Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.”
To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.
So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?
Anyone who remembered the 1990s could have predicted something like the current political craziness. What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don’t consider government by liberals — even very moderate liberals — legitimate. Mr. Obama’s election would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he isn’t, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.
By the way, I’m not talking about the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich. Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama with a vengeance: last month Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, compared proposals to end tax loopholes for hedge fund managers with the Nazi invasion of Poland.
And powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage. Jane Mayer’s new article in The New Yorker about the superrich Koch brothers and their war against Mr. Obama has generated much-justified attention, but as Ms. Mayer herself points out, only the scale of their effort is new: billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife waged a similar war against Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, the right-wing media are replaying their greatest hits. In the 1990s, Mr. Limbaugh used innuendo to feed anti-Clinton mythology, notably the insinuation that Hillary Clinton was complicit in the death of Vince Foster. Now, as we’ve just seen, he’s doing his best to insinuate that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. Again, though, there’s an extra level of craziness this time around: Mr. Limbaugh is the same as he always was, but now seems tame compared with Glenn Beck.
And where, in all of this, are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some partisans are going too far? Nowhere to be found.
To take a prime example: the hysteria over the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan almost makes one long for the days when former President George W. Bush tried to soothe religious hatred, declaring Islam a religion of peace. There were good reasons for his position: there are a billion Muslims in the world, and America can’t afford to make all of them its enemies.
But here’s the thing: Mr. Bush is still around, as are many of his former officials. Where are the statements, from the former president or those in his inner circle, preaching tolerance and denouncing anti-Islam hysteria? On this issue, as on many others, the G.O.P. establishment is offering a nearly uniform profile in cowardice.
So what will happen if, as expected, Republicans win control of the House? We already know part of the answer: Politico reports that they’re gearing up for a repeat performance of the 1990s, with a “wave of committee investigations” — several of them over supposed scandals that we already know are completely phony. We can expect the G.O.P. to play chicken over the federal budget, too; I’d put even odds on a 1995-type government shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.
It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get.
If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off this prospect, offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.
Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter's questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would be asked about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California's ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.Mehlman headed the RNC when the Republican Party was pushing anti-gay initiatives and increasingly speaking out against marriage equality. Former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie and Mehlman's longtime friend called Mehlman's coming-out "significant," but added that he remains opposed to gay marriage"It's taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life," Mehlman said. "Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I've told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they've been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that's made me a happier and better person. It's something I wish I had done years ago."
EXCERPT: The subject of UFOs -- of intense interest to the general public -- is no longer something that reputable journalists will feel they need to avoid or dismiss as silly. Popular culture has distorted the facts about this compelling mystery, and a new book sets the record straight. "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record" (Harmony Books / The Crown Publishing Group) by journalist Leslie Kean pulls back the curtain on the incredible occurrences of unexplained behavior by unknown objects over many decades.
"UFOs" includes a foreword by John Podesta and riveting, first-person accounts written by over a dozen military and aviation witnesses and official investigators from around the world. Contributors include a former governor of Arizona, the former head of the FAA's Accidents and Investigations Division, military generals from five countries, a retired senior research scientist from NASA, Air Force and commercial pilots, and government officials from agencies investigating UFOs in their respective countries.
We are never going to build a stable, flourishing society in Afghanistan. What we desperately need is a campaign of nation-building to counteract the growing instability and deterioration in the United States.
We are never going to build a stable, flourishing society in Afghanistan. What we desperately need is a campaign of nation-building to counteract the growing instability and deterioration in the United States.
Study: Prayer Actually Heals
Prayer heals when it's close-up and personal, and there's a study to prove it.
It's not just any kind of prayer, but "proximal intercessory prayer," or PIP — when one or more people pray for someone in that person's presence and often with physical contact — that was found by a team of doctors, scientists, and religious experts to have remarkable results in healing some patients.
A team of medical doctors and scientists led by Indiana University professor of religion Candy Gunther Brown found in the study, conducted in rural Mozambique, that prayer brought "highly significant" improvements to hearing-impaired participants and significant changes to the visually impaired.
Fourteen hard-of-hearing and 11 visually impaired study participants were recruited at meetings of pentecostal Christian groups in three Mozambican villages and one town.
They were tested with a handheld audiometer or vision charts, depending on their impairment, both before and after they took part in a prayer session.
"There was a highly significant improvement in hearing across 18 ears of 11 subjects" and "significant visual improvements," says the study, which will be published next month in the peer-reviewed Southern Medical Journal.
