Virtual, but permanent.
The stupidity to which American citizenship condemns us all.
Pakistani troops fire on US helicopters at border | Yahoo! News
Ah, yes, now that Pervez Musharraff is gone and Pakistan is governed by politicians more in tune with the sentiments of the country’s population, the love fest begins. And, if there is any doubt as to how much love there is between Pakistan and the United States, read today’s statement from the Pak government.
There has been, perhaps, no love affair in more dire need of lubricant.Â
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Dire warnings fail to sway senators on big bailout | Yahoo! News
What do you do when you can not offer any semblance of reason, any item of reality and any moral basis for what you advocate? You threaten, of course. A necessary condition for the threat to be effective, however, is that you threaten something that is not already happening. This important but trivial aspect of the threat was apparently lost on Chairman of the Federal Reserve Benjamin Bernanke and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson.Â
Refusing to be pushed, Republicans and Democrats alike rebuffed dire warnings Tuesday from the government’s top economic officials of recession, layoffs and foreclosed homes if Congress doesn’t quickly approve the administration’s emergency $700 billion financial bailout plan.
“Give us the money, or there will be recession!” the two chicken littles seemed to be screaming. Astonishingly, Congress seemed to be unswayed by this threat. For the first time in over a decade, the members of Congress seemed to be aware of reality (!!!), that the United States has been in a recession for over three years, and they stood firm in the face of this hollow threat.Â
One may surmise that this threat, or “warning”, of recession was the strongest threat that their handlers offered Paulson and Bernanke. “Give us the money or we’ll tell everyone that Joe Biden has had hair transplants” was the runner up, most likely.
Educated, learned and exceptionally wealthy and intelligent men have been reduced to blathering idiots. In ancient Greece, this was comedy. In modern America, this is politics. More specifically, it is the ruling Republican Party. No art could possibly aspire to imitate such nonsense.
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Under Pressure, White House Issues Climate Change Report | NYTimes.com
What are we to make of grown men who are too frightened of the truth? Woe be upon a populace–indeed, a world–led by such men.Â
The New York Times article above cites the Bush Administrations latest defeat in its efforts to stifle scientists. After many years of suppressing the findings of a panel on the effects of global warming, the Bush Administration finally released the findings of its scientific staff. This report can be found at www.climatescience.gov.
Alas, the release was not voluntary. The Administration was forced to honor its scientific staff by a court order that required the release of the report by the end of May. Otherwise, the report’s release would have been delayed until 2009, possibly until 2017 by a McCain White House.Â
The cowardice of the Bush bunch is perhaps surpassed only by their incompetence in reasoning. Although their stupidity and ignorance in matters of science, philosophy and morality is enormous, their lack of courage in confronting facts repeatedly confirmed by every scientific advisory panel ever assembled is so staggering that it defies measurement, even description. Absent any evidence that  environmental regulation is deleterious to economic growth (Japan, Germany and the rest of the EU enjoy healthy growth under heavy regulation) and in the presence of abundant legal precedent and import, the Bushies still cannot muster the courage to do what’s right. They are so beholden to their political patrons and their ideological masters that they dare not contradict a single stroke of the agenda handed to them from the moneyed sources.
Certainly, with regards to environmental matters, White House foot-dragging has ample precedent.
More poignantly, what are we to make of a country that claims the pinnacle of humanity, that owns the greatest resources of any nation, that contains the greatest wealth on the planet, that boasts the most powerful military in the world, that wields the largest economy in the world, and yet cannot muster the courage to acknowledge the excesses of its being?Â
Suffice it to say that the United States needs leaders worthy of its giant stature, desperately.
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Out There: People Who Live Without TV | Yahoo! News
The entire argument hinges on this premise: recognizing that American television programming is garbage and failing to tolerate such garbage is a sign of intelligence. If one can accept this premise, then it would seem as if the very politically liberal are more likely to be intelligent than the very politically conservative. According to this fairly small survey, two-thirds of those who find television so insufferable that they refuse to keep onee in the house are politically liberal.Â
The politically conservative cited in this survey may be more appropriately described as frightened, for they are turned off more by the perceived affronts emanating from television rather than the sheer stupidity of the programming that multibillion dollar corporations insist on producing and airing. In other words, the conservatives are more likely to fear what they see on television than to loathe it.Â
And, if that premise is also true, and if one also accepts the premise that intelligent people are more likely to loathe stupidity than to fear it, then it is simply true that the politically liberal are more likely to be intelligent than the politically conservative. Fear and loathing may have made for a remarkable story in Las Vegas, but the two sentimens do define a stark line of demarkation between those who prefer to act on the merit of things and those who act on their fears and prejudices.
