capitalism, having defeated communism, now seems about to do the same to democracy.

I dont think I buy into that. IMO Obamas stimulas will help create jobs ,build schools and fix our neglegcted infrastructure with the main focus being on our own country and its needs. the republican spending involved wars and halliburton fraud.

Creating Jobs is what it is all about. Last time I checked the only people who got free bags of cash were the wall street tycoons with hardly a murmer from the teabaggers.

Could this be a mingle sucsess story? possibly being I discovered this lady was single by her profile on mingle even though I had a past with her platonicly for 8 years or so. I logged on one day and "poof" there she was on mingle. It has clicked like magic ever since.

I find it hard to believe that the so called conservatives have an excuse for doing nothing for the past 8 years after all these are the same folks who spent 8 years shouting down and bullying anyone who was against the bush policies and saying it was treason to be against them. I find this whole tea party thing to be a massive propoganda effort by the right to try to gain some type of support. It seems rather pathetic to me and pityfull but that explains why they are the minority party, probably for the next fifty years. Do not we as americans colectivly need Obama to fix the economy? If this doesnt work all these morality issues so important to the GOP will fall on empty ears as families lose their homes and children lose the stability they need to grow into productive adults.

So as could be expected I was deluged with mail this weekend, most of it from outraged Michelle Malkin readers, and nearly all of whom sounded the same basic theme: that I was a bad, bad person for issuing ad hominem attacks and should be discredited for "not having my facts straight" and for being too much of a coward to "debate the real issues."

Which is interesting, except that no one actually found an incorrect fact in anything I wrote, and no one seemed very interesting in debating any issues. Instead, about 99% of the mail I got focused on the name-calling and the "childish" sexual innuendoes. I would say that is my fault, that I should have known that once you start dropping sack onto another columnist's face in public you can pretty much forgo any expectation of being taken seriously -- except that when dealing with teabagger types, you know in advance you're not going to be taken seriously anyway. So the incentive to be restrained in one's response (particularly when the people you're arguing with are running around screaming about the fascist threat with tea bags dangling absurdly from their hat-brims) is not particularly strong.

But the real reason nobody takes the teabaggers seriously is that they have no answers to several enormous holes in the parody of a protest argument they tried to make last week. I got nearly two hundred letters this weekend and not one of them had an answer for any of the following:

1. If you're so horrified by debt and spending, where were your tea parties when George Bush was adding $4 trillion to the federal deficit?

2. If you're so outraged by the bailouts, where were your tea parties when the bailouts were first instituted by Henry Paulson and George Bush last fall?

3. If you're so troubled by pork, where were your tea parties when the number and cost of congressional earmarks rose spectacularly in each year of Republican congressional rule between 1996 and the end of the Republican majority in 2006?

A number of people wrote in to me and complained that the only reason I'm not seeing eye to eye with them is that I have no children and therefore don't care about the debt burden in the future. Oh, please. There's only one reason we're talking about "the children" in this debate at all: because 95% of the people protesting the tax outrage will actually be getting a tax break. Until you can plausibly answer the question of why future government debt burdens didn't bother you during the last eight years or massive deficit spending, that whole "O the children!" bull**** has to be put back on the shelf.

Anyway, I'd really be curious to hear some answers to these questions. Because if the spending argument is moot, if the bailout argument is moot, if the pork argument is moot, and the tax argument is moot, then what you're left with is arguing that it's not waste when we spend billions handing out soccer balls in the Anbar province, but it is waste when we build bridges in Peoria and Tulsa.

The only thing even remotely resembling a logical justification for any of this was the argument, made by several letter-writers, that the fact that the teabaggers are hypocrites doesn't necessarily make them wrong about the Obama budget. If that point is conceded at the top, I think most Americans would be willing to discuss the rest of it, because that's a discussion worth having. The problem is that once you admit that you sat on your hands during a period of unprecedented waste for eight years, it makes it very hard to take when you start calling yourselves victims of fascism and tyranny and threatening to secede in year nine, which just happens to be the first year of a new regime you oppose politically. In other words if you concede the hypocrisy, the hysteria automatically becomes obnoxious and wrong. So I don't think the "My hypocrisy is irrelevant" line holds water, not unless you can answer one more question:

4. Would you be protesting any of this bull**** if this had been George W. Bush's budget?
_______



About author
I'm a political reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, a sports columnist for Men's Journal, and I also write books for a Random House imprint called Spiegel and Grau. My main ambition in life is to someday strangle that chick in the Progressive Insurance commercials who is always waving her hands back and forth and screaming, "Discount!!!" Anyone who has suggestions for how to dump her body without being caught is welcome to write to me. I already have plenty of plastic and a staple-gun.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/21372

I am off the mind that 911 was either allowed to happen or was an inside job being our own government was involved. This has been an ongoing debate and there is much data to support this view. In fact much more data than supports the pancake theory.

