Clear & Present Threats to our Liberty

People used to talk about clear and present dangers to society that would be grounds to infringe upon our liberties. There are some people, even on the right, who fear the infringements to our liberties. I’d at this time like to summarize that 1:14 long video I watched on computer yesterday early evening on our loss of liberty. First of all they want to drive all small farms out of business and eliminate all non pasteurized milk from the diet. They want to eliminate “free range chicken” and any other farm where humane treatement of animals is allowed in favor of these “factory farms”. They claim that if prices in the ‘thirties had been allowed to come down instead of paying farmers not to plant much of the food deprivation of the depression could have been prevented because prices would come down to where people could afford them. As Barry Goldwater pointed out in his book, you even get into trouble eating food grown on your own farm as "impacting interstate commerce". Now they say even using rainwater to water your plants could be interfering with water allocation laws. They now have a new disease just coined by the psychiatrists called “Healthy Eating Disorder”. If that isn’t Orwellian! There was a case where a father was arrested for kidnapping his own son to protect him from his mother who wanted to put him on psychoactive drugs. The father says “I know my own son better than any doctor”. They talked about police abuses such as NYPD officers being admonished to meet their quotas for certain petty crimes. You can be arrested for putting money in other peoples’ expired parking meters. Also anytime there is a domestic dispute the officers are instructed to bring along building inspectors with them to cite landlords for maintenance offences. But they aren’t given a reasonable period to fix them like a month or two. Instead all the tenants have to move out immediately and the landlords have to pay to put them up in hotel rooms. There are some strange zoning laws. On the one hand garage sales are illegal, which would be a consequence of people doing the sensible thing and raising money during hard times. But on the other hand homeless people are allowed to camp out on the streets in crowded Vennice urinating on people’s front lawns, and they have the audacity to tell the owners “You really out to put up out houses on your front yard to facilitate us”. In immigration the government is actually making it hard for immigrents to LEAVE this country who want to leave because they can’t find work here. The government makes them STAY and jump through a bunch of hoops and red tape. It’s pointed out that you can live much more comfortably in Mexico buying a really nice hacienda on the beach for a fraction of what it would cost here. Of course they are trying to make buying gold and gold coins harder by slapping on some fee and some special form for buying gold, that was a tacked on provision to the Obama health care bill! It was pointed out there can be no “gold bubble” because so few Americans own gold now, and when investing in gold becomes a general trend, prices will rise much higher. There was a lot of talk how the Fed is mainly interested in bailing out the financial interests of their friends on Wall Street. Of course there is that deal between the Fed and Goldman Sachs I mentioned before. They mentioned those nude body scanners. And they talked about how accommodations for the handicapped are suffering at air ports. There were a lot of personal examples. They said a dark complected six year old girl was put on the “No fly list”. They had a guy with his food provisions for a year in some underground shelter talking about how food prices on everything have jumped lately. They said the real inflation rate was five percent now and not zero, but that rate will rise. There were a lot of cartoons and illustrations involving the debasement of our currency. Rather than watch the whole thing yourself I just did a pretty good job of summarizing it for you. I guess a bit question mark in my mind is, “To what extent were the election results of last November influenced by watching propaganda, scar tactic films like these? Will any of these issues be addressed? Can they be?

That paragraph was written last Wednesday. Perhaps it resorts to scare tacticts but you know they are continuing to test us to see what governmental outrages we'll put up with. Last week all the buzz was about inconvieniences to airline passengers. Now they are saying on the talking heads shows that because of all the current tension in the world, we have to put up with abridgements of our liberties, including our right to privacy. Of course they are conducting war games in the Yellow Sea off shore from South Korea. The US wants China to pressure North Korea into ending further military hostilities. I have a feeling the biggest news headline in this part of the world hasn't occurred yet. Now they are saying that North Korea is selling nuclear weapons to Iran and Syria. Sometimes you can only hold off an inevitable conflict for so long. Yesterday at a family gathering we managed to keep politics out of the conversation for most of the visit but then the tipping point was reached and everything exploded. At some point, no one can say when, one of these nuclear pressure points is going to blow. It could be Iran, Pakistan, North Korea or elsewhere.

I think this talk of some biparitzan accord between Mitch Mc Conell and John Baner and President Obama is a little pointless. They've already made their intensions known. If President Obama wants to fancy it a game of cooporation, he'll be the only one playing. All this congress has to do is three simple things. Since the elections of almost a month ago now, this lame duck congress hasn't done squat. They only convened for a few short days the week before last and then it was time for another holiday recess. It's a wonder they get anything done. This congress needs to ratify the START treaty, which they have indicated they won't do. They need to extend unemployment, and they need to extend most of the Bush tax cuts, except for the rich. If they refuse to act on either of the first two items, I would get a little hard ass at this point and insist they pass the tax cut with the increase in millionaire's tax. The Republicans have as much as said that if they don't get their way to the letter they are going to hold the whole bill up. The sad thing is that I honestly don't think Obama cares whether he loses on these issues or not. I would say that our president is "thick skinned to a fault" in that nothing seems to bother him, when they should.

We've had cold weather here that merits talking about. For the last ten days or so we've had at least temperatures ten degrees below normal. Yesterday at a quarter to eight on KNX they said that it was 41 degrees in Anaheim with a significant percentage of locations in the thirties. Today's temperatures mid day ranged from about 45 to 55. A few days ago they said we would be in a warming trand and hopefully get up to 65. I don't think we made it. Now they are predicting colder weather with rising winds, which we are getting. Ski resorts like cold, dry snow and they don't care if it's man nade because that way the roads say open without chains. Dana was remarking that if you thought it was cold here, in Palmdale they had to wait in nineteen degree weather for the local Wall Mart to open. Perhaps I wouldn't mind this except temperatures here in the West Wing are chilly, compared to the East Wing. And I'm not referring to the White House. I've been drinking a lot more coffee lately.

Is This the Opening Salvo of W W III?

