The Velvet StraitJacket

I rag Drudge as much as the next liberal blogger. His head lines and ’scary Obama’ stories are stuff of legends, but today he gets a reprieve. Today, the best headline I’ve ever read is right there on Drudge’s page..

Disabled veteran 'banned' after service dog poops in aisles...

God I wish he had used the lights and sirens for it.

Thank You Matt Drudge, for putting ‘poop’ in a headline on your site!

By the way, the story is pretty funny as well. Ok, take away the disable veteran part and it’s pretty funny. Especially this part

D’Amour-Daley disputes Mucha’s version of the story, saying Ivy was not anywhere near her owner, was not on a leash and defecated on the floor several times, including once in an area near where Big Y employees were making sandwiches for customers.

I imagine being at my grocer, having one of their delicious subs made fresh for me… looking over, seeing a dog and watching that dog crap in the aisle.

I don’t care who you are, that visual is hilarious.

If it’s not racism then what is it?

If it’s not to instill fear, anger and hate against one race… then what is it?

Yesterday the extreme font Drudge headline read.

MICHELLE TELLS BLACKS TO ‘INCREASE  INTENSITY’…

What was even worse was where the link took you.   It’s changed today ,now that it’s not an infamous raging Drudge-line anymore. Yesterday and last night though all you had to do was read the Drudge headline,the linked story headline, the first paragraph and that would tell every white person on the planet just exactly where this first lady is coming from and what her goal is.

Michelle Obama Rouses NAACP Before Vote Condemning ‘Racist’ Elements of Tea Party

and if that doesn’t tell you.If it doesn’t inflame you against what this black-hearted administration is trying to do… well then just read the 1st paragraph

First Lady Michelle Obama brought renewed energy to the NAACP today, delivering the keynote speech at the annual convention one day before the nation’s largest civil rights group is expected to condemn what it calls racist elements in the Tea Party movement.

Well there you go. I don’t need to read the comments to see what this means, she’s nothing but a race-baiter. It’s confirmation that the woman who was never proud of this country or of being an American until her husband was nominated to be it’s Supreme-being. Here  is why we don’t like this government. It’s not because we are racists, it’s because they are! We all heard the  Rev. Wright, we know what these people really feel about this country and the whites in it! We know that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are right when they say this President and his racist wife hate this country so much that their plan is to destroy it for all, except for their black brethren. They want the blacks to be on top, they want the wealth of the hard-working white American to be redistributed to their kind. What more proof do you need to convince you? The woman and the NAACP are out there calling the good Americans who want to end this abuse racists! She is telling her people to increase their intensity! She’s trying to start a race war!

Look, I don’t really believe Drudge headlines.. or  I should say I take them with the grain of conservative salt that they are meant to be taken with. His only goal isn’t to inform people, it is to get people to click his site.  His mentors are the big bosses in the industry who get people to listen and they get them to listen by inflaming them, he’s a wannabe, a hack, copying the format of others. So when I see a Drudge-line I know it’s pretty much his ‘emo’ attempt to fit in with the conservatives showing,  but this story actually goes to an ABC.Com website and you only have to read a smidgen of it to see what’s really going on here. The Obama’s hate white people and they are calling anyone who speaks against them, like the Tea-Party, racists! The Obama’s hate whites and they hate this country.

At least that’s what I would think if I had not  already read the real, and unfiltered story of  Michelle OBama speech on another website.

First lady touts anti-childhood obesity initiative

Wait? what? But Drudge and ABC said she was there and she was talking about increasing intensity and the NAACP is going to call out the tea-party as being racist? What?

“I know that I stand here today, and I know that my husband stands where he is today, because of this organization — and because of the struggles and the sacrifices of all those who came before us,” Mrs. Obama said today. “But I also know that their legacy isn’t an entitlement to be taken for granted.  And I know it is not simply a gift to be enjoyed.  Instead, it is an obligation to be fulfilled.”

Mrs. Obama said the work is not yet done.

“When African American communities are still hit harder than just about anywhere by this economic downturn, and so many families are just barely scraping by, I think the founders would tell us that now is not the time to rest on our laurels. When stubborn inequalities still persist — in education and health, in income and wealth — I think those founders would urge us to increase our intensity, and to increase our discipline and our focus and keep fighting for a better future for our children and our grandchildren.”

YES! There.. There it is.. Abc.com and Drudge were right! See, she’s riling them up!

Bringing her platform to combat childhood obesity to the convention, Mrs. Obama said that the African American community is being hit even harder by the obesity epidemic.

ummm.. what? Obesity? OBESITY!!SHE’S ONLY TALKING ABOUT THE DANGERS OF CHILDHOOD OBESITY!

But, but… there isn’t any racism going on in white America. The racism is only happening in the Obama house! I read it right there in those two headlines.. She’s talking at the NAACP about tea-parties and how they are racists and she’s telling blacks to increase their intensity and telling them to not rest on their laurels… she’s race-baiting, right?

“We are living today in a time where we’re decades beyond slavery, we are decades beyond Jim Crow; when one of the greatest risks to our children’s future is their own health.  African American children are significantly more likely to be obese than are white children.  Nearly half of African American children will develop diabetes at some point in their lives.  People, that’s half of our children.”

Mrs. Obama said that no one wants that kind of future for kids, and warned what could happen should work not be done to combat this problem.

“Surely the men and women of the NAACP haven’t spent a century organizing and advocating and working day and night only to raise the first generation in history that might be on track to live shorter lives than their parents.  And that’s why I’ve made improving the quality of our children’s health one of my top priorities.”

“Or just being more thoughtful about how we prepare our food — baking instead of frying.  I know.  Don’t shoot me.  And cutting back on those portion sizes. Look, no one wants to give up Sunday meal.  No one wants to say goodbye to mac and cheese and fried chicken and mashed potatoes — oh, I’m getting hungry forever.  No one wants to do that.”

Mrs. Obama said the changes in diet and exercise can be small – such as believing that dessert is “not a right,” as she said they say around the White House.

Obesity, she’s talking about increasing the intensity to stop our kids from growing up to be fatty-fat-fats! Oh the fucking horror of it! This administration is trying to make our kids healthy *gasps*! While Drudge and others in the news media are trying to make them out to be race-hating abominations that we simply must stop! You only had to spend 10 secondes reading 2 headlines and a few words  in the article to see that this is an administration to fear. Well, that’s what they were hoping to get out you anyway. Fear, hate,distrust. The purpose here wasn’t to let you know this woman is trying to get us to feed our kids healthy foods instead of junk and to make our kids go outside instead of sitting in front of the tv,computer or playstation all day, everyday. The purpose was to make you hate and fear what they want you believe are the racist blacks in control of this country. The purpose was the right-wing media’s attempt to manufacture outrage over Michelle Obama’s noncontroversial NAACP remarks. Sure, it’s a subtle attempt meant to give the reader and the websites enough deniability in what they were attempting to do and if you are inclined to look and say “I don’t see it, sorry” you might just be the problem.If you can look at the drudge-line and the abc.com headline along with the first paragraph in that story and can’t see the attempt to make whites angry and even more distrustful of blacks and this black administration… then please tell me what the hell you do see.

Related articles by Zemanta

• NAACP To Offer Resolution Condemning Racist Elements Of Tea Party Movement (huffingtonpost.com)
• ABC News: ‘Michelle Obama Rouses NAACP Before Vote Condemning “Racist” Elements of Tea Party’ (newsbusters.org)
• Right-wing machine attacks Michelle for focusing on childhood obesity (dailykos.com)

I mentioned yesterday that I had become a reader of the comments sections on pretty much all news stories. Well that’s not exactly true, it’s become more like an addiction. The ‘hate’ in these comments is so overwhelming that each day when I think it can’t get any worse, I am rewarded the next day with something even better.

Today’s ‘comment watch’ is from a story on ABC.com

President Obama to Make Recess Appointment of CMS Administrator Republicans Attacking as ‘Expert on Rationing’

With Congress officially on recess, President Obama will on Wednesday use his ability to make recess appointments to name one of his more controversial nominees: Donald Berwick, nominee to be Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

First, no he isn’t an expert on ‘rationed’ care and everyone knows it.

