President Obama still doesn't seem to understand that he won.
It's over, you're in. You don't have to charm and cuddle anymore. You got the job.
Now, it will be good if you could get the job done.
I don't know who got the bright idea of putting him on Leno but now, thanks to this 10 watt light bulb, Obama might lose most of his political capital and the confidence of the American people at the time where he needs it the most.
The nation is suffering and scared of what's to come. It doesn't need a star or a comedian (except for Jon Stewart) but a President that seem conscious of the degree of damage afflicted by the financial crisis and capable of mitigating the worst of what's to come. It needs ideas, inspiration, faith, a clear-headed leader and a new path. Not a chuckling, silly beer buddy. We had one for awhile. Didn't do us much good. Left us with a hell of hangover and an empty wallet.
Even Clinton, who was a congenial crowd pleaser, could put a serious face when needed, though an attentive viewer could fell a jocular smile hovering just beneath the daddy-knows-best mask. I'm sure we all know a guy like this who just can't resist a joke , even in the most inopportune of moments. Usually, I love this kind of humour. My husband is one of those guys always seeing the absurd facet of every situation, wowing the crowd with a joke a minute and loving it. But it all can get a bit tiring when every circumstances gets trivialized and humour becomes a crutch, or worse, an apparent escape from reality.
With in-fighting within the Democrats ranks and the neonuts job getting trigger happy and closer to the looney bin day by day, with financial crisis, unemployment, military uncertainty, poverty and crooks getting away with murder, President Obama have enough on his plate that parading on Leno does not count as a capital imperative let alone a sane decision. Cleaning house at AIG looks less glamorous but much more urgent in the grand scheme of things.
Obama does not have a Cheney to act as his rapacious looney watchdog. Or a Rove to be his personal Machiavellian voodoo witch doctor. He has to do it all himself and play the bad cop/good cop role alone. But he does need to find a way to stop being a mere sitting duck for criticism. And finding the real culprits in these messy affairs is the only logical beginning. Gave the public the real frauds. Madoff didn't not act alone. Create a sense of justice being accomplish or the Obama presidency will be tainted as accomplice to the deeds instead of exactors of redress ant truth.
We elected a President, not the class clown. If President Obama needs our help, he has to ask us through the proper presidential channels, not with a comedy routine on late-night TV. His foe, in the meantime, are very serious. And they seriously want to see him and this country fail miserably. You better get on the same page quick, Mr. President, and get serious too.
Really. He does.
His article in Counterpunch, "The Cash-for-Trash Economy", is the most comprehensible and extensive explanation of how we got into this horrendous financial mess.
To read Hudson is to finally understand that the "too big to fail" doctrine does not apply only to different American industries but to America as a whole.
"Our deficit, their problem" "Our war, their problem" " Our gas guzzling SUV, their problem": we have been letting the world clean up our problems for so long while stuffing their banks with our worthless money and wriggling our holier-than-thou middle finger under their noses that we just thought we could go on forever.
Well, the party's over and Wall Street still doesn't get it. Bernanke still thinks we should give more money to the bank so that they could keep doing business as usual. "Our deficit, the taxpayer problem". But let's keep all the players and the deficient structures in place and hope for different results.
So your taxes' dollars should go 1/2 to the military, 1/4 to repay those banks' debts and the rest for tax cut for the rich or interest repayment. Shame on you should you ask for good schools, good health care or consumer protection. The market will provide. The Repugs have only your best interest at heart. And yes I said Repug. If Obama does not accomplish a clean break with the past 8 years or so, it will only be a continuation of a destructive "conservative" philosophy that rhymes with sacrificing the weak and poor for the profit a very small incredibly toxic minority. It's too bad many take their toxicity for strength, power or even worse, wisdom.
Landrieu, Lincoln, and Bayh will be to the Obama's what Sam Nunn, Patrick Moynihan, and George Mitchell were to the Clinton's.
Long after Bayh's forgotten and out of office, it will be remembered that Obama's agenda collapsed on account of Michelle Obama's bare arms.
Healthcare will have deteriorated further, and the Obama's will be blamed for the failure to pass any reform at all.
Only Landrieu, Lincoln, and Bayh will gloat, knowing they led the bible thumper's splintering of the Democratic agenda.
I saw the Watchmen movie last week-end. I loved it if you really want to know. I seemed to be one of the few that did.
I have to applaud a superhero movie that finally did not forget to be a movie too. I loved the interplay of time, music and visual American icons, I loved the stylized fights, I loved the different textures that could be rendered on the screen from gritty polar noir to slick 80's rock video designs. I really love the syncretism of different moments in American history that created a surreal portrait of what it could mean to be an American in such times and how do one dealt with the anxiety of living in an empire gone mad. With masks and self-defeating prophecies or harrowing auto-fictions, seemed to suggest Moore and the directors. And love, love, love, of course... Girls, put your f*ck me leather boots on!
