Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Responders to: CHICKENHAWKS UNTOUCHED BY WAR!

Click here to watch this disturbing film


Hi, it's me thinkingblue... I just opened up my last blog posting
and found the below replies... Thought you might like to see
what the people who read the postings on the democratic.org blog-site, are saying... Then below that, is my response to them... JUST FOR LAUGHS, thinkingblue


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Re: Chickenhawks
Reply By D Tree Yesterday at 2:57 pm EST

"Fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them
over here" is not a strategy it is a SLOGAN.

That's fine if you feel "safe" while our sons and
daughters are being killed in Iraq.

I cannot sleep safely at night knowing the only thing we
are doing to stop terrorism is to send our brave soldiers
to their deaths in a foreign land.

We as Americans are supposed to be braver than that. Give
me liberty of give me death.

Anything else is just cowardice.
have some respect for the rest of us
___________________________________________________________
Re: Chickenhawks

BRING THEM HOME NOW

CAROLYNCONNETION - I've got a mind and I'm going to use it!

thinkingBlue blogspot


YOU CAN BEAM ME UP NOW, SCOTTIE. Thinkingblue

Monday, November 27, 2006

TO THE CHICKENHAWKS UNTOUCHED BY WAR!

Click here to watch this disturbing film


After watching this clip, (click picture on the left) I just sat stunned, staring at my computer screen for several minutes... It was so sad. A truly woeful experience for the thirsty children and a depressing one for the children taunting them. That is how I see it anyway... Two groups of kids teasing each other... except the group in need, the weaker ones, got the brunt of it.

Out leaders sent our children to fight and die in an unjust war. It was just an ideological sport, sort of an experiment to those who have no skin in the game. For the troops (other people's children) who have to live with the horrible reality of war, there's no competition, it's either kill or be killed. I can't imagine living every minute of your life in fear of what might happen to your own being or what you might do to another living soul.

This film was appalling but I believe it is just the tip of the iceberg. There are stories yet to be told of the misery suffered by all who have been thrust into this hornets nest of unreality and there will be despicable tales of depravity from both sides.

When, if ever, there is an end to this atrociousness and the neocon, chicken-hawks, who sit on the sidelines, out of harms way, can no longer cheer their collection of gladiators on. We will finally learn just how destructive this folly of theirs really was. There will be no sadness on their part, there will be no guilt, for they, like I've said before, HAD NO SKIN IN THE GAME. And without this tangibility, it's only a test, a trial run, a game of chess. For without personal presence, one remains untouched, unfeeling and unabashed to war. War becomes just a word, just a small little word. But for those who are smack-dab in the middle of war, it is a macabre, grisly, grotesque encountering and should never be allowed so haphazardly, to happen again. thinkingblue

PS: Please read the recent Maureen Dowd article below...

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No One to Lose To


Published: November 25, 2006

Washington

After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis,
President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and give
an interview headlined: “If I did it, here’s how the civil war
in Iraq happened.”

He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant
and self-defeating blunders, including his team’s failure to
comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious
zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and
prosperity.

But W. is not yet able to view his actions in subjunctive terms,
much less objective ones. Bush family retainers are working to
deprogram him, but the president is loath to strip off his
delusions of adequacy.

W. declined to tear himself away from his free-range turkey and
pumpkin mousse trifle at Camp David and reassure Americans about
the deadliest sectarian attack in Baghdad since the U.S.
invaded. More than 200 Shiites were killed and hundreds more
wounded by car bombs and a mortar attack in Sadr City. October
was the bloodiest month yet for civilians, and in the last four
months, some 13,000 men, women and children have died.

American helicopters and Iraqi troops did not arrive for two
hours after Sunni gunmen began a siege on the Health Ministry
controlled by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has a
militia that kills Sunnis and is married to the Maliki
government.

Continuing the cycle of revenge yesterday, Shiite militiamen
threw kerosene on six Sunnis and set them on fire, as Iraqi
soldiers watched, and killed 19 more.

The New York Times and other news outlets have been figuring out
if it’s time to break with the administration’s use of
euphemisms like “sectarian conflict.” How long can you have an
ever-descending descent without actually reaching the civil war?

Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of civilizations,
arguing that civil war is too genteel a term for the butchery
that is destroying a nation before our very eyes. Anthony Shadid,
The Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his
Iraq coverage, went back recently and described “the final,
frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces unleashed more than
three years ago by the invasion. There was civil-war-style
sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation ago.
Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and
survival; a raft of political parties and their militias
fighting a zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of
authority; social services a chimera; and no way forward for an
Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who themselves are
still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still
depriving that government of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps
too easy a term, a little too tidy.”

It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that America’s
troops should be in the middle of somebody else’s civil war than
to convince them that we need to hang tough in the so-called
front line of the so-called war on terror against Al Qaeda.

With Iraq splitting, Tony Snow indulges in the ludicrous
exercise of hair-splitting. He said that in past civil wars,
“people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides
clashing for supremacy.” In Iraq, “you do have a lot of
different forces that are trying to put pressure on the
government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that
they are operating as a unified force.” But Lebanon was a
shambles with multiple factions, and everybody called that a
civil war.

Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the fighting
is not taking place in every province and because Iraqis voted
in free elections. But that’s like saying that the Battle of
Gettysburg only took place in one small corner of the country,
so there was no real American Civil War. And there were
elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln was
re-elected months before the war’s end.

The president’s comparison to how Vietnam turned out a
generation later, his happy talk that Iraq is going to be fine,
is preposterous.

As Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam who wrote
the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Bright Shining Lie,” told me: “In
Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a
government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and
a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do.
So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war
ended. In Iraq, there’s no one like that for us to lose to and
then do business with.”

The questions are no longer whether there’s a civil war or
whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is,
who can we turn the country over to?

At the moment, that would be no one.


DESPARATE CROSSING the real story of the Mayflower

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE MOVIE FREEDOM TO FASCISM


Scientist Richard Dawkins on Darwin, the Sistine Chapel,
and why the world would be better off without religion.

Interview by Laura Sheahen
BRING THEM HOME NOW

CAROLYNCONNETION - I've got a mind and I'm going to use it!
thinkingBlue blogspot


YOU CAN BEAM ME UP NOW, SCOTTIE. Thinkingblue

Thursday, November 23, 2006

A TURKEY ABOVE THE LAW



Click to go to the history channel
The other night on The History channel, I watched an episode of Lost Worlds: Hitler's Super city. What Hitler was Aiming to construct was a new Germany based on an ideology of ‘ruin value’ – the idea that all new buildings would be constructed in such a way that they would leave aesthetically pleasing ruins thousands of years into the future. He strove to place his people's achievements on a par with the great civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. This remarkable program told a story of how Hitler was mad, psychotic with grandiose visions for a super race, lead by a superpower that would one day conquer the entire world. He tried to rid Germany of its past and reconstruct it as a personification of his "the Fuhrer’s" spectacular greatness.

