FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL!

As we reflect on 9-11 and the tragedy that is was, we need to never forget the root cause of a LOT of this MESS! one word the BUSH'S! When little W was in college his DADDY was the head of the CIA, and they were secretly shipping weapons to a freedom fighter in Afghanistan named....OSAMA BIN LADEN (Who by the way is a relative of the Saudi royal family) BTW they are friends with the BUSH's!!! So when 9-11 happens Mr. Bin Laden steps up and said he was the Mastermind behind the terrorist act...hmmm why after all these years we can't find a nasty azz raghead with a dialysis machine in the wilderness? My spin is we DON'T want to find the bastard! Why? Ask the BUSH'S! If we can find other criminals ANYWHERE in the world why can't we get this nasty Bastard? Oh but there was plenty of OIL in Iraq!!! No Al Quida!!! Plenty of OIL!!!

The BUSH Problem

As we reflect on 9-11 and the tragedy that is was, we need to never forget the root cause of a LOT of this MESS! one word the BUSH'S! When little W was in college his DADDY was the head of the CIA, and they were secretly shipping weapons to a freedom fighter in Afghanistan named....OSAMA BIN LADEN (Who by the way is a relative of the Saudi royal family) BTW they are friends with the BUSH's!!! So when 9-11 happens Mr. Bin Laden steps up and said he was the Mastermind behind the terrorist act...hmmm why after all these years we can't find a nasty azz raghead with a dialysis machine in the wilderness? My spin is we DON'T want to find the bastard! Why? Ask the BUSH'S! If we can find other criminals ANYWHERE in the world why can't we get this nasty Bastard?

Where are the Old School Democrats? Obama needs HELP!

"As for the Democrats, they have been both pragmatic and moderate, despite all the claims that this plan is "left wing" or "socialist." It is neither."

Democrats have NOT been pragmatic and moderate. Obama had to negotiate this bill behind closed doors with health industry and biotech CEO's. That's how "moderate" it is from a (genuinely) Democratic perspective.

The truth is as follows: Obama is a conservative Republican himself. To win his election, like the elections of Diane Feinstein in CA, he had to change his party label, which Diane does from election to election.

Of course, as this author himself admits -- single payer is the RIGHT way to go. Given the logic here that the Republicans will vote NO on anything Obama produces, why is the common sense maneuver to push through single pay AGGRESSIVELY not happening? It's because of what I've stated over and over again and a fact admitted in this article: Obama legislates, thinks, and feels as a CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN.

It's not just the Republicans, as this author observes, who've moved so far to the right that they are barely recognizable, as Republicans; the Democrats have done exactly the same thing.

SO what we have here, from a higher point of view, is a solidly Republican congress. You have the Republican scavengers, hateful of all government on the severe right, and then you have the rest of the Congress: moderate right wingers who are neo-liberal free market (solidly Republican, like Max Baucus) worshippers keeping government participation at an absolute minimum. We have a whole slew of Democrats who as a central feature of the political philosophy want to reduce government's involvement in all spheres of life. The reason"? It's a central tenet of neo-liberalism that government is inherent evil, "the problem" to be overcome. It's Adam Smith all over again.

Here's what we need: a return of the Democratic party of the 60s, Democrats who have faith in "big government." We need a return of the social state, only done better than it ever has been done before, as we see in GREEN and WAR FREE Scandinavia.

We need an Oval Office and Congress filled with Bernie Sanders-like-politicians. Otherwise, it's "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Why Are Democrats Fighting for a GOP Health Plan?

FRIDAY 19 MARCH 2010
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Why Democrats Are Fighting for a Republican Health Plan
Friday 19 March 2010

