Kristen Gillibrand is now hearing noise about running for President. Ms Gillibrand is presidentially attractive, intelligent and a clever speaker but she just doesn’t have the gravitas to make this run now. I’ve seen her in two instances get her ass handed to her on national TV. The first time was in a debate with Michele Bachman who she should have taken apart. She had all the facts at her fingertips but didn’t make her points, simply because Bachman wouldn’t let her get a word in. That showed weakness. Anyone who can’t bury Michele Bachman in a debate has no business running for president. The second time was recently when she let Martha Radatz twist the discussion everyway she wanted to when she, Gillibrand, had all the facts on her side. All she had to do was to keep returning the discussion back to where she wanted it but she failed to do that. It’s a matter of strength and Kristen doesn’t have that yet.
But maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe the only thing wrong with Gillibrand’s presence is in her vocal chords, which produce the voice of a young girl and therefore give the impression of her not being strong enough. I don’t know which is right but I do know that in order to get the respect that her intelligence and command of her subject demands she must fix one or the other.
I have been following Senator Gillibrand’s fight to get sexual assault out of the chain of command in the military. She is spot on, both in her opposition to having the chain of command handle the problem and in her refusal to take other major crimes out of her bill. She has thus far been unable to get the numbers to back her bill but let’s hope that she is successful eventually. The military has been grossly inadequate in solving this problem and sooner or later, if it is not solved, a larger problem will emerge. That problem will be women’s role in the military in general.
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In the discussion on Iran. Again Martha Raddatz sounds like she’s rooting against an agreement there. What s wrong with her? Anyone who doesn’t want a solution to Iran is nuts. Not any solution, but the right solution, is the best of all possible worlds. It is very indicative of where the neocoms sit and probably most of the military industrial complex, when one looks at the big Bret Stephens lip slip on recently. He was asked the question: “Should we be looking for a treaty solution?” and his first word was, ”NO.”. Then he recovered himself and started to talk about the “right” treaty. It was an obvious faux pa but a dead giveaway as to how certain portions of our own government are already looking more to war than to peace. That’s it guys, fuck the kids who’ll die, as long as you can make a buck,
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The GOP is at it again. Scott Walker is being hyped for a 2016 presidential run. Back to the seven dwarfs of 2012. This guy often makes Perry and Bachman look thoughtful..
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If there is anything we need to know about the Orwellian leanings of the guys who run our spy agencies all we have to do is look to Keith Alexander the director of NSA, who recently called for the outlawing of any reporting on his agency’s secret program of spying on his fellow citizens.
“We ought to come up with a way of stopping it…(reporting) It’s wrong to allow this to go on.”
Sure, Keith, why the hell don’t we just throw them all in jail, like you’d like to do with Edward Snowden. If any of you wonder, Thomas Paine is currently spinning in his grave. Where was Alexander trained, Moscow? Is this clown too stupid to understand that what he is doing is the absolute antithesis of everything this country stands for? If he is, why e hell does he have this job?
Is it possible that our intelligence head has less intelligence than a slug and that the only criteria for his job is having kept his nose clean and not stepped on any toes in the military industrial hierarchy?
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I want to feel really sorry for James Carville, sitting next to his wife Mary Matalin, his head in his hands as she makes a complete ass of herself on national TV. Of course, he did marry her and he is just getting what he deserves. The woman is an intellectual embarrassment and a political disaster. She will espouse any concept that is part of the far right party line, without any investigation or any need for logical thought and she does it in an annoying voice like rubbing her teeth on broken glass.
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I can’t believe that Henry Winkler, an actor that I have always been fond of can sell out to a degree that he is shilling for Quicken Loans phoniest of bank schemes, the reverse mortgage. It can’t be that he needs the dough. He has a successful series now, even if he didn’t save when he had his mega series in the past. What makes a guy do something like this?
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A court in Canada has ruled that Indians in the Ecuadorean rain forests can collect over $18 billion in damages to their land and health done by Chevron during oil extraction from their areas. Since the award the victims have been trying to collect their money but Chevron is hardballing them. Maybe it’s time for a sniper the next time a Chevron executive visits the drilling sites.
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And let’s talk about fearless congressmen. Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Tex) who has gone on record about the Keystone southern pipeline that is now running and leaking its way through Texas.
“The State of Texas has a proven track record of successful oversight of the oil and gas industry, including pipelines, and I am confident that they will be diligent in ensuring the pipeline’s safety. The keystone pipelines will create jobs and help reduce dependence on oil supplies from unfriendly nation.”
