Free Markets! Stop It!

STOP IT! Stop talking about free markets! They are not free. The involvement of the government in the functions of the markets preclude them from ever being know as free.

Free trade is there--meaning that there is trade among countries without tariffs and such--but nothing about them are near free markets. Just look to the government bail out of financial institutions within the subprime debacle. The government is protecting the business of mortgages, not the people that got hood winked by the practices of the shady organizations and practices.

The American people are just there to prop up business, seldom is anything done to protect them from the vultures in the business world.

The Political Hawks Speak

With the death of Bhutto, the Hawks have come out of the woodwork. Most top tier candidates have used the assassination as a platform to spotlight their foreign policy stands. Everybody has an opinion, they are like a/holes.....

Clinton jumped on this with both feet, she knew Bhutto and her kids.....that is not just a policy thing but a warm fuzzy moment. Clinton will fall in line with the stand of the admin.....

And then there is Rudy---as Biden had observed earlier, everything Rudy says has a noun, a verb and 9/11--the assassination was no different. He will rise in the polls now, because he used his only strength and he has returned to the headlines....you may thank the media for that.

All the candidates, top tier ones, are hawks, regardless of their words they are business as usual when it comes to the world.

Benazir Bhutto and the Politics of Chaos - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog

Benazir Bhutto and the Politics of Chaos - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog



Yes, she is dead and yes, she will be martyred, and yes it was a tragedy, but.........there is always, "the rest of the story".

Two Parties----How Absolutely Boring

First of all, the concept of a two party system breeds mediocrity. It helps keep the old saying, "business as usual" political plan in business. There is NO real political progress. When was there any substantial progress in the political arena?

Since the Reagan days, that all conservs want so desperately want to resurrect, the media has been one of the main marketing agents of the 2 party system. They alone choose the candidates for the people. They push the candidates that will be the best for their interests, not what is best for the country. OK, some are "conserv" or "liberal" which is just crap! take a long look at the candidates they push--none are truly different from the other--all are spokesman for the status quo.

True candidates of change, either right or left, are not given adequate air time. They spend time trying to discredit these candidates by asking stupid, moronic question like "do you believe in UFOS?" Questions like that help make a person a "fringe" candidate.

It is sad that the American voter allows this type of manipulation to continue.......I guess the lack of education in the No Child Left Behind program is doing its job well.

It Is Nit Picking Time

Okay, the last couple of weeks before the Iowa Caucus and what is the media reporting?

1--Romney's "saw" comment
2--Obama's grandparent was a Muslim
3--Edward's house size
4--Clinton's...whatever
5--Kucinich's wife and height

My point is--should not the focus of any reporting to be to educate the caucus goers on the issues of these candidates? Maybe it is just me, but the media is doing all they can to keep the voters confused and ignorant of the real issues.

Am I the only person that is sick of the media and its lack of accurate reporting? Does anyone but me really care? Please stop it! Give the voter the information they need to make an accurate choice in the process. Only mindless morons are interested in the size of a house, or haircut, or whatever. Just f*cking stop it!

What Have They Done For You?

Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer—except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.
—George Orwell, Animal Farm

The beginning of political wisdom is the realization that despite everything you’ve always been taught, the government is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you.

Sometimes government functionaries and their private-sector supporters want simply to bully you, to dictate what you must do and what you must not do, regardless of whether anybody benefits from your compliance with these senseless, malicious directives. The drug laws are the best current example, among many others, of the government as bully. Our rulers presently enforce a host of laws that combine the worst aspects of puritanical priggishness and the invasive, pseudo-scientific, therapeutic state. They tolerate our pursuit of happiness only so long as we pursue it exclusively in officially approved ways: gin, yes; weed, no.

Notwithstanding the great delight that our rulers take in tormenting us with their absurdly inconsistent nanny-state commands, they generally have bigger fish to fry. Above all, the government and its special-interest backers want to take our money. If these people ran a store, they might aptly call it Robberies R Us. Their credo is simple and brazen: “you have money, and we want it.”

Unlike the sincere street criminal, however, the robber in official guise rarely puts his proposition to you in the blunt form of “your money or your life,” however much he intends to relate to you on precisely such terms. (If you doubt my characterization of these intentions, test what happens if you steadfastly resist at every step as the brigands escalate their threats: first ordering you to pay, then billing you for unpaid balances plus penalties and interest, sending you a summons, and ultimately beating you into submission or killing you for resisting arrest. Your sustained, open resistance always ends in the state’s use of violence against you, in either your forcible imprisonment or your removal from the land of the living, after which your memory will be defamed by your designation as a criminal—governments never settle for mere brutality, but always supplement it with unabashed presumptuousness.)