by: E.J. Dionne Jr., Op-Ed

Washington - Here is the ultimate paradox of the Great Health Care Showdown: Congress will divide along partisan lines to pass a Republican version of health care reform, and Republicans will vote against it.
Yes, Democrats have rallied behind a bill that Republicans -- or at least large numbers of them -- should love. It is built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.
Republicans have said that they do not want to destroy the private insurance market. This bill not only preserves that market but strengthens it by bringing in 32 million new customers. The plan before Congress does not call for a government "takeover" of health care. It provides subsidies so more people can buy private insurance.
Republicans always say they are against "socialized medicine." Not only is this bill nothing like a "single-payer" health system along Canadian or British lines. It doesn't even include the "public option" that would have allowed people voluntarily to buy their insurance from the government. The single-payer idea fell by the wayside long ago, and supporters of the public option -- sadly, from my point of view -- lost out last December.
They'll be back, of course. The newly pragmatic Rep. Dennis Kucinich was right to say that this is just the first step in a long process. We will see if this market-based system works. If it doesn't, single-payer plans and public options will look more attractive.
Republican reform advocates have long called for a better insurance market. Our current system provides individuals with little market power in the purchase of health insurance. As a result, they typically pay exorbitant premiums. The new insurance exchanges will pool individuals together and give them a fighting chance at a fair shake.
Republicans now say they hate the mandate that requires everyone to buy insurance. But an individual mandate was hailed as a form of "personal responsibility" by no less a conservative Republican than Mitt Romney. He was proud of the mandate, and also proud of the insurance exchange idea, known in Massachusetts as "The Health Connector" (the idea itself came from the conservative Heritage foundation). Romney had a right to be proud. As governor of Massachusetts in 2006, he signed a bill that is the closest thing there is to a model for what the Democrats are proposing.
Don't believe me on this? On The Wall Street Journal's opinion page earlier this week, Grace-Marie Turner -- criticizing Romney from the right, it should be said -- noted the startling similarities between the plan he approved and the one President Obama is fighting for.
"Both have an individual mandate requiring most residents to have health insurance or pay a penalty," she wrote. "Most businesses are required to participate or pay a fine. Both rely on government-designed purchasing exchanges that also provide a platform to control private health insurance. Many of the uninsured are covered through Medicaid expansion and others receive subsidies for highly prescriptive policies. And the apparatus requires a plethora of new government boards and agencies."
She added: "While it's true that the liberal Massachusetts Legislature did turn Mr. Romney's plan to the left, his claims that his plan is 'entirely different' will not stand up to the intense scrutiny of a presidential campaign, especially a primary challenge."
What does it tell us that Republicans are now opposing a bill rooted in so many of their own principles? Why has it fallen to Democrats to push the thing through?
The obvious lesson is that the balance of opinion in the Republican Party has swung far to the right of where it used to be. Republicans once believed in market-based government solutions. Now they are suspicious of government solutions altogether. That's true even in an area such as health care where government, through Medicare and Medicaid, already plays a necessarily large role.
As for the Democrats, they have been both pragmatic and moderate, despite all the claims that this plan is "left wing" or "socialist." It is neither.
You could argue that Democrats have learned from Republicans. Some might say that Democrats have been less than true to their principles.
But there is a simpler conclusion: Democrats, including President Obama, are so anxious to get everyone health insurance that they are more than willing to try a market-based system and hope it works. It's a shame the Republicans can no longer take "yes" for an answer.
E.J. Dionne's e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.
(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group
All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

The Lies of Karl Rove

Joseph Goebbels, the leading propagandist of the Third Reich, believed in the power of the lie; the greater the lie, the greater the power. Goebbels would have loved Karl Rove's "Courage and Consequences: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight," a pastiche of lies, fabrications and distortions designed to rehabilitate the record of the Bush-Cheney years. There are too many lies to treat in this one column, but his greatest lie is that the Bush administration would not have invaded Iraq if it had known there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there. Its corollary is that the administration did not lie about the presence of such weapons in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
In fact, the Bush administration mounted an intense six-month campaign to make sure that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) produced "evidence" of WMD, and then made sure that such players as National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell parroted the administration's big lie to the American public and to the international community. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their acolytes Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Karl Rove desperately wanted to go to war against Iraq for reasons that have never been explained. As a result, they created and employed a strategic disinformation campaign to convince Congress and the American people of the need for war. Goebbels would have beamed.
This is not the first time the United States has manipulated intelligence to make a case for war. It happened prior to the Mexican-American War to support the policies of President James Polk, the Spanish-American War to support the policies of President William McKinley and the Vietnam War to support President Lyndon Johnson. But the Iraq war marked the first time that the White House mounted a full-court press with such zeal to take the nation to a war that was unneeded, illegal and immoral. Rove and Libby were key operatives in a programmatic "marketing plan" to justify the war, which included the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose husband had dared to challenge the case for war; the phony intelligence documents produced by the CIA and DIA; and the public commentary linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and Iraq to al-Qaeda. Bush's chief of staff Andrew Card has already admitted to the marketing plan, which was introduced in September 2002, because "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
In the summer of 2002, the White House Iraq Group was formed to convince public opinion at home and abroad of the need for war against Iraq. The group met regularly in the White House situation room and the regular attendants included Rove, Libby, Condi Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley. At the same time, Cheney and Libby began meeting directly with analysts at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, an unprecedented procedure. The purpose of these meetings was to garner the intelligence justification for a pre-emptive war to remove Saddam Hussein in order to make a case to the Congress, the American public and the international community. In July 2002, the chief of the British MI6 intelligence service, Sir Richard Dearlove, after several meetings with CIA Director George Tenet, warned Prime Minister Tony Blair about the American misuse of intelligence and the public relations campaign to justify war. Dearlove concluded that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," and that "military action was now seen as inevitable."
A major aspect of Rove's "marketing plan" was to leak unsubstantiated and flawed intelligence (supplied by Iraqi defector Ahmad Chalabi and his minions) to the press and then offer authoritative White House confirmation of the leaked information. The White House selected Judith Miller of The New York Times as the key recipient of these leaks. Miller had a front-page story in the Times on September 8, 2002, citing administration officials as claiming that Saddam had acquired aluminum tubes "specifically designed" to enrich uranium. On the same day, Cheney told "Meet the Press" that "we know with absolute certainty" that Saddam was "using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon." Four days later, President Bush took the aluminum tubes claim to the UN General Assembly. The issue was central to Secretary of State Powell's UN speech in February 2003.
Rove and Libby were also central to the outing of Plame, a CIA operative, whose husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, refuted Cheney's charge that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger. The outing of Plame was designed to embarrass the ambassador and to keep other officials from testifying against the White House's case for war, which required a nuclear dimension. Rove was not indicted for lying about the outing of Plame, although Libby's lawyer, Theodore Wells, argued that Libby was a scapegoat to protect Rove. Cheney charged that the White House was failing to "protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy this Pres asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others." Cheney ultimately scratched out "this Pres" and substituted "that was."
Rove, of course, was not alone in these efforts. He had help from CIA Director Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who lied to Secretary of State Powell about the sources for the secretary's speech to the UN Security Council. He benefited from CIA senior analysts such as Robert Walpole and Paul Pillar, who helped to craft specious documents such as a National Intelligence Estimate and a white paper that were used to influence the Congressional vote on the use of force authorization in October 2002. As the chief of the CIA's largest analytic office Alan Foley told his senior managers, "if the president decides to go to war, it's our job to supply the intelligence to allow him to do so." Foley's comments took place only several days after Tenet assured President Bush that gathering intelligence support for a public case to go to war would be a "slam dunk."
At the Pentagon, Douglas Feith and Abram Shulsky created the Office of Special Plans (OSP) to circulate intelligence that even the CIA did not believe was credible. According to the Pentagon's Inspector General, OSP's major mission was to provide the White House with so-called intelligence to make the case for war. Feith regularly briefed the White House on this disinformation in August and September 2002 and then passed the "classified" findings to Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard. The OSP had close links with the Defense Policy Board, whose members - particularly Richard Perle, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey and former Republican speaker of the House Newt Gingrich - peddled the OSP's disinformation to high-level opinion makers at home and abroad.
There were many CIA and Defense Department puppets in this effort, but two major Geppetos in the White House: one named Libby and one named Rove. Perhaps that is why the Rove memoir is titled "Courage and Consequence" and not "Truth and Consequence."

