Once Were Good.

Once upon time the US was a good-guy in this world, a model of what democracy represented. What it could do. How it could change the world for the better. After the last ten years, I'm not so sure we're projecting that image.

We've now given the world two ten-year wars against muslims, one on pretty much trumped-up charges. Millions of civilian deaths. Torture. Corruption. Our media is alive with constant threats of a third war. We given un-ending support of Israel's UN violations and theft of Palestinian lands. We've thrown in a couple of financial meltdowns costing the world trillions. We're deep in debt with a stagnant economy. Corporations and the wealthy rule the land. They've spent the last few decades exporting our technology and jobs to cheap labor markets around the world effectively gutting our economy. The wealthy own more, and the poor less, than at any time in the last 70 years. A major news network has turned into a propaganda tool unlike anything the country has seen before and has convinced many of the poor that because our president is a marxist, socialist, kenyan, muslim, they should cut taxes on the rich instead of having universal health care. Crazy fundamentalist christian right-wingers are re-writing science and history books to fit their dogma. Our government is broken, corrupt and gridlocked. Right-wing idiots are driving the political debate. Race relations are at a low point and gun sales are at an all time high.

The rest of the world must think we've gone crazy. They might be right.

tnb

The War Party

We have two major papers calling for pretty violent stuff. What happened to all those anti-war baby boomers? I guess they grew up to be teabaggers?

Jonah Goldberg at the Chicago Tribune wonders why we don't kill Julian Assange.
Kill Assange? - chicagotribune.com

And David Broder suggesting that a war with Iran would be a good thing.
War with Iran


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Freedom - What Kind do you want?

A couple of lines from a good post by Maxine Udal (Girl Economist).

Freedom Is Not Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose - Maxine Udall (girl economist)

..."But, wait," you say, "this can't be right. The Republicans stand for freedom, liberty, and the American way." To which I say, "Well, you've got a funny idea of freedom." You see, the last time I checked, the US Constitution protects me from the US government. As far as I can tell, there is nothing that protects me from large corporations, except the US government and the court system. And these days, the US government and the courts, largely thanks the dominant Republican economic philosophy, aided and abetted by the bipartisan repeal of Glass-Stegall in 1999, aren't doing such a great job of this.

...Markets, free or otherwise, will not automatically fix all harms or yield all benefits. That's why, to be successful, capitalism requires regulation and fine tuning.

Hell, corporations rule the land. With corporate cash and the corporate-media propaganda machines, the government of the people, by the people and for the people has ceased to exist.

tnb

Invisible Hand

Spreading the Wealth.

Harold Meyerson - When Tea Party wants to go back, where is it to?

The Tea Partyers are right to be wary of income redistribution, but if they had even the slightest openness to empiricism, they'd see that the redistribution of the past 30 years has all been upward -- radically upward. From 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to the bottom 90 percent of Americans -- effectively, all but the rich -- increased from 64 percent to 65 percent, ....... that means that the average income of Americans in the bottom 90 percent was growing, too -- from $17,719 in 1950 to $30,941 in 1980 -- a 75 percent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars.

Since 1980, it's been a very different story. The economy has continued to grow handsomely, but for the bottom 90 percent of Americans, it's been a time of stagnation and loss. Since 1980, the share of all income in America going to the bottom 90 percent has declined from 65 percent to 52 percent. In actual dollars, the average income of Americans in the bottom 90 percent flat-lined -- going from the $30,941 of 1980 to $31,244 in 2008.

In short, the economic life and prospects for Americans since the Reagan Revolution have grown dim, while the lives of the rich -- the super-rich in particular -- have never been brighter. The share of income accruing to America's wealthiest 1 percent rose from 9 percent in 1974 to a tidy 23.5 percent in 2007.

I guess the title of this post should be "Taking the Wealth".

oh,... and don't raise taxes on the rich people.....

stupid, stupid teabaggers...

tnb

A Presidency Heading for a Fiscal Train Wreck

From the one of the people credited with predicting the financial crisis.

