We, the PEOPLE!!

Barack Obama issued a statement earlier this week, stating that Sarah Palin’s family is off limits to his campaign. In other words, regardless of the status of Bristol Palin, Sarah’s her 17 year-old daughter, being pregnant and unwed, neither she nor any other member of Palin’s family is to be derogatorily dragged into the campaigning for president and vice-president of the United States. The political campaign is about John McCain and Sarah Palin, the woman whom is McCain’s choice to be vice-president, and not their families.

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The official position of “We, the PEOPLE” is that Obama is absolutely correct. The families are not running for office. The candidates are the ones running, and it is they whom must bear scrutiny for their policies and actions, and results thereof.

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McCain’s choice of Palin has absolutely nothing to do with Palin’s daughter, nor should it. But McCain’s choice must bear examination for something else. Palin is a social conservative who is on record as opposing comprehensive sex education in public schools, believing that abstinence-only sex education, highlighted not by instruction regarding birth control, but concentrating on abstinence only before marriage, is the only right way to raise children.

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The lack of comprehensive birth control knowledge seems to have worked only too well in her daughter’s case: She is, indeed, a 17 year old unwed pregnant woman living at home. The abstinence-only part seems to have miserably, but not surprisingly, failed.

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The issue is not Bristol Palin. The real issue is Sarah Palin’s live-long judgment and sense of human reality, or, more to the point, lack thereof. It is also about McCain’s judgment, or more to the point, lack thereof, in selecting Sarah Palin to run as his vice-presidential running mate.

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Telling healthy teenagers in today’s world not to have sex until they’re married is consistently doomed to failure. This is clear reality if for no other reason that the sex drive is there continuously, but the reinforcing (brain-washing?) abstinence-only lectures occur only sporadically.

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Since social conservatives are against sex before marriage and thus against pregnancy before marriage, and they are also against universal comprehensive birth control education, abortion, and the like, how is it that their own family members are ignoring all of this and doing it anyway?

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Do as they say, not as they do?

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In watching the republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota last Tuesday night (9-2-08), one could not help but note that the minister providing the religious invocation stated that country comes first. Besides being the same mantra as that of national socialism (the fatherland above all else, remember?), it was a political instruction, if you will, from a religious leader. Aren’t religious leaders supposed to stick to religion? Don’t the dominant religions of the western world put God first?

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Do as they say, not as they do?

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Another striking facet of the republican convention is that there are almost no minorities visible anywhere in the convention hall, as opposed to the democratic convention last week, which had copious numbers of African-Americans, Asians, and others as delegates and attendees. McCain keeps talking about how he wants to the president of all Americans, but how does one accomplish the “all” thing, when one is supporting and being supported predominantly by white folks?

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Do as they say, not as they do?

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McCain keeps telling everyone who will listen that he is different from Bush, that his policies will be different from Bush, and that he is a change agent. But he has voted with Bush over 90% of the time, agrees with Bush about making the rich richer, fighting the Iraqi war, making the wealthy-enhancing Bush tax cuts permanent, and appointing unproven and/or incompetent people to high positions based solely upon politics.

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Quite similarly, Bush appointed Michael Brown as the incompetent director of FEMA based solely upon Brown’s political contributions to the Bush campaign, just as McSame has appointed Palin to be his running mate solely upon the political contributions of both her social ly conservative beliefs so as to appeal to the socially conservative evangelical base of the republican party, and her gender so as to pander to disaffected Clinton supporters.

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With McCain’s selection of Palin, not one of the selection factors involves competency for the job of stepping up to the presidency if McBush slips on a banana peel and lands on his head.

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Do as they say, not as they do?

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One might remember a time when people in authority practiced “leadership by example”, in which one would gain respect, admiration, and loyalty by conducting oneself in a manner that enhances those characteristics. But when one looks closely at the present-day leaders of the republicans, one sees something completely different, which We, the People!! would call, for lack of a better term, “leadership by do as I say, not as I do!”

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So what if McSame claims to be different from Bush, but votes with him 90% of the time? So what if Palin supports abstinence-only sex education without comprehensive birth control instruction but her 17 year-old unmarried daughter now has an unwanted pregnancy? So what if McSame says he wants to represent all Americans but excludes minorities from the convention?

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Do as they say, not as they do. After all, they know what’s good for you.

Anyone familiar with the pop super-group ABBA will recognize the title of this article. It’s from the most popular song the group ever recorded, “Dancing Queen”. The song itself is about a woman whom was thought to be a teaser, but all she really wanted to do was to dance.

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Last night, Hillary Rodham Clinton, US senator from New York, former First Lady of the United States of America, and one of only two viable candidates for the democratic nomination for president of the USA during the primary season of 2008, danced her heart out. She spoke forcefully and inspirationally on the second night of the democratic convention, clearly, emphatically, and loyally supporting Barack Obama as her choice for president and making it crystal clear that her fiercest supporters must, for the safety of America, do the same.

