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July 04, 2009
What a hoot. She virtually told everyone what she is doing at her press conference, it seems to me. "Make change outside of government? Hell yeah! Want money? Hell, yeah! Want a bully pulpit? Hell, yeah!"
I think she knows she could never win a national election, she has become a joke to some and an icon to a rabid few.
I have thought for awhile that she will end up a fixture on the Fox Channel. She will be the female Rush Limbaugh, they appear to have a mutual admiration thing going on. The details elude me, but maybe a show with a co-host of similar ideology, like Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
As ABI says (after I planted the thought btw) she would not be held accountable to any high standard, like Rush. She could fill the airwaves with nonsense, like much of the Fox Channel. She will make gazillions of dollars, like Rush for spouting off nonsense. What a great idea! All the ballyhoo about loving Alaska — nonsense, Palin style.
Posted on 07/04/09 by
mci
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June 21, 2009
Joe Galloway is throwing in the towel on the Yes We Can presidency:
Obama's approval ratings are beginning to unwind and begin a long downward spiral among those who had believed in the promises of change. There was a golden moment when change was possible, but it is gone now.
He's probably right. It's beginning to look like Obama will be the second best Republican president we ever had, right after Bill Clinton.
Posted on 06/21/09 by
abi
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What fighting for your rights looks like:
Posted on 06/21/09 by
abi
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June 09, 2009
Republicans in Congress are reacting to the public option in Obama's health care plan like eight-year-olds at a Freddie Krueger movie. Max Baucus recently had this to say about the need to handle Republicans with kid-gloves:
The [public option] is most concerning to most Republicans, so we're trying to figure out a way to help keep the insurance companies feet to the fire in a way that doesn't frighten Republicans away because it sounds too much like [insert scary music here] government."
But Baucus is the Trojan Horse for the insurance and pharma industries in the current health care horse-and-pony show. If Baucus gets his way, the public option will be DOA.
Republicans on Baucus' Senate Finance Committee recently sent Obama a letter that pulled a decades-old boogeyman out of the closet to put yet another scare into the kiddies:
[The public option] would be a federal government takeover of our healthcare system, taking decisions out of the hands of doctors and patients and placing them in the hands of a Washington bureaucracy.
Of course it would do no such thing. But the Republicans aren't known for letting the facts get in the way of a good horror story.
You can't really blame the Republicans for mounting a fear-heavy, fact-light campaign against the public option. The facts simply aren't on their side.
Another boogeyman the Republicans like to use to get the kids in the peanut gallery peeing in their pants is that the private option is the slippery slope towards a single-payer system — you know, s-s-s-socialized m-m-m-medicine — along the lines of the Canadian system. But after their mommys finish changing their underwear for them, they might want to look at the facts:
Tell you what, kids. Go have some freedom fries and a shake, and let the adults handle the health care overhaul.
Posted on 06/09/09 by
abi
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June 05, 2009
Bankruptcy is not for the faint of heart. Everyone loses money, explains economist Greg Palast, except pensioners — at least, according to that quaint concept we call the law:
When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit: fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name.
But that's not what's happening with GM's pensioners and its bank creditors (emphasis mine):
Here's the scheme: [Obama administration "Car Czar" Steven] Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. Cash in the insurance fund would be replaced by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM's stock - or 25%. Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well ... just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock.
Yet [creditors] Citibank and Morgan, says Rattner, should get their whole enchilada — $6 billion right now and in cash — from a company that can't pay for auto parts or worker eye exams.
Robbing Peter to pay fat bankers 100% on the dollar? Is that legal? Says Palast:
If you ran a business and played fast and loose with your workers' funds, you could land in prison. Stevie the Rat's plan is nothing less than Grand Theft Auto Pension.
It doesn't make it any less of a crime if the President drives the getaway car.
Posted on 06/05/09 by
abi
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June 04, 2009
The heart and soul of Obama's speech today in Cairo (PDF):
I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.
The haters around the world and especially in this country will no doubt find plenty wrong with this speech, because spawning hatred and deep divisions between people reflect their diseased hearts and dark souls. But Obama's speech is a brilliant overture to the great majority of people of all nations and all religions to reject the haters among us, and to focus on the things that we all hold in common and dear.
