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"Get the government off people's backs!" Email Print

The above headline was President Ronald Reagan's famous saying, which became a Republican big business "mantra."

The passage of time permits us to fairly analyze this popular big business slogan to see exactly how it worked in practice.

In 2008 we vividly see how decidedly dangerous and foolish Reagan's slogan really was.

By 2008 the meltdown of the mortgage market demonstrates dramatically what happened when the government "got off" regulating the U.S. banks' mortgage loan departments.

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McCain "Spiritual Adviser" Claims America Created in Part to Destroy Islam Email Print

As Sean Hannity and others make clear, the Republicans would like to toss all the real issues away and run against Barack Obama's former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

One point needs to be abundantly clear to Hannity and all the other right wing propagandists exploiting the "Wright issue."  These well paid zealots harp on an extreme compilation of over 30 years of Wright sermons into a 10 to 15 second sound bite.  Even they needed to be taken out of context to deliver the intended resounding message.

It is necessary to take nothing out of context to analyze the McCain spiritual advisers that he continues to retain in his ranks.  John Hagee calls Catholicism "the great whore" and asserts that New Orleans residents had been punished by God for having scheduled a gay pride parade.  He looks forward to what he sees as a God-ordained nuclear war known to the reverend and his followers as "rapture."

Reverend Rod Parsley of Columbus, Ohio is another McCain spiritual adviser who speaks in harsh, raging tones of doctrinal self-righteousness.  Parsley fashions himself as something of an historian as well as he informs listeners blisteringly that "one of the reasons" why America was created was to "destroy Islam."  

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"43,000 deployed (to Iraq) unfit for combat" Email Print

That was the shocking headline in USA Today on May 8.

Gregg Zaroya wrote the story from Washington, D.C.  It read:

"More than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the week before their scheduled deployment to Iraq as Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway, Pentagon records show."

Zaroya continued, "The reliance of troops found medically non-deployable is another sign of stress placed on a military that has sent 1.6 million servicemen to the war zones."

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McCain's "Spiritual Adviser" Believes Nuclear War Inevitable Email Print

With the mainstream media's steady firepower being directed basically in one direction, one would think that the big story of this presidential campaign season revolve around statements made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago and how they politically impact on Barack Obama.

How essentially silent this same media has been concerning the statements of Reverend John Hagee of San Antonio.  The only recent definitive study I have seen done on Hagee came from Hagee's fellow Texan Lou Dubose in the excellent political journal he edits and writes for, The Washington Spectator.

Here is how the mainstream media has handled the Hagee matter when it has focused on it at all.  There were two infamous statements that were discussed.  

One dealt with Hagee's explanation that Hurricane Katrina involved an act of vengeance wreaked on the city of New Orleans by an angry God because the city had scheduled a Gay Pride Parade.  Hagee later backed away from the statement when pressured for an answer by media sources.

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The Dollar Destruction Derby! Email Print

How did greedy big business demolish the U.S. economy?  This is a story that must now be told.

The fact is that ex-Fed chief Alan Greenspan with his 40-year low interest rate has demolished the U.S. economy!

It really is quite simple.  

For years the U.S. dollar represented the bench mark for world currency.  That dramatically changed when the U.S. stock market plummeted as high tech, over-valued stocks surged downward.  Other stocks tumbled.   Alan Grenspan, who sat on the sidelines as the high tech boom skyrocketed stock prices, made this observation:

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Is Obama-Hillary the Inevitable Ticket? Email Print

To paraphrase Harry Truman's dictum that the only things we don't yet know being the history we haven't yet read, current headlines, in a comparative vein, are reminiscent of 1960.

Shortly before the beginning of the Democratic Convention of 1960 a group of prosperous looking Texans stood in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, the convention's headquarters, and one said in a strong, determined accent with a notable Texas twang:

"That Kennedy is making me damned mad!"

The youthful Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy and the politically experienced majority leader of that same body, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, had exchanged plenty of verbal blows as each sought to win the Democratic nomination and the opportunity to face Vice President Richard M. Nixon in the fall presidential campaign.

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Is Every Nation in the World Living on the Nuclear Edge Now? Email Print

Ever since the George Bush Republican administration launched the Iraq War debacle on the false claim of the U.S. was being threatened by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction the entire world is on the edge of a nuclear disaster.

If the most powerful nation, militarily speaking, can unleash a war on the basis of lies and not be brought to the International Court of Justice at The Hague to be thoroughly investigated, and promptly brought to justice, a horrifying precedent in war crimes against humanity has been established.

When the Democrats were empowered to stop the Iraq War, the Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi betrayed the Democratic vote, brazenly declaring that "impeachment of George Bush is off the table!"

Basically she did have the decency to admit that she did disagree with his policies but thought that he was a nice person.

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Nigeria, Australia Move Toward Aiding Workers and Families Email Print

On Fox News snippets were distributed throughout the mainstream media of Bill O'Reilly snarling with impending dyspepsia to Hillary Clinton over the sheer audacity of her statement that his federal income tax might be raised to 39 percent under a plan she would offer as president.

This is so prevalent under the crybaby yuppie mentality of the Bush-Cheney Administration, fostered by the neoconservatives at the top carrying the spears for the likes of the company Cheney continues to, in all reality, lead, Halliburton, along with Bechtel.  

