New Rules from Bill Maher Aug. 7, 2009

Bill Maher gives his New Rules this week and really takes on the dumbing down of America. I have to agree with him. We have dumbed down and it is pitiful. People act and seem to celebrate the fact they know nothing, and act proud of the fact that history means nothing to them.

When I first started this blog that was one of the things I talked about, was what did we know or forget in the years from school. But they don't teach these things in school like they used to. We used to have a full Civics course and had to learn the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the State I lived in. That had to be done in 9th grade. If not, you didn't get to move on.

Listen to the facts he recites and to the statistics, it is scary to think we are this dumb, and I mean dumb about our history and our country and it's leaders. But we have let ourselves and our children become this way. We have to take that responsiblity on ourselves and fix this problem.

Amazing Mash-up Video from a Right Wingers MySpace..lol

This was on a supposedly Right Wingers MySpace Page..Warning it is a live page, why they haven't taken it down I don't know.. but the link is still working. There are some different things on there... lol To say the least. I didn't see anything really offensive.

I found it funny, he was arrested just before TeaBaggers Day in Oklahoma City, for planning to kill himself and several others.

It was pointed out at Crooks & Liars on their "blog round up" they linked to Wired.com and they were talking about how he had all this hate Obama stuff on his page. I really didn't see that much against Pres. Obama, it was more against Bush. So, I was scrolling down through the vids and I found this one...lol The title is "How to create an angry American". I would say that's correct...lol



It really shows how we were lied to, pandered to, and manipulated over the years of the Bush fiasco. Why did Congress allow this to just keep going on. Why were the Republicans so stupid they couldn't stand up to him as some of the Democratic Party does now to Pres. Obama?

But they didn't. They blindly followed along with everything Bush did and wanted to do all along and for the 8 years, no matter what it was. Now, Pres. Obama comes along and has to fight them because still they are lock step, but against everything he wants to do to fix our country, and our own Democratic Party is fighting and questioning him too.

But that is ok, that is why we have separation of powers, that's why we have Congress and a President. They are supposed to question each other. But for the Republicans to vote against everything just to say NO to Pres. Obama just because they think that's the way to win back Congress and eventually the White House, I think they are fooling themselves.

So, what do you think? Let me hear from you.

The Greatest Greatness of George W. Bush

The Greatest Greatness of George W. Bush

by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you're the queen of the underground
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won't forget to put roses on your grave ...

- The Rolling Stones


To: George W. Bush
From: Your biggest fan
Re: Your imminent unemployment

Greetings, Mr. Bush.

I was sorry to hear about the passing of your cat, India. Eighteen years is a long time for a cat - my mother has one that's 20 and still going strong, if you can believe it - and I'm sure India had a comfortable, caring life with your family.

I got to spend part of last weekend with an old friend of mine. He's a bit older than 18, and he's also a troop who recently rotated back from a tour in Falluja. He just had a baby daughter, and he will be sent to Afghanistan before too much longer. He did his duty in Iraq, dealt his share of death and saw his friends die or be ripped to shreds right in front of him.

He was hollow in a lot of places that had been full before he went to Iraq. He was not the same man we'd said farewell to. But he was alive, and if he survives his upcoming Afghanistan tour, maybe he will get the chance to have a long, comfortable, caring life with his family, just like little India.

At present, my friend's life is the polar opposite of comfortable, and he still has Kabul waiting for him just over the horizon. His life is the way it is because of you, Mr. Bush. You have been the single greatest influence upon his time in this world; you put him over there and hollowed him out, and because of you, it's about to happen again. You were the single biggest influence upon the lives of every person he knew over there, every person he saw over there, and every person he killed over there.

It's funny. I was thinking the other day about when I marched in one of the first large-scale post-inauguration protests against you in Washington, DC. It was May of 2001, it was The Voter's Rights March to Restore Democracy, and it was a few thousand people shouting down the unutterably ruinous Supreme Court decision which unleashed, just as we then feared, everything that has since come to pass. "Not my president!" we bellowed. "Not my president!"

It's funny because that memory seems so very quaint to me now. A stolen election? Pfff. To paraphrase a different president, Americans get scarier stuff than that free with their breakfast cereal nowadays. Thanks to you, governor.

My All-Time-Grand-Prize-Bull-Goose-Gold-Medal-Winning Top Five list of what you've done, in no particular order, and in my own humble opinion:

1. You were warned by the outgoing administration when you first took office. You were warned by the Russians. You were warned by the Israelis. You were warned by the Germans. You were warned in a memo given to you by your own National Security Adviser. You were warned by men like Richard Clarke. You were warned all those times that Osama bin Laden intended to strike the United States, and still the Towers came down.