When I say “rarely,” I do not mean that the authorities never carry out their plunder blatantly. Throughout the land, for example, criminal courts, acting as de facto muggers, strip people of great sums of money in the aggregate by fining them for conduct that ought never to have been criminalized in the first place—drug-law violations, prostitution, gambling, antitrust-law violations, traffic infractions, reporting violations, doing business without a license, and innumerable other victimless “crimes.” The predatory judges and their police henchmen care no more about justice than I care to live on a diet of pig pancreas and boiled dandelions. They are simply taking people’s money because it’s there to be taken with minimal effort. In this manifestation, government amounts to a gigantic speed trap.

The more common way for government officials to rob you, however, involves their seizure of so-called taxes, which take countless forms, all of which are purported to be collected in order to finance—mirabile dictu—benefits for you. Such a deal! You’d have to be a real ingrate to complain about the government’s snatching your money for the express purpose of making your world a better place.

Sometimes the “political exchange” into which you are hauled kicking and screaming rests on such a ludicrous foundation, however, that honesty compels us to classify it, too, as a mugging. I have in mind such compassionately conservative policies as stripping taxpayers of hundreds of billions of dollars and handing the money over, for the most part, to rich people engaged in large-scale agribusiness and, sometimes, to landowners who don’t even bother to represent themselves as farmers. The apologies that the agribusiness whores in Congress make for this daylight robbery are so patently stupid and immoral that the whole shameless affair resembles nothing so much as the schoolyard bully’s grabbing the little kids’ lunch money and then taunting them aggressively, “If you don’t like it, why don’t you do something about it?” Every five years, when the farm-subsidy law expires and a new one is enacted, a few members of Congress pose as reformers of this piracy, but truly serious reforms never occur, and even the minor ones that come along from time to time prove unavailing, as the farm-booty interests invariably suck up “emergency relief” payments from the public treasury later on to make up for any shortfalls from the main subsidy programs.

Government sneak thieves, in contrast, fear that they may occupy more vulnerable positions than the agribusiness gang and similarly impudent special-interest groups cum legislators, so they dare not taunt the little kids so flagrantly. Instead, they specialize in legislative riders, budgetary add-ons and earmarks, logrolling, omnibus “Christmas tree” bills, and other gimmicks designed to conceal the size, the beneficiaries, and sometimes even the existence of their theft. At the end of the day, the taxpayers find there’s nothing left in the till, but they have little or no idea where all of their money went. Finding out by reading an appropriations act is next to impossible, inasmuch as these statutes are almost incomprehensible to everyone but the legislative insiders and their staff members who devise them and write them down in a combination of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.

For example, for many years, a single congressman from northeastern Pennsylvania—first Dan Flood and then Joe McDade—substantially enriched the anthracite coal interests of that region by inserting a brief, one-paragraph limitation rider in the annual appropriations act for the Department of Defense. The upshot of this obscure provision was that Pennsylvania anthracite was transported to Germany to provide heating fuel for U.S. military bases that could have been heated more cheaply by using local resources. This coals-to-Newcastle shenanigan was a classic sneak-thief gambit, a thing of legislative beauty, but every year’s budget contains thousands of schemes that operate with similar effect, if not in an equally audacious manner.

Unlike the government sneak thieves, the government con men openly advertise—indeed, expect to receive great credit for—certain uses of the taxpayers’ money that are represented as bringing great benefits to the general public or a substantial segment of it. Surely the best example of the con man’s art is so-called national defense, a bottomless pit into which the government now dumps, in various forms (many of them not officially classified as “defense”), approximately a trillion dollars of the taxpayers’ money each year. The government stoutly maintains, of course, that all ordinary Americans are constantly in grave danger of attack by foreigners—nowadays, by Islamic terrorists, in particular—and that these voracious wolves can be kept from the door only by the maintenance and active deployment of large armed forces equipped with ultra-sophisticated (and correspondingly expensive) equipment and stationed at bases in more than a hundred countries and on ships at sea around the globe.

Without dismissing the alleged dangers entirely, a sensible person quickly appreciates that the threat is slight—just do the math, using reasonable probability coefficients—whereas the cost of (purportedly) dealing with it is colossal. In short, as General Smedley Butler informed us more than seventy years ago, the modern military establishment, along with most of its blessed wars, is for the most part nothing but a racket. Worse, because of the way it engages and co-opts powerful elements of the private sector, it gives rise to a costly and dangerous form of military-economic fascism. Lately, the classic military-industrial-congressional complex has been supplemented by an even more menacing (to our liberties) security-industrial-congressional complex, whose aim is to enrich its participants by equipping the government for more effectively spying on us and invading our privacy in ways great and small.