Here Come The Racist!

During the campaign, Barack Obama’s enemies seemed reluctant to smear him with ugly rhetoric. But as The Daily Beast’s Matthew Yglesias points out, the last week has seen it come out in full force.

White America proved ready last fall to accept an African-American president. But in the eyes of some on the right, it was as if Barack Obama’s election meant that any talk of racial discrimination in America had to end. How else to explain the firestorm of controversy set off by the president of the United States offering the banal observation that there is "a long history" of "African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately," and that a police department that arrests a man inside his own home and winds up dropping the charges has acted “stupidly”? But as soon as the president spoke, the right wing pounced, smelling blood.

The Gates affair was the opening right-wingers used to pummel Obama with race-based attacks—to prove that America’s first post-racial presidency was anything but. On July 26, Fox's Brit Hume whined on air that "to be labeled a racist" in today's America is very bad, which has "placed into the hands of certain people a weapon" that can be wielded against poor, defenseless white America. One might think that the existence of social opprobrium against racists was a good thing and certainly an improvement from the recent past in which such opprobrium was directed at interracial couples and it was commonly impossible for Southern blacks to vote.

Since the campaign ended, we’ve been seeing the extreme racial paranoia that has characterized the American right for decades.

Either way, run-amok anti-racism doesn't seem to have stopped Hume's Fox News colleague Glenn Beck, who opined on July 28 that Obama had "exposed himself as a guy" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture."

Given that the roster of white people in Obama's life includes his mother, his vice president, his chief of staff, his chief political aide, the majority of his Cabinet, etc., the hatred strikes me as unlikely to be all that deep-seated. Rather, as with the absurd campaign by Newt Gingrich and others to brand Judge Sonia Sotomayor a "Latina woman racist," we're seeing the extreme racial paranoia that has characterized the American right for decades.

These sentiments long predate Obama's rise to the White House or any particular actions on his part. Popular conservative talk-radio host Michael Savage self-published a 1991 book called The Death of the White Male at a time when there wasn't so much as a black member of the United States Senate. But it's perhaps not surprising that America's first African-American president would prompt an outburst of racial anxiety and racist attacks. Indeed, many observers were expecting more of this sort of thing during the campaign. That it's only emerging in a big way now illustrates the paucity of appealing political leaders on the contemporary American right. During the presidential campaign, John McCain himself was, for obvious reasons, the most prominent face of American conservatism. And McCain was a practical politician looking to appeal to a majority. He was also a quite popular figure, whose approval rating remained over 50 percent even as he ultimately lost the election to an even-more-popular Obama. Under the circumstances, he had strong incentives to avoid the sort of hyper-ugly rhetoric that could easily prompt a backlash.

Today, though, Republican congressional leaders are gray nonentities like Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell. That leaves the right wing's public presentation dominated by Fox News personalities, and the likes of Gingrich and Michelle Malkin, who recently dubbed Obama a "racial opportunist." Such figures aren't trying to build a viable electoral coalition; they're just competing for the intense devotion of a narrow segment of the conservative base. You can have a hit cable show with only a trivial fraction of the overall population watching, and you raise funds for your political organization by attracting a relatively small number of devoted followers. And a certain segment thrills to this sort of rhetoric.

GOP and "morality"

Leonard Pitts Jr. / Syndicated columnist

A long fall from a high horse for the "Morals Party"
So, anybody up for a chat about family values? The term has been a registered trademark of the GOP — the self-styled Morals Party...

So, anybody up for a chat about family values?

The term has been a registered trademark of the GOP — the self-styled Morals Party — for years, a bludgeon against Democrats who, by implication, oppose families and have no values.

Like most political language, it's a code, intended to be understood by those with ears to hear. "Family values" means the pol in question has God on speed dial and can be counted upon to oppose gun control, the so-called "homosexual agenda" and abortion, while pushing schools to teach, as Tina Fey once put it, that Adam and Eve rode to church on dinosaurs.

