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The person who put this together is a pure, creative GENIUS..............Classic Movies Redone
The Treasure of Sierra Madre
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The Wizard of Oz
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Gone With The Wind
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Bonnie & Clyde
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The Godfather
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The Wizard of Oz
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It's A Wonderful Life
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_
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Reality
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More reality
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Still more
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And a couple of more?'
* * * * * *
Nope, gotta have just one more !
Way too good....not to share!!!!!!!!
The OBAMA motto:
We've got what it takes, to take what you've got!
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The only candidates supporting gay marriage. Convention director is lesbian and political activist
Blog: BigHomo
Post: Libertarians have a gay ole time with lesbian organized convention
Link: http://bighomocon.blogspot.com/2012/05/libertarians-have-gay-ole-time-with.html
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Anti state - A Poem
| by William Gomes
[ May 05, 2012, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka Guardian]
I am ANTI STATE!
Yes, I am!
I am against the state, which runs on the bases of injustices
I am against the state which comes out of killings
I am against its every system
I am against its governments
I am against its Presidents, Prime Ministers
I am against its criminal hierarchy
I am against all those leaders of criminals in the parliament
Yes, they are criminals!
They are the traders of injustice,
They are the killers of justice
They are root and reasons of injustices
They are the creator of poverty
They crates poverty
They are traders of poverty
Yes! When people are poor, they are powerful
Yes, they are powerful and I am poor!
Yes, I am people!
They are running the corporate state of injustice
They are traders of hatred,
They sell hatred
They sell riots!
They do everything for power!
They are traders of religions
They sells the ALLAH, RAM , BUDDHA , JESUS !
They have declared war on people
They have declared war on peace
I declared war on these criminals,
I declared war on their System
I declare that I am anti state
For sure, I am for the people!
I am people!
I will burn their RED and GREEN flag,
I will burn the constitution of injustice
I will burn down the parliament
I will burn down all into ashes
I dream no red and green flag
No traders of injustice
But a place full of peaceful of people!
No mater, if need to change the name of Bangladesh
I declare, I will change it!
I will change for peace, for people
I declare, I am anti state!
http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2012/05/anti-state-poem.html
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William Nicholas GomesJournalist & Human Rights Activist
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Cell: +88 019 7 444 0 666
E-mail:William [at] williamgomes.org,editorbd[at]gmail.com
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A Comparison of Three Government Budgets
By Randall Holcombe | Thursday May 3, 2012 at 2:26 PM PDT
One effect of the ongoing recession is that it reduces tax revenues. That's one reason the federal deficit is as large as it is. But not all governments have responded the way the US government has.
I live in Florida, where total state appropriations (that is, state government expenditures) peaked in 2006, prior to the recession, at $73.9 billion. Because of declining revenues, expenditures fell to $66.2 billion in 2008, and in 2012 have come back to $70.0 billion, which is 5.3% less than their peak six years ago. The fiscally conservative Florida legislature has held the line on taxes, and state government spending has fallen.
In California, 2006 state expenditures were $130.0 billion, and in 2012 are $137.3 billion, a 5.6% increase. Not much of an increase over six years, but it looks like more when compared to Florida's expenditure reduction.
Meanwhile, federal government expenditures in 2006 were $2,655.1 billion, and rose to $3,795.6 billion in 2012, for an increase of 43%. I conjecture that few Americans would argue the federal government is providing 43% more value to them now than it was in 2006.
If the federal government had kept its spending increase to the same level as California's state government from 2006-12, federal expenditures would be $2,803.8 billion, or 26.2% lower than they are today.
If the federal government had reduced its expenditures as much as Florida did, federal expenditures would be $2,514.4 billion, or 33.8% lower than they are today.
The Floridians I hear complaining about government budget cuts are government employees, the people who get paid by government. I never hear ordinary Floridians in the private sector complaining about reduced government services. I suspect you'd have few complaints if the federal government budget were cut 33.8% today, except for the people who are recipients of taxpayer dollars.