Two of the hard-of-hearing study participants were able to hear sounds at 50 decibels lower after the prayer session and three of the visually impaired subjects saw their vision improve from 20/400 or worse to 20/80 or better.
The study focused on the clinical effects of prayer and did not attempt to explain how or why some participants saw such remarkable improvements.
"This study shows that in some instances there are measurable effects that can be demonstrated using clinical studies," Brown told AFP.
"I consider this very much a first step and an indication of the direction for where research needs to head. Much more needs to be found out about why these effects are noticed, what are the mechanisms, are there structural changes involved," she said.
Stressing that their study sample was small and the conditions under which the study was conducted were far from ideal, the researchers urged "future study... to assess whether PIP may be a useful adjunct to standard medical care for certain patients," especially in countries with limited care options.
"The implications are potentially vast given World Health Organization estimates that 278 million people, 80 percent of whom live in developing countries, have moderate to profound hearing loss in both ears and 314 million people are visually impaired," the study says.
Dear reader, do you get it yet? Of course, the above is just an allegory. But there are mountains of truth in it. The system is controlled by plutocrats and, as any astute high school student knows, they finance political campaigns and the careers of politicians. For these bribes, they obtain access to our esteemed legislatures and influence or stymie bills in Congress, as each individual case is considered as to what benefits them.
They buy our Senators and Congressmen. That’s the way it works most of the time.
That’s the nature of American Democracy! (Cue the national anthem in the background, the Hendrix version, please!).
And if you don’t understand how the system works yet, you probably are barely aware of the decision made by the Supreme Court. Oh yeah, they ruled that corporations (confirmed as individuals with rights of their own over 100 years ago by that same august body), now have the right to contribute untold millions to the advertising campaigns of politicians. The Supreme Court calls this free speech. Ouch! Take that you motherfucker progressives! In your face!
Not to sound too pompous but here’s a little refresher on how the system works.
Our bicameral legislature, which makes the laws, ensures that business is conducted very agonizingly slowly with versions of bills developed in each house. Typically, the work week is only three days, Tuesday through Thursday. Any bill can be hindered by any number of methods or parliamentary strategies, the most controversial one being the invocation of a filibuster in the Senate which can forestall a vote on a bill. That means 60 votes are required to invoke the so-called cloture rule and limit debate.
In other words, a minority can hold all business hostage to their whims, hurts, egos and assorted power-grabs. (There are other parliamentary maneuvers as well, some allowing a single congressperson to prevent a bill from moving forward).
And in the meantime, a horde of cockroaches come out to impede the progress (if you care to call it that) of the bill. These cockroaches, also known as lobbyists, acting on behalf of the sinister plutocrats, mesmerize the representatives with promises of alluring treats, vacations, jobs for their family, and perhaps a sexual dalliance of his or her choice.
The next thing you know, the bill is stalled or compromised so much that it is not a bill anymore but a degenerate and bastardized piece of crap (like the Healthcare or Financial Regulation bills that ultimately became law). And then, everybody criticizes Obama for being unable to compel the congress to behave.
Folks, get real. Our system is antiquated, dysfunctional and so corrupt that the peoples’ business is impossible. In reality, the corporations run the show. Democracy? Please! The Senate is the least democratic institution we have. Give me a break!
Best Online Lesson on UFOs: A powerfully revealing online lesson brings together the best video, quotes, essays, and much more on the important topic of UFOs. Developed by individuals involved with WantToKnow.info, this dynamic two-hour lesson provides a greater context with which to understand not only the cover-ups and manipulations going on involving UFOs and ETs, but how this directly affects our lives and world. This eye-opening lesson also gives ideas on what you can do to make a difference, and leaves you feeling a refreshing sense of hope for the future of our world.
http://www.insightcourse.net/lessons/06a_ufos_testimony
Speculation on UFOs and the Big Picture on Earth: This seven-page essay by the founder of WantToKnow.info provides deep speculation on the UFO presence on our planet and its implications. Though this is a speculative essay in which the sources provided are not as reliable as those usually used on the website, plentiful links are provided to explore some of the fascinating theories proposed. Don't miss this inspiring essay which calls on each of us to join in transforming our beautiful planet.
http://www.WantToKnow.info/meaningoflifebigpicture - A Speculative Look at the Big Picture
The former head of the UN Biological Section, who worked closely with Dr Kelly in Iraq in the 1990s, has written to Attorney General Dominic Grieve about the 'mysterious circumstances' surrounding the death. The weapons inspector's body was found after he was unmasked as the source of a damaging BBC news report questioning the grounds for the Iraq war. Officially, he took his own life.