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If you missed it, you can watch the twenty-three minute speech HERE and read it HERE.

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When the speech was over, it was clear that Hillary was having the time of her life, having given the speech of her life.

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But it wasn’t only her. Throughout the speech she brought the vast majority of the four thousand delegates and fifteen thousand others to their feet, cheering and applauding Hillary, regardless of whether they were Obama or Clinton supporters. When the speech was over, the response was tumultuous, demonstrating beyond any doubt that they were having the time of their lives.

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Some snippets of the speech:

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“No way. No how. No McCain!”

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“You never gave in. You never gave up. And together we made history.”

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“Those are the reasons I support Barack Obama….I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young marine and others like him?”

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“We don’t need four more years of the last eight years.”

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“With an agenda like that, it makes sense that George Bush and John McCain will be together next week in the Twin Cities. Because these days they’re awfully hard to tell apart!”

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And, of course, when Hillary stated “’We, the PEOPLE!!!’ not ‘We the favored few!’”, the blog just tingled with joy….

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She also praised Joe Biden, whom Barack Obama has picked to be his vice-presidential nominee, and Michelle Obama, Barack’s wife. Hillary is a class act.

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Of course, the republican pit bulls, as expected, immediately went on the attack, but the nature of their argument was bizarre, at best. They claimed that Hillary stopped short of endorsing Obama’s level of experience, and thus that she was agreeing with McCain that Obama lacks the experience to be Commander-in-Chief.

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One might speculate that the republican spin machine selectively didn’t hear Hillary state that, “Barack is my candidate and he must be our president!….We don’t have a moment to lose or a vote to spare. Nothing less than the fate of our nation and the future of our children hang in the balance.”

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Those are strong words, by a strong woman who won eighteen million votes during the primary season, who stated that it was really “18 million cracks representing Americans that looked beyond the biases and barriers to vote for a woman with the potential to build an America that respects and embraces the potential of every last one of us.”

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Hillary will go down in history as the first woman to ever win more than one primary election (she won twenty-three). And she is still a viable force in the US democratic party. Some think she will be tapped by the Obama Administration to shepard and guide American universal health care through to reality, perhaps in a role as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

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Finally, one has to wonder, after hearing that speech, why Hillary wasn’t tapped by Obama to be his vice-presidential running mate. Regardless of speculation, what’s done is done and Joe Biden will make his acceptance speech tonight. Stand by for another trouncing of McSame.

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Oh, and Bill Clinton will also make a speech tonight. He and Hillary are competitive with each other. So it is expected that Bill will at least attempt to match her speech. Or perhaps, beat it as far as crowd enthusiasm is concerned. Can he do it?

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One thing is certain: He, Hillary, and the delegates at the convention will continue to have the time of their lives tonight. And as wonderful a time as it will be, there is still another time that will be better:

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January 20, 2009: The end of the Bush nightmare. On that night, “You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life!”

Next week the first of the major US political parties’ nominating conventions will be held in Denver, Colorado when the democrats meet to nominate Barack Obama. Then, a week later, the republicans will nominate John McCain at their convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Presumably, both candidates will have announced their respective picks for vice-president by then as well.

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Knowing in advance who is going to be the presidential and vice-presidential nominees for each party renders the conventions essentially a waste of time and money. Of course, corporations that donate to the political parties would not be too happy to see the conventions gone. And by the way, more large corporations donate to big-business-friendly republicans than to democrats, You see, these corporations can deduct their political donations from their corporate income taxes.

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As if to confirm what most Americans agree is the grossly unfair to the middle class, unmitigated disaster known as the US tax code, the United States Congress Government Accountability Office (GAO) last week released a report entitled “Comparability of the reported Tax Liabilities of Foreign- and US- Controlled Corporations, 1998-2005″. You can read more about the non-partisan GAO HERE.

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The GAO report revealed what many Americans already suspected: Most corporations doing business in the USA don’t pay income taxes. The report found that 72% of foreign corporations and 55% of domestic corporations in the USA didn’t pay any taxes for at least one year during the seven-year period covered in the report, 1998 through 2005. Furthermore, 80% of these corporations claimed no profit to justify their zero dollar tax bill.  You can read the GAO report HERE, and the associated news report HERE.

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Remember that the report covers the period during which G.W. Bush instituted his tax cuts for corporations and the very rich in the USA. Those tax cuts were touted by Bush and his syndicate as being very beneficial to the economy. It’s not working out that way, though, is it?

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Both Obama and McCain are proposing more tax cuts, but their proposals are very different.

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Obama proposes to make the tax system more progressive, with tax cuts for the middle class folks making less than $250,000 a year. He proposes to close the tax loopholes for corporations, thus raising the adjusted taxable income of those corporations and folks in the top 1% of income earning to ensure that everyone pays their fair share of taxes.