(All those people working on that Legacy Project of yours should go back to bed, by the way; they are trying to salvage the unsalvageable. You protected us, they claim? Ha. You're 0-1 on terrorism and 0-2 on war)

2. Less than a month after those Towers came down, a reporter asked what you thought we should do. "We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer," you replied, "by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates." I happened to be watching television and heard you say that live into a camera. The only reason I didn't throw up on myself is because my teeth were clenched too tightly for the vomit to pass my lips. I swallowed hard, grabbed a pen, and wrote down what you said and when you said it. It was October 4, 2001, just after nine in the morning. You'd like people to remember you standing on that pile of rubble in Manhattan, you with the bullhorn and the heroic pose. I, however, will always remember you pitching tax cuts to a devastated nation while a pall of poison smoke still hung in the air over Ground Zero.

3. A few years later, you wanted hundreds of billions of dollars diverted from other areas of the federal budget and into your war in Iraq. You took more than $70 billion out of the budget used by the Army Corps of Engineers in Louisiana to fund the repair and maintenance of the New Orleans levee system. Katrina struck not long after you took that money and poured it into the sand, and the levees failed for lack of funded upkeep. Through this, along with your disinterested disinclination to help your own countrymen in their hour of darkest need, you played the very last note for that old, sad, lost American city. Reflected in those actions are the same budgetary priorities that motivated you to turn Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the hospital where I was born, into an abattoir of suffering and neglect for the wounded soldiers you tore apart for a lie.

4. You let Dick "Crazy-Eyes" Cheney do whatever the hell he wanted to whomever he wanted whenever and wherever he wanted, and be damned to the damned old Constitution anyway. Cheney once said the vice president's office was not part of the same branch of government as the president's office, and he said it with his bare face hanging out the whole time. Why? He didn't want to give any of his official papers over to the National Archives, as mandated by at least two federal laws. Nope, he said, my office is in Congress today, sorry about that, but be sure to come on back after you drop dead. Or words to that effect. That's about one zillionth of a percent of what he did, because you let him pick himself to be your boss.

5. On July 19, 2006, you vetoed H.R. 810. On June 20, 2007, you vetoed S. 5. Both vetoes killed legislation aimed at funding and vastly enhancing the reach and scope of stem cell research in America. The father of someone I know died of bone marrow cancer just after that first veto; he was adopted, no family could be located, so no donor match for a bone marrow transplant could be found. With stem cell therapy, doctors could have taken his own marrow and grown enough healthy, matching marrow to save his life. Two other people I know have diabetes, like millions of Americans. Stem cell research could offer them a cure. Someone else I know has multiple sclerosis, and stem cell research could very well help her, too. She'd write you a thank-you note for those vetoes, but her right hand doesn't work so well anymore. She's getting better with her left hand, so maybe that note can get written next year.

Also, you defied lawfully issued subpoenas and potentially set a precedent that could shatter the separation of powers. You told the American people Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons - which is one million pounds - of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 missiles to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, al-Qaeda connections and uranium from Niger for use in a robust nuclear weapons program, even though all of that was a lie. You made a joking video about not being able to find any of it. You outed a deep-cover CIA agent who was running a network designed to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, and you did so because her ambassador husband told the truth about you in the public prints.

You gave away our right to privacy by sending the NSA to spy on us. You turned us all into torturers and butchers in the eyes of the world with your decision to use Abu Ghraib prison the same way Saddam Hussein once did. You tried to appoint Henry Kissinger to lead the investigation into 9/11. You turned the entire Justice Department into a carnival of political hackery. You championed the economic policies and deregulation fantasies that have left the financial stability of millions in ashes. You used the threat of terrorism against your own people in order to give yourself political cover. You killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who did you nor us no harm.

You did all this, and so much more.

From a certain perspective, one could argue that you have been the most successful president the country has ever seen. Think about it, because according to your definition of "success," it's true. You came into office looking to make your friends richer, and to fulfill as best you could your most overriding personal belief: that government is the problem, so government must be damaged and denuded to the point of impotence. Through your tax cuts and your two vastly expensive boondoggle wars, you made your friends rich. By unleashing Mr. Cheney and your other minions, you tore the Constitution to shreds and tatters. You have achieved both goals in smashing style, so from that certain perspective, you have triumphed.

Could you also, from the proper perspective, be considered our greatest president?

Perhaps, someday, if we make it so.

It will be in the best interests of many powerful people if we as a nation simply dismiss you and forget you ever happened. A lot of news media people want us to forget you, because in forgetting you, we would forget the media's vast complicity in your actions and misdeeds. A lot of rich people making new fortunes from war profiteering and defense contracts want us to forget they and you even exist, as it would make it possible for them to do it all again someday. A lot of politicians who stapled themselves to you would simply adore it if we forgot about you. The Republican Party would be forever in our debt if we forgot about you.