For all its policy implications, though, "family values" has always had a larger meaning. It was an implicit promise to white, non-ethnic, rural or suburban-dwelling, church-going Christian moms and dads that the party would — pun intended — always do the right thing. It was an assurance to Ward and June Cleaver that GOP was the brand name of a certain fundamental decency.

Unless, it turns out, Ward and June were foolish enough to let Wally and the Beav sign up as congressional pages. In that case, kiss decency goodbye.

If the scandal over Florida Rep. Mark Foley's sexually charged e-mail exchanges with teenage boys suggests nothing else, it suggests this: the Republican Party was not overly concerned about the well-being of the children in its care. GOP leaders learned last year — more like two or three years ago, according to one former congressional aide — that Foley was sending "overly friendly" e-mails to pages. The response: no investigation, no censure. Foley was simply told to stop, to behave himself.

Last week with Foley disgraced and resigned, White House spokesman Tony Snow seemed to still not get it. He initially dismissed the exchanges as "naughty e-mails." Mind you, we're talking about a 52-year-old man discussing masturbatory techniques, setting up dates, and having cybersex with boys.

Naughty? Try creepy. Try appalling. It's like one of those "To Catch a Predator" hidden camera exposés, except that this predator was a congressman. Even more bizarrely, a congressman who has pushed legislation to protect children from Internet pedophiles.

Now Foley is in seclusion, sending his representatives out with roughly an explanation a day: Foley is a drunk, Foley was molested as a teenager, Foley is gay. Of them all, that last would-be clarification is the most vexing, playing as it does to the conservative predilection for conflating homosexuality and child molestation — as if Foley's actions would be one iota less execrable if the pages were girls. Meantime, his party has its knickers in a knot over whether Speaker Dennis Hastert will survive this scandal.

I am preoccupied by different questions: What should we make of the fact that members of the Morals Party have behaved with such an appalling lack of same? How could our self-appointed decency police have been so inert while one of their members practiced perversion against children? Isn't protecting children a family value?

I make no case for Democratic moral superiority. The Monica Lewinsky, Gary Condit and Barney Frank scandals are too fresh in memory for anyone to suggest that with a straight face. But at least the Democrats had the good taste not to sell themselves as The Morals Party, never claimed to have God on speed dial.

The GOP did, and its performance in this affair underscores what a cynical joke that was. To put it another way: It's a long fall from a high horse.

One feels sorry for those who bought what the GOP was selling. One hopes they will be less gullible in the future — will understand that decency and honor are not wholly owned subsidiaries of any political ideology.

And the Morals Party? There is no such thing.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.'s column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: lpitts@herald.com

Some things never change....

Thursday, October 16, 2008
A little GOP inspired racism

Gleaned from the morning news...

From San Bernardino, the local equivalent of Central Ohio, GOP Women's Group Decides Obama Should Be on Foodstamps, Along with Fried Chicken and Watermelon. After reading the article, I had to ask, "When is a letter of resignation appropriate?" Diane Fedele, I hereby call for your resignation.

Obama Cannot Do it Alone

I set out an urgent plan for restoring economic security for struggling middle class families. This is my top priority, but I cannot do it alone -- and that's why I'm writing to you now.

Tonight, I called on Congress to enact reforms and new initiatives to defend the middle class -- to create millions of new jobs, support small businesses, and drive up wages; to invest in the education of our children and the clean energy technology that must power our future; and to protect the economy from reckless Wall Street abuses.

And I made my position on health reform clear: We must not walk away. We are too close, and the stakes are too high for too many. I called on legislators of both parties to find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people.

I have no illusions -- there have been setbacks, and there will be more to come. The special interests who have shaped the status quo will keep fighting tooth and nail to preserve it.

So tonight, I'm asking you to join me in the work ahead. I need your voice. I need your passion. And I need your support.

Can you help fuel our fight for the middle class with a monthly donation of $15 or more?

https://donate.barackobama.com/StateOfTheUnion

We have just finished a difficult year. We have come through a difficult decade. But a new year has come. A new decade stretches before us. We don't quit. I don't quit. Let's seize this moment -- to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our union once more.

Thank you for making it possible,

President Barack Obama

Why I can Never be a Republican (A Black man over 50)

Here's some advice for Republicans eager to attract more African-American supporters: don't stop with Trent Lott. Blacks won't take their commitment to expanding the party seriously until they admit that the GOP's wrongheadedness about race goes way beyond Lott and infects their entire party. The sad truth is that many Republican leaders remain in a massive state of denial about the party's four-decade-long addiction to race-baiting. They won't make any headway with blacks by bashing Lott if they persist in giving Ronald Reagan a pass for his racial policies.
The same could be said, of course, about such Republican heroes as, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon or George Bush the elder, all of whom used coded racial messages to lure disaffected blue collar and Southern white voters away from the Democrats. Yet it's with Reagan, who set a standard for exploiting white anger and resentment rarely seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, that the Republican's selective memory about its race-baiting habit really stands out.