Lynndie England was sentenced as well as many others. Why not those who gave the orders?

Home of the Barricaded, Land of the ‘Fraid
By David Michael Green

April 17, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- There are few statistics as stunning as the following simple, single number: The United States spends two times more on its military than all the other countries of the world, combined.

Yes, that's right. All 200 or so of them. Combined.

According to GlobalSecurity.org, last year, the US dropped about $625 billion in taxpayer dollars on its military, while all the rest of the world together spent $500 billion. (The aggregate global figures come from 2004, but have been steady over the prior decade.) However, if you also add in nuclear weapons costs handled separately by the Energy Department, Veterans Affairs, interest on money borrowed to fund previous wars, and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the total rises to a jaw-dropping one trillion dollars per year.

Think of how astonishing that is.

Imagine if you lived down the street from a guy who insisted that his house had to be two times bigger than all the other houses in the neighborhood, combined. You and your neighbors live in 2,000 square foot houses, but he has to have an 800,000 square foot house. That's one that would be the length of three football fields long, and three football fields wide.

Imagine you and all your fishing buddies tied up next to a guy who had to have a boat that was twice as big as all of yours combined. You guys have 15 footers. His would be 6,000 feet long, or six Queen Marys, length-to-length.

Imagine that you knew someone who had to spend double on dinner what everyone else dining in a decent restaurant was spending. The average meal for the rest of you costs 25 dollars. This guy insists on spending $10,000 on one meal, of the same food, prepared by the same chef.

This is an astonishing ratio in so many ways.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about it is that nobody particularly talks about it. It's one thing to say that military spending has now joined Social Security as the third rail of American politics - you touch it, you die. And, of course, now we are treated to the visage of the "liberal" - even "socialist" and "defeatist" "pal of terrorists" - guy in the White House actually increasing military spending, and doing so at a time when the federal budget is hemorrhaging red ink as if it were the Exxon Valdez, drunken captain at the helm and all. But it's actually even worse than that.

Not only can you not seriously discuss cutting military spending in America, you can't even know about this spending ratio relative to the rest of the world, or contemplate what it means. Do you know of any single politician who ever mentions this?

It's also astonishing because the Cold War is over, the once Nazi-controlled Germany has turned into one of the most pacifist countries in the world, Japan is all about making cars and TVs, and there isn't a serious enemy of the United States anywhere on either the geographical or temporal horizon. Right now, we are spending vast sums of money to fight gaggles of angry young men armed with box-cutters, and scraggly mullahs hiding in remote mountainous caves. And they're winning.

It is conceivable that China might, maybe, someday, spend something like what the US does on its military. But for what? Right now China spends a tenth of what the US does on its military, and considerably less than that if you count the other items that bring the US total up to a trillion per year. If it reached parity, what would that permit it that is now impossible, apart from perhaps taking back Taiwan and creating a twentieth century Latin America-style neighborhood it could dominate even more than it does already? Would it allow China to invade the United States, or bend it to Chinese will for fear of a military confrontation? Of course not.

Which is another reason this ratio is so astonishing. Say whatever you want about nuclear weapons from a moral perspective. They have nevertheless changed the dynamic of international politics radically. No state will ever again invade another one which possesses a nuclear arsenal and the means to project it in quantity. The doctrine of mutually-assured destruction may indeed be mad from a psychological perspective, but it works - at least apart from situations in which the attacking country's leadership is either so bonkers or so determined on an issue that national suicide isn't a deterrent. Of course, non-state actors like al Qaeda are a problem, because they provide little target for retaliation, but would spending another $100 billion on more destroyers or fighter jets solve that problem? Of course not.

