tonypolitical

I have nothing to do on this rainy Saturday but write about politics, so thats my plan.

Our leaders do not share the mentality of the people. I have heard Henry Kissinger say, in defense of atrocities he authorized and/or ordered, that serious people have to make serious decisions. Or something to that effect.

He is saying that serious people must play chess with human lives.

This is a morally obtuse view, yet I believe that it predominates in the minds of Dick Cheney and other influential people in the Bush administration. It lends itself to the thinking of right-wing Israeli hawks who hold the view that Arabs only understand the language of force and therefore mass pummeling of Arab nations is the only way to send a message to the Arabs to chill out. Iranians are Persians, not Arabs. I wonder what the book says on Persians and force.

Oil was certainly a factor in going to war, but not the most important factor. I can't offer direct quotes, but based on my recollection of past reading, the number one reason for bombing Iraq was simply to show American force. To say to the Arabs, here is (to quote Toby Keith) "a boot in your ass." Fuck with us again and we'll blow up another one of your countries.

The word is that Rumsfeld was not happy with the lack of physical destruction in Afghanistan because one could not appreciate the scale of the force with which the USA could strike. I also think that he felt silly and uneffective because US forces were not capable of finding Bin Laden. Rumsfeld needed a real country to destroy so they chose Iraq.

You've seen this video of Cheney saying in 1994 that Iraq is in a very volatile region and that taking out Saddam would create chaos, so you know that Dick Cheney knew what would happen in Iraq, yet, he and Rumsfeld desired to show how the US military can take out an Arab miltary in weeks if not days, so without thinking of any "post-war planning," Bush and Co took the US to war on trumped up nuclear claims. Unfortunately, I supported the war out of the naivete of thinking that we would set Iraqis free and they would create an instant democracy even if there weren't any nukes. I was as ignorant as Bush on the subject. Cheney was not ignorant. He knew that disaster would result, yet it was a serious decision he thought he had to make as a serious person.

Unfortunately, when you give someone with a certain world-view power, they will impose that view upon the world to the extent their power allows.

Those who voted for Bush and Cheney were greedy fools. They thought they would get rich because of tax cuts and such. They didn't realize that at the same time they were voting for a foolish and arrogant leader. They know it now because its splattered before their faces, but they should have known it in 2000 and most certainly in 2004 if they were willing to say, maybe universal healthcare isn't so bad and maybe there is a real estate bubble and Bush is not such an economic genius.

Life is about choices. Choosing Bush has cost America.

9/11 was a terrorist act. Taking out Saddam had nothing to do with it. Christopher Hitchens can argue that Iraq was crumbling from within anyway and that the US luckily intervened before it all really went to hell, but it is hell now. And worse yet, it is a hell that America created. Had internal strife caused Iraq to fall apart, at least the US would not be at fault and therefore liable to fix the situation at all cost.

Iraq was a matter of Dick and Donald and some other heavy-handed and serious people (as Kissinger would say) who wanted to make an emphatic statement about US power.

Unfortunately, their statement has been heard loudly around the world.

Some Headlines The price of oil is never coming down. Israel struck Syria on nuclear fears. Israel declared Gaza a hostile state and Hamas is taking it as a declaration of war. Another anti-Syrian Lebanese politician was assasinated. And Britney Spears is to undergo random drug tests.   Dance Craze Tecktonik is the latest dance craze hitting the streets of France.

19 Sep 2007 Black People Speak the Truth Why have four Republican presidential candidates said that they will miss the upcoming "All American Presidential Forum" organized by black talk show host Tavis Smiley, scheduled for Sept. 27 at Morgan State University in Baltimore and airing on PBS? Oh my god! Black people and PBS! That's a powerful combo if you're an old white establishment candidate. They talk tough about terrorists but they can't face some liberal questions?  It makes me squeamish.

OJ My thoughts on OJ's recent alleged attempts at armed robbery are that deep inside, OJ feels as if he should be in jail for the murders of his ex-wife and Ron Goldman and is acting out in a way that is sure to land him there. The so-called Juice is human and his insides must be killing him. He knows what he deserves.

