Monday, May 31, 2010

Dealing with out-of-control corporations

This is what we now have to deal with in our world because of capitalism/corporatism run amok! Trying to rein in the big corporations is like bolting the barn door after the horse has run off. Thank you, Ronald Reagan, George H.W Bush, Duhmbya Bush, and Dick Cheney -- and all Congressional representatives (supposed to represent US, tho' they only represent themselves) for deregulating big business and allowing Corporations to Rule the World.  How do you like the world you've created?  It's fine for all of you who have pocketed millions from Big Corporation Payoffs -- but just look at what it is costing the rest of us!  Will common sense EVER, EVER be practiced in our political world????!!!!!  HOW can we get these pigs at the trough to ever listen to us ("we, the people")???? They are too busy gobbling up the riches that the corporate lobbyists deliver to their door, day after day after day.  The power of the corporations has become so great, not even the president can rein them in.  If he tried, he would probably end up like JFK.  Our democratic republic has been dealt a death blow by greed and power.  We are doomed to end up like every other civilization in history that succumbed to the same kind of takeover by the elite.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/why-obama-should-put-bp-u_b_595346.html

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Stupidity in our kids

Ignorance/stupidity reigns on planet Earth.  New "game" among boys proves it:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/sack-tapping-boys-punch-testicles-game/story?id=10762563
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Saturday, May 29, 2010

Top Kill for Oil Leak is not working -- more disaster ahead

The nightmare continues...  Interesting, isn't it, that we hear nothing from the Bushes or the Cheneys about this.  Their chumminess with big oil and their insistence on deregulation of big companies has delivered this disaster to our country.  Even Big Mouth Liz Cheney is keeping mum.  They're all hunkering down in their palatial estates, while they still collect mega bucks from their oil buddies.  And the cry Drill Baby Drill seems to have faded to a whisper these days, except of course for Sarah Palin, heir to the Idiocy Throne vacated by Duhmbya.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/29/bp-says-so-far-gulf-well-_n_594501.html
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WWII Soldier speaks of personal torment in his recently found poem

What comment can there be, when you know you'd feel the same as he? A heart-touching poem by a soldier from WWII.
LONG-LOST POEM REVEALS SOLDIER'S ANGUISH

What does it feel like to kill a man? James Lenihan of Brooklyn, New York, knew.

He fought in Europe in World War II and he killed a German soldier during a battle in Holland. He described how it felt in a poem.

I shot a man yesterday

And much to my surprise,

The strangest thing happened to me

I began to cry.

So begins "Murder: Most Foul," a work that echoes poetry about war in the tradition of William Shakespeare and borrows its title from the bard's "Hamlet."

As powerful as the poem is, the story behind it is also fascinating.

Sgt. James Lenihan returned home after the war, got married, had children and made a career as a salesman in the meatpacking industry.

If he ever wrote any other poems, his son Robert and daughter Joan, who still live in Brooklyn, New York, don't know of any.

In fact, they didn't know about this poem until after their father died. They found it when they were going through his possessions.

Robert and Joan Lenihan found two typewritten pages, each with a copy of the poem. It was unsigned, but Robert believes the poem was written by his father and later typed up by his mother for safekeeping.

The poem describes a killing in Holland, where Lenihan served in the 104th Infantry Division as it battled German units.

It portrays a soldier very upset about taking a life.

I knelt beside him

And held his hand --

I begged his forgiveness

Did he understand?

But even while he describes the shooting as murder, Lenihan makes clear he had no choice.

It was the War

And he was the enemy

If I hadn't shot him

He would have shot me.

Robert Lenihan said the poem is a bit unlike the father he grew up with -- a man who could be a "tough customer" if need be, not someone tormented by a fleeting, albeit intense, moment on a battlefield in Holland.

"I'm just starting to appreciate how much he suffered only now in this part of my life. When I was a kid, like if he yelled at me or something, I'd say 'Well, Dad's being cranky,' " Lenihan said.

Lenihan said even though the incident in the poem took place more than 60 years ago, it still resonates and should be a lesson to young soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan that they aren't the first to face such emotional turmoil as this.

"That feeling they may have of regret and pain and shock of what they've done. It shows they are not alone," Lenihan said.

While Lenihan is obviously proud of his father's poem, CNN sent it to Georgetown University professor David Gewanter, who has published several books of poetry, including "War Bird" published last year.