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - A presidency heading for a fiscal train wreck

Corrupt Countries

Our (the US) banking shenanigans probably have a lot to do with our fall

The U.S. fell to 22nd from 19th last year, with its CPI score dropping to 7.1 from 7.5. This was the lowest score awarded to the U.S. in the index's 15-year history and also the first time it had fallen out of the top 20.

Israel? Corruption runs deep.

That score positions Israel in the 22nd place out of 33 members of the OECD.

Israel ranks among Western world's most corrupt countries - Haaretz Daily Newspaper Israel News

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Funnies

Brand Image Survey

Brand Image survey finds Fox News top brand amongst Republicans | Media Matters for America

This explains a lot. The Democrat's top brand, Google, is a company that allows the individual to find information so they can make informed decisions. The Republican's top brand, Fox News, invents or slants information to influence people to make the decision that Fox News wants.

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Monday Morning GinAndTacos

ginandtacos.com » AND THEN…

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Scary as Hell....

American housing too expensive and the multi-income trap will not save the housing market. Banks have laundered their bad bets through the Federal Reserve and GSEs while working and middle class income has eroded. » Dr. Housing Bubble Blog

Tea Party

A good rant on how "Real'Mericun's' think from the Smirking Chimp:

How Do You Take Your Tea? With Heaping Spoonfuls of Irony, Of Course The Smirking Chimp

A good summary below from Political Irony:

http://politicalirony.com/2010/10/22/the-seven-ironies-of-the-tea-party/

It’s ironic, to begin with, that the ones who are bitching loudest today are precisely the people who created the mess we’re in.

The astonishing irony here is that they’ve had their way with economic policy in this country for thirty years running. And, excuse me, but now they’re pissed off at the results?

Taxes today are a mere hint of what they used to be, just as the right has insisted must be the case. For the rich especially, top marginal income taxes have come down from 91 percent to 35 percent. But, of course, even that doesn’t include earnings on capital gains, a giant portion of their income, which is now at 15 percent. Nor does it include the estate tax, which has now disappeared entirely.

On trade, previously existing barriers and protections for domestic industries have been eviscerated almost completely, so that for much of the world today, it’s a single market for products and capital. Labor? Not so much. What a shock, then, that America’s good jobs – especially in manufacturing – are now all located in Mexico. Or at least they were, until even those became too expensive and got moved to China and India and Vietnam.

The story is the same in the domain of labor relations, where the playing field has been slanted massively in the direction of capital, starting with Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers. The upshot of these rule changes and enforcement laxity has been that the portion of union-protected jobs in America has shrunk from about 35 percent to about 7 percent, with precisely the results for workers that you’d expect.

With deregulation, too, we’ve seen massive changes as well over the same period, across industries far and wide, not least of which includes the repealing of Glass-Steagal and the unleashing of Wall Street. The right insisted – and still does – that this is great news for the economy. History begs to differ.

The result, of course, has been economic devastation far and wide. The rich have gotten massively richer, the rest of us are sinking, the federal debt has skyrocketed, our jobs have been exported to China and India, Wall Street has plunged the global economy into the toilet, corporations like BP do whatever they want without fear of consequence, and the United States is imploding as a great power. These are not coincidences, either. And now here comes the great irony: the same people who have been getting their way on the economy for thirty years now are just absolutely livid about what they themselves have created! They’re just completely enraged at the product of their own politics.

A second great irony is the extent to which the tea party bozos are being manipulated by elites like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch and the likes of Dick Armey. The very people who created the public’s economic insecurity in order to get rich off of it, are now channeling the resulting rage into support for more of the same.

Another pretty serious irony is that the tea partiers are likely about to gain some substantial power, but have no solutions to the problems they perceive. … Unless, of course, they’re prepared to slash Social Security and Medicare spending. Which they’re not. When the New York Times ran a poll on tea partiers back in April, it found that they tend to favor the generic idea of cutting government programs. Just not the only ones that really matter. Some were unable to reconcile the competing concepts: “‘That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?’ asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. ‘I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.’ She added, ‘I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.’”

The only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: ‘No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.’”