President Actor The bad news is that some informed people I've been talking to (former government officials and party activist), are claiming that Republican Fred Thompson will be the next president. The reasons they give (in no particular order) are as follows: A. Americans love actors. B. Americans will not vote for a black man for president. C. Americans won't vote for a women president either. In 2000, a professor of mine told me that Gore lost the south because his running mate, Joe Lieberman, was a Jew and people weren't ready for a jewish VP. I can't say really. The problem might be that a majority of all eligible voters would vote for a black person, jew, or woman, BUT all eligible voters DON'T vote. A lot of the seemingly non-prejudiced people who curse the so-called white trash for not being willing to vote for minorities simply don't vote themselves. If these people voted, the story may be different. That goes to all of you cool young people out there.

18 Sep 2007 Update on Kerry Now this report that the student who was tasered at a John Kerry event somehow provoked his own arrest because he is a prankster. The police report says that the student told the police officer while in the police car that police really did nothing wrong. Ya right! There are additional claims that when the cameras were on the student he was yelling but when they were off he was not yelling and was being cooperative. Hmmmm? All of these things happened when the cops were the only witnesses. I have dealt with many police reports. The quality of the reports depends on the quality of the individual officers involved in the incident. Some reports are great and precise, others vague and unhelpful, while still others (such as the one in the story) are used for the officer to write in events that would protect the officer if he/she is accused of breaking the law or procedure. This is a funny story, but the sad thing is that America is slipping into a police-state. I'm coming atcha with more on the police-state talk because it requires boring details and I don't have the temperament for such stuff just now.

John Kerry: Still a Shmuck From the Kerry for Senate website: In 37 years of public appearances, through wars, protests and highly emotional events, I have never had a dialogue end this way. I believe I could have handled the situation without interruption, but I do not know what warnings or other exchanges transpired between the young man and the police prior to his barging to the front of the line and their intervention. I asked the police to allow me to answer the question and was in the process of responding when he was taken into custody. I was not aware that a taser was used until after I left the building. I hope that neither the student nor any of the police were injured. I regret enormously that a good healthy discussion was interrupted." Watch the video (2 blogs ago). Kerry has a mic but for some reason you can't hear telling the police to leave the student alone or that he could handle the situation. I love the caveats in Kerry's statement such as he didn't know what might have transpired between the man and the cop before hand. Bullshit. If that is the case, how does Kerry know that he could have handled the student himself? John Kerry should retire from public service/pontificating. And Arlen Specter too. And the rest of the disengenuous bunch scumming up Congress these days.

John Kerry is Pretty Much Worthless Check out this video. A guy is telling Kerry that he and Bush are essentially the same etc. Then the police step in. Granted, the guy was wriggling which looks like resisting, but if Kerry had balls he would have told the cops to chill before they tasered the guy. I have never like Kerry. He's a spineless tool. See it here.

Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan has written a memoir which offers harsh criticism for Bush & Cheney and their Republican cohorts. To wit:

"Mr. Greenspan, who calls himself a "lifelong libertarian Republican," writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb "out-of-control" spending while the Republicans controlled Congress. He says President Bush's failure to do so "was a major mistake." Republicans in Congress, he writes, "swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose."

Thanks Alan. Thanks for speaking the truth when it counts. I am overcome by your courage. You follow in a long line of "public servants" who lie while serving and find the nerve to offer some tasty tidbits of truth when a publishing company comes knocking on your door. Your book wouldn't sell much without the hype associated with your late and useless criticisms of the worst administration I have witnessed.

Thanks again, Dick! 

I Must Vent.