This grossly disproportionate ratio of military spending to other countries is also astonishing, and astonishingly obscene, for what it costs this country in missed opportunities. We are by far the richest country in the world - no one is even close. And we have no real enemies. And, as noted, we spend double the entire world combined in order to defend against those non-enemies.

Such thoughtful priorities also entitle our lucky population to have a national healthcare system that is ranked 37th from the top, worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Isn't that special? Morocco does better than we do. So do Colombia, Chile and Costa Rica. And Dominica. Does anyone really even know where Dominica is? All those weapons systems don't just purchase for us a lack of security, they also buy a country where 50 million Americans lack health insurance of any kind, and countless others are grossly under-insured (including those who don't know it yet, but will find out fast if they ever get sick).

In part because of this fine health care system, the United States also ranks 29th globally on infant mortality. And the longitudinal trend isn't pretty. We were 12th in the world in 1960, and 23rd in 1990. Now we are tied with Poland and Slovakia. The good news, though, is that we are still by far and away first worldwide on obesity, with 31 percent of the population qualifying for that distinction, over six percent higher than our nearest competitor! The rest of the world can kick us around all day long, but nobody can ever take that distinction away from us. Oh, and we had almost twice as many plastic surgery procedures as any other country in the world. I guess these figures also partially explain why the richest country in the world, by far, is ranked 47th in the world in terms of life expectancy, below Boznia-Herzegovina, Jordan and Guam. Cool. Go USA!

Dollars paying for a bloated military are not only not spent on healthcare, they also aren't spent on social development either. The United States had more teen pregnancies per capita than anyone in the world by far - about half-again as many as our nearest competitor. We have the highest number of prisoners per capita, right up there (but still well ahead of) Russia and Belarus. The US has two million prisoners, about half a million more than China, despite having about one-fifth the Chinese population. We also have more crimes committed than any other country in the world, about twice the number as the number two country on the list. Oh, and by far the highest divorce rate in the world. I'm pretty sure you won't see this stuff mentioned in the tourist literature.

Expenditures on the military also mean dollars not spent on teaching our kids (especially about comparative national statistics!). The richest country in the world is ranked 39th on education spending as a percent of GDP, below Tunisia, Bolivia, Jamaica and Malawi. As a result, the US shows up as 18th in mathematical literacy, and 15th in reading literacy. Woo-hoo!

Spending on rockets and guns does not bode well for economic development, either. Despite being in hock for more national debt than any other country in the world - even before recent events - we rank only 16th in broadband access per capita. And, we are a dismal 92nd in the world in terms of the equitable distribution of family income within our society. Cameroon does better. So does Russia, Uzbekistan, Laos and Burkina Faso. Along with most of the rest of the world.

In short, in exchange for the privilege of dwarfing the entire rest of the solar system in military spending, in order to defend ourselves against an enemy we don't have, the United States has purchased a second rate healthcare system, a second rate educational system, and social and economic characteristics within spitting distance of Sub-Saharan Africa.

For all of these reasons, our devotion to military spending is really quite amazing, and really begs the question of what could explain so patently foolish a national policy. Undoubtedly, there are many explanations.

To begin with, this would hardly be the first essay ever to note the American propensity toward paranoia. A country twisted enough that it can spend six years fighting a brutal and costly war in Iraq on the basis of 9/11 attacks that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with is certainly a country capable of outspending the entire rest of the planet on its military, two times over.

What does it say, moreover, about our near-complete failing at the practice of diplomacy, that we feel compelled to sit atop a military arsenal of such outrageous proportions, and to send bombs and military bases, rather than diplomats, as our calling card around the world?

Without question, furthermore, such an obscene military budget is grossly inflated because of sheer greed. It wasn't some long-haired, Birkenstocks-wearing, pipe-smoking, Berkeley professor of French literature, after all, who warned us of the dangers of the metastasizing military industrial complex. It was Dwight Eisenhower - conservative Republican president, lifetime military man, commander of NATO and hero of World War II.

Eisenhower was right, of course, although it would have been nice had he acted on his wisdom during his two terms, rather than sounding hypocritical warnings about this danger only as he walked out the door. In any case, as in so many other domains - but with an intensity unmatched elsewhere - when it comes to providing military hardware, corporate America has come to see the federal government as little more than a handy centralized collection system, to which it then avails itself. But, of course, everybody is in the act now, with members of Congress from every district in the land fighting to protect their defense dollars, and selfish Americans screaming about deficit spending on Sundays, and then going to work at the local defense boondoggle plant on Mondays.

