23 Thursday Jul 2009
Posted in Obama, Politics, Uncategorized
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The meaning of “I want my country back,” from Roland Martin of CNN.
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23 Thursday Jul 2009
Posted in Obama, Politics, Uncategorized
Chris Matthews gets to the real reason behind the “birther” nonsense–racism. From Media Matters.
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23 Thursday Jul 2009
Posted in Obama, Politics, Uncategorized
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birthers, Castle, Dobbs, Larry King, Limbaugh, Liz Cheney, Obama, townhall
The “birthers,” that formerly fringe element of the Republican Party who still question the citizenship of President Obama, are back in the news because of this video from a townhall meeting held by Congressman Mike Castle of Delaware.
The disturbing part of this clip is not the lady waving her own birth certificate around and screaming “I want my country back,” but the cheers she gets from the others in attendance, and the boos Rep. Castle receives when he says that President Obama “is a citizen of the United States.”
The reason I say this is a formerly fringe element is that this view is quickly becoming the mainstream of the Republican Party and the right.
Legislation has been introduced by Rep. Bill Posey of Florida, and co-sponsored by nine other Republican members of the House, five of whom are from Texas by the way, that would “require the principal campaign committee of a candidate for election to the office of President to include with the committee’s statement of organization a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate.”
De facto leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program that “Barack Obama has yet to have to prove he’s a citizen.”
When a caller to Lou Dobbs radio show said President Obama was “rushing all these programs through by whatever means, knowing he will soon be exposed as a fake, a fraud, a . . . Kenyan,” Dobbs’ response was, “Certainly your view can’t be discounted.”
Then there was Liz “Baby Dick” Cheney, who was on Larry King Live with James Carville. Instead of saying outright that the “birthers” are, to use Carville’s word “ludicrous,” Ms. Cheney tried to elude the issue by saying,“People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas.”
When later asked for a clarification, Cheney gave the equally slippery answer, “I don’t have any question about Barack Obama’s right to be President of the United States.”
What these “birthers,” and those who continue to aid and abet their lunacy, are doing is to not only question Barack Obama’s citizenship, but his legitimacy as president of the United States. Let’s see, what could be their motivation? What is the difference between the 44th president and the previous 43.
Let me think about that, I’ll get back to you.
03 Friday Jul 2009
Posted in Obama, Politics, Uncategorized
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Appalachian Trail, Bachmann, Census, Governor Sanford, Lynn Westmoreland, Patrick McHenry, Republicans
Times are tough in Bachmann-land ladies and gentlemen, even fellow Republicans are asking the Minnesota Congresswoman to put a lid on her babbling about not properly filling out the Census form.
“Three Republican members of the House subcommittee overseeing the 2010 census are asking a fellow Republican, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, to back off her boycott of the national population count.
Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia and John Mica of Florida, members of the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Achieves, are afraid that her repeated threat to ignore the forms could be contagious.
“Boycotting the constitutionally mandated Census is illogical, illegal and not in the best interest of our country,” they said in a statement Wednesday.”
As if Rep. Bachmann being called out by her Republican colleagues wasn’t bad enough, two of the three, McHenry and Westmoreland are not exactly the more reasonable members of the Republican caucus themselves.
Here’s Congressman McHenry on the mission of the GOP between now and the mid-term elections:
“We will lose on legislation. But we will win the message war every day, and every week, until November 2010. Our goal is to bring down approval numbers for Pelosi and for House Democrats. That will take repetition. This is a marathon, not a sprint.”
And it was Congresswoman Westmoreland who said this last November when asked about Michelle Obama:
“Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Senator Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity.”
When these 2 tell you to rein it in, and call you “illogical,” you’re really out there.
The response from the Bachmann camp comes via spokeswoman Debbee Keller:
“Congresswoman Bachmann can not be reached, but we appreciate their views and hope to be able to work with them to keep ACORN — which has earned public mistrust through its repeated voter registration fraud — out of the Census.”
Wait a minute, “cannot be reached?” Two questions come to mind. Does the Appalachian Trail run through Minnesota, and has anybody seen Governor Sanford?
