The Bush Administration sent a $700 billion plan for a U.S. government bailout of bad mortgage debt to Congress on Saturday, seeking extraordinary authority as it tackles the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Democratic lawmakers, who control both houses of Congress, said they hoped to approve the bailout quickly but wanted changes such as more oversight, limits on executive pay at participating firms, and assistance for homeowners.
Conservative rhetoric doesn’t kill people. Guns do — in the hands of crazed lunatics without hope, fired up by “conservative” rhetoric.
No matter that their dire economic circumstances are Bush’s fault, not the Democrats’. They would never go after “whose the man” Bush, whom they fervently voted for, twice.
And now that I think about it, why is it that liberals don’t kill people — not even loony conservatives?
They just want to feed their hunger and ease their pain, the bleeding hearts. Maybe feed them a Xanax and some Yuengling Black and Tan or a bowl. They would feel better, and then the cops would feel better too, and we could all get back to partying like it was 1999.
The problem is, the cops are looking in all the wrong directions for the people who are truly dangerous. Why? Because that’s what the Bush Empire wants them to do. Harass peace groups and environmental groups, and of course the crack heads, since they are black and armed — and tend to vote for Democrats.
The Real Terrorists
The real terrorists who screw up people’s lives are not poor and black — and they are certainly not liberal.
They are the angry white guys with money, who fire up the angry white guys without much hope, and send them off on a killing spree like they did in Knoxville, Tennessee, last week and Little Rock Arkansas this week.
In one of the best examples of Web journalism I’ve seen yet, on a newspaper Website at least, the Knoxville News-Sentinel online made me proud after spending four years pioneering Web journalism there and teaching the young reporters how to do it. The staff did a thorough and interesting job of covering the church shooter who interrupted that Sunday morning’s service with his shotgun and tried to bag himself 7 “liberals,” sort of like Dick Cheney does his friends. He managed to kill one and wound six.
The Reverend Chris Buice, trying to collect his thoughts on the gunman who invaded his congregation, Jim David Adkisson, 58, said he’s curious whether any clues might be gleaned from the writings of right-wing radio talk-show host Michael Savage and Fox News personalities Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, whose books were seized as evidence from Adkisson’s residence by police.
“The words you choose may be the difference between war and peace,” Buice said, speaking to a belief in the power of “dehumanizing language.”
“I believe in free speech, in rigorous debate,” he said. “But what’s the difference between a political opponent and a cockroach? You stomp a cockroach. You debate a political opponent.”
Take Back The Highways From Whom?
I was thinking about that over the past couple of days, along with the man who fatally shot the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, Bill Gwatney, when I was pulled over by the Birmingham Police Department Thursday afternoon on the eve of Alabama’s now infamous “Take Back The Highways” weekend. It started out on holiday weekends a few years ago, but now appears to be every weekend. That’s a lot of your federal tax money being spent locally by the Bush and Riley Homeland Security Departments.
We don’t know if the crazed gunman in Arkansas who was shot down by police left a manifesto like the killer in Tennessee, who lives to tell about it. But we know Timothy Dale Johnson left a Post-It note at home with the victim’s last name and phone number along with 14 guns, antidepressants, and a last will and testament, according to the AP. AlterNet has an interesting perspective on that too, here.
All three incidents together prompted me to send out an e-mail notification on a list known to be frequented by Democrats and liberals and progressives — and even some Unitarians, libertarians, and independents — from all over Alabama and the country, warning people to be on their guard more than ever.
The warning was not the same as the Homeland Security Department’s color-coded system to warn us of the threat from “radical Muslim terrorists.”
This warning is simply a blog post and an e-mail message warning open-minded people of all kinds everywhere to be aware of their surroundings at all times. They should be on the lookout for gun-toting rednecks hell-bent on a revolution of their own — to stop a black man from inhabiting the White House.
They should also be on the alert against the more establishmentarian types of enforcers of the King’s code, if you know what I mean, those in blue uniforms with badges and guns and fast cars.
More than 125 additional state troopers will be on Alabama’s roads and highways as part of what is being billed as a crackdown on speeding and drunken driving in the so-called “Take Back Our Highways” campaign, according to the official press release. Tennessee and Mississippi do it too, in three of the states in the union with the least options for mass transportation for their citizens.
The crackdown trickles down to every police department as well, where anyone with a gun and a badge, under orders not to look for Muslims with bombs but hippies with peace signs (read “liberals”) can inflict even more damage.
And if they were not already aware of it, they should be concerned since the passage of the FISA spying bill a few weeks ago in Congress and along with telecom immunity. Now anyone with a government e-mail address or who works for a telecommunications or power company can “research” their subjects like never before with the Google Earth-Virtual Alabama Big Brother system.
And now this, to appear in Saturday’s Washington Post:
The Bush Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years. It would revise the federal government’s rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to all of the nation’s 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants. Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its final months.