And there is another explanation, as well. You don't need to spend a trillion bucks per year in order to protect the United States from attack by another country. The existing stockpile of nuclear warheads more or less guarantees that that will never happen. You also don't need to spend that money in order to fight some sort of conventional war on land or sea, as occurred during World War II. No country comes remotely near the United States in terms of battlefield and naval hardware, and even those who possess significant quantities of such materiel almost entirely lack the capability of projecting such military power beyond their borders. Finally, you don't need all that money to fight ragtag bands of terrorists either. On that front, smarts go a lot farther than dollars (not that we would know, of course).

The only thing that such a seemingly bloated military is good for is power projection. If you want to intimidate developing countries into selling you their natural resources at ridiculously low prices, a giant military is the only way to do it. If you want to force weaker countries into joining political alliances they are otherwise not remotely interested in, some good old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy is the way to make that happen.

Or, at least, was. The United States is no longer very much able to shove around other countries like it used to, and yet, even the so-called liberal Obama administration is now seeking to spend even more on the American military than the monsters of the last regime did.

It was one thing - albeit still a stupid bargain - to forgo health, education, and the good life for an empire.

But what Americans should be asking themselves right now is, whether giving away happiness and prosperity in exchange for a non-empire is finally a bridge too far, even for a country so justly famous for its chronic political immaturity.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.


http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22442.htm

The wonderfull spring romance continues. Made another trip to observe the eagles nest and I was suprised to see the blue herons have there twenty or so nests within about fifteen yards of the eagles. The Herons are nesting now and the eagles have hatchlings we caught a glimpse of them. Oh what fun we had. Every day should be like yesterday.

CNBC Correspondent Rick Santelli called for a "Chicago Tea Party" on Feb 19th in protesting President Obama's plan to help homeowners in trouble. Santelli's call was answered by the right-wing group FreedomWorks, which funds campaigns promoting big business interests, and is the opposite of what the real Boston Tea Party was. FreedomWorks was funded in 2004 by **** Armey (former Republican House Majority leader & lobbyist); consolidated Citizens for a Sound Economy, funded by the Koch family; and Empower America, a lobbying firm, that had fought against healthcare and minimum-wage efforts while hailing deregulation.

Anti-tax "tea party" organizers are delivering one million tea bags to a Washington, D.C., park Wednesday morning - to promote protests across the country by people they say are fed up with high taxes and excess spending.

The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America.

They covered their faces, massed in the streets, and destroyed the property of a giant global corporation. Declaring an end to global trade run by the East India Company that was destroying local economies, this small, masked minority started a revolution with an act of rebellion later called the Boston Tea Party.

On a cold November day in 1773, activists gathered in a coastal town. The corporation had gone too far, and the two thousand people who'd jammed into the meeting hall were torn as to what to do about it. Unemployment was exploding and the economic crisis was deepening; corporate crime, governmental corruption spawned by corporate cash, and an ethos of greed were blamed. "Why do we wait?" demanded one at the meeting, a fisherman named George Hewes. "The more we delay, the more strength is acquired" by the company and its puppets in the government. "Now is the time to prove our courage," he said. Soon, the moment came when the crowd decided for direct action and rushed into the streets.

That is how I tell the story of the Boston Tea Party, now that I have read a first-person account of it. While striving to understand my nation's struggles against corporations, in a rare book store I came upon a first edition of "Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773," and I jumped at the chance to buy it. Because the identities of the Boston Tea Party participants were hidden (other than Samuel Adams) and all were sworn to secrecy for the next 50 years, this account is the only first-person account of the event by a participant that exists. As I read, I began to understand the true causes of the American Revolution.

I learned that the Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways the growing modern-day protests against transnational corporations and small-town efforts to protect themselves from chain-store retailers or factory farms. The Tea Party's participants thought of themselves as protesters against the actions of the multinational East India Company.

Although schoolchildren are usually taught that the American Revolution was a rebellion against "taxation without representation," akin to modern day conservative taxpayer revolts, in fact what led to the revolution was rage against a transnational corporation that, by the 1760s, dominated trade from China to India to the Caribbean, and controlled nearly all commerce to and from North America, with subsidies and special dispensation from the British crown.