One final thought: 2012 federal tax revenues are $2,468.6 billion, so if the federal budget actually were cut by 33.8%, we'd still have a $48.8 billion budget deficit.
http://blog.independent.org/2012/05/03/a-comparison-of-three-government-budgets/#comments
There Are 100 Million Working Age Americans That Do Not Have Jobs
The unemployment crisis in America is much worse than you are being told. Did you know that there are 100 million working age Americans that do not get up in the morning and go to work? No wonder why it seems like there are so many people that do not have jobs! According to the federal government, there are 12.6 million working age Americans that are considered to be "officially" unemployed, but there are another 87.8 million working age Americans that are not working either. The federal government considers those Americans to be "not in the labor force" so they are not included in the unemployment rate. In fact, this is one of the key ways that the government manipulates the unemployment numbers. The Obama administration would have us believe that the unemployment rate is going down and that that since the start of the last recession about as many Americans have left the labor force as we saw during the entire decades of the 1980s and 1990s combined. Of course that is a bunch of nonsense, but that is what the Obama administration would have us believe. The truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is just about the same right now as it was two years ago. It was incredibly difficult to get a job back then and it is incredibly difficult to get a job right now. So don't believe the hype that things are getting much better. If you still do have a good job, you might want to hold on to it tightly, because there is not much hope that things are going to improve significantly any time soon.
The first chart that I have posted below shows the total number of "officially" unemployed workers in America. According to the Federal Reserve, that number is currently 12,673,000. This chart makes it look like the employment picture in America is getting significantly better....
![[]](http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Unemployed-440x264.png)
But if you dig deeper into the numbers you quickly see that this is not true. A lot of those workers that were formerly classified as "unemployed" have now been moved into the "not in labor force" category. Since the start of the last recession, the number of Americans not in the labor force has risen by more than 8 million according to the Obama administration. The total number of working age Americans not in the labor force now stands at 87,897,000....
![[]](http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Not-In-Labor-Force-440x264.png)
So when you add 12,673,000 and 87,897,000, you get a total of 100,570,000 working age Americans that do not have jobs.
Yes, there are certainly millions upon millions of working age Americans that do not have jobs and that do not want jobs.
But you have to be delusional to believe that there are nearly 88 million working age Americans that do not have jobs and that do not want jobs.
The Obama administration tells us that the labor force participation rate is now the lowest it has been since 1984. But back then, a very large percentage of women were staying home and raising families. The percentage of stay at home mothers has declined steadily since then.
So the truth is that the employment statistics that we are being fed are not portraying an accurate picture of what is really going on.
As a CNN article recently explained, there are millions of Americans that say that they would like to have a job even though they have not been "actively" looking for one in the past four weeks. If those people were included in the unemployment rate, it would immediately shoot up to around 11 percent....
- About six million people claim they want a job, even though they haven't looked for one in the last four weeks. If they were to all start applying for work again, the unemployment rate would suddenly shoot up above 11%.
Let's take a look at the employment to population ratio for the last six years for the month of March....
March 2007: 63.3%
March 2008: 62.7%
March 2009: 59.9%
March 2010: 58.5%
March 2011: 58.5%
March 2012: 58.5%
The percentage of the working age population that had jobs fell rapidly during the recession and it has stayed very low since then.
When Barack Obama tells you that "America is going back to work" he is lying to you.
The cold, hard reality of the matter is that there are millions of hard working Americans that have been sitting at home for years hoping that a new job will come along.
Back in 2007, approximately 10 percent of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for one year or longer.
Today, that figure is above 30 percent.
The average duration of unemployment in the United States today is about three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.
And according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the number of announced job cuts is actually rising again....
- Also, announced jobs cuts rose 7.1% in April, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, to 40,599 and up 11.2% from last April another bit of evidence that the jobs market isn't doing well.
There are two other trends that I want to briefly mention.
1) A lot of jobs that used to be very labor intensive are now being replaced by technology. Thanks to robotics, automation and computers, a lot of big companies simply do not need as many workers these days. Those are jobs that are never going to come back.
