Tax Cuts

Labels: Bush, Humor, Obama, Taxes

posted by Stash @ 10:28 AM

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Neugebauer Admits to Yelling "Baby Killer!"

First the GOP gave us Joe "You Lie!" Wilson. Now we have Randy "Baby Killer" Neugebauer. The Party of No! really needs to learn how to debate.

Neugebauer Admits to Yelling 'Baby Killer'

Labels: GOP, Obama, Republicans

posted by Stash @ 12:49 PM

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Rate Obama's First Year in Office

CBS News Poll.

Labels: Barack Obama, Obama, President Obama

posted by Stash @ 10:40 AM

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Another splinter in their fragile case against Obama

Viet Dinh, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and one of the authors of the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. (it has nothing to do with patriotism) Act, gets big applause at CPAC for trashing President Obama for (you won't believe this) "killing too many terrorists".

Darth Cheney, Rudy "a verb, a noun, and 9-11) Giuliani, Ann "The Slobber Goddess" Coulter, and others are repeatedly suggesting the President is "soft on terrrrr".

The dissonance in their positions comes as no surprise.

link.

Labels: Ann Coulter, Cheney, Conservative, CPAC, Giuliani, Obama, Terrorism

posted by Stash @ 3:41 PM

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Liberals Are Useless

by Chris Hedges
Commondreams

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

More...

Labels: Democrats, liberal, Obama, Politics, Progressive

posted by Stash @ 7:05 AM

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Democrats War Now

Yeah, it’s official - - What once Democrats could argue was “Bush’s war,” is the Democrats war now. On June 16, “in a vote that should go down in recent histories as a day of shame for the Democrats,” according to the writer Jeremy Scahill, 221 Democrats and 5 Republicans backed the Obama administration’s $106 billion supplemental appropriation bill to maintain the occupation of Iraq, escalate the quagmire that is Afghanistan, enlarge the bombing and death into Pakistan and “fund the International Monetary Funds anti-social policies of forcing developing countries to sacrifice programs for the poor in order to bail out big banks.

It was quite a day for Obama and Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership. Only 32 Democrats, most associated with Progressive Democrats of America, had the courage to vote their convictions. Not one of the 32 was from the state of Washington, certainly not our war-mongering Congressman, Norm Dicks. Those 32 Democrats faced “significant threats to their political future from the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.” “The White House and the Democratic Congressional Leadership played a very dirty game in their effort to ram through the funding,” reports Scahill. Representative Lynn Woolsey of California, a leader of the antiwar Democrats, said the White House is threatening to withdraw support from freshmen who oppose the bill, saying, “you’ll never hear from us again.” She said the House leadership was also targeting freshmen. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, the right-wing, former congressman from Illinois, was reported “cutting deals with Republicans to go easy on them in the 2010 elections in exchange for votes,” supporting the supplemental war funding.

Anybody remember the 2006 elections? That was the election when Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi asked us to vote for Democrats because the Democrats would end the war. Democrats took over the Congress in that election and then pulled a bait-and-switch by not only not ending the war but escalating it. They voted for war funding supplemental after war funding supplemental. They told us they could not overcome the unpopular Bush. Well, Bush is gone so what is their excuse now? “We’ve got to give Obama’s war a chance?” “This vote,” Scahill writes, “revealed a sobering statistic for the anti-war movement in this country and brought to the surface a broader issue that should give die-hard partisan Democrats who purport to be anti-war reason for serious pause about the actual state of their party.” “Under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Democratic-controlled Congress has been a house of war. Unfortunately, it is not a house where the war is one of noble Democrats fighting for peace, freedom and democracy. . . . Instead, it is a house void of substantive opposition to the ever-expanding war begun under Bush and escalating under Obama.”