Gewanter called the poem "accomplished." In an e-mail to CNN, Gewanter said the poem "is good, and its truths are that of experience and some literary traditions."

Robert Lenihan sounded surprised when he heard Gewanter's analysis of his father's amateur poem.

"I'm very deeply touched," Lenihan said. "For an expert to assess it that way and make such important comparisons I'm amazed and quite touched."

The poetry professor said Sgt. Lenihan's poem reminds him of a famous portion of Shakespeare's play "Henry V."

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered --

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

But Gewanter said it perhaps most closely resembles "The Man He Killed," a work by Thomas Hardy written at the start of World War I. In that poem, Hardy writes that the soldier and the foe he killed might have shared a drink or loaned each other money had they met somewhere other than a battlefield.

Sgt. Lenihan's poem ends not with talk of loans or drinks, but a darker scene.

I shot a man yesterday

And much to surprise

A part of me died with Him

When Death came to close His eyes.


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Backwards Planet, Backwards Civilization

This article should be required reading for every politician and corporate head, not that they would pay the least attention to it. They're far too busy feathering their own nests while the nests of the birds on the Louisiana coast are covered with thick, slimy crude oil--all because Cheney/Bush told Big Oil, Big Banks, and other corporations that they can regulate themselves.
TOP KILL, INDEED
by William Rivers Pitt

"Top kill." That has been the phrase on the lips of every network news talking head, and in the lead paragraph of every news report, all throughout this last week. British Petroleum (BP) describes the process this way: "The primary objective of the top kill process is to put heavy kill mud into the well so that it reduces the pressure and then the flow from the well. Once the kill mud is in the well and it's shut down, then we follow up with cement to plug the leak."

Think about that for a second. Here was the Deepwater Horizon, an absolute marvel of high-flying engineering and construction, until it exploded and collapsed into the sea. Afterward, here was this hole in the ocean spewing raw crude into the fertile waters of the Gulf. Despite all the fantastic technological prowess evidenced in the construction of the Deepwater Horizon, it's failure left us so buggered for answers to the oil vomiting from the hole they drilled that they are down to stuffing mud into it and praying that works.

Maybe it has, actually. Friday's New York Times suggested as much, reporting, "By injecting solid objects overnight as well as heavy drilling fluid into the stricken well leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico, engineers appeared to have stemmed the flow of oil." However, the report goes on to state that we won't really know if it worked for another day or so, and even if it did work, the leak could start up again without warning.

Let's all take a huge, arm-flapping leap of faith for a moment and assume the "top kill" mud bomb did in fact work, and the oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster has actually been stopped. A lot of people will probably do some victory dancing on your television screen - BP officials, Coast Guard officials and maybe even the president - and if they do, it is your moral obligation to scream at them until you feel like your throat could burst.

This is just beginning, and even with the oil spigot turned off (for now), it is going to get much, much worse, and will stay that way for a very long time.

This thing has been spewing as much as 19,000 barrels of oil into the ocean per day, every day, for the last five weeks. There are tens of millions of gallons of oil down there, swirling around in the currents and making their way toward a long and desperately fragile shoreline.

Here is one example of what we're all going to be hearing about for the next several months, if not years, to come:

Marine scientists have discovered a massive new plume of what they believe to be oil deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, stretching 22 miles (35 kilometers) from the leaking wellhead northeast toward Mobile Bay, Alabama. The discovery by researchers on the University of South Florida College of Marine Science's Weatherbird II vessel is the second significant undersea plume recorded since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20.

The thick plume was detected just beneath the surface down to about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters), and is more than 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) wide, said David Hollander, associate professor of chemical oceanography at the school. Hollander said the team detected the thickest amount of hydrocarbons, likely from the oil spewing from the blown out well, at about 1,300 feet (nearly 400 meters) in the same spot on two separate days this week.

The discovery was important, he said, because it confirmed that the substance found in the water was not naturally occurring and that the plume was at its highest concentration in deeper waters. The researchers will use further testing to determine whether the hydrocarbons they found are the result of dispersants or the emulsification of oil as it traveled away from the well.

The first such plume detected by scientists stretched from the well southwest toward the open sea, but this new undersea oil cloud is headed miles inland into shallower waters where many fish and other species reproduce. The researchers say they are worried these undersea plumes may be the result of the unprecedented use of chemical dispersants to break up the oil a mile undersea at the site of the leak.