2) As labor has become a global commodity, millions upon millions of U.S. jobs have been sent overseas. Today, you are not just competing for a job with your neighbors. You are also competing with workers on the other side of the globe. Unfortunately, it is legal to pay slave labor wages in many of those countries. By sending our jobs out of the country, big corporations can also avoid a whole host of rules, regulations, taxes and benefit payments that they would be facing if they hired American workers.
So U.S. workers are at a massive competitive disadvantage. Why should a big corporation pay 10 or 20 times more for an American worker when they can pad their profits by exploiting cheap foreign labor?
The sad truth is that the value that the marketplace puts on the labor of the average American worker is continually decreasing.
This is making it much more difficult to find a job and it is keeping wages down.
In the old days, pretty much any man that was a hard worker and that really wanted a good job could go out and get one.
But now all of that has changed. Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
And sadly, the vast majority of the jobs that are being lost are good jobs. As I wrote about the other day, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the recession were middle class jobs.
So how are middle class families making it these days?
Many of them are going into tremendous amounts of debt. As a recent CNN article detailed, the average debt load being carried by those of us in the bottom 95 percent of all income earners has risen dramatically over the past several decades....
- In 1983, the bottom 95% had 62 cents of debt for every dollar they earned, according to research by two International Monetary Fund economists. But by 2007, the ratio had soared to $1.48 of debt for every $1 in earnings.
If your goal is to live a middle class lifestyle, you need to realize that the entire way that the game is being played is changing.
In the old days, you could start out with a company as a young person and stay with that company until you retired. If you worked hard and you were loyal, there was a really good chance that the company would recognize that and be loyal to you too.
These days, most companies are absolutely heartless when it comes to their workers. The good job that you have today could be gone tomorrow. Workers are increasingly being viewed as "liabilities", and there is a good chance that the moment you become "expendable" to your company you will be kicked out on the street.
That is one reason why I am encouraging people to consider starting their own businesses. If you work for someone else, your security can be taken away from you at any moment. But if you work for yourself, you aren't going to get fired.
Unfortunately, tough economic times are coming and things are not going to be easy no matter what road you take. It will be imperative to work harder than ever, to stay flexible, and to never, ever give up.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/there-are-100-million-working-age-americans-that-do-not-have-jobs
What Are You Afraid Of if You Have Nothing to Hide?
by Matt Harwood, Posted May 3, 2012
The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades our Liberties by David K. shipler (New York: Knopf 2011), 384 pages.
Late this past spring, two U.S. senators finally had the courage to look Big Brother in its inhuman, electronic eye and try to come clean on the USA PATRIOT Act. According to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Org.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), two PATRIOT Acts operate inside the United States: the first is the actual law passed immediately after the shock of 9/11, giving the government unprecedented powers to counter terrorism. The second is how the government interprets the legislation.
Why does the government's interpretation send shivers down the spines of these liberals? It's a simple and straightforward question, but Wyden, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, can't say, because in a perfect Monty Pythonesque punchline, it's classified.
He can, however, vaguely outline what troubles him so. "It is fair to say that the business-records provision is a part of the PATRIOT Act that I am extremely interested in reforming," he told Wired.com's Spencer Ackerman. "I know a fair amount about how it's interpreted, and I am going to keep pushing, as I have, to get more information about how the PATRIOT Act is being interpreted declassified. I think the public has a right to public debate about it." That, however, has not happened. Instead, this past August the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted to keep the American public in the dark.
What's distressing about this dog whistle isn't that only a few can even hear it; it's that the PATRIOT Act and other post– 9/11 intelligence and security policies have already cast a creeping authoritarian shadow over America. It's this darkening landscape on which Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Shipler shines the floodlights in The Rights of the People, the first of twin volumes on the decline of American civil liberties since that grotesquely beautiful morning a decade ago.
In his first installment, Shipler tells intimate stories of American lives wrecked by government abuse and intrusion in violation of the Fourth Amendment -- which protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures and requires probable cause before a search or arrest warrant can be issued. As Shipler reminds Americans, it's not a new story. "In practically every war it seems, those wielding the authority of the state were gripped with a galvanizing fear, not just of the enemy abroad but of an imagined virus of resistance and subversion at home," he observes, quickly summarizing America's past descents into darkness, such as John Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, and Wilson's Red Scare.
