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Barack Obama, I Want a Divorce | | AlterNet

My honeymoon with the Democrats has long since passed. Our relationship has turned sour, and I'm in no mood to marry again.

March 20, 2010 |

My honeymoon with the Democrats has long since passed. Our relationship has turned sour, and I’m in no mood to marry again.

Anyone who has ever gone through a divorce or marital separation knows how traumatic it can be. Marriages are supposed to be forever, but then life intrudes. First, the blissful honeymoon when it’s unthinkable to be apart from the loved one. Then the middle doldrums when spine-tingling doubts arise followed by flimsy excuses to oneself, self-rationalisations, for the other’s bad behaviour. Love weakens but loyalty remains. (For some of us, constancy is stronger than lust.) We soon grow accustomed to abuse, insults, betrayals and infidelity to the marriage vows. After all, where would we go, what would we do, if we freed ourselves from the bondage of a bad relationship? It’s too terrifying to think about, so we don’t.

That’s pretty much where my liberal friends and I are today with the Democrats and Obama administration spiralling out of control and showing every sign of wanting to do us harm before it flames out. We, like battered husbands and bruised wives, feebly grab at straws of hope. The straws are real, too. There may be only an inch of difference between Republicans and Democrats but real people in a real world live by that inch. For example, north of Los Angeles, where I live, an Obama-reinvigorated Environmental Protection Agency is seriously probing a toxic scandal in the mainly Latino hamlet of Kettleman where carelessly dumped corporate chemicals may have led to babies being born with facial disfigurements. The Republicans wouldn’t have bothered. That’s no small thing for the people concerned. And Obama appointed a known workers’ friend in Hilda Solis as secretary of labour in place of Bush’s Elaine Chao who never saw a union she didn’t despise. In other words, our Harvard professor in the White House has done something.

But the fact remains he is a war president with blood on his hands like Lyndon Johnson – only without LBJ’s guts and arm-twisting talent. Obama leads a dysfunctional, cowardly and bribable Democratic party establishment, personified by his mean-minded economic gurus Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, and his frazzled secretary of state the war-loving Hillary Clinton. The few Democratic politicians who stand up for sanity – against the war, for a public health option – are like Florida’s Alan Grayson and Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich – marginalised by the media and their own colleagues as lunatics or, in Rahm Emanuel’s immortal phrase, “retarded”.

In a bad marriage, if we’re lucky, a sad, angry, unwelcome realism takes over and an existential fear invades our soul. But we do not want to be alone in a loveless world. A divorce often means being cast out into psychological darkness, exile from the “mainstream”, the loss of (and even abuse from) friends, a terrifying sense of isolation and inadequacy. So, stuffing our ears and blinding our eyes to our own victimisation, we recommit to the relationship. We continue to deny, deny, deny. Life goes on, diminished and undignified. Soul-suicide.

But now I want a divorce from the Democrats, the “party of the people” versus the Republicans who with a few honorable exceptions are the party of cruelty. Are there some good Democrats? You bet. Are they outnumbered by callow, fearful Democrats? You bet.

I don’t care that at the moment there’s nowhere to go and hardly anybody to cheer for.

Like the Tea Partiers I’ve had it up to here. But as a taker of GI Bill, social security and Medicare benefits, and as a child of the New Deal which put my unemployed mother and father to work, I know that only big government, as dangerous as it can be, can help pull us all out of the shit – yes, the same government that by deregulating and bailouts pushed us into it. (I wonder how many populists, screaming about “socialist” government, are only too happy to take their portion of federal money as I am.)

I wish I could get behind Ralph Nader or the Green party or Cynthia McKinney or even Ron Paul for his antiwar stance. But having just split from my heart’s desire – the Democrats – I’m in no mood to marry up again. I’m caught in a vise between a lingering wish to be “effective”, not “waste my vote”, and a Huckleberry Finn itch to light out for unknown territory.My honeymoon with the Democrats has long since passed. Our relationship has turned sour, and I'm in no mood to marry again.... more

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9 hours ago

Census blamed in internment of Japanese

Friday, March 17, 2000 By STEVEN A. HOLMES THE NEW YORK TIMES WASHINGTON -- Two scholars say in a new research paper that... more