“I think anyone who is close to this understands this debate is really not about Don Berwick but the opportunity to relitigate the underlying health care reforms,”John Rother, executive vice president for policy and strategy at the AARP. “In ordinary times, the nomination of somebody with Don’s record and standing in the field would not be controversial.”

even the man Bush appointed to this positions tells us this is just bullshit hyperbole..

“He’s universally regarded and a thoughtful guy who is not partisan. I think it’s more about … the health care bill,” Scully said of Berwick. “You could nominate Gandhi to be head of CMS and that would be controversial right now.”

Even GOP darling Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has uttered the same ‘rationing’ observation, but when he said it he was cheered as being some kind of visionary.

“Rationing happens today! The question is who will do it?”

But OH MY, let that ‘R’ word pass through the lips of an Obamite and the world shuts down while twittering idiots spew forth worms of wisdom that burrow into the minds of the paranoid and eat away what’s left of their sanity.

Donald Berwick has spent his life advocating Patient-care as a way to reduce health-costs. He has worked “to find ways to lower costs through better patient care and safety. One of his particular causes has been reducing medical errors.” When even an appointee of  George W Bush  tells you this is all simple political grandstanding meant to instill fear into an already scared populous, when even Gandhi himself would be shunned as some kind of elderly-killer, and you are still following the 149 character uttering of an unemployed commentator, something is seriously wrong with you; and if you had any doubts about that characterization just take a gander at some random comments on this news story…

-Sure sounds like we are going to experience a re run of Germany in the 1930s. Either we get rid of the Democrats in November, otherwise you might want to find a different country to live in!

-Simple if you are determined to be unqualified for treatment or meds and end of life counseling is advised. Do your country a great service and try to take at least ten of the criminals whom sponsored and supported this foul legislation with you.

-The death panels are here. My parents worked 50 years, always paid their taxes, never accepted a penny of public assistance. Since Obamacare they have been denied medical care. I read the government form letter. This is genocide and we are all accomplices standing idly by as people are allowed to perish. We are no better than the Germans who allowed so many to be erased from this world. It is that serious. When we awake it will be from the guilt and shame we all share

-”You Lie!” hussein is really the gift that keeps on giving to Repubs. All they need do is run and re-run and re-run videos of the outrageous, incendiary, insane comments of this lunatic healthcare RATIONING, ABORTION and DEATH PANEL czar during the campaign. That will ensure that the d-crat socialists have the biggest losses in American history in that election. And if that isn’t enough, run videos of hussein/holder slamming Arizona’s immigration reform efforts. Hopefully, the d-crat socialists will be put out of power for the next century, or more.

-When will the idiots that fell and voted for Obama realize that he hates our country and is trying to ruin it?He’s ruined the best health care system in the world, he’s fired the head of GM to show “he won” and has no business being president. This man has done nothing good for this country, it’s clear he hates the USA.Do you all rememeber Mrs. O’s comments that this was the first time she was proud of her country? Let them both go to China, a communist country that he’d like.

-Sarah Palin was right. The Death Panel is being assembled, and Dr. Death has just been appointed. Berwick will literally decide who lives and who dies, based on what medical treatment he allows them to receive. My guess is that he will try to wipe out all conservatives first and foremost.

Aww damnitman! They found us out! The secret plan to ‘to wipe out all conservatives first and foremost.” has been breached! Wait.. maybe the plan can still be salvaged in some way

-President Bush, a White House official said, “was not facing the same level of obstruction. Twenty-eight of President Obama’s nominees have been held on the Senate floor for more than three months. At this point in the Bush administration, only six of his nominees had been waiting that long.”

This proves that Bush nominated centrist-based persons since the senate was almost balanced between the number of democrats versus the number of republicans. Obama had a FILLIBUSTER PROOF super majority (i.e. 60 demcrats and Independents/Socialists – who vote with democrats – in the senate) and still could not get his nominees confirmed. Common sense leads one to conclude that either (1) the senate was too busy working on other issues to bring Obama’s nominees to the floor or (2) Obama’s nominees were so far left that even the FILIBUSTER PROOF super maority of democrats could not support his choices. Given Dr. Death’s (Donald Berwick) credentials, my common sense leads me to conclude that the latter is likely the reason the 28 nominees have not been confirmed.

Whew, that was close! I was afraid that there was some kind of intelligence backing these wads. I see now that I was mistaken, there isn’t any intelligence in them at all. Bush appointed ‘centrist’? By the way,when did this idea of a party needs to have 60 votes to do anything come into place? Oh yeah, it was the same day the negro was sworn into office. But ya know the Judge flubbed the oath that Obama was sworn into office with, so he might not really be our President! True Story.

Oh wait! They did it again the next day, Damnit!

Look, no one could spend enough time or energy dispelling all the hyperbolic rhetoric being spewed out there in the interworld. It’s hard enough trying to dispel it when it’s  from the GOP and their news channel. But when you add in the fact that 91% of all radio talk programming or commentary is identified as conservative talk radio and the fact that all those out of  power Republicans took to the internet because it’s easier to get your propaganda out there if you never have to actually prove your claims and it becomes clear that one would have to spend more hours than there is in any given day just refuting it all and then where would there be time to ‘jam through’ those death panels?

But for the sake of sanity, for just a quick minute… let’s try and play fair for a minute.

Republican darlings admit there is rationing going on today and even submitted a proposal that is based on rationing. So when a Democrat appointee utters the “R” word, treat it as the same wisdom you treated it as when you heard it from the Republicans mouth.

Never before has a President be forced to govern by a 60 vote majority. This is a new play-time tactic that the GOP will not appreciate when they are in office. Ok, never mind liberals are not ‘borg’ they actually think for themselves instead of following the hive but still, the GOP congress has filibustered more times than any other congress session. So for the love of God, quit thinking this 60 vote super-majority is how it’s supposed to work. It’s not!

This President has appointees that have waited +200 days, not because he’s appointing socialists czars that even the Liberal’s don’t like,  it’s because it only takes one Republican to stop the appointment and they have been caught stopping appointments until they get paid to lift their objection. Sen. Richard Shelby (R) used a blanket hold on 70 nominations until he got the money pork he was asking for. Where oh where were the faux deficit hawks then?

But most of all, you people are following the lead of a “leader” who lost an election and when on to quit her job. Then went on to become a one of those Hollywood-types and wrote a book then helped herself  and her entire entourage to Hollywood swag(gift) bags at the Oscars. Whose shining star in her governing was to redistribute the wealth of the oil companies and hand it out to everyone in her state! Her exact words were “So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Her idea of ‘gotcha media’ is being asked “what kind of newspapers do you read?” You’re not following a staunch small government,conservative you’re following a Paris Hilton wannabe! Whose only claim to fame at this point is being unemployed and still wealthy. I don’t know if Paris can see Russia from her house, but I do know that even if she did it wouldn’t make her any better a candidate than it did Sarah Palin.

No matter what your radio head tells you, this President did not somehow convince George Bush to start  tanking the economy so that when he was elected President, he could (on purpose) tank it even farther because he wanted reparations for 200 years of racial discrimination!

The tan-tax is not a form a racism and  you cannot say you now know what the pain of racism feels like because you have to pay that tax. We pay an extra tax on cigarettes, not because we’re white and we’re certainly not feeling racism for the 1st time because of it. We pay it  because it’s a nasty habit that causes health problems whose cost shouldn’t be put unto people who don’t smoke!

Fox New does distort the truth in favor of the GOP! Plain and simple, it really is an arm of the party and will make shit up as they feel it’s necessary to do so.. This isn’t my point of view, it’s the conservative leaning media’s point of view.

Ah, the wasted breath could go on and on, but why bother.. it will not change a single mind that was made up November 5 2008 when they woke up and realized who their new President was and started demanding their country back! Back from what at that point? I don’t know, the only thing that had changed was the color of the Presidents skin.. but they’ll tell you that had nothing to do with it. Of course they’ll also tell you President Obama is destroying the country on purpose nd that white’s allowed Obama to be elected because they felt guilty over slavery. They’ll also tell you that “We” ya know, whites, own the civil rights movement because hell, we allowed  it in the first place. Not that they all agree with allowing blacks a chance to eat with the white folk, but hey, race has nothing to do with this so at this point why bother?

