You must work midnights. I am adjusting to that as well after 16 years on the job with all the layoffs my senority puts me on midnights. I suppose I should be glad to have a job

I think we lose an hour this weekend

"There's class warfare, all right. But it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." ~~~ Warren Buffett

This film is astonishing, it goes in detail through the untold history of The Project for the New American Century with tons of archival footage and connects it right into the present. This film exposes how every major war in US history was based on a complete fraud with video of insiders themselves admitting it. This film shows how the first film theaters in the US were used over a hundred years ago to broadcast propaganda to rile the American people into the Spanish-American War. This film shows the white papers of the oil company Unocal which called for the creation of a pipeline through Afghanistan and how their exact needs were fulfilled through the US invasion of Afghanistan. This film shows how Halliburton under their "cost plus" exclusive contract with the US Government went on a mad dash spending spree akin to something out of the movie Brewster's Millions, yet instead of blowing $30 million they blew through BILLIONS by literally burning millions of dollars worth of hundred thousand dollar cars and trucks if they had so much as a flat tire. I have seen a ton of films, this film contains a massive amount of incredible footage I have never seen before anywhere, it is an historical documentary which exposes all the lies of the past so that you can understand the present. This film is a must see. - IL
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=26614

Earlier this decade when some of us warned that George W. Bush was behaving more like an incipient dictator than the leader of a constitutional republic, we were dismissed as alarmists, left-wingers, traitors and a host of less printable epithets.

But it is now increasingly clear that President Bush and his top advisers viewed the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to implement a series of right-wing legal theories that secretly granted Bush unlimited power to act lawlessly and outside the traditional parameters of the U.S. Constitution.

These theories held that at a time of war – even one as vaguely defined as the “war on terror” – Bush’s powers as Commander in Chief were “plenary,” or total. And since the conflict against terrorism had no boundaries in time or space, his unfettered powers would exist everywhere and essentially forever.

According to his administration's secret legal memos released Monday, Bush could waive all meaningful constitutional rights of citizens, including the First Amendment’s protections on free speech and a free press.

John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department's powerful Office of Legal Counsel – which advises a President on the limits of his constitutional powers – declared that Bush could void the First Amendment if he deemed it necessary to fight terrorism.

"First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote in an Oct. 23, 2001, memo entitled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.”

Yoo then added ominously, "The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically."

What was particularly stunning about Yoo’s reference to waiving the First Amendment – a pillar of American democracy – was his cavalier attitude. He tossed the paragraph into a memo focused on stripping Americans of their Fourth Amendment “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

While saying that Bush could order spying on and military attacks against U.S. domestic targets at his own discretion as Commander in Chief, Yoo added, almost in passing, that the President also could abrogate the rights of free speech and a free press.

Wiping Out Public Trials

Another Yoo memo, dated June 27, 2002, essentially voided the Sixth Amendment and a federal law guaranteeing Americans the right to public trials. In the memo, Yoo asserted that Bush had the power to declare American citizens “enemy combatants” and detain them indefinitely.

“The President’s power to detain enemy combatants, including U.S. citizens, is based on his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief,” Yoo wrote, adding that “Congress may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”

Yoo acknowledged that in “war on terror” cases, an “enemy combatant” may have no formal connection to an enemy group, may have no weapon, and may have no discernable plan for carrying out a terrorist attack. In other words, an “enemy combatant” could be anyone that Bush so designated.

Under Yoo’s analysis, an alleged “enemy combatant” would have no legal recourse, since Bush’s Commander in Chief powers trumped even habeas corpus requirements that the government must show cause for imprisoning someone. Further, this opinion wasn’t just hypothesizing; it provided the legal basis for indefinitely detaining U.S. citizen Jose Padilla.

Though the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately issued a narrow 5-4 decision overturning Bush’s supposed right to deny habeas corpus and punish “enemy combatants” through his own military court system, many of Yoo’s concepts survived in the Military Commissions Act, which was passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2006.

While the law appears on the surface to target only non-citizens, fine print deep in the legislation makes clear that the Bush administration still was asserting its power to detain U.S. citizens who were viewed as aiding and abetting foreign enemies and to punish those citizens through military commissions that denied normal due-process rights to defendants.

