BartBlog

September 17, 2007

American History in Latin America

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Steve @ 6:21 am

Writer Gore Vidal called the USA the “United States of Amnesia”. I think you’ll have to admit that there’s some truth in it.

The “War on Terror” is, needless to say, also a “War for Democracy”. The Australian journalist John Pilger has visited a lot of countries, and in his latest documentary, he shows us the influence of US foreign politics on Democracy in Latin America. He especially features Venezuela, but also Guatemala, Chile (they had their 9/11, too) and Bolivia. If you have some time (about 90 minutes), go and watch the movie War on Democracy to see the consequences of US interventions and learn a bit about your history.

Change

Filed under: Uncategorized — Twisted_Colour @ 6:21 am

Using electroencephalographs, which measure neuronal impulses, the researchers examined activity in a part of the brain — the anterior cingulate cortex — that is strongly linked with the self-regulatory process of conflict monitoring.The match-up was unmistakable: respondents who had described themselves as liberals showed “significantly greater conflict-related neural activity” when the hypothetical situation called for an unscheduled break in routine.

Conservatives, however, were less flexible, refusing to deviate from old habits “despite signals that this … should be changed.”

Yep.

Even A Broken Clock…

Filed under: Commentary — macrobank @ 6:20 am

I read Bart’s “beatdown” of Medved regarding gays serving openly in the military. I move to strike as non-responsive.

Let me start by saying I have nothing against anybody in the LGBT community. I believe that in the wide spectrum of human sexual response, homosexuality is most properly viewed as just another normal part of the continuum. I believe same-sex couples should be allowed to marry or divorce or anything else their heterosexual counterparts are allowed to do. My response to the “man-marries-sheep” obfuscation is: “Yes, they SHOULD be allowed to marry…just as soon as the sheep can give recognizable consent and sign the marriage license.”

In short, I don’t care who’s sleeping with whom, so long as someone’s sleeping with me…

(more…)

Our mortgage companies sneeze, and Britain has a bank run

Filed under: Uncategorized — JosephEBacon @ 6:19 am

Bank Runs, you gotta be kidding!

From the UK Guardian

Britain’s house price growth will be halved next year as the global financial crisis exacerbates the impact of rising mortgage rates, according to Nationwide, the biggest mortgage lender.

After the dramatic bail-out of high street bank Northern Rock underlined the impact of the American ‘sub-prime’ mortgage crisis on Britain’s financial sector, Fionnuala Earley, Nationwide’s group economist, said she expected house price inflation to slow to around 3 per cent next year.

Thousands of anxious customers queued outside Northern Rock branches for a second day yesterday, ignoring calls for calm from the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, and the bank’s management, and sparking fears of a full-blown ‘run’ on the bank.

Well, I guess Andrew Mellon’s famous quote is in order when he said “In a depression, wealth goes back to its’ natural owners…”

James Wolcott on FREDERICK of HOLLYWOOD®

Filed under: Guest Comment,Uncategorized — JosephEBacon @ 6:18 am

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2007/09/future-presiden.html

Future President of Petticoat Junction Seeks Florida Fun

Sopping up gravy wherever he goes, Republican hopeful Fred Thompson pays his respects to the good people gathered around the filling station.

“It’s good to be back among neighbors,” he said. “You know, in Tennessee, every time I had a day or two I always would try and find an excuse to get down to Florida. Well, it looks like I found a pretty doggone good one. I’m going to be down here a whole lot.”

One wonders why the former Senator from Tennessee was always itching so bad to get down to Florida. It’s not as if Tennessee and Florida are right next door to each other; it’s not a brief commute. Given my extensive reading of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels, where rich women with coral toenails hide their inscrutable pasts and bitter sorrows behind tinted sunglasses as their nymphomaniac stepdaughters go missing, I have a fair idea of what might have been enticing the Fredmobile southward on the flimiest of excuses, but it would be imprudent to speculate further. I do think it’s fair to speculate how long someone with Thompson’s history as a politician, lobbyist, and film-TV actor can get by with this Goober-Gomer “doggone” shtick. It’s true that Reagan had his folksy side, complete with cheeks that blushed like painted roses, but he also delivered fully-rounded speeches with rhetorical bridges and perorations; he didn’t just show up as if to shuck corn. I will say this, though: Thompson’s somewhat lackadaisacal lope is a smart counterfoil to Mitt Romney’s executive-vampire zeal and glinty opportunism–maybe it takes a real fake to show up a fake fake. Thompson at least seems to be composed of organic material; Romney is pure vinyl exterior down to the empty core.