Space doesn't permit a complete list of the Gipper's signals to angry white folks that Republicans prefer to ignore, so two incidents in which Lott was deeply involved will have to suffice. As a young congressman, Lott was among those who urged Reagan to deliver his first major campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in one of the 1960s' ugliest cases of racist violence. It was a ringing declaration of his support for "states' rights" — a code word for resistance to black advances clearly understood by white Southern voters.

Then there was Reagan's attempt, once he reached the White House in 1981, to reverse a long-standing policy of denying tax-exempt status to private schools that practice racial discrimination and grant an exemption to Bob Jones University. Lott's conservative critics, quite rightly, made a big fuss about his filing of a brief arguing that BJU should get the exemption despite its racist ban on interracial dating. But true to their pattern of white-washing Reagan's record on race, not one of Lott's conservative critics said a mumblin' word about the Gipper's deep personal involvement. They don't care to recall that when Lott suggested that Reagan's regime take BJU's side in a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, Reagan responded, "We ought to do it." Two years later the U.S. Supreme Court in a resounding 8-to-1 decision ruled that Reagan was dead wrong and reinstated the IRS's power to deny BJU's exemption.

Republican leaders and their apologists tend to go into a frenzy of denial when members of the liberal media cabal bring up these inconvenient facts. It's that lack of candor, of course, that presents the biggest obstacle to George W. Bush's commendable and long overdue campaign to persuade more African-Americans to defect from the Democrats to the Republicans. It's doomed to fail until the GOP fesses up its past addiction to race-baiting, and makes a sincere attempt to kick the habit.



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,399921,00.html#ixzz0e2YsXqps

The Myth Named "RayGun"

Reagan apologists often attack Jimmy Carter because, like the predators they are, they smell weakness. It is a mistake. Carter, is in fact among the best Presidents in job creation and he is the only US President to have brokered a Middle East peace --the Camp David Accords. In the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Carter acted quickly. He replaced Kissinger's incremental, shuttle diplomacy with a comprehensive, multilateral approach that included reconvening the 1973 Geneva Conference to include a Palestinian delegation. The GOP feared to duplicate that approach because it might have succeeded.

Reagan’s election in November 1980 also was welcomed in other quarters. His victory set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anti-communist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.

The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. [Martin Edwin Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]

Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anti-communist action justified, no matter how brutal.

From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.

The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.

The one consistent element in these slaughters was the over-arching Cold War rationalization, emanating from Ronald Reagan's White House.
--Robert Parry, Obama's Dubious Praise for Reagan

Hoping to deflect attention from the new Äugustus, Reagan worshipers claim that Carter was responsible for "horrible inflation" and 20% interest rates. So what? Interest rates would be expected to decline under Reagan's depression as interest rates, in fact, decline in every recession or depression. During Reagan's depression, the GDP declined at a rate of 2.2 percent, quite possibly the biggest such decline since the Great Depression, most certainly it was the biggest decline in the more than twenty years between 1973 to the assumption of the White House by Bush. Millions lost jobs and homes. In any case, it was the Federal Reserve Board that slashed interest rates and expanded the money supply, thus reducing prices. Ronald Reagan had nothing whatsoever to do with it! It was the Fed --not Reagan --who was responsible for the following but short-lived recovery.

Under Carter, people were at work and productive. They were buying homes --not leaving them under the threat of imminent foreclosure as many, perhaps, millions are doing now. That was not the case under Reagan who destroyed the trade unions, exported jobs and technology, and plunged the nation into a depression of two years ---the very worst since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression!

Ronald Reagan justified disastrous economic policies with ideological nonsense called 'supply-side economics or, derisively, 'Trickle Down' theory might have worked in a completely "closed economy". But the US imports goods from abroad. 'Tax cuts' to non-productive, American elites who outsource [read: export] jobs abroad will only squirrel away a 'tax cuts' in a safe haven beyond the reach of the tax man. It is money that will never trickle down. It is monies lost forever to investment inside the United States. It is the mechanism by which the GOP has made of America a third world nation. It is the mechanism by which the axis of Reagan/Bush destroyed a once great nation!

The US, a net debtor nation, imports most of its automobiles, appliances, and electronic goods from abroad. No wealth trickles down. Items that had been the staple of the US economic engine had, at one time, provided jobs at home. That has not been the case since Ronald Reagan and the GOP feasted upon the rotting carcass that had been the source of US industrial might. Compounding the tragedy, Ronald Reagan slashed taxes for millionaires and billionaires and everyone else got poor.

"Globalization" amid Ronald Reagan's orgy of union-busting, offshore tax havens and outsourcing, must be blamed for the decline of US exports, the collapse of major US industries, the fact that the US is now a third world nation behind a mask of Hollywood and glitz. The US now pulls up the rear, behind China, Japan, Europe and much of the world. Everything from jeans to binoculars now come from China, IT is outsourced to India, and I see few Americans driving anything but Japanese cars.


Given this hole dug over more than twenty years, I am as outraged as I am unimpressed with the crumbs now thrown the rest of us by this profligate administration, this profligate, arrogant party.

Meanwhile, the nation’s official poverty rate declined for the first time this decade, from 12.6 percent in 2005 to 12.3 percent in 2006. There were 36.5 million people in poverty in 2006, not statistically different from 2005. The number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 44.8 million (15.3 percent) in 2005 to 47 million (15.8 percent) in 2006.
--US Census Bureau Release, AUG. 28, 2007

Capital "trickling up" to Bush's base is money lost to productive investment, lost to small business, lost to consumers who might have spent it in ways that would have created jobs here in the US.

