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Latest Articles: Opinions/Editorials
10 Facts That Prove Big Sis Is Wrong, Drudge Is Right
Post Date: 2011-09-06 22:09:22 by A K A Stone
1 Comments
Janet Napolitano’s contention that Matt Drudge is “just wrong” about privacy worries surrounding airport screening technology is completely at odds with the facts, which illustrate how the DHS has been caught time and time again lying about both privacy and health issues in a transparent ploy to undermine genuine concerns. “I think that what he means is we are watching too much—kind of an Orwellian view. He’s just wrong. I mean, he’s just wrong,” Napolitano told Politico, labeling privacy concerns “overblown”. A quick fact check however shows that it’s Napolitano who is “just wrong”. The DHS has repeatedly lied about the ...
Buchanan: How Capital Crushed Labor
Post Date: 2011-09-06 17:42:32 by Brian S
1 Comments
Once, it was a Labor Day tradition for Democrats to go to Cadillac Square in Detroit to launch their campaigns in that forge and furnace of American democracy, the greatest industrial center on earth. Democrats may still honor the tradition. But Detroit is not what she was, not remotely. And neither is America. Not so long ago, we made all the shoes and clothes we wore, the motorcycles and cars we drove, the radios we listened to, the TV sets we watched, the home and office calculators and computers we used. No more. Much of what we buy is no longer made by American workers, but by Japanese, Chinese, other Asians, Canadians and Europeans. "Why don't we make things here ...
Reagan's Party No More
Post Date: 2011-09-06 14:00:20 by Brian S
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Ronald Reagan is the patron saint for Republicans, just as John F. Kennedy is for Democrats. But parties evolve, and just as a Democrat with Kennedy’s views on foreign policy (“pay any price, bear any burden”) couldn’t be nominated today, the late Reagan might not be able win a Tea Party primary. After all, he raised the debt ceiling 18 times during his eight years in office, signed one major tax increase into law, and let several other small tax increase take effect, too. And his tenure produced some of the most infamous examples of government waste, like the expenditures of the "star wars" program and the Pentagon's notorious $600 toilet seat cover. ...
The price of 9/11
Post Date: 2011-09-06 12:34:01 by lucysmom
3 Comments
The September 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W Bush’s response to the attacks compromised the United States’ basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security. The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to al-Qaeda - as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive - orders of magnitude beyond the $60bn claimed at the beginning - as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation. Indeed, when ...
Bin Laden Fulfilled His One True Ambition
Post Date: 2011-09-06 11:09:48 by Brian S
5 Comments
Here is a bet about the decade since Sept. 11: Historians are going to be mystified by it. First, the U.S. won the Cold War -- or at least it appeared to. Then, like the U.K. initiating the Industrial Revolution at the height of its global dominance, the U.S. jump-started the Information Revolution. A decade after the Berlin Wall came down, the U.S. seemed poised for another century of global domination through a combination of hard and soft power. We could even afford an extended legal fight over who the next president was going to be. Now, another 10 years on, the U.S. remains the most significant superpower -- but its position looks increasingly shaky. Its hard power took a hit ...
Who Art Thou For America…Israel?
Post Date: 2011-09-05 20:17:01 by Brian S
1 Comments
US, (Pal Telegraph)--Tick, tick, tick go the sounds of the clock or that of, at least in movies, a bomb getting ready to explode. The sounds we hear though are not of a wall clock or a Hollywood bomb, but those of discontent. Discontented people and a contented elite are definitely the ingredients needed to generate some sparks, but what will it take to cause an explosion to rival any 4th of July fireworks display? Are the death, destruction, genocide and torture of others paid by American taxpayer dollars and an unresponsive US government beholden to Israel and her policies of apartheid not enough? The US government and its elected officials refuse to cut the funding that pays for the ...
Why Are the Corporate Media In Denial About the Right-Wing Terrorist Threat?
Post Date: 2011-09-05 20:05:19 by Brian S
0 Comments
It was a little over a month ago that the Norwegian Islamophobic Christian fundamentalist Anders Behring Breivik, wreaked havoc in Norway, killing 77 and injuring many more, and more than seven months since a bomb planted along the route of a march honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was discovered. After the initial flurry of reportage, analysis, commentary and punditry, for all intents and purposes the Breivik story has disappeared into the ether that is the American mainstream media. Maybe it is thus because it happened in far off Norway, maybe it is because our attention span is disastrously truncated, maybe it is because - like in so many of these cases -- he has been too easily ...