30 Tuesday Jun 2009
Posted in Obama, Politics, Uncategorized
The next time you hear one of our elected officials in Washington rail against President Obama’s proposed public option on health insurance by saying it will “destroy the marketplace” (Richard Shelby) or that there’s “plenty of competition in the private insurance market” (Joe Lieberman) remember this report from Heath Care for America Now (HCAN).
The only thing in danger of being destroyed is the monopoly the large insurance companies presently hold, and which they are willing to make any amount of campaign contributions (aka bribes) to continue.
Consider the following:
“In the past 13 years, more than 400 corporate mergers have involved health insurers, and a small number of companies now dominate local markets but haven’t delivered on promises of increased efficiency. According to the American Medical Association, 94 percent of insurance markets in the United States are now highly concentrated.”
“Highly concentrated,” according to the U.S. Justice Department means that one company holds more than a 42 % share of the market, a level reached in 31 states.
“In Hawaii, Rhode Island, Alaska, Vermont, Maine, Montana, Wyoming, Arkansas, and Iowa, the two largest health insurers control at least 80% of the statewide market.”
In Senator Shelby’s own state of Alabama, Blue Cross Blue Shield controls 83% of the statewide market, the highest rate in the nation for a single company. Is this what he is intent on preserving? Apparently so.
Right here in Texas, two companies, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Aetna, control 59% of the market. Our own Senator John Cornyn was one of 9 GOP senators who sent a letter to President Obama which said “a federal government takeover of our healthcare system would take decisions out of the hands of doctors and patients and place them in the hands of a Washington bureaucracy.” I suppose placing those decisions in the hands of an insurance company “bureaucracy” is acceptable.
But having a monopoly can be a very profitable enterprise:
“Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007. In 2007 alone, the chief executive officers at these companies collected combined total compensation of $118.6 million—an average of $11.9 million each.
That is 468 times more than the $25,434 an average American worker made that year. Moreover, the health insurance industry invests more in buying back its own stock and rewarding its shareholders than in improving system operations, reducing premiums, or in developing ways to pay doctors and hospitals fairly.”
For those of us who pay premiums however, it’s not such a sweetheart deal. They have risen more than 87%, on average, over the past 6 years. From 1999-2007, while the average U. S. wage growth was 29%, the average premium growth was 120%.
This is the status quo that Shelby, Lieberman, Cornyn, the big insurance companies, and their lobbyists want to maintain. It’s up to us to let them know that another 15 years of business as usual is unacceptable.
27 Saturday Jun 2009
Posted in Obama, Politics, Uncategorized
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The hatred and racism from the far-right continues bubbling over the top. Listen to the leader of the Grand Old Bigots, Rush Limbaugh, from his June 26 program. “Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African colonial” who “wants to turn this into a third world country,” spews Limbaugh. He is “more African in his roots than he is American” and is “behaving like an African colonial despot.” Pathetic, but predictable. Thanks to Media Matters.
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27 Saturday Jun 2009
Posted in Obama, Politics, Uncategorized
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ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, executive order, incarcerate, indefinitely, Obama administration, TPM
With most of our celebrity-crazed media and public focused on the death of Michael Jackson, I guess it was the perfect time for a Friday night news dump like this:
“Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.
Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war.”
Then came the non-denial denial and the and semantic games from the White House:
“White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said that there is no executive order and that the administration has not decided whether to issue one. But one administration official suggested that the White House is already trying to build support for an order.”
Notice the difference in language? There “is” no executive order. The WaPo article didn’t say there “is” an order, it said officials “are crafting” language for an executive order. I had hoped we were through with these kinds of slippery word games.
But the statement by “one administration official” gives it away. I assume the White House wouldn’t waste their time “trying to build support” for an action that they don’t intend to pursue.
There was also this strange claim:
“Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order,” the official said.”
One such civil liberties group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, told TPM:
“Prolonged imprisonment without trial is exactly the Guantanamo system that the President promised to shut down. Whatever form it takes – from Congress or the President’s pen – it is anathema to the basic principles of American law and the courts will find it unconstitutional.”
The ACLU released this statement:
“This is not change – this is more of the same. If President Obama issues an executive order authorizing indefinite detention, he’ll be repeating the same mistakes of George Bush, and his policies will be destined to fail as were his predecessor’s. How justice is served in America should not be an open question in a country where we have a rule of law and a time-tested criminal justice system. Throwing people into prison without charge, conviction or providing them with a trial is about as un-American as you can get. While President Obama might be experiencing difficulty with Congress when it comes to implementing his decision to close Guantánamo, the answer is not to issue an executive order authorizing a system which is unconstitutional and counter to the most fundamental American values.”