“Any person is punishable as a principal under this chapter who commits an offense punishable by this chapter, or aids, abets, counsels, commands, or procures its commission,” the law states, adding that “any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States ... shall be punished as a military commission … may direct.”

The reference to people acting “in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States” would not apply to Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda but would cover American citizens.

The Military Commissions Act remains in effect to this day, although President Barack Obama has vowed not to apply it, favoring use of regular civilian or military courts.

Loss of First Amendment

Though some of us have cited Bush’s determination to override key constitutional protections for years (see, for instance, our book Neck Deep), few critics – including me – thought to include the notion that Bush was interested in suspending the First Amendment.

The significance of Yoo’s throwaway paragraph about throwing away the First Amendment is that it suggests that the Bush administration intended as early as October 2001 to act against journalists and citizens who were viewed as undermining Bush’s “war on terror” through public comments or disclosures.

As a right-wing legal scholar, Yoo surely shared the Right’s knee-jerk animosity toward past reporting on the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War’s Pentagon Papers, as well as contempt for Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War.

But his First Amendment reference also may have reflected the thinking of senior Bush aides in those early days of the "war on terror" as they collaborated with Yoo in formulating his legal opinions.

In his 2006 book War by Other Means, Yoo describes his participation in frequent White House meetings regarding what “other means” should receive a legal stamp of approval. Yoo said the “meetings were usually chaired by Alberto Gonzales,” then White House counsel, and involved Vice President **** Cheney’s legal counsel, David Addington.

So, a seemingly incongruous reference to overriding the First Amendment – in a memo centered on overriding the Fourth Amendment – could be explained by the desire of White House officials to have some legal cover for actions aimed at journalists who were exposing secrets or whose reporting might weaken the national resolve behind Bush’s actions.

It also suggests that Bush’s critics who exercised their free speech rights in challenging his “war on terror” could have become targets of special government operations justified under Bush’s Commander in Chief powers.

In other words, Bush’s assault on America’s constitutional Republic may have been more aggressive than many of us imagined. It was a bullet that came close to the heart of a dream dating back to 1776.
_______



About author
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

Robert Parry's web site is Consortium News

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/20607

Limbaigh is like a monkey at the zoo tossing its own refuse against the wall, every now and t hen something sticks ( no offence to monkies intended)

Out of power and out of touch, they feast on stale slogans and whine.
by Thomas Frank

Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and "zombie" financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead. Its partisans cling to a now-toxic portfolio of discredited notions, rhetoric, gestures and strategies. They lumber comically on, their only goal being to obstruct efforts to save the economy from catastrophe.

These days the zombie right is rallying around CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who won fame last month when he railed against a rescue of the economy's "losers."

Mr. Santelli claimed he was backed in his outrage by "the silent majority" -- meaning a floor full of traders at the Chicago Board of Trade -- and he called for a "Chicago tea party" to protest the administration's mortgage plan.

Next thing you knew, there were "tea parties" all over the land. When I showed up for one last Friday in Washington's Lafayette Park, however, my suspicions were immediately raised. A fellow in an expensive-looking pinstriped suit came hustling into the gathering knot of the discontented, handing out pink pig balloons. This had to be a put-on, I thought, one of the "Billionaires for Bush" pranksters in his capitalist costume, preparing to lead us in a chant of "Four More Wars."

But no, this was for real: the pigs symbolized "pork," the stuff of which President Barack Obama's stimulus package was supposedly made. Suits were common among the protesters. And the slogans on the signs made their undead politics impossible to misinterpret: "Liberalism Socialism Communism," read a typical one, "What's the Difference?"

Lending proletarian authenticity to the proceedings was the famous Joe the Plumber, who took up the bullhorn to deliver a dose of working-class cynicism that would have been convincing in, say, 1978. "Our politicians up on the hill, Republicans or Democrats, don't give a rip about you, and that's the bottom line right there," Joe Wurzelbacher declared.

Banks are insolvent, asset prices are falling, GDP has taken a nose dive, but what exercised this bunch was the possibility that government -- understood as a force of pure evil -- might get too big.