Don’t they jail opposition politicians in third world countries?

Filed under: Uncategorized — mmorrow @ 6:16 am

I was extremely surprised to run across this recently. I mean, I read the papers, watch CNN a little in the morning while getting dressed, and voraciously read lefty political blogs. Yet I didn’t know that Don Siegelman, a candidate for governor of Alabama, was apparently railroaded into jail. The New York Times:

Questions About a Governor’s Fall

Published: June 30, 2007

It is extremely disturbing that Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama, was hauled off to jail this week. There is reason to believe his prosecution may have been a political hit, intended to take out the state’s most prominent Democrat, a serious charge that has not been adequately investigated. The appeals court that hears his case should demand answers, as should Congress.

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September 16, 2007

Ol’ Hill Does It Again! -Grim

Filed under: Uncategorized — grimgold @ 10:58 pm

Once again, if most of the money is taken out of politics by requiring free television spots, the same as weather is required by the FCC, this sort of thing would diminish, don’t you think?

Hillary Fundraiser Curses Out GOP
When Florida’s Republican Party attacked Hillary Clinton for enlisting a fundraiser once accused of racketeering, the fundraiser responded with a profanity-laced tirade — and later apologized.

(more…)

Progress in Iraq

Filed under: Toon — Volt @ 9:30 pm

George Lakoff: Whose Betrayal?

Filed under: Opinion — Volt @ 5:57 pm



George Lakoff, The Huffington Post, September 16, 2007

Betrayal is everywhere in the news. We learned today from the Washington Post that Alan Greenspan said, in his new book, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Not keeping our country safe, as the troops were told. Not democracy. Not Weapons of Mass Destruction. Not al Qaeda. Oil! All those lives and maimings about oil! Are you shocked, shocked? It is Betrayal of Trust of the highest order: “Politically inconvenient … everyone knows…” Oil was not discussed at the Petraeus hearings. The silence in Washington has been polite.

MoveOn’s “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” ad has raised vital questions that need a thorough and open discussion. The ad worked brilliantly to reveal, via its framing, an essential but previously hidden truth: the Bush Administration and its active supporters have betrayed the trust of the troops and the American people.

MoveOn hit a nerve. In the face of truth, the right-wing has been forced to change the subject — away from the administration’s betrayal of trust and the escalating tragedy of the occupation to of all things, an ad! To take the focus off maiming and death and the breaking of our military, they talk about etiquette. The truth has reduced them to whining: MoveOn was impolite. Rather than face the truth, they use character assassination against an organization whose three million members stand for the highest patriotic principles of this country, the first of which is a commitment to truth.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich, right about so many things, got it wrong when he criticized the ad in his Sunday column.

He overlooks the fact that the “distraction” he worries about has led the supporters of the Iraq occupation to endlessly evoke the Betrayal of Trust frame, identifying themselves with the Betrayer of Trust in that frame. The betrayers themselves took MoveOn’s bait.

Thanks to their making it a national issue, we can now proceed to discuss their Betrayal of Trust on the national stage they have conveniently provided. The importance of this frame is discussed in “Betrayal of Trust: Beyond Lying” — Chapter 6 of Don’t Think of an Elephant!

Read More Here

The Story Of Huey And Mongo. -Grimgold

Filed under: Uncategorized — grimgold @ 11:53 am

Once upon a time there were two entrepreneurs, Huey and Mongo. They began a business appropriately called Humongous Brothers Inc.

Since there was demand for large rocks that needed to be hauled out of quarries and plopped into landscaping projects, the brothers began driving to quarries, picking up, and delivering rocks. This was soon followed by the developing of connections to get humongous boulders from all over the world, for delivery to people who had the cash and wanted that big, pretty rock in their front yard, or mall entrance.

