28 December 2009

The Empire's Next Target

[click image]

Just getting an early start. I'm expecting another false flag attack somewhere, to provide an excuse to invade Yemen.
And there's something mighty fishy about the recent airliner incident.
In 2008, the ACLU estimated the US 'No Fly List' to have grown to over 1,000,000 names --heck, even Cat Stevens and the late Senator Ted Kennedy were on it --and it continues to expand. But, suspected terrorist Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was curiously able to obtain military-grade high explosives -- 80 grams of PETN (gee, where'd he get that?) -- managed to escape airport security and detonate his underwear bomb! In April 2009, American authorities reportedly refused an Air France flight from Paris to Mexico entry into US airspace because a left-wing journalist writing a book on the CIA was on board. Got it? Write a book critical of the CIA -- you cannot fly. Carry explosives (allegedly from Yemen) on board when the US is trolling for an excuse to invade and occupy Yemen for its oil -- yes you can!
http://www.legitgov.org/northwest_bomb_plot_oddities.html

17 December 2009

Kill It Before It Comes to Life!

on the health care "reform" bill:

Give credit to Howard Dean. This still practicing physician, former governor of Vermont, former chair of the Democratic Party and former Democratic presidential candidate has called for progressive members of Congress in both houses to join their Republican colleagues in killing what he rightly says has become "an insurance company's dream."

Those namby-pamby, self-described "progressives" in the Democratic Party who claim that the health bill can still be saved with the inclusion of a fake, carefully circumscribed and thoroughly emasculated "public option" government insurance plan that at best would only be able to offer lousy coverage at high rates to a small number of self-employed poor people are wrong. This supposed attempt at reforming the US health care system--the costliest and least effective in the developed world--is simply past saving.

The only appropriate place for the bill at this point is a dumpster.

What could have been a transformational moment in American politics--an end to decades of corporate health care and the creation of a system in which all Americans were guaranteed affordable, quality care as a basic right of citizenship, the way people are in Canada, in all the countries of Europe, in Japan, in Taiwan, in Cuba and much of the rest of the world, has been squandered.

It has been squandered by President Obama, who was too gutless to take a leadership role, and left matters to Congress, and who then slithered up to the major players in the medical-industrial complex and cut secret deals with all of them--doctors, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and the hospital industry--in return for their "support."

It has been squandered by many leading members of Congress in both houses, especially those who call themselves the Blue Dogs, but also by many who call themselves "liberals," who accepted the tainted coin of those industries (and their lobbyists have been flooding Congress over the past year with contributions in unprecedented amounts), and who have transformed the legislation into a huge gift for those industries, producing a bill that will leave employers as the main agency for providing health coverage (though not for paying for it--that will be the employees' responsibility), require those without coverage to buy it themselves, guaranteeing a vast new market of mostly health young people for the insurance industry, and that will do almost nothing to control costs.

Doctors will get richer under this "reform." Insurance companies will get vastly richer under this "reform". Pharmaceutical companies will get richer under this "reform". But there will still be millions of people left with no access to health care. There will still be tens of millions of people who will get substandard or even pathetically trashy health care. And the cost of medical care, both for individuals and for society as a whole, already the highest in the world, will continue to soar. To make matters worse, taxes will also go up dramatically, by at least $100 billion a year. For extra laughs, while these costs would start hitting the public right away, the "benefits" of the bill wouldn't go into effect until 2013, meaning that a likely resurgent Republican Party, ousting Obama from the White House, and the Democrats from the majority in Congress in 2012, would simply undo the whole thing anyhow.

Dr. Dean is right. This is indeed a bad bill. But it's not just a bad bill. It is a morally outrageous, politically disgusting and economically dangerous bill. It moves the country in exactly the wrong direction--not towards the socialism that the right has been decrying, but towards an increasingly costly corporatist system that will be even harder to reform down the road.

There is only one hope, and that is that enough liberal members of House and Senate will recognize that nothing is better than something in this case, and that for the sake of their constituents they will refuse to support this legislative monstrosity.

The Health Insurance Enrichment Act of 2009 must be killed in the congressional womb before it can emerge to become the monster it has become.