Worst of all, despite everything that is claimed for the military’s protective powers, its operation and deployment overseas leave us ordinary Americans facing greater, not lesser, risk than we would otherwise face, because of the many enemies it cultivates who would have left us alone, if the U.S. military had only left them alone. (Yes, Virginia, they are over here because we’re over there.) The president routinely declares that the hugely increased expenditures and overseas deployments for military purposes since 2001 have reduced the threat of terrorism, but, in fact, terrorist incidents and deaths have increased, not decreased. Although privileged elements of the political class gain from militarism and neo-imperialist wars, the rest of us invariably lose economic well-being, real security, and all too often life itself. In 2004, people who said that security against terrorism was their top concern voted disproportionately, by an almost 7-to-1 margin, for George W. Bush. They had been conned.

Although the mugger, the sneak thief, and the con man are not the only types of government operatives, they make up a large proportion of the leading figures in government today. The lower ranks, especially in the various police agencies, have a disproportionate share of the bullies. No attempt to understand government can succeed without a clear understanding of these ideal types and each one’s characteristic modus operandi. With this understanding firmly in mind, you will remain permanently immune to the infectious swindle, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” The truth, of course, is the exact opposite: I say again, the government—this vile assemblage of bullies, muggers, sneak thieves, and con men—is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you.

An article written by Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute.

When Is A Lie Not A Lie?

That is an easy question to answer--in politics! Why? recently Rudy has been taken credit for the drop in crime in NYC, but the truth is that crime, according to FBI stats was already declining before Rudy took office. It was credited to former city admin and federal programs as the reason that it declined, not something MR. Wonderful did, with the exception of taking credit for the decline.

A lie is a lie--call it political spin, call it an embellishment, call it a fib, call it a horny horse--a lie is a lie.

It is time for the American people to realize that ALL lies are not acceptable--even in a campaign. Time for the media to stop the assistance of the spreading of lies, like manure on a lawn. But the political process is very similar to the media--crap in, crap out!

More Rats Leave The Ship

It was reported the other day that neocon pricks, Perle and Wolfowitz, that they were against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. More cowards speak. More neocons throwing Bush under the bus. That old saying about rats leaving a sinking ship seems to be holding true, huh?

Pretty soon with all these defections, it will be a solely Bush decision; no one else was for it.

Damn! you gotta love all these political cowards.

Let Kucinich Speak!

Since Mitt got 20+ minutes to explain religion to people, I think all candidates should have equal time. Let Kucinich explain height voting or veganism. The media needs to be fair and balanced, something they say they do, but in reality are nothing but bullshit spreaders.

Rudy could speak on how not to treat your kids. Or Paul on the title of "Dr. No".

My point is, the media gave Mitt a free campaign ad for 20+ minutes. The rest of the field deserves the same. Stop! Calling any of the media, fair and balanced; they ARE NOT! They will push the candidates they want you to know about and will assist you in your choices.

Wake up! you are being playing, dumbass!


NOTE: Jesus is doing well in the GOP primaries of '08. Huckabee, when asked about his surge in the polls, said it was beyond human capabilities and that it was GOD who is on his side. So there you are God has chosen you might as well stay in bed.

The Romney Speech

I have heard alot of the corporate political pundits say that Mitt's speech was a huge success. Where? Did he explain why Mormonism is not a cult? NO! Did he clear up any misconceptions about his religion? NO! Then what did he accomplish with his speech?

He looked presidential, I am told by news people. I say he still looks like a game show host. I did learn that Jesus is Jesus and the bible is the Bible. So for 20+ minutes we were subjected to a tap dance....all it did was confuse and misdirect....and apparently that was somehow all ok.

Since it was a political speech and was carried live on ALL news outlets, will the others get equal time? Why was he given the time, free of charge? IMO, it was to keep the scrapping between the Repub candidates going. The people want to know what the candidates will do for America; the media wants a negative cat fight. The media is doing NOTHING to further the cause of democracy. They however are chasing ratings, not news.

More Good News From Iraq?

It seems with the lull in the violence in Baghdad, refugees from Syria, mostly are starting to return home. This is good news right? Not really! These people are returning home for various reasons like limited cash, discrimination, unemployment, harsh living conditions. It has more to do with finances then it does with the success of the "surge".