Occupied territory
Ironically for a book ostensibly about the evisceration of American civil liberties and privacy after 9/11, Shipler opens on the streets of Washington, D.C. Embedded alternately in an anti-gun task force and a narcotics squad, he is at his best detailing what it's like to be young and black in the District. Aptly he calls the first of three chapters devoted to the city's rougher neighborhoods "Another Country."
For young black men in the nation's capital, life is one big suspicionless search. The rule of law in this foreign land isn't something to be observed and respected by police. Rather it's something to be creatively evaded. Shipler shows how police aggressively use the Terry stop, which allows them to pat down suspects for weapons, ostensibly for self-protection, to fish for evidence of a crime when officers already have scant reasonable suspicion to stop someone in the first place. Many young black men don't even need to be asked to be searched, they simply lift their shirts exposing their waistband as they stride by cops who are looking for guns. For those men, the police are not there to serve and protect; they're an occupying force.
While Shipler never says it directly, it's easy to conclude he believes the writing has been on the wall for some time now: Most Americans are just too privileged to have seen it. What has been happening to black men only miles from the Supreme Court for decades has begun lurking into the sycamore-studded cul de sacs of suburban America with the pigeon-hearted passage of the PATRIOT Act.
FISA
Immediately after 9/11, we were all New Yorkers, but a small minority, overwhelmingly Muslim, discovered they had more in common with D.C.'s wretched of the 'hood.
Enter Brandon Mayfield, a victim of bad forensic work that led FBI investigators to believe this lawyer, veteran, and father played a role in al-Qaeda's 2004 Madrid train bombing that murdered 191 people and wounded more than 1,400. Mayfield learned that he was under government surveillance only when agents broke into his home, leaving telltale signs -- shoe prints -- that a stranger had been there. The Mayfields, observant Muslims, did not wear their shoes indoors.
Mayfield had become the target of a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant, which allows government investigators to do deeply disturbing things in secret -- for example break into homes, tap phones, copy computer hard drives, and sort through trash -- to determine whether a person is an agent of a foreign power. Unlike criminal wiretaps, FISA warrants do not require the feds to notify a suspect that he is the subject of a government investigation. Also unlike traditional criminal warrants, FISA warrants allow blanket surveillance, not just interception of communications involving the alleged crime.
The rationale behind this evasion of the Fourth Amendment was that the primary purpose of the surveillance was to collect intelligence, not gather evidence for prosecution. But after 9/11, the PATRIOT Act amended FISA, making it easier to use information gleaned from FISA warrants in criminal prosecutions. (During the Cold War, Shipler notes, an outed spy was simply expelled from the country.) Those muscular differences, critics charge and Shipler agrees, give federal investigators the option of doing an end run around the Fourth Amendment, using FISA wiretaps rather than stricter criminal wiretaps. For instance, a senior Justice Department lawyer told Shipler that the FBI would have had no problem persuading a judge to give them authority to get a criminal wiretap on Mayfield: the FBI had what they erroneously believed to be a partial fingerprint of his taken by Spanish National Police from a plastic bag containing seven detonators that matched detonators found on an unexploded device.
Mayfield was innocent, but the FBI had already closed its jaws on him, so exculpatory evidence was rationalized away. "With Mayfield profiled as a Muslim involved in the Madrid bombings, the scattered bits and fragments of information that the FBI secretly collected were spliced into a gathering fantasy," writes Shipler. "It was a thought process demonstrating the danger of clandestine spying, for when the target never has a chance to respond, the thinnest string can be spun into a shroud of suspicion." Today Mayfield is a free man, but only because the Spanish National Police never believed he was a suspect in the first place and eventually arrested the right man, forcing the FBI to admit it had been wrong about the former U.S. soldier.