Obama's backpedaling and equivocations on a number of issues are troubling. But today's appeal to the Muslim world and to all the world underscores why Barack Hussein Obama is exactly the person the world needs at this moment in history.
Posted on 06/04/09 by
abi
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June 01, 2009
Hard to argue with Robert Parry on the sad, shameful Kabuki Theater that is transforming a once-great America into a caricature of itself:
The same ornately costumed characters — snarling Republicans, angry right-wingers, cringing Democrats, careerist media personalities and an ineffectual Left — maneuver around each other in a stylistically choreographed dance of national failure.
I'll give Parry that there is more than a dime's worth of difference between Bush and Gore in 2000, and between the Establishment Right and Establishment Left today. But as long as both sides keep collecting those dimes and dollars from the same corporate interests (think Max Baucus), don't hold your breath for the kind of difference that translates into change you can believe in.
Posted on 06/01/09 by
abi
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May 28, 2009
According to an annual survey called the "Update on Health Reform in Massachusetts," about 70% of Massachusetts residents still like the state's almost-kinda-sorta universal health care system.
That's the good news. Here's some of the bad:
[A]n increasing percentage of residents are now reporting problems paying medical bills. It also found that a rising number of residents, especially those with lower incomes, are reporting that they did not get needed care because of costs, which are rising faster than inflation.
Health care reform that doesn't control costs isn't much of a reform. And "reform" that maintains the inefficient and expensive system of multiple for-profit payers isn't reform at all.
Last year, almost 18% of Massachusetts residents reported having problems paying bills, in spite of our "near-universal" health care law.
And this may be most disturbing of all:
Difficulties finding a physician were much more common for low-income than higher-income residents. And adults with state-subsidized health insurance were much more likely to be told that a physician was not taking their type of insurance - 24 percent - compared with those with private insurance, 7 percent.
One out of four low-income residents with subsidized insurance have trouble finding a doctor who'll take them as patients? I don't call that reform at all.
Percentage-wise, more Massachusetts residents are insured than those in any other state. But it's starting to sound to me like many of them are insured in name only. This is not the kind of system the US should adopt. But the Obama plan, with its insistence on maintaining private insurers, sounds alarming like it.
Posted on 05/28/09 by
abi
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May 27, 2009
Shame on you. Fool me every time you open your mouth — well, you get the idea.
If anyone is surprised by this, please contact me immediately — I have some GM stock you might be interested in:
The Pentagon is prepared to leave fighting forces in Iraq for as long as a decade despite an agreement between the United States and Iraq that would bring all American troops home by 2012.
The first test comes next month, when we're supposed to get combat troops out of urban areas. Good luck with that.
Posted on 05/27/09 by
abi
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May 18, 2009
If Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal played any role in distorting the facts of the death of Pat Tillman for propaganda purposes, and it appears that he did, that alone should disqualify him from heading up US military operations in Afghanistan.
But that Obama would even consider putting a man with this background in charge of US operations in Afghanistan is worrisome as hell, and makes me wonder whether he's up to the job of Commander in Chief:
Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.
The point of the 'Special Operations' teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT's 'counter-terrorism' is terrorism in reverse...
McChrystal was a special favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney because he was in charge of the 'direct action' forces of the Special Missions Units. 'Direct Action' operatives are the death-squads and torturers, and their only engagement with the local population is to terrorize, and not to propagandize. They engage in 'propaganda of the dead', assassinating local leaders to 'teach' the locals to obey and submit to the occupation. Obama's appointment of McChrystal as head reflects a grave new military escalation of his Afghanistan war in the face of the advance of the resistance throughout the country.
Who knows — maybe we really do need a few good men like McChrystal and Col. Nathan Jessup who allow the rest of us to sleep securely under a blanket of freedom that they provide. Maybe we really can't handle the truth behind what makes that blanket possible. But that's not the kind of man who should be leading the military effort in Afghanistan, where our mission is becoming more and more fuzzy, and where we are already alienating the population through a steady stream of civilian deaths.
Posted on 05/18/09 by
abi
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