This is Crazy! This is Bizzarro world! This is unacceptable language coming from an elected official like Mitch (the bitch) McConnell who took an oath to serve the public and the citizens of the United States. ALL of us, not just the rich. He should be thrilled that finally someone can be on the side of 'the little guy'. What a crock of shit that line is. As read on "Evil GOP Bastards":
"Since the New Deal, Republicans have been on the wrong side of every issue of concern to ordinary Americans; Social Security, the war in Vietnam, equal rights, civil liberties, church- state separation, consumer issues, public education, reproductive freedom, national health care, labor issues, gun policy, campaign-finance reform, the environment and tax fairness. No political party could remain so consistently wrong by accident. The only rational conclusion is that, despite their cynical "family values" propaganda, the Republican Party is a criminal conspiracy to betray the interests of the American people in favor of plutocratic and corporate interests, and absolutist religious groups. "
Prove.Me.Wrong.
What a sniveling weasel 'the Bitch' is. Typical Republican in the pockets of Wall Street, he could give a shit about the people being robbed by financial institutions EVERY DAY of millions of dollars in what should be illegal tricks, spin and obfuscation. I get so disgusted watching this ignorant fuck work his way around the shit-sandwich that is a lie from start to finish that we do not need a Consumer Financial Protection Agency or Elizabeth Warren. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Hate Media AND the MSM all serve the Financial Industrial Complex very well by adding to the negative noise. This is all about the money. They love the money.
Republicans are all about the money. No Altruism, No sharing, no community all 'Atlas' all the time. This has been my experience for years and years. This focus on money is what makes a Republican a Republican in the 21st century. Sad.
The author of the song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" – which helped pioneer sounds that would fuse to become rap – has died in New York City. Musician Gil Scott-Heron was 62.
Scott-Heron recorded "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" in the 1970s in Harlem.
He mixed minimalistic percussion and spoken-word performances tinged with politics in a style he sometimes referred to as bluesology. He recorded more than a dozen albums. An American poet, musician, and author known primarily for his late 1960s and early 1970s work as a spoken word soul performer and his collaborative work with musician Brian Jackson. His collaborative efforts with Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues and soul music, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time.
As an impressionable young man in the mid-70's, I was impressed by the frank nature of his writing and song composition, edgy at the time with no fluff to be found. I hated fluff in the 70's.
Here are a couple of my favorites from Gil:
"Johannesburg" - a call to action against Apartheid.
"The Bottle" - this song hits a little too close to home for some people of all colors including white.
Thanks Gil for your work and your music. You will be missed.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, U.S. Representative for New York's 14th District has taken a stand on the Elizabeth Warren nomination for the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
Last week, 44 Republican Senators signed a letter to President Obama declaring that they will refuse to confirm anyone as a director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) "absent structural changes that will make the Bureau accountable to the American people."
The changes they propose -- which match legislation being considered today by the full House Financial Services Committee-- would cripple the bureau and slow the reforms necessary to help avoid another financial crisis.
In other words, Senate Republicans have the CFPB, and if we ever want to see it alive, we have to meet their demands.
My good friend and colleague Barney Frank called this "the worst abuse of the confirmation process I've ever seen" and I couldn't agree more.
Now is the time for Democrats to put all out pressure and make Boehner and McConnell cough up the details on their planned cuts. Make them caught up the details on how they envision gutting medicare and other programs, and hang those around their necks. We have already seen how these guys can get easily flustered if you put a little pressure on them and force them to deal with facts.
Democrats need to keep pushing them to cough up their plans on how they want to cut the deficit. Make them spell out the details on their plan to gut medicare. Now is the perfect time to turn that heat up even more.
Politico reports that supporters of George W. Bush are “irked” that the former president isn’t getting more credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, despite the droves of conservatives lawmakers and pundits who have been rushing to give Bush equal credit as Obama.
But this praise for Bush relies on rewriting history to obscure the fact Obama re-prioritized the hunt for Bin Laden after Bush had largely abandoned the effort to focus on Iraq.
While many conservatives are triumphantly replaying Bush’s September 2001 declaration that he would find Bin Laden, just months later, by Bush’s own account, he was unconcerned about the terrorist mastermind. Asked about the hunt for Bin Laden at a March, 2002 press conference, Bush said, “I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq.” “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you,” Bush added.
By 2006, the trail for Bin Laden had gone “stone cold” and Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes said Bush told him that hunting Bin Laden was “not a top priority use of American resources.” (Indeed, there was a flailing war in Iraq to fight.)
In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military’s counterterrorism units, like the Army’s Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.
