

“China and its Eastern partners in Asia and the Middle East, have soured on the dollar’s future beyond the short to medium term. They’ve entirely lost faith in the ability of the US to really get its monetary, financial and economic houses in order before the repercussions of shortsighted policy come home to roost with a vengeance. They’re preparing new solutions that will take two or three more years to fully enact but which will shove the dollar aside toward the margins of international finance and international monetary policy. The handwriting is therefore on the wall for dollar-denominated financial assets.”

“When the catch-22 alluded to above soon becomes fully set in place and irreversible, say in the next few months when sufficient new sovereign debt is actually racked up, and then a short distance farther down the road when Washington, the Fed and the Treasury try to withdraw the present hyper-inflationary policies and find themselves fully trapped in that catch-22 bind, with no viable way out – say within the next 12 to 24 months – then Washington may have no choice but to let the Treasury default on some flavors of sovereign debt, while simultaneously inflating away some other flavors.”

“Unless the most rosy and unrealistic scenario comes about wherein vibrant US economic growth returns very soon, unless the government toxic asset and bailout plans become renowned successes, unless securitization gets a new lease on life and America is able to quickly get its house in order in the next three to four years, the dire forecasts here for US sovereign debt defaults and a dollar crisis, with all their colossal implications and repercussions, are unavoidable in the next 24 to 36 months at most. The UK and Japan face a similar outcome.”

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KE07Dj02.html

-Thanks G for the excerpts and link!

Where are the US news media and leaders? Simple economics 101 teaches that massive deficits and debt will lead to inflation or default or both. People should be warned so they can take measures to protect themselves!

Call me what you will, but I draw the line at habeas corpus. This can’t stand, it is so disappointing. Obama was a Professor of Constitutional Law too!

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/11/bagram/index.html

I recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s my summary…The story is about how Obama is continuing Bush’s policy of NOT providing Habeas Corpus to detainees in Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. And these prisoners are not just from the battlefield there, they are flown to this base from all over the world because they can be sent there forever. The Supreme Court said in June 2008 that prisoners in Guantanamo have a right to have a hearing to determine their guilt and challenge their detention (habeas corpus), so Bush just started sending guys to Bagram instead. Obama then in February filed a brief in federal court stating that he embraced this plan. Then a conservative federal judge, in March 2009, rejected Obama’s petition and said the Supreme Court ruling from 2008 applies to Bagram in addition to Guantanamo because the prisoners were foreign citizens caught elsewhere and just brought to Bagram to be detained. At the time of the June 2008 ruling, it was the height of the Presidential campaign, and you may recall that was when candidate-McCain called it one of the worst ruling in the history of the Supreme Court (this was laughable, try Plessy v Ferguson!). At the same time, candidate-Obama did the right thing and said the decision was great, and that it shows we can try and convict alleged terrorists using our tried and true justice system.

The most sickening part to me is how by doing this, all the lives lost fighting to get the right of habeas corpus over the centuries for all citizens are now looking like they were wasted by these actions. I highly recommend reading the “update” at the bottom of Greenwald’s report too…we can’t start saying things like: “I’m sure Obama has a good reason for it” which is exactly what Bush’s fan’s were saying all along.

Did anyone know that the 3 pirates killed by the US military were aged 17-19? Check out this interview by Davey D (Oakland representin) of K’naan a Somalian rapper, poet, activist about piracy. Again, what a novel journalistic technique: interview someone who is from the country you are reporting about! The largest point is the mass media omission of the fact that nuclear waste is being dumped into the ocean off the Somalian coast.

I signed it. I think its important, I hope you do too. War crimes and illegal actions must be prosecuted. Obama is totally wrong on this…a truth commission does not “look backward,” and IT IS “looking ahead,” because it means we want to show future people that your ass will be thrown in jail for this shit!

http://ga3.org/campaign/btcpetition

Peace!

We really are a country to envy, right?
So Christian at heart.

Man who froze over $1K in unpaid bills had $600K

BAY CITY, Mich – An attorney says a 93-year-old Michigan man who froze to death after a power company restricted electricity to his home over roughly $1,000 in unpaid bills left an estimated $600,000 to a hospital.

Marvin Schur’s attorney, Cathy Reder, told the Detroit Free Press the World War II veteran bequeathed his entire fortune to Bay Medical Center.

Schur’s frozen body was found Jan. 17, four days after Bay City Electric Light & Power installed a device on his electric meter that cuts power after a predetermined level is reached.

State regulators on Wednesday issued emergency rules designed to protect more people against electricity or heat shutoffs in the winter.

-Thanks A for the link

“Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”
— Frederick Douglass

Thanks Daily Show for being honest. Remember, change only can come from below, not above!

Thanks G for the link!

A friend of the president’s daughter, Barbara, writes about his experiences eating at the white house, before 9/11, and after, and how his view of him changed over time. There are some amazing insights in this article, check it out.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/01/dubya-and-me200901