If the first casualty of war is truth, the second should surely be the destruction of “patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory” in which war comes wrapped. Except for the 32, the hands of the Democratic members of Congress who have made Bush’s wars their own will now be forever stained by the blood of those whom they sent to die and those who will be killed by our soldiers. “War from a distance,” writer Chris Hedges recalled recently, “seems noble.” But, “war is always about betrayal,” Hedges concludes. “It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians.”

Labels: Democrats, Iraq War, Obama, Republicans

posted by Gary Murrell's What's Left @ 6:20 AM

6 Comments

Second Worst President in History Gets Centennial

Obama caves to Wrong Wing... Nancy Gets Ronnie's Centennial

UPI.com

U.S. President Barack Obama Tuesday created a panel to plan events in honor of the late President Ronald Reagan on what would have been his 100th birthday.

"President Reagan helped as much as any president to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit that transcended politics," Obama said as he signed the legislation with former first lady Nancy Reagan at his side. "President Reagan had the ability to communicate directly and movingly to the American people; to understand both the hardships they felt in their lives and the hopes that they had for their country."

Obama also praised Nancy Reagan, saying she redefined the role of first lady and has "taken on a new role, as an advocate on behalf of treatments that hold the promise of improving and saving lives."

"There are few who are not moved by the love that Ms. Reagan felt for her husband -- and fewer still who are not inspired by how this love led her to take up the twin causes of stem cell research and Alzheimer's research," Obama said. "In saying a long goodbye, Nancy Reagan became a voice on behalf of millions of families experiencing the depleting, aching reality of Alzheimer's disease."

The panel Obama established will have 11 members and plan events for Feb. 6, 2011.

"I was delighted to be back at the White House today and even more delighted to be part of the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission bill signing ceremony with President Obama," Nancy Reagan said. "I look forward to working closely with the commission and the Reagan Foundation to honor Ronnie in 2011 for his 100th birthday."


If this ends up being an acknowledgement that Ronnie would have been 100, then, heck. It's not so bad. He would have been. But, if it ends up being a year of tributes around the nation to RayGun, then I'm almost to the point of giving up on President Obama.

We need a Democrat in office!

Just kidding, Barack. I'm not giving up, yet. But, you're making it hard.

Labels: Obama, Reagan

posted by Stash @ 7:33 PM

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Permanent War and Empire

Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges published an essay recently titled, “The Disease of Permanent War.” The subject has been on my mind for several weeks as I have been re-reading Chalmers Johnson’s book, The Sorrows of Empire and Joel Kovel’s, Red Hunting in the Promised Land.

While it seemed that the United States had been in a continual state of war throughout the 20^th century, it was not until 1948 that U.S. foreign policy elites devised a rationale for permanent war. George Kennan, head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff penned two of the most crucial Cold War documents outlining permanent war. “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth,” Kennan wrote in a 1948 memo, “but only 6.3 percent of its population. . . . Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; . . . We should cease to talk about vague and - - for the Far East - - unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. . . . The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.” Kennan’s memo is a recipe for empire and that is exactly what the United States created. The sentimentality and unreal objectives, the Puritan ideals, were brought out of the closet as needed over the next six decades - - most notably as alternative reasons for invading Iraq after no WMD were found - - but only to mask the naked economic interests inherent in U.S. war-making. “ . . . Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. It is gilded corporate welfare.

As a society focused on permanent war, with massive war spending, nearly a trillion dollars this year, what have we won? “Bridges and levees collapse,” Hedges wrote in his essay. “Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.”

After the attacks on 11 September 2001, many people asked the question, “Why do they hate us?” Not knowing our own history and seemingly oblivious to the permanent state of war already controlling our country, the questioners did not know that we taught state terrorism to thousands of Latin American military and police officials at the School of the Americas. That presidents used their own private army, the CIA, to bring about “regime changes” around the world through coups, assassinations, or economic destabilizations. The we have bombed or invaded countries that have openly broken with or opposed our hegemony. Just ask the people in Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Iraq Afghanistan or Pakistan to name a few. We have made ourselves the most belligerent people on earth who, as President Kennedy presciently noted, have made peaceful revolution impossible and violent revolution inevitable.