They say that history is always repeated and I believe this to be
true. What the neoconservatives with
CLICK HERE
their absolute power were envisioning for this world was not unlike that of Hitler's. Scary is too mild a
word for the planned havoc they had wished to execute upon our nation and the world. But what these ideologues did manage to carry out, has strained our Nation, our Constitution to the brink and they should be held accountable for this.

They never feared retribution because they thought (as Hitler did) their invincible powers could never be taken from them. They believed they were accomplishing an insidious coup d'état of our government by manipulation of the masses through fear.

Well, hopefully their plans have been interrupted and now they should face their just deserts. All ten reasons should be addressed and penalties should be applied, THESE TURKEYS NEVER WAS AND NEVER WILL BE ABOVE THE LAW!

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more pictures hereTen Reasons to Impeach George Bush and Dick
Cheney

I ask Congress to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney for the following reasons:

1. Violating the United Nations Charter by launching an illegal "War of Aggression" against Iraq without
cause, using fraud to sell the war to Congress and the public, misusing government funds to begin bombing without Congressional authorization, and subjecting our military personnel to unnecessary harm, debilitating injuries, and deaths.

2. Violating U.S. and international law by authorizing the torture
of thousands of captives, resulting in dozens of deaths, and
keeping prisoners hidden from the International Committee of the
Red Cross.

3. Violating the Constitution by arbitrarily detaining Americans,
legal residents, and non-Americans, without due process, without
charge, and without access to counsel.

4. Violating the Geneva Conventions by targeting civilians,
journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, and using illegal weapons,
including white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and a new type of
napalm.

5. Violating U.S. law and the Constitution through widespread
wiretapping of the phone calls and emails of Americans without a
warrant.

6. Violating the Constitution by using "signing statements" to
defy hundreds of laws passed by Congress.

7. Violating U.S. and state law by obstructing honest elections in
2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006.

8. Violating U.S. law by using paid propaganda and disinformation,
selectively and misleadingly leaking classified information, and
exposing the identity of a covert CIA operative working on
sensitive WMD proliferation for political retribution.

9. Subverting the Constitution and abusing Presidential power by
asserting a "Unitary Executive Theory" giving unlimited powers to
the President, by obstructing efforts by Congress and the Courts
to review and restrict Presidential actions, and by promoting and
signing legislation negating the Bill of Rights and the Writ of
Habeas Corpus.

10. Gross negligence in failing to assist New Orleans residents
after Hurricane Katrina, in ignoring urgent warnings of an Al
Qaeda attack prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and in increasing air
pollution causing global warming.

Impeachment By Spring: We're Off and Running!
click to sign petition



It's been just one week since we announced ImpeachForChange in Philadelphia and the response has been tremendous!

Over 23,000 activists signed our petition - even though our
overloaded server turned many away. We upgraded our server so
please try again:

http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/88
and help us reach our goal of 1 million by forwarding the petition
to your friends!

Then print copies of our simplified impeachment petition

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/petition-4.pdf

and collect signatures from friends, co-workers, and neighbors.

Then keypunch the email addresses into our invitation letter to
ask the signers to complete the full petition online. Full
instructions here:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/petition

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



New Senate Committee Chairs Will Carry Powerful Punch to Bush Agenda

Democratic leadership in the Senate announced committee chair assignments for the 110th
Congress
, from 2007-08, and it's enough to give the President hearburn and a headache as he attempts to force his agenda and judicial appointments through the new Democratic-controlled Congress.

None of these Senate committees will be a rubber stamp for Bush proposals... with the possible exception of the HomelandCLICK HERE Security Committee, chaired by Senator Joe Lieberman, whose
recent election victory was financed largely by Republicans and supported by the White House.

Senate Democrats had no choice, though, but to give "independent Democrat" Joe the chairmanship. Consider the alternative: he could change his party affiliation to Republican, thus causing the two parties to share control of the Senate. It's an excellent slate of long-serving Democratic senators who will serve as powerful, opinionated chairs of
influential Senate committees. You can scan the list here at US Senate Committee Chairs for the 110th Congress.

Our country's collective nightmare over the Bush Administration is almost over as the White House is forced to face its last two years with a Democratic Congress. Most certainly, the darkest days of having short-sighted and greedy legislation foisted on middle-class Americans is over.

Ding dong! The wicked witch isn't yet dead, but she's surely dying...

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Well, that was a brief bit of civility
Published: November 22. 2006

President Bush's political fortunes have changed for the worst, but he himself
is announcing that he hasn't changed a bit.

He still hates not getting his own way on everything.

His immediate actions after proclaiming his deep desire to work with Democrats
in a fresh mood of bipartisanship were to reinforce his preference for
right-wing religious goals. This is the new civility in the nation's capital?
Bush has had it pretty much the way he wanted things for six years; you'd think
he would be wondering what hit him. The word hasn't gotten through his isolation
bubble, apparently.

Or Karl Rove has not told him yet. Reports are that Rove is still defending his
strategy of sticking to the so-called base of mostly Southern far-right
extremists, who didn't deliver very well this November. Maybe it's time for the
president to look beyond the bubble.

The first move he made was to stick the Democrats in the eye by re-nominating a
group of judicial nominees already rejected as too conservative and unqualified
by the current Senate. This was no accident. Why did he do it?

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., a key Democrat on the Senate Judiciary
Committee, was outraged, pronouncing them all politically dead on arrival.
Again.

"The days of hard-right judges'' are over, Schumer said.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, had
this reaction to Bush's surprise renominations: "Barely a week after the
president promised to change course by working in a bipartisan and cooperative
way with Congress, it is disappointing that he has decided to 'stay the course'
on judicial nominees by renominating a slate of his most controversial past
choices.'' Leahy noted that these candidates had failed to win confirmation
under a Republican-controlled Senate.

Message: Forget about getting through the Senate after the Democrats take charge
in January.

Here are some of Bush's picks for life-time appointments to the federal bench:

William Haynes II, a one-time lawyer for the Pentagon who helped formulate the
administration's torture and enemy combatant policies that have redefined normal
understanding of civil liberties.

Terrence Boyle, a former aide to Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., has a record of
racial insensitivity.