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20 hours ago

Obama Makes Final Plea: 'We're 24 Hours Away'

Victory within reach, President Obama rallied House Democrats today for a final health care push. "After a year of debate ...... more

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2 days ago

McCain and Lieberman's "Enemy Belligerent" Act Could Set U.S. on Path to Military Dictatorship | | AlterNet

Glenn Greenwald calls the bill "probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in... more

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3 days ago

GORDON DUFF: ATTORNEY GENERAL HOLDER HINTS AT BIN LADEN DEATH, FINALLY : Veterans Today

SAYS BIN LADEN “WON’T” BE TAKEN ALIVE…DOES HE MEAN “CAN’T?” HOLDER SEEN AS SOFTENING... more

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3 days ago

Liars, cheats, thieves: the terrible truth about the mean greens - Telegraph

Every now and again there comes along a scientific study that proves beyond reasonable doubt what you instinctively know to be true: wine is good for you, exercise is dangerous, and self-righteous environmentalists are lying, cheating, thieving degenerates.

I'm exaggerating only a little. Do Green Products Make Us Better People?, a paper in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science, argues that those who wear what the authors call the "halo of green consumerism" are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. Faced with various moral choices – whether to stick to the rules in games, for example, or to pay themselves an appropriate wage – the green participants behaved much worse in the experiments than their conventional counterparts. The short answer to the paper's question, then, is: No. Greens are mean.

The authors, two Canadian psychologists, came up with an intriguing explanation for this. "Virtuous acts," they write, "can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviour." It's the yin-yang theory of psychology, or "compensatory ethics", to give it its proper name. Buy an organic potato, then go home and beat your wife with The Guardian. Hop smugly into a green hybrid car, then use it to run over little old ladies doing their shopping.

This "moral balancing" argument, however, clearly has its limits. Most people are sufficiently balanced without having to swing to opposite ends of the moral spectrum. We can give money to charity without dipping into the company till at the same time. Every good act doesn't necessitate a bad one. To every action, there is not an equal and opposite reaction. Buying an expensive courgette with a bit of mud on it need not turn you into a tyrant.

No, what this study really does is to confirm our deep-rooted suspicion that there is something fishy about people who profess to be greener than thou. Those climate-change scientists in East Anglia didn't do their cause any favours with their emails. The most inconvenient truth for Al Gore was when reporters discovered just how large his home energy bills were.

As with the worst type of religious zealot, there is nothing more annoying than the zeal of the converted, especially when it is tainted with the hypocrisy of self-righteousness. As we report today, people are more likely to buy environmentally friendly produce in shops than on the internet. Being seen to be green is more important than anything else. I wonder whether that will change if it now becomes a case of being seen to be mean.

We should, of course, distinguish between the quiet, worthy faith of the majority, who recycle when they remember and try not to fly long-haul to New Zealand more than twice a month, and the infuriating, evangelical minority, who pour white paint all over nice, black 4x4s.

We've always suspected they were bullies. In the Seventies British film Nuts in May, Mike Leigh hilariously skewered the sort of couple whose supposed love of the environment – and why do so many of these people live in towns? – is really just a device to stop everyone else having fun.

And now, at last, we have confirmation that they're tight as well. They might be willing to pay over the odds for a lovingly tended carrot, but in every other area of normal human activity, their greenness is merely a mask for miserliness. The wind turbine, the tandem bike with a dangerous little buggy on the back for the twins, the self-denying holidays in Wales… Get a boiler! Get a car! Get out of here!

We have been kind to these unkind people for far too long. Now that their halo has fallen and they can no longer boast their green credentials as a shorthand for moral superiority, it is time to fight fire with fire. How about a little compensatory ethics of our own? Double the tax on organic food as a deterrent; it is clearly a starter drug to a lifetime of amorality. Stop and search anyone in a Prius. Conduct dawn raids on north London allotments. Otherwise, one can only imagine the sort of dystopia that would ensue if these mean little green men were allowed to run amok.Every now and again there comes along a scientific study that proves beyond reasonable doubt what you instinctively know to be... more

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3 days ago

Government Warned 9/11 Commission ‘Not To Cross The Line’

Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com Wednesday, March 17, 2010 Documents recently obtained by the ACLU show that the... more

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3 days ago

ZAGrrl: 6 Ways Law Enforcement Uses Social Media to Fight Crime

From felons on Facebook to tips through Twitter, social media is being used more and more by law enforcement agencies, and not... more

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3 days ago

An American Dream: Christopher Hignite’s Story / Scratch a child support case and solve a murder

Prepared for Ky State Representative Stan Lee By Christopher Hignite with the assistance of Henry Schankula November 6, 2007... more

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4 days ago

Look at the gray leaves!

Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation - check out the gray leaves.... more

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4 days ago

Nestle censor Greenpeace advert - removed from youtube

Dear Nestle's PR department, Hey! How are you doing? I know that when we highlight the damaging effect your business is... more

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4 days ago

Kids kicked out of catholic school, because Mummies are gay

The two mommies of the two children being forced out of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School in Boulder aren't some... more

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4 days ago

Iraq: Lockdown, Beheadings, Bribes: It's "Democratic Election Time" Again

"Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of... more

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4 days ago

Obama On Fox News: Bret Baier To Interview President

"Obama will appear on Baier's 6PM broadcast, "Special Report" to discuss "the upcoming House vote on... more

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4 days ago

The Twilight of the Elites - 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years - TIME

In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it's General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment.

In the wake of the implosion of nearly all sources of American authority, this new decade will have to be about reforming our institutions to reconstitute a more reliable and democratic form of authority. Scholarly research shows a firm correlation between strong institutions, accountable élites and highly functional economies; mistrust and corruption, meanwhile, feed each other in a vicious circle. If our current crisis continues, we risk a long, ugly process of de-development: higher levels of corruption and tax evasion and an increasingly fractured public sphere, in which both public consensus and reform become all but impossible.

For more than 35 years, Gallup has polled Americans about levels of trust in their institutions — Congress, banks, Big Business, public schools, etc. In 2008 nearly every single institution was at an all-time low. Banks were trusted by just 32% of the populace, down from more than 50% in 2004. Newspapers were down to 24%, from slightly below 40% at the start of the decade. And Congress was the least trusted institution of all, with only 12% of Americans expressing confidence in it. The mistrust of élites extends to élites themselves. Every year, public-relations guru Richard Edelman conducts a "trust barometer" across 22 countries, in which he surveys only highly educated, high-earning, media-attentive people. In the U.S., these people show extremely low levels of trust in government and business alike. Particularly distrusted are the superman CEOs of yore. "Chief-executive trust has just been mired in the mid- to low 20s," says Edelman. "It started off with Enron and culminates in Citi."

Such figures show that the crisis of authority extends beyond narrow ideological categories: Big Business and unions, Congress and Wall Street, organized religion and science are all viewed with skepticism. So why is it that so much of the country's leadership in so many different walks of life performed so terribly over this decade? While no single-cause theory can explain such a wide array of institutional failures, there are some themes — in particular, the concentration of power and the erosion of transparency and accountability — that extend throughout.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1971133_1971110_1971117,00.html#ixzz0iQYu4JDjIn the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it's General Motors, Congress, Wall... more

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4 days ago

Final destination Iran? - Herald Scotland | News | World News

Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia... more

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4 days ago

Barack Obama, former CIA agent

I recently had the pleasure of talking with Dr. James David Manning who has been ministering to the people of Harlem since 1981. He is now the Senior Pastor at ATLAH which stands for All the Land Anointed Holy, Manning's inspired name for Harlem as of September 14, 1991.

Dr. Manning heads the Columbia Obama Treason Trial which is scheduled for May 14-19, 2010 at the ATLAH building at 38 West 123rd Street in ATLAH, New York, 10027. Unfortunately, the Department of Justice and the Supreme Court have failed in their duties to uphold the Constitution and address the legitimacy and other questionable issues surrounding the White House's current resident. So, Dr. Manning, being a longtime resident of the Columbia University area, the school that Obama allegedly attended, began an intense investigation into Obama's educational background and discovered some profound discrepancies.