One wonders what the founders, who knew full well that no republic in history had lasted more than 300 years, would make of the country we have become. Would they be “dismayed by a society that that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools,” these fools who are leading us over the precipice?

What kind of government do we have, a citizen asked Benjamin Franklin as the Constitutional Convention ended? A republic, Franklin replied - - if you can keep it.

Labels: Middle East War, Obama, Republic v. Democracy

posted by Gary Murrell's What's Left @ 5:58 AM

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Sotomayor gets the nod

As expected, President Obama announced Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for The Supreme Court vacancy left by the retirement of Justice David Souter.

Judge Sotomayor has an extensive record for Republicans to scour in their "Politics of NO" strategy to block anything done by this President. But, it will be more difficult as Judge Sotomayor was first appointed to the bench by Republican President George H. W. Bush. They will also be loathe to alienate their Hispanic base any more than they have already.

Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed with only lame objections.

Labels: George H. W. Bush, Obama, Republicans, SCOTUS, Sotomayor

posted by Stash @ 8:31 AM

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Obama Nominates Christ. GOP Opposed.

The Republicans will opposed any nominee, of course.

h/t HuffPo

Labels: Humor, Jesus Christ, Obama, Republicans, SCOTUS, YouTube

posted by Stash @ 11:32 AM

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Obama Watch

As previously noted in The Whirlpool, Judge Sonia Sotomayor is still on a conviently leaked short list of those under consideration for the upcoming SCOTUS seat.

The leaked list includes 5 women and one Hispanic male. They include Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Appeals Court judges Sonia Sotomayor and Diane Pamela Wood, as well as California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno.

We'll keep watching the President in this most critical of dances he'll do early in his Presidency.

Labels: Granholm, Napolitano, Obama, SCOTUS, Sotomayor

posted by Stash @ 10:09 AM

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Obama Laughed at a joke about Limbaugh?!?! Oh, my!

Breitbart, Drudge, and most of the other Wrong Wing Pundants have their knickers in a knot because President Obama "may" have laughed at Wanda Sykes' joke about Limbaugh's kidneys failing.

First, our President is expected to be able to solve any problem, fight any foe, deal with any obstacle that may befall his constiuents, AND cure all illness. Now, we find out the President always needs to also monitor all jokes for appropriateness when told by a professional comedian. Even when that comedian is Wanda Sykes and know for some of her raucous and even raunchy jokes.

Did Breitbart get in a snit when President Bush insulted the troops regarding WMD.

Limbaugh can say, "I hope the President's policies fail" during Obama's first weeks in office, but a raunchy comedian can't say, "I hope America fails... I hope his kidney's fail!" Or, if she happens to say it, the President better not giggle, snort, or guffaw, for fear the media will think him unsensitive.

Don't invite comedians to a function with the President if he can't laugh.

Labels: Breitbart, Hannity, Obama, Press Corps, Rush Limbaugh, Wanda Sykes

posted by Stash @ 1:21 PM

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Wanda Sykes soars at Press Club Dinner

Wanda Sykes was the comedic entertainment at the Press Club Dinner Saturday night. There were a couple groans out of the audience, but overall she was quite funny. She took cheap shots at Limbaugh's oxycontin addiction, and Cheney shooting friends in the face, but got a lot of laughs from the politicians and media folk in the crowd.

When she blasted Limbaugh and got a groan, Sykes bantered with President Obama, "Too much?", she asked. "Ok, but you're laughing on the inside, right? You know you are!"

Watch it on HuffingtonPost

Labels: Cheney, Humor, Obama, Press Corps, Rush Limbaugh, Wanda Sykes, White House

posted by Stash @ 10:23 PM

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Judge Sonia Sotomayor - the next member of SCOTUS?

It appears a wager placed on Judge Sonia Sotomayor as President Obama's pick to fill Justice Souter's upcoming vacancy would be well placed.