Michael Wallace, a former adviser to Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., built a
GOP-promoted legal case for letting Bob Jones University keep its tax-exempt
status despite its open discrimination on the basis of race. He also got a "not
qualified'' rating from the American Bar Association.

Peter Keisler is a nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia. When President Bill Clinton tried to fill that empty slot, Republican
senators blocked him on the grounds that the court didn't need another judge.
This is a pretty bad double standard statement for Bush to make.

But the lurch to the right didn't end there.

He also promptly nominated Andrew Biggs, an advocate of privatizing Social
Security, to a six-year term as the next deputy commissioner of Social Security,
despite the fact that Bush assigned Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. to work
with the next Congress to build a consensus on what to do with Social Security.

So, what is going on here? The Democratic majority has said that Social Security
privatization is off the table. Period. Public opinion polls show no support for
private accounts, which are seen as too risky for the elderly who rely on a
dependable retirement income. How can Paulson negotiate in good faith with a
deputy committed to a policy that cannot pass?

And just so he didn't overlook any area important to the religious right, Bush
also appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of
Health and Human Services who is opposed to contraceptives for women. Eric
Keroack works at a Christian pregnancy counseling organization that calls the
distribution of birth control pills "demeaning to women.'' He gets to advise the
department on reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy, with $283 million in
grants to provide "access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who
want and need them.'' The appointment does not require Senate-confirmation.

And then there's the subject of United Nations ambassador John Bolton, whom Bush
is also pushing for confirmation even though he couldn't win Senate approval
earlier in a Republican-controlled body. The controversial, abrasive Bolton has
a recess appointment, which expires at the end of this congressional term if he
is not confirmed by the Senate.

Am I missing something here? Where's the good will and cooperation that Bush
promised? It's the same old provocative, bossy attitude of the past six years.
But it's not the same old rubber-stamp Republican terrain. If he wants partisan
warfare, he'll get it. He's started it and now he's going to be stuck with it.

Marianne Means writes for Hearst Newspapers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
DESPARATE CROSSING the real story of the Mayflower




CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE MOVIE FREEDOM TO FASCISM

Scientist Richard Dawkins on Darwin, the Sistine Chapel,
and why the world would be better off without religion.
Interview by Laura Sheahen BRING THEM HOME NOW

CAROLYNCONNETION - I've got a mind and I'm going to use it!

thinkingBlue blogspot

YOU CAN BEAM ME UP NOW, SCOTTIE. Thinkingblue


Sunday, November 19, 2006

A THINK TANK OF FISHY IDEOLOGUES


Today, we have a new beginning, a new chance to regain peace and sanity. We, the free thinkers of this world, have been through some very dark times. It is time to lift our heads and souls out of the toxic, miserable and hateful muck of the neocon ideology. Something that was thrust upon us in the past, by the black-hearted, ingenuous movement, of a right-winged "Think-Tank", full of ideologues who swim on the surface of their "tanks". Up where, they can take their needed oxygen from the two elements. The air, an unknown world of creatures, very different from the breed they come from, and the water of which they live, a cozy place where the populous all resemble each other and share the same interpretation of reality.

It is one thing, to exist in a body of theory and not dare allow any acknowledgement of what really goes on in different worlds (cultures). The neoconservative movement was THAT brazen, because they felt that with absolute power they didn't have to concern themselves with how others existed on this planet. That would just be a time consuming annoyance that they didn't want to upset their time-tables of planning with. So they busily went on their hubris way, plotting their agendas, their life scripts of how the adolescent masses should behave in this world of one leader, one culture, one superpower.

As, much as I don't like this arrogant bunch of misguided IVORY TOWER idiot saviors, I have to concede that I believe, they really thought their ne-plus-ultra vision, would reflect a world of thriving, flourishing capitalism and a triumph to the vigor and spirit of man (that is the wealthy man).

CLICK HERE FOR A NOVEL IDEA...Oh, this isn't the first time a body of delusional men have lived in only one dimensional reality, or a box of sorts,where other measures of spatial extent become a black hole or vacuum which does not have to be considered in this utopia equation. Remember Social Darwinism, THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST that was used to understand the evolution of society.

(just as competition between individual organisms drives biological evolutionary change (speciation), competition between individuals or groups in human societies drives social evolution or the manipulation of the masses, sometimes, construed to mean POPULATION CONTROL to make the world an exalted place for the master race.)

Please, read the article below written by Frank Rich... for a better understanding of how the dark years of the past and the mistakes of the hauteur group of arrogant neocons tried to give us a NEW DAY, A NEW BEGINNING FOR A BETTER LIFE (but for who?). Thank you thinkingblue

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Click Here To Go To Cartoon siteThis is a great article by Frank Rich.
==============================
The New York Times
November 12, 2006

2006: The Year of the "Macaca" By FRANK RICH

OF course, the "thumpin" - was all about Iraq. But let us not forget Katrina. It was the collision of the twin White House calamities in August 2005 that
foretold the collapse of the presidency of George W. Bush.

Back then, the full measure of the man finally snapped into focus for most Americans, sending his poll numbers into the 30s for the first time. The country saw that the president who had spurned a grieving wartime mother camping out in the sweltering heat of Crawford was the same guy who had been unable to recognize the depth of the suffering in New Orleans's fetid Superdome. This brand of leadership was not the "compassionate conservatism" that had been sold in all those photo ops with African-American schoolchildren. This was callous conservatism, if not just plain mean.

It's the kind of conservatism that remains silent when Rush Limbaugh does a mocking impersonation of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's symptoms to score partisan points. It's the kind of conservatism that talks of humane immigration reform but looks the other way when candidates demonize foreigners as predatory animals. It's the kind of conservatism that pays lip service to "tolerance" but stalls for days before taking down a campaign ad caricaturing an African-American candidate as a sexual magnet for white women.

This kind of politics is now officially out of fashion. Harold Ford did lose his race in Tennessee, but by less than three points in a region that has not sent a black man to the Senate since Reconstruction. Only 36 years old and hugely talented, he will rise again even as the last vestiges of Jim Crow tactics continue to fade and Willie Horton ads countenanced by a national political party join the Bush dynasty in history's dustbin.

Elsewhere, the 2006 returns more often than not confirmed that Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, are far better people than this cynical White House takes them for. This election was not a rebuke merely of the reckless fiasco in Iraq but also of the divisive ideology that had come to define the Bush-Rove-DeLay era. This was the year that Americans said a decisive no to the politics of "macaca" just as firmly as they did to pre-emptive war and Congressional corruption.