Well because I’m an addict and the comments sections enthrall me that’s why. So until tomorrow (or hell, it could be an hour from now since the hate infests every section of the web) I bid you adieu.

I just want to make sure I have this right. When a veteran opinion writer is accosted in her private life and asked an opinion, she is forced to retired because that opinion doesn’t conform with conservative ideology and no 1st amendment right  is afforded to her.

When a conservative blogger speaks his mind in private emails and those private letters are then released by his employer and he is forced to resigned for his private opinions,  no 1st amendment right is afforded to him.

A President banning the the rival  party’s mascot because he didn’t want the world to see them in a positive light? totally within the parameters of “OK”.

When a military leader and his circle of aides, all still on active duty thus having no rights to free  speech, makes disparaging comments against his commanders and is forced to retire HE should be afforded all privacy and rights of speech because his views bolster conservative ideology.

When a governmental agency restricts web surfing and tells it’s employees they will no longer be able to access certain websites while at work, websites like

• Chat/messaging
• Controversial opinion
• Criminal activity
• Extreme violence and gruesome content, including cartoon violence
• Gaming

the outrages is palpable because even though this is an employer’s internet and the people being ‘censored’ are being paid by the government to work and not ‘game’,  waste and inefficiency is trying to be weeded out by the current administration to make government work better and cheaper… these people are having their 1st amendment and privacy rights infringed upon and we need to stop the totalitarian ‘thing’ that was elected to office? Are you insane, incompetent or have your brains finally imploded from having all that resentment build up from not being able to say “Well, he’s black for one” in polite company when voicing concerns about the current President ?

The predictable and  insanely large font on the Drudge report yesterday  leads you to a story on how the TSA sent a letter out informing employees that instead of standing around playing online all day while they are supposed to be working, certain website will now be restricted.  The comments on this piece should be shocking but I have become a reader of all comments sections these days because the stupidity that has taken over the ‘tubes’ is growing exponentially and I am as unable to turn away from them as I would be any horrific scene being played out in front of me.

-This is how it starts.
It’s as if Hitler himself was in charge.

-Does Janet Napolitano fit either, or both of the following?

1. The worst dregs of society gather around the tyrant – they are people of weak character who trade servility for unearned wealth.
2. Accomplices can profit greatly from their positions in the hierarchy.

Fear government.

-Sounds like China….

-It’s amazing how useless the first amendment is to these people now that they are in charge. Its how the left operates when in charge they ignore the constitution and when they are out of power they manipulate it to the other extreme and use its freedoms to harm, stiffle and dismantle progress. Absence of opposition is the sole intent of this administration like all dictators they must have no interruption of their propaganda. Truth is the worst enemy of chronic liers.

-China does tha same thing and they are a dick-tator-ship. What are we? I wonder if McCrystal is intrested in heading up a revolution, a military takeover. It works for some countries. Now my computer will blow up in my face, I will commit suicide (shot in the back of the head with a riflea) or I will be sent to a concentration camp for speaking against the King of America

**update**

TSA backs off and caves into right-wing extremism..

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reversed itself today, announcing that it will no longer block TSA employees, using work computers, from accessing websites that contain a “controversial opinion.”

Well there you go… the Right cried and now tax-payers get to foot the bill for government employees to access sites that could pose security risks to the country.. It’s a weird logic that says employers shouldn’t be forced to serve blacks or give access to the handicapped , but they should be forced to let their employees have internet even if it poses a national security risk to the country, not too mention the Right advocates letting people browse online sources while we’re paying them to work.

Ok, it’s not weird logic, it’s reactionary and more proof of the small minds that responds to each individual issue as being separate from the other, never seeing the whole picture because their world would crumble if they did. Let’s have a tax revolt, my taxes are really fair.  Say NO to socialism but stay away from my medicare and social security. Get out of our bedrooms, but ban homosexuality. Health options are between doctors and patients not government panels, but stop abortion.

I don’t think we need a voting ballot as much as we need a map to keep up with all the twists and turns this bizarre party hopes  to lead us on.

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There was an interesting comment in Paul Krugmans piece yesterday.

Unemployment benefits were not extended because the political elite does not depend on the well-being of masses any longer; political donations by the economic elite are sufficient to secure re-election and the well-being of those donors. This latest stunt out of Washington should be a wake-up call to demand campaign reform.

The Krugman piece was on unemployment and the heartless,clueless and confused who simply do not, or will not give understanding to the people on it. In an era where there is 10%+ unemployment  across the board some have actually decided that there really are jobs, it’s just that those lazy unemployment people don’t want them. I think this ‘blame the unemployed’ is just their coping mechanism because as long as they can ignore the poverty of their neighbors,friends,church mates they can sleep a night with never having to address just how badly the new version of the American Motto, coined by Gordon Gecko “Greed is Good”, really isn’t working out for 95% of this country. But hey, they may one day be in that 5%, so they don’t want anything changing before they get there.

I know what it’s like to try and live off of Florida unemployment for months at a a time. I’ve read where some states give $500+ a week compensation, here we get $275.. unless you chose to have taxes removed which most don’t for obvious reasons, but we did so they average compensation my husband received was about $212 a week. Sure, a man who has worked every day in the Florida sun since he was 14 would rather lounge around the house for a mighty $212 a week because everyone knows that when you lose your job the utility companies, stop asking for payment, mortgage companies give you automatic stays,gas and food are delivered each night by fairies on unicorns and clothes and shoes are made by those cute little cobbling leprechauns.

What people like  Krugmans ‘clueless’  forget is that unemployment benefits aren’t going to uneducated, welfare mom’s and immigrants… ya know ‘those’ people. It’s going to people who were employed! Who, through no fault of their own went to work one day and were told they didn’t have a job any longer. It’s not going to people who were fired for being incompetent or lazy, it’s going to roofers,painters,CPA’s, teachers,electricians,plumbers, people who worked their asses off every day of their life.  These are the people we want in society, the job-doers. These are not the shiftless and lazy and fuck you to those making them out to be!

Clueless is a good word for them and Krugman is correct to name them such. Just as he is correct that Republicans are heartless for their part in this never ending story.  Republicans know that if they can just get the economy to sink a little more,  if they can just hamper any recovery then maybe they can regain power. That is their goal right now, not to govern in cooperation with the majority who was elected by a country  based on the idea of majority wins, but to obstruct everything that might just enhance recovery and hopefully this stalemate  will turn the average Joe  against the current majority. They hope  the people will forget it was the Republicans and their deficit spending wars,tax cuts, de-regulation and social programs that got us here in the 1st place. Most of all they hope they can get back in power because those unpaid for tax-breaks for the richest of the rich expire soon and they want to re-up them. You can understand atleast the heartless, just remove your soul and care for nothing but yourself and you get them perfectly. But it’s the clueless that keep me going back to them. They are the ones I can’t understand even when I try. They are the ones on unemployment and using medicaid who rail against.. yep, Obama socialists agenda in paying people to stay out of work and giving them all health care at tax-payers expense. In them are the tea-party members who chant “Say No to Socialism” in one breath and “Don’t touch my medicare” in the other. I actually saw a crowd of signs the other day that made me laugh out, one woman was holding a sign that said “Stay out of our bedrooms” and the man she was holding hands with had a sign that read “Stop Abortion”, those kinds of ‘clueless’ are too far gone to even try and educate. They are mad and just can’t quit put a finger on the reason. (Well, personally I think they can put a finger on the reason but are too afraid to be called ‘racists’ for saying exactly what their problem with this administration is.)

While Krugman writes a great article it was the comment above that struck a chord in me because I don’t think a recent ruling of the supreme court has sunk in yet.

But it will.

When the supreme court ruled that corporations are really people and as people are entitled to donate to the official they’d like elected, that forever ended the ‘voice of the people’. Until that time candidates had to at least pretend to be on the side of the little guy in order to be able to fundraiser off him, but now? There isn’t a little guy around who can match donation funds with corporation giants. You only have to look at recent events to see just exactly how shitty things will get for the working, soon-to-be-serf class.