Being able to check off the "female" and "minority" box at the same time is a good thing. But, all accounts point towards a very good Judge as well. She has the distinction of being nominated by both George H.W. Bush, a Republican; and William Jefferson Clinton, a Democrat.

On the litmus test that no one is allowed to talk about or ask, she is Pro Choice. We'll keep watching.

Labels: Obama, SCOTUS, Sotomayor

posted by Stash @ 2:13 PM

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Great picture...

... but REALLY!? WTF were they thinking?

Louis Caldera, the director of the White House Military Office resigned.

Labels: 9-11, air travel, Caldera, Obama, White House

posted by Stash @ 12:14 AM

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Havana calling...

President Obama lifted travel restrictions to Cuba on Monday.

There was no mention in the Executive Order regarding the number of Cohibas that can legally be brought back in to the States.

The Wrong Wing, of course will be in partial melt down after White House Latin American policy adviser Dan Restrepo spoke in Spanish from the Press podium. It seems it may be the first time a foreign language was uttered in the Press Room... not counting some of comments made by President Bush, of course.

Labels: Cuba, Obama, Press Corps, Reagan, White House

posted by Stash @ 5:03 PM

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Make My Filibuster

DAVID E. RePASS
New York Times


PRESIDENT OBAMA has decided to spend his political capital now, pushing through an ambitious agenda of health care, education and energy reform. If the Democrats in the Senate want to help him accomplish his goals, they should work to eliminate one of the greatest threats facing effective governance — the phantom filibuster.

Most Americans think of the filibuster (if they think of it at all) through the lens of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” — a minority in the Senate deeply disagrees with a measure, takes to the floor and argues passionately round the clock to prevent it from passing. These filibusters are relatively rare because they take so much time and effort.

To reduce deadlock, in 1917 the Senate passed Rule 22, which made it possible for a supermajority — two-thirds of the chamber — to end a filibuster by voting for cloture. The two-thirds majority was later changed to three-fifths, or 60 of the current 100 senators.

In recent years, however, the Senate has become so averse to the filibuster that if fewer than 60 senators support a controversial measure, it usually won’t come up for discussion at all. The mere threat of a filibuster has become a filibuster, a phantom filibuster. Instead of needing a sufficient number of dedicated senators to hold the floor for many days and nights, all it takes to block movement on a bill is for 41 senators to raise their little fingers in opposition.

Historically, the filibuster was justified as a last-ditch defense of minority rights. Under this principle, an intense opposition should be able to protect itself from the tyranny of the majority. But today, the minority does not have to be intense at all. Its members have only to disagree with a measure to kill it. Essentially, the minority has veto power.

The phantom filibuster is clearly unconstitutional. The founders required a supermajority in only five situations: veto overrides and votes on treaties, constitutional amendments, convictions of impeached officials and expulsions of members of the House or Senate. The Constitution certainly does not call for a supermajority before debate on any controversial measure can begin.

And fixing the problem would not require any change in Senate rules. The phantom filibuster could be done away with overnight by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. All he needs to do is call the minority’s bluff by bringing a challenged measure to the floor and letting the debate begin.

Some argue that this procedure would mire the Senate in one filibuster after another. But avoiding delay by not bringing measures to the floor makes no sense. For fear of not getting much done, almost nothing is done at all. And what does get done is so compromised and toothless to make it filibuster-proof that it fails to solve problems.

Better to risk a filibuster — an event that, because of the great effort involved, would actually be rare — than to save time and accomplish little or nothing.

It also happens to make a great deal of political sense for the Democrats to force the Republicans to take the Senate floor and show voters that they oppose Mr. Obama’s initiatives. If the Republicans want to publicly block a popular president who is trying to resolve major problems, let them do it. And if the Republicans feel that the basic principles they believe in are worth standing up for, let them exercise their minority rights with an actual filibuster.