Shipler also doesn't shy away from highlighting those incidents where someone vile got what he deserved, but only because the government bent the rules. Ronald Kline, a California judge, went to prison for 27 months after a hacker infected his computer with malware and discovered child pornography and writings describing the judge's interest in young boys. The hacker then delivered the evidence to an organization called PedoWatch, which turned it over to the police. Is that hacker merely a good citizen doing his civic duty to protect young children, or a dangerous vigilante who has broken the law to serve his own sense of justice? Shipler thinks the latter and believes the evidence against Kline should have been thrown out of court, because the hacker had become a de facto agent of the state, and thus Kline's Fourth Amendment rights had been violated.
Chilling effects
While Shipler is no Luddite, a persistent fear of the rapidly expanding power of technology courses through his narrative, because it makes it simple for the government, aided by FISA warrants, national security letters, exigent letters, or the random hacker, to surreptitiously invade the lives of its citizens by reading email, scanning call histories, and mapping movements.
Shipler worries that it's all taking a toll on Americans' right to be left alone, creating citizens fearful of exercising their rights and even their interests. "Some citizens begin to act as if someone is listening or looking in, and they take precautions," he writes. "Reporters use disposable cell phones to avoid exposing anonymous sources in case calling records are secretly obtained. A producer doing a television documentary on circumcision hesitates to type the word into Google because it links to pictures of naked children...."
While some may roll their eyes and find Shipler's fears overwrought, I find myself doing similar things. I try hard to write every email message as if some omnipresence will scan it for something inappropriate or something that could be used against me later. Eerily enough, as I write this I've just learned that in 2004 the FBI opened an investigation into Antiwar. com, a site that has republished my work and has interviewed me on articles I've written, to determine whether editorial director Justin Raimondo and a colleague "constitute a threat to National Security on behalf of a foreign power."
Ode to civil rights
Shipler understands the ramifications this has on the nation's marketplace on ideas. "If you think you're being constantly watched, you may behave differently, for better or worse -- better if you hesitate to shoplift because you're on camera, worse if the spying steals your political fearlessness." That produces a passive citizenry, especially among the talented, who have the most to lose. "Those who are careful to keep their files clean -- who decide not to speak, not to assemble, not to step into what they fear might be a zone of government concern -- take an invisible path away from civil society," or at least move cautiously at the forest's edge before taking a step into the open.
Reading The Rights of the People it's hard not to be reminded of pastor Martin Niemöller's famous statement about the rise of Nazism:
- First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
- Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
- Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
- Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.
- Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
"Freedom demands a certain state, not the open society, that strives to abolish risk." Fear is a terrible thing: it transmogrifies marginal threats into existential menaces, empowering Leviathan, while neutering the skeptical and the humane. In his own way, Shipler has written an ode to American civil liberties, and possibly its eulogy.
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1201f.asp
A little long winded, but a good piece nevertheless. Makes one stop and think.....(Or it should at any rate.....)
May 4, 2012
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/05/obama_meets_his_nemesis.html at May
-- Obama Meets His Nemesis
By J.R. DunnAs the Greeks saw it, "nemesis" was an abstract force (personified by the goddess of divine justice of the same name) aimed directly at the destruction of a single individual. It is nemesis that brings down the heroes of the tragedies. A force that builds up over years, inescapable, inevitable, and in large part created by the hero's own actions. Nemesis is very much the Western equivalent of karma. It is a form of divine payback, which, we are told, is a bitch.
Nemesis is what is taking down Barack Obama. Not politics as such, not the actions of his opponents -- at least not yet -- not any disaster or setback in the world as a whole. Obama is in the process of being ablated as the result of his own actions, born from his own personal flaws. There's a certain type of personality that constructs a life out of the nurturing and protecting its own failings rather than attempting to resolve or overcome them. This is the only formula that is required to understand Barack Obama.
For close to four years, I've been arguing that Obama's actions as president -- actions taken in defiance of law; of American tradition; of the realities of current condition; and, not the least, of the American people -- would, in his final months, take him down. That was my prophecy, vouchsafed unto me in the seventh house during the seventh hour of the seventh day, and behold, it is coming to pass exactly as foretold.