Before Reagan, America had a steel industry. After Reagan, it didn't. Before Reagan, America had a viable automotive industry. After Reagan, the US was buying its cars from Japan. Before Reagan, small retailers still existed. After Reagan, small stores had all but disappeared, giving way to huge corporate chains, and, in time, WalMart --the economic Kudzu that ate America.

Typically, Reagan would take credit for reforms begun under Carter. It was Carter who gave the rich a capital gains tax cut, even as he deregulated key industries like trucking and airlines. Carter also increased defense spending. I happen to think Carter ought not have done that! But, to his credit, he didn't muck it up nearly as much as did Reagan who sold his soul for the elite GOP base of robber barons, war lords and buyers of crooked GOP politicians!


The era was largely characterized by the undue influence of corporate PACs which forced Congress to pass pro-business/anti-individual, anti-family legislation. Supply-siders believed it would trickle down. Like Bush's war on Iraq, it didn't work out as planned. The nation was plunged into the worst and longest (two years) depression since WWII.

The GOP would love to fight another cold war. The "commies" were shooting back like the misnamed "insurgents", "terrorists" or whatever they are called this week.

Much is made of the demoralized military under Carter. What had they to be demoralized about? They were no longer slogging through the swamps in Viet Nam and they had to yet been sent to Lebanon by Ronald Reagan. The Pentagon brass should have just gotten over it! These guys are not 'war heroes'. They don't put their lives on the front lines. They don't get shot it! They are glorified pencil pushers and bureaucrats. If they were disgruntled, it is no fault of the electorate. Screw 'em. If they don't like their jobs, let them try to get into another line of work while a gopper is President. Lotsa luck, general!

All in all, the enlisted person, under Carter, had it a helluva lot better than do soldiers under either Ronald Reagan who dispatched them to Lebanon to be blown up in a Marine Barracks or under Bush who has them mired and dehumanized in Iraq. Has anyone bothered to check out the suicide rates of returning servicemen?
(CBS) Some of America's 25 million veterans face their biggest fight when they return home from the battlefield -- when they take on mental illness.

And, a CBS News analysis reveals they lose that battle, and take their own lives, at a clip described by various experts as "stunning" and "alarming," according to Chief Investigative Correspondent Armen Keteyian. One called it a "hidden epidemic."

He says no one had ever counted just how many suicides there are nationwide among those who had served in the military -- until now.

The five-month CBS News probe, based upon a detailed analysis of data obtained from death records from 2004 and 2005, found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 as non-vets.

A recent Veteran Affairs Department estimate says some 5,000 ex-servicemen and women will commit suicide this year, largely as a result of mental health issues, and Keteyian says, "Our numbers are much higher than that, overall."

--CBS News: Vets' Suicide Rate "Stunning"
Goppers have been known to opine: ...cleaning up after Carter's utter incompetence was messy. In fact, there was nothing to clean up. There was, in fact, nothing for Reagan to do but screw up and screw up he did! The nation would have been better off if Reagan has done absolutely nothing! See my article: Reagan was no hero but he played one in a movie.

That's because, under Reagan, the GOP became not merely a crime syndicate, it became a kooky cult.

The Myth of "The Great Communicator"

Rank and file goppers will find reasons not to believe anything unflattering about Reagan but that's not the same thing as refuting anything that I have ever written in my admittedly Quixotic quest to set the record straight.

Reagan-heads have often tried to shout me down on these issues. But facts are facts and the fact is it was Ronald Reagan, indebted to GOP money interests back home, a tiny elite of just one percent of the total population, who blinked at Reykjavik and thus blew --perhaps forever --what might have been the world's last chance for a non-nuclear peace.
If, that is, the ensuing “Great Society,” to borrow a term from JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, were laid low by a nuclear attack on an American city (or seven, if al Qaeda had its way).

This is the territory into which Gorbachev launched his most daring raids. First, in 1985, he announced that the Soviet Union would no longer deploy intermediate-range nuclear forces (INFs in Eastern Europe. Later that year, he proposed that both his country and the US slice their nuclear arsenals in half.)

The next year, at the memorable Reykjavik summit, Gorbachev got Ronald Reagan to agree in principle to his plan for removal of all INFs from Europe, as well as to draw them down worldwide. Caught up in Gorbachev’s enthusiasm, Reagan expressed a willingness to join Russia in eliminating all nuclear weapons in 10 years.

In the end, though, Reagan clung to his blankie, the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars.

Gorbachev feared SDI would lead to nukes in space, not to mention leave the Soviet defense establishment with the impression he’d been played. Their dreams of saving the world came crashing back down to earth.

--It’s not a new JFK we need in Obama, but the next Gorbachev
Recently, Mitt Romney built his failed campaign around two words: 'Ronald' and 'Reagan' just as Giuliani built his around 'nine' and 'eleven', as McCain has now built his platform around three words: 'stay', 'Iraq', 'surge'!

Morally bankrupt and out of ideas, stuck with McCain who has trouble walking while chewing gum, the GOP has tried to make of Ronald Reagan a "savior". Failing live leadership, the GOP would settle for myths and desperate hope for the "second-coming" of Ronald Reagan! It won't work. Reagan is still dead!