Then there are the revered telephone communication giants, and how Bush wants you to believe that U.S. intelligence sources will dry up post haste if we do not grant these giants immunity from prosecution.

Amid this jockeying that is occurring not only in America but worldwide over the New World's Order to keep things running in a neoconservative fashion by having the "super haves" hold on to all they have while expanding to own even more, there are efforts afoot to provide economic justice by giving those groups whose rights have been lying dormant all too long in the wake of expanding costs an opportunity to achieve needed economic benefits.  

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Ecology Watch: Toronto Wants to Pay Citizens for Green Concepts Email Print

The April 26 edition of the Toronto Star in an article by its environmental reporter Moira Welsh reveals, "The City of Toronto plans to pay its citizens to go green."

Starting in May, a staff with the Live Green Toronto program, operating with $20 million in city funding for five years, will begin meeting with residents to discuss carbon-saving projects it will help subsidize.

Toronto Mayor David Miller has said that the "the plan's success depends on residents creating change."  

An initial target has been projected of a 6 percent decrease in carbon emissions by 2012.

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150 Oregon Officials Quit Over Ethics Policy Email Print

The above headline was revealed on a Seattle Times local news page April 28.

Why would 150 officeholders resign quickly before revealing personal data, such as names of relatives?  

Goodbye and god luck is what, in effect, 150 office holders hastily exclaimed as they rushed to resign.  

Ah!  At long last an ethics law recently passed revealed name by name who was afraid of being discovered.

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Justice Scalia, Do Your Manner and Tone Really Denote Fascism? Email Print

For any international historian who had been away for a time either on another planet or taking a Rip Van Winkle style nap, how would that person find contemporary America?

That individual would have found the "60 Minutes" interview time that CBS generously bestowed on Chief Justice Antonin Scalia highly informative.  He presented the term "originalist" as defining his philosophy on the U.S. Constitution, but after listening to him in detail the question would have to be asked whether what he presented is unstead unvarnished fascism.

The first point that would have to be questioned was when segment moderator Leslie Stahl referred to Scalia, without any supporting evidence, as "one of the most brilliant" jurists we ever had serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Where are his credentials to justify such a glowing introductory comment?

Earl Warren had as his enduring legacy Brown v. Board of Education and Baker v. Carr, both landmark decisions that positively changed the face of American education and legislative democracy.  John Marshall, who served 34 years on the Court, in Marbury v. Madison presented the cornerstone principles of judicial review that shaped the Republic during succeeding years.

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Criminals in the White House? Email Print

The aforementioned question is the number one burning issue in the U.S.A. today and has never been anwered by an investigation.

Rob Lewis of Langley, Washigton in a Seattle Times Letter to the Editor appearing in the Aparil 25 edition wrote:

"The New York Times' revelation of a massive, orchestrated Pentagon propaganda campaign that used retired officers to parrot George Bush's ... support of the war."

The statement continues by noting, "Many media analysts under sway of Pentagon."

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Rush Limbaugh: As Always, Wallowing in Slime Email Print

Rush, your reign of gutter radio commentary has embedded you into the public consciousness as one of the ultimate slime wallowers in our nation's history.

You show no sign of letting up.  In fact, perhaps an air of desperation has finally reached you as the taste for your style of "political analysis" is receding.

To say that you embrace hypocrisy is letting you off far too gently.  Yours is the mammoth category of hypocrisy that would have to be carried to the realm of infinity and beyond.

Remember Rush, you were the one who took the stern and unrelenting view that anyone caught consuming drugs under any circumstances should sustain one of two punishments: 1) execution; 2) be dismissed from America without ever receiving a future opportunity to return.

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Ecology Watch: Daunting Report on Greenland's Melting Surface Email Print

Andrew C. Revkin in a New York Times in a January 8, 2008 article reveals a daunting reporting on the melting surface of Greenland.

As stated by Revkin:

"For a lengthening string of warm years, a lacework of blue lakes and rivulets of meltwater have been spreading ever higher on the ice cap (cloaking Greenland).  The melting surface darkens, absorbing up to four times as much energy from the sun as unmelted snow, which reflects sunlight.  Natural drainpipes called moulins carry water from the surface into the depths, in some places reaching bedrock.  The process slightly, but measurably, lubricates and accelerates the grinding passage of ice toward the sea."

Glaciologists report the breakup of huge semi submerged clots of ice "where some large Greenland glaciers, particularly along the west coast, squeeze through fjords as they meet the warming ocean.  As these passages have cleared, this has sharply accelerated the flow of many of these creeping, corrugated, frozen rivers."

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International Scene: A London Nail-biter Email Print

A look at the current London mayor's race gives every indication of a nail-biter with incumbent Ken Livingstone of the Labour Party seeking a third term.

On those two previous occasions Livingstone was compelled to secure victory in a second round of voting.  

A current Sunday Times telephone survey of one thousand Londoners suggests that history will repeat itself once more.  

The result showed incumbent Livingstone with 45 percent of the vote, just a shadow of a nudge ahead of Conservative challenger Boris Johnson with a 44 percent figure.  Liberal candidate and former Metropolitan police commander Brian Paddick received 9 percent.

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