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McCain’s proposal is almost the exact opposite. His plan would make the tax system more regressive, even compared with the tax system in place since the Bush tax cuts for the very rich. McCain’s would provide practically no tax relief to those at the bottom of the income scale while providing huge tax cuts to corporations and to households at the very top of the income ladder. You can read and see a direct comparison HERE.

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Last January, WE the PEOPLE!! supported Mike Huckabee’s “Fair Tax” plan, wherein folks only pay taxes on what they spend, when they spend, without having to file out a single tax form, instead of an inherently unfair income tax. Your can read the article HERE. While We, the PEOPLE!! continues to believe that the “Fair Tax” is the fairest possible tax plan, there is no hope that we will see it on our lifetimes.

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So in the meantime, we are left with a choice between bad and absolutely awful. And since we have seen that making the rich even richer does nothing good for the country, the economy, or the middle class in general, one has to wonder why any middle class citizens would risk further financial pain and suffering for themselves and their families by embracing a tax plan that favors the rich and the corporations and the candidate, McSame, who advocates it.

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But we offer a solution to all middle class citizens should another electoral disaster occur and McBush wins the presidency:

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Become a corporation!!!!!! Anyone can do it! Just google “incorporate” (or click HERE) and a gazillion legal companies will pop up, chomping at the bit to incorporate you for cheap. And the incorporation fee is tax-deductible!!

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Get on that gravy train enjoyed by so many rich folks and companies! Qualify for unexplainable tax breaks and loopholes! Use the money you save to vacation in Cabo!!

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Coming soon: How to qualify yourself as tax-deductible shop equipment!!!

It seems the folks that have the most to lose if Barack Obama is elected president of the USA are dusting off the computers and mailing lists, and starting to exercise their perceived “right” (often extreme right) to slander and libel the democratic nominee-apparent for president of the USA.

 

Yesterday, Stuart Shepard, director of digital media the political arm of the conservative Christian group “Focus on the Family”, a religious-right organization that is against sex before marriage, against gay/lesbian relationships, against reproductive freedom for women, and for abstinence-only sex education was forced to remove a YouTube video where he was asking people to pray for “rain of biblical proportions”.

 

This prayer was for torrential rain to specifically occur in Denver on Thursday, August 28^th, on the night  and at the time that Obama is scheduled to give his nomination acceptance speech in an open stadium with 75,000 people seated for the occasion at the Demcractic National Convention.  You can read more about this outrageous video and watch it HERE.

The video was placed prominently on the website of the aforementioned organization.  It was pulled only after massive public criticism, with the claim that it was only a joke.

Of course, this is pretty tame stuff.  Either you believe that you can get rain (or win the lottery) when you pray for it, or you don’t.  But what about much more seriously egregious actions, such as accusing someone of things that simply aren’t true for the sole purpose of misleading the public and assassinating the character of a political candidate?

 

“We the PEOPLE!!’’ recently received a couple of emails that sadly drive home the desire of some groups to use whatever underhanded tactics, regardless of how dishonest or disgusting, to convince the uninformed of their view of the world.  The first one uses a tactic known as the “respected elder’s view”, and is presented here in pertinent part for space reasons:

“Thoughts of an 83 year old man about the destruction of the United States of America.   Profound!

 

PLEASE READ EVERY WORD — We have been told by the leaders of Islam, (the likes of Louis Farrakhan,) the United States will collapse from inside itself.

We also know the terrorists plan years and years ahead on what they will do to complete one of their acts of terror.  The destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers was the culmination of plans made after the first attempt at destruction failed.

Remember the terrorists are patient, methodical and determined to do it right the first time.

Now let’s examine this scenario:  We know about the uproar over Mitt Romney’s religious affiliation with the Mormon church and the opposition to electing a Mormon to the Presidency.

Knowing this, can you even imagine what an uproar would come about if a candidate was affiliated with the Muslim faith?

In the 83 years of my lifetime there has been no President of the United States, to my knowledge, elected that didn’t claim to be a Christian.  If I am wrong, please correct me.

The question now arises, How does Islam get one of their own elected. Answer: pass him off as a Christian.  How do they do that?

Answer: plan years ahead and carefully choose the right person for the job. Choose someone who is born on American soil, because that is a requirement for qualifying for the office. (Note it must be a male because women are not allowed to rule in Islam). Although his father is a Muslim, his mother an atheist and his step-father also a Muslim, he is sent to a Catholic school after being removed from a Muslim school.

This process of selecting someone to fill all these qualifications will take more than a decade, it will require a generation, but remember, Islam is patient.

Do we know anyone who fits this mold?  Yes, I think we do.  We know someone running for the nomination of his party for President of the United States of America who was born on American soil.

He attended public schools in Jakarta, Indonesia where his step father returned after marrying Barack’s mother… As Senator from Illinois…He has spent the better part of the last two years not being present to vote or just voting ‘present’ on most legislative issues.

He has associated himself with people of questionable loyalty to the United States of America for the last 20 years and has refused to disown any of them although he has tried to disassociate himself from some of the things they have said and some of the things they have done while maintaining his relationship with them.

