Thursday, April 24, 2008
Hide The Children...
0 comments
...Here come the "Kinder, gentler Republicans"!!! Hide your watch; count your fingers!
McCain Says He Would Have Responded Differently to Hurricane Katrina
Uhhhh, no. You wouldn't have. Go easy on the direct lies, John.
When one has a long record, as you do, John, and one proudly points to that record as reason to be given higher office, you cast your fate to what you DID, John, not what you "would've" done.You could have followed the brave example of your captured comrades. You could have found the courage to remain silent, especially after the North Vietnamese discovered you were a valuable asset as an Admiral's son. You could have not spilled your guts to the NV and told them everything you knew, John. But, Senator Hero, you did.
You could have learned from your POW experiences. They might have taught you not to flip-flop on recent torture bills in the Senate, where you first voted against the horror you intimately knew torture to be, before your hunger for a job (that America will never let you have) led you into voting YEA! on visiting that torture on other human beings. But, alas, those lessons didn't take.
You might have not broken the very Campaign Finance laws you worked so very hard, with Sen. Russ Feingold, to pass. But, hey, you needed the money, so you broke the law anyway.You very easily could have led a movement within the Senate GOP to pass legislation that would actually have saved lives and salvaged the fallen city whose rubble you caress yourself with this morning. But, alas, no.
You could have made standing up for America and All Americans your mission and your credo, when dying people—whose fatal flaw was merely to have less money than your wife Cindy—pleaded with you for your help. But, no, helping those in harm's way would have diverted you from your presidential aspirations. And we can't have that, now can we, John?You could have loudly repudiated the noted hate monger, Rev. Hagee, who proclaimed to the world that Katrina was New Orleans' own damn fault, for pissing off God. But, you decided you needed the right-wing, nut-job vote. So, no, you passed on sanctioning Hagee. Kept giving him props, actually.
Wow.
Ya know? It's "hard work" being such a "maverick," isn't it, John?
posted by Gotham 4:34 PM
What Your Friends Try To Tell You...
Even Rupert Murdoch thinks it's worse than Bush 19% does.0 comments
A bad sign.
posted by Gotham 3:59 PM
Your Justice Department Dollars At Work
0 commentsHere's what happens when your main, national law enforcement department, in this case, the Justice Department, alters its mission to narrowly define its function as underpinning the administration's efforts to root out every single terrorist of the Democratic Party currently working in any level of government, and effectively create One Party Rule in the U.S.
Doing that, however, tends to leave some gaps in its previous, historic mission...
You start with a bit of San Antonio,
Teen shot in the head in gang shooting on busy San Antonio street
Throw in a big glop of Chicago,
Chicago Police: 36 Shot, 2 Stabbed, 9 Dead Over Weekend
Add in a few dollops of reporting of increased homicide rates across the country...
According to the conservative Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a lobbying group in Washington, DC—Among the jurisdictions filing reports with PERF, total homicides in 2006 were 10.21% higher than they were in 2004. Increases of 20% or more in the number of homicides over the two-year period (2004 to 2006) were detected in:Here's the part from the PERF report that jumped off the page:
Baltimore County, Md.; Boston; Charleston, S.C.; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C.; Cincinnati; Cleveland; Fairfax County, Va.; Hartford, Conn.; Kansas City, Mo.; Memphis; Nashville; Newark, N.J.; New Haven, Conn.; Orlando; Philadelphia; Rochester, N.Y.; San Antonio; San Jose, Calif.; and Seattle.Throughout 2006, PERF closely monitored violent crime rates. In an effort to obtain the latest trend information sooner than the FBI can provide with its massive Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, PERF obtained statistics from 56 jurisdictions across the nation for 2006.Not only are the feds ripping the guts out of all the rights and freedoms that Americans have fought and died for over a couple of centuries, they're even screwing up those newly gained powers! Again, true totalitarian zeal is totally lost on the truly incompetent.
Also, here are some FBI stats from George W. Bush's first term:
CRIME CLOCK
One murder EVERY 32 MINUTES.
One violent crime EVERY 6 SECONDS.
One robbery EVERY 55 SECONDS.
One assault EVERY 7 SECONDS.
One theft EVERY 2 SECONDS.
One burglary EVERY 10 SECONDS.
One rape/sexual assault EVERY 2 MINUTES.
56 women are victimized by an intimate EVERY HOUR.
A teenager is victimized EVERY 19 SECONDS.
3 women and/or men become victims of stalking EVERY MINUTE.
A child is abused and/or neglected in America EVERY 35 SECONDS.
EVERY 19 SECONDS a violent crime is committed against a person at work or on duty.
A person is killed in an alcohol-related traffic crash EVERY 30 MINUTES.
An identity theft is reported EVERY 3 MINUTES.
Nice.
And this was as the country was coming out of the First George W. Bush Recession (not to be confused with the George H.W. Bush Recession), and people of means were starting to do a bit better. It'd be interesting to see what those numbers are like now that we're in the throes of the Second George W. Bush Recession.