This moron doesn’t seem to know that all the oil piped down through Texas, at least all that doesn’t spill out all over the surrounding states, will be going to China. As far as jobs goes, that big lie has already been exposed by every paper and station that has managed to avoid big payoffs from the fossil fuel industry. Oh, yeah. Hall didn’t manage to avoid such a payoff. He grabbed $59,500 from the oil and gas industry before the 2012 elections and has already glommed up another $12,500 for the next election in 2014. He has done this, of course, in the rue nature of Texas neutrality. As if that was not enough, he has earned as much a $1 million from North East Trading Company, an outfit that holds mineral rights along the Barnett Shale.ow this will help reduce anything but
Of course it’s not just the Republicans who are on the take and ignoring their constituents. The Democrats are just as crooked and just as big liars. Rep Gene Green (D-TX) has come out with a mouthful of drivel that more than matches Hall’s comments. This crook got $97,000 from oil and gas interests during the 2012 campaign and has already glommed up another $31,100 in preparation for the 2014 run. How the hell can we ever solve the country’s problems if we continue to elect thieves and scum that are only interested in lining their pockets and the hell with the people who elected them.
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I find it fascinating, that John McCain will go to the Ukraine and encourage demonstrators to continue their fight against the government but the same senator will come down on the side of brutal police and corporate financed security against demonstrators in his own country as he did with the Occupy demonstrations here a couple of years ago, There is nothing our country needs more right now, than enormous demonstrations against the corporate power structure that is crushing democracy. The police brutality against a few hundred or a few thousand demonstrators that was carried out against the Occupy or pipeline demonstrators would not exist if the police were faced with tens of thousands of demonstrators who could easily overwhelm the forces set out against them. There is no better way to put a cowardly bully in check than to line him up against one thousand to one odds. We proved it in the sixties and seventies, it would work just as well now.
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The Snowden revelations continue to bite the NSA in the ass. Two federal judges have now come out with two interpretations of whether or not the law allowing NSA to collect our phone conversations en-mass is constitutional. This will, I’m sure, end up in the supreme court, but meanwhile the argument goes on and the two poles are being represented by two very clear arguments. On the right we have the argument that we already give almost all the information available about us to any number of internet sources that then use it to track us, guess at our wants and needs and sell us all manner of unnecessary and usually unwanted goods, so why shouldn’t the NSA be able to do the same thing to keep us safe?
The other side of the argument says, that the difference is that we give the information to the Internet. We have done no such thing with the NSA, nor have they asked us to. They have just taken it. My telephone is not the same as the Internet and I have given no one the right to listen to my conversations on it. As far as the protection aspect, a recent panel organized by the president and employing former head of the CIA as well as a number of security officials found no instance where the NSA’s theft of our phone calls led to averting any terrorist activity, This despite the lies that NSA director James Clapper told congress under oath in is interview.
When Snowden said that he won, be wasn’t speaking about any personal war with NSA, he was speaking about the, now given, fact that he had called attention to the NSA abuses and had opened them up to the scrutiny of the American people and the congress.
The statements by any number of government officials, including the president, are, that if Snowden feels he is innocent and that what he did was in the public interest, he should come back to this country and with a lawyer present himself to the courts. This is naivety taken almost to the point of a mental disorder. Only a fool would think he could possibly get a fair trial in this climate, especially since he has been charged under the 1917 law that set as its criteria, and was aimed at, espionage. Snowden hasn’t committed espionage but a little detail like that doesn’t seem to bother the government. In addition, since he is charged with crimes that involve national security, he doesn’t have the right to a lawyer, nor does he have any rights. They could just throw him in jail and forget about him, as has been done with a number of suspected but not proven enemies of the state, of late.
People are constantly attacking Snowden about being in Russia. He doesn’t want to be in Russia, he got stuck there when the US government revoked his passport while he was in a Russian airport. He has tried to arrange transport to another country, actually a number of them, but his enemies in the US government have cleverly kept him from going anywhere else by pressuring all the countries which he has attempted to enter. They understand that his current residence in Russia makes him look bad to the average, dumb redneck, who thinks he loves Commies and there are a lot of dumb rednecks in this country- and they’re not all in the south.
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The latest news on energy efficient technology comes from Ford motor company. They are developing a solar powered car. I won’t go into the tech specifics because they are still in early development and that isn’t the story anyway. The real story is the continued search by a major industry for a fossil fuel replacement. I am taking the naïve position that Ford is indeed reputable in this endeavor. This is, of course, as opposed to most of the major corporate red herrings that are actually thrust out there to cover attempts to squelch legitimate attempts to get rid of our planet’s largest poisoners of the land.
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Chuck Schumer, who should know better, in a session with Stephanopoulos speaks his mind about Ed Snowden. He believes that Snowden should come back and face trial without any preconditions. In this he seems to be with the great majority of politicians. What neither Schumer nor any of his other fellow politicians mentions is that our government has shown neither the will nor the ability to conduct a fair trial for whistleblowers and that only a fool would, at this point in history, put himself into the hands of such a bunch of hangmen. If the politicians want a trial maybe they should indict, James Clapper, the degenerate perjurer and head of the NSA. This disgraced liar, flat out lied to congress when asked if his agency was tapping phones across the country. The failure to hold him accountable for his crime, is the exact reason why Snowden should not present himself for any kind of trail by our rigged courts.