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September 15, 2007

Frank Rich: Will the Democrats Betray Us?

Filed under: Opinion — Volt @ 10:18 pm

Frank Rich, The New York Times, September 15, 2007

“Sir, I don’t know, actually”: The fact that America’s surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week’s festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.

Not that many Americans were watching. The country knew going in that the White House would win its latest campaign to stay its course of indefinitely shoveling our troops and treasure into the bottomless pit of Iraq. The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush’s troop “reduction” are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.

On the sixth anniversary of the day that did not change everything, General Petraeus couldn’t say we are safer because he knows we are not. Last Sunday, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the C.I.A.’s Osama bin Laden unit, explained why. He wrote in The Daily News that Al Qaeda, under the de facto protection of Pervez Musharraf, is “on balance” more threatening today that it was on 9/11. And as goes Pakistan, so goes Afghanistan. On Tuesday, just as the Senate hearings began, Lisa Myers of NBC News reported on a Taliban camp near Kabul in an area nominally controlled by the Afghan government we installed. It is training bomb makers to attack America.

Little of this registered in or beyond the Beltway. New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we’re back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, “is virtually impotent.” Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America’s P.R. in the jihadists’ world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international “special sports envoy.” We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.

Read More Here

When Harry Met Nancy

Filed under: Toon — Volt @ 4:33 pm

Mailbag

Filed under: Uncategorized — Bart @ 9:55 am

It is a constant campaign to falsely define anyone or anything. How could they turn a word which means free thinker and generous, liberal, into something bad.

Bart says: Because the pink tutu liberals just stood there and TOOK it until the word became a negative. When you allow the Fascist bastards to define you, you look bad. 

My hat is off to Hill, in the Dem Debate, when asked if she was a liberal, she replied she was a progressive. She dealt them a severe beating. All that hard work by the Repubs to vilify that word went down the drain.It’ll take another dozen years to destroy the meaning of progressive.

Rudedog

More Monkey Mail

Filed under: Uncategorized — Bart @ 9:50 am


Hey, just wanted to know if you’d heard about the latest campaign contribution scandal?? Are you a betting man?? I’d be willing to bet that Mr. Hsu is a Chinese government agent.? I’d bet anything on it? You’d think she’d be smarter than to use Chinese government agents as bag men AGAIN to fund her campaign.? You sure this woman can run the country?? She doesn’t seem too bright.

Bart says: She’s getting money from thousands of sources.
Meanwhile campaign aides for Rudy, McCain and Romney are busy selling cocaine and trying to blow 2 cops, (Florida, Minnesota) but let’s concentrate on the money because two GOP bastards trying to blow two cop isn’t news, right?

WHORE USA Today newspaper

Filed under: Uncategorized — Bart @ 9:46 am

I was reading their “25 year” special and they were so proud to recommend Clinton be impeached for “not putting the country first,” as tho his sex life was OUR business.

Now that madman King George has set the Middle East aflame with his crimes,
WHORE USA Today would rather go out of business than call for his impeachment.

To me, that’s the very definition of a political whore. They wanted Clinton thrown out of office for a BJ but 4,000 dead soldiers and maybe 50,000 maimed soldiers means NOTHING to them because it doesn’t involve Clinton’s zipper.

Why does WHORE USA Today think a BJ is worse than 4,000 dead soldiers?
Because they are Republican whores, that’s why.
They see their job as protecting Bush and attacking Democrats.

Ayatollah: Bush will be tried for Iraq crimes

Filed under: Uncategorized — Bart @ 9:09 am

Link

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Bush will be called to account for the U.S.-led invasion.

“A day will come that the current U.S. president and officials will be tried in an international supreme court for the catastrophes they caused in Iraq,” he said.

“Americans will have to answer for why they don’t end occupation of Iraq and why
waves of terrorism and insurgency have overwhelmed the country,” he added.
“It will not be like this forever and some day they will be stopped as happened
to Hitler, Saddam and certain other European leaders.”

Bart says: “Waves of terrorism” is what Bush needs to steal that oil. If Iraq was at peace, reporters could drive to the oil fields and ask where all those millions of barrels disappear to every day – and why there are no meters on the pumps.

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