Could this North Korean incident be the first salvo of World War III? They attacked an SK fishing village and the people were shaken up. South Korea said that if it happens again North Korea will experience a severe retaliation. Why don’t they just do the retaliation this time and save a step? Unless George Bush personally planned our the whole thing in 1999, the US doesn’t care what goes on in the world. Dana said just now that China would not dare intervene on North Korea’s behalf today because we would cut off trade with them and the thing is they still need us to buy all their cheap goods to keep their economy going. According to Dana we give they our old junky cars and stuff we don’t want and they turn it into brand new merchandise. They say if a US base had been bombed by the North Koreans THEN we would react. People are saying that it’s just the grooming process of Kim Jung Il’s son taking over and they are “getting the people of North Korea to rally around the new leadership and the military. If Obama were like Franklin Roosevelt or Truman he would say “What the hell of there is a nuclear exchange in the Korean pennincula? Just as long as we aren’t affected. Those people can both use Nukes on each other and we’ll step in and set up a military dictatorship like after WW II in Japan, and we will be the big heroes”. That’s possible.

There is a real concern with these pat downs at the air ports and that is the matter of the gloves the TSA people wear for their OWN protection, but not the passenger’s. Because they stick their hands down people’s pants and run their fingers through people’s hair and could pick up lice or herpes or worse yet this MRSA virus they have in hospitals, which is what Jim Hansen died of. All this virus needs to spread is physical touching and you’re done for. But few people speak of it as a real issue. They don’t see the concern we are breeding a nation of sheep like they had in Nazi Germany in the ‘thirties. This whole talk about pat downs on Stephanie Miller is getting really old, especially since the vast majority of the people just opt for the one shot body scan and can be done with it. I was surprised to learn that these pat downs take several minutes. Today is travel Wednesday and any sort of organized protest would not work today, as it would have in the ‘sixties. Back then you could have nudes in trench coats or people with exploding urine bags and it would have provided deterrence. But today I don’t even think the authorities would be bothered if hundreds of passengers were late to their destinations.

. Yesterday I had Bill Handel on and he was talking about how in Israel they have only a fraction of the air traffic we do. They follow your car into the lot with guns trained on you. They go through every bit of everything in your luggage and then do a decompression test to see if the stuff is set to explode at higher altitudes. Then they give you the most thorough grilling separating you and your wife and analyzing which questions you vary on, or whether your responses are so similar they sound rehearsed. They say Israel has never lost an air liner to a terrorist bomb. But the point was raised that why can’t any terrorist just set off a big bomb in the screen area where so many people are congregating? Compared to accident or disease or any other cause of death, the risk of dying in a terrorist attack is absolutely infinatessible. I turned off the radio this morning. I couldn’t take any more.

John Lennon says he likes the songs of his on the White Album better than the stuff on Sergent Pepper because they aren't "processed". Well, now I'm sure you've heard everything. It seems that Abbey Road is the best selling album so far on line, and "Here Comes the Sun" is the best individual song on line. Well, I say anything that spreads Beatle music to the younger generation is a good thing. I still say if the Beatles had stayed together they could have become one of the real mega-groups of the early 'seventies like David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Yes, or Emerson, Lake and Palmer. But the powers that be who controle such things said "No".

Republicans To Reject Vital US - Soviet Treaty

I had KNX radio on as usual for a Saturday. The President’s address this morning was on the confirmation of the START treaty, which the Republican Senate is holding up. This was a topic of discussion on "This Week" on ABC. George Will, being the loyal conservative, defended the obstructionism of the Republicans in the senate on this matter. George Will does now even believe we should allow lame duck sessions of congress. But of course if the treaty can't pass now it will never pass next year. Surely George Will must know this. The Republicans are just following their play book laid down by Mitch Mc Connell to make President Obama a one term President. What is clear now is that the Republicans hate this administration more than they love their country, which I find really disturbing. This treaty is a continuation of the original START treaty under Ronald Reagan under the slogan of “Trust but Verify”. We have not had inspecters on the grounds in Russia in nearly a year. Of course it’s pointed out what a valuable ally that Russia now is helping us with troublesome nations like Iran. Personally I still don't regard Russia as a friend because it's clear they are continuing in their autocratic tradition. You know both the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union have in comon that they started under the doctrine of "From everyone according to his ability and to each according to his need". Many tea baggers say it's no mystery why so many college students find communism attractive because they were raised under this general doctrine by their parents. As college students of limited means they "haven't experianced the true joys of genuine greed" like Gordon Gecko and his multi millions. But in truth the Russian nation is one of the must stuffy, stultifying and stagnent nations on the face of the earth, as is the Catholic Church. The government acquires property from the laety, er uh the people, and they hoard it. And they do anything to keep the fresh breezes of democracy from blowing.

In related news it was announced that the US will begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan as scheduled in July of 2011, but that we won’t have all the troops out of that country till 2014. That’s over three long years away and a lot of military deployments down the line. Other people say to face the fact that we’ll have troops in Afghanistan for the next ten years because they say that’s how long this war will take to win. Our troops claim that the Tallibon kills more civilians than our military does. I highly contest this fact. We killed a MINIMUM of 120,000 Iraqi civilians during that war there, which is a whole lot more than any "insergency" killed. Basically we have about a thirty to one kill ratio. I find no reason to believe things are any different in Afghanistan. Personally, I bet they're worse, with all of our drone flights. Karzai doesn't entirely trust the US and I don't blame him. This Admeral guy on "This Week" also talked about the START treaty and also "Don't Ask' Don't Tell". He doesn't like this one Marine Corps guy speaking up the way he did when they had all agreed to keep quiet till after the committee had issued their report. Of course people have complained about John Mc Cain's "moving of the goal posts" and I don't mean at Wrigley Field. I mean Mc Cain was going to abide by whatever the military agreed to. Now even though the military appears to be going along with eliminating "Don't Ask Don't Tell" Mc Cain, to appease his right wing friends, has moved further to the right. One guy on ABC news said that Sarah Palin "doesn't even have a slight chance of becomming president". To comment further on anything Sarah Palin does or says at this point would be pointless. Clearly she's living in a fantasy world, as are her minions of followers.