Stop being pathetic consumers of trifling garbage. You are what you eat and YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ. Some of you are nothing but hogs and cows with asparagus legs. Some of you are fat mozzarella-filled gay men who sit online and gossip about fashion and cock-sucking all day. Some of you are vegetarian astronomers seeking meaning from crystal meth balls. As my good friend Beardo says, 'wake up America!' Sorry to tell you this but most of the culture is saturated with disgusting nonsense. There are god knows how many celebrity  blogs out there all reporting the same nonsense. Ok Hollywood, I know this has been going on forever. But that doesn't mean its a good thing or that we should be taking it to the extreme in this era of Digital Narcisism and crap proliferation. At the supermarket, US Weakly and the other lie-monger mags (yes, most of the shit in there is unsubstantiated trash) are sold out while Time and Newsweek take up shelf-space. I hate Time and Newsweek. You can get it all and so much more from the Economist and the internet. Time and Newsweek are both subsidiaries of for-profit corporations (the Economist may be but it doesn't show) and are therefore inclined to promoting various agendas or even movies and books to increase overall corporate profits, the news being secondary. The news is shaped to sell products, to keeping the consumer upbeat. If you don't like the generalizations I'm making, at least understand that Time and Newsweek are written at a Junior High level (at best) so its all softball goofy reporting. Besides, these magazines always get there too late. The internet beats them every time. My point is that even though I don't personally recommend Time or Newsweek, people buy the bullshit gossip rags instead of what are commonly thought to be good news magazines. This means that people have the time and money to read but they would rather fill their heads with bullshit than anything real. Don't tell me that people read those magazines as an escape from reality because in truth they are escaping nothing. They are making the situation worse by allowing stupidity, superficiality, triviality, and ignorance to come before the search for knowledge and meaning. If a society is to move forward, the latter is what is required. As you keep your senses tuned into the distraction of ego-driven celebrities and their sycophants while the corporations and their government partners loot the treasury and squelch the indvidualistic edge that made this country great, you are part of the problem. Everyone deserves a little mind-numbing entertainment once in a while, but mind-numbing is now the standard we go by. The corporate media is on a mission to reach as many people as possible so they dumb it down to keep the audience broad. They have been doing this for so long now that dumb has become the standard. At&t censored Eddie Vedder on a live webcast when Vedder sang a negative lyric about GW Bush. This is the same concept. At&t did not want to alienate anyone in their audience (or they just too tied to the Bush administration, another feasible and scary thought - see the earlier blog) with the Vedder lyric. In the same way, media and news are presented on the most base level so that the whole audience can understand. No one must be alienated. Politicians are bland, stupid, and boring because they are told not to alienate people. Movies, and the culture in general, is bland, stupid, and boring because the consumer must not be alienated.

 

Idaho Senator Larry Craig was caught looking for gay sex in an airport bathroom.

In other news, six cruise missilles with nuclear war heads were flown across the US from a South Dakota base to a Louisiana base. Larry Johnson points out that Barksdale, Louisiana is a launching point for middle east operations. He thinks these weapons are intended for a possible nuclear strike against Iran.

It looks to many observers that Bush and Cheney are preparing the public for a strike on Iran. But their primary intent may be in convincing Iran that the US will strike, hopefully forcing Iran to back down. Or is that wishful thinking on my part?

With respect to the leaking of the news regarding the nuclear armed B-52's, one theory is that someone inside is trying to send out a warning that Bush may authorize nuclear strikes on Iran. Alternatively, it could be Cheney doing the leaking himself. He wants Iran to be afraid of a US attack. Richard Nixon believed that it could be to his advantage if the enemy thought he was crazy. Maybe Cheney thinks that losing momentary control of nuclear weapons would give the Iranians just such an impression of himself.

Oprah backs Obama and she wants to play a broader role in his campaign. This is good news to me because I back Obama too and Oprah is clearly an influential personality. If she endorses a book it becomes a best-seller...

 

Co-conspirators?

It is true that Republican Senator Arlen Specter (PA) issued a lashing upon soon to be former AG Gonzales in the public hearings. It is also true, as my fellow blogger panasonicyouth points out, that the Judiciary Committee is probing into the possibility of pursuing perjury charges against the AG even though he has tendered his resignation. Panasonicyouth rightly states that the perjury was obvious.

The problem is that we all know that Gonzales was lying. There is not a question. So what the hell is the probe about?

This was not the first time that Specter and Congress have questioned Gonzales. There were hearings regarding the NSA and warrantless spying, the US Attorney purge, and the ridiculous account of Gonzales appearing before an incapacitated Ashcroft seeking a signature on an unconstitutional law. And if Ashcroft thought it illegal, it is scary to consider what it stated.