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Jobless claims jump, productivity soars | Financial News | Yahoo! Finance
In light of the remarkable string of bad news that has emanated from the American economic system for the past three years, one wonders who on earth found the sudden increase in unemployment “unexpected”. When every major economic indicator has been heading down for over two years and the financial markets are in the middle of a complete metldown, why on earth would it be surprising that companies are shedding jobs because they have less business to conduct?Â
We know that the economy has been shrinking because the “growth” of the last four years was nothing but a house of cards built on subprime mortgages. Unfortunately, American journalism is far too incompetent to keep up with what’s going on.
Liberal media, my ass!
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Â
Tom Toles’ genius is scarcely doubted by anyone anymore. One only wishes that  his cartoons did not constitute such eerily accurate portraiture of the United States and its  political system.  In that vein, it is hard to refute the fact that in the aftermath of the Cold War, Russia has just scored a significant victory.
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Sighted at the Ve
ntura County Fair was this remarkable display of enthusiasm for the (arguably) most conservative of movements in the American political system. Granted, the Obama table was hardly more active, but it was comforting to see that the warped idealists who go by the moniker of Libertarian are finally getting their just desserts. People have the freedom to ignore them, it seems, and they seem to be mature enough to accept it.
At least at the Ventura County Fair.
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The evil liberal media dominators at the New York Times report on a Bush initiative that has had an apparently remarkable impact on the chronically homeless in the United States. What is especially surprising is that all sides of the issue seem to be in agreement that the data are reliable. If such consensus is born of truth, then it is true that the chronically homeless population has declined by nearly 30% in the United States over the past four years.
Coupled to this report on PBS’s The News Hour about how resoundingly successful the President’s AIDS relief program in Africa has been, this astonishing development compels one to think of all the remarkable good that could have been achieved with the trillions of dollars (projected costs including interest) currently being squandered in Iraq. After all, the total cost of these programs ($15 billion for AIDS relief as cited by The News Hour report, and ostensibly no more than a few billions of dollars for the “housing first” program; I can’t presently find a citation) absolutely pales when compared with the $752 billion cited by the CBO for the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan thus far. Had such resources been allocated to AIDS relief and homelessness, the earth may well have been purged of both scourges.
Could the President be asking himself if the pursuit of the war in Iraq was a gross misappropriation of resources? After all, the three-quarters of a trillion dollars thus far spent in Iraq has had the sole effect of bringing the American economic engine to a halt by sending the price of crude oil into the stratosphere. Thus, the military operation in Iraq has, in effect, quashed all effective programs undertaken by the government in two ways. First, it has absorbed moneys that would otherwise have been dedicated to such effective programs like AIDS relief and housing first. Second, it has reduced the capability of the American economy to provide for any government program by reducing economic output.
Thus, the reasons why the neoconservatives keep insisting on the validity of the military operations in Iraq are almost understood. Any admission that moneys spent elsewhere would be more effective than the moneys squandered in Iraq would reveal these war mongers to be the frauds and the hucksters that they are. It is, therefore, nothing but an article of fear that compels the cowards who wage war to deny their misdeeds.
And, that is why their cowardice is almost understood. Those occupying positions of power must have the courage to make such admissions. It is their duty. It is, in fact, their legal obligation to confess to their mistakes so that these mistakes can be rectified or remedied before they erode the public’s trust and destroy the institutions that guarantee accountability and efficacy in governance. This very fact that persons vested with authority must carry a higher responsibility is the reason why such childish denials of fault in government are labeled high  crimes and misdemeanors, while those of the child who had broken a vase are labeled mere fibs.
If the constitutional mandate that punishments fit crimes were observed, then such high crimes and misdemeanors would merit harsher punishments than those meted out by parents for their children’s fibs. As it is, however, children are being held accountable for breaking vases, but politicians are exonerated for their squandering of the common wealth and the nation’s prestige. Who is measuring the merits of spending a pittance for the sake of the welfare of humanity against the spending of fortunes to increase the misery of mankind and opting for the latter?
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BBC NEWS | Business | US economy at a glance
Perhaps the only thing gloomier than this picture is the fact that no American news source can be bothered by the simple process of consulting publicly available data from the government. The Brits seem to have grasped the utility of the internet browser better than American journalists. Perhaps that’s because it was a Brit who invented the world wide web and the browser.
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Let’s have some fun. I tend to be right on these matters, so I might as well publish these predictions and see how I fare against the “professionals”.
Barack Obama will choose either Bill Richardson or Wesley Clark as his running mate because both men are without peer in their respective fields. Richardson is peerless in issues of foreign affairs, and Clark is peerless in military affairs. Either man will round out the ticket nicely.
The most likely choice is Bill Richardson because he was the first to endorse Obama.
Sorry Hilary. You just blew it big time.
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