Yesterday Dr Spertzel told the Mail that the British authorities were 'intentionally ignoring' the issue. He believes that there is something 'fishy' and insisted that a coroner should examine the death as soon as possible.
A new Esquire profile of Newt Gingrich offers a rare glimpse into the personal life and political ambitions of the former House Speaker as he vies to make a comeback after resigning in disgrace over a decade ago.
Gingrich himself was interviewed for the feature story; however, some of the juiciest insight into the life of the prominent conservative voice comes from his ex-wife, Marianne Gingrich, whom he divorced in 2000.
"He asked me to marry him way too early," she revealed. "And he wasn't divorced yet [from his first wife Jackie Battley]. I should have known there was a problem."
Marianne Gingrich suggested that the former House Speaker found himself in the same relationship pattern eighteen years later when he sought to marry his current wife, then-congressional aide Callista Bisek.
"I know," she explained. "I asked him. He'd already asked her to marry him before he asked me for a divorce. Before he even asked."
The profile paints a silhouette highlighting the intersection of Gingrich's personal life and political career:
"There's somebody else, isn't there?"She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?
She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. "'I can't handle a Jaguar right now.' He said that many times. 'All I want is a Chevrolet.'"
He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.
He'd just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he'd given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.
The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, "How do you give that speech and do what you're doing?"
"It doesn't matter what I do," he answered. "People need to hear what I have to say. There's no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn't matter what I live."
As for 2012, Marianne Gingrich shared her take on speculation swirling over the possibility of Newt Gingrich making a run for the White House in the next election cycle. The bottom line, she said, is that "there's no way" he'll be president.
"He could have been president," she explained. "But when you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don't like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new . . . you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way."
Marianne Gingrich suggested that her ex-husband "believes that what he says in public and how he lives don't have to be connected" and added, "If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president. ... He always told me that he's always going to pull the rabbit out of the hat."
Gingrich's second wife zeroed-in on what she suggested might be her ex-husband's achilles' heel:
"He was impressed easily by position, status, money," she says. "He grew up poor and always wanted to be somebody, to make a difference, to prove himself, you know.
There's much more in the full Esquire profile -- click here to read it all.
Carly Fleischmann has severe autism. And for 11 years she couldn't communicate. But then she started typing. It changed everything
Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”
But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.
Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits “in apocalyptic terms.” And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has, however, stepped into the breach. Its numbers indicate that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.
And that’s about the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration’s plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible — which you shouldn’t — the Roadmap wouldn’t reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.
And I do mean slash. The Tax Policy Center finds that the Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.
Finally, let’s talk about those spending cuts. In its first decade, most of the alleged savings in the Ryan plan come from assuming zero dollar growth in domestic discretionary spending, which includes everything from energy policy to education to the court system. This would amount to a 25 percent cut once you adjust for inflation and population growth. How would such a severe cut be achieved? What specific programs would be slashed? Mr. Ryan doesn’t say.
After 2020, the main alleged saving would come from sharp cuts in Medicare, achieved by dismantling Medicare as we know it, and instead giving seniors vouchers and telling them to buy their own insurance. Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s the same plan Newt Gingrich tried to sell in 1995.
And we already know, from experience with the Medicare Advantage program, that a voucher system would have higher, not lower, costs than our current system. The only way the Ryan plan could save money would be by making those vouchers too small to pay for adequate coverage. Wealthy older Americans would be able to supplement their vouchers, and get the care they need; everyone else would be out in the cold.
In practice, that probably wouldn’t happen: older Americans would be outraged — and they vote. But this means that the supposed budget savings from the Ryan plan are a sham.
So why have so many in Washington, especially in the news media, been taken in by this flimflam? It’s not just inability to do the math, although that’s part of it. There’s also the unwillingness of self-styled centrists to face up to the realities of the modern Republican Party; they want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense. And last but not least, there’s deference to power — the G.O.P. is a resurgent political force, so one mustn’t point out that its intellectual heroes have no clothes.
But they don’t. The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.
How long, too, must concerned Obama supporters ask, "Whatever happened to the guy who campaigned as a fired-up crusader for truth, light and justice?" For it is painfully obvious that Barack Obama abandoned his campaign-winning persona once he prevailed in the election.