Let Obama run for re-election based on the nonsense that ARRA has "worked" and the economy is growing.
Post Date: 2011-09-05 16:52:01 by A K A Stone
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Let Obama run for re-election based on the nonsense that ARRA has "worked" and the economy is growing. The writer needs to get serious. Not even Obama could sell that the Recovery Act has "worked." The rest is lots of hot air with few results. Health Care depends on the Court upholding an unconstitutional mandate. The Consumer Protection Act has protected nobody, not even Elizabeth Warren. If TARP has made a profit, let's fund the Tooth Fairy Protection Act and the Creative Bookkeeping Act. Education cost has gone up at all levels while results have gone down at all levels. The lower and middle class are being priced out of a college education or being saddled with ...
Social Security Is No Ponzi Scheme (Note to Rick Perry)
Post Date: 2011-09-05 11:53:58 by Brian S
17 Comments
As Rick Perry campaigned in Iowa late last month, he made it clear that he doesn’t have much faith in Social Security, one of the most popular U.S. government programs. “It is a Ponzi scheme for these young people,” Perry said. “The idea that they’re working and paying into Social Security today, that the current program is going to be there for them, is a lie. It is a monstrous lie on this generation, and we can’t do that to them.” As we celebrate a holiday devoted to American workers, it’s worth asking whether, as the Texas governor and leader of the Republican pack claims, the retirement program created for those very workers is at risk. The ...
Neoconservatism - The Last Refuge Of The Scoundrel
Post Date: 2011-09-04 18:52:36 by Brian S
0 Comments
I got an e-mail the other day from one of my readers. He wanted to tell me that radio talker Mark Levin had been trashing me the night before on WABC. The reader suggested I call up the program on the internet and give it a listen. “I’ll have my dog listen,” I replied. “She’s the only one in the house who can hear that high-pitched voice.”My reader thought that was funny. It’s even funnier than he could imagine. There is, at the moment, a great debate raging between us traditional conservatives and the pretenders, such as Levin, who are known as “neo” conservatives. And somehow, I ended up in the middle of it.The debate centers on an article ...
Tripoli's In Libya! Who Knew? Not The Neocons
Post Date: 2011-09-04 18:37:30 by Brian S
0 Comments
I don't know what got into the formerly sane Gene Hoyas. It's a little late in history to be signing on to the nutty neocon cause. In any event he's embarrassing himself with stuff like his recent attack on Ron Paul: There is the uncomfortable matter of the Barbary Wars (conducted almost exactly two centuries before the War on Terrorism) that were directed against Muslim pirates operating out of – believe it or not – what is present day Libya. Believe it or not? Hasn't this guy ever heard the Marine Corps hymn? I knew it by heart by the time I was 6 thanks to my World War II Marine father singing it incessantly. It begins: "From the Halls of Montezuma, ...
If Al Gore Had Won
Post Date: 2011-09-04 13:55:23 by Brian S
6 Comments
A recent poll by "60 Minutes" and Vanity Fair found that a majority of Americans, and a majority of Democrats, do not believe things would have changed much if Al Gore had been inaugurated president in January 2001. With a jobless scandal gripping the nation, the presiden'ts popularity collapsed from earlier levels, congressional favorable ratings laughably at 12 percent (within reach of Saddam Hussein's favorables), the Gore v. Bush poll is breathtaking. If Al Gore had won, for starters: Had Gore been briefed by intelligence officers as Bush was in August 2001 about terrorist planes attacking buildings, Gore would ...
Drill, baby, drill fails: Oil prices soar in spite of sharp increase in U.S. production under Obama
Post Date: 2011-09-04 08:29:56 by lucysmom
4 Comments
US oil production last year rose to its highest level in almost a decade…. As a result, analysts believe the US was the largest contributor to the increase in global oil supplies last year over 2009, and is on track to increase domestic production by 25 per cent by the second half of the decade. Domestic oil production is soaring, but so are global prices. It should be obvious that yet more drilling can’t have any significant impact on oil prices — particularly since the U.S. Energy Information Administration has been making that precise point for years now (see EIA: Full offshore drilling will not lower gasoline prices at all in 2020 and only 3 cents in 2030!). The only ...