Who knows how many of those plumes are lurking in the Gulf? Where will they go, and when will they arrive? Will this oil be carried around Florida and up the Eastern Seaboard, drowning beaches and fishing grounds and every ecosystem it encounters? How much damage will be done by the dispersants that will be used to quell the oil damage?

I don't know. Neither do you. BP doesn't know; the Coast Guard doesn't know; the president doesn't know. Nobody knows.

We're going to find out, though. Slowly, dreadfully, we are going to find out.

Factor this in before you think this is as bad as it can get: it's about to be high, hot summer in the Gulf. Cleaning up oil at sea and on land when it's above 90 degrees and brutally humid will test the endurance of every human who dares to assist in the clean-up. People died when the Deepwater went down, and mark my words, people will die cleaning up the mess.

This, too: it's about to be hurricane season:

The upcoming Atlantic hurricane season will likely be a busy one and may spawn as many as 23 named tropical storms, including up to seven major hurricanes, the U.S. government said Thursday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that eight to 14 storms would strengthen into hurricanes, with top winds of 74 mph (119 kph) or higher. Three to seven of those could become major storms that reach Category 3 or higher - meaning they bring sustained winds of at least 111 mph (179 kph).

"If this outlook holds true, this season could be one of the more active on record," NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco said in a statement. "The greater likelihood of storms brings an increased risk of a landfall. In short, we urge everyone to be prepared."

So, let's be clear. There are millions of gallons of oil threatening thousands of miles of coastlines, ecosystems and livelihoods. Nobody knows how much there is, or where it will appear, or when. It's about to be brutally hot exactly where the clean-up needs to happen, and a whole slew of hurricanes and tropical storms are on the way.

And our best response is to fill a hole with mud, just like the little Dutch boy facing 11 holes in the dike with only ten fingers on his hands. All of this because we are so addicted to oil that the petroleum companies like BP were allowed to "regulate" themselves.

Top kill indeed.


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Friday, May 28, 2010

How Christian are Tea Party followers?

Good article written by a Christian leader: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/how-christian-is-tea-part_b_592170.html
The author brings up some interesting points that I have also been wondering about...

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Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Oops -- More pesky side-effects: heartburn drugs cause fractures


http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MensHealthGERD/fda-warns-fracture-risk-heartburn-drugs/story?id=10746531

Now here's a tough decision:  Which would you rather have?  Heartburn or a spinal fracture?  Pharmaceutical drugs = dangerous side effects.

1/2 tsp. of Bob's Red Mill Baking Soda (aluminum-free, which is not the case with Arm & Hammer) in a glass of water, taken once a day will cure heartburn for good.  It makes your body more alkaline (most people's bodies are acidic).  But it costs hardly anything, so the A.M.A. and Big Pharma don't want you to know about it.  They want you to take Prilosec or Nexium at a high cost for the drugs, and risk bone fractures.  Self education is important in our world today.



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Good Quote re. Dick Armey

""He ( Dick Armey) is like a stupid person's idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like."
--Ezra Klein

Armey is a lying political blowhard, who is leading/egging on the Teabaggers.  He is the Chairman of FreedomWorks, a far right-wing organization (cult). Ezra Klein's quote is extremely apt. (~.~)
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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

This essay should be read by everyone

I've included some important excerpts, but the entire article is well worth the short reading time it will take. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/lucinda-marshall/29011/when-the-truth-is-found-to-be-lies   We need many more Congressional leaders like Dennis Kucinich and Alan Grayson to combat the entrenched leaden-footed, corporate-funded, lying traitors who pretend to cast their Congressional votes for "the people," but who only enrich themselves with money and power at the cost of the people.  So many are fooled by their town criers, the Rush Limbaughs, Sarah Palins, and Glenn Becks. It's really pitiful.

WHEN THE TRUTH IS FOUND TO BE LIES
By Lucinda Marshall

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/lucinda-marshall/29011/when-the-truth-is-found-to-be-lies

EXCERPT:
We have almost pathological blinders when it comes to seeing the obvious perils to our continued existence–climate change and global warming, peak oil, water and food shortages, melting glaciers, species extinction, deforestration, floods, droughts, oceans under siege. But still we gulp the koolaid and believe that growth is good and things will be better soon. And we are just as blind when it comes to understanding that commodifying the sanctity of corporate well-being over human welfare is ultimately our downfall, not the path to prosperity that it claims to be....
And in the Gulf–one wonders if there has been a coup–BP seems to be calling the shots. The EPA tells them not to continue to use a toxic chemical dispersant (see quote below regarding why this is so extremely terrifying and see here regarding the issue that this chemical was approved for use even though we have known about its toxicity for many years), and BP says they will keep using it. When reporters call law enforcement, they reach BP, scientific evidence is being evaluated by a company that counts BP as a client and worst of all, damage estimates are repeatedly minimized.