"America wants people who are gonna come to D.C. and say no," exhorted Andrew Langer of the Institute for Liberty. "No more taxes! No more spending! No more expansion of government!" Another speaker insisted that deregulation was not at fault for our troubles, and that the free market had never really been tried.

As the event wore on, the speakers began to repeat, zombie-like, some version of the famous line from "Network," the 1976 movie, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore."

I got out of there quick. This was no place to find the changed, chastened conservatism that all the pundits are looking for.

But at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which was going on in the swank Omni Shoreham hotel on that same day, what I found was merely a smoother version of the same grumbling.

Capitalist self-pity was much in vogue. Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, looking tanned and groomed and yet strangely mechanical, joked that he needed to get through his speech "before federal officials come here to arrest me for practicing capitalism."

Jim Gilmore, a former governor of Virginia, moaned that the "philosophy" one encountered in the land these days was that "people who succeed and have wealth are bad people, and they're entitled to be discriminated against in the tax code."

Perhaps this was because the current economic crisis was being "overblown," as claimed Lew Uhler, who heads the National Tax Limitation Committee. The administration was trying "to create as much trouble for all of us as possible, and we're here to create trouble back, back, back!"

A little while later, Mr. Uhler lapsed into the same confused zombie cry as the tea partiers across town: "We're not going to stand around and take it anymore! We're mad as hell and we're not taking it!"

They're not going to take it anymore? I guess it's supposed to be obvious that conservatives are history's real victims -- that their imagined suffering at the hands of that Big Deficit to Come trumps the global systemic economic crisis and all the upheaval it may unleash.

Or is it that the mind of the right is running on some spooky kind of autopilot? "Silent majority," "Mad as hell": These are the sayings of the 1970s. Remembering them brings back all the false populisms to flicker across the screen since then, all the stale illusions that brought us to our present disaster -- all the fake cowboys, the folksy radio talkers, the regular-guy billionaires, the middle American tax rebels, the salt-of-the-earth bankers.

There is much to dislike about President Obama's approach to the financial crisis. But opposition, it seems, will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch.

© 2009 The Wall Street Journal
Thomas Frank is the author of The Wrecking Crew, What's the Matter with Kansas? and One Market Under God.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/05-7

Bush was the best thing to ever happen for progresives and liberals. He made us realize that the republicans if given power can actualy destroy america and and make it a "free market" paradise inhospitable to people.

Given Limbaugh's history of racial controversy, and Steele's prominence as the first black GOP chair, this is a huge blow for the Party's image. Tools

Former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele assumed the Republican National Committee's chair a month ago with great fanfare. The first African American elected to the position, Steele triumphed over a candidate who once belonged to a whites-only country club, and another who had distributed a CD that included the song, "Barack, the Magic Negro." Days after taking over the party's moribund infrastructure, Steele promised an "off the hook" PR campaign to apply conservative principles to "urban-suburban hip-hop settings"--offering the GOP a much-needed image makeover for the dawning of the age of Obama.

Hip-hop legend Russell Simmons hailed Steele's election in an open letter, assuring his friend, "The hip-hop community remains eager to hear the views of national leaders like you" But Simmons added a warning: "Don't let those who are angry in your base guide your choices or let the people to the left of President Obama push your buttons."

Of course, many of those to "the left of President Obama," including members of "the hip-hop community," greeted Steele's election with a collective yawn. Meanwhile, the RNC chairman made little noise at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, with one exception that occurred only after he finished addressing a dinner banquet. He turned the mic over to Representative Michele Bachman of Minnesota. "You be da man! You be da man!" Bachmann repeatedly shouted to him. The awkward incident was among the evening's top stories on cable news shows, while Steele's jeremiad against Obama's stimulus package went almost unnoticed.

When Rush Limbaugh basked in the CPAC spotlight for more than an hour and a half on February 28, drawing boisterous, sustained applause from conference attendees with a stemwinding speech reiterating his desire to see Obama "fail," Steele took action. The following evening, on CNN's D.L. Hughley show, Steele attempted to reassert control over the party. When Hughley referred to Limbaugh as "the de facto leader of the Republican Party," Steele shot back, "No, I'm the de facto leader of the Republican Party!" And he mocked Limbaugh as an "entertainer" whose behavior was "incendiary" and "ugly."