Most recently, Specter, Dianne Feinstein and a majority of Congress approved a law granting greater discretion to the Attorney General in cases of warrantless spying. What the fcuk? You question a man's integrity in a public hearing then grant him more power to spy on Americans with no oversight and then expect me to take the probes into perjury seriously/

Anyway, the damage is done. Who cares is the intellectually impish Gonzales serves a little time for a perjury offense? What good will it do? Power mongers and sycophants will not be deterred from operating in DC as long as the people of this country remain distracted by a constant stream of targeted digital narcissism.

 

That's a cliched title if I ever wrote one, but everything you've heard about the road is false. Unless you've heard that it can be grueling and about as glamarous as working in a candle factory.

I've read the headlines on most days, but internet service is sporadic at best as one drives through the Kentucky or Indiana countryside, so I haven't had a chance to delve to deeply into current affairs.

I noticed that Attorney General Gonzales has resigned. The funny thing is that the commentators are debating whether this resignation removes the cloud from over the administration. The commentators asked the same stupid question when Karl Rove resigned. The cloud will remain over the Bush administration in Gonzales' absence simply because Gonzales was a toady who followed orders from above. This, despite the fact that as it relates to the Attorney General of the United States, 'orders from above' should mean orders from the US Constitution, not orders from the president. If Gonzales wanted to be ordered around by the president he should have remained Bush's personal attorney.

But why should resigning put Rove or Gonzales in the clear. If the accountant at a company embezzles thousands of dollars and then resigns, he/she is not thereby cleared of any possible civil or criminal penalties. If that was the case, Ken Lay or Conrad Black would have resigned from their posts as CEO of Enron and Hollinger respectively and flown their private jets into the sunset. For the reasons stated above, that option is simply unavailable.

It is a wonder why or how the press can ask such silly questions and still be taken seriously.

I've seen a lot of the USA this month and as soon as I reach the comforts of home in LA I will relate some stories.

Until then.....

In a recent post Who Knew, I wrote that the mortgage and housing crash was easily foreseeable. Here is further confirmation. Some people were betting on the plunge. Obviously.

It seems that if you want to be taken seriously in American politics, you cannot be seen as a conspiracy theorist. However, there is a difference between announcing a government conspiracy in the death of JFK and Hoffa with arguing that modern corporations are conspiring to acquire more and more power.

I am more concerned about this economic conspiracy than anything else. This economic conspiracy is one by which corporations fund the elections of candidates of their own choosing and then have those candidates pay them back by implementing policies that favor the corporations. The circumstantial evidence combined with the confessions of Jack Abramoff and those like him make the case all but clear.

The problem we face in America is that the mainstream media has been co-opted by the corporations. These for profit organizations report what is most titillating and good for ratings rather than in-depth and objective news programming. Unfortunately, given the overwhelming media manipulation, most people don't even know it is going on. The bamboozling is all encompassing.

But these are not foreign concepts I express. It is given that politics is corrupt and that media barons have a long history of deception. Randolph Hearst is famous for starting the Spanish-American over a false story regarding a Spanish attack on the USS Maine. Hearst's apparent motivation in egging the US to war with Spain was simply to sell more newspapers. Newspapers sell better in time of war.

So really, the question is not how, but why. Why do people allow themselves to be manipulated as pawns by the powerful and corrupt especially in what is ostensibly a democracy? I think that the answer to this question is the very same reason we see corporate barons in the world today, greed. Some people are greedy and smart while other are greedy and dumb. While some see the system and climb to the top, others are thrown off by the great decoy of consumer materialism........

I'm leaving you hanging.

If you read my myspace blog recently then you know that I had that Dick Cheney YouTube video up there before Jon Stewart made it notorious the following evening. Good for me.