Who is this young man whom I believe has been selected, groomed, polished and refined by the patient Islamic extremists to accomplish the mission of destroying the United States of America from within? 

I believe Barack Hussein Obama, candidate for the Democratic Party nomination as President of the United States of America , fits the mold exactly.. (emphasis added).”

The second email talked about how Obama hates the American flag and loves rap music.

Of course, it is all a pack of cowardly lies designed to make the uninformed afraid of, and hate Obama.

In 2004, private groups operating under 26 USC A(1)F(VI) section 527 which is part of the hideous US tax code put out copious amounts of false information about democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam war hero who later spoke out against that war which everyone now admits was a huge mistake.  But the “527-swift-boat ” groups, as they’re commonly referred to, consisting at the time almost exclusively of extreme-right wing organizations, continued to fabricate lies about Kerry’s military record as a swift-boat captain in the Vietnam war, in an effort to turn voters against him.  It may have been just enough to give us another four horrible years of George W. Bush.

And there’s the problem:  This kind of lie-infested activity can sway an election just enough to give all of the rest of us a four-year nightmare.  Possibly the worst effect of this activity is that citizens who will vote can be influenced by this kind of dishonorable activity.  The creators of this garbage know all too well that many people are either too busy or too lazy to really find out the truth about the candidates and their positions on issues, so sewage like this actually can have an impact with certain voters.

Ideally, the legal system would deal swiftly with libel and slander, but we all know that it neither has the capability nor the desire to do so.  Even if a case were to spring forth in court against these groups and people, it would literally be years before it saw the light of day.  So much for prompt justice.

Although it is clearly desirable for voters to educate themselves with verifiable facts, it’s a foregone fact that many won’t bother.  In the meantime, the “527 swift-boaters” continue unabated, spewing hate and lies and character assassination, while the legal system looks on.

Thank goodness it won’t be this way if McCain is elected.  After all, as a man 142 years old with stainless steel fangs who has promised to bite off the heads of chickens and mail them to the “527 swift-boaters” as a warning against the next step he’ll take…voodoo hexes to match his voodoo economics…he’s meaning what they say he said!

Whoever “they” and “he” are.

 As reported by “We, the PEOPLE!!” last week in “What’s US$482 Billion Among ‘Friends’”, the citizens of this nation are being strapped with an enormous national debt in excess of nine trillion (that’s trillion with a “T”, folks) dollars.  Much of it has come about by Bush’s incredibly incompetent “excellent adventure” in Iraq, while Bush concurrently provided tax cuts to the very rich, including the obscenely profitable oil companies. 

 

In the meantime, Iraq now has a budget surplus of $50 billion!

 

This is a war, you will recall, that we were all told would pay for itself because of the oil revenue generated by Iraq’s oil reserves, the third largest oil reserves on Earth.

 

We were also told that invading Iraq in 2003 was absolutely necessary for the following reasons:

 

1.  Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

 

2. Saddam Hussein was aiding and abetting terrorists, including those tied to 9-11 (whatever “tied” meant).

 

3.  Saddam Hussein was acquiring “yellow cake” uranium to make fission bombs.

 

Each of these premises was proven to be false, or in other words, a lie.  Nonetheless, America rushed to invasion, and in the process, either destroyed the civil infrastructure or through the worst post-invasion planning in memory, allowed the insurgency to destroy it.

 

But one part of that infrastructure was repaired immediately, and every time it was subsequently damaged:  The oil industry.  Today, Iraq is pumping two million barrels daily, and is capable of producing up to five million barrels a day.  Yet, even at a measly two million daily barrels, at $120 a barrel, that’s a gross revenue of US$240,000,000 a day, or almost a billion dollars every four days!

 

For quite some time more and more people have been asking about this:  How can it be that Iraq doesn’t fund its own military and civilian reconstruction and infrastructure recovery, while the American taxpayer does?

 

Senators Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan and senate armed services committee chairman, and John Warner, Republican from Virginia, both wanted answers to the same question.  So they asked the U.S. Government Accountibility Office (GAO), to investigate.

 

The GAO found that while the financially abused American taxpayer has been footing, and continues to foot the bill for reconstruction projects in Iraq, the Iraqi government has only spent a small fraction of its large oil revenues on its own reconstruction, security, military, etc.  Instead, it has placed enormous sums of its money in the Development Fund for Iraq at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, earning interest a la 401K.

 

That’s right.  Iraq has a virtual 401K fund right here in the USA, having invested thirty BILLION dollars in an American bank, earning American revenue!  You can read more about it HERE. 

 

Senators Levin and Warner issued the following joint statement:  “It is inexcusable for the U.S. taxpayers to continue to foot the bill for projects the Iraqis are fully capable of funding themselves.  We should not be paying for Iraqi projects, while Iraqi oil revenues continue to pile up in the bank, including outrageous profits from $4 a gallon gas prices in the U.S.”