Hewes notes: "The [East India] Company received permission to transport tea, free of all duty, from Great Britain to America..." allowing it to wipe out New England-based tea wholesalers and mom-and-pop stores and take over the tea business in all of America. "Hence," wrote, "it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity ... The colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine their course ... "

A pamphlet was circulated through the colonies called The Alarm and signed by an enigmatic "Rusticus." One issue made clear the feelings of colonial Americans about England's largest transnational corporation and its behavior around the world: "Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. They have levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes, and sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain. The Revenues of Mighty Kingdoms have entered their Coffers. And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions, and Monopolies, stripped the miserable Inhabitants of their Property, and reduced whole Provinces to Indigence and Ruin. Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Price that the poor could not purchase them."

After protesters had turned back the Company's ships in Philadelphia and New York, Hewes writes, "In Boston the general voice declared the time was come to face the storm."

The citizens of the colonies were preparing to throw off one of the corporations that for almost 200 years had determined nearly every aspect of their lives through its economic and political power. They were planning to destroy the goods of the world's largest multinational corporation, intimidate its employees, and face down the guns of the government that supported it.

The queen's corporation

The East India Company's influence had always been pervasive in the colonies. Indeed, it was not the Puritans but the East India Company that founded America. The Puritans traveled to America on ships owned by the East India Company, which had already established the first colony in North America, at Jamestown, in the Company-owned Commonwealth of Virginia, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi. The commonwealth was named after the "Virgin Queen," Elizabeth, who had chartered the corporation.

Elizabeth was trying to make England a player in the new global trade sparked by the European "discovery" of the Americas. The wealth Spain began extracting from the New World caught the attention of the European powers. In many European countries, particularly Holland and France, consortiums were put together to finance ships to sail the seas. In 1580, Queen Elizabeth became the largest shareholder in The Golden Hind, a ship owned by Sir Francis Drake.

The investment worked out well for Queen Elizabeth. There's no record of exactly how much she made when Drake paid her share of the Hind's dividends to her, but it was undoubtedly vast, since Drake himself and the other minor shareholders all received a 5000 percent return on their investment. Plus, because the queen placed a maximum loss to the initial investors of their investment amount only, it was a low-risk investment (for the investors at least-creditors, such as suppliers of provisions for the voyages or wood for the ships, or employees, for example, would be left unpaid if the venture failed, just as in a modern-day corporation). She was endorsing an investment model that led to the modern limited-liability corporation.

After making a fortune on Drake's expeditions, Elizabeth started looking for a more permanent arrangement. She authorized a group of 218 London merchants and noblemen to form a corporation. The East India Company was born on December 31, 1600.

By the 1760s, the East India Company's power had grown massive and worldwide. However, this rapid expansion, trying to keep ahead of the Dutch trading companies, was a mixed blessing, as the company went deep in debt to support its growth, and by 1770 found itself nearly bankrupt.

The company turned to a strategy that multinational corporations follow to this day: They lobbied for laws that would make it easy for them to put their small-business competitors out of business.

Most of the members of the British government and royalty (including the king) were stockholders in the East India Company, so it was easy to get laws passed in its interests. Among the Company's biggest and most vexing problems were American colonial entrepreneurs, who ran their own small ships to bring tea and other goods directly into America without routing them through Britain or through the Company. Between 1681 and 1773, a series of laws were passed granting the Company monopoly on tea sold in the American colonies and exempting it from tea taxes. Thus, the Company was able to lower its tea prices to undercut the prices of the local importers and the small tea houses in every town in America. But the colonists were unappreciative of their colonies being used as a profit center for the multinational corporation.

Boston's million-dollar tea party

And so, Hewes says, on a cold November evening of 1773, the first of the East India Company's ships of tax-free tea arrived. The next morning, a pamphlet was widely circulated calling on patriots to meet at Faneuil Hall to discuss resistance to the East India Company and its tea. "Things thus appeared to be hastening to a disastrous issue. The people of the country arrived in great numbers, the inhabitants of the town assembled. This assembly, on the 16th of December 1773, was the most numerous ever known, there being more than 2000 from the country present," said Hewes.