The only positive thing I can see in this debacle is that perhaps if President Obama is slapped down by his own most ardent backers on what he has claimed is his number one legislative goal, he and his too-clever-by-half advisers will realize that they need to do a U-turn and rethink how they are trying to govern.

More likely, however, this defeat will be the beginning of the end of the Obama administration, which has now been revealed as devoid of principle, incapable of leadership, and in thrall to the most cynical and greedy corporate interests.

Triumph of the Money Party




Health Care Reform DOA. Why the Surprise? They Did what they Always Do

[image lifted from capitt.com]

15 December 2009

And the Prize for Best Xmas Decorations Goes To...

This Guy!



Apparently he had to take it down after a couple days. People kept attempting a rescue.

Had Enough?



Video from puppetgov.com

13 December 2009

Chamber of Horrors



After Fox railed about it the idiot wing responded by flooding VR with hate mail and death threats.

11 December 2009

Obama is WRONG About Afghanistan


Members of the Nobel Peace Prize committee were stunned to hear President Obama preaching war at the award of his prize medal. The fact is we need to be winding down our ruinous occupational excursion there, not getting in deeper. And the most appalling thing is the way the hardcore neocons are chortling over their new "war president".

They tell us our military force in Afghanistan is fighting terror. The exact opposite is true. Ten percent of every dollar we pour into that country goes to bribe the Taliban not to shoot at us. And when they talk about building up the Afghan army, what they don't tell you is how many recruits are in fact terrorists in for the free training. Yes, that's right, in essence the U.S. Army is running the terrorist training camps for the terrorists.

Click HERE to send a free fax to President Obama and all your members of Congress.

The North American Jaguar Needs Your Help



Click pic to sign petition and, if you can spare it, make a donation. Extinction is forever.

10 December 2009

A Righteous Rant

From Michael D. Rectenwald at Citizens for Legitimate Government.

The Obama Effect: The Demise of the Democratic Party and a Gift to the Country

The decision to escalate Afghanistan War should put the final nail in the coffin of "change" and "hope" that Democrats and others crawled into when they supported Obama. The evidence that Obama is every bit the representative of the corporate oligarchy and no less a corporate shill than the rest has been mounting for nearly a year-or well before the election for the cognoscenti. Only fanatics could have heard Obama's speech on Afghanistan and failed to hear the resonances of Bush. But the writing was on the wall over a year ago when Obama supported the bailouts of the banks and brokerage firms that leveraged their destruction of the economy on the foreclosures of homes. Few could miss the fact that the health care reform bill, should it ever pass, will be another unwarranted and gratuitous bailout-this one of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Obama diverted the legitimate anger and energy for real change and scuttled it under the fraudulent tent of the Democratic Party. He led millions to the cliff; they are now falling off in droves. Those who've not quite gotten to the edge screech and yell: "Wait! Give him time!" Those who gave warning from the outset are not busy casting nets. We welcome the demise of the Democratic Party.

And that is exactly the Obama Effect. Every last tissue of belief in the Democrats should by now be shred and cast aside. The Democrats are no less the corporate bailers and militarists than the Republicans. They hand trillions to the banks and brokerage firms; they dissolve union contracts and send the workers to the dogs; their unmanned drones bomb Pakistan, killing and maiming innocents and displacing tens of thousands; they sell the same lies about the wars-that they have to do with terrorism or democracy rather than oil and other resources-as their predecessors; they fund the very enemy that they claim to fight; they keep up the same contracts with Blackwater and its successors; they vote for the same war funding; they carry out the same secret renditions; they sanction and continue the same spying on US citizens; they exonerate torturers and war criminals from the previous administration; they are war criminals in complicity with other war criminals.

Click here to continue...

08 December 2009

The Dream is Over


On November 4, 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States.
Five weeks later John Lennon was assassinated.
The world has never recovered.



"Laurel and Hardy, that's John and Yoko. And we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot."
- John Lennon
http://www.john-lennon.com/whokilled.htm

01 December 2009

Obama's Afghanistan Speech.


Reactions to sending 30,000 more solders into harm's way.