I notice that nobody running for Congress this year is specifying just how they’d kill the deficit. They want to cut spending, and they say they can, but they can’t see any rush in specifying how they’ll do it. That can wait til after the election. Republican duplicity and hypocrisy.

What would it look like if Obama didn’t have to pay for Bush’s wars based on lies, didn’t have to pay for Bush’s prescription drug plan, didn’t have to pay for Bush’s tax cuts, didn’t have to pay for stimulus funds to rescue the country from Bush’s Great Recession, and didn’t have to pay interest (one of the biggest items in the federal budget) on the money that Bush and Reagan borrowed previously? Most likely, it would look like it did on January 20, 2001, the day that Bush came to office, and the United States was running the greatest surplus ever in its history.

So here we stand. The people who created endless disaster as far as the eye can see are now completely beside themselves in outrage that someone is spending a few dollars to clean up the mess these same folks have made by convincing America to follow their policies over the last thirty years. They want big changes, right now, even though they can’t quite specify what they want – other than changes that won’t hurt them, personally – and even though these changes would do absolutely nothing to solve the current problems facing the country, and would in fact probably exacerbate those.

If we weren't so damn stupid.

tnb

How Big is Africa

damn, Africa is a big place.

Pig-headedness

Political Irony › Pig-headedness

Tea-Baggers

Teabaggers.....

Some good stuff in this at the Booman Tribune

"In a New York Times/CBS News Poll last month, fewer than one in 10 respondents knew that the Obama administration had lowered taxes for most Americans. Half of those polled said they thought that their taxes had stayed the same, a third thought that their taxes had gone up, and about a tenth said they did not know."

"Federal, state and local income taxes consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.
"The idea that taxes are high right now is pretty much nuts," says Michael Ettlinger, head of economic policy at the liberal Center for American Progress."

"No one is more to blame for this current madness than Mr. Bush. He weaponized the Stupid and McCain deployed it with Palin."

Keep up the good work Booman.

tnb

Coons-O'Donnell Debate

This may be the best take i've seen on the Coons-O'Donnell debate.

From the The Rude Pundit

The look on the face of Chris Coons in that debate with O'Donnell said it all. It was the look of a man who thought he had come for a debate to help voters decide who is going to be one of the most powerful people in the country. But when he showed up, it was a pie-eating contest.

Keep up the good work Mr. Rude Pundit

tnb

Rise of the Machines

Technology: Rise of the machines | The Economist

Rise of the Machines - part 2: Signwavers

In my area I think signwaver has been one of the fastest growing positions. I see them everywhere. too bad.....

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The Future is now.

5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S. | Cracked.com

Funnies

A couple of funnies via Political Irony

What if Obama cut taxes, and nobody noticed?

In your own self interest

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Palestinian school set on fire.

Those Israeli settlers are such nice people.

I think this should get them labeled "Terrorists". Every news organization, in every story, should categorize the Israeli settlers as either "Israeli Militants" or "Israeli Terrorists"

Palestinian school set on fire, vandalized - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

More here: Juan Cole

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Foreclosure Crisis

"that courts have found that some mortgages have been sold again and again to different trusts, when they should have only been sold once."

Guest Post: Mortgages Were Pledged to Multiple Buyers at the Same Time « naked capitalism

Fox News and Tea-baggers, please note that this was not caused by Barny Frank and the Democrats forcing the good old banks to loan money to "Those" people.

tnb

Well Said

I would never vote for most Democrats either but with only two choices R or D, what else can you do.

A Reminder

Who bailed out the banks? Who was in charge when the financial crisis hit. Who was in when the recession started.

Reducing the Deficit

OK TeaBaggers,... What do you want to cut to lower the deficit or balance the budget? Social security? The military's budget? Medicare? Foreign aid to Israel? the FBI?

Has anyone heard a Republican name one thing they would cut to reduce the deficit?

Robert Reich: The Perfect Storm

Robert Reich: The Perfect Storm

It’s a perfect storm. And I’m not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I’m talking about the dangers facing our democracy.

First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.

The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.