The group called for a vote on whether to oppose the landing of the tea. The vote was unanimously affirmative, and it is related by one historian of that scene "that a person disguised after the manner of the Indians, who was in the gallery, shouted at this juncture, the cry of war; and that the meeting dissolved in the twinkling of an eye, and the multitude rushed in a mass to Griffin's wharf."

That night, Hewes dressed as an Indian, blackening his face with coal dust, and joined crowds of other men in hacking apart the chests of tea and throwing them into the harbor. In all, the 342 chests of tea-over 90,000 pounds-thrown overboard that night were enough to make 24 million cups of tea and were valued by the East India Company at 9,659 Pounds Sterling or, in today's currency, just over $1 million.

In response, the British Parliament immediately passed the Boston Port Act stating that the port of Boston would be closed until the citizens of Boston reimbursed the East India Company for the tea they had destroyed. The colonists refused. A year and a half later, the colonists would again state their defiance of the East India Company and Great Britain by taking on British troops in an armed conflict at Lexington and Concord (the "shots heard 'round the world") on April 19, 1775.

That war-finally triggered by a transnational corporation and its government patrons trying to deny American colonists a fair and competitive local marketplace-would end with independence for the colonies.

The revolutionaries had put the East India Company in its place with the Boston Tea Party, and that, they thought, was the end of that. Unfortunately, the Boston Tea Party was not the end; within 150 years, during the so-called Gilded Age, powerful rail, steel, and oil interests would rise up to begin a new form of oligarchy, capturing the newly-formed Republican Party in the 1880s, and have been working to establish a permanent wealthy and ruling class in this country ever since.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It," and "Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion." His newest book is Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.


http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/15-10

by Abby Zimet

Given pretty much everything they do and say – think Michael Steele, Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Jindal, tea parties – it's tough to argue with economist Paul Krugman that "Republicans have become embarrassing to watch." While he offers a compassionate caveat – "It doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people " – he also issues a warning. Republicans, in fact, seem not much more crazy than they ever have, which didn't stop them, not long ago, from getting alot of power and wreaking alot of havoc. Most telling in Krugman's look backward: the term 'liberal' was once insult enough; these days it's 'socialist.' Is this what you call progress?

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2009/04/13-2

ARCHIVES
Was Limbaugh’s On-Air Meltdown His Macaca Moment?
Jon Ponder | Apr. 9, 2009


Via Keith Olbermann on “Countdown” last night — Republican Party boss Limbaugh had a mini-meltdown on the air yesterday when a conservative caller dared to criticize Limbaugh — not because of Limbaugh’s statements saying he hopes America fails — but because of Limbaugh’s support for torturing suspects.

Here’s a transcript (via HuffPo) of what the conservative caller dared say to Rush Limbaugh:


LIMBAUGH: We’re going to go to Chicago. This is Charles. Charles thank you for waiting and for calling. Great to have you here. Hello.

CALLER: Thanks Rush. Rush listen, I voted Republican and I really didn’t want to see Obama get in office. But you know Rush, you’re one reason to blame for this election, for the Republicans losing. First of all, you kept harping about voting for Hillary. The second big issue was the torture issue. I’m a veteran. We’re not supposed to be torturing these people. This is not Nazi Germany, Red China, North Korea. There’s other ways of interrogating people, and you just kept harping about, it’s okay, or it’s not really torture. And it was just more than waterboarding. Some of these prisoners will killed under torture.

And it was crazy for you to go on and on like Levin and Hannity and Hewitt. It’s like you’re all brainwashed. And my last comment is, no matter what Obama does, you will still criticize him because I believe you are brainwashed. You’re just — and I hate to say it — but I think you’re a brainwashed Nazi. Anyone who can believe in torture has got to be — there has got to be something wrong with them.

LIMBAUGH: You know –

CALLER: And I know Bush wanted to keep us safe and all of that but we’re not supposed to be torturing these people.

LIMBAUGH: Charles, if anybody is admitting that they are brainwashed it would be you.

CALLER: No, no, Rush. I don’t think so. You, Hannity, and Levin are all brainwashed –

LIMBAUGH: Charles, you said at the beginning of your phone call that you didn’t want Obama in there. But you voted for him because of me.

CALLER: I didn’t vote for him. I voted for McCain. I voted Republican.

LIMBAUGH: Oh, so you’re saying I turned people off –

CALLER: You turned people off with all this vote for Hillary and all this BS.