But the marshes are being destroyed, the oceans poisoned–there is no going back from this and as yet no way to stop it. This isn’t Exxon-Valdez, it is far, far worse and the damage beyond anything this country has ever seen and one which cannot be fixed. The Gulf coast as we know it is gone. The fishing, the tourism. There will be health consequences. There won’t be fish. Or perhaps coral reefs. Or perhaps us. And that is the truth of it.

QUOTE ABOUT DISPERSANTS:

“Dispersants can contain particular evils. Corexit 9527 -- used extensively by BP despite it being toxic enough to be banned in British waters -- contains 2-butoxyethanol, a compound that ruptures red blood cells in whatever eats it. Its replacement, COREXIT 9500, contains petroleum solvents and other components that can damage membranes, and cause chemical pneumonia if aspirated into the lungs following ingestion.

But what worries Dr (Susan) Shaw most is the long-term potential for toxic chemicals to build up in the food chain. "There are hundreds of organic compounds in oil, including toxic solvents and PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), that can cause cancer in animals and people. In this respect light, sweet crude is more toxic than the heavy stuff. It's not only the acute effects, the loss of whole niches in the food web, it's also the problems we will see with future generations, especially in top predators."”



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Saturday, May 22, 2010

War Is Making You Poor Act-- Please sign petition to Congress

http://www.TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com

Watch video at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-alan-grayson/the-war-is-making-you-poo_b_585343.html   and please pass this e-mail along to your friends.

Next week, there is going to be a "debate" in Congress on yet another war funding bill. The bill is supposed to pass without debate, so no one will notice.

What George Orwell wrote about in 1984 has come true. What Eisenhower warned us about concerning the "military-industrial complex" has come true. War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape, so much so that no one notices it anymore.

But we're going to change this. Today, we're introducing a bill called 'The War Is Making You Poor Act'. The purpose of this bill is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars.

Next year's budget allocates $159,000,000,000 to perpetuate the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. That's enough money to eliminate federal income taxes for the first $35,000 of every American's income. Beyond that, leaves over $15 billion to cut the deficit.

And that's what this bill does. It eliminates separate funding for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and eliminates federal income taxes for everyone's first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for couples). Plus it pays down the national debt.

The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There's no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war.

We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don't even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using 'emergency supplemental'. A nine-year 'emergency'.

Let's show Congress the cost of these wars is too much for us.

Tell Congress that you like 'The War Is Making You Poor Act'. No, tell Congress you love it. Act now.

http://www.TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com

All we are saying is "give peace a chance." We will end these wars.

Together.

See Rep. Alan Grayson introduce the bill in Congress: Video is at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-alan-grayson/the-war-is-making-you-poo_b_585343.html


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Oil spill debacle -- where is Obama?

What a disappointment Obama has been as President.  Those of us who voted for him and expected so much more are appalled by his lack of attention to this oil spill catastrophe. The corporations rule our world and we the people are all looked on as dispensable by the elite who now run everything for their own profit. I'd like to ask all conservative Reagan and Bush-worshipping Republicans:  How do you like Reaganomics now? How's that old "Trickle-down" theory working for you?

MORE THAN JUST AN OIL SPILL
By Bob Herbert

The warm, soft winds coming in off the gulf have lost their power to soothe. Anxiety is king now — all along the coast.

“You can’t sleep no more; that’s how bad it is,” said John Blanchard, an oyster fisherman whose life has been upended by the monstrous oil spill fouling an enormous swath of the Gulf of Mexico. He shook his head. “My wife and I have got two kids, 2 and 7. We could lose everything we’ve been working all of our lives for.”

I was standing on a gently rocking oyster boat with Mr. Blanchard and several other veteran fishermen who still seemed stunned by the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Instead of harvesting oysters, they were out on the water distributing oil retention booms and doing whatever else they could to bolster the coastline’s meager defenses against the oil making its way ominously and relentlessly, like an invading army, toward the area’s delicate and heartbreakingly vulnerable wetlands.