Who are these people? With the exception of a few entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, they’re top executives of big corporations and Wall Street, hedge-fund managers, and private equity managers. They include the Koch brothers, whose wealth increased by billions last year, and who are now funding tea party candidates across the nation.

Which gets us to the second part of the perfect storm. A relatively few Americans are buying our democracy as never before. And they’re doing it completely in secret.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates — without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Maleck, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.

We’re back to the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. The public never knew who was bribing whom.

Just before it recessed the House passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed. But it couldn’t get through the Senate. Every Republican voted against it. (To see how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)

Here’s the third part of the perfect storm. Most Americans are in trouble. Their jobs, incomes, savings, and even homes are on the line. They need a government that’s working for them, not for the privileged and the powerful.

Yet their state and local taxes are rising. And their services are being cut. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling, pipelines are leaking, schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut.

There’s no jobs bill to speak of. No WPA to hire those who can’t find jobs in the private sector. Unemployment insurance doesn’t reach half of the unemployed.

Washington says nothing can be done. There’s no money left.

No money? The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it’s been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (who no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. Congress is even fighting over whether to end the temporary Bush tax cut for the rich and return them to the Clinton top tax of 39 percent.

Much of the income of the highest earners is treated as capital gains, anyway — subject to a 15 percent tax. The typical hedge-fund and private-equity manager paid only 17 percent last year. Their earnings were not exactly modest. The top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion.

Congress won’t even return to the estate tax in place during the Clinton administration – which applied only to those in the top 2 percent of incomes.

It won’t limit the tax deductions of the very rich, which include interest payments on multi-million dollar mortgages. (Yet Wall Street refuses to allow homeowners who can’t meet mortgage payments to include their primary residence in personal bankruptcy.)

There’s plenty of money to help stranded Americans, just not the political will to raise it. And at the rate secret money is flooding our political system, even less political will in the future.

The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.

We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.

It's unbelievable to me that huge portions of the population can be convinced that we should reduce what we spend on the people, things that affect millions of people,.. like education, health-care, taking care our old or poor, or rebuilding our infrastructure just so we can let multi-millionaires keep a few extra thousands.

tnb

Israel Violated International Law?

Imagine that!?

Oscar Fernandez Taranco, UN assistant secretary general for political affairs, told the monthly council session at UN headquarters in New York that Israel's decision to build 238 new housing units violated international law and contradicted efforts by the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia to settle the Middle East conflict.

UN: Settlement building contradicts efforts to achieve Mideast peace - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

Pot: California vs Feds

OK Teabagger-Republicans, where do you stand on this one? Should the federal government government be allowed to over-ride the wishes of those in a state? One possibility is those fine, patriotic Arizona folks making their own immigration laws, another is those damned liberal California hippies leaglizing pot.

US Feds will overrule California pot law

Hebron

Yglesias has a good article on how the Israelis treat the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. It ain't pretty. Hebron

About the 4th or 5th comment down is chilling...

-------------
comment by abb11

"Sad, but necessary: the Jewish people needs living space"

-------------

"Living Space",... the same excuse Nazi Germany used to justify its moves into Eastern Europe.

tnb

Over-Paid Government Employees

Op-Ed Columnist - The Paralysis of the State - NYTimes.com

Though I agree some of the public pension amounts seem way "out-there", I think the main point of this article is a karl-rove type attempt to change the goal posts in the the raise-taxes-on-the-rich battle.

The republicans know there's little support for the super rich so instead of fighting that battle, they're trying to change the target, make the poor/middle class think it's the big bad government over-paying people that's the problem. The message is "We don't need to tax the the super wealthy we just need to cut the wages of those in government". It's a great plan, it keeps the rich versus poor class war going but just changes the definintion of "rich" to mean "over-paid government employees". Pretty soon the Fox news watchers will forget all about those making 300 million a year.

Expect to here more on this from Rush, Savage and Fox News.

Israel vs Russia

Ok Sarah Palin and all you "We Stand By Israel" yard-sign owners. How do you feel about this.