LIMBAUGH: That was Operation Chaos. That was to keep the chaos in the Democrat primaries –

CALLER: It didn’t work and what we have with you Hannity Levin and Hewitt is sour grapes. That’s all we have. And believe me, I’m not — I’m more to the right than I am to the left.

LIMBAUGH: Oh, of course you are.

CALLER: I am.

LIMBAUGH: Of course you are. You wouldn’t be calling here with all of these sour grapes if you weren’t.

CALLER: Well I’m tired of listening to go on and on with this –

LIMBAUGH: I don’t know of anybody who died from torture.

CALLER: We’re not supposed to torture people. Do you remember World War II, the Nazis? The Nuremburg trials?

LIMBAUGH: Charles, Barack Obama –

CALLER: What’s the matter with you? You never even served in the military. I served in the Marine Corps and the Army.

LIMBAUGH: Charles, Barack Obama is president of the United States today because of stupid, ignorant people who think like you do. You pose - you and your ignorance are the most expensive commodity this country has. You think you know everything. You don’t know diddly squat. You call me a Nazi? You call me someone who supports torture and you want credibility on this program? You’re just plan embarrassing and ludicrous. But it doesn’t surprise me that you’re the kind of Republican that our last candidate attracted. Because you’re no Republican at all based on what the hell you just said right here.

Limbaugh’s meltdown at the end has all the makings of a “macaca” moment — the sort of video clip that could go viral and permanently changes public perception, as happened when neo-Confederate presidential wannabe George Allen was caught on tape using the racial slur “macaca” to describe a young man in his audience.

We’ll see.
http://www.pensitoreview.com/2009/04/09/was-limbaughs-on-air-meltdown-his-macaca-moment/
watch clip at link below
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kofIN80jvtI&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Esmirkingchimp%2Ecom%2Fnews%2F21228&feature=player_embedded

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because a liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of coffee, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because a liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance - now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because a liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because a liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because a liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air. He walks to the subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because a liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because a liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune. Its noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because a liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because a liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because a liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.

He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because a liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to. Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day. Joe agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.

http://www.theseminal.com/2008/10/30/a-day-in-the-life-of-joe-republican/

Thanks for the great advice and well wishes. We had a great date thursday after work as we went to PA to see a blue heron rookery about thirteen nests are there and I was curiouse if they had started nesting and it was a great weather day for a ride and we both enjoy the outdoors what we found was a bald eagles nest that had been built this year and wasnot there last year we were wtihin thirty yards or so of it along the edge of a beaver pond they built it in the middle were the trees were flooded out. What a great show we got. In the three hours we were out we also saw wild turkys a white crane, blue herons, muskrats swimming around a dozen or so deer and a wide variety of ducks. Too much of a gentleman to menetion friday night

So finaly after months of being single I found a great gal. I have a past with her being we have two kids th exact ages and we both did alot of field trips with them. Though she was married at the time we buddied up alot on the field trips being her son and mine were also friends. This was in grade school for them. I allways had a thing for her but of course knew she was married and I kept it friendly. As the years rolled by and the kids got older my interaction with her would be a chance meeting at a grocery store or YMCA were we allways exchanged greetings. Now that our kids are in high school they do not hang as much being her son is in wrestling and mine in baseball and basketball but as fate would have it she got divorced and I heard about it. Things are going fantasticly well its like a dream romance and I am on cloud 9 as she also appears to be. I dont wish to sound like a braggert but after my hopeless winter with no romance at all it may go to show some folks that when you least expect it love will come knocking on your door. Keep the faith that someone is out there for you and it will magicly click and feel so so right.

Oh those pesky regulations, cant dump chemical waste down the toilet, omit toxic fumes or carcinogens. those darn MSDS forms the list goes on and on. I am sad you couldnt make a go of it these are tuff tuff times but it is hard for me not to have sympathy for workers who only wish to improve their working conditions and lifestyle. good luck to you regardless.

how about a link or source please

Lets not re write history eh? Korea tested its first nuke while George "the traitor" Bushs was president. We were bogged down chaseing boogey men in Iraq by the way and did absolutly nothing.

The biggest change I see are that people in overwelming numbers stood up on election day and said "NO" to the party of racism and elitism and torture and war crimes and propoganda. Only the sturborn 33% remain to be taken lightly and with a sence of humor.