For all of Mr. Limbaugh's supposed clout, his nasty efforts did not defeat the ballot measure supporting stem-cell research in his native state, Missouri. The measure squeaked through, helping the Democratic senatorial candidate knock out the Republican incumbent. (The other stem-cell advocates endorsed by Mr. Fox in campaign ads, in Maryland and Wisconsin, also won.) Arizona voters, despite their proximity to the Mexican border, defeated two of the crudest immigrant-bashing demagogues running for Congress, including one who ran an ad depicting immigrants menacing a JonBenet Ramsey look-alike. (Reasserting its Goldwater conservative roots, Arizona also appears to be the first state to reject an amendment banning same-sex marriage.) Nationwide, the Republican share of the Hispanic vote fell from 44 percent in 2004 to 29 percent this year. Hispanics aren't buying Mr. Bush's broken-Spanish shtick anymore; they saw that the president, despite his nuanced take on immigration, never stood up forcefully to the nativists in his own camp when it counted most, in an election year.

But for those who've been sickened by the Bush-Rove brand of politics, surely the happiest result of 2006 was saved for last: Jim Webb's ousting of Senator George Allen in Virginia. It is all too fitting that this race would be the one that put the Democrats over the top in the Senate. Mr. Allen was the slickest form of Bush-Rove conservative, complete with a strategist who'd helped orchestrate the Swift Boating of John Kerry. Mr. Allen was on a fast track to carry that banner into the White House once Mr. Bush was gone. His demise was so sudden and so unlikely that it seems like a fairy tale come true.

As recently as April 2005, hard as it is to believe now, Mr. Allen was chosen in a National Journal survey of Beltway insiders as the most likely Republican presidential nominee in 2008. Political pros saw him as a cross between Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush whose "affable" conservatism and (contrived) good-old-boy persona were catnip to voters. His Senate campaign this year was a mere formality; he began with a double-digit lead.

That all ended famously on Aug. 11, when Mr. Allen, appearing before a crowd of white supporters in rural Virginia, insulted a 20-year-old Webb campaign worker of Indian descent who was tracking him with a video camera. After belittling the dark-skinned man as "macaca, or whatever his name is," Mr. Allen added, "Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!"

The moment became a signature cultural event of the political year because the Webb campaign posted the video clip on YouTube.com, the wildly popular site that most politicians, to their peril, had not yet heard about from their children. Unlike unedited bloggorhea, which can take longer to slog through than Old Media print, YouTube is all video snippets all the time; the one-minute macaca clip spread through the national body politic like a rabid virus. Nonetheless it took more than a week for Mr. Allen to recognize the magnitude of the problem and apologize to the object of his ridicule. Then he compounded the damage by making a fool of himself on camera once more, this time angrily denying what proved to be accurate speculation that his mother was a closeted Jew. It was a Mel Gibson meltdown that couldn't be blamed on the bottle.

Mr. Allen has a history of racial insensitivity. He used to display a Confederate flag in his living room and, bizarrely enough, a noose in his office for sentimental reasons that he could never satisfactorily explain. His defense in the macaca incident was that he had no idea that the word, the term for a genus of monkey, had any racial connotation. But even if he were telling the truth - even if Mr. Allen were not a racist - his non-macaca words were just as damning. "Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia" was unmistakably meant to demean the young man as an unwashed immigrant, whatever his race. It was a typical example of the us-versus-them stridency that has defined the truculent Bush-Rove fear-mongering: you're either with us or you're a traitor,possibly with the terrorists. As it happened, the "macaca" who provoked the senator's self-destruction, S. R. Sidarth, was not an immigrant but the son of immigrants. He was born in Washington's Virginia suburbs to well-off parents (his father is a mortgage broker) and is the high-achieving graduate of a magnet high school, a tournament chess player, a former intern for Joe Lieberman, a devoted member of his faith (Hindu) and, currently, a senior at the University of Virginia. He is even a football jock like Mr. Allen. In other words, he is an exemplary young American who didn't need to be "welcome" to his native country by anyone. The Sidarths are typical of the families who have abetted the rapid growth of northern Virginia in recent years, much as immigrants have always built and renewed our nation. They, not Mr. Allen with his nostalgia for the Confederate "heritage" are America's future. It is indeed just such northern Virginians who have been tinting the once reliably red commonwealth purple.

Though the senator's behavior was toxic, the Bush-Rove establishment rewarded it. Its auxiliaries from talk radio, the blogosphere and the Wall Street Journal opinion page echoed the Allen campaign's complaint that the incident was inflated by the news media, especially The Washington Post. Once it became clear that Mr. Allen was in serious trouble, conservative pundits mainly faulted him for running an "awful campaign," not for being an awful person.

The macaca incident had resonance beyond Virginia not just because it was a hit on YouTube. It came to stand for 2006 as a whole because it was synergistic with a national Republican campaign that made a fetish of warning that a Congress run by Democrats would have committee chairmen who are black (Charles Rangel) or gay (Barney Frank), and a middle-aged woman not in the Stepford mold of Laura Bush as speaker. In this context, Mr. Allen's defeat was poetic justice: the perfect epitaph for an era in which Mr. Rove systematically exploited the narrowest prejudices of the Republican base, pitting Americans of differing identities in cockfights for power and profit, all in the name of "faith".

Perhaps the most interesting finding in the exit polls Tuesday was that the base did turn out for Mr. Rove: white evangelicals voted in roughly the same numbers as in 2004, and 71 percent of them voted Republican, hardly a mass desertion from the 78 percent of last time. But his party was routed anyway. It was the end of the road for the boy genius and his can't-miss strategy that Washington sycophants predicted could lead to a permanent Republican majority.

What a week this was! Here's to the voters of both parties who drove a stake into the heart of our political darkness. If you'll forgive me for paraphrasing George Allen: Welcome back, everyone, to the world of real America.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE MOVIE FREEDOM TO FASCISM

Scientist Richard Dawkins on Darwin, the Sistine Chapel,
and why the world would be better off without religion.

Interview by Laura Sheahen

To My Conservative Brothers and Sisters, I know you are dismayed and disheartened at the results of last week's election. You're worried that the country is heading toward a very bad place you don't want it to go. Your 12-year Republican Revolution has ended with so much yet to do, so many promises left unfulfilled. You are in a funk, and I understand.

Well, cheer up, my friends! Do not despair. I have good news for you. I, and the millions of others who are now in charge with our Democratic Congress, have a pledge we would like to make to you, a list of promises that we offer you because we value you as our fellow Americans. You deserve to know what we plan to do with our newfound power -- and, to be specific, what we will do to you and for you.