And now another chapter of "Those Murdering Bradys". But first Vivian Alamaine tipped her hand that she was no longer entombed in a coffin by talking to Victor almost cocky and mocking saying “You rejected me, but what have you got now? You’ve got nothing”. Brady also had feelings afresh that he really ought to be setting Vivian free because that’s what his mother would want. Samantha is in tears because Elvis gave her the long expected ultimatum that she either had to totally relinquish Sydney and Johnny, or else spend life in prison. E J is in a sense being kind. After all as E J points out it could shd should well be that Will and Raphael both go to jail as accessories to the crime after the fact. But also candidates for prison are police chief Bo Brady, and his mother, Caroline Brady, who have become accessaries after the fact. This whole keeping Samantha's attempted shooting of E J as the family secret - is becomming scandelous. Again, Samantha is a first rate fool if she doesn't grab E J's deal with both hands. Most murderors would leap at the chance never to have their case go to court. Not Sammy. She would rather traumatize her own children when she has a clear choice offered to her. What kid wants to grow up with the knowledge that her mother tried to kill her father. Sydney has had only one father, Elvis, but she has had three mothers, Anna Di Mira, Nicole, and Sammy. Which ever of these women continues to raise her now will be the one Sydney calls “Mommy” in the end. If I were Nicole I wouldn’t feel “used” in doing what any upstanding law abiding citizen would do. She has no reason to be ashamed of her actions, regardless of the consequences. She did the right thing. But I could point out to Elvis that “I know you are a caring, compassionate man. You have seen that side to you and I know that because I have lived with you. And I know you want your children to have the nurturing of a mother figure, even if you aren’t married to her, and I think I am by process of elimination the most logical candidate for that”. There is no need for any sort of groveling, desperation plea.

In personal news I have been getting regular interval interference on my TV reception at certain times of the day. It occurs on all channels and regardless of how the antenna is turned. Clearly there is some short or some applyance that is malfunctioning somewhere else in the building that needs tending to. I have not gotten much traction on this issue yet.

Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve

Fresh evidence has come to light concerning the long suspected connection between Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve. You will remember that Goldman Sachs profited more than any other bank during the Bush 2008 bail out. We were told that Lehman Brothers was in competition with Goldman Sachs but there were people from the latter company who actually determined which companies would go under or stay afloat. Normally I wouldn't pass along a video from a right winder. There was some Bible stuff in the main letter but this video with the two cartoon characters talking about the Federal Reserve mentions that Goldman Sachs was a principal beneficiary of the Bush bank bail-out. Some have argued that if we had gone the way of Herbert Hoover the rich would be suffering along with the rest of us in this recession but the average American wouldn't be any worse off. Various banks would go into receivership and the FDIC would come into play and pay off depositors to these banks. Just today a Thom Hartman substitute host was on and he was a little too left leaning for my taste. He said lower prices during a recession are a bad thing. That may be true in housing but not for other areas such as the local Wal-Mart. Poor people can buy more during a recession with lower prices. While it's true that lower wages bring the benefit of lower retail prices, the converse is not true. Lower prices do not CAUSE lower wages as the KTLK host was implyingThis video points out all the things that have risen in price during this recession, notibly the stock market. Many such as Judy even have said that "this economy takes time to heal itself and one way of doing that is to let some deflation occur and let the markets readjust to the lower amount of spendable money by the public. The Fed has already tried this "monitization of the reserve" on a smaller scale and it hasn't worked very well. What they are planning to do and now are doing seems really strange to me and I'm wondering whether some congressional committee shouldn't investigate it. If nothing else this would be a justification for having a Republican congress these next two years. We need to know after a century of secrecy just who is running the Federal Reserve. People on the right say it isn't just to screw up our economy but to wreck the world economy on a grand scale. Leaders from other nations have pleaded with our government not to make this move. Some people want to have universal standards and say that North Korea can't screen out our beef because cattle over thirty months of age have the propensity for mad cow disease. I think they have the right to reject our products just as we have the right to reject products made from child slave labor conditions from Shri Lanka. The Glen Becks of the right fear that the Obama administration has designs on world economic domination. Here is the link. Go down to the You Tube box and play it. The use of the word "the" so much is kind of a Romulan trait. The Romulans I don't know don't use the expression because they speak English. It's a Romulan language idium. They informed me one time when my brother and his girlfriend were babysitting a little girl who used the "the" expression all the time and my Romulan friends said "she was obviously Romulan in a previous life".

http://blogs.forbes.com/robertlenzner/2010/11/16/go-to-youtube-for-quantitative-easing-explained/?boxes=financechannelforbes

This “deep pat-down” at airports has raised controversy. You have a choice between those nude X ray thing where your children get irradiated, which might not be good for them. Or you can have your five year old little boy have his genitals handled by some forty year old man who just might be gay, for all you know. They use a new circular stroking motion that has the feel of some kind of physical "advance". Glen Beck says he wouldn't want his daughter's boyfriend doing it to his daughter. So you can get your naked body placed as the next You Tube video and everyone see your private parts - - - Or else you have the groping pat-down, which is worse. Both take a lot of time and neither is really appropriate for normal security concerns. We need to do as the Israelis do and that is have airline personnel talk with passengers to acertain which one of them seems to be unduly nervous. They could have air marshals on the flights. And they should bring in the bomb sniffing dogs. Dogs have sensitive noses and they tell me even if the bomb is sequestered in a body cavity, the dogs will alert to it. And you know something, after the steps they have taken right before this thanksgiving holiday, maybe racial profiling isn't such a bad thing after all.

I think there are fresh doubts about whether President Obama is a citizen of the USA. I know when I went to get my birth cirtificate from OC records that it wasn't the birth cirtificate that was in my baby book for years, which got lost. My license had expired in 1999 on the last day of the year and I was a little leery about the authorities finding out and so in September of 2002 applied for another at DMV but they told me they now only kept records for two years. It would seem that Obama is on tape admiting he's not a citizen of the United States and in fact was born in Kenya. There are other reports about his saying to Allan Keys in an Illinois senate debate that he is not a citizen but he is running for US Senate and not the Presidency. It would seem as if Obama has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover up all his early records, which seems strange for a man with nothing to hide. These right wing sources quote countless laws and exact legal specifications which cast further doubt on Obama's elligability to run for President.

You know, one positive thing was stated in these videos I think all of us liberals can get behind. If our liberal policies are really so popular why don't we have the issues aired openly in the 2012 year election and then we can nominate ourselves the liberal of our chosing, as long as he's actually ellagable to run for President of the United States. If Sarah Palin is serious about running, which I still doubt, she should be pretty easy to defeat with just about anybody.