A fisherman named Donny Campo tried to hide his anger with wisecracks, but it didn’t work. “They put us out of work, and now we’re cleaning up their mess,” he said. “Yeah, I’m mad. Some of us have been at this for generations. I’m 46 years old and my son — he’s graduating from high school this week — he was already fishing oysters. There’s a whole way of life at risk here.”

The risks unleashed by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig are profound — the latest to be set in motion by the scandalous, rapacious greed of the oil industry and its powerful allies and enablers in government. America is selling its soul for oil.

The vast, sprawling coastal marshes of Louisiana, where the Mississippi River drains into the gulf, are among the finest natural resources to be found anywhere in the world. And they are a positively crucial resource for America. Think shrimp estuaries and bird rookeries and oyster fishing grounds.

These wetlands are one of the nation’s most abundant sources of seafood. And they are indispensable when it comes to the nation’s bird population. Most of the migratory ducks and geese in the United States spend time in the Louisiana wetlands as they travel to and from Latin America.

Think songbirds. Paul Harrison, a specialist on the Mississippi River and its environs at the Environmental Defense Fund, told me that the wetlands are relied on by all 110 neo-tropical migratory songbird species. The migrating season for these beautiful, delicate creatures is right now — as many as 25 million can pass through the area each day.

Already the oil from the nightmare brought to us by BP is making its way into these wetlands, into this natural paradise that belongs not just to the people of Louisiana but to all Americans. Oil is showing up along dozens of miles of the Louisiana coast, including the beaches of Grand Isle, which were ordered closed to the public.

The response of the Obama administration and the general public to this latest outrage at the hands of a giant, politically connected corporation has been embarrassingly tepid. We take our whippings in stride in this country. We behave as though there is nothing we can do about it.

The fact that 11 human beings were killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion (their bodies never found) has become, at best, an afterthought. BP counts its profits in the billions, and, therefore, it’s important. The 11 men working on the rig were no more important in the current American scheme of things than the oystermen losing their livelihoods along the gulf, or the wildlife doomed to die in an environment fouled by BP’s oil, or the waters that will be left unfit for ordinary families to swim and boat in.

This is the bitter reality of the American present, a period in which big business has cemented an unholy alliance with big government against the interests of ordinary Americans, who, of course, are the great majority of Americans. The great majority of Americans no longer matter.

No one knows how much of BP’s runaway oil will contaminate the gulf coast’s marshes and lakes and bayous and canals, destroying wildlife and fauna — and ruining the hopes and dreams of countless human families. What is known is that whatever oil gets in will be next to impossible to get out. It gets into the soil and the water and the plant life and can’t be scraped off the way you might be able to scrape the oil off of a beach.

It permeates and undermines the ecosystem in much the same way that big corporations have permeated and undermined our political system, with similarly devastating results.


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Want the truth about how much oil is spilling into the Gulf?

BP said 5,000 barrels a day -- more likely it's up to over 100,000 barrels a day.
http://trueslant.com/stephenwebster/2010/05/20/congress-told-oil-gusher-jetting-up-to-104000-barrels-per-day/

Dennis Kucinich, my favorite Congressman, says we are turning our planet into a smoking, glowing, oily mess.  Our poor Earth has a terminal case of the humans.  Read the article below for Kucinich's comments, which are right on
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0521/firedup-kucinich-reducing-earth-smoking-glowing-oily-mess/

EXCERPTS: 
"Written in the oily sands of the Gulf," Kucinich concluded, "our world exists through fragile interconnected systems of life. Our survival depends upon reconciliation with – not exploitation of – the natural world."
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Thursday, May 20, 2010

Limbaugh leads the way....to disaster

Rush Limbaugh is leading his "dittoheads" and the Party of No into disaster for our country and the world.  Crazy as their rhetoric may seem to anyone with brains, Rush and Glenn Beck and their ilk have followers who dote on their every word...and do exactly what they tell them to do.  If they and their dittoheads prevail in their insanity, they could well be the death of us all.  They don't believe in global warming, they'd love to have Sarah Palin for President, they don't think the oil spill in the Gulf is a big deal,  and they still want to "Drill, Baby, Drill." 

THE LIMBAUGH VICTORY
By Zev Chafets

THERE are many theories for why very conservative Republicans seem to be doing so well lately, taking their party’s Senate nominations in Florida, Kentucky and Utah, and beating Democrats head-to-head in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia. Some attribute this to a generalized anti-incumbent mood. Others say it reflects the tendency of parties in power to falter in midterm elections. Recently it has been fashionable to ascribe right-wing success to the Tea Party movement.