After the supreme court ruling, GOP leaders made a bee-line to wall street. They wanted the big bankers who crumbled the world’s economy to know that the Democrats were planning ‘reform’ and if they’d just come over to the GOP way, well that reform would die where is started..Last week’s Financial Reform Bill vote pretty much tells you how that offer was received.

In conjunction  with this,  was another shocking  revelation. Just after the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with fraud the headlines  were “Obama to keep money Goldman donated to campaign” . TV heads could talk of nothing else, the audacity of this president keeping the donations from this company while his SEC was investigating them . The subtext of course was missed by these Mensa members , but that wasn’t so shocking, some of those people think sitting on a couch for a couple hours a day talking to their co-hosts is the same job as President of United States. No, what was shocking was that it rippled through the conservative world unchecked until it was repeated by talking head and ‘man on the street’ alike. Obama is thief and he is untrustworthy because he kept the donation while still allowing an investigation of the company.

Do you see where this is going yet? I’m sure some of you do, but unfortunately.. some (well a lot)  don’t. For those that don’t here goes what you seem to be advocating with extreme vigor. By saying the President had the audacity to charge Goldman for fraud after he used their donations, is akin to saying he should have taken the money and said nothing about their crime.  You’ve decided that the leader you want will take money from anyone, any corporation and if that donor breaks the law… he’ll ignore it and protect their right to break the law by dissolving any investigation into their misdeeds. If it is true that it is untrustworthy and unbecoming of an elected official to prosecute his own corporate donors when they break the law, then  it must also be true that the politician you value  is the one who is bought and paid for by the corporations who donate to them.The politician you want isn’t the one who can take a donation from a corporation in good faith and still not be beholden to them, but instead you want the one who takes the bribes and hides the crimes.

Well, fear not heartless,clueless, and confused.. you might just get the government of you chose. One that looks at 14% unemployment and blames the laziness of the workers.  The kind of government who will destroy what is left of the country for their own political gain. The government who will advocate for more power being taken from the citizens of the country and given to the corporations who elect them and finally the government who takes the donations from the massive corporations, and sit back, allowing them free-reign without fear of prosecution. In other words, the country you wish to live in is not one where the worker is cared for but where the corporation is deemed the more valuable entity, where the megacorporation is the more valuable voice and the one who no law should bind. To you I say, welcome to public servitude, welcome to corporatocracy, welcome to Soylent Green.

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Thank you Rush, Glen, Sarah.  Thank you Fox news,Drudge and Liz Cheney. Thank you Joe Wilson,Chuck Grassley, and Michelle Bachman. Most of all, thank you John McCain.  Because of the sum total of your greed, bias,paranoia and political agenda, one of the highest ranking officers and his inner circle felt it was OK to make fun of and de- legitimize this President, Vice President and those this administration assigned the task of keeping this country safe and winning a unwinnable war.  If Gen. McChrystal felt safe enough to speak about his superiors the way he did in front of a stranger, a civilian outsider… a reporter for a liberal magazine, just how free were they in front of other officers,military personal and soldiers at the front with their disdain?

We know now that John McCain would sell the “maverick” off his back to win an election, but in the summer of 2008 that wasn’t as apparent.  Sure, we knew he wanted to win the election that year, what we didn’t know was just how far he was willing to go, not until he tapped Sarah Palin.  Sarah was a no body in the world of politics, she was a hot Governor who had a certain backwoods charm about her, but she was unschooled,unconventional and as it turned out unpredictable. She was also willing to go after her opponent in any “Dick Cheney” way she was told to.

As with any other Vice Presidential candidate she was tasked with the job of being the attack-dog of the campaign. The  Presidential candidate cannot be the one to blatantly attack his rival, its  unbecoming of the image he is trying to put forth. A gentlemen, a statesmen, a leader can not be seen as petty and whiny, it makes him look weak and unfitting of the title President of the United States, so the Vice Presidential candidate has traditionally been tasked with the job of being the ‘pit bull’ who attacks his foe.

Enter Sarah.

I don’t blame Sarah too much for the type of politician she’s turned out to be because she sadly never had a chance. She was a small town girl thrust into the biggest arena on the planet. One night she was an unknown and the next minute she was historic. Every eye in this country (and a vast number outside this country) was looking at this newcomer and wondering “who was she”, “what can she offer”,  and more than anything else “What the fuck?”

Over the next few days it turned out that it wasn’t just the rest of us who didn’t know a thing about her, but the campaign that tapped her was clueless also. But by that time who cared, she was hot! Her wink, her smile, her red-bloodedness. The GOP salivated at the possibilities… could she deliver ? That answer was a straight up, resounding.. You Betcha!

From pal’ing around with terrorists, to “Thanks, but no thanks!” they loved her.   There was a visceral reaction to the Democrat candidate,  his name and his color struck a deep chord in people. I’m not going to argue that, those who know it, know it. Those who ignore it, ignore it.Those who don’t see it it, never will. But it was there and Sarah tapped into that. She outright lied about her “No Thanks” to the bridge to no where and what was the reaction? “Who cares! Leave the woman alone and stop attacking her! Did you see her wink?” Very early on the campaign learned that this woman could say what she wanted and it didn’t matter. People loved her and would accept her word as gospel and then defend her against anyone or anything that tried to correct her. She very quickly became untouchable.

“We want to fight,

and I will fight,

but we will be respectful.

I admire Senator Obama

and his accomplishments

and I will respect him,”

McCain said at a Minnesota rally.

I’m not going to rehash her campaign rhetoric, we know what her  job was and how well she did it. She was the attack dog who started the process of  de- legitimizing the President and forever tainting him as a Muslim, a friend of the terrorist, a Socialist. Like any child who is given praise for doing something well that an adult rehearsed with them, she learned to take it farther and farther. It was never meant to go as far as it did, but she’s just so damn cute when she does it so why would we stop her?

Even though Sarah Palin took on big oil and the result was a redistribution of their wealth to the pockets of every Alaskan, it was  Barack Hussein Obama who was the enemy of democracy. At one point, it looked like John McCain might have actually come to his senses and realized what he was allowing was the same thing that had been done to him by George W Bush and ‘illegitimate black child’ attack he waged against McCain during his first run at office.All of a sudden, it was like he stepped up and once again became the Maverick we could be proud of when he corrected a woman in his audience who was afraid of that “Arab”. But shortly after that, he once again threw the maverick off his back, never to don that title again.

“I want everyone to be respectful

and let’s make sure we are,

because that is the way that politics

should be conducted in

America.”-John McCain

And so it went.. the socialist, the Nazi, the racist, the Muslim Arab who was not even born in this country was elected. But the process of taking him down didn’t stop there, it only intensified. For a brief moment there, after the flubbing at the swearing in process.. there was actually hope that he could be ignored as the voice of authority in this county because he didn’t say the oath of office properly. Yes! We’re saved! He didn’t swear the oath, he is not the real president, we do not have to listen to him! But, like everything else.. this was taken from Obama’s opponents when he re-took the oath the next day.

It’s interesting to look back on now, it seems on that night in November a section of the population looked around and said.. Oh God, what have we done! Since then everything that can be done, has been done to take away any power this president had.  We watched as a lowly congressman was cheered when he heckled the president at an address before Congress. We’ve watched our most popular conservative voices call him a racist, and speak of his ‘regime’ and then rewarded them for it. We’ve seen everything from his ears, his use of a teleprompter to his impressive education as reasons for contempt for him. In 2004 “Flip-Flop” was a political death sentence. Since the rise of Sarah Palin though, the practice of being one both sides of an issue(sometimes at the same time on different networks) has become a staple in this country.Extremism and Conspiracy were words used to belittle and negate liberals now they are mainstream and visionary.   Who cares if you agree that there are Death Panels and plugs to pull on grandma, who cares if you want to criminalize the census  while pounding away at Washington to follow the Constitution because the census is taking concentration camp RSVP’s, who cares if you scream YOU LIE at the leader of the country when it’s really you who are lying.  Who cares! Leave them alone, stop it with the “Gotcha media”.. we don’t care if they are lying this guy is an Arab who pals around with terrorists for God’s sake!