Flush The Obomonation

We know that Clinton was no liberal. Michael Benner reminds us of that. But now we learn that Black people convicted of drug possession can’t get housing or other government benefits. That doesn’t seem fair. And they say that many predominently Black people have been disenfranched of their vote for life when cocaine junkies like George Bush and Bill Clinton go on to become President. Also Obama and his stimulus plan spends twelve the times as much money for drug control as we previously had. So for once I’m happy to drink and smoke tea with the tea baggers. Clearly the liberals will need to put up a different candidate in 2012. The things this President has done are completely beyond rationalizing away. This president is not even a centrist but leaning to the right. Obviously he has actively opposed the gay protagonists in the federal courts. He is against prosecuting anyone in the Bush administration. He is pro Wall Street. Liberals have said that if Bush let the banks fail that Goldman Sachs would have gone down, but basically the economy would be no worse off. But unlike Hoover, this president believes only the poor need suffer in a recession and not the rich. It’s quite believable that President Obama has given the green light to republicans wanting to extend all the Bush tax cuts, hopefully by making them permanent. The gun lobby has a friend in this President. To use that Christianity metaphor, if President Obama were to go on trial on accusations of “being a liberal” there would not be enough evidence to convict him.

Lisa Marcausky is 1.700 votes ahead of Joe Miller in the Alaska write-in contest. It would seem to me it should be a matter of days before we know to a certainty which candidate won. People are nit-picking over spelling errors, though.

This guy on KTLK says that ear marks by Congress aren’t so bad and that banning them would be unconstitutional because of article 1 paragraph 9 or whatever. It’s not up to some Presidential executive agency to allocate funds to a project. This duty is placed directly in congress’s hands. So I’ll tamp down my complaints about earmarks.

Now there is a sickening alternative to the “Fetus in a Jar” story, as George Bush switches off stories in interviews. Bush Senior was recovering from an operation and she asks a nurse twice, “Are my testicles black?” and she starts to lift the sheet and then Buih clarifies it to “Are my test results back”? That’s almost too sickening to ever repeat.

Charlie Wrangle was convicted of eleven of the thirteen ethics violations of congress. I heard some of his speech yesterday and his miking wasn’t very good, as if by conspiracy. Like I say he complained he didn’t have an attorney and wanted another delay in the process. Apparently after the speech he stalked out in a huff, and now congress is mad because they didn’t want to try him in abstentia.

Let me just give Nicole Walker a little advice. If Raphael was successful in unleashing that “worm” to erase all files on Samantha, notably her confession to murder, and Nicole learns about it, I’d go first to E J Di Mira and tell him the evidence I had. And it turns out she still has it because the "worm" that Raphael used to attack her computer and destroy files was made known to Nicole by the computer. And Brady, who was with her, volenteered the information that any downloads to that computer would be deleted with that particular virus. Armed with that information Nicole went straight to Elvis Di Mira. She says "I knew I should have gotten suspicious when Raphael said the baby needed changing when she didn't, just to get me out of the room".

Terry is on this gay “investigation” kick, sort of like Steve, only he does it with communists. Well, guess how many times the word “homosexual” was used in the Wickepedia entry article on “decline and fall of the Roman Empire”. You guessed right if you said Zero. Not one time. The closest I got was the letters “h-o-m”.

Kate Middleton is the woman destined to be Queen, probably after I'm dead. (that sounds like a fictional "soap opera" name) Because today Prince William proposed to her. They will be married sometime in 2011. She's apparently wearing a piece of jewelery owned by Dianna. (is that a jinx?)

Single use plastic bags have been banned in LA county. I think that's a bad idea because now they'll charge you by the paper bag, which for a large shopping spree, could add up. Plastic is a way to carry a lot of groceries more easily if for instance all you have is a bike, or you're walking.

They have taken to banning outright those "energy drinks" combining alcohol and caffein because people have become flushed with a high pulse and heart palipitations. My feeling is to let people buy whatever mind altering substances they want. But we have an epidemic of prudishness.

The Beatles were one of the last groups to get their music released on CD and now they are one of the last groups to have their music on-line. In 1987 they rush released their stuff and so the first four albums were released in mono, and I don't think that was intensional.

The book called "The Bush Family Secrets" is one I thought was already out. Apparently Prescott Bush's father got us into world war I against President Wilson's wishes. We know Prescott Bush himself was a Nazi sympathiser. This book tells us the Bush family has always been obsessed with "Intelligence" and associates of theirs prompted the formation of the CIA. Of course George Bush Sr. was appointed head of the CIA to replace William Colby in late 1975. I remember writing Stewart Mc Bernie I was against that move saying that Bush's communist Chinese connections couldn't be trusted. We know now that Prescott Bush hand picked Richard Nixon in 1946 to run against Jerry Vorhes, a democrat who wanted the securities industry investigated. The book tried to connect George Bush Sr. to Dallas and the JFK assasenation. When Richard Nixon became president he broke with the past and formed the environmental protection agency and other things that displeased the Bushies. So the plot of "Silent Coup", which I read a long time ago claims that Watergate was a plot to oust Nixon from the right wing. I'd like to read this book but perhaps too much could be read into these conspiritorial coincidences.