But the most obvious explanation is the one that’s been conspicuously absent from the gusher of analysis. Republican success in 2010 can be boiled down to two words: Rush Limbaugh.

Mr. Limbaugh has played an important role in elections going back to 1994, when he commanded the air war in the Republican Congressional victory. This time, however, he is more than simply the mouthpiece of the party. He is the brains and the spirit behind its resurgence.

How did this happen? The Obama victory in 2008 left Republicans dazed, demoralized and leaderless. Less than six weeks after the inauguration, in a nationally televised keynote address to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Limbaugh stepped into the void with a raucous denunciation of the new president’s agenda and a strategic plan based on his belief that real conservatism wins every time. He reiterated his famous call for Mr. Obama to fail and urged the party faithful to ignore the siren song of bipartisanship and moderation and stay true to the principles of Ronald Reagan.

Democrats responded by branding Mr. Limbaugh — whom they considered self-evidently unattractive — as the leader of the opposition. The day after the conservative conference, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, went on “Face the Nation” and described Mr. Limbaugh as the “voice and the intellectual force and energy” of the G.O.P.

Mr. Limbaugh loved being tossed into this briar patch. He mocked the notion that he was the titular leader of the Republicans even as he was becoming the party’s top strategist and de facto boss.

His strategy was simple. With Democrats controlling Congress, Mr. Limbaugh saw that there was no way to stop the president’s agenda. He dismissed the moderates’ notion that compromising with the president would make Republicans look good to independents. Instead he decreed that the Republicans must become the party of no, and force Democratic candidates — especially centrists — to go into 2010 with sole responsibility for the Obama program and the state of the economy. And that is what has happened.

Mr. Limbaugh was not just the architect of this plan, he was (and continues to be) its enforcer. Dissenters like Arlen Specter, whom Mr. Limbaugh disparaged as a “Republican in Name Only,” found themselves unelectable in the party primaries. Moderates like Michael Steele, the party chairman, were slapped down for suggesting cooperation with the administration. When Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia had the temerity to suggest that Mr. Limbaugh was too uncompromising, he was met with public outrage and forced into an humiliating apology.

When the Tea Party movement emerged, Mr. Limbaugh welcomed it. The movement’s causes — fighting against health care reform, reducing the size and cost of government, opposing the Democrats’ putative desire to remake America in the image of European social democracies — were straight Limbaughism. A very high proportion of the Tea Partiers listen to Mr. Limbaugh. Sarah Palin’s biggest current applause line — Republicans are not just the party of no, but the party of hell no — came courtesy of Mr. Limbaugh. (Ms. Palin gave the keynote address at the first national Tea Party convention.) Glenn Beck, who is especially popular among Tea Partiers, calls Mr. Limbaugh his hero.

So why the lack of attention? Mr. Limbaugh has studiously refrained from claiming credit for the movement. His only intervention thus far has been to quash talk about the Tea Party becoming a third party. He wants a unified, right-wing G.O.P. in 2010, and by all appearances he is going to get it.

Rush Limbaugh came along after the age of Ronald Reagan. He has never really had a Republican presidential candidate to his ideological satisfaction. But if the party sweeps this November under the banner of Real Conservatism, Mr. Obama will find himself facing two years of “no” in Washington and, very likely, a Limbaugh-approved opponent in 2012.

Zev Chafets is the author of the forthcoming “Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One.”


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Thursday, May 13, 2010

Oil spill video -- scenes from the air

Our dependence on oil has to end.  The Sarah Palin "drill baby, drill" type of consciousness must die out and be replaced by intelligent, environmentally-conscious decisions on the part of our leaders.

Below is an amateur video of the oil spill.

 

 

 

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Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Jon Stewart video re. Obama vs. Bush years

This is a very humorous take on how the Republicans are using old Bush comparisons to denounce each and every Obama move now.  After trying to convince us for 8 years that everything Bush did was relevant and intelligent, all of a sudden the conservative pundits/politicians are using all the Bush gaffes/mishaps/mistakes to compare Obama to in order to make Obama appear like the train wreck Bush really was.  It's very comical how their minds can twist and turn on a dime to suit their own belief system.  Jon Stewart, as always, is hilarious in his take on all of this...comparing them to a used-car salesman who tells you how wonderful the car is when he is selling it to you -- and as soon as you buy it, says, "That piece of s--t is your problem now, Buddy."  If you like to laugh and appreciate the oh-so-thinly veiled hypocrisy in politics, this is a must-watch short video. Highly recommended for overall humor value. (~.~)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/12/stewart-hammers-conservat_n_573004.html


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Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Should this essay be required reading for all Christians? YES.