But Bush’s biggest misstep in the Bin Laden hunt occurred years before, in the early days of the war in Afghanistan. As a 2009 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report found, the Bush administration blew a critical opportunity to capture Bin Laden in 2001. Bin Laden was wounded and on the run, but top Bush national security officials rejected repeated pleas for reinforcements from commanders and intelligence officials fighting the terrorist leader in the caves of Tora Bora, despite the availability of resources:
Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan. The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines. Instead, the U.S. command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias. [...]
Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, [Commanding Gen. Tommy] Franks refused to deviate from the plan.
The report “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora,” but that decisions made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputies, and other top administration officials allowed Bin Laden to escape.
The consequence of this missed ooportunity are tremendous. As Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, told NPR yesterday, “if bin Laden had been killed in Afghanistan eight years ago in the caves of Tora Bora, al-Qaida might well have died with him. Now the organization is diversified enough it could weather bin Laden’s death — and hardly miss a beat.”
Moreover, as Rumsfeld himself acknowledged, Bush’s extra-legal torture and rendition policies did not help capture Bin Laden. Enhanced interrogation techniques did not work. Bush ordered one final push to capture Bin laden shortly before he left office, but this effort too was unsuccessful.
My daughter posts a lot of her pics and art on Facebook, so I thought I'd check in and take a look. I have been deactivated for some time but by simply logging in - my account, full and complete, was still there like I had never left (slightly creepy).
After logging in, the first thing staring me in the face was a rant from one of my old classmates, forwarding a deceitful post on how Obama did not capture or kill OBL, Bush should get all the credit and if you believe this re-post it immediately!
I'm so sick of that shit. Juvenile, fact-free propaganda freely distributed designed to divide or make sure one complies or face the ridicule of the wingnuts on your "friends" list. Daughter, you'll have to e-mail me I am so done with Facebook.
In an interview with Russia Today (RT), Julian Assange explained that Facebook is “the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.”
“Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies, and building this database for them,” he said.
Since the President saw fit to release his Long Form Birth Certificate today to satisfy The Crazy, I felt as a responsible blogger I must present mine as well. So without further ado:
"This week is a special time for bunnies, peeps, and colored eggs as well as all of conservative Christendom who are celebrating their special holiday with the facsimiles of the instrument of torture that killed their religion’s namesake."
"In regional newspapers around the country churches have taken out full-page ads touting “holy week” and the wonders of knowing that a mythological character was tortured to death on a cross only to miraculously rise from the dead three days later."
"However, resurrection aside, there isn’t too much for conservative Christians to be proud of as of late based on the evil assault on women’s rights being waged by conservative Christians in Congress and state legislatures around the country. In fact, conservative Christians have targeted the LGBT movement and the American Cancer Society as well as women in their “holy war” on all things not emanating from the Christian bible."
"There are many different ways to be holy, but conservative Christians in America have bastardized the meaning of the word holy as well as the message of their savior who taught that neighborly love, charity, non-violence, and acceptance exemplifies what it means to be holy. Although there are a few conservative Christians who epitomize the embodiment of Jesus and his teachings, the majority are judgmental, mean-spirited, and vindictive toward anyone who refuses to go along with their satanic leanings."
"The Christian bible characterizes Satan as an angry, jealous being in opposition to god and his plan for humanity that Jesus personified. Based on the level of hate most conservative Christians have for non-compliant human beings, it sure appears that holiness has been redefined to mean something very different from what Jesus preached."
[snip]
"In California during the Proposition 8, same-sex marriage debate, Catholics and Mormons poured millions of dollars into campaign coffers to deny gay couples the right to marry. Besides forcing their holy belief system on all Californians, the groups used the pulpit to inform congregants on how to vote and aired fallacious television ads warning that second graders would be indoctrinated into the gay lifestyle. In the same elections, there were several holy priests that warned parishioners that if they voted for Barack Obama, they would not be allowed to partake of the cracker and grape juice or confess their transgressions."
"In the House of Representatives, holy Christian-conservative Republicans led by Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) are attempting to use their holy mandate to defund Planned Parenthood and deny access to birth control, cancer screenings, and pre-natal care for millions of poor women. Obviously, the holier-than-everyone Republicans have insight into the scriptures that unholy people lack because for the pittance Planned Parenthood receives from the government, there must be a command in the bible that informs Christians it is holy to deny poor women access to life-saving cancer screening. Who would believe that anyone, holy or not, would oppose cancer screening or cancer research for that matter?"
[snip]
"It is too bad that conservative Christians aren’t limited to just having one big holy week. If they were limited to just seven days of holiness, America would be a much better place. It would certainly be safer for women and gays if holiness abounded for a week instead of year-round. But the holy-roller Republicans practice their brand of holy all year and not just during holy week."
