Bits & Pieces #30

 

 

The latest news out of our justice community.  The filing of a Freedom of information Act brief by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has revealed that the FBI was in possession of information indicating that certain leaders of the Occupy movement had been targeted for assassination during rallies against Wall Street ad corporate America.

 

It seems that the FBI, along with Homeland Security, the US military and private corporations, ( an interesting and frightening mix)  had been monitoring the Occupy movement for possible terrorist activities when the assassination plans came to light. The documents unearthed by PCJF show no attempt by any of the governmental justice organizations to stop the plot or even to inform the targeted members of Occupy that it existed.

 

It seems that our country really has turned into a government backed oligarchy and this is exactly why we need Occupy and groups like PCJF to protect us against our own government and the corporate oligarchs that control it.

 

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While the nation, especially the northeast, is justifiably outraged by the southern Republican House members refusing to consider the hurricane Sandy Aid bill, the stupidity of its framers have definitely left them a few outs.  What the hell do funding for  fisheries in Alaska and museum roofs, both of which, are in the bill, have t do with aid to hurricane victims in New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island?  It’s these kinds of greedy perks by dishonest legislators that anger citizens and slow down the legislative process. This bill should have been about nothing but hurricane aid and nothing else. To sneak in these unrelated items just to help local politicians is dishonest, deceitful and self defeating. Whoever allowed them to get into the bill is just giving Republicans an excuse to hold up the process.

 

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The Republicans have had many low points in the last few years including the birther baloney and the No Niggers in the White House signs I spotted at a Tea Party rally in CT but for a true sleazy move, the noise that they have been making about Hilary Clinton’s  current illness really puts the point on the pencil. She’s lying, it’s a fake; she doesn’t want to appear before the committee investigating Benghazi. Every Right wing asshole from John Bolton to the fat radio drug addict with the big mouth and the small brain has had something to say on the matter.

 

If only any of them could read. If they could and they browsed anything but gay porn they might have noticed that Hilary has already taken complete responsibility for what happened and ordered all the changes recommended by the committee.

 

Oh well, the stupidity of the fanatic right just seems to go on and on.

 

*****

 

Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas has made it a point on TV that he will vote against former Republican Senator Chuck Hagal for Secretary of Defense because Hagel once stated that we weren’t going to win the war in Iraq with another surge. Cotton claims that he was a soldier in Iraq at the time and the statement by Hagel broke his morale. Gee Tom, too bad about your morale; in fact, the statement was true. Neither that surge nor any other, gave us a win in Iraq. We finally got smart and just pulled out leaving a decimated country, fierce political strife and all the oil we thought we were going to get out of that phony war.

 

Maybe it’s because Hagel served in ‘Nam and has a sense of the futility of these wars for profit that he will be a good Secretary of Defense. Maybe not, but it’s really refreshing to hear someone speak the truth and not just mimic what a clown like Dubya was saying. If you don’t like Hagel, that’s one thing, but don’t condemn him because you don’t understand what he’s talking about. We all know you’re from Arkansas, Tom, and we already have too many dunces in congress, we don’t need one more.

 

 

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Michael Moore really puts the screws to Bill Kristol, neo-com jerk-of-the-year, scribbling in the right wing rag, The Weekly Standard, who attacks Chuck Hagel over his statement that we were in Iraq because of oil.

 

Kristol seems to thing that this is heresy, but Moore embarrassingly points out that such super right  pundits as Alan Greenspan; “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil” Ann Coulter;   “Of course we should go to war for oil… we need oil. That’s a good reason to go to war.”  or general John Abizaid; “ Of course it’s about oil, it’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that.” or fanatic right winger Midge Decter, “We’re not in the middle east to bring sweetness and light to the whole world… We’re in the middle east because we… depend on something that comes from the Middleast, namely oil.”

 

These right wing heavyweights all seem to think the same way Chuck Hagel and a lot of liberals do about Iraq and oil so maybe Kristol should just sit on it.

 

*****

 

Watched a movie called Bullworth the other night. It was made in 1998, that’s fourteen years ago, and in it Warren Beatty brilliantly satirizes exactly the same political/financial mess that still devours our country. Yes, even fourteen years ago the financial sector was trying successfully to subvert the political sector by buying politicians wholesale.

 

I really don’t know why I’m surprised about this because it has almost always been the same. It was the same with the robber barons in the post Civil War days and again just prior to the great depression.

 

I understand the desire to have more money than God but I’m still amazed that these industrious, entrepreneurial, ultimately successful men can’t see that by crushing the labor force they are destroying their own markets. Henry Ford understood it, Warren Buffet understands it but not many others seem to.

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if these greedy bastards understood that by taking just a little less profit they could benefit the whole country by an enormous degree. I mean, how many yachts does a guy need?

 

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Rush “The Idiot” Limbaugh really went over the wall recently on his radio show when he did a diatribe on how normalizing same sex marriage was part of a movement to normalize pedophilia. What this degenerate drug addict failed to mention was that the only group seeking to indulge in pedophilia in any significant way is the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, a serious right wing organization. Only a bigoted buffoon like Limbaugh would fail to understand this.

 

*****

 

 

I am not a conspiracy theorist but there is some serous noise out there pointing to the Bush administration as the propagator or at the very least the enabler of the 911 attack on our country. That noise has not come from conspiracy nuts but from the government commission that was appointed to investigate the attack and all its ramifications. That committee was shut down before it could publish its final conclusions but before it was disbanded it was quoted as saying that it was lied to by most of the government agencies that it interviewed and it strongly believed that there was more to the attack then had been reported by either the media or the government.

 

*****

 

John McCain on Face the Nation proving again that we made the right decision in 2008, attacks Obama’s decision to pull the troops out of Afghanistan this spring, saying that he has ignored the military this time as he did in pulling the troops out of Iraq and as he did with the surge.  That’s right John, that’s why we have civilian authority over the military in this country so someone is able to decide based on what’s right for the country instead of who wins the fight.

 

McCain thinks that this decision will prevent us from achieving victory. What victory? What is victory in Afghanistan? There is no such thing as victory there, that was decided the moment Bush, Cheney and their brain dead neocoms invaded a country to kill one man. Afghanistan may be a ratty little country that is barely out of the stone age, but they kicked the crap out of Russia and now they’re doing it to us. What McCain just doesn’t get is that there could never be a victory from two wars that started without goals.

 

We are a country full of people who think they are very smart but in the last sixty years we have now entered goalless wars in Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. Just think about the definition of a person who continually repeats the same act while expecting a different result.

 

*****

 

There is a full page ad in Tuesday the 15th’s New York Times paid for by the Emergency Committee for Israel, attacking Chuck Hagel and asking that people call Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand and urge them to vote against Hagel’s appointment as Defense Secretary. The headline signatory of the ad was the late Ed Koch who was a hell of a mayor but had lately faded into senility. I think he was emblematic of those who posted the ad.

 

Hagel will be an excellent Secretary of Defense, the best one for this country that Obama could appoint. I say, this country, because that is, after all, that’s what we are speaking of, when we speak of the cabinet…. Isn’t it?

 

Look, there has never been, and probably never will be, a better friend to Israel that the United Sates and that’s as it should be, but more and more lately, despite our proven friendship with Israel, pro- Israel, American citizens have been pushing agendas that are more friendly to Israel than they are to their own country and that’s wrong. Schumer and Gillibrand should vote their conscience (I know that’s an antiquated concept) in this matter and those misguided elements that care less about their own country than they do about a foreign one should hold their peace.