No. We will not forget you. We will remember.

We the people are going to save you from ignominious oblivion. We will remember. You could be the president who doomed America, the worst president of all time, but we must not, will not let that happen. You will be remembered differently, because we will hold the memory of you high, and behold you, and say, "Never, never, never again." We have tasted the soot and smelled the blood on the wind; we have seen how fragile our way of government is when placed in the hands of low men such as you, and because of that, you will be remembered for all time.

Your greatness will be defined by how we rise to overcome and undo what you have done. Your greatness will stand forever if we never, ever forget the hard, bitter lessons you taught us. We are responsible for this republic, for our Constitution, and for each other. We are our brother's keeper. You taught us that by becoming our Cain. You nearly slew us, but here we stand, and we defy the place in history you would relegate us to. We defy you, and by doing so, we rise.

Something like you must never again be allowed to happen to this country, and if we save ourselves by preventing you from ever happening again, your greatness is assured. You are the tallest of all possible warnings, and a promise all of us must solemnly and stalwartly keep. If we can damn you to the past, we will save our own future.

May you live forever, you son of a bitch.


From Truthout.org

Atif Irfan Family kicked off Flight...what do you think??

I hate to fly. I have always hated to fly. People tell me I am silly, but I can't help it, I get nervous and have just never been a good flier. I used to have to fly for my job, between Dallas and Phoenix. Sometimes it got very interesting.

This week the Atif Irfan family were boarding an Air Tran plane and said they were having an innocent conversation about where was the safest place to sit. Now, I don't care WHO you are. If I had been on that plane, or close enough to hear them. I would have freaked out.

Like I said, I hate to fly. Since 9-11, it has gotten worse. Back when I drank, I used to get a little drunk before I would get on the plane. Then I would drink while I was flying. And of course then you could smoke. So that always helped. Now, I don't drink, you can't smoke on the plane, (and I have quit smoking anyway) so all those things I used to distract myself with are gone.

We have a long record of bad things happening with planes. We have had hijackings, remember when Flight 847 was hijacked and held for 16 days by 2 Lebanese men. And that was just one of many. Of course the greatest hijacking of all was 9-11. And who could forget the legend of DB Cooper? One of the most famous "One who got away". Every once in a while, that story rears it's head, if some hiker in Washington or Oregon finds some old money in the mountains.

Yet, this family, American citizens, gets on an airplane, with our checkered history of tragic airplanes and loss. With the uncertainty in the Middle East, with the recent, fair or unfair, attack on President Bush by a shoe thrower, and yes, he laughed it off and yes we all chuckled a little at it, but it was still an attack.

This family, gets on an airplane and starts talking about where was the safest place to sit??? Well, my alarm bells would be ringing too. The airlines and the airports ask you to report anything suspicious. They ask you the stupid question about someone giving you something you don't know about to carry on the plane.

So, they get reported for talking about sitting in the safest place, they get asked to get off the plane. Then everyone is off the plane so they can check it. Then they are refunded their money and told to fly on another airline. I don't have a problem with that. I don't care what their religion is. Besides how would I know what their religion is. So throwing that into the mixture is just wrong. Now saying they looked to be of Middle Eastern culture...ok...but to say they were Muslim... that has nothing to do with the story.

What do you think?? Fair..unfair... I am really interested..

Bush Refuses To Interrupt His Final Vacation As Middle East Crisis Escalates

In an effort to “prevent Palestinians from attacking towns in southern Israel” with rockets, Israel today undertook its third day of offensive military airstrikes in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, raising the death toll to more than 300. The Palestinian casualty numbers have been described as the highest over such a brief period since the 1967 Six-Day war. Scores of Israelis have been wounded — and at least one killed — by rocket attacks fired by Palestinians. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak called the situation “all out war.”

While Bush has been briefed on the situation by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, he has opted not to interrupt his final vacation as president to make a public statement on the crisis. For someone who has enjoyed the most vacation days as sitting president — including days spent relaxing in comfort during Hurricane Katrina and in the lead-up to 9/11 — it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that Bush prioritizes vacationing over crisis management.

Even an emerging crisis in the Middle East, one he pledged to resolve just 13 months ago, has not drawn President George W. Bush from his final vacation before leaving office. Despite his personal pledge at Annapolis last year to broker a deal between Israel and the Palestinians before 2009, this weekend Bush sent his spokesmen to comment in his stead.

Since departing Washington for Crawford on Friday, President Bush has made no attempt to be seen in public. In fact, he has yet to leave his ranch.