Even the wacks at Newsmax ("Wackiness To The Max!") were on to this story in 2006. However, in their adorable, cuddly little way, they got everything exactly backwards. They proclaim Victory in Iraq!!! by stating that, in 2006, Baghdad had a lower violent death rate than Washington, DC!
Ummmmm, folks... A more serious reading of those numbers spell a tad more trouble here on the homefront: Washington, DC, along with a handful of other U.S. cities, has a higher violent death rate than BAGHDAD, fer crissakes!!!
What a legacy...
posted by Gotham 3:05 PM
The Great GOP War Comes Home
Your Bush administration governmental principles at work:1 comments
Chicago Police: 36 Shot, 2 Stabbed, 9 Dead Over Weekend
Reportedly, 13 of the victims were school students. No Child Left Behind, my ass. The GOP attempt to create a nobles/serfs caste construct in our nation's schools systems has had exactly the impact you could probably imagine—unless, of course, you happen to be a neo-con theorist.
This re-emergence of urban violence, gang activity and random street violence (and we can set our watches for the coming onslaught of fear-mongering and "law and order" stories) sits right there, nestled comfortably with the housing and credit meltdowns, the Great GOP War and a ransacked Fort Knox as legacies of years of GOP rule.
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley speaks for all U.S. mayors when he says:"Know where your children are. It's going to be a long summer..."
Where do we start with this?This is why this election is so critical to the future of this country. And perhaps the world. The survival of this country depends on reversing each and every aspect of GOP rule, bringing each and every U.S. citizen back into the realm of hope and possibility. Back into a world where there are options other than gangs for identity, safety and prosperity.
- Do we start with an educational system that has squeezed learning everything positive for the human spirit out of our school systems—replacing it with a rigid metric program that major segments of the student population are guaranteed to fail, thereby raising the rates of drop-outs, hopelessness and poverty—and giving students only those lessons they need to become functional drones as adults?
- Do we start with the criminal manipulations of the economy that give full license to those fully politically connected to loot city, state and federal coffers with abandon, along with the ability to turn and blame those who have been squeezed out of the system when shortfalls are eventually discovered?
- Do we start with a ginned-up GOP war in the Mideast, which is highly populated with soldiers who come from depressed areas—to the point where the military becomes one of the few remaining career/job options in their communities?
- Do we start with those few skeet shooters and couple dozen hunters with megaphones who would happily sacrifice major sections of the country to gang and individual criminal violence on the altar of their myopic misreading of the Second Amendment (while blithely ignoring the full and complete dismantling of all the other Amendments)?
- Do we start with the utter gutting of the Justice Department and all other federal agencies whose sole mission is to protect the health, safety and betterment of the American people? There simply stands one crime left on the books worthy of having the full apparatus of our law enforcement and justice system thrown at it, and one crime only: Breathing While Democrat. Otherwise, sorry, they're not interested.
- Do we start with a governmental population control apparatus which is now perilously close to being out of control, which takes an ostensibly anti-terrorist law, the "Patriot" Act, never uses it for the purposes for which it was intended, but uses it fully to turn state and local police forces into heavily armed, paramilitary forces, now buttressed with the legal underpinnings for complete corruption of their core mission, which is the safety and well being of their communities.
- Do we start with your average urban youth, whose family has been squeezed out of a decent life by this economy; who's been pushed out the school door because he/she couldn't hit a certain number on a test in a short time frame; who looks at enlisting as perhaps his/her only job option even though he/she knows that means a strong probability of coming home in a box or as a basket case; who sees his/her neighborhood awash in gunfire thanks to the good folks at the NRA, who give media cover to the greatest gun-running operations in the world's history; who sees the FBI and Justice Dept. refuse to return phone calls for help since those citizens feel threatened by are not high-placed Democrats; and who now see gang membership as being a tad more attractive an option when living under a GOP administration?
The United States of America can simply no longer afford a Republican in any office or agency, be it federal, state or local. They badgered the American people for forty years to give them the levers of power, saying that they had the answers to America's woes, and could deliver true Utopia to all—if only their principles and theories were given free rein.
Well, the American people decided to give them a try. They gave them the power.
It may take another forty years to fully clean up all the damage. Nice party; now who's gonna clean up this mess?
Maybe another forty years to reverse all the destructive self-serving policies, dig out all the deeply entrenched apparatchiks, frog-walk all the corrupted, convict all the malfeasance, build new jails for the evildoers, negotiate with the World Court to hand over all the war criminals and track down every obscure corner of government that needs to be fully re-regulated to protect America from the greed and hubris of personal embellishment and aggrandizement every human being is tempted by.
Hopefully, with the coming Democratic electoral tsunami in November, which should leave no Republican standing, the long, painful American healing process can begin.
posted by Gotham 12:04 PM
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Bush 27%: Finally, The Uniter
0 comments...And not just in ways you'd imagine, either.