[snip]
"If conservative Christians were serious about being holy, they would follow Jesus’s example and not worry about telling the world they’re holy. They would stop being judgmental and start expressing neighborly love instead of being vile, vindictive fear mongers to gain power and riches. Republican legislators claiming to be holy would not deny poor women cancer screening or poor children food and shelter. A holy person would not call for a boycott of the American Cancer Society or compare cancer research to Nazis. But then again, there are very few holy people in America; if there are any, they’re not conservatives, Republicans, or teabags. As Jesus said, the holy are poor, tired, and hungry and they don’t have to announce that it’s holy week."
So - "Fuck off you opportunistic leeches", Jesus did not say but really, really wanted to.
These are remarks Chris Hedges made in Union Square in New York City last Friday during a protest outside a branch office of the Bank of America.
[Excerpts from this article below. I recommend reading the whole thing.]
"The two most destructive forces of human nature—greed and envy—drive the financiers, the bankers, the corporate mandarins and the leaders of our two major political parties, all of whom profit from this system. They place themselves at the center of creation. They disdain or ignore the cries of those below them. They take from us our rights, our dignity and thwart our capacity for resistance. They seek to make us prisoners in our own land. They view human beings and the natural world as mere commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. Human suffering, wars, climate change, poverty, it is all the price of business. Nothing is sacred. The Lord of Profit is the Lord of Death."
"The pharisees of high finance who can see us this morning from their cubicles and corner officers mock virtue. Life for them is solely about self-gain. The suffering of the poor is not their concern. The 6 million families thrown out of their homes are not their concern. The tens of millions of pensioners whose retirement savings were wiped out because of the fraud and dishonesty of Wall Street are not their concern. The failure to halt carbon emissions is not their concern. Justice is not their concern. Truth is not their concern. A hungry child is not their concern."
"The priests in these corporate temples, in the name of profit, kill with ruthlessness, finesse and cunning. Corporations let 50,000 people die last year because they could not pay them for proper medical care. They have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, Palestinians and Pakistanis, and gleefully watched as the stock price of weapons contractors quadrupled."
"And after looting the U.S. treasury these corporations demand, in the name of austerity, that we abolish food programs for children, heating assistance and medical care for our elderly, and good public education. They demand that we tolerate a permanent underclass that will leave one in six workers without jobs, that condemns tens of millions of Americans to poverty and tosses our mentally ill onto heating grates. Those without power, those whom these corporations deem to be ordinary, are cast aside like human refuse. It is what the god of the market demands."
"The bankers and hedge fund managers, the corporate and governmental elites, are the modern version of the misguided Israelites who prostrated themselves before the golden calf. The sparkle of wealth glitters before them, spurring them faster and faster on the treadmill towards destruction. And they seek to make us worship at their altar. As long as greed inspires us, greed keeps us complicit and silent. But once we defy the religion of unfettered capitalism, once we demand that a society serve the needs of citizens and the ecosystem that sustains life, rather than the needs of the marketplace, once we learn to speak with a new humility and live with a new simplicity, once we love our neighbor as ourself, we break our chains and make hope visible."
I am especially pissed this year and cannot stand all the Jesus-ey crap around Easter with the extended family. How can one believe in a deity that has the power of life or death and lets the mother of two teenagers die well before her time?
There is no God as they understand him and if there were he would be one hell of an asshole.
Years past I have been able to hold my nose and nod my head at the yearly Zombie Jesus Easter family gathering. Not this year. I won't be attending.
My daughter and her boyfriend were perusing the stacks at Borders on a lazy Saturday when they found themselves in the religion section and decided to check out a Quran. They selected one from the shelf, opened it and a million dollar bill fell out. It was a fake, of course, but the printing on the back was a litany of Christian propaganda ending with a website where one could go to repent where they ask, "Are you a good person?".
C'mon, cater to the insecure much?
The Christians and conservatives have a pact made in hell. The marraige of ideology and greed. That's why the million dollar bill. The Conservo-Christians project their love of money into outreach programs. I was disgusted as were my kids.
Click here for Award-winning journalist Max Blumenthal's video summary of his new book that traces the rise of the radical right in the US and how it used the concept of personal crisis to grow as a movement and eventually capture control of the GOP to transform it from the party of Dwight Eisenhower to the party of Sarah Palin.
Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane
Friends Don't Let Friends Watch Fox News
Click image for the FoxNewHounds bullshit meter
The Problem, with Jon Stewart
Same Jon - now on YouTube
Fox News can kiss my Presidential ass.
Air America Radio - Rest In Peace, we will miss you.
That famous liberal media bias that you are always hearing about but can't get anywhere else.
Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us