Gitmo On The Platte
And for anyone going to Democratic Party’s National Convention later this month in Denver, and who might happen to be thinking about protesting — or maybe photographing a protest — a CBS news crew has uncovered a huge warehouse holding facility in Denver, consisting of steel cages topped with barbed wire, ready to receive thousands of protesters at this year’s convention.
On seeing the footage one local political organizer told the crew it resembled a “concentration camp,” while another described it as a “meat processing plant.” The facility has already been dubbed “Gitmo On The Platte.”
It might be a good idea to carry a digital recorder and/or a digital camera around with you in case you are stopped or anything else happens. You might be able to pop a shot with your cell phone camera, if you practice being discrete. If caught, they will surely confiscate your phone.
The cops may very well be on high alert themselves about now, and perhaps a tad trigger happy.
If you hear of any instances that look suspicious, please report them here. I’ll report on them if I’m alive, and not in jail : )
A guest letter originally published in The Daily Telegram, Wednesday, August 06, 2008
First, my definitions:
Neoconservative (neocon): Not your grand daddy’s style of fiscal conservatism. Neocons are conservative only when it comes to the poor/working poor, committed only to money and power (mutually inclusive), without concern for the Constitution or the canons of human decency. They’ll expend any amount of capital and lives to enhance their economic power.
Corporatist: Advocate of Corporatism, wherein the government is run by and for the corporations. First cousin to “fascism,” as defined by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who said (paraphrasing) that Fascism occurs when government and business become one in the same.
Their application:
The Goebbels-Rove propaganda network disseminates half-truths, innuendoes and falsehoods from the neoconservative-corporatist wing of the Republican party, which is choking the life out of our country. It’s as if Karl Rove studied Joseph Goebbels’ tactics (Hitler’s propaganda minister) and followed them closely. One of Goebbels’ first moves: control the media. Now, we have Rupert Murdoch and others of his ilk, with a right-wing monopoly on most of the news, disseminating neocon-corporatist propaganda can be controlled by telling them they’re in danger and keeping them in constant fear, then, denouncing any dissenters as unpatriotic and treasonous. Sound familiar?
Many attacks on Obama smack of “talking points,” from the Goebbels-Rove propaganda machine, through their right-wing media outlets.
Obama didn’t get to visit the troops in Germany because the Defense Department said it would be inappropriate as part of a campaign stop. Obama honored this. The neocons would have griped either way.
Flip-flops? McCain claimed to be a maverick Republican. In 2000, surrogates (swift-boaters of their day) pulverized John McCain in the South Carolina primary by claiming, among other lies, that McCain fathered an illegitimate Black child. McCain knows how vicious neocon-corporatists are and I believe he decided to capitulate. So, he reversed much of what he said he was for or against, including permanent tax cuts for Bush’s filthy-rich oil buddies and, worst of all, sanctioning torture as a policy that violates the Geneva Convention. McCain’s flip-flops make John Kerry look as faithful as Horton hatching an egg. By dangling the White House in front of him, the same neocons who destroyed him in 2000 can lead McCain anywhere.
McCain is a defeated (by the neocons) old man, desperate to catch one last ride on the merry-go-round, before the tents fold up and the carnival of life closes, willing to become the neoconservative-corporatists’ next puppet … just so his portrait will hang in the White House, next to that of George W. Bush.
Obama’s policies couldn’t be any worse than the neoconservative-corporatists’ were under Bush and would be under McCain.
Looks like more legal trouble for Bush’s disgraced Brain…
Plaintiff attorneys for a lawsuit filed in 2006 that sought voting records to prove whether their suspicion that Republicans conspired to suppress the votes of two active Democratic demographics that helped President Bush win the state and a second term in the White House, changed the focus of their lawsuit Thursday to focus on Karl Rove.
They will now focus on learning more about the roles played by Karl Rove, Bush’s political architect and Mike Connell, a long-time Bush family confidant and Information technology guru – now working for Sen. John McCain – who as an information technology tradesman, built various computer systems that produced election irregularities that favored Republican. If not ferreted out and stopped now, it may do the same this year for McCain as it did for Bush against Kerry four years ago.
We’ve been listening to John McCain and George Bush talk about the economy, and we’ve noticed a pattern: they keep saying the problems are all in our heads.
McCain’s campaign co-chair Phil Gramm had to step down because of controversy over his comment that we were in the middle of a “mental recession.” But the truth is, John McCain threw Phil Gramm under the bus for saying, less artfully, what he himself has said repeatedly.
What do you think?
Are Americans just crazy to think the economy is bad? Or do you think the inside-the-bubble rich Republicans just don’t care about whether you have a job or not or whether you have the money to buy gas if you do?
Our special focus for the past year and a half has involved in-depth coverage of the travails of Don Siegelman and Richard Scrushy on trial, especially as the investigation made it's way to Washington last fall. To catch up on all our coverage, check out this archive and this one that goes even further back to the original Scrushy trial in Birmingham.
Under the Gun