This long and winding road we’ve been on has a new victim. Stanley Allen McChrystal, one of the most disciplined men in uniform. The man who sleeps for just 4 hours a night, jogs 8 miles a day rain or shine and eats only one meal… This career officer, who graduated from West Point, who spent his entire adult life in the military, was the son of a career military father was  so confident in his position, and the stability of the “who cares, it’s the gotcha media who is at fault for not investigation the birth certificate of this ineligible presidency”crowd that he went on record and trashed his superior officers in a civilian liberal magazine.   Either that, or he just didn’t know what he was saying was wrong and didn’t understand the person in the room with him was writing it all down.

No, I just don’t believe he didn’t know. I believe that he’s watched  how over the last 18+ months, this President from his speech patterns to his birth place has been  reduced to a either a powerless,naive, community organizer who is dangerously incapable of leadership or he is a tyrant,destroying the very fabric of this country and should thus be revolted against. I believe the General felt he would be insulated the same way he was insulated when he covered up the fratricidal death of Pat Tillman and protected the same way he was protected when he extorted 30,000 troops from the President. He was given carte blanche by the people who didn’t care how outrageous the attack was, as long as it made into  the Foxnews channel and conservative talk shows conversation. He  was emboldened by all those before him and while he should be hanging in head in shame for the dismissal of the president and his advisers in a time of war, on the eve  of a ‘make or break’ offensive he is instead exalted as the newly crowned Prince of the Right.  McChrystal/Palin 2012 prayers are already out on the blogsophere.  You don’t have to scroll through but a very few comments on any article dealing with this issue before you see the  ignorant ramblings of the ‘we don’t care, he’s an Arab!” crowd.

• it’s funny when some 1 supposed to be [sic]cammander  and chief knows nothing about military are anything else and has to be told what to say and do by his advisers can hold a position as he does? all he’s good at is flapping his mouth. i’m glad this general spoke his mind. so what his in the military he still has a voice and opinion. this ’so call’ code come on.

• Big, big mistake. Obama’s inability to accept criticism demonstrates the fragility of his leadership abilities. This move suggests that Obama and his team will not tolerate opposing viewpoints on matters that are crucial to our national security. At least the man will be a “one-termer.”

• Obama looks like the tiny, petulant dictator that many of us have suspected he is all along. His theatrical bombast about General McChrystal just proves that Obama’s a tiny, incompetent fool.

• McChrystal gets the last laugh, because so many of us see what he and so many of our military see–that their “commander in chief” commands absolutely nothing,

The same people who are screaming about tyranny and the dictator that is this president are saluting and celebrating the military general who belittled his civilian commanders in magazine article. The words “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do” ring through air and are ironically missed by the ones who devote their life to speaker of those words.

General McChrystal is another victim of the “Gotcha Media”. The Hannity’s out there are more upset with him for giving an interview to someone other than themselves than they are in what he said. They’ve skipped over the subtle implications of what was said and absolute destruction of the moral of the soldier fighting in this war. They can’t see how the words “clown and intimidated” when spoken by the military leader about the civilian authority can pit one soldier against the other and give fodder to our enemy to use to their advantage. They can’t see it because they just don’t care. They want this Muslim, Marxists out of power because Sarah told them how Barack Hussein,  pal’ed around with terrorists.

I’m not saying that I think Sarah Palin made Gen. McChrystal give that interview. I’m saying that people were starting to wake up around the end of 2006 and look around and get pretty unhappy with what they were seeing. Coming awake ‘07-’08 during a continuous campaign season like they had been Rip Van Winkle for 10 years and finding their lives were going to shit, their jobs were non-existent, the houses they were told they could re-mortgage into a better loan were defaulting.  Banks were giving their CEO’s millions of dollars in bonus’ while their secretaries   and janitors were applying for welfare. They didn’t trust anyone anymore.  All that was needed was something to light the fuse that had been laying there waiting to be lit. Sarah Palin was it, in her they saw what they thought they wanted from their leaders and they were willing to ignore every lie she told and believe like it was gospel every exaggeration she spewed forth with because they want so badly for her to be genuine. Palin was just as much of a victim as they were. She was told that it was her job to become the pit bull, only no one told her that didn’t mean she was to be the pit-bull rabies and a thorn in it’s foot. She was a n00b to the Big Show and was just never able to learn the rules of the game, the only rule she knew was simply ‘Rubbin is racing’.  With her though, came an era where politicians are belittled and lied about, that part is not new but it has been amplified to the point were even the military feels they are no longer subservient to their civilian commanders. The scariest part of all of this is that these same people will break the rules that this country was founded on for anyone who they feel agrees with them, hears them, listens and will help them. They are babes waiting to be exploited.  The next generation will either be the last or the greatest of this country.  We will either break every rule,code and constitutional freedom we’ve fought long and hard for in the hopes of creating the unattainable Utopia  we had when we were children and someone else took of things for us, or we’ll shake out it and come together; putting the mistrust,the cynicism and the anger away and somehow become greater than we’ve ever dreamed of. Rome attained greatness and withered away, England did the same…the question we have to answer is, will we?

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and  it’s all going to be down hill from here.

I’ve seen this president mocked and belittled for his ears.. not altogether unfair or unheard of (no pun intended) to mock the physical characteristics of a person.

I’ve seen him de-legitimized for his teleprompter usage… strange, considering most every other speech giver also uses a teleprompter, unless it’s Sarah Palin, she just uses her hand because she’ so environmentally  friendly.

I’ve seen every criticism there is thrown at this man, some deserved, some over the top and some just plain stupid, hateful, bigoted and biased.  Until today, I thought I’d seen it all.

Language guru: Obama speech too ‘professorial’ for his target audience

(CNN) — President Obama’s speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

Tuesday night’s speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience,” Payack said.

Well, there you have it folks.. the guy is aloof,uncaring, not up to par, unemotional and disconnected because he talked to the country like 10th graders.

Let’s just impeach the guy and get it over it with. Seriously people, if we’re going to take our criticism of the man to the point of  “he talked smart to people” what the hell is there left to criticize him for?

What a sad, fucked up society we are when it comes down to finding fault with our leader, not because he can, but because he did have an educated and adult conversation with us. It’s no wonder so many in this country love the Sarah Palin’s of the world…  It isn’t that we think she should talk like an idiot because we find it charming, it’s because we are idiots and want everything spoon-fed to us by mommy.  If we have to think for ourselves.. well that’s just too much work! Gimme the guy who I can drink a beer with instead of the guy who can not only spell the word ‘Brewery’, but use it in a 19.8 word sentence.

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Look out America, here comes the Tea party.

Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle surpassed more than a dozen GOP candidates to become the Republican nominee

Tea Party favorite Nikki Haley nabbed a majority of votes in the South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary..thanks to endorsements from the Tea Party in general, and Sarah Palin in particular.

Tea Party supporters also nabbed a victory in the contested runoff in Georgia, where former state representative Tom Graves defeated former state House member Lee Hawkins in a special election for the U.S.

Carly Fiorina [California] defeated Rep. Tom Campbell and state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore in the race to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in November. Fiorina, as with Haley in South Carolina, received an unexpected endorsement from Palin even though DeVore has been supported by Tea Party groups.

Drudge calls it, Republican Women Dominate... No, it’s not ‘Republican woman’, the ‘GOP’ was running their own candidates in some of those races and they lost to .. “Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Women”.

At this point I don’t know whether to be encourage or discourage. It’s encouraging because some of these candidates are pretty outside the mainstream, so outside the mainstream that the people who chose them as the nominee are totally against they platform they are running on..Take for instance Sharron Angle will be running against Harry Reid. Angle is an anti-tax crusader and an uncompromising conservative. She favors abolishing the Departments of Education and Energy, phasing out Social Security and Medicare, and removing the United States from the United Nations. That doesn’t exactly  match up with the ‘Keep your hands off my medicare’ and “Save Social Security” people  who founded the Tea-Party in response to  the Democrats health reform. It also does nothing for the talking heads and moderate constituency crying for bi-partisanship when they nominate an ‘uncompromising conservative’. As for wanting to abolish the Department of Education and Energy . Well that’s stupid no matter who you are,  the extreme anti-tax rhetoric becoming a reality will take care of that because the Department of Education will close it’s doors anyway from lack of funding. Ok, so will State Department,Department of the Interior, EPA,FCC,FAA and pretty much everything else except for the Defense Department, but I don’t think that Tea-party crowd would mind that too much.