I was surprised to found out that Zack "We are Sparta" Snyder was responsible for such a coherent, successful, sharp-eyed adaptation of Alan Moore's comic. It was far from perfect, mind you. Xena look-a-like Silk Spectre, played by actress Malin Ackerman, was gorgeous and could deliver a kick but her acting was a bit as thin as her costume, unfortunately, with no second degree. Compare it to the three-names-guys, Jackie Earle Haley or especially Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who's somehow channeling a very, very mean Robert Downey jr, and it's clear that Spectre was not in the same league.
Nixon, Kissinger and all the other crazy boys of "How I learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb..." make an appearance and the only one missing was Peter Sellers. But every single frame is charged with a sense of hopeless irony and absurdist folly that Sellers himself would probably have recognize. Of course, if you like your movies quick and empty, this one is not for you. It's fast and furious enough but catching a bad guy and beating him to a pulp is not the whole point here. In this story, the villain is within. And catching him makes for a bitter harvest, indeed.
But I digress...
While we're watching the Watchmen, who's watching Wall Street? In fact, who's watching the government guys who are supposed to watch Wall Street?
We're in a freaking deep mess that is itself in a deeper mess. in literature, we call this "une mise en abyme" - or to be put into an abyss. Harry Shearer from HuffPost just discovered that in New Orleans (remember them?) just as much was spend in administrative cost than on building affordable housing units there. We're talking 40 to 50 millions for the pencil pushers and another 40 to 50 for the contractors/landlords to fix their units. Results? A little more than a 1000 units in two years. And the money keeps on coming...
I hope you see there is a big problem here.
Henry "Hank" Paulson worked at Goldman Sachs, he headed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and repealed the "net capital rule" that required brokerage firm to hold reserve capital that limited their investments and could offset their risks. He championed "voluntary regulation"(!!). In a way, he was one of the Wall Street elite, to use a word the Repugs love to hurl around, and he was ask to cuddle their way out of a mess he helped create. And somehow his decisions were made non-reviewable or unchallengeable by law.
I hope you see there is a problem here.
So not wanting to alarm the Rush Limbaugh of this world, we cannot talk of temporary nationalization as we should, so we can't clean house, we can't move in and react quickly enough to stop the crisis from getting worse. Obama is caught trying to be all thing to all people, unable to believe that we put him in power so he could tell a major "Fuck you" to the Wall Street Frat boys and their Bush Dynasty crew. He is stuck in pleasuring the masses mode warming up to the crooks and forgetting his main plan: getting Main Street it's due after years of numbskulls rulers.
So, Obama, you are either FDR or a sitting duck. Your choice. Emergency Banking Act, a restructuration of the SEC, a bonification of Unemployment benefits, Homeowner Loan's Corp. II and jobs, jobs, jobs…
Or be ready to start licking Limbaugh's feet like the rest of the yellow livered Dems BNO.
But incredibly, I still believe you can...
What gets me is the fact that all his "outrage" is a reflection of what I felt towards the Republicans when they were selling out this country to the highest bidder while trying all they could to bankrupt it morally as well as financially, sucking it dry of any hope. The controlling GOP mentality who made sure to call every dissent voice unpatriotic, telling others who they should marry, love, hire, fire, let live or harass, was patiently tolerated for all those years. But threatening to secede 4 months after the legal election of a Democrat. And to give way to what solution? More big men with big guns!!!Beck lists nine principles guiding his new movement on his Web site. The principles contain the usual right-wing "government ain't the boss of me," pro-Christianity propaganda. My favorite, though, marks a turnaround for the hardcore right. After years of conservatives screaming that those who don't support the president are un-American and want our troops to die terrible deaths, Beck comes out with principle number eight:
"It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion."
Beck said this on his show when introducing the eighth principle: "My opinion or others' opinions may be anti-American. Anti-American rhetoric would be anything that's destructive to the Constitution and our country as the founders understood it unless you want to change that."
He then called his audience to action saying, "If you agree with seven of these nine, please, stand up and fight for them."
| COUNTRY | AID | PURPOSE |
| 1. Israel | $2.4 billion | Virtually all of this money is used to buy weapons (up to 75% made in the U.S.). Beginning in 2009, the U.S. plans to give $30 billion over 10 years. |
| 2. Egypt | $1.7 billion | $1.3 billion to buy weapons; $103 million for education; $74 million for health care; $45 million to promote civic participation and human rights. |
| 3. Pakistan | $798 million | $330 million for security efforts, including military-equipment upgrades and border security; $20 million for infrastructure. |
| 4. Jordan | $688 million | $326 million to fight terrorism and promote regional stability through equipment upgrades and training; $163 million cash payment to the Jordanian government. |
| 5. Kenya | $586 million | $501 million to fight HIV/AIDS through drug treatment and abstinence education and to combat malaria; $15 million for agricultural development; $5.4 million for programs that promote government accountability. |
| 6. South Africa | $574 million | $557 million to fight TB and HIV/AIDS; $3 million for education. |
| 7. Mexico | $551 million | Click here for details. |
| 8. Colombia | $541 million | Click here for details. |
| 9. Nigeria | $491 million | Click here for details. |
| 10. Sudan | $479 million | Click here for details. |
THE United States, keen to develop new sources of oil supply outside the Middle East, has offered to help Nigeria protect the flow of oil in the Gulf of Guinea and combat terrorist attacks on the oil industry, officials said. The Gulf of Guinea, stretching from Liberia in the west to Angola in the south, currently provides about 15 per cent of US oil supplies. That share is expected to grow to 25 per cent by 2015, according to a recent report commissioned for the U.S. Congress.