Some Absolutely Idiotic Ideas

This Obama debt commission has come out with some of the stupidest ideas you’ve ever come across to eliminate the deficit. Do they want to raise the 100,000 ceiling on FICA payments? No. Do they want to eliminate the Bush tax cuts? No. Do they want us to end the war in Afghanistan? No. Do they want protective terrifs on foreign goods? No. Instead what they want to do is Lower taxes on businesses by ten percent and eliminate the Mortgage deduction the average person has to pay on his house. And they want to raise the retirement age to seventy, which will hurt the unemployment picture, and they want to cut Social Security payments. Bill Handel was saying yesterday how government is soaking the rich and the middle class, who used to pay income tax, doesn't any more. That's the way people like Bill Handel and Larry Elder see it. Some on the right want that 23% value added tax on everything we buy. Clearly this debt comission was dominated by conservatives. I don't even recall a half percent stock trade tax, that would slow down the stock trading frenzy. Did the comission recomend changing our tax laws so that corporations can't so easily relocate overseas? I don't think so. How about raising money by buying massive ammounts of Gold and then dumping it at a high price after speculative fever has run its course? That's what a rich person would do. If the government had any imagination they could raise money without sticking it to the comon person. But the screwiest idea the government has now is these graphic depictions on cigarette packages. First of all cigarette consumption is way down. They act as if it's a growing crisis or something. To spend any money "investigating" this problem at all seems to me another waste of money. It's like building that border fence when imigration from Mexico is way down now. That's the government for you. They want to show terminal patients with horrible diseases taking up half of both the front and back of a pack of cigarettes. I’m surprised they don’t mandate every Free Clinic have a fetus in a jar you have to bow down to as you enter. The government is not thinking. Of course Obama is a horrible leader and has marketed his ideas very poorly. What the Sixty Minutes interview showed was that the President has no real ideals he’s willing to put on the line and fight for. Basically the only difference between this President and George W Bush is that Obama will occasionally make a speech about health care or else he will go overseas and tell people under Islam that America isn’t that great of a country to live in. Otherwise his administration is just a continuation of the Bush administration. People seem to think they can do without government altogether and the Republicans; chief pledge is to shut government down and then to make President Obama a one term president. They have no other ideas. If I were the President talking to CBS I would have told them that I do have core beliefs I’m willing to fight for like Bring Scudder Libby and Karl Rove and Dick Chaney to justice. And also that I completely revamp our foreign war policy and stop renditions and stop covering up secrets that our people are entitled to know. I would mention these “Christmas tree” appropriations bills voted on by congress. I would argue for an open air policy and not legislate in secret. There is nothing that the President is doing now that inspires any confidence in me. And if the President should suddenly vanish tomorrow into thin air, few would miss him. The people have indicated they really don’t care about health care reform despite what earlier polls indicated. The people seem bent only on halting all forward governmental progress. Since Obama has no principles he willing to fight for and not sell out on completely, I’m not even sure why we even need a president these next two years. Is it to move more US jobs to India like he did last week? I don’t know. What on earth is he going to talk about in his next State of the Union speech in January? I can’t imagine... Of course I wouldn’t waste time and taxpayer’s money trying to impeach this president because he’s already been rendered impotent. It’s just a two year waiting game now. I honestly can’t remember the last time this president showed either uncompromised principles or anything he’s willing to go to the mat for. If the president hadn’t betrayed his supporters we’d have a democratic congress in January. Only four liberals were voted out of office and 24 blue dog house democrats were voted out of power, according to the Stephanie Miller show. If you must sacrifice, a blue dog will do fine.

I don’t understand how that cruise ship could be “out of food” and has to be given Span to prevent starvation or whatever. People don’t starve in one day. There is such a thing as freezers and ice, and food doesn’t thaw out instantaneously. Foods don’t go bad instantaneously. Meat will last at least a day after thawing. Produce and fruits will keep several days. Candy bars and canned drinks and alcohol will keep indefinitely, as will dry goods like spaghetti. They say that many toilets don’t work. The laws of gravity haven’t been done awsay with, have they? Do they or don’t they have ways of pumping water? The pipes don’t leak and the toilets still work. What about butane lanterns for lights? Why do people have to sleep out on the deck? That makes no sense. The only real problem would be for dairy products such as milk and ice cream. They say this ship is twice the size of the Titanic, but I guess that must be in volume, since it's under a thousand feet long and the Titanic was just over. They had 4,000 people aboard. We are told the Star Ship Enterprise held just over one thousand at one point. But we know they had 36 decks, which is puzzling. But if you picture them in concentric circles in the "saucer" section it makes a little sense. Because they can rotate the wheel and in this way obtain gravity.

I've thought a little about it and have come to the conclusion that the national deficet can be easily handeled if we do but one thing. We raise the tax on stock dividends from fifteen to thirty five percent to match income. I would make it an absolutely flat fax lest the people on the right get their knickers in a twist over it. No matter if it was a one share gift from your grandfather on your birthday or you're a milti-millionaire, you pay the same constant 35% rate. No one need complain about that. This will encourage, hopefully, people in the corporation to reinvest earnings and not let the bulk of the money go to the biggest of stock holders. It also addresses the problem of the rich millionaire "sitting around the pool waiting for the dividend check to arrive. I would not raise the capital gains tax now for two reasons. Number one if you're poor and need to sell a long held family business I believe you're entitled to every penny you can get. Secondly a jump in capital gains to 28% or whatever right now would cause a massive sell-off of the stock market and that we don't need right now. In exchange for this I would let the republicans have their 35% rate for billionaires. They can get rid of the entire experation and keep ALL of the Bush tax cuts the way President Obama seems to want, and has been hinting at for a long time now. To risk a republican filibuster over this issue would be risky because you know given the addeled nature of the American population, they would blame the democrats for the hold up of this tax relief bill. And the Republicans would only need to come back and pass the bill in the next session when they reign supreme.

Something funny struck me while I was watching the soap opera today that was kind of a tangental thought. There are two types of people. One type like me when they see a good thing or discover something that will benefit mankind or come upon an enlightened thought, they want to tell the world about it. Other personality types think "How can I keep this good thing to myself and use it to manipulate my enemies. You know, I believe that Neil Savadra alias Jesus Christ, wants to shrink Christianity down small enough to where you're able to drown it in the bath tub like Andrea Yates or people want to do with government. I remember Judy's exclamation against universal salvation when she said "What would be the point?" Salvation seems to be no fun unless you can lord it over someone or else keep people out of your exclusive club. You want a god who is small enough to keep in your back pocket, accross from your wallet, and if need be you can do away with it alltogether if you can no longer control it. Neil's consistent message is "Your God is too big" and you see this sentament manifest in manifold ways. You see it when he says "Don't be too eager to share the gospell with others. Be picky about it and make that person see you as the center of their focus rather than God, and have it be your life they lust after rather than some abstract principles from the Bible. They have to see in you that you have a good thing going in your life" You know I was looking at that map on ABC news the other night and noticing that California and New York alike are two fairly non religious states. As you make your way tword the deep South faith becomes more concentrated. I can't help think their must be something racial in this and white supremicy. I don't know how Orange County feels about these statistics. They think they are the religious center of the world. But a week ago Tuesday California proved that it was one state that wasn't in the grip of the tea party. I also remember those people who say that this is the first generation where the young people are not joining churches once they get married and "settled down". To me this is a sign that indeed and at long last, Christianity is dying on the vine. If Southern churches have so much money they want to ship a Cathedral from Buffalo down 900 miles south piece by piece it means they are bereft of impulses to spend their copious funds in more edifying ways to both God and humanity.