But then, who will police the MTV Movie awards and censor their use of the “F-word”? Who will people complain to when the President lowers the office to that of pond scum by using the horrible   ‘ass’?  Oh my !

It doesn’t matter, the Church will  teach our children since the Department of Education is gone and  MTV will become more of a gospel network anyway.

I haven’t even told you that Angle wants to bring back prohibition.. in Nevada.. uh, Las Vegas? a dry city?

And that’s where we cross over into ‘discouraging’.  It’s discouraging because some of these candidates are pretty outside the mainstream, so outside the mainstream that the people who chose them as the nominee are totally against they platform they are running on and either they don’t know this so they are still thinking that when they say… “Well, when I say I want fewer taxes I don’t mean I want my social security and medicare cut off, I mean I want other peoples welfare cut off” that will protect their government entitlements.  They are so blinded in hate and confusion that they aren’t seeing clearly.. or worse, they don’t see it and  cannot connect it because they are unable to think for themselves in a 1+1 manor.

Naivety or stupidity.. not great choices .

The Tea-Party wants lower taxes, even though they admit their taxes are within reason. They don’t want socialized medicine even though they want their medicare. They don’t want government subsidizing incomes even though they rely on their social security. Yeah, that’s why I’m discourage, these people don’t know what they want they just know things went a little bit crazy here a couple years ago, the stock market collapsed,the banking sector turned out to be thieves,  the top echelon turned out to be overpaid with multimillion dollar bonuses  for jobs like running 100 year old establishments into oblivion. Years of their ignorance forced the car companies to falter, the same years forced us to drill baby drill in deeper and deeper territories without caring about the consequences of cutting corners. The invention of derivatives that was born through de-regulation, created a global collapse that put some countries out of business. Things went crazy, and they had no where to turn in their blame. There ultra-partisan ideological world that was living out there couldn’t look to the Bush administration for blame, they had spent too many hours defending justified torture, illegal wire-taps looking for terrorists, accidental outings of undercover spies and their ‘covers’. They couldn’t just turn on that which they had allowed to flourish and spent countless hours forgiving and defending… This conflict ‘crashed’ their minds and they have had to shed all major programs in order to re-boot in ‘Safe Mode’. The inability to look at their creation over those 8 years and the damage it created,  has them living in a ‘critical systems only’ world right now where logic and reason have been jettisoned in order to survive.

I’ve seen welfare recipients  whose only search for a job is to peruse Monster.Com for 5 minutes every morning, slam socialized medicine and food stamps. Not for them mind you, but for those people who  are lazy and refuse to get out there and look for a job.

There simply is no reason or logic in that.

When this is pointed out to them? Even better.. “well I paid into it”.. um, so? You are also out there saying no one should have to pay into it because you are also screaming for less taxes. If you get your ‘less taxes’, true you won’t have to pay into it, but you also won’t get it when you’re the one on your ass looking for someone to pick you up and dust you off.

Naivety or stupidity?.. you chose.

The party dujour,  looks at the ‘no fly’ list and questions how a ‘terrorist’ can be missed and allowed on a plane because hey, it says right there this guy is dangerous, but they defend his right to buy a gun because it’s our god given right! Second Amendment FTW!

Naivety or stupidity?

They organize a protest to decry the building of a non-christian church near the World Trade centers, not because of color or ethnicity(wink) and then surrounded,harass, threaten, and scare  ‘brown’ men. Even though those men were  on their way to the protest mosque  because they are Christians themselves.

Naivety or stupidity?

They want the freedom to walk about in their lives unmolested by government intrusion, but they also want the government checking the birth certificates of any ‘non-american-looking’, citizen or not, just to be sure they belong here.

They want the EPA to stay out of their business, but want government to wait around with oil-spill booms and equipment when the private sectors causes a catastrophe .

Most of all the government they want is one that gets it’s funding from leprechauns and not by taxing  it’s citizens.

Naivety or stupidity?

The extremism  they demand, when laid out before them, will cause some re-boot again after the critical system scan tells them everything checks out. Those few will join the rest of us who understand what the fundamentalist will do to this country if given the chance.

No government in our private sector, instead the extreme religion policing of what we do behind closed doors.

No government in our health care, instead  religion telling us what we can and can’t do with our bodies.

No government interfering with the private sector regulations or doling  out welfare to the undeserving , instead the Church will feed us and God will end greed since it’s one of the seven deadly sins.

No government in our schools, instead our kids will be educated by the church or in church funded public schools because that is all that is left.

No government opening up  the monopoly conservative radio has on our airwaves and instead allowing the Church to decide what we see, hear, watch, read and download.

The world they will create, will no longer have Freedom of speech because we don’t like what all people say or Freedom of religion because some of them practice non-Christians faith.

The Tea-party was a creation of the GOP to take on the Democrats in the mid-term. The GOP is learning a hard lesson this morning, when they allow a monster to grow unchecked and even aided by a so called ‘News’ channel, that monsters grow so big it eats it’s own. Don’t fool yourself, the GOP is more afraid of this monster  than any Democrat. They court the religious and the militia, but they do it for their money and not because they believe in them. Those in the GOP who are still asleep and feeding the monster will awake one day to a world that they never intended to create, they just wanted to beat that Muslim and those Hollywood liberals. What they will see when they do rise  from their slumber is a country ruled by extremism and turning more and more into Europe, only not the ‘liberal,socialized’ Europe they fear but worse, the Europe of the dark ages where freedoms,safety,wealth and status were given only to the church and the monarchy and the rest of us, including those who slept for so long, are only here to make those bishops and kings lives more comfortable.. at the expense of our own.

Yes, this seems to be the year of the woman, the Sarah Palin,pit bull with lipstick woman.  The Democrats have harbored their own fear of that woman, and by voicing it over and over and over ad nauseum created their own monster. No, not a more powerful Palin, that would be the more acceptable of the choices, because what’s been created now is not a single Palin but and army of them spreading through the country and running for seats in  Government. And is you think a Muslim, Nazi, Kenyan is taking this country to extremes just wait until the neighborhood good ole christian busy body, Gladys Kravitz’s  take over and decide how we live.

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Mr Hayward [BP’s chief executive] reiterated a promise that BP “will honour all legitimate claims for business interruption”. Asked for examples of illegitimate claims, he said: “I could give you lots of examples. This is America — come on. We’re going to have lots of illegitimate claims. We all know that.”

Yes, and you are an oil executive who is responsible for one of the worst oil spills in US history so you are going to make illegitimate claims of safety… come on-we all know that.

What a smug reply from a person who should be on bent knee with head bowed in every interview he gives at the moment. Yes, this is America and your oil rig has just destroyed a large swath of it, so is this really the right time to start insulting it’s inhabitants? It would seem that not only is this the right time to insult the country their product just destroyed, but it’s also the time to threaten the president with the oh-so-subtle yet ballsy statement..

He urged the US Government to pursue a policy of “absolute co-operation” with BP. “We will only succeed if we work together,” he said — a day after President Obama’s press secretary promised that the White House would “keep a boot to the throat of BP” to ensure that it fulfilled its responsibilities.

Is that right? How about BP pledges “absolute co-operation” with the US Government. Wow, it’s the US Government who should cooperate with the ones whose oil is destroying our coastline.

Ok, well.. or what?

Corexit was 54.7 percent

effective at breaking down

crude oil from the Gulf,

and Dispersit was 100 percent

effective.

What am I saying? Or what… HA! Or nothing. BP was ordered by the EPA to start using less of dispersant called Corexit 9500 because of it’s toxicity and to start using a more environmentally friendly one. There are quite a few others out there and besides, Corexit is banned in BP’s own country. It’s not just that this stuff is toxic to the oceans, workers at the Exxon Valdez clean-up reported “respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders,  that were linked to an earlier version of the Corexit dispersant.” So the EPA gave BP 72 hours to switch to a less toxic product. BP said, ‘Umm.. no’ and still continues to use the highly toxic dispersant over a more effective and ecologically friendly  one.