Here are my thoughts:

1. The surfacing of this video is evidence that the US press are a bunch of corporate cronies with no ethics or moral grounding. They do the bidding of their bosses and that is it. The slightest investigation would have turned up the '94 interview where Cheney says going into Iraq will be a quagmire. Why did not one reporter bring this up in the run up to the Iraq war? It is pathetic that the media was cowed into thinking that if they are not for Bush's craziness then they are against America. Also, ratings for news shows that did not hype the war were not as high as the ratings for those beating the drums of war. Money talks and soldiers die.

2. Cheney can claim that this is a post 9/11 world and that therefore, despite the risks of quagmire and Iranian, Syrian, and Turkish meddling, Iraq still had to be attacked. This strikes me as being preposterous given the scope of the quagmire. However, Cheney may still believe in the cause.

3. Cheney is a liar because even if he thought the probable problems in Iraq were worth the risk, he never leveled with the American people about the risks. Instead he said it would be a cake-walk and our troops would be greeted with candy in the streets. He knew better yet his drive to take this nation to war got the better of everybody.

4. Iran was always the real target. Afghanistan is to the east of Iran and Iraq is directly to the west. Cheney's plan was to put the squeeze on Iran. Despite our problems in both Afghanistan and Iraq, I believe that that is still the plan.

There's a plan to allow domestic law enforcement to use satellites made for and owned by the Defense Department for domestic intelligence gathering. Both NPR and the Wall Street Journal quoted experts who claim that the capabilities of these spy satellites is largely over-estimated and not even close to the real-time imagery available to agents on TV shows. So you can smoke your joint without big brother watching from space, but he can see you from the closed circuit cameras going up in our cities.

Even so, the closed circuit cameras seem to be very useful in post facto investigations but as yet, have not shown themselves to be great predictors of crimes.

Additionally, Department of Homeland Security sited border and port security as two areas where the satellites would be useful. Apparently some satellites can track heat and would therefore be able to see people being smuggled in vessels. Satellites can pick uo radiological traces too.

I don't buy the border argument. Our borders are incredibly porous. If a person really wants to get across it, the only barrier would be a lack of tenacity. The attackers of 9/11 got into the country with forged or stolen identity documentation. They didn't come running across the Rio Grande.

We live in a society where our privacy is being eviscerated by technology. Sun Microsystems Inc. CEO Scott McNealy is famous for once saying following 9/11, that "privacy is dead. Get over it." McNealy envisions a world where chips are implanted in people and national ID cards combined with biometrics for tracking people.

The question is about how far we take these Orwellian programs and how efficiently and rigorously constitutional guidelines for their use are enforced. I'm not optimistic that the majority of our legislators are competent to handle these serious civil rights issues given that they have just passed legislation granting the incompetent Attorney General (incompetent is their very own characterization of the AG) greater eavesdropping authority! Always requires and an exclamation mark!

Be on your Revolutionary Guard!

GW Bush is going to designate the 125,000 strong Iranian force as a terrorist organization. This designation is likely intended to allow Bush to order strikes against the RG.

Iran has been in this administration's sights since September 12. I don't think Cheney and Co. will back down now. In fact, Shia hegemony based from Iran is now a real possibility and Cheney and his Saudi and Egyptian Sunni are not just going to allow Iran to take over without a fight.

Get ready for another preemptive strike.

Ketchup is terrible for you. Not just because the high fructose corn syrup(HFCS)is bad for you in general (the obesity rate began to increase in the early seventies as sugar was replaced with corn syrup in almost everything you eat), but also because according to Dr. Mehmet Oz, the HFCS causes a chemical reaction that tells your brain that you are still hungry. Click the link to watch the interview with Charlie Rose. Its a good guide if you want to learn more about what you ingest.

If you are asking yourself why corn syrup replaced sugars all of a sudden in the early seventies, the answer is the corn lobby. Apparently there are a lot of corn farmers and that is a lot of votes. Sugar is not native to most parts of the US. The US government has high sugar tariffs. This means that it is costly for a food manufacturer to use sugar rather than corn syrup. The same is true for ethanol from sugar. Brazil has tons of it and it works wonders. Brazil does not rely on middle eastern oil. We do. We also make ethanol out of corn despite the fact that creating ethanol from sugar is far more efficient than making it out of corn. Or we can get rid of the applicable tariffs and import ethanol from Brazil. Dollar bills ya'll.