KEY EXCERPTS:
Zogby Poll: Americans Support Impeaching Bush for Wiretapping
Submitted by Bob Fertik on January 13, 2006
For Release: January 16, 2006
By a margin of 52% to 43%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
Recently White House spokesman Scott McClellan cited a Rasmussen poll that found 64% believe the NSA "should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects." Of course, that is exactly what Congress authorized when it created the FISA courts to issue special expedited secret warrants for terrorism suspects. But Bush defied the FISA law and authorized warrantless wiretaps of Americans, which has outraged Americans to the point that a majority believe Congress should consider Bush's impeachment.
"Bush admits he ordered illegal warantless wiretapping, but says it began in response to 9/11 and was limited to a small number of calls to or from Al Qaeda," Fertik said. "But recent reports suggest wiretapping affected a much larger number of Americans, and a report in Friday's Truthout says the wiretapping began before 9/11."
Truthout article
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011306Z.shtml
Does anyone know where George W. Bush is?
You don’t hear much from him anymore. The last image most of us remember is of the president ducking a pair of size 10s that were hurled at him in Baghdad.
We’re still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza. And the U.S. economy is about as vibrant as the 0-16 Detroit Lions.
But hardly a peep have we heard from George, the 43rd.
When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.
HONOLULU - President-elect Barack Obama's top asset in pushing his agenda will not be his Cabinet secretaries or aides, but rather his online network.
Obama's political e-mail list tops 13 million names, a digital force that the incoming White House can tap to push for his legislation, tamp down critics or bolster popular support. It's also a way for Obama to reach into every state, every city, and every neighborhood.
A study released Tuesday found that a quarter of Obama voters said they would continue to work online to support the new administration. The nonpartisan Pew Internet and American Life Project also found 62 percent of Obama's voters say they would ask others to support Obama's policies.
Welcome to the Democrats' new permanent campaign, one planned online and executed on Main Street.
If it works the way Obama's top lieutenants plan, the White House would marshal hundreds of thousands of phone calls within hours if it looked as if the president-elect were losing a policy battle. With the click of a keyboard, Obama's aides could ask supporters to flood the phone lines of Congress, making it untenable to ignore the clamor.
That, at least, is the idea.
Obama's unmatched database gives his incoming administration a clear advantage over its Republican rivals, who have seen decades of datamining overcome in the matter of months. GOP leaders, though, insist they are not deterred.
"I'm impressed with what Obama did, but did they do anything innovative? No," said Cyrus Krohn, the Republican National Committee's online director. "They did things creatively."
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Washington, Dec 29 -
U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich today released the following statement as Israeli attacks on Gaza have gone into a third day with a pending ground invasion of Gaza by Israel:
“Today I sent a letter to Secretary General Ban ki-Moon urging the United Nations to establish an independent inquiry of Israel's war against Gaza. The attacks on civilians represent collective punishment, which is a violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm). The perpetrators of attacks against Israel must also be brought to justice, but Israel cannot create a war against an entire people in order to attempt to bring to justice the few who are responsible. The Israeli leaders know better. The world community, which has been very supportive of Israel's right to security and its right to survive, also has a right to expect Israel to conduct itself in adherence to the very laws which support the survival of Israel and every other nation,” Kucinich said.
“Israel is leveling Gaza to strike at Hamas, just as they pulverized south Lebanon to strike at Hezbollah. Yet in both cases civilian populations were attacked, countless innocents killed or injured, infrastructure targeted and destroyed, and civil law enforcement negated. All this was, and is, disproportionate, indiscriminate mass violence in violation of international law. Israel is not exempt from international law and must be held accountable. It is time for the UN to not just call for a cease-fire, but for an inquiry as to Israel's actions.”
According to published news reports, since the commencement of aerial strikes, over 300 Palestinians have been killed and approximately 1,400 have been wounded. The dead include 20 children under the age of 16--nearly half of them killed while on a school bus, according to the United Nations--and 9 women. The attack aggravated a humanitarian crisis wrought by the Israeli-imposed blockade of food, fuel, and medical supplies. With a population of 1.5 million people, the Gaza Strip is among the most densely populated territories in the world."
Remember that the Idiot-In-Chief's mama once said: ''Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's gonna happen? . . . It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?''
Time to put in practice a variation of Georges Constanza's secret for success: just do the opposite of what Georges Bush and family would do and you should display a beautiful sound mind and have a solid moral compass.
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