No, really. After being ordered by the US Government to stop using a chemical known to be less effective than the product recommended by the EPA and more toxic to ocean and humans… BP issued a statement saying in essence, “Up yours”

“Based on the information that is available today, BP continues to believe that Corexit was the best and most appropriate choice at the time when the incident occurred, and that Corexit remains the best option for subsea application.

Well hey, they believe they are right.. so why should they follow an order from the US government? Like Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chairman of BP, said, “The US is a big and important market for BP, and BP is also a big and important company for the US…..So the position goes both ways.”

See, the position of importance between BP and the United States goes both ways. I am really glad it was James Carville to respond  to that delusion of grandeur.

Carville: “BP is not the equal of the United States government. This president needs to tell BP ‘I’m your daddy, I’m in charge, you’re going to do what we say. You’re a multinational company that is greedy and you may be guilty of criminal activity.’ It’s time that we understand, BP does not wish this thing well. They have been negligent. They need to whip out their checkbook and start moving into action and the president needs to push them.”

I understand that “stuff just happens” and when it’s oil or nuclear power plants  that “stuff” is  going to be ugly.. very ugly. The problem here is this is looking less and less like an accident and more and more like a criminal act. Each new day brings another startling revelation about some of BP’s questionable  practices add that in with their feelings of superiority and this is getting really ugly.

Yesterday we learned that in the hours before the explosion, there was  ’skirmish’ between the BP ‘company man’ and the rig operators. Bp was ready to shut down that well because they were done with, but they were still paying $500,000 a day rental fees. When told of the process they had to go through to shut down the well, things got heated. Part of the process  involved “removing the mud from the drill pipe. That mud is used to keep pressure down on any gas that might come out of the pipe. The question was how quickly you remove that mud safely to do that”. Time was money, the BP “company man” was interested in getting the process done a little faster than the rig operators wanted.  This is not to say either, at that time, was more right than the other. As a lessor who is paying by the minute.. when you’re done, you’re done and you want your tab closed out as soon as possible, but when you’re the leasee, getting paid by the minute, you want that time to drag out. What we did know at that time was the BP man stood up, after hearing the procedures,  and said “‘No. We have some changes to that.’ Going by the superiority complex we see  today, this comment doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that the oil rig acquiesced  to BP’s demand. The excuse could be as simple as they knew where their paychecks and the helicopter ride home were coming from.

After the skirmish,  Doug Brown, one of 115 rig workers, “recalled top Transocean man Jimmy Harrell saying,”

“Well, I guess that’s what we have those pinchers  for.”

“Brown said he assumed Harrell was talking about the shear rams on the blowout preventer, the devices that are supposed to slice through a drill pipe in a last-ditch effort to close off the well in case of an emergency. The implication was that the Transocean employees expected they might have to take emergency action because of BP’s push to remove the drilling mud.”

Looks like we needed more than those ‘ pinchers.’ Which leads us to look at the the blowout preventer or, BOP. The last and only time this BOP was inspected was just before it was installed in 2005. At the same time it was inspected, we’ve learned that the MMS was allowing oil companies to do their own inspections, written in pencil, so  the MMS could trace over the written record in ink and attach their name to it.  So one thing we can be grateful for is that the ones doing the inspection was not MMS. But, why did the BOP fail? Why was there an explosion? Why did 11 people lose their lives and untold miles of coastlines and marshes suffer irrevocable  harm?

BP has promised to pay for any and all damages, sure, along with putting themselves on the same importance level as this country, demanding our complete cooperation,ignoring our environmental standards, and insulting us by saying.. ya know, this is America, so there are going to be a lot of illegitimate claims, and that looks  to be a breeze.

Ironically, there seems to be a lot of those illegitimate claims going around and they’re coming from BP. One of the most frustrating aspects of this entire debacle is the crazed policy of allowing BP to not only do all the clean up, but letting them decide what information is  given out, what photos are seen, what reporters have access and to where and the exclusion of experts that aren’t BP people.. Jean-Michel Cousteau, Jacques Cousteau’s son was denied entrance in the the “Land of BP” because BP also controls the air over the spill and Cousteau had an aerial photographer with him. Reporters from Mother Jones tell of their experience of being blocked and then yelled at to get approval and an escort from BP. While you may say “Well, ok it’s Mother Jones, it’s not like it was CBS or anything”, think again. CBS was barred from the scene by the Coast guard telling them “This is BP’s rules, not ours”

It’s not just the air, land,sea and press BP has control and say so over, they are in charge  of the water testings done in any of the Gulf states. An environmental official for Escambia County, Florida was ordered to send water samples to a lab in Texas whose biggest clients are BP.Is this not the craziest thing you’ve ever seen? Oh yeah, you aren’t seeing it because everything you are seeing has been cleaned and filtered through BP first.

But hey, they are going to pay for the damages and really, they’ve been straight with us so far. When they first said it was only 1000 barrels a day, when it was really 5000 barrels that was just another unintentional mistake. It’s not like they have an incentive to have anything other than complete transparency here. It’s not as if there is something called a Natural Resources Damage Assessment that’s done after a spill and relates to how many claims can be placed and how much is paid out. Of course the lower the spill the lower the payout, but hey BP promised to pay for all of it, they wouldn’t low-ball spill amounts. If you don’t count the complete ban on information or the repeated readjustment of the oil spill amount,  then today’s news is really nothing to be concerned with either and you can go back to the “Land of BP”. For the rest of us, today Government scientist have finally be able to verify  that it’s not 5000 barrels like we’ve been told repeatedly by BP, it’s worse.. much much worse..

government scientists said Thursday that the undersea gusher was spewing oil at a rate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, more than twice the 5,000-barrel estimate given by BP.

To put this into perspective

That would mean 260,000 to 520,000 barrels had been leaked as of 10 days ago. The Exxon Valdez leaked about 250,000 barrels into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989.

10 days ago we surpassed the Exxon Valdez and it’s still not over.
From day one BP has insulted the people in this country, demanded cooperation from our government, taken over operations and barred the press,independent scientists,volunteers and experts from the scene and the data. They have knowingly misjudged the amount of flow by repeatedly low-balling the numbers and have told their own media outlets in Britain after the explosion and the death of 11 men that the leak is “relatively tiny” compared with the “very big ocean.”

Yesterday, Lt.Gen Russel Honoré, who commanded the military response to Hurricane Katrina, had this to say(emphasis mine)

(CNN) — It’s interesting how many people have swallowed the BP public relations’ bait to call the explosion from Deepwater Horizon oil rig the Gulf oil spill. We need to call it what it is: the BP oil spill. The federal government needs to take control and take punitive action against BP and any negligent government regulators immediately.

As a concerned citizen, preparedness speaker and author, and former commander of federal troops in disaster response, I watched with interest as BP brought out its big PR guns to protect its brand and its platoon of expert engineers, paid by BP to talk about how it happened and how they intended to fix it.

BP’s reaction was much like Toyota’s when it was confronted with safety issues. It, too, focused on PR to protect its brand, versus telling the truth, and sent out its engineers to talk about the problem and the fix.

The U.S. Coast Guard was the first responder. The Coast Guard’s priority always is to save lives. They spent days looking for the 11 missing men. Meanwhile, BP took advantage of this time to make itself the authoritative voice in the news about the spill and blame other companies.

The U.S. government response was based on laws and rules that were created after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. After Valdez, the law changed to make the offending company responsible for the cleanup. A fund was created that all oil companies contributed to. If there was an emergency oil spill, a company could draw up to $75 million from this fund to fix the problem. But the fund was meant to help small wildcat operations, not huge conglomerates like BP.

Sticking to that regulation was part of the problem. The No. 1 rule when dealing with disaster is to figure out which rules you need to break. Rules are designed for when everything is working. A democracy is based on trust. BP has proved it can’t be trusted.

The government needs to change the game and make this a punitive effort. The government has been too friendly to oil companies.

The government should immediately freeze BP’s assets and start to charge the corporation — say $100 million — each day the oil flows. The money could be held in a fund that U.S. government draws on to take care of the people along the Gulf Coast and pay the states for doing the cleanup.

Next, BP and the government bureaucrats who broke a law and put the public at risk need to go to jail.