On another health note, keep your kids off coffee! Seriously, they grow up too fast as it is. Plus cigarettes look cooler than a cup of joe.

Clusterfuck Nation's Jim Kunstler on the effects of the sinking of the mortgage industry:

The upshot is that we are going to find ourselves a poorer nation. There will be far fewer people with money. There will be far fewer buyers of repossessed McHouses, bass boats, etc. Even the houses in Sagaponak and the Manhattan apartments will go cheap. The effort to pretend our way out of a financial crisis will fail. Sooner or later the recognition will set in that all that "boo-yah" was dreamed up. The United States swindled itself. We became a nation of such greed-crazed clowns that we committed financial suicide in an orgy of self-deception.

The full article is here. Kunstler has been warning us for some time now that investors are investing in nothing and using smoke and mirrors to keep themselves artificially wealthy.

You knew he was gay, but seriously, what the hell is wrong with him? Why does he insist on bashing teenagers like Rumer Willis? Generally I simply scoff at the dim-witted blabber mouth, but it irks me that he attacks these young impressionable people on his popular website. That's it, it just irks me. What kind of a dick head gets his jollies bashing teenagers? Is he pissed that he was not invited to her sweet sixteen? The guy is an idiot.

I wrote here that the world largely ignores human plight unless it involves bashing Israel for persecuting the Palestinians.

The LA Times reports today that Arabs from Chad are now "occupying" land that was deserted by the Africans of southern Sudan following mass ethnic cleansing by the Khartoum sponsored janjaweed militia. The Times seems to be indicating that this is the culmination of the Sudanese government's effort at Arabization in the country.

The atrocities in Darfur were widely reported. So is China's oil interest. China has consistently blocked tougher sanctions on Sudan. Where is the outrage?

Imagine the wrath that would be brought down upon Israel by popular opinion and the press if Israel played the roll of either the Sudanese or the Chinese. Not to say that Sudan and China don't get bad press, but it hardly compares to the attacks incurred by Israel.

Good to know that the actress can walk and talk at the same time. I think this headline pretty much amounts to the press pissing in your eyes and telling you that you like it.

Search this blog (www.tonypotato.blogspot.com) for the name Arlen Specter and you will find me questioning the senator's motivations. There is no longer a question in mind that Arlen Specter's actions do not follow his rhetoric. He sits on the Judiciary Committee and has repeatedly questioned the honesty and abilities of the Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Yet, mere days following verbal lashings of the AG, Specter voted to approve the Protect America Act of 2007. This act gives new and unprecedented as well as unchecked power to none other than the Attorney General of the United States in conducting foreign surveillance from US soil. Such surveillance includes listening to conversations between a person in the US and someone who is "reasonably believed" to be on foreign soil. Specter now trusts Gonzales' ability to make judgments as to what may or may not be reasonable in light of the fact that Gonzales has shown himself to be so completely disingenuous regarding classified surveillance programs in the very recent past?

This is lunacy. Lunacy that Dianne Feinstein voted for approvingly. How ridiculous. Feinstein herself has been an outspoken critic of Gonzales. These people have no respect for anything.

The presidential election season has been open for some time now. Too much time. How long must we listen to these candidates utter 30 second sound bites scripted based on polling information? This useless exercise only serves to cheapen the significance of the issues being 'debated.'

Moderator: 'Mr. Giuliani, would you like to see an end to human suffering?'
Giuliani: 'What a great question. If by human suffering you mean the suffering of our enemies, then certainly not.'
Moderator: 'Thank you mayor. Now, moving on to healthcare'

In what I call 'mature' countries, candidates sit down for hour long drillings by a member of the press or sit at a small round table and debate the issues in full, face to face. Not nine bodies cluttering a stage and cluttering and ultimately undermining the 'debate' itself. Can it be any coincidence that sound bite debates and sound bite news stories are a direct result of a superficial sound bite culture?

I will be covering the elections as November '08 approaches, but for the moment I must address several mysteries in the legislative arena.