Almost as soon as the broadcast ended, a firestorm of criticism erupted on the right-wing blogosphere. "It's not easy watching a black guy stumble around in the dark, but really, I'm trying," wrote Dan Riehl, a marketing manager who hosts the popular conservative blog, RiehlWorldView.com, in posting widely circulated on the right.

While conservative bloggers and radio talkers piled on, Limbaugh lashed out at Steele with a condescending on-air rant, barking at the chairman "to go behind the scenes and start doing the work that you were elected to do." Finding himself under fire from Rush's army of self-proclaimed "Dittoheads," Steele immediately sued for peace. "I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren't what I was thinking," Steele whimpered. "It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of peoplewant to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman--and he's not."

Steele's apology recalled a similar incident from late January, when Republican Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia attacked Limbaugh for "throwing bricks" without paying the consequences. As I reported for the Daily Beast, Gingrey invited himself on Limbaugh's radio show the following day to grovel before the host. "I clearly ended up putting my foot in my mouth on some of those comments," the penitent congressman said.

But given Limbaugh's well-documented history of racial controversy, and Steele's position as the Republican Party's first African American chairman, his apology is more significant than Gingrey's. Limbaugh has, for example, mocked Obama as a "Halfrican-American" who should "become white;" he has called for a "posthumous Medal of Honor" for the assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., James Earl Ray, and told an African American caller, "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back."

Steele's "off the hook" PR campaign is now off the rails. Within days, he has gone from being "da man" to just another "Dittohead."







Max Blumenthal is a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute based in Washington, DC. Read his blog at maxblumenthal.blogspot.com.
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/129862/top_republican%27s_groveling_apology_to_rush_limbaugh_is_a_media_disaster/

Confession of a CIA Agent about FEMA - Important !!!!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K9dgqKmJ50&feature=related

FEMA COFFINS & THEIR PLAN TO KILL 90% OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ( food for thought) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MPgpK0uHfk&feature=related

I think the fix is campaign finance reform. As long as elections depend on donations the poor and middle class will be second fiddle the the money class who can voice their opinion far beyond what their numbers represent.

I agree you cant bleed a company white and you cant kill the goose that laid the golden egg. My union lays off by senority and recalls the same. I would have to say its been my experience that many of the older workers are troublesome but many of them have spent 30 plus years on the job and paid their dues. I have friends that work non union and when layoffs come it is done in an unfair manner they tend to wack the older better paid workers and keep the younger ones who make less and have less vacation time. Im sorta hopeing for a layoff fora few months being my senority puts me on midnights with so many guys laid off.(love the job hate the hours) my recall is guarenteed of course by contract.

In a startling ambitious budget message, President Barack Obama has thrown down the gauntlet to the American Right not only by tying the current economic crisis to the recklessness of the past eight years under George W. Bush but by tracing it back further to the anti-regulatory, anti-labor and anti-government policies of Ronald Reagan.

“For the better part of three decades, a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth has been accumulated by the very wealthy,” the 142-page budget message states. “Technological advances and growing global competition, while transforming whole industries -- and birthing new ones – has accentuated the trend toward rising inequality.”

Though Obama lays the bulk of what he calls “a legacy of mismanagement and misplaced priorities” at the feet of the Bush administration, there is no mistaking his larger message – that the problems which were “exacerbated” by Bush’s tax cuts and other pro-rich policies have been building since Reagan’s 1981 inaugural declaration that “government is the problem.”

Obama even made a glancing reference to that formulation in his preamble to the budget message. “We need to put tired ideologies aside, and ask not whether our government is too big or too small, or whether it is the problem or the solution, but whether it is working for the American people,” Obama said.

To the American Right, those are fighting words, and leading right-wingers have already trotted out their curious charge of “class warfare,” an ironic message given the fact that the growing disparity in American wealth reveals that “class warfare” has long been at the heart of Reagan-Bush policies – and the rich are winning.