Thus, here is our Liberal's Pledge to Disheartened Conservatives:
To: Conservatives and Republicans I, and my fellow signatories, hereby make these promises to you:

1. We will always respect you for your conservative beliefs. We will never, ever, call you "unpatriotic" simply because you disagree with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us.

2. We will let you marry whomever you want, even when some of us consider your behavior to be "different" or "immoral." Who you marry is none of our business. Love and be in love -- it's a wonderful gift.

3. We will not spend your grandchildren's money on our personal whims or to enrich our friends. It's your checkbook, too, and we will balance it for you.

4. When we soon bring our sons and daughters home from Iraq, we will bring your sons and daughters home, too. They deserve to live. We promise never to send your kids off to war based on either a mistake or a lie.

5. When we make America the last Western democracy to have universal health coverage, and all Americans are able to get help when they fall ill, we promise that you, too, will be able to see a doctor, regardless of your ability to pay. And when stem cell research delivers treatments and cures for diseases that affect you and your loved ones, we'll make sure those advances are available to you and your family, too.

6. Even though you have opposed environmental regulation, when we clean up our air and water, we, the Democratic majority, will let you, too, breathe the cleaner air and drink the purer water.

7. Should a mass murderer ever kill 3,000 people on our soil, we will devote every single resource to tracking him down and bringing him to justice. Immediately. We will protect you.

8. We will never stick our nose in your bedroom or your womb. What you do there as consenting adults is your business. We will continue to count your age from the moment you were born, not the moment you were conceived.

9. We will not take away your hunting guns. If you need an automatic weapon or a handgun to kill a bird or a deer, then you really aren't much of a hunter and you should, perhaps, pick up another sport. We will make our streets and schools as free as we can from these weapons and we will protect your children just as we would protect ours.

10. When we raise the minimum wage, we will pay you -- and your employees -- that new wage, too. When women are finally paid what men make, we will pay conservative women that wage, too.

11. We will respect your religious beliefs, even when you don't put those beliefs into practice. In fact, we will actively seek to promote your most radical religious beliefs ("Blessed are the poor," "Blessed are the peacemakers," "Love your enemies," "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God," and "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me."). We will let people in other countries know that God doesn't just bless America, he blesses everyone. We will discourage religious intolerance and fanaticism -- starting with the fanaticism here at home, thus setting a good example for the rest of the world.

12. We will not tolerate politicians who are corrupt and who are bought and paid for by the rich. We will go after any elected leader who puts him or herself ahead of the people. And we promise you we will go after the corrupt politicians on our side FIRST. If we fail to do this, we need you to call us on it. Simply because we are in power does not give us the right to turn our heads the other way when our party goes astray. Please perform this important duty as the loyal opposition.

I promise all of the above to you because this is your country, too. You are every bit as American as we are. We are all in this together. We sink or swim as one. Thank you for your years of service to this country and for giving us the opportunity to see if we can make things a bit better for our 300 million fellow Americans -- and for the rest of the world.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned

BRING THEM HOME NOW

CAROLYNCONNETION - I've got a mind and I'm going to use it! thinkingBlue blogspot


YOU CAN BEAM ME UP NOW, SCOTTIE. Thinkingblue

Thursday, November 09, 2006

DEMOCRATS WIN IN 2006 but be cautious

CLICK HERE TO HEAR A LITTLE CELEBRATION MUSIC
CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE GIFS LIKE THIS
Yes, there is something to celebrate... The Democrats have taken back
our Congress and the American people have spoken. Literally,
the days seem a bit brighter... But let us be optimistically
cautious. We cannot afford to act giddy and arrogant like those on the right did when they were on top. (control your overwhelming urge to smile like the the Cheshire Cat in Alice and Wonderland)


We need to hope the Democrats will break out of their political paradigm of fear... Self induced apprehensions, that made them behave like conservatives... They have, for too many years now, gone into the proverbial liberal closet and emerged as right-wingers. Why, one might ask...?

Well, they thought that was the only way to win... They were mislead by the right-wing-Rovian types to believe the only strategy for victory was to become republican impersonators. And did this, course of action, bring them success? We all, painfully know the answer to that.

We true Liberals did not have a voice... our best interests were put on back burners. Corporate greed and Corporate need were the only demands listened to. I hope we progressives will have a voice now... even if it is just a whisper, to begin with... Later, when the dust settles, IT HAS GOT TO TURN INTO A COLLECTIVE PRIMEVAL SCREAM... that is, if we want to survive.

CLICK TO WATCH THIS ENLIGHTENING BROADCAST OF DEMOCRACY NOWPlease, click on the theater picture of Amy Goodman and watch the very enlightening broadcast of Democracy Now, "DEMOCRATS WIN"... of November 8, 2006... Thank you thinkingblue




PS: Also read below about Bernie Sander's remarkable win in VT .

A SALUTE TO BERNIE,

A TRUE LEADER OF THE PEOPLE.




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Click Here To Go To Cartoon site

The day after: Sanders prepares to take fight to Senate

By David Gram, Associated Press Writer November 8, 2006
BURLINGTON, Vt. --Preparing to crash the gates of the world's most exclusive club, self-described socialist and senator-elect Bernie Sanders on Wednesday vowed to continue his fight for the middle class and poor in the Senate. "I believe that right-wing extremist policy is now dead in America. That is a big deal," said Sanders, I-Vt.

The 65-year-old Brooklyn native easily won election Tuesday, setting the stage to become the first
socialist in U.S. Senate history. He vowed to "demand that the Senate focuses its attention on the needs of the middle class and working families."

Sanders beat millionaire businessman Rich Tarrant, winning 65 percent of the vote to 32 percent for the Republican.

Sanders, who ran for the Senate as a member of the fringe Liberty Union party twice in the 1970s, joked that he also would be the only senator in history who ever got 1 percent of the vote in a statewide election.

Sanders said Tuesday's election marked a turning point in American politics, but how far the nation will turn is an open question.

He said he would call on Democrats, which whom he will caucus, to "begin to stand up to the powerful corporate interests and the moneyed interests in Washington."

"Are the Democrats going to do that? I don't know if they will or not. I don't know how far they'll go. I
hope they do."

Sanders' relations with Democrats have a long and checkered history. During his nine years as mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, he often argued that the two major parties were little different from one another, sometimes calling them "tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee."

But he said he was happy to have joined forces with Vermont Democrats for his successful Senate bid. Democrats didn't put up their own candidate for the Senate, nominating the independent Sanders instead.