Today, in a press briefing delivered from the “Western White House” in Crawford, TX, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe was asked what is on Bush’s schedule today. In addition to receiving “updates on the ongoing situation,” Johndroe said, “I expect he’ll probably ride his bicycle today and spend time with Mrs. Bush.”

President-elect Barack Obama has also been monitoring the violence from his vacationing spot in Hawaii, staying in contact with Bush and Rice. “President Bush speaks for the United States until Jan. 20 and we’re going to honor that,” Obama adviser David Axelrod said.

One senior Bush administration official told the Washington Post that he thinks the Israelis acted in Gaza “because they want it to be over before the next administration comes in” and because “they can’t predict how the next administration will handle it.” Indeed, Bush has become fairly predictable in how he manages these sorts of crises.

On ABC's This Week yesterday, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) expressed his hope that removing Bush's hands-off approach may help address the situation. "I'm hopeful that as this transition comes, as we look to January, that strong presidential leadership can make a difference here."

Jon Alterman, head of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, speculated that Israeli leaders synchronized their retaliatory attacks to political calendars in both Israel and the U.S. More moderate politicians running in the Feb. 10 national election needed to appear strong against Hamas, and it was perhaps better to strike before Bush left office on Jan. 20 because they weren't as sure what Obama's reaction would be.

"I think Obama will be supportive of Israel, but will bring a little more skepticism to it," Alterman said. "I think Obama will start from premise that Israel is an ally, but that we have to look at this fresh."

This is taken from two different sources. Part of it is from Think Progress and another is from a story by the Associated Press.

Some of what is happening in the Middle East is hard for me to justify. I understand both sides, yet it is hard to get news here that tells the true story of what is really going on. We are told mostly only what is happening from the side of the Israli's because they are supposed to be the good guy's, yet from what I can see, I am not sure they are right now.

Oh, I know, Hamas is bad, they are supposed to be a terrorist organization. But, really are who are they hurting lately?? That's my question. Maybe I am just naive, and just haven't been paying close enough attention to what has been happening. This is just my opinion, but right now it looks like the big boy is beating up on the little boy...and I really don't like that.

What's the difference between a Conservative and a Liberal??

What is a Conservative?? A Liberal?? A Democrat, a Republican?? We hear these terms all the time. But what do they really mean??

Here is a definition from the dictionary of a Conservative: One who desires to maintain existing institutions and customs; also, one who holds moderate opinions in politics; -- opposed to revolutionary or radical. Sound like someone you know??

Here is where I have a problem. Conservatives, Republicans always say they are for less government. Yet, they seem to want more regulation or laws regarding personal freedoms. Or lack of freedom I guess would be a better way of putting that. They would like to overturn Roe v. Wade, for one, they don't believe in civil unions, or any kinds of rights for gays or lesbians. Basically, more laws, I call them bedroom and body laws.

Now, here is what it says about a Liberal: favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.

Liberals, Democrats are usually more open to an everything goes type lifestyle I guess would be the best way to put it. They believe in allowing you the choice of how you live your life. Not the government telling you how to live. Yes, there are laws on the books, and that's as it should be, but Dems believe Roe v. Wade is fine as it is. Basically, NO more bedroom or body laws.

Another thing is the death penalty. This one is puzzling. Conservatives are supposed to be the "Christian" party. So, if someone asks God for forgiveness for his or her crimes and according to the Bible if we ask God will grant it, then our sins are forgiven and forgotten. So therefore we are for the moment anyway, sinless. How then, do we justify putting someone to death for that crime?? Isn't that murder, as they claim abortion is??

Of course, there are just as many Christian Democrats as there are Republicans I believe. Even if some of the Christian Conservatives just think there is no way you can be a Christian Liberal. They seem to think it just doesn't work that way.

So, what do these terms mean to everyone else?? One Conservative columnist wrote a book and titled it "If Democrats had brains they would be Republicans." I guess we know how she felt. There seems to be a lot of divide between the two parties, yet when you compare them, actually they are rather close. I think we all want the same things. We want a government that helps us up, but doesn't bail us out as it seems they have been doing Wall Street lately.

We want our elected officials to be able to talk to us like they actually know what they are talking about. With some knowledge, not like they dropped out of school in the 6th grade. We want integrity, honesty, and honor. We want people around the world to respect the USA again as they used to.

We want our troops to come home from Iraq with honor, we want to find the ones that attacked us on 9-11 and punish them. We want to honor our military and take care of them with the dignity they deserve, instead of treating them like 2nd class citizens.

We all want these things and I am sure there are other things we want as well that I have not mentioned. It doesn't matter if we are Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat. At the end of the day, when the final tally is done, the final census will show we are all American's.