Yet, while it may be audacious for the young President to take on the well-entrenched forces of reaction in Washington, there is another reason for Obama and his supporters to worry. The national news media remains largely enthralled by the pro-Republican rules of the past three decades.

In both right-wing and mainstream news organizations, stories continue to be structured as faulting Obama and largely absolving Bush (not to mention the iconic Reagan).

Look for example at the lead stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post on Saturday. Both describe the stomach-turning 6.2 percent drop in the gross domestic product during the last quarter of 2008. Though that was the last economic quarter of the Bush administration, the stories instead were framed around Obama’s failures.

The New York Times cites “a sense of disconnect between the projections of the [Obama] White House and the grim realities of everyday American life.” The Washington Post says “the worse-than-expected data fueled doubts about whether the Obama administration had adequately sized up the challenges it faces.”

What is remarkable about the two stories – and similar ones at other leading newspapers – is that the name “Bush” is nowhere to be found. Instead of a negative slant against Obama, the stories might reasonably have read that George W. Bush left behind an even worse economic mess than previously understood.

The newspapers could have explained how Bush’s policy prescriptions – such as large tax cuts for the wealthy, a neglect of regulation and the declining living standards of the middle class – had pushed the United States to the brink of economic catastrophe. There might have been at least one reference to how Bush contributed to “the grim realities of everyday American life.”

Or some of the commentators who have been criticizing Obama’s dire warnings about the state of the U.S. economy – accusing him of “talking down” the economy – might have extended an apology, admitting that the President was more correct than they were. They might even have noted that Bush actually had “taken down” the economy.

But that would require a break from the media paradigm of the past few decades – and there is no sign that the powerful right-wing news media has any intention of changing its ideological ways, nor that the mainstream news media will stop its endless attempts to prove it’s not “liberal.”

The only times Bush gets mentioned these days, it seems to be in the most favorable light.

For instance, while forgetting to mention that the fourth quarter of 2008 fell during Bush’s presidency, the U.S. news media gave Bush lots of credit for Obama’s announcement that he will withdraw all U.S. combat forces by Aug. 31, 2010. CNN and other news outlets cited Bush’s Iraq War “surge” as the reason Obama could pull out troops.

In other words, Bush gets credit for Obama ending an unnecessary war that Bush launched almost six years ago, while Obama is faulted for the 6.2 percent drop in the GDP under Bush.

As Obama sets off on a hazardous political journey – seeking national health insurance, a “greener” economy, educational and infrastructure investments, and higher taxes on the rich – he can expect continued hostility from most of the American news media, both on the right and in the mainstream.

That may be a structural problem that could prove fatal for the President’s goals.
_______



About author
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/022809.html

On the same night he was offering the keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Rush Limbaugh drew criticism from an unlikely source: Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.

In a little-noticed interview Saturday night, Steele dismissed Limbaugh as an “entertainer” whose show is “incendiary” and “ugly.”


http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090302/pl_politico/19498

How about gas prices? how about the war in Iraq that enriched a few and bankrupted the many. How about the tax laws that favored the wealthy under bush. Come on no games your smarter than that. I am out for the night. you can have the last word

We have allways had a mixed economy in this country, since the great depression anyhow we get into trouble when one class (the rich) manage to rob the wealth of the middle class. If we didnt have social saftey nets in place we would have a revelution in this country and the poor would be busting down the gates of gated communities and raiding their refrigerators roasting their steaks with the wood broken from the rose wood staircases.

the laws werein place perhapse but not enforced.

as the late great Paul Harvey would say,Now the rest of the story.........A country decimated by unregulated banks who then got bailed out without a murmer from Limaugh or his ditto heads and when Obama tries to fix it by building schools, repairing bridges, investing in green energyetc etc, he is suddenly a socialist. Well folks it seems the republicans are all for socialism when it bails out the rich but when it bails out you and me its just awful. that of course is why they are the minority party and will be for the forseable future.

I do not think chernobyl is a good anology. the only thing that keeps Nuke plants from bloweing up in this country is the government over site. If we let it up to the capitalists they would never shut down plants for saftey. We basicly had un regulated capitalsitm for the last 4 years or so possibly 8 and it destroyed us.