At the same time, Vermont's Progressive Party -- seen as closely allied with Sanders, even though he doesn't belong to it -- declined to put up a candidate for the U.S. House. That unified the left,
clearing the way for Tuesday's victory by Democrat Peter Welch, who will now succeed Sanders in
Vermont's lone U.S. House seat.

On policy issues, Sanders said any new proposal from President Bush for partial privatization of Social Security would be "dead on arrival" on Capitol Hill.

He said the U.S. should craft a timetable to withdraw from Iraq within the next year, but has a "moral obligation" to do so in a way that doesn't create a bloodbath for the Iraqi government and military.

He said he would push legislation that would set up Vermont as the pilot test for a universal health care system.

And he said he would push for reform in the media to encourage greater diversity and encourage a more thorough examination of complex issues.

Click Here To Go To This Cartoon Site

BRING THEM HOME NOW

CAROLYNCONNETION - I've got a mind and I'm going to use it!

thinkingBlue blogspot

YOU CAN BEAM ME UP NOW, SCOTTIE. Thinkingblue

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

HOW THE GRINCH STOLE THE MIDTERM ELECTION


'CLICK


Another short film fromGOOGLE on the reasons Karl Rove is so confident about winning this mid-term election. He did it 3 other times, so he figures, it is in the bag again. You can't fool with THE BRAIN.

We shall see old buddy Karl. As Pres. W. Bush has said. "FOOL ME ONCE... EH... EH... EH... SHAME ON YOU... EH ...
EH... FOOL ME ...EH... YA CAN'T GET FOOLED AGAIN!"

Mr. Dubya, This time we will find out who the fool is.Thank you, thinkingblue

P.S. Read below this essay by our old pal Greg Palast,
on HOW THEY STOLE THE MID-TERM ELECTION.

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CLICK TO SEE GRINCH SITEHOW THEY STOLE THE MID-TERM ELECTION

by Greg Palast for The Guardian (UK), Comment
Monday November 6, 2006

Here's how the 2006 mid-term election was stolen.
Note the past tense. And I'm not kidding.

And shoot me for saying this, but it won't be stolen by jerking with the touch-screen machines (though they'll do their nasty part). While progressives panic over the viral spread of suspect computer black boxes, the Karl Rove-bots have been tunneling into the vote vaults through entirely different means.

For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment for BBC TV
and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty of the gaming of US
elections. We've found that November 7, 2006 is a day that will live in infamy.
Four and a half million votes have been shoplifted. Here's how they'll do it, in
three easy steps:

Theft #1: Registrations gone with the wind.
On January 1, 2006, while America slept off New Year's Eve hangovers, a new
federal law crept out of the swamps that has devoured 1.9 million votes,
overwhelmingly those of African-Americans and Hispanics. The vote-snatching
statute is a cankerous codicil slipped into the 2002 Help America Vote Act --
strategically timed to go into effect in this mid-term year. It requires every
state to reject new would-be voters whose identity can't be verified against a
state verification database.

Sounds arcane and not too threatening. But look at the numbers and you won't
feel so fine. About 24.3 million Americans attempt to register or re-register
each year. The New York University Law School's Brennan Center told me that,
under the new law, Republican Secretaries of State began the year by blocking
about one in three new voters.

How? To begin with, Mr. Bush's Social Security Administration has failed to
verify 47% of registrants. After appeals and new attempts to register, US
Elections Assistance Agency statistics indicate 1.9 million would-be voters will
still find themselves barred from the ballot on Tuesday.

But don't worry: those holding passports from their ski
vacations to Switzerland are doing just fine. And that's the point. It's not the
number of voters rejected, it’s their color. For example, California's
Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson figured out how to block 40% of
registrants, mostly Hispanics. In a rare counter-move, Los Angeles, with a
Hispanic mayor, contacted these citizens, "verified" them and got almost every
single one back on the rolls. But throughout the rest of the West, new Hispanics
remain victims of the "José Crow" treatment.

In hotly contested Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State and the
Republican's candidate for Governor, remains voter-rejection champ -- partly by
keeping the rejection criteria a complete secret.

Theft #2: Turned Away - the ID game
A legion of pimple-faced Republicans with Blackberries loaded with lists of new
voters is assigned to challenge citizens in heavily Black and Hispanic (i.e.
Democratic) precincts to demand photo ID that perfectly matches registration
data.

Sounds benign, but it's not. The federal HAVA law and complex new ID
requirements in states like New Mexico will easily allow the GOP squads to
triple the number of voters turned away. Rather than deny using these voter
suppression tactics, Republican spokesmen are claiming they are "protecting the
integrity of the vote."

I've heard that before. In 2004, we got our hands on fifty
confidential internal memos from the files of the Republican National Committee.
Attached to these were some pretty strange spreadsheets. They called them
"caging lists" -- and it wasn't about zoo feeding times. They were lists (70,000
for Florida alone) of new Black and Jewish voters -- a very Democratic
demographic -- to challenge on Election Day. The GOP did so with a vengeance: In
2004, for the first time in half a century, more than 3.5 million voters were
challenged on Election Day. Worse, nearly half lost their vote: 300,000 were
turned away for wrong ID; 1.1 million were allowed a "provisional" ballot --
which was then simply tossed out.

Tomorrow, new federal ID requirements and a dozen new state
show-me-your-ID laws will permit the GOP challenge campaign to triple their
300,000 record to nearly one million voters blocked.

Theft #3: Votes Spoiled Rotten
The nasty little secret of US elections is that three million ballots are cast
in national elections but not counted -- 3,600,380 not counted in 2004 according
to US Election Commission stats. These are votes lost because a punch card
didn't punch (its chad got "hung"), a stray mark voided a paper ballot and other
machinery glitches.

Officials call it "spoilage." I call it, "inaugurating Republicans." Why?
According to statisticians working with the US Civil Rights Commission, the
chance your vote will "spoil" this way is 900% higher for Black folk and 500%
higher for Hispanics than for white voters. When we do the arithmetic, we find
that well over half of all votes spoiled or "blank" are cast by voters of color.
On balance, this spoilage game produces a million-vote edge for the GOP.

That's where the Black Boxes come into play. Forget about Karl
Rove messing with the software to change your vote. Rather, the big losses occur
when computers crash, fail to start or simply don't respond to your touch. They
are the new spoilage machines of choice with, statistically, the same racial
bias as the old vote-snatching lever machines. (Funny, but paper ballots with
in-precinct scanners don't go rotten on Black voters. Maybe that's why
Republican Secretaries of State have installed so few of them.)

So Let's Add it Up

Two million legitimate voters will be turned away because of
wrongly rejected or purged registrations.

Add another one million voters challenged and turned away for "improper ID."