Israel signs $400 million deal to sell spy drones to Russia - Haaretz Daily Newspaper Israel News

Palin and I think most of the yard-signers think Russia is one of the US's main enemies on the planet (Remember, Palin's "when putin rears his ugly head..." comment) BUT,... Palin and the yard-signers are also big-time Israeli supporters. So you idiots, now your favorite country is selling military equipment to one of your most evil enemies. What do you think about that!

Enormous Mortgage-Bond Scandal

For you "Fox News Watchers" that think the financial crisis was caused by Barney Frank forcing the banks to lend money to all "those" people, please note,.... the rich, wall-street bankers pulled this one off.

The enormous mortgage-bond scandal Analysis - Opinion

uggabugga

Yet another good comment on how the loud-mouths scare the people:

uggabugga

No More Mister Nice Blog

A good rant on how the crazy, media loudmouths try to get people wound-up over nothing.

No More Mister Nice Blog

Mankiw and Taxes

Two more articles, actually an Op-ed from conservative, Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw and a rebuttal from John Shmitt's "No Apparent Motive" blog, showing the difference between a pundit lying to promote a cause and someone actually thinking about the subject at hand.

Mankiw is a rich, powerful, conservative Harvard economist. He knows/understands what he's talking about so I have to assume he's written a deliberately misleading article for political purposes.

Economic View - Higher Taxes Mean I’ll Work Less - NYTimes.com

NoApparentMotive: Three Card Mankiw

It's funny how in both these cases, Palin (found here) and this Mankiw case, the liar less-than-truthful article is from the corporate, main-stream media and an independent blogger is telling the truth.

tnb

Sarah Palin and Sharia Law

These two articles, actually a statment from Sarah Palin and a rebuttal from Juan Cole, show the difference between a dipshit pundit lying to promote a cause that doesn't know what they're talking about and someone who actually understand the subject at hand.

A Sarah Palin quote trying to scare the teabaggers into believing Sharia Law is coming to The US. Sarah Palin

Whether it be just affecting a segment of the population, a demographic, certainly not in its entirety all over our country, Americans will not stand for this because Americans are smart enough to know Sharia law, if that were to be adopted -- allowed to govern in our country, it will be the downfall of America. And too many Americans are onto this already and are starting to rise up and send that message to our federal officials and say, no, we will not put up with any hint of Sharia law being any sort of law of the land.

Juan Cole explaining why Sarah Palin is full of shit. palin-fear-mongers-on-iran-sharia

tnb

Now Remember....

"They hate us for our freedoms"

They hate us for our occupations - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Fair and Efficient Health

Fair and Efficient Health - Maxine Udall (girl economist)

A few highlights....

"It turns out that even though the US spends more, our population health indicators, such as life expectancy and infant mortality, are significantly lower than similar developed countries, such as the UK, France, Japan, and Germany. In fact, we rank lower than all but a handful of countries, such as the Czech Republic, Turkey, and Mexico."

"The curve in the above graph can be thought of as the amount of total health (measured by life expectancy) that a nation could expect to obtain from a given amount of expenditure on health. Points above the curve are highly efficient in that they are achieving higher levels of health than would be expected given their expenditures. As you can see, the US is high on expenditures and substantially below the curve, indicating a highly inefficient health production process. It's odd because it is also one of the few health "systems" with a large private sector presence. Remember that, at least in the US, the private sector is imagined always and everywhere to be more efficient than the public sector. I will leave it to you to ponder the meaning of this rather remarkable graph."

We can do better and I believe a better plan starts with Medicare for all.

Our Elections

This is how I feel this election cycle. I think we need more choices in our elections, maybe something like this......

1. Obama - D
2. McCain - R
3. Not a Democrat
4. Not a Republican
5. None of the Above

If one of the two main candidates doesn't get 50%, the parties both have have to put up new candidates.

Collapsing Empire Watch

We're certainly doing something wrong,.... and for the tea-baggers out there,... it all didn't happen in the last two years.

Collapsing empire watch - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Collapsing Empire Watch

Great commentary on the state of the US from the always good GinAndTacos.

ginandtacos.com » Blog Archive » A FIRST-RATE THIRD-RATE COUNTRY

Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies - Part 3

Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 3: Why Are Servicers So Bad At Their Job? « Rortybomb

Wall Street Pay

Them rich Folk seem to be doing all right...