 

At some point, even the staunchest Bush suck-up/McCain supporter has got to think, “Hey, wait just one minute…you mean I’m paying taxes to support Iraq, while Iraq is investing in its USA-based 401k to support…what….??” 

 

After all, well over five years after the US’s horribly misguided invasion of Iraq, the citizens of Iraq still endure daily massive electricity outages and only partial running water.  America funds the reconstruction projects, as well as the training and equipping of the security and military forces.

 

And meanwhile, Iraq plays “Wheel of Fortune” in the USA with funds that could go a long, LONG way toward not only rebuilding its own country, but also relieving the American taxpayer of Iraqi reconstruction costs and perhaps an additional $50 billion being tacked onto our national debt.

 

“We, the PEOPLE!!” doesn’t understand what the 28% of Americans that still support Bush and the 42% that support McSame don’t understand.

 

If you do, please explain it to the 70% who don’t support Bush and the 56% who don’t support McSame. 

 

We’re listening…

 

The USA is a great place to live, but recently it hasn’t been easy for many people.  High energy costs, a crashing real estate market, failing mortgage companies and suppliers, oil companies that want more land and offshore areas to drill into when they don’t drill on most of the land and offshore areas they already have access to.  Higher food prices, loss of disposable income, an outrageously expensive but not very responsive health care system, the never-ending war in Iraq, crumbling infrastructure such as bridges and roads, a reducing middle class…one wonders what it would take to fix all of this.

 

How about $482,000,000,000?  Or put another way, almost half a trillion dollars?  We’re talking serious money here.

 

When GW Bush came into office in January 2001, he inherited a $128,000,000,000 surplus.  He quickly converted that into a budget deficit with his very first budget proposal, which was formulated before 9-11.

 

In 2002, Bush had the pleasure of working with a republican majority in both houses of the US Congress.  For the next four years, through 2006, this governmental lock by the republicans gave us huge yearly budget deficits.  Keep in mind that the Republican Party is supposed to be the party of fiscal restraint, which means that they should be restricting their spending, not blowing cash they have to borrow from the Chinese every year and that has to be paid back by our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, for starters.

 

Besides the outrage of violating this basic tenet of conservatism, republican congressmen and senators, spending like  an entire aircraft carrier of drunken sailors, earmarked special projects such as the infamous Alaskan “bridges to nowhere”, which you can read more about HERE.  In fairness, republicans were not the only ones doing earmarks, but they were the ones in power, controlling the votes in Congress and ultimately it was Bush who signed these spending bills into law.

 

It is significant that Senator Ted Stevens, republican from Alaska, was one of two republican senators from Alaska involved in the “bridges to nowhere” debacle.  Steven was indicted on seven counts of lying on senate disclosure forms yesterday, July 29, 2008, by a federal grand jury in a case involving his accepting gifts in excess of $250,000 from a firm involved in oil production.  It is illegal for federal employees to accept such gifts.  You can read more about this HERE.

 

It evidently is as easy for some to spend the money of others as it is for them to accept expensive illegal gifts from others.  The largest yearly budget deficit in history, $482,000,000,000, has been proposed by Bush in the last six months of his term.  While some of that has to do with the questionable economic stimulus package of several months ago, the almost half a trillion dollar deficit, lumped onto the existing national debt of over $9 trillion dollars, will take virtually forever to pay back, particularly with no increase in taxes.  It’s simple math.  You can watch the national debt climb second by second HERE, if you can stand it.

 

 

Bush’s tax breaks for the rich while funding a useless and unnecessary war in Iraq, rewarding big business for taking jobs overseas, tax incentives for the oil companies whose profits are obscenely enormous, etc., are all directly and indirectly responsible for the recession-like state of our economy, the international fall of the dollar, and the real threat of increased inflation in the coming months, as predicted by some experts.

 

In true “do as I say, not as I do” fashion, the Bush administration has castigated democrats as irresponsible “tax and spend” folks.  But no one in history has ever proposed such a large budget deficit as Bush has.  The republicans will forevermore be known as the “recklessly borrow and spend” party.  After all, it’s not their money.  It’s yours!

 

Four hundred and eighty two billion dollars.  $482,000,000.  Almost half a trillion dollars.  Almost half of $1,000,000,000,000.

 

And we can’t spend one single dime on stem cell research for curing cancer.

 

One immutable sign of an advanced society is its embracing of justice and the premise of equal justice under the law.  With that in mind, the civilized nations of the world, in the United Nations Charter of 1945, long ago gave rise to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands.

 

The United States withdrew from compulsory compliance of the International Court of Justice in 1986, during the administration of republican Ronald Reagan, approximately at the time of the Iran-Contra controversy.  The result of this unilateral action of the USA is that after the International Court issues a decision, the USA gets to accept or reject that decision based upon its own interests.