Then add yet another million for Democratic votes "spoiled" by
busted black boxes and by bad ballots.

And let's not forget to include the one million "provisional" ballots which will
never get counted. Based on the experience of 2004, we know that,
overwhelmingly, minority voters are the ones shunted to these baloney ballots.

And there's one more group of votes that won't be counted:
absentee ballots challenged and discarded. Elections Assistance Agency data tell
us a half million of these absentee votes will go down the drain.

Driving this massive suppression of the vote are sophisticated
challenge operations. And here I must note that the Democrats have no national
challenge campaign. That's morally laudable; electorally suicidal.

Add it all up -- all those Democratic-leaning votes rejected,
barred and spoiled -- and the Republican Party begins Election Day with a 4.5
million-vote thumb on the vote-tally scale.

So, what are you going to do about it? May I suggest you ... steal back your vote.

It's true you can't win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get over it. The
regime's sneak attack via vote suppression will only net them 4.5 million votes,
about 5% of the total. You should be able to beat that blindfolded. If you can't
get 55%, then you're just a bunch of crybaby pussycats who don't deserve to win
back America.
********
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE."

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE POEM "TRUE LIES"

BRING THEM HOME NOW

CAROLYNCONNETION - I've got a mind and I'm going to use it!

thinkingBlue blogspot

YOU CAN BEAM ME UP NOW, SCOTTIE.Thinkingblue



Monday, November 06, 2006

Video ELECTION 2006 CATCH THE TRUE LIES

'CLICK



Here is a short film from You Tube on the horrors of the 2000 and 2004 elections. We must not allow this to happen again. Video the elections this time around and make sure the horrors are all documented. It is time to take back our America and stop being victims of the RIGHT'S Take Over of our Democracy. We must all be investigating journalists and catch the TRUE LIES in action. GOOD LUCK WORLD.
Thank you thinkingblue

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE POEM "TRUE LIES"



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12 Ways You Can Safeguard the Vote

by Fran Korten, Doug Pibel, Paul Mozur and the staff and interns at YES! Magazine

Will it happen again? On November 7 we may see voters waiting in long lines, only to find they’re not on the voter rolls. We may see election workers struggling with malfunctioning machines. If you’re worried that we will wake up November 8 to find that, once again, election procedures in key races are in question, read on.

The staff at YES! Magazine has researched the recommendations of voting integrity advocates and offers 12 ways you can protect your own vote—and the fairness of the system. Please forward this checklist to others to help make our election system work. calendar

BEFORE ELECTION DAY

1. Check your registration. Even if you think you're registered, you may not be. Check online at www.CanIVote.org. Or call your local election officials (find contact information at Overseas Vote Foundation).

2. Mail with care. If you’re voting by mail, check carefully where you need to sign, how to seal the envelope, and how to mark the ballot. And note: Some ballots weigh more than an ounce and require extra postage.

3. Find out who’s in charge. Make a phone list of your county and state election officials—it may save valuable
time on Election Day if you need to get registration verification or other information. calendar

ON ELECTION DAY

4. Vote early. If you encounter problems, you'll have time to sort them out and may be able to help others.

5. Take your government-issued ID (such as your driver's license). You may not need it, but it's best to have it.

6. Bring your cell phone, if you have one. If you have problems, or see problems, you can call a hotline immediately (see point #9).

7. Ask for a paper ballot. Some states, such as California, require polling places to have paper ballots available on request. If you don't want to use a machine, see if your polling place can provide a paper ballot. If machines aren't working or there are other problems, ask for an emergency ballot (although they may not be available everywhere).

8. Verify your vote. If you’re voting on an electronic voting machine, check the review screen to make sure it reflects your vote. If the machine produces a paper record (28 states require one), read it carefully to make sure it correctly reflects your vote. If it is incorrect, speak to a polling attendant—don’t leave until you’re sure your vote has been properly recorded.

9. Document and report. If you encounter difficulties, or see others experiencing difficulties (excessive lines, voter
harassment, malfunctioning machines, etc.), make a detailed record. Get all the facts you can—location, names, specific problem.

We recommend two nationwide networks where you can report problems. One is 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683), which will have volunteer lawyers in 15 locations standing by to provide assistance. The other is 1-866 My Vote-1
(1-866-698-6831), which will record your problem by voicemail, then forward your call to your local board of elections.
Both will enter the information you provide into a database to use to support challenges to problem elections now and demands for reform in the future. calendar

AFTER ELECTION DAY

10. Call your candidate. If there are questions about an election result, urge your candidate not to concede early; encourage that person to follow through with all available challenges and recounts. Ask how you can help.

11. Call your election officials. Let your county and state election officials know that you have concerns about the election and will be monitoring their response. Ask them not to certify the election before all challenges and recounts are finished. calendar

INTO THE FUTURE

12. Work for fair, transparent elections. Voice your questions about voting machines, vote suppression, and election problems promptly. Keep the issue in front of your election officials. If we want clean, trustworthy elections in 2008,
we have to start working on it now.

Want more information? Here are three websites from the leading edge on voting issues.
www.verifiedvoting.org

www.VotersUnite.org

www.truthout.org/voters.rights.htm

CAROLYNCONNETION - I've got a mind and I'm going to use it!

thinkingBlue blogspot

YOU CAN BEAM ME UP NOW, SCOTTIE. Thinkingblue

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

SWIMMING IN MUDDY WATER!

SWIMMING IN MUDDY WATER

Click Here To See An Amazing Interview With Aaron Russo


I received a thoughtful response on my Aaron Russo interview post that I would like to share. Please read below the reply from Barry and my respondence to him. Thank you thinkingblue

I was feverishly taking notes while watching the interview of Aaron Russo. It is true in one sense that our courts lack the independence that is called for in the Constitution. But I am not sure it goes to the level Mr. Russo is claiming. But it did make me want to do some research myself.

I'll give you a quick anecdote. When I got married my wife was flabbergasted.
She had just learned that I hadn't file taxes in three years. The story behind
that was one January I sat down to figure out my taxes. I owed a small amount to
both the state and federal governments. I had just finished working all 52 weeks
of the year and now they wanted more money. I was pissed. My feeling was "You
get the first bite of the apple. If you didn't take enough money too bad. I am
not going to pay money for the privilege of working 40 plus hours a week only to
have them tell me I now owe them more money." Luckily I knew a CPA who
straightened it all out with something called "income averaging". In the end I
got refunds for all three years with interest. Go figure.