It is up to Mr. Reid. He can do away with the supermajority requirement for virtually all significant measures and return majority rule to the Senate. This is not to say that the Democrats should ride roughshod over the Republicans. Republicans should be included at all stages of the legislative process. However, with the daunting prospect of having to mount a real filibuster to demonstrate their opposition, Republicans may become much more willing to compromise.

Labels: Democrats, Harry Reid, Obama, Senate

posted by Stash @ 4:15 PM

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Obama Inaguration

As I write this commentary, Barack Obama has just been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States.

The first black president.

Now, we can begin the process of redemption for our original sin as a nation - - slavery. Obama’s inauguration does not mark the end of white racism, it does not mean that the inequalities and discrimination faced by generations of black people in this country has ended.

It does mean that finally, the process has started.

As one who has long fought for racial equality, openly and defiantly since that day in 1967 when the commanding general at Keesler Air Force base in Bilouxi, Mississippi attempted to cover-up a racial incident and ordered several of us to deny the truth, which we refused to do, I am feeling an overwhelming sense of pride that that a black man will lead this country.

I can still hardly believe it.

I did not vote for Obama. I couldn’t - - not after spending the last eight years protesting the illegal and immoral actions of the United States’ government and demanding the impeachment and prosecution of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell and the rest of the criminal conspiracy in control of our government.

I could not vote for Obama because he promised to continue some of those policies and embark on similar crimes.

How could I protest Bush’s illegal war in and occupation of and then vote for Obama who intends to continue that occupation through the too clever by half manipulation of language regarding “combat troops?”

How could I protest Bush’s illegal war in and occupation of Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, and then vote for Obama who promised during the campaign to escalate that war? Not only escalate the war in Afghanistan but enlarge that war by continuing Bush’s covert invasion of Pakistan Pakistan

How could I vote for Obama when, like Bush, he attempts to erase the Palestinians as if the root of the solution to the crisis in the Middle East did not go through Jerusalem.

The inauguration of Barack Obama holds great promise for our country. I want Obama to succeed. I want our country to succeed as a beacon of freedom and justice. I’m just not sanguine in either case.  I guess I read too much history.

Labels: Afghanistan, Iraq War, Obama, war crimes

posted by Gary Murrell's What's Left @ 4:41 PM

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Hey, Obama. Where's Howard Dean?

There is a little fuss here and there regarding President-elect Barack Obama's picks for his Cabinet. There have been mumblings about not-enough _____(fill in the blank with under-represented group of choice).

The most visible absence from his cabinet, however, is a representative from a most elite group that played one of, if not the most significant role in his election. That is, a representative from the group of DNC Chairs with the successful 50 State Strategy that made a Democratic candidate viable in former staunch Republican states. That, of course, is a group of one... outgoing DNC Chair, Howard Dean.

Dean was not invited to the announcement of Tim Kaine as his successor. He has not been offered a Cabinet position in the new administration. Obama has overtly snubbed Howard Dean for some unknown reason.

If anyone deserves the reward of a position in the Obama Cabinet, it is Howard Dean. What gives, President-elect Obama? Why?

Labels: Democrats, Howard Dean, Obama

posted by Stash @ 10:10 AM

0 Comments

Thank you, America!

Besides great turkey (and great turkeys), outstanding stuffing (and some a little too stuffed), there are many reasons to be grateful.

I am thankful... or at least hopeful... that the election of a new President will help us restore the full respect for our Bill of Rights in America. George W. Bush, with the complicit (both the Republicans and Democrats) Congress trampled on the BOR for the last eight years.

We will watch with great anticipation as our new President lives up to expectations and brings respect and honor back to America.

And I am thankful that, in America, if the new President doesn't live up to those expectations we can, for now at least, raise all kinds of hell.

Gotta luv it!

Happy Thanksgiving.

Labels: Bill of Rights, Cheney, Civil Liberties, George W. Bush, Nat Hentoff, Obama, Sarah Palin, Thanksgiving

posted by Stash @ 8:48 PM

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