When the well off refugees, like doctors, lawyers, teachers and such start returning home from Jordan, then success can be declared by the admin. until then nothing is a success.

The surge is successful? Originally, it was put into place to help give the Iraqi govt room for reconciliation and progress. That part FAILED! Now the Us is rewriting the script to make it look like the plan was an undeniable success. STOP IT!

I is true that Baghdad is a bit quieter than before, violence is down, but that is basically because most neighborhoods have been ethically cleansed; they are now totally Sunni or Shi'a. There is the reason for the decline in violence; there is no need now.

The question now should be, with refugees returning to Baghdad, what will they find? And will it lead to more violence?

BTW, true, Baghdad is calmer than before, but wait! Northern Iraq is exploding daily--killings, bombings, and such. But it is kept fairly under raps to promote the bullshit of a successful surge.

YO! Dumbass! you are being played like a cheap flute! Wake up!

CHUQ

New National Poll

The new national poll for republicans show a surging Huckabee.

Huckabee--20%
Rudy--17%
Mitt--13%
McCain--13%

But will the trend continue? IMO, no it will not. Huckabee will begin losing luster when they enter into the larger states.

The Media Did It

I have been watching politics for many many years. I have been writing and analyzing politics for just as long. So when Bill Clinton goes on with a speech that is blaming the media for Hil's slide in the polls, it is, IMO a sign that the campaign is going down the toilet.

In the past it was a sure sign that you were losing your bid when you start blaming the media for you loss of support.

Clinton is losing support among women and blacks--so now they go on with it is the media's fault. It has nothing to do with the fact that people see her as not a good thing for the country. They possibly see her as "business as usual".

Her "inevitability" looks less and less. Obama seems to be more appealing for now and that is why the Clinton camp is pulling all strings to make him look less acceptable. We will see how this plays with the American voter.

A Wasted Vote

Have you heard this rationale? That if you vote for say the Green Party or a Libertarian that it is a wasted vote? What a crock of crap! They want you to believe this sh*t so that the one party with two branches retains control.

How can a vote for someone that you believe in be wasted? Voting for someone that you feel offers the most for the country; is NOT a wasted vote! Do not let these sanctimonious a/holes dictate to you who to vote for. If you fall for this sh*t then you are a weak kneed coward!

Let us talking about voting period. Have you heard that if you do not vote, then you are somehow unpatriotic and a fool? have you heard this crap? I say, if the candidates do not offer change from the position that we are now in, why vote for someone you do not believe in?

This is just another ploy to control the outcome of an election. It is done by both parties, none of them are exempt.

You DO what you think is best for the country and your family. Do not let the dicks dictate to you. you are in control of your vote, if you choose not to use it, then NO ONE has an opinion on your choice.

We Must Win In Iraq!

This is the call of the conservs. McCain has said that all is gpoing well and to give the troops a chance to win. IMO, "win" is a subjective term. Its definition will depend on who is talking and what constitutes "win".

I have a thought, yes it is early but it is caffeine fed. Since the "surge" is being proclaimed a success, I say declare a victory and bring the troops home. That is as easy as it gets.

This will not be done. Why? It is not about a win per se, it is more like how long we must keep the troops in place to protect US corporate interests. If YOU TRULY WANT a win, then declare it won and come home. Sorry, but it cannot get any simplier.

Health Care For The benefit Of The People

OK, Congress and the Pres are just going crazy with all the restrictions and such pertaining to health care. The anti-smoking campaign, anti-drinking, weight control just to mention a few. But who do they really benefit? The people? Yes, the point is to get Americans more health conscience. But is that the sole reason? Not really.

It is to the benefit of the Insurance companies. They keep charging premiums and the people keep paying and if these programs are successful, the companies will be paying out less. What? They will make more money than they do today? Bingo!

Basically health care is a gamble. You are betting you will get sick and they are betting you will not. But it is always in their favor. They will do NOTHING that will benefit the people.

Economy Looks Good But Slow

All the news from the markets look good. Investors are bottom feeding. Production is up. Yada, yada.

That is the story that the media pushes on the country. The truth is not so rosy. housing industry is in the toilet. Financial markets are needing a transfusion of cash to survive. Foreclosures are up 94% over last year. Rising gas prices and soaring food prices. Wages are stagnant.

Now if you are a real working stiff the economy is in a recession and has been so for at least a year, most likely longer; it will depend on who you talk with and where they live.

So take the reports on CNN or CNBC or wherever with a grain of salt. ask yourself if YOU, personbally, are better off today than last year. There will be the REAL answer to what shape the economy is in.