 

An offshoot of the UN International Court of Justice is the International Criminal Court, commonly known as the “World Court” also headquartered in The Hague.  It was established in July 2002 to deal with issues of human rights and crimes against humanity, such as war crimes. 

 

In recent days it has been announced that Radovan Karadzic, who had been the Bosnian Serb president in the mid 1990’s, and who had ordered the genocide of Muslim men and boys during his reign, has been apprehended and will face trial in the World Criminal Court in The Hague, on charges of war crimes and genocide.

 

This is actually not new.  Internationally recognized tribunals have held trials and issued verdicts and sentences as far back as the Nuremburg trials on 1946, during which the USA, along with other countries, prosecuted nazi official on charges of war crimes and genocide.

 

With Karadzic in custody and facing trial, the issue of the World Court returns to center stage.  The concept is sound and essentially states that civilized countries recognize certain codes of human behavior, including but certainly not limited to respect for human rights.  Most countries already guarantee such concepts in their governing documents.  Even the USA’s Declaration of Independence states:

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

 

Obviously, denial of human rights, including human rights outrages, torture, and genocide are violations of these “unalienable Rights, that among (which) are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

 

In fact, the USA is presently conducting war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who allegedly was Osama Bin Laden’s driver, and who is being charged with and tried for conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.

 

So what does it say that one hundred six nations on Earth are members of this esteemed World Criminal Court but that the USA, under republican president George W. Bush, has joined China in refusing to sign on to the World Criminal Court.

 

Of course, it’s just a coincidence that another republican president is leading the USA during this refusal.  Equally coincidental is the fact that the timeframe for becoming a member of the World Criminal Court is roughly the same as the US invasion of Iraq and mismanagement of that selfsame war.

 

It has been stated that the USA is not a member of the World Court because members of the Bush administration fear being prosecuted “for political reasons”. 

 

If true, then one must presume that “political reasons” might be defined as the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country, destruction of that country’s civilian infrastructure, causing mass misery to a civilian population, suspension of habeas corpus rights for captives, the murder of unknown numbers of prisoners held in secret prisons, and the planning, ordering and implementation of all the above.

 

In the meantime, in typical “do as I say, not as I do” fashion, the Bush Syndicate continues a questionable, often secretive military tribunal system in Guantanamo, having fought against prisoners’ legal rights for years (much as China has been known to do), and yet refuses to participate in what just might be the highest and most credible system of justice on the planet, endorsed by over one hundred countries.

 

How can this be possible?  Or, in the vernacular…WTF??

(posted enroute @ Las Vegas Airport)

 

 

 

 

Aboard the M.S. Ryndam in Vancouver, British Columbia - Americans are much divided regarding the wisdom of the American invasion of Iraq and continuing Iraqi war.  A very large majority is now convinced that it was and is a mistake, while a very small and shrinking minority continues to support the Bush “Excellent Adventure”.  After all, according to the supporters, we “liberated” Iraq and its people form the evil Saddam Hussein and we were subsequently welcomed as “liberators”.  Or so we were led to expect.

 

This writer had the opportunity to interview an Iraqi woman who, along with her family, is a member of the Iraqi Christian minority.  She married a European and was able to leave Iraq, although she still has family there seeking to leave. As an Iraqi Christian, she is not involved in the Shi’ia vs. Sunni conflict.    In fact, as an extreme minority, her family was anything but confrontational with the Muslim majority in Iraq.

 

The woman, whom shall be identified only as “Maria”, made it clear that she and her follow Christian Iraqis recognized Saddam as a tyrant that one did not want to cross.  She was equally clear that Iraqis recognized that opposing Saddam was tantamount to a death wish, and that someone who did dare to speak out against the dictator might simply disappear off the face of the planet.

 

Having prefaced her comments with the aforementioned facts, she compared the life of the average Iraqi under Saddam with conditions five years after the American invasion.

 

Under Saddam, different religious beliefs were accepted and tolerated..  Christians and even the small Jewish population lived in peace alongside Muslims.  Shi’ias and Sunnis coexisted.  It was known that Saddam would not tolerate religious intolerance, and a violation of this premise could be very dangerous to one’s health.

 

Women were allowed to work, drive, and attend universities.  As a result, there were a large number of educated women in Iraq who held relatively well-paying jobs.  Doctors and hospital operated normally.  Electricity flowed through the utility lines to homes and apartments, and water flowed through the pipes in similar manner.

 

Crime was at a minimum, and criminals were apprehended and severely punished.  People felt it was safe to walk the streets, and left their doors unlocked at night.  Gasoline was cheap and plentiful.  Some goods were hard to come by, but food and most necessities were available.  Medical care was available on a continuous basis.

 

Five years later, there is total religious intolerance in Iraq.  Women are subservient to men and Islam. Crime is rampant, led by religious and political assassinations and suicide bombings.  This woman told of her friend’s sister and mother having been killed last week in their home after gunmen first robbed them and then murdered them because they were Christians. 