People Who Live in Glass Houses

The big news of the past day has been that George W's new book "Decision Points" or whatever, is out. Last night I missed the interview with the former President because I hadn't had my coffee and my brain was a mental fog and the event just plum slipped my mind. Not to defend George Bush or anything but I am of the school that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. I don't think stone throwing is a particularly good idea anyhow. I don't like the idea of a whole family clan being classed as mentally ill or "dysfunctional" or what have you. I remember riding home from a dinner with my cousin and his son and our family at a place at Long Beach harbor (I had stead) and we were riding home and a person in the car went off on my father and what a horrible role model he was and how our family (and particularly Pete Richards) suffered for it. My feelings were mixed. My first impulse was to tell them to shut up because it was none of their business and ignormasuses shouldn't pose as experts on things they know nothing about. On the other hand I wanted to hear what this person knew, or thought they knew. People on the inside of families have the right to criticism and confrontation. Outsiders probably don't have the full picture. And if you were to put Obama's upbringing up to scruteny it might not be nice. One could make a lot of the whole mixed race thing or the Indonesian Islamic indoctrination thing or the absent father thing. In Bush's case we are told that Barbra was an abusive woman who worked out her anger in inappropiate ways. When I think of Barbra I think of that Michael Jackson interview in 1988 during the campaign, and how antagonistic and hostile Barbra became to just routine questions. I remember thinking then, "this woman has anger issues". How we hear how the family played golf after the death of George's three & a half year old sister, Robin, when he was seven. And then Barbra apparently did a 180 and had sixteen year old George W drive her to the hospital after she had miscarried and she had her fetus in a jar and she was telling George "this is your little brother or sister". It sounds a little weird to me, but I wasn't there. Apparently with Senator Santaurum it was stranger. They packed up the family for a trip to grandma's with the six year old, the four year old and the eighteen month old, and of course the fetus and had the children talking to the fetus and singing it lulibies and when they got to Grandma's they had a naming ceremony and then burried the fetus in the back yard. People talk about stresses causing George to begin drinking. In my own case I steer clear of both Mark Bove and William Halliday, two Reverands, because I know they would eat me alive if they were able to pin alcoholism on me. I don't know what all goes into alcoholism, and I'm not going to start slinging mud or advance some psychological theory about family upbringing for it. On the contrary I think Bush is superior to Obama in a lot of ways because he answers questions directly and from the heart and doesn't just start babbling rationalistic nonesense the way our current President is wont to do. In terms of the Bush legacy I'll just say that my latest message from the Bush's "guardian angels" on Cassiopia, suggests to me that these of the "Texas group" we we at the Federation call them, are not very happy with the tea baggers and suggest that they will wreck the country unless someone pulls them aside and tells them the facts of life. My only hope is that that statement is true. The Heritage Foundation is still saying that the tea party movement was entirely spontanious and grass roots in nature. It seems already Rand Paul is reversing his position on earmark legislation saying now he's all for them. My other observation about Bush is don't go off attacking him, when our current President has adopted all of his basic pro war and pro wall street policies. People say that President Obama is a lot smarter than Bush was. If that is true - then it makes his acts even more deliberate and increases his culpability. Whatever you say about George Bush - - his administration is over and done and Bush is prepared to fade into the sunset twilight. President Obama's policies are ongoing and in the present and that is the danger we need to fear. Some say you can judge a man by who they are afraid of. President Obama seems really afraid of offending the tea baggers and is willing to compromise with with them in ways that would make Nevil Chamberlin blush. People talk about the Bush war crimes. Well, it was this President's decision not to prosecute them. If you are looking for the most immediate source to blame, blame this President. He continues to live preaching this farsical fantasy that he's a liberal. As is pointed out on the Thom Hartman show today there ARE no real liberals left. Not the kind that world net daily has these wild delusions about. Robert Welsh has gone main stream, and Joe Hill is considered too subversive to even include in the history books. There are no socialists or communists left and Labor Unions cower like Iraqi troops after the first few days of the ground invasion of "Opperation Desert Storm" in 1991. We have expunged the Left from our "American Heritage" and Heritage Foundation should put that in their pipe and smoke it. Remember, contrary to what Hillary Clinton says, tea baggers don't get stronger in hot water, they just get weaker- - and turn bitter. (Selah)

Melanie Layton is in big trouble on Days of our Lives. I'd watch my back. We all know that Clowie is a lying sociopath. She drove one husband to drugs, and insensed one mother in law so much that she tried to have her murdered. Now she's cheated again and regards the Truth as kryptonite. What lengths will she go to to keep her secret? Throwing the keys to the boat in the water is only the first step. Now she is trying to fake having her baby to keep Melanie off the cell phone to her father. Were I Melanie I'd just say "Hell, you won't die in the next two minutes. Just sit there and lie quietly and make it easier on yourself". Then we have the other serpantine character, Vivian Alamaine. Yesterday she was released from her coffin. So now you should expect a reign of terror like Satan being loose from the bottomless pit after a thousand years. I found it interesting the line spoken yesterday that goes "The reason why Vivian lothes Maggie so is that she sees such a basic goodness in Maggie and she can't stand that, so her only instinct is to destroy it". That's interesting. At last we come to Elvis Di Mira as the lone wolf and the only one in Salem who cares whether the person who shot and almost killed him should be brought to justice. It's kind of the dirty little Brady family secret that they all know Samantha pulled the trigger, but nobody wants to say it aloud. I identify with Elvis. I know what it's like to be a minority of one, and now the only ally he had in the world is dead. But that may soon change. Nicole Walker was the lucky dog who found the camera phone recording Samantha's full, explicit confession to the shooting. She says she's going to put it on the evening news. If she does so she has my full endorsement, and Sammy has it coming. It'll put the whole Brady family in their place. Samantha lost my sympathy when innocent lives became affected. And when Adriana's life was hanging in the ballance that was IT for me. Sammy had gone over the line. It may be a way for Nicole to reconcile with an ex lover / slash / enemy to once again get on his good side by giving him what he wants most.