At another level, rank and file GOP understand that should a deified Reagan fall out of the Pantheon, the party itself is finished. Reagan was all they had left. In the blogosphere, Reagan defenders themselves are resurrected, more vehement and less rational than ever. To wit:
The lies of the left about Ronald Reagan stink up the blogosphere worse than a rest room at a Greyhound bus depot.
I leave it to Larry Craig to assess the stalls at Greyhound --a topic about which he may have considerable expertise and foot-tapping experience. Craig is but a specimen of GOP hypocrisy, lack of imagination, it's endemic inability to come up with anything other than stupid slogans on the one hand and lies, smears, propaganda, assassination on the other. It's their one-two punch! Various sexual perversions to include sado-masochism and homosexuality are just contrapuntal to the sellouts made to the Military/Industrial complex.

The presidency of Ronald Reagan confirms the assertion: the GOP is not a political party, its a criminal conspiracy, a kooky cult built up around Reagan types who encourage addled followers to 'feel good about being liars, psychopaths, and elite militarists.
In my book, Without Conscience, I argued that we live in a "camouflage society," a society in which some psychopathic traits- egocentricity, lack of concern for others, superficiality, style over substance, being "cool," manipulativeness, and so forth- increasingly are tolerated and even valued. With respect to the topic of this article, it is easy to see how both psychopaths and those with ASPD could blend in readily with groups holding antisocial or criminal values. It is more difficult to envisage how those with ASPD could hide out among more pro social segments of society. Yet psychopaths have little difficulty infiltrating the domains of business, politics, law enforcement, government, academia and other social structures. It is the egocentric, cold-blooded and remorseless psychopaths who blend into all aspects of society and have such devastating impacts on people around them who send chills down the spines of law enforcement officers.

--[Hare, Robert D., PhD., Psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder: A Case of Diagnostic Confusion, Psychiatric Times, February 1996: Vol. XIII Issue 2] The Role of the Psychopath in the Generation of Global Evil
Reagan was precisely what the GOP needed at the time. A former movie star, he was a practiced Spellbinder.
To the spellbinder, everything becomes subordinated to their conviction that they are exceptional, sometimes even messianic. An ideology can emerge from such individuals that is certainly partly true, and the value of which is claimed to be superior to all other ideologies. They believe they will find many converts to their ideology and when they discover that this is not the case, they are shocked and fume with “paramoral indignation.” The attitude of most normal people to such spellbinders is generally critical, pained and disturbed.The spellbinder places on a high moral plane anyone who succumbs to his influence, and he will shower such people with attention and property and perks of all kinds. Critics are met with “moral” outrage and it will be claimed by the spellbinder that the compliant minority is actually a majority.Such activity is always characterized by the inability to foresee its final results, something obvious from the psychological point of view, because its substratum contains pathological phenomena, and both spellbinding and self-charming make it impossible to perceive reality accurately enough to foresee results logically.In a healthy society, the activities of spellbinders meet with criticism effective enough to stifle them quickly. However, when they are preceded by conditions operating destructively on common sense and social order - such as social injustice, cultural backwardness, or intellectually limited rulers manifesting pathological traits - spellbinders activities have led entire societies into large-scale human tragedy.Such an individual fishes an environment or society for people amenable to his influence, deepening their psychological weaknesses until they finally become a ponerogenic union.

Three myths about the cold war"

Three myths about the cold war"
'We won the cold war'! But in fact, the end was negotiated.

'The Soviet Union collapsed because the US brought pressure to bear or because Unca Ronnie 'outspent' them.' In fact, the opposite is true as you will learn.
'Ronald Reagan defeated communism'. In fact, Ronald Reagan defeated America!!
Let's set the record straight. Ronald Reagan had nothing to do with the fall of communism. A great statesman-- Mikhail Gorbachev --deserves the credit for withdrawing nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe which he did upon his own initiative. Gorbachev was the architect of Perestroika and, later, Glasnost. Reagan merely followed the leader.

As I have pointed out: Ronald Reagan Blew the World's Last Chance for Peace! It was Gorbachev --a real leader --who had put total nuclear disarmament on the table. It was an offer Reagan could not accept! Reagan had bosses who had already made him an offer he didn't refuse: the sale of his soul!

The real power base back home would have had Reagan's head. Reagan was a typical Republican, that is, he said many things and did the opposite. Every Republican has two stories to tell: one that he/she tells the base via "code words" like "family values" the other, he/she tells to the world. This second category is most often just lies and bullshit. In this case, Reagan had talked the talked --world peace, nuclear disarmament, etc. When Gorbachev put total nuclear disarmament on the table, Reagan blinked because he was not free to negotiate in 'good faith'. He was but the figure-head for an entire class that had been enriched by 'cold war' military spending. The same folk have a vested interest in a destabilized middle east.


Here is what Reagan himself said about the threat of nuclear war.
The Russians sometimes kept submarines off our East Coast with nuclear missiles that could turn the White House into a pile of radioactive rubble within six or eight minutes. Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radarscope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that? There were some people in the Pentagon who thought in terms of fighting and winning a nuclear war. To me it was simple common sense: A nuclear war couldn't be won by either side. It must never be fought. Advocates of the MAD policy believed it had served a purpose: The balance of terror it created had prevented nuclear war for decades. But as far as I was concerned, the MAD policy was madness.
--Ronald Reagan, The Official Site

So, if that's how Ronald Reagan really felt about nuclear madness, why did he blow what is perhaps our last chance at peace? The answer is simple. Reagan was not his own man.