...For all the times it came, that clarion call for "change," it is now beyond doubt that Barack Obama has been unable to overcome his own demons and challenge the "way things are" in Washington. "Change" is a word that's easy to say, but it's much harder to accomplish. To cite John Donne, "no man is an island," and Barack Obama seems to have forgotten how many true believers across this country and across the globe were rooting for his success -- and would stand with him again, if he had the courage to call them into action. Or, would stand with him again if they had not been burned once by a group whose ambition truly seems to be "the last infirmity of noble minds."
It is not cynicism to wonder if Barack Obama ever really believed his own most eloquent words.
The Democrats need to use this footage for some campaign ads this year. Rachel Maddow lays out how the Republicans have continually flip-flopped on their own campaign issues once Democrats decide to embrace them whether it be health care reform, campaign finance reform, aid to small businesses or cap and trade. As she said in the clip of this rank hypocrisy, they're just not embarrassed. But then since the media largely gives them a pass on this kind of stuff, why should they be?
The days of depending on journalists to bring forth truth to the masses are long gone. They will not police themselves, thus allowing FAUX news to fool the people, many of whom don't seem to care whether they get truth or fiction from their news reporters.
From www.crooksandliars.com
By David Neiwert
Bill O'Reilly was all giddy last night about the news that in the wake of the seat-shuffling that followed Helen Thomas' departure from her front-row seat at White House press conferences, Fox News has managed to nab a front-row slot (the AP was awarded Thomas' coveted spot).
BillO even implied that he'd be coming down and making things rough on Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Ho ho ho ho hah.
But as Lynn Sweet's report notes, Fox was awarded the spot over two other superb news organizations: NPR and Bloomberg. Indeed, both are at least legitimate news organizations and not the brazen propaganda outlet that Fox News has become.
Fox has been able to get away with being a propaganda organ while pretending to do real "news" because of the cowardice of real working journalists, who have simply failed in their supposed role as the profession's "internal policing" mechanism.
This was exemplified, really, by the White House press corps' craven surrender to Fox's campaign to get that front-row seat, even though every working journalist in that room knows that at the end of the day, even a semi-decent guy like Major Garrett has to answer to Roger Ailes. Every one of them knows, too, that Fox churns out right-wing propaganda as a 24/7 operation.
But they will never do anything about it.
I was reminded, incidentally, of the old seven techniques of the propagandist, identified back in the 1930s:
· Name Calling: hanging a bad label on an idea, symbolized by a hand turning thumbs down;
· Card Stacking: selective use of facts or outright falsehoods, symbolized by an ace of spades, a card signifying treachery;
· Band Wagon: a claim that everyone like us thinks this way, symbolized by a marching bandleader's hat and baton;
· Testimonial: the association of a respected or hated person with an idea, symbolized by a seal and ribbon stamp of approval;
· Plain Folks: a technique whereby the idea and its proponents are linked to "people just like you and me," symbolized by an old shoe;
· Transfer: an assertion of a connection between something valued or hated and the idea or commodity being discussed, symbolized by a smiling Greek theater mask; and
· Glittering Generality: an association of something with a "virtue word" to gain approval without examining the evidence; symbolized by a sparkling gem.
That describes Fox News' daily "news" operations to a T.
EXCERPT: As if there is not enough that has gone tragically wrong in this era of endless warfare, the military is facing an epidemic of suicides. In the year that ended Sept. 30, 2009, 160 active duty soldiers took their own lives — a record for the Army. The Marines set their own tragic record in 2009 with 52 suicides. And this past June, another record was set — 32 military suicides in just one month.
War is a meat grinder for service members and their families. It grinds people up without mercy, killing them and inflicting the worst kinds of wounds imaginable, physical and psychological. The Pentagon is trying to cope with the surge in suicides, but it is holding a bad hand: the desperate shortage of troops has forced military officials to lower the bar for enlistment, thus letting in people whose drug and alcohol abuse or other behavioral problems would previously have kept them out. And the multiple deployments (four, five and six tours in the war zones) have jacked up stress levels to the point where many just can’t take it.
...It’s time to bring the curtain down for good on these tragic, farcical wars. The fantasy of democracy blossoming at the point of a gun in Iraq and spreading blithely throughout the Middle East has been obliterated. And it’s hard to believe that anyone buys the notion that the U.S. can install a successful society in the medieval madness of Afghanistan.
For those who haven’t noticed, we have a nation that needs rebuilding here at home. Maybe we could muster some shared sacrifice on that front.
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