But I'm sure the political conservatives among them would find a way to shoot it down (with Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck taking the first shots).
HOW DO CHRISTIANS BECOME CONSERVATIVE? (A Very Good Question)
By Mike Lux

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/how-do-christians-become_b_570361.html

EXCERPT: T
he most fundamental difference between progressives and conservatives is that question of which side you are on. Conservatives believe that the rich and powerful got that way because they deserve to be, that society owes its prosperity to the prosperous, and that government's job when they have to make choices is to side with those businesspeople who are doing well, because all good things trickle down from them. Progressives, on the other hand, believe it is the poor and those who are ill-treated who need the most help from their government, and that prosperity comes from all of us -- the worker as well as the employer, the consumer as well as the seller, the struggling entrepreneur trying to make it as well as the wealthy who already have.

...if you actually read the Gospels, it is clear that Jesus' main concern in terms of the people whose fates he cared about was for the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast. Comment after comment and story after story in the Gospels about Jesus relates to the treatment of the poor, generosity to those in need, mercy to the outcast, and scorn for the wealthy and powerful. And his philosophy is embedded with the central importance of taking care of others, loving others, treating others as you would want to be treated. There is no virtue of selfishness here, there is no "greed is good," there is no invisible hand of the market or looking out for Number One first. There is nothing about poor people being lazy, nothing about the undeserving poor being leeches on society, nothing about how I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps so everyone else should, too. There is nothing about how in nature, "the lions eat the weak," and therefore we shouldn't help the poor because it weakens them. There is nothing about charity or welfare corrupting a person's spirit.
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Bringing the Vatican to Justice

An eloquent essay by Sam Harris, whose proposal at the end is one with which I am in full agreement and support. "By their fruits you shall know them."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/bringing-the-vatican-to-j_b_571088.html


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Monday, May 10, 2010

More proof of our upside down world

A Simple Way to End This Recession
by William Rivers Pitt

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-rivers-pitt/28611/a-simple-way-to-end-this-recession-forever

EXCERPT:

Just dumping the Osprey program would have given us enough money to pay for the disasters in Tennessee and the Gulf, with a whole lot left over to help those affected by the recession and the Wall Street thievery. Shaving the tiniest percent off the 2010 "defense" budget would feed, clothe and educate every person of woman born in the United States, and we'd still have the most awesomely formidable military arsenal in the history of the galaxy.

But we don't talk about that stuff. We close libraries, cut education budgets, tax everything, and borrow from our children's future instead of tapping into the awesome reservoir of taxpayer cash shoveled into the Pentagon each and every year.

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Saturday, May 08, 2010

End of the Euro? And what it means...

http://www.newsweek.com/id/237645

Will a United States of Europe have to be formed to keep the financial centralization going?  Stay tuned...

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Alarm Bells re. Chemicals and Cancer--from the government

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/opinion/06kristof.html?src=me&ref=homepage

EXCERPT
:
The President’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.
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Thursday, May 06, 2010

Wise Observation!

"Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality"
- Michael Ellner
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Monday, May 03, 2010

Rush Limbaugh: Ocean will clean itself from oil spill

Anyone who listens to Limbaugh or Beck and takes what they say to be gospel ought to be institutionalized...

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/limbaugh-environmentalists-square-off-blame-oil-leak/story?id=10542582

EXCERPT:

Limbaugh has downplayed the need for a massive cleanup, saying that oil in the ocean was a natural phenomenon and as a result the ocean would take care of cleaning itself.

"You do survive these things. I'm not advocating don't care about it hitting the shore or coast and whatever you can do to keep it out of there is fine and dandy, but the ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and was left out there," Limbaugh said. "It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is."

But according to scientists, while some oil is normal seepage can be handled by natural systems, it's doubtful that the ocean could simply assimilate so much oil. Instead, the oil if left unchecked would break down into a sticky "mousse" coating seabirds, killing fish and spoiling delicate marshes and beaches.


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Who Are We? Experiments suggest we're not who we think...

Interesting article by a medical doctor:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/spirituality-who-are-we-e_b_551719.html

At the end of this article, there are several links to more articles by Dr. Lanza--interesting reading for the curious among us ...



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