One thing Aaron Russo says is true we have to make government responsive to the people. I hope everyone who takes time to come to a blog like this knows that
our recent voting history is dismal. Not because of Florida or Ohio or whether
or not computer voting is safe. Because the number of citizens taking the time
to do their civic duty is embarrassingly low. How many of us have turned to
someone who is bitching about this or that and asked "Did you vote", Too often
the answer is no. By the way fight the impulse to say shut up no vote no
bitching. It comes under freedom of speech. We defend to the death your right to
speak your mind even if you are out of your mind. Barry


I agree, Russo seems a bit over the top but I can't help but ask myself... OR IS HE? I feel there is so much information kept from the masses. They aren't sure we could handle the bad news so they fairytale it up before releasing it to the naive hoi polloi. (which isn't hard to do since most of us have not a clue about this mysterious fiat currency, world trade and Federal Reserve phenomenon.)

Not for our protection but for theirs... I am sure there is a fear that a great chaos would erupt creating upheaval in the markets... Just imagine if we, in large numbers, would stop buying, even for a short period, there would be a financial seism measuring 5 or 6 on the cash flow Richter scale.

We, the consumers, are the backbone of the entire capitalistic world. The buying, selling, manufacturing and consuming is our conditioning from day one. We are good little disciples and do exactly what is expected of us.

I wish I knew more about the world of financial workings, so I could understand exactly what is happening but like most I just speculate or surmise. Even the expert financiers who seem to be in the know, have lamented that we may possibly be in trouble, if something soon isn't done to break the rapid, uncontrolled freefall of bad decisional routine. Read the below excerpts from this article...

Financial Wizardry & Collapse

Bear with me for a second here. This isn't an easy topic. That's because no one understands Credit-Default Swaps (CDSs), or other complex credit-derivatives, but it is important that we try to understand the implications of their exponential increase. Sure, some people claim to understand: hedge fund managers, investment bankers, etc. They understand the derivatives marketplace just like neuroscientists understand consciousness—they know the component parts, they can use them as tools barely under their control, but when it comes to understanding exactly how the greater dynamic emerges from the component parts they are in the dark.

No one really understands the credit-derivative market, but everyone is impacted by it. Credit-derivatives represent the creation of money out of thin air, like some act of financial wizardry. Take a Credit-Default Swap, for example. Here’s how it works: Corp. A needs to raise funds to expand operations, so they issue a $10 million bond. Pension Fund B buys that bond, but is concerned with the risk of Corp. A going bankrupt and defaulting on the bond. So Hedge Fund C offers what is, in effect an insurance policy—Pension Fund B pays Hedge Fund C $200,000, and in exchange if Corp. A defaults on the bond, Hedge Fund C covers the $10 million for Bank B. Here’s the magic: because this insurance policy creates the market for this otherwise too-risky bond from Corp. A in the first place, and because the par-value of the credit-default swap (the insurance
policy) that the Hedge fund issues does nothing more than eat up the difference
between the risk-premium on this bond, this $200,000 that the hedge fund makes
is essentially fabricated out of thin air. Don’t forget to sprinkle in a liberal
portion of fractional-reserve-banking fairy dust and viola: now you understand
the credit-derivatives market as well as anyone else in the world.

Clear as mud? Try this on for size: there were $25 Trillion dollars in credit
derivatives issued so far in 2006. That’s about half the size of the world
economy. Oh, and it’s unreported, unregulated, and largely non-transparent. But
wait, it gets better:
MoreHere
And this next one...

World financial system heading for collapse


The World Today - Friday, 26 August , 2005 12:20:00
Reporter: Eleanor Hall

ELEANOR HALL: A former United States trade negotiator and businessman is warning that the world financial system is headed for collapse before the end of this decade unless US policymakers make some radical changes.

Clyde Prestowitz is an international trade specialist who worked for the Reagan
administration in the 1980s and now heads the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington.

He’s just written a compelling and at times alarming new book about the shift in
power in the world economy from the United States to emerging economies like
China and India.

His book, Three Billion New capitalists: the Great Shift of Wealth and Power to
the East is intended to be a wake-up call to policy-makers in western countries,
including Australia, to recognize and respond to the new challenges of international competition and to stop living beyond our means.

When he joined me in The World Today studio this morning, Mr. Prestowitz described the savings problem in the United States in particular, as an urgent crisis that is set to topple the world economy.

CLYDE PRESTOWITZ: The US right now is absorbing 80 per cent of global savings. Well when you hit 100 per cent, the music stops and leading figures, people like Paul Volcker, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, people like George Soros, the great speculator, have all made statements that they fear a major financial crisis within the next five years because the system is unsustainable.

ELEANOR HALL: Within five years?

CLYDE PRESTOWITZ: Yes.

More Here

Well does that make it a bit more understandable? Maybe a driblet for me but still I feel like I am swimming in very muddy water... and due to this, I have no confidence in what the big wheelers and dealers are doing in this quagmire of crapulence. When wealth and power are the byproducts of human endeavor, it's EVERYMAN FOR HIMSELF! (If it's every man for himself, then people are trying to save themselves from a difficult situation without trying to help anyone else...) Thanks for the response, thinkingblue aka Carolyn

Click to go to this amazing articleTHE ROOT OF ALL EVIL by Rob Kirby
KirbyAnalytics.com
May 10, 2006


Look at any modern schoolbook that publishes "The Constitution of the United States of America", and then go back to the original document signed by the Founding Fathers, which is actually titled "The Constitution for (sic) the United States of America". That one small word change found only in modern schoolbooks alters significantly the intent of the Founding Fathers.

Their intent is made clear if you think of the federal government in terms of
the "united States" - or in other words, States, each of which is a sovereign
power, that are united - as opposed to the "United States", a single sovereign
power. The reality is that the Founding Fathers found the concept of a single
sovereign power to be abhorrent. When they spoke of the loss of power within a
State to a federal authority, they called it "consolidation" and they were
dead-set against it.

That realization explains why the Founding Fathers went to great pains in the
Constitution to delegate only 17 specific and enumerated powers to the federal
government. They intended that the powers of the federal government would be few and limited. And so it was until the establishment of the Federal Reserve
created the ruling elite. After all, who do you think is responsible for that
one small word change in today's 'textbooks' if not the Establishment?
MORE HERE

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QUOTES FROM:

Click here to go to THINK-EXIST for quotes
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others
might pick them up.- Oscar Wilde

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed-
Mahatma Gandhi

A greedy father has thieves for children - Serbian Proverb

Poverty wants much; but avarice, everything - Publilius Syrus (Roman author, 1st
century B.C.)

YOU CAN BEAM ME UP NOW, SCOTTIE. Thinkingblue