According to Dr. Manning, Obama (born in 1961) enrolled at the very pricey Occidental College in Los Angeles, California in 1979 and was recruited there in 1980 by the CIA which has made it a practice since its inception to recruit college students. He was, by his own admission, a "C" student, a dope smoker and a member of the Marxist Club at Occidental, a co-educational liberal arts college. In 1981, Obama allegedly transferred from Occidental to Columbia University. It is atypical for a student to begin their education in one four-year school and then transfer to another school. Columbia University requires that incoming students pass certain academic requirements which Obama apparently lacked. However, Columbia had a foreign student program and the CIA has major connections and influence with Columbia and the nation's other educational facilities.

The CIA needed Muslims or others who were fluent in Farsi and who could easily blend into the Muslim environment in the Middle East. The CIA persuaded Columbia University to extend their foreign student program to Obama, now a Columbia student, so that he might travel to Pakistan and enroll in the universities around Karachi in addition to the Patrice Lumumba School in Moscow. [1] The school, one of Russia's most prestigious universities was founded on February 5, 1960 as The Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (PFUR). It was renamed the Patrice Lumumba School on February 22, 1961. On February 5, 1992 the university re-adopted its former name. According to their web site, "The main aim was to give young people from Asia, Africa and Latin America, especially from poor families, an opportunity to get University education and to become highly qualified specialists. The students were admitted through non-governmental organizations, governmental establishments, and the USSR embassies and consulates." [2]

Obama, as an undercover agent, was the lead agent in the arms and money supply for the CIA-trained Taliban Army against the Soviet Army war machine. His actions were integral to the Taliban's success in their opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Obama, it is publicly acknowledged, went to Pakistan in 1981. There is no way of knowing how often Obama traveled between Pakistan and Russia. According to Dr. Manning, Obama was an interpreter for the CIA during the war in Afghanistan. When Obama completed his CIA operations in the mid 1980s and returned to the U.S. he persuaded the State Department to maneuver his entrance into Harvard Law School; since the CIA, the U.S. president's personal agency for black operations throughout the world, also has connections to federal and state politicians, they managed to arrange Obama's entrance to yet another elite school in 1988.

Percy Ellis Sutton, a civil-rights activist and lawyer, was the Manhattan Borough President from 1966 to 1977. He was an intelligence officer with the Tuskegee Airmen, the name of a group of African American pilots who were part of the 332nd Fighter Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. Sutton entered Harlem politics and became a leader of the Harlem Clubhouse, known as the "Gang of Four" which has controlled Democratic politics in Harlem for at least fifty years. His Clubhouse allies were New York City Mayor David Dinkins, U.S. Representative Charles Rangel, and New York Secretary of State Basil Paterson, father of the currently beleaguered David Paterson who replaced Spitzer as New York Governor in 2008. Percy Sutton wrote a letter to Harvard officials requesting that they admit Obama as a student after a hiatus of five years (from 1983 when he allegedly left Columbia to 1988).

Despite a five-year absence from the rigors of college activity he was accepted at Harvard where he excelled and on February 5, 1990, was elected president of the venerable celebrated Harvard Law Review, the highest student position at Harvard Law School, a term that lasts for one year. [3] After graduation he could have worked in any leading law firm except that he lacked the proper citizenship qualifications which would have come to light during the interview and normal background checks pursued by major law firms. Moreover, his academic deficiencies at Occidental College would have disqualified him from the top law firms. Furthermore, he was a CIA operative in the Middle East during the time that he was supposed to be attending Columbia University. So despite his Harvard achievements, Obama became a Saul Alinsky-style community organizer in South Chicago which alleviated the necessity of providing a legitimate background check. [4]

In 1990, Obama accepted a job with Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a law firm which represented civil rights cases but also represented Rezmar Corp. owned by Chicago slumlord, Tony Rezko. The law firm helped Rezmar Corp. get more than $43 million in government funding. As early as 1995, Rezko started contributing to Obama for his political aspirations. In 2003, Rezko was a fundraiser for Obama's Senatorial campaign as part of a group that raised over $14 million. In 2006, Rezko was found guilty of sixteen out of twenty-four charges filed against him.