The Iraq Disaster Looms Big: But Don't Tell That to the Petraeus Worshippers
Post Date: 2011-09-02 20:16:00 by Brian S
0 Comments
As Gen. David Petraeus retired from the Army on Wednesday, he received a 17-gun salute and was hailed across the U.S. news media as the strategic genius who organized the “successful surge” in Iraq and similarly achieved gains against the Taliban in Afghanistan. He is now off to run the CIA. However, the less glorious truth about Petraeus’s much-heralded “surge” in Iraq was that it cost the lives of almost 1,000 more U.S. soldiers, inflicted more violence upon the people of Iraq and will likely only have achieved a delay in a U.S. military defeat of historic proportions. Much the same could be said for Petraeus’s “surge” in Afghanistan. The Iraq ...
I've Come To The Conclusion That Facebook Is The Antichrist
Post Date: 2011-09-01 23:50:43 by A K A Stone
3 Comments
[[I'm really sort of only half-joking...]] So for a long while now, I’ve had this theory that facebook is the antichrist and/or the “mark of the beast.” Tonight, I decided to investigate my theory further, and what I have found may shock you. Prepare yourselves for the epiphany of a lifetime. First of all, my initial theory stemmed from the verse in Revelations that says the antichrist will require everyone to get the “mark of the beast”: He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads. [Revelations 13:16] Well, facebook is something pretty much EVERYONE has nowadays, right?! ...
Dick Cheney, The Ultimate American Terrorist
Post Date: 2011-08-31 15:41:56 by Brian S
6 Comments
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. - Dick Cheney It is axiomatic by now: when someone leaves government service, especially from a high-profile position, they write a book. They all do it, sometimes more than once. Richard Nixon is the main example of one who produced a multi-volume apologia; by the time he went into the ground, he'd penned enough books to fill a wide shelf. Henry Kissinger was similarly prolific, which leads one to wonder about the relationship between criminal activities and the printed page. Nixon was chased from office after a series of crimes that, at the time, had no precedent, and Kissinger is still so ...
Jihad el-Khazen : Reasons For Hating Israel Are Completely Justified
Post Date: 2011-08-30 19:55:25 by Brian S
9 Comments
There is the story about the psychiatrist who is unsuccessful in treating a patient with an inferiority complex. The doctor tells the patient, “Maybe you don’t have a complex. Maybe you’re really inferior.”
Israel is the one with the inferiority complex, and like the patient, is actually inferior. No one likes it, and it responds with what makes people hate it even more.
I put together translations of the Israeli press from the weekend, and found an item in Maariv, saying that Israel decided to start a fight with Qatar because of its growing anti-Israeli activity in the world. The item focused on the huge legal and political support offered by Qatar, as the chair of the Arab Follow-up ...
Beau Biden cautious on signing off on mortgage settlement
Post Date: 2011-08-30 11:38:17 by lucysmom
3 Comments
B eau Biden isn't winning any friends on Wall Street. The big-money guys aren't happy that Delaware's attorney general insists on asking tough questions about bad mortgages. A lot of big players want the mortgage mess behind us. The top banks, for instance, want a settlement that would protect them from future lawsuits or prosecution over fake paperwork. The U.S. Treasury Department, on the other hand, wants the burden of the foreclosure scandal off the banks' books. snip Most of all, he has said, why is there such a hurry to settle things before anyone knows what really is going on? That speed is what worries Biden. The scandal is not going to go away even if the ...
You Think Obama’s Been a Bad President? Prove It
Post Date: 2011-08-29 10:57:30 by Brian S
38 Comments
Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president? I’m not talking here about him as a tactician and communicator. We can agree that he has played some bad poker with Congress. And let’s stipulate that at the moment he’s falling short in the intangibles of leadership. I’m thinking instead of that opening sequence in the show “Mission Impossible,” the one where Jim Phelps, played by Peter Graves, gets his instructions. Your mission, Jim (and readers named something else), should you decide to accept it, is to identify where Obama has been a poor decision-maker. What, specifically, has he done wrong on policy? What, specifically, would you have done ...