Nicole Walker here with the evening news and this next story will knock your socks off. They talked about the political divide on the ABC news and how the north and west coast don't have the deep religious faith of the deep south. But now something Pete Richards mentioned to me years ago may be coming true. He said that a lot of devout pastors had lost their faith. I didn't believe it. But now ABC news says that it's a growing trend particularly among evangelical pastors of the South with large congragation. (of religious addicts that need to be regularly fed - slash - supplied) And they say that they lost their faith FROM reading the Bible itself. One pastor said that he knew he'd lost his faith and it just wasn't there any more, but he still had to go on. But all the same time was looking for an honorable way out of the pulpit. He feared he had lost his soul but at the same time prayed for God to take his life before he had comitted the unpardonable sin. It seems there are more of us out there than I think.

The news is that contestent on Wheel of Fortune who guess the phrase "I've got a good feeling about this" all from guessing one, letter, the L in feeling. Well, I don't know. The show has always been on the up & up so I'll take Pat Sajac at his word. Maybe it's just true. She really did have a good feeling about this one.

Positive Economic News Comes Too Late

Well, yesterday’s news on employment was not altogether unanticipated. It was announced that for the first time that we knew of, 150,000 jobs were actually added to this economy even though the unemployment rate itself remained at 9.6% Furthermore they raised the figures of previous months to indicate that for the last four months we have been adding a hundred thousand new jobs each month. Where was this news before the elections? Now the Republicans when they get into power can trot out these new economic statistics and say “Look, America is already back. Just the mere anticipation of our rule has turned this economy around”. Of course their chief complaint is that the taxes would be going up on January first. They have retroactively blamed every economic shortfall of the past three years on the fact that NEXT YEAR taxes will be going up. They have spoken of “uncertainty” in corporations hiring new workers. But as I have already said, jobs come not from the generosity of rich people, despite what Larry Elder says. Jobs come from increased demand as the common people have money in their pockets to spend on product which in turn creates a need for corporations to expand their work force. Democrats are still mad at Obama for being too conciliatory in his press conference a few days ago. Clearly Republicans do not want to compromise on anything but are proud obstructionists all the way. Harry Truman was not like this in 1948 when he ran for reelection. He did not point to his “going along with Republicans” as reason for his reelection. It cannot be over stressed that it was Obama’s left wing constituency that did not turn out to vote for him this past cycle. This was the difference in the election. It’s the president’s own fault that convress went to the Republicans. It wouldn’t have happened if the people who put Obama in office had come out to vote on Tuesday. Here’s another thought for you all. The person most responsible for the financial crisis of the past few years is none other than democrat Bill Clinton for bills he signed into law ten years ago. Dr. Levy doesn’t like Brown or Boxer or Obama, but calls himself a democrat because he liked Clinton. Personally I would think twice before making an idiotic statement like that. It’s true that this Oriental takeover of the economy was begun under Ronald Reagan. But Clinton passed N A F T A and later abolished Glass-Stiegal, which set up the whole financial crisis of the previous decade. Get off your meds long enough to let this one thought sink in before you go back to your prozac and your usual mental fog.

Of all the cop shooting of unarmed suspect cases that have happened I’m a little surprised at this Oscar Grant case in Oakland right now. It seems a white transit worker shot an unarmed Black man named Oscar Grant and how there are people protesting because the courts only gave the officer involved two years in prison. Usually officers get NO years in prison. Often the case is scarcely investigated at all. In this case there actually was a trial. Oscar Grant’s family says the subject was not resisting arrest. The officer says he was. He says he reached for his Tazer gun but instead got his service revolver and shot the man dead. Most officers don’t even have the Choice of a Tazer gun to use. Maybe if people protest more cases then consciousness will be raised. We know how little the media likes to cover protests nowadays. Hopefully this is in green italic font.

Keith Oberman was fired by CNBC last week for making a donation to a political campaign. The people at KNX radio spared no invective to describe how other stupid and thoughtless this act was and how a man like Oberman ought to know better. But I am puzzled. The people at KNX said “Of course you can’t compare NBC to Fox because Fox has a whole different set of standards. They allow people to be as overtly political in their off time as they please. Sean Hannity has given several thousand dollars to candidates of his choice and nobody says a word. But they are now saying if Keith had just had higher ratings he would not have been suspended. I guess that’s an object lesson to have high ratings. Of course that didn’t help Dan Rather at CBS. Rather was working on a basically factual story about George Bush’s draft dodging carrier and there was one questionable document involved and Rather was fired over it, ending a carrier of some fifty years. So high ratings are no guarantee.

This year has been pretty free of references to turning back the clock this weekend. I had wondered about it. It seems that the first reference to it definitely happening was this morning when Dana and Paul confirmed it. I did not hear it in the media till KNX radio had it on about 6:45 this morning. It seems that in Tijuana that up until this year they were already on standard time and their workers who crossed the border into San Diego every morning had to get up an hour earlier. Now nine cities along the border are allowed to stay on Daylight Savings time till this weekend.

I was just listening again to that “Purity” company advertisement info-mercial about their product with Co Q 10 and Resveritrol, which sounds like Resperidal, which is the drug I take. It seems resveritral is found in red wine and is the substance which “turns on” metabolism genes of the body that otherwise don’t get turned on unless you diet or fast or something and these genes promote good matabilism. They also put B 12 in their product that increases mental alertness and energy and clarity. As I have said I think I had a B 12 deficienty my senior year in high school because I did so bad in math and science that years. Perhaps it was the Stelezine but perhaps it was the lack of B 12. You know I’d only have a bowl of cereal in the mornings and junk food all day, and we had cheap dinners in those days like macaroni and cheese or tuna casseroles. As such I was lacking protein in my diet which contains B 12. Anyhow I’d use this product. Co Q 10 is not a gasoline additive. It is the secret energy substance that increases the body’s ability to make A T P, which is essential in energy. Co Q 10 is thee substance you have in abundance when you are younger but lose throughout life. So that’s it.