Barack Obama had been employed for a short summer stint as an associate with Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP, the same law firm that Harvard graduate Michelle Robinson worked for from 1988 to 1991. She became his trainer and supervisor and, as such, may have handled any background information. Michelle Robinson, through the efforts of Valerie Jarrett, then-deputy chief of staff for Mayor Richard Daley, became an assistant to the mayor. Robinson later became an "economic development coordinator." Obama married the politically connected Michelle Robinson in October 1992 in the Trinity United Church of Christ. This gave him citizenship and credibility. [5] In 1993, according to the Records at the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois, Michelle Obama, as an attorney, was "voluntarily inactive and not authorized to practice law" per her request. After she gave up her law license, Michelle Obama worked for the University of Chicago Medical Center where she received a very generous annual salary of $317,000. [6]

Dr. Manning, an African American, asserts the following:

More at the link:I recently had the pleasure of talking with Dr. James David Manning who has been ministering to the people of Harlem since 1981.... more

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5 days ago

Marijuana and right-wing politics get together: Mason Tvert and Jon Caldara

At first blush (and second) (and third), marijuana advocate Mason Tvert and Jon Caldara, frontman for the conservative... more

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5 days ago

Medical Marijuana User Sues After Being Fired

A Great Falls man who says he was wrongly fired from his job for using medical marijuana has filed a $500,000 lawsuit against his... more

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5 days ago

Is Our Sexed-up Society Creating Prosti-Tots? | | AlterNet

Super-sexualized 'prosti-tot' culture posits hotness -- as opposed to, say, math -- as a girl's highest attainable goal.
March 11, 2010 |

Last week’s YouTube sensation was the adorkable 12-year-old Avery, all haystack hair and crooked glasses and giant Bugs Bunny teeth, lip-syncing in her messy bedroom to the Ke$ha mega-hit "TiK ToK.” (Sample lyrics: “I'm talking about everybody getting crunk, crunk / Boys tryin' to touch my junk, junk.”)

What’s awesome about Avery is that -- especially given the other sagaciously smart-ass material on her YouTube channel -- it’s safe to say she is totally in on the joke. (Doofy kid + “brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack” = funny!) She’s not trying, pathetically/disturbingly, to be grownup “hot.” She’s letting her creative eccentric ironic sarcastic confident dweeb flag fly. “I’munna fight!” indeed.

But much of Avery’s charm comes from the fact that she embodies a refreshing counterpoint to (if not commentary on) everything that is disturbing these days about pop culture for young girls. In other words, she’s not Azucena Diaz, the Peruvian 9-year-old who remade Britney’s “Toxic” video shot into terrifying soft-porn (and was then applauded for it, when she wasn’t being enthusiastically slut-shamed, slash, threatened with sexual assault). Diaz is not just shaking what God gave her. (Though God did appear to give her an unusually large budget.) She is shaking what we gave her and her tween peers: the super-sexualized "prosti-tot” culture that re-packages porn as mainstream "sexy" and posits “hotness” -- as opposed to, say, math -- as a girl’s highest attainable goal.

Just a small sampling of what we get from teen culture’s role-model-o-matic: mini-Miley Noah Cyrus, following in the pole-dancing steps of her big sis, sharing her rendition of “Smack That,” and dressing up as Hermione Granger a diminutive dominatrix for Halloween. Recently came the “news” that 9-year-old Noah was launching a lingerie line for little girls. That she is in fact doing no such thing (the error has reportedly been traced to the otherwise unimpeachable Perez Hilton) is “not the point,” writes Marjorie Ingall at Tabletmag.com. “The point was that it seemed completely credible, because hey, look at her.”

Also: Suri Cruise’s red lipstick, Brazil’s 7-year-old “samba queen,” slutty undies in the juniors department, Toddlers & Tiaras, baby’s first stilettos (which, we understand, are supposed to be "heelarious"), Bratz.

What’s going on? Why the ever-more-aggro sexualizing of ever-younger girls -- even as abstinence-only crusaders and their ilk try, fatuously, to wish their sexuality away?

“The most basic answer is that it’s highly profitable,” says Meenakshi Gigi Durham, professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Iowa and author of The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It. “These sexualized images are all commercially driven. The younger the demographic advertisers target, the more they can create cradle-to-grave consumers.” (And gone-to-early-grave parents.) Tweens were already the “most powerful consumer group since the baby boom" -- a $335 billion market -- in 2004. By 2007, according to Durham, the tween market had reached $700 billion worldwide.

more at the link:Super-sexualized 'prosti-tot' culture posits hotness -- as opposed to, say, math -- as a girl's highest attainable... more

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