Why This Is The Moment Libya's Islamic Extremists Have Prayed For
Post Date: 2011-08-28 14:43:45 by Brian S
0 Comments
As Tripoli fell to anti-Gaddafi rebel forces, the euphoria that erupted in some parts of the city was matched only by that which broke out among Middle East pundits in the West. The fall of the Libyan capital represents a clear victory for freedom over tyranny, they tell us, and a new country - defined by an enthusiastic embrace of democracy, pluralism and representative government - will emerge. However, we have been here twice before in the Middle East in recent months. First, when Tunisia's strongman, Zine El-Abidene Ben Ali, fled Tunis, and then when Egypt's dictator Hosni Mubarak vacated the presidential palace in Cairo. Seven months on, both countries are as authoritarian ...
The Story Of How Bin Laden Was Found Is Fiction
Post Date: 2011-08-28 14:27:36 by Brian S
9 Comments
The whole story of how Osama bin Laden was found to be hiding out in Abottabad, Pakistan — recreated in incredible detail in The New Yorker — was made up, according to R.J. Hillhouse, a prominent security analyst and author. According to Hillhouse, who attributes the news to her sources inside the intelligence comunity, a Pakistan intelligence officer came forward with the information of bin Laden's whereabouts in exchange for the $25 million reward and U.S. citizenship for his family. The informant, Hillhouse says, claimed that the Saudis had been paying the Pakistani military and intelligence agency, ISI, to shelter bin Laden under house arrest. "The C.I.A. and ...
Alex Jones And Ron Paul Are The Voices of Reason And Dissent Inside Babylon
Post Date: 2011-08-27 16:00:00 by Capitalist Eric
0 Comments
Take it to the wilderness Into the jungle sun Lookin' for the voice of reason Inside this babylon." - Jefferson Starship, from the song "Layin' It On The Line." "The truth would certainly do well enough if she were once left to shift for herself. . . .Errors, indeed, prevail by the assistance of foreign and borrowed succors. But if Truth makes not her way into the understanding by her own light, she will be but the weaker for any borrowed force violence can add to her." - John Locke, as quoted in the book, "Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition," by John Durham Peters. "But at my back I always hear Time's winged ...
Did Fracking Cause the Virginia Earthquake?
Post Date: 2011-08-26 08:04:31 by lucysmom
31 Comments
Earthquakes in the nation's capitol are as rare as hen's teeth. The epicenter of Tuesday's quake was in Mineral, Virginia, which is located on three very quiet fault lines. The occurrence of yet another freak earthquake in an unusual location is leading many anti-fracking activists (including me -- they have just started fracking in Stratford, which is 40 minutes from New Plymouth) to wonder whether "fracking" in nearby West Virginia may be responsible. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is the process of initiating and subsequently propagating a fracture in a rock layer, employing the pressure of a fluid as the source of energy. The fracturing is done from a wellbore ...
CLAIM: The Founding Fathers Believed in Redistributing Wealth -- Why Do Tea Party Heroes Like Perry and Bachmann Vilify It?
Post Date: 2011-08-25 18:15:04 by Brian S
7 Comments
American conservatives have lurched so far to the right they're now trying to re-litigate questions about the role of government that have been settled for hundreds of years.
The redistribution of wealth is a perfect example. Listening to today's Republicans, one would think it is some kind of pernicious and un-American leftist principle – an idea only embraced by foreigners, socialists and assorted freaks.
During the waning days of the 2008 campaign, John McCain jumped on Barack Obama telling “Joe the Plumber” on the campaign trail that we need to “spread the wealth around” a little bit. It became the heart of the case that the decidedly centrist Obama is a “socialist.” A feverish ...
The American President And Freedom For Jonathan Pollard
Post Date: 2011-08-25 13:13:47 by Brian S
4 Comments
The extensive powers of clemency the American Constitution grants to the president are his solemn responsibility. This executive privilege is bestowed to enable the president to safeguard the rights of all American citizens. In cases where the justice system has discharged its responsibility appropriately and the public good would be neither benefited nor harmed by the president’s intervention, it is entirely his prerogative whether or not to exercise executive clemency. But in a case like that of my husband Jonathan Pollard, where the judicial system has been subverted to prosecute one American citizen excessively and where all legal remedies have been exhausted, there is a moral ...
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