Wall Street Pay Heads Toward New High - WSJ.com

Government....

... of the Corporations, by the Corporations, for the Corporations.

Some media types talking about it....

George Will: The AFL-CIO is Just Like the Chamber of Commerce with Representing Foreign Entities | Video Cafe

Middle East Reality

From Juan Cole

Abbas: Israel has Abrogated the Peace Process | Informed Comment

Fanatics like Lieberman have taken over Israel and they have no future in a Muslim Middle East that is now growing faster than Israel economically and which is likely to become more and more militarily and scientifically sophisticated. As Obama’s initiative for a two-state solution is thwarted by the Liebermans and Netanyahus, their actions guarantee that Israel’s future in coming decades is bleak. Unfortunately, the attendant trouble generated by that bleakness is likely to fall on the heads of all our children.

Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies - Part 2

Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 2: What is a Note, and Why is it So Important? « Rortybomb

Part 1 is here foreclosure-fraud-for-dummies-1

Pictures of Detroit

David Byrne's Journal: 09.23.10: Don't Forget the Motor City

Israeli Cabinet approves loyalty oath for new citizens

This CNN article misleads on leaves out an important part of the law. Israeli Cabinet approves loyalty oath for new citizens - CNN.com

Seen here in the Haartz article: cabinet-approves-loyalty-oath

...which would require every non-Jew wishing to become a citizen of Israel would have to vow loyalty to "the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."

So it applies to only the "non-Jewish". My guess is most in the US would think this is not really fair to the 1.5 million Arabs living there,.. so CNN chooses not to bring the suject up. Nice job CNN.

UPDATE: More on this from Jaun Cole: israel-declares-for-ethnic-nationalism

UPDATE II: From No MOre Mister Nice Blog: loyalty-oaf

On Global Terror

All you "We Stand with Israel" yard sign owners,..... please ignore the evidence and repeat.. "They hate us for our freedoms" like George Bush and your preacher tell you.

Bill spills the beans– linkage of global terror and Palestinian issue

Also, check out this map: West Bank Map.

The green line outlines the West Bank which is Palestinian land. The blue shapes are Israeli settlements. Please note that they are on Palestinian land.

I would guess that if the Canadian Government sent their army to take your Indiana farm, that your grandparents settled, so the Canadians could build a settlement, you might do something that could get yourself qualified as a terrorist.

An Australian Housing Bubble?

Bronte Capital: Australian bubble pornography

Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies

A good start on explaining the foreclosure crap thats going around.

Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 1: The Chains and the Stakes « Rortybomb

Health Care Reform....

... didn't go far enough. We should extend medicare/medicaid to everyone. Take the insurance companies out of the picture.

Why it’s time to panic | The Incidental Economist

Some Common Sense on Social Security

This is less alarmist than most Social Security talk.

Off the Charts Blog | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities | Blog Archive | Social Security Sense and Nonsense

A Little Song...

War on Terror logic

As we escalate the war on Pakistan, a reminder from Glenn Greenwald on creating terrorists. This, in the update, seems fitting.

Here's a reminder of what a 2004 Task Force convened by Donald Rumsfeld said about the actual causes of Terrorism and, specifically, the effects on Terrorism from our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The whole Report is worth reviewing, but among the highlights: (a) the "underlying sources of threats to America's national security" are grounded in "negative attitudes" towards the U.S. in the Muslim world and "the conditions that create them"; (b) what what most exacerbates anti-American sentiment, and therefore the threat of Terrorism, is "American direct intervention in the Muslim world" -- through our "one sided support in favor of Israel"; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, "the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan"; and (c) "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies."

War on Terror logic - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

US vs Pakistan

Remember, "They hate us for our freedoms".

As Pakistan-US Tensions Mount, Tankers Burn and Obama Administration Suggests Coup | The Seminal

UN Report finds Israel Executed US Citizen

Glenn Greenwald on target again.

U.N. Report finds Israel "summarily executed" U.S. citizen on flotilla - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com