That doesn’t sound to me like they “encouraged the administration” to “do it through executive order.”
To me this issue, call it indefinite incarceration, preventive detention, or any other name, goes beyond Barack Obama’s presidency, the “war on terror,” or the closing of Guantanamo. This is a fundamental question of what kind of country we are.
We are the United States of America, damn it. We don’t hold people indefinitely without charges and without trials. If we don’t have enough evidence to bring people to trial, or if the evidence we do have was obtained through torture, we release them, plain and simple.
The danger in this is the precedent. What happens the next time we have a President Nixon, who draws up an enemies list and decides to imprison people indefinitely, and what happens if not just alleged terrorists but American citizens are among those “certain people” who are imprisoned based on nothing more than suspicion. His or her reasoning will be, President Bush got away with it, President Obama got away with it, who is going to stop me?
It’s time to put an end to this before it goes any further.
24 Wednesday Jun 2009
Posted in McCain, Obama, Politics, Uncategorized
Tags
be quiet, Fred Thompson, Governor Sanford, Iran, Joe Klein, Larry King, Lindsey Graham, Obama, take a hike, Time
TIME’s Joe Klein had some good advice for John McCain in an appearance on Larry King Live Tuesday night. Advice that also applies to Lindsey Graham, Fred Thompson and the rest of the Republican chorus of bluster and bravado urging President Obama to “do more” about the situation in Iran.
“Be quiet.”
Whatever happened to “politics stops at the waters edge?” I recall not too long ago Republicans saying that criticizing the President’s foreign policy in a time of war amounted to treason. Does that only apply when a Republican is in the Oval Office? Apparently so.
Klein added:
“You don’t need to do this…. What you’re doing is a self-indulgence at this point. Senator McCain, if he’s going to talk about this, should also talk about the fact that the United States supported Saddam Hussein in the Iran/Iraq war for eight years. Every one of those protesters out in the streets, every last one of them believes the United States supplied Saddam Hussein with the poison gas that has debilitated tens of thousands of Iranian men…. They blame us for identifying them as part of the Axis of Evil, with two countries that they disdain, the Iraqis and the North Koreans.”
To go back even further, Iranians also know that it was our CIA who overthrew their democratically elected government in 1953 and put the Shah in power. It was also American presidents who supported the Shah for the next 26 years while his secret police brutalized and terrorized the Iranian people leading up to the 1979 revolution.
And try as McCain might to make the situation in Iran analogous to Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the fall of the Soviet Union, it just isn’t the same.
“Obama’s shades-of-gray approach rejects comparison to an era when Communist bloc dissidents had virtually no access to the Western media and the world was more neatly divided between a pair of superpowers, not complicated by the set of ambitious regional powers such as Iran that the Obama administration is seeking to manage.”
The day following his remarks on Larry King, Klein posted this at Swampland:
“I’ve been receiving a steady stream of favorable emails from Iranian-Americans regarding my appearance on Larry King last night. They’re delighted that I made it clear that Iran is different from the other countries in the region–better educated, more sophisticated, with far greater rights for women (although not nearly enough). And they also appreciated the fact that when King asked me what John McCain should do right now, I said, “Be quiet.”
I have yet to hear what possible good it would do for the President of the United States to encourage the protesters, except to give the Iranian regime a better excuse for killing more of them. McCain’s bleatings are either for domestic political consumption or self-satisfaction, a form of hip-shooting that demonstrates why he would have been a foreign policy disaster had he been elected.
To put it as simply as possible, McCain–and his cohorts–are trying to score political points against the President in the midst of an international crisis. It is the sort of behavior that Republicans routinely call “unpatriotic” when Democrats are doing it. I would never question John McCain’s patriotism, no matter how misguided his sense of the country’s best interests sometimes seems. His behavior has nothing to do with love of country; it has everything to do with love of self.”
I have some advice of my own for Sen. McCain and his cohorts, join Governor Sanford on the Appalachian Trail. In other words, take a hike.