Gen Honore’… James Carville…  they’re right. It’s time we stop letting the fox clean up the hen house and tell the farmer he’s just as important as the farmer is. It’s time for President Obama to take over this mess and start the punitive effects. While he says the government is in charge, everything we’re seeing contradicts that the government has done anything except give complete trust in BP and their actions. I know we will hear nothing but outrage that here is another industry Obama is socializing, but for right now those people can go pound sand and watch Palin and Beck re-runs. They don’t offer anything to the conversation  as it is, so let them sit on their couch in their foil-hats crying about how they want their country back. No one with a brain can watch the Anderson Cooper piece from last night and not see that this has gone far too long enough. BP, private industry, you were once again given a chance to police yourself, prevent catastrophe and clean up the mess you made, and once again you have failed. Once again it is us, the people of this country who will suffer from your destruction and it’s our government who has to step in where they are rightly loathed to step in, an act like the adult and fix your mistake.  We would demand a thank you, but we’ll be too busy arguing with the lunatic fringe who will be having more apoplectic fits that this is just more proof that this president is a Muslim,Nazi,Socialist.

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Here is what is wrong with Fox and it’s bat crap-crazy base and why Liberals and their ‘media’ will always be better.

After 9/11 there was a theory floating around that it wasn’t the planes that brought the towers down, but instead it was an inside job hatched out by George Bush,Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.  They knew the attack was coming, which is why President Bush was out of the White House and why many others in charge were also out of harms way. They knew the planes wouldn’t be able to do more than burn a few floors but they wanted something spectacular.. a ’shock and awe’ if you will, so they had a demolition team rig the towers to implode and fall. For proof,  9/11 truthers point to WTC build 7.

The reason behind all this was to give Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld a reason to enact the Patriot Act and other Constitutional rights-ending laws and to take us back to Iraq so President Bush could either finish the job his dad left unfinished, or to get vengeance on the man who tried to kill his daddy.  Personally I feel if it was the latter then a secret hit squad would have been used instead, but the former doesn’t make any sense either unless you consider he and his dad had such a crappy relationship that he wanted to ‘best’ his father by actually deposing Saddam and brining freedom to the area. Plausible sure, but the idea that he’d destroy New York city to do it? Crazy.. I know. I’m not saying it’s not crazy. In fact, even in the face of some pretty convincing information, it’s still crazy talk. Sure, some of those question raised should be answered, but the idea that any president would not just allow an attack on the country to take place, but help the death and destruction along to prove he’s better than his daddy is just cuckoo .  I’m more willing to say it was to bilk billions out of the governement for war contracts.. but that’s just another part of this crazy conspiracy.

While the Right has it’s ultra-conservative in Ann Coulter (did you just feel that? it felt like a ghost walked over my grave).. the Left has it’s own ultra-wing in Bill Maher. To me, he’s the liberal liberal. I don’t dislike him, in fact I think his show should be a must see for both sides because even though he’s a liberal’s liberal, you can’t deny his facts. Anyway, like Coulter (there’s that ‘ghost walking on my grave; feeling again) Maher has a few ‘fringe’ leanings so to me, this 9/11 truther stuff would be right up his ally and yet..

even he doesn’t buy into the ‘crazy’. It’s not like he was a fan of George Bush, that would be like saying Coulter secretly yearns to have Jeremiah Wright’s love child. No, Maher just knows crazy-talk when he hears it and  as a comedian, a ‘social commentator‘ who could discuss the theory in jest while at the same time lending it credibility, Maher doesn’t.  But,instead of just ignoring it, he goes after it. When brought onto his show, he even attacks it and tosses it out

That’s right, don’t be gentle with him.. ass-kicking is what’s called for. Why? Because this kind of shit is simply crazy talk that even  Bush-bashing, Peta member,Prius driving,arugula eating, ultra liberals find it too insane to put out there. Maher was not the only ultra-liberal, Noam Chomsky and Matt Tiabbi of Rolling Stone also called it crazy.  Ok, Taibbi called it clinically insane..but the point is, the liberal world said “whooaa, are you fucking crazy?” to people promoting such an extremist idea.  So what does it say when the highest rated, so called ‘News’ network who aren’t invaded by people spreading the crazy, but actually have them on voluntarily, put the crazy  out there and say nothing against it?

And I would not be surprised if the White House said, you know, we might be able to, guess what, do what? Use this crisis to our advantage. Let this crisis get really bad, and then we will step in. We will be able to shut down offshore drilling. We will be able to turn to all these alternate fuels.-MICHAEL BROWN, FORMER FEMA DIRECTOR on NEIL CAVUTO

How did Cavuto respond? Did the “Fair and Balanced” network respond to crazy the same way Bill Maher did and throw it off the set?

...And I would not be surprised if the White House said, you know, we might be able to, guess what, do what? Use this crisis to our advantage. Let this crisis get really bad, and then we will step in. We will be able to shut down offshore drilling. We will be able to turn to all these alternate fuels.

And I think the problem they have right now is, they waited too long.

CAVUTO: So, by constantly referring to this as the BP still, the BP leak, the BP disaster, that there’s a method to that, right?

BROWN: Oh, absolutely.

That’s right sports fans.. nothing. Not a thing. The idea that any president would allow a catastrophe that will affect generations of American to just happen so that he can get his agenda through is the kind of talk you will only see shut down by the liberal .. what do they call it.. ‘lame stream media’. Conservative media on the other hand,will not only put the crazy out there, but they’ll leave it there unquestioned to fester and spread throughout the masses. Don’t kid yourself, it’s out there and it’s spreading. Today, Poltico.com reported that White House Press secretary ‘gave it to’ Fox news for allowing this crazy on their airwaves, after reading the story and watching the video of Gibbs

I took a gander at the comments..

-If bumbling Bobby screams, it’s not so, then we have to watch FOX because we know it”s true.

-I wouldn’t put anything past this regime.With the elections coming this fall and the possibility of a major loss, everything is on the table and everything is political.

-Whatsa matter Goebbels -I mean Gibbs- does the truth hurt? Obama’s incompetence is stunning. Heckuvajob Obama!

-That’s not so far fetched. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Maybe that’s why he got so mad. ‘thou doth protest too much’ This administration is in bed with the environmental wackos who in turn are in bed with eco terrorists. Makes sense to me.

-LMAO … “Baghdad Bob” Gibbs is one of those who unfairly targeted George Bush for the Katrina ‘errors’ that were really the fault of the inept Mayor of N.O and the Democrat Gov. or LA. Sorry about the oil tragedy, but watching Gibbs whine like a stuck pig is another example of, WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND!

yep, Cavuto sure played to his base didn’t he?( Never mind the fact that as a “News” channel, it shouldn’t have a base.) This goes on for 200+ consecutive replies.  No rebuttal and  no sanity it’s just a giant orgy of crazy hate.

My favorite of course is the “what goes around comes around” argument because that has been the feeling since election night. I’ve said it before, there is a section of the population that thought immediately after learning they had a new President, “Let’s see how you like it”. From that moment on they have stood in opposition of everything, while complaining about things that don’t have any basis in reality. “What goes around!” is the underlying motto behind every single attack against this President. The funny thing is, this President is a lot more “George Bush” than liberals expected and is a lot more passive and conservative than they’d hoped. Had the raving loons at Fox news and those out there living by the “Let’s see how you like it” agenda only argued valid points on policy instead of birth certificates,teleprompters,czars and socialism.. there would have had more liberals in their corner than they’d know what to do with. Instead, the fringe right has taken over the conservative media and the nations attention. It’s not that a majority of the nation believes in what the fringe is spouting, it’s more of a .. you can’t look away from the horror of that car accident.. type problem. But lost in this shuffle are the moderates who by their silence give their consent. Well that’s their problem to work out. John McCain has found a way, and that’s to go back on everything he’s ever done just to prove his purity. Other GOP members are throwing their own personal relationships out the window for proof of purity and party loyalty, and they are to admitting it.  Like I said,  the bridges they are burning are their own problems to fix when the attention shifts away from the crazy. For now, the ‘tin-foil hats’ have taken over and while you would expect a politician to go whichever way will get him elected, for a so called “News” channel to once again wear theirs proudly, truly is the downfall of journalism. Especially when the only place real people are left to get real news is from the real comedians.

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