 

The previous week, her friend’s brother was killed as well. 

 

The Iraqi police are incapable of tracking down the perpetrators of so many criminal acts which occur each and every day. Non-Muslims are no longer tolerated or safe.  If you are not Muslim in Iraq, your life can be in danger.

 

Electricity is available perhaps two to four hours a day.  Water often doesn’t reach the kitchen sink.  Gasoline is scarce and expensive.  Medical services are also scarce since many doctors and nurses have left the country.  There is no end in sight to the misery that exists in that country.  The present Iraqi government, supported by the USA and its military forces, appears incapable of solving basic infrastructure problems, let alone create an environment of liberty, tolerance, and safety.

 

When “Maria” (not her real name), who for safety’s sake had to hide her very Christian name in favor of a Muslim name to disguise her Christianity in Iraq, was asked if the Americans should continue their mission or leave, she emphatically stated that Americans should leave as soon as possible, because the only purpose served by them as seen by the Iraq people was to continue “more of the same”.  She went so far as to say that although Saddam was an awful tyrant, that most Iraqi long for a return to life as it was under Saddam.

 

That’s quite a commentary for the war that Bush built, during which over 4,100 Americans have given their lives.  Instead of this waste of American and Iraqi lives, a better way to effect positive change in Iraq would clearly have been through covert internal means, perhaps supporting an alternative Iraqi leadership group in exile.

 

Make no mistake:  Saddam Hussein was a bad person, a dictator, a tyrant who murdered anyone that got in his way.  But so is Mohammar Khadafi of Libya and Kim Yong Il of North Korea, as well as many African and several Asian national leaders.  Yet, the USA did not invade any of those countries.  The reason the US invaded Iraqi but not the others?

 

1.  Oil (in Iraq), or lack thereof (in the other countries);

 

2.  The other leaders didn’t try to kill GW Bush’s dad, as Saddam did;

 

3.  Other reason(s) too sensitive for We, the PEOPLE to know.  See #1 and #2 above.

 

There is little hope that anything in Iraq will improve within the six months and one day left in Bush’s debacle administration.  But perhaps after January 20, 2009, the long journey back to Iraqi civilian stability can begin.  According to “Maria”, Iraq needs not strong external propping, but strong internal leadership to solve its problems….strong internal leadership it at present is not evident.

 

Is she right?

 

Anyone paying the least bit of attention to the news lately knows that a very serious near-missed collision event occurred at Kennedy Airport, also known globally as JFK, over the past few days.

One airline jet on short approach to the runway had to “go around”, or abort the approach and proceed with alternate unsafe published instructions for a another approach later, while another airline jet was taking off from a perpendicular (90 degree offset) runway. The two jets came very, VERY close to colliding and killing perhaps up to four hundred people.

This writer has thirty-three years of air traffic control experience, and is now recommending to his family that they take the train, or at least fly out of less-congested airports than the biggest ones, such as JFK, in the USA. There is an obvious safety-related reason for this.

For the average US citizen, most of the turmoil that has overtaken the US Air Traffic Control System, known internally as the National Airspace System (NAS) since 2002 has been invisible. But the Bush Administration has been hard at work attempting to dismantle the previous presidential administration’s, and ex-Federal Aviation Administrator (FAA’s) Jane Garvey’s actions to ensure the safety of the American flying public, both present and future state.

Jane Garvey was appointed by President Clinton to a five-year term as FAA administrator in 1997. You can read more about here HERE.

Garvey acutely understood that the extremely technical and highly stressful profession of air traffic control demanded that people actually involved in the daily practice of this profession be the ones making decisions about its future demands and requirements. To that end, she worked very successfully with the nation’s air traffic controller workforce to ensure the highest levels of safety. Liaison positions of controllers on management teams were created to ensure that the user interface, i.e., where the rubber meets the road, was taken into consideration when establishing new air traffic procedures or designing new air traffic equipment.

When Garvey’s term was up in 2002, GW Bush nominated, and the republican US senate confirmed, Marion Blakey as administrator.

Blakey had a primary task assigned by Bush: Turn FAA into a profitable business model, so as to facilitate contracting out the NAS to a private contractor, as is done in Canada (with 10% of the air traffic of the USA); Minimize the influence of the workforce, since they are not concerned with business models, but only safety, in their daily work.

It is clear that private contractors are primarily concerned with profit, and NOT safety. Remember that as you read on.

The union/management contract, negotiated under Garvey and beneficial to both the government, in terms of facility staffing and technical support, and to the workforce, in term of pay and the ability to input into technical advances, was due to be renegotiated in 2005. When the Bush team and controller (National Air Traffic Controllers Association, a.k.a. NATCA) team met, it immediately became apparent that the Bush administration was never interested in negotiating a fair contract replacement. Based upon a quirk in federal law, the Bush Administration, through its puppet Blakey, declared a negotiation impasse, and in September of 2006, the FAA was able to impose draconian and unnegotiated work rules upon their air traffic controllers, some of which included a 30% reduction in pay.