Violence and the Teenage Brain

Thom Hartman has some very interesting things to say about the teenage brain and violence today. Some 24 year year old called him and he said when he was fourteen he used to play video games all the time. But Hartman said back in the nineties the games were more cartoon like and not as explicit as today in 3 D. Hartman familiarized us all with the three demilenizations of the brain. The nerves of the brain have a coating of milen around them to protect them and the more entrenched the pattern is the more milen builds up. But three times in the young there is a flood of a substance called “milen” that destroys the nerve pathways of the brain and you flush brain cells out of the body in your urine. Of course when you do this the brain actually shrinks but it becomes more efficient in handeling data. The first demilenazation takes place at age seven and before this it’s a “magical” world for kids where you actually believe all that Disney movie clap trap. Kids lose their belief in Santa Clause around age seven. Personally I remember it was Easter of 1958 when me and [Al Owens] has gotten up in the pre dawn hours of Easter and [Al Owens] says “You know the Easter bunny isn’t real. In fact come to think of it, Santa Clause isn’t real”. I sat back and thought about it a bit and thought “That makes sense”. So it was the first Christmas after we moved from east Westchester (or whatever you call it) that I still believed in Santa Clause. But I didn’t believe in the flying reindeer or going down the chimney. I was sensible, like the girl in the Hippopotamus song. I believed Santa came in through the front door. I remember it was the last Christmas in Westchester when I asked my Mom “How does Santa Clause know if we’ve been good or bad” and my Mon said ‘He has spies”. I was already in the first grade back then. (We moved from Westchester on Halloween night) At any rate Hartman says that if you’re going to learn music (which I did. My parents bought me that xylophone thing in mid 1956) or if you’re going to learn another language, before seven is the time to do it because if you learn it then you won’t speak it with an accent. But if you learn after seven you’ll always speak it with an accent. Also in kids who learned prior to seven the parietal and temperal lobes of the brain light up, but after seven it’s the occipital lobe that is active, because you have to think of word assotiations in terms of pictures. At any rate a lot of childish nonsense gets flushed down the toilet at age seven. There are changes at thirteen and also around age twenty when your “world view” and personality changes. This could be what they mean when they say that “Your brain isn’t fully formed when you’re a teenager”. What they mean is that excess brain cells haven’t yet been flushed down the toilet. This may be why they say people “get mature and responsible” at age of twenty or so and no longer have that rebellious “juvenile” personality. But if you stimulate the violence centers of the brain excessively before a certain age, then you will keep that violence with you always. This means a ten year old should not be playing extreme video games of violence because the brain will go ahead and create a “violence center” as a valued center of knowledge. This is why Bush’s “wars of choice” in Iran and Afghanistan are a bad thing because children exposed to this violence will carry it with them the next sixty years, and provide fodder as future recruits. I found this little essay of Hartman utterly fascinating. This may account for what I’ve called “The Jesus gene”. Why is it Mark Bove’s four boys all turned out to be such holy rollers? It’s because they had been propagandized as small toddlers and onward. For a person like me or Pete Richards or Jim Cooper or Jim Klein or Bobby Hayden or Henry, it took an extrordenary chain of events to make us Christians. For some people a stint in prison is that “extrordenary event”- . Whatever it is, it had to be something that came as a shock to the normal brain patterns to disrupt the brain patterns after they had been established. In my case I think moving here caused a de milenization. Because suddenly Chrisstian belief in the hereafter “no longer made sense”. My writing style was different in the nineties than now, and I should provide examples of it.

Ravi Batra says that this “Monitization of the national dept” that Judy predicted last week, was in fact a bad thing to do. Personally I think it’s pretty smart. It is about the only thing we’ve got left. But detractors say that will only drive up oil and energy prices and make corporations and banks richer. As I said in a previous posting “If China thinks our dollar is undervalued, why is it they’d rather have our money than our goods. If they don’t trust the dollar shouldn’t they fix it so we have to pay more dollars for their goods, if we buy them at all, and they can get our stuff on the cheap. But that doesn’t happen. They refuse to raise the valuation of the dollar in relation to ours. So like I say “Put your money where your mouth is”. I think inflation is the last thing we have to worry about. It’s akin to someone with 115 over 75 blood pressure smoking a cigarette. The effect on cartiac stimulation is near nill. Now they’re saying some children got sick eating canibus laced brownies. They got nauseous and rappid pulse rates, and are being checked out by medical personnel. I think the only good way to restore American industry is for the senate to ratify laws passed in the House the past two years. Of course they can change the rules to majority rule in the Senate in January, but won’t all bills “die” at the end of this congressional term? That’s my understanding of constitutional law. There will be no large reserve of House passed bills just waiting to be ratified by the Senate come January. We need to legislate prohibitions against certain practices that are anti US economy. But the Republicans like the status quo too much to do anything to keep US industry on its downward track.

We need to be reminded that stock prices are not really related to corporate profits or CEO salaries. If you invest in a stock you are not "giving the corporation money". The exception to this rule where the corporation gets the money is in an I P O or initial public offering of common stocks. Otherwise - the only one you are paying is the guy who sold the stock to you at the other end of the brokeraged sale. Stocks can easily sell for several times "book value". This makes the individual owners richer but not the piggies in the corporation. The stock market in fact is still in what would be the doldrems at the end of any other big recession. The highs were over 1400 on the D J I. But individual C E O's at the top get more money than they would deserve than the price of their stock would indicate. A rise in stock price does not increase corporate capital. These come from reinvested dividends, if there are any. Technically every stock owner has a say in corporate policy. You get share allocated votes. In a sense corporations are a democracy. However it's the big pension fund and mutual fund managers that make all the decisions. Most votes are controled by huge blocks of stock no individual investor could hope to compete with. Conversely if the market were to crash, book value of the corporation would not necessarily go down. But if profit and loss statements are adverse they could have a major cash flow problem. But I think it's fair to say that except for the first few months of the recovery, stock share owners are not making any killing in windfall profits. I gave a "buy" indication in October of 2009 and I never retracted that and I am not retracting it now. Personally I don't think it's a particularly good time to buy either comon stocks or precious metal futures. Stocks pay dividends though, and they are superior to T bills. People pay for comodities what they Expect them to be worth at the delivery date. For the most part you are not competing with idiots and if something appears really obvious, look again. - - - - - (and now for the Abbey Road tape splice)

OK, what we’re doing with this file now is to format the thing for the blog right here in Word and then transfer the formatting tword the blog so I’ll know it will it will stick. Then I’ll go back and change the formatting back to normal when I’m done.