The Critics Were Silenced!

I believe President George W. Bush's decision to initiate war in Iraq will be the greatest and most costly blunder in American history - Republican Rep. Paul Findley

“It is reported that more than half of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein is responsible for the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This means that the U.S. media have utterly, spectacularly, shamefully and pathetically failed.”

"Criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government" Senator Robert Taft 1941

The Most Heinous Crime of the New Millennium - "We have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities. There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." - Colin Powell on February 6, speaking to the UN Security Council, demanding their support for the invasion of Iraq

“There must have been two wars in Iraq. There was the war I saw and wrote about as a print journalist embedded with a tank company of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized). Then there was the war that many Americans saw, or wanted to see, on TV.” - Ron Martz

The story of Jessica Lynch is the tale of how a modern war icon is made, and perhaps how easily officials and journalists with different agendas accepted contradictory, self-serving versions of what happened to her.

The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history — worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra. Indeed, the idea that we were deceived into war makes many commentators so uncomfortable that they refuse to admit the possibility.

Lies About Iraq...WE should be pissed!

LIE #1: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.

FACT: This story, leaked to and breathlessly reported by Judith Miller in the New York Times, has turned out to be complete baloney. Department of Energy officials, who monitor nuclear plants, say the tubes could not be used for enriching uranium. One intelligence analyst, who was part of the tubes investigation, angrily told The New Republic: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie."

LIE #2: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." -- President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.

FACT: This whopper was based on a document that the White House already knew to be a forgery thanks to the CIA. Sold to Italian intelligence by some hustler, the document carried the signature of an official who had been out of office for 10 years and referenced a constitution that was no longer in effect. The ex-ambassador who the CIA sent to check out the story is pissed: "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," he told the New Republic, anonymously. "They [the White House] were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more strongly."

LIE #3: "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." -- Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003 on "Meet the Press."

FACT: There was and is absolutely zero basis for this statement. CIA reports up through 2002 showed no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

LIE #4: "[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." -- CIA Director George Tenet in a written statement released Oct. 7, 2002 and echoed in that evening's speech by President Bush.

FACT: Intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and al-Qaeda in the early '90s, but found no proof of a continuing relationship. In other words, by tweaking language, Tenet and Bush spun the intelligence180 degrees to say exactly the opposite of what it suggested.

LIE #5: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." -- President Bush, Oct. 7.

FACT: No evidence of this has ever been leaked or produced. Colin Powell told the U.N. this alleged training took place in a camp in northern Iraq. To his great embarrassment, the area he indicated was later revealed to be outside Iraq's control and patrolled by Allied war planes.

LIE #6: "We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." -- President Bush, Oct. 7.

FACT: Said drones can't fly more than 300 miles, and Iraq is 6,000 miles from the U.S. coastline. Furthermore, Iraq's drone-building program wasn't much more advanced than your average model plane enthusiast. And isn't a "manned aerial vehicle" just a scary way to say "plane"?

LIE #7: "We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established." -- President Bush, Feb. 8, 2003, in a national radio address.

FACT: Despite a massive nationwide search by U.S. and British forces, there are no signs, traces or examples of chemical weapons being deployed in the field, or anywhere else during the war.

LIE #8: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5 2003, in remarks to the UN Security Council.

FACT: Putting aside the glaring fact that not one drop of this massive stockpile has been found, as previously reported on AlterNet the United States' own intelligence reports show that these stocks -- if they existed -- were well past their use-by date and therefore useless as weapon fodder.

LIE #9: "We know where [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003, in statements to the press.

FACT: Needless to say, no such weapons were found, not to the east, west, south or north, somewhat or otherwise.

LIE #10: "Yes, we found a biological laboratory in Iraq which the UN prohibited." -- President Bush in remarks in Poland, published internationally June 1, 2003.

FACT: This was reference to the discovery of two modified truck trailers that the CIA claimed were potential mobile biological weapons lab. But British and American experts -- including the State Department's intelligence wing in a report released this week -- have since declared this to be untrue. According to the British, and much to Prime Minister Tony Blair's embarrassment, the trailers are actually exactly what Iraq said they were; facilities to fill weather balloons, sold to them by the British themselves.

So, months after the war, we are once again where we started -- with plenty of rhetoric and absolutely no proof of this "grave danger" for which O.J. Smith died. The Bush administration is now scrambling to place the blame for its lies on faulty intelligence, when in fact the intelligence was fine; it was their abuse of it that was "faulty."

Rather than apologize for leading us to a preemptive war based on impossibly faulty or shamelessly distorted "intelligence" or offering his resignation, our sly madman in the White House is starting to sound more like that other O.J. Like the man who cheerfully played golf while promising to pursue "the real killers," Bush is now vowing to search for "the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, no matter how long it takes."

On the terrible day of the 9/11 attacks, five hours after a hijacked plane slammed into the Pentagon, retired Gen. Wesley Clark received a strange call from someone (he didn't name names) representing the White House position: "I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein,'" Clark told Meet the Press anchor Tim Russert. "I said, 'But -- I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence.'"

And neither did we.