The Bush administration has never been good at timing, as evidenced by the Iraq war and its aftermath, and it didn’t contradict this record here, either. It imposed its non-negotiated work rules and pay reduction upon the controller workforce, just as thousands of air traffic controllers, hired as replacements after the 1981 PATCO air traffic controller strike during which 11,700 controllers were fired, were becoming eligible to themselves retire.

Two thousand controllers have since done exactly that, leaving the NAS desperately wanting for experience. The FAA, slowly responding to the huge self-caused staffing shortage, would hire anyone under the age of 31 who can spell their name two out of three times without making a mistake. And that’s exactly the kind of response they’re getting, after having reduced the salaries of new hires to the point that they cannot live normal lives.

It will take three to five years to train these new “slave-wage” workers.

And what does this mean to you, the American flying public?

It means that veteran controllers, who cannot yet retire, have to pick up the slack, work much longer hours under increased traffic conditions, under extreme mental fatigue conditions, with procedures they sometimes feel are unsafe and into which they had no input.

Imagine that you need an operation on a brain tumor. Imagine that your brain surgeon has to pick up the slack for three others that left for whatever reasons, and the only replacements are still in their internship. Further imagine that your surgeon is now really tired and fatigued because to the increased number of operations per day. Imagine his last operation of the day, under these conditions, is YOU.

That’s the status of the present Bush-raped, experience-starved, profit-motivated, contractor-ready, mistake-laden FAA Air Traffic Control/NAS system in the USA.

McCain, whom is extremely anti-union/anti-worker, has stated that he supports the present FAA management practices.

Wanna fly? Do you feel lucky today?

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Click HERE for the latest on this fiasco!

You might remember the saga of U.S. senator Larry Craig, republican from Idaho, who was arrested last summer in the men’s room at Minneapolis Airport for soliciting sex in a men’s room (frequented by men, you realize). Craig pleaded no contest to charges and paid a fine. You can read more about this incident HERE.

You might also remember U.S. senator David Vitter, republican from Louisiana, who has admitted to consorting with prostitutes over a long time frame. You can read more about this “pillar of integrity” HERE.

Just this week, a group of ten right-wing republican senators reintroduced the “Federal Marriage Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution, which proposes, in pertinent part:

“Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.’.

These two aforementioned bastions of hypocrisy were among the ten who cosponsored the proposed constitutional amendment. You can read multiple articles about this HERE.

You will notice in bold that the proposed amendment includes a prohibition of civil unions, meaning that same-sex couples living together, but not allowed in their state to marry, could not even access joint health or beneficiary benefits, or a thousand other benefits presently legally available to both married couples and folks in legal civil unions today.

Thankfully, this stupid amendment, which attempts to inject certain religious beliefs about marriage and civil unions into the U.S. Constitution, has no hope of passage, or even having a hearing scheduled in the U.S. Senate. But it does raise issues that need to be addressed.

First, marriage in the legal sense and marriage in the religious sense are two totally distinct entities. From a legal point of view, which the “state” clearly administers, it is essentially a legal financial contract between two people. Many laws at multiple levels come into play for and between two legally married people, which primarily impact real and personal property, assets and benefits. If children are involved, the state has legal jurisdiction over their fate should the married partners not agree, most commonly during and/or after a divorce, just as it has legal authority over disposition of property and assets.

Marriage in the religious sense, while touching on the above, has no legal standing in the United States or other western industrialized nations. Religious marriage is often considered to be permanent and has its roots in ancient history. The teachings of Judeo-Christian religions make clear that marriage is a union between people of opposite sex because of a primary religiously mandated marital function, which is procreation. This, placed against the property and children disposition of legal marriage, is a huge distinction between religious and legal marriage.

Additionally, religious marriage is defined differently depending upon whether one follows Catholic, Jewish, mainstream Protestant or fundamentalist Protestant teachings. Catholics and some fundamentalists do not accept divorce.

Clearly, the state does accept divorce and exercises considerable control over the procedure.

Thus, to accept a religious-oriented view of marriage into the U.S. Constitution would clearly violate the First Amendment protections (with subsequent Supreme Court case law) which states in pertinent part: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” .

But the most amazing issue to surface out of this marriage amendment debacle is that Larry Craig and David Vitter co-sponsored this legislation. Clearly, these two guys think they are fooling their constituents, and now the rest of the American people.

Craig and Vitter obviously subscribe to the “Do as I say, not as I do!” philosophy that so many of history’s hypocrites before them have followed. Besides not having any integrity, or the good sense to remain quiet and invisible for the rest of their tainted terms, they also seem to be incredibly stupid. That doesn’t say much for the folks that elected them in the first place, either.

If the republicans can’t find a way to move away from these two guys, and others like them, then they deserve the pounding that they seem likely to get this November.

As far as same sex marriage is concerned, as long as it (or anything else) doesnâ