17 Wednesday Jun 2009
Posted in McCain, Obama, Politics, Uncategorized
Tags
do something, Farewell Address, Frank Gaffney, George Washington, interventionists, John McCain, Mitt Romney, neo-conservative, Richard Perle
Proving that they have learned absolutely nothing from our experience in Iraq, the neo-conservative interventionists, led by former Republican presidential candidate, Mr. Bomb, Bomb Iran himself, Senator John McCain, are beginning the drumbeat of “do something” following the fraudulent Iranian election.
And naturally the cries of “weak” and “appeaser” in reference to President Obama and his non-interventionist policy are also being heard.
Mitt Romney saying:
“It’s very clear that the president’s policies of going around the world and apologizing for America aren’t working. … Look, just sweet talk and criticizing America is not going to enhance freedom in the world.”
Noted neo-con and former presidential advisor Richard Perle:
“Normally, when you unclench your fist it benefits the hardliners, because Obama appeared to be saying we can do business with you even with your present policies.”
Frank (the president is a closet Muslim) Gaffney:
“It underscores the folly of the president’s basic premise that the problem we have with bad actors around the world is that they don’t understand us. These people are thugs and they have been emboldened by our weakness.”
But President Obama’s course of action is exactly the right one. The Wonk Room explains it best:
“Were the U.S to clumsily wade into this Iranian political crisis, as McCain would have us do, it would support Ahmadinejad’s main arguments against his domestic opponents, and likely provide the perfect pretext for a more intense crackdown. In other words, the preferences of hardliners in Iran and the U.S. are pretty closely aligned here.
As with McCain’s impetuous response to the Georgia crisis last summer, his first reaction to the events in Iran is condemnation and a call to “act.” Fortunately, we have an administration in power that understands that knowing when not to act is as strategically important as knowing when to do so, and that the most productive thing the United States can do for Iran’s reform movement -and human rights- at the moment is to keep itself, to the extent possible, out of the equation.”
Read the words of another well-known “appeaser” and “apologist” and tell me if his views on foreign policy more closely resemble those of President Obama or Senator McCain.
“Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.
The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.
The Nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the Government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The Government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times, it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives.
Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.”
13 Saturday Jun 2009
Posted in Obama, Politics, Uncategorized
Tags
Democrats, detainees, Frank Wolf, Guanatanamo, Jim Webb, release, Republicans, Uighurs, Virginia
We need to change the last line of our national anthem. No longer are we the home of the brave, we are home of the frightened, cowering in fear. Fear brought on by demagogic Republicans and spineless Democrats who go along so as not to be portrayed by those demagogues as “soft on terror.”
This is the latest example that we have become a nation of cowards;
“The Obama administration has all but abandoned plans to allow Guantanamo Bay detainees who have been cleared for release to live in the United States, administration officials said yesterday, a decision that reflects bipartisan congressional opposition to admitting such prisoners but complicates efforts to persuade European allies to accept them.”
I have a message for the demagogues and the jellyfish in Washington, as well as the American people who polls show are so easily manipulated and frightened about releasing the Gitmo detainees, it’s time we man up and accept the responsibility for our actions.
We are the country who captured and incarcerated people for 6 or 7 years without charges, without trials, without proof of any wrongdoing, just the fear of what they might do if not detained, and now the fear of what they might do if released.
Now that our courts have ordered some of them set free, as in the case of the Chinese Uighurs, we are asking Palau and Bermuda to take them. Even though there is a large Uighur community in Virginia who would gladly accept them.
But no, Virginia elected officials, Sen. Jim Webb and Rep. Frank Wolf, one Democrat and one Republican, opposed the Uighurs resettling there “as a matter of national security.” Our national security is threatened by people who have been proven guilty of nothing? Nothing other than being the object of irrational fear stoked by politicians with their collective moistened fingers in the wind.
We are also asking Australia and Germany to accept released detainees but they are understandably balking because we refuse to take any of them ourselves.
Do we owe anything to those we have imprisoned without cause or without due process? If a country held me for 7 years without charges because of mere suspicion would I feel I was owed something on my release? You’re damned right I would.
But that would have to be a country which takes responsibility for it’s wrongdoings and attempts to make amends, not one whose leaders and whose population are afraid of their own shadows.
Desperado's Outpost 