He's destroyed not only our U.S. economic way of life, he's finally been able to crater everyone else's, as well.
As a result of Bush 27% crapping on every aspect of American life, the coming U.S. Democratic election tsunami you know about. That's why the Republicans have allowed the hated John McCain to have their nomination. They know what's coming, and have effectively said, "Here, John, you wanted it; you hold the turd."
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence afoot, like this Bob Herbert column, of the economy's looming political power and potential. You know how badly you and your area are being hurt by seven years of Bush 27's pseudo-economic policies, and the depth of your passion to make someone pay for all this.
Well..., the happy news is: it's only gonna get worse. All those breaks he gave his friends over the years? All the corruptions of corporate regulations he gave his benefactors, and the ongoing free pass he's given firms to simply close up shop here and happily land in some place cheaper? That's all finally succeeded in damaging the economies not only of major players like China and India, but now even of smaller emerging economies like Egypt and Vietnam. Which has the additional benefit of giving these countries even greater control over the U.S. economic policy and decision making (and your daily life) because Bush has destroyed the weight of the dollar against almost all foreign currencies. The mighty American dollar has gone from being the dog to being the tail.
So now, it's all starting to backfire. Or to simply reach its inevitable conclusion:[So] far, Asian exporters have passed along only a portion of their costs. In China, for instance, prices are now rising almost 9 percent a year, triple the pace of a year ago.Workers in the developing world facing higher prices have been increasingly vocal in demanding higher wages, with protests erupting in recent days in Vietnam, Cambodia and Egypt.
At the same time, inflation keeps rising: the Philippines announced that its inflation at the consumer level had doubled in the last five months, showing a 6.4 percent increase in March over the same month a year ago. And weekly inflation at the wholesale level has accelerated in India, reaching an annual rate of 7 percent in the week ended March 22, up from 3.1 percent as recently as last October.
Not long ago, it would have been unlikely for a poor country with high inflation to see its money strengthen in value against the mighty dollar. But the dollar is not quite as mighty as it once was. Large American trade deficits and other problems have weakened its appeal.
And there are signs that the dollar could fall further if developing countries’ central banks stopped supporting it, particularly in Asia.
Vietnam’s central bank even had to order the country’s commercial banks late last month to resume buying dollars within the tight range of exchange rates set by the government. Many banks had started betting on dollar depreciation and refusing to accept large sums in dollars, to the point that multinationals and exporters had trouble wiring money into the country to pay their employees’ salaries.
Any move these countries make now to control inflation and rectify the imbalance in their own financial structure can only come at the expense of hurting your wallet harder—even while it's already getting pretty severely stomped.
When Bush allowed the Green Flight of companies out of the U.S. to foreign shores to soak up the cheap labor, two things happened:
One, it ravaged your area as the pool of available jobs shrank.
Two, as any U.S. urban dweller who has experienced gentrification in their neighborhood will attest, the flood of new investment capital into an area cannot easily gauge what its impact on the area will be, and where the balance lies between invigorating a country, an area or a neighborhood, on the one hand, and completely washing away what made it attractive in the first place.
And, simply put, capital doesn't give a crap. It'll keep mining that spot until it's finally tapped out, then simply move somewhere else.
So, this causes all prices for goods and services to rise dramatically, until residents find they can no longer afford to take part in the improvement of the region and leave, creating a vacuum which attracts more of the monied class.
It happened here on the island of Manhattan; it's now also happening in smaller countries, like Vietnam. A flood of investment capital is forcing prices through the roof. When that much cash is floating around, there will always be people with enough to pay the higher price, which attracts more suppliers who raise prices to grab some of that extra available loot, which forces others to raise their prices to offset that rise, which forces workers to demand higher wages to pay for it all, which...
...eventually, lands on your doorstep, forcing you to pay more for those very cheap things you started buying since you couldn't afford the normal things you used to buy regularly. Your cheap import alternatives at Wal-Mart, Costco, etc. are about to soar.The cost of American imports from less industrialized countries as a group is rising. A Bureau of Labor Statistics index of average prices for imports of manufactured goods from such countries fell gradually through early 2004, but is now rising briskly and was up 5.6 percent in February from the same month last year.That contributes to rising inflation in the United States; in the 12 months through February 2008, the prices of goods for sale in the United States increased by 4 percent, according to the government’s Consumer Price Index.
Voila!
We are now looking at impending runaway inflation on a worldwide basis! And we can't do anything about it, in policy terms, since the dollar is just about useless, on its way to equaling Confederate War Bonds in value and strength.
YEA, GEORGE!!
Bush 27 has effectively united the globe in ways that Bonaparte, ancient Rome or Hitler could only dream of.
He's destroying ALL the world's economies. At one time. How clever of him!
On a global scale, he's quickly dividing the world into two classes:
The Corporati, and serfs.
(No, not nobles, since there's nothing noble about any of Bush's cronies.)
posted by Gotham 1:02 PM