Nobody acts with the arrogance of an Obama without paying for it. In the ancient dramas, it was called hubris. (A lot of debate exists as to how that word was actually pronounced, there being no "u" sound in ancient Greek. Some say it's an "ee" sound; some say a "y.") The hero apes the gods; begins to view himself as more than human, beyond the laws that prevail even on Olympus; and the machinery of fate starts grinding. And once that machinery goes into motion, it doesn't stop until its victim has been reduced to dust.
Obama is one of the most arrogant figures ever to sit in the White House. John Adams, Andrew Jackson, and Teddy Roosevelt do not have a thing on this man. There has been considerable speculation that his condition is clinical, that he is in fact a narcissist in the psychological sense, 
and there is evidence to back this contention. The public sneer, the smirk, the upthrust chin, the repeated use of the personal pronoun at times when it is far from appropriate (e.g., the speech announcing the shooting of Osama bin Laden, where you'd be forgiven, from the way he told it, in believing that Obama himself took the old butcher out in single combat). The remarks like "I won" in circumstances where they are completely uncalled for. He required no help, on taking office, in boosting his already mammoth ego to the level of near-megalomania, but he got it anyway. Obama, we were told, was "kind of God." He was the One, the Messiah, the "Alpha and Omega," in the words of a chant repeated by some of his followers -- a description that in the Old Testament was limited to the Almighty and none other.
Obama was praised as fulsomely (in the real sense of the word) as any individual since Josef Stalin. But unlike Uncle Joe, he actually believed it. This kind of thing would have turned the head of even most solidly grounded of individuals; with someone as unstable as Obama, it was fatal.
It was fatal in that it set the stage for nemesis. And Obama took it from there, with some of the most lurid, unjustifiable, and grotesquely inflated policies and programs since the heyday of the New Deal. The $760-billion stimulus. Government takeover of entire industries. The shanghaiing of an eighth of the American economy through his health-care plan. And this is only to mention the most egregious offenses. There is scarcely a single aspect of American life that Obama hasn't attempted to remake in his own image. And why not? He was the Alpha, after all. And the Omega.
The odd thing is, he didn't actually do much. He didn't really put a lot of work into it. Like a Divine Right princeling, he thought that all he needed to do was make his wishes clear for them to be realized -- an odd conception of the presidency that I think is unmatched anywhere else in the record. Obama wanted millions of shovel-ready jobs; he sent his Ivy League-trained economists out to arrange it. He wanted a health-care revolution, and he turned that over to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. And so on down the line -- every revolutionary program was assigned to some secretary or czar or union goon.
The results have been what any normal individual might have expected. As Americans, we have gotten next to nothing out of all this wasted effort and energy and cash. But that's more than what Obama got. Because the only thing he got was nemesis.
His grand schemes are falling apart. It seems that a week doesn't go by without another "green" corporation -- Solyndra, First Solar, Ener1 -- going down the tubes despite (or perhaps because of) being funded to the tune of hundreds of millions by Obama's functionaries. His dream machines -- the electric cars and high-speed trains -- have been transformed into punchlines. His grand design, ObamaCare, appears to be headed for the boneyard through action by the Supreme Court, the only question being whether the justices will kill it outright or maim it to a point that it can't survive. (Obama's reaction was characteristic: public insistence that the Supreme Court had no right, historically, legally, or otherwise, to lay a finger on one of Obama's sacred endeavors.)
Which brings us to the open scandals. Arrogance begets arrogance. The United States was born out of a reaction to imperial flunkies who truly believed that they could behave as vaingloriously as their monarch and his corrupt nobility. The Bourbons were brought down not so much by their own actions (Louis XVI was in fact something of reformer) as those of their out-of-control bureaucrats. It's no different today. We see it in the GSA scandal, the Secret Service hooker scandal, and above all in the Justice Department's Fast and Furious scandal. All these result from hirelings mimicking the activities and attitudes of their bosses, including their ultimate boss in the Oval Office. Each is rooted, and obviously so to even to most blasé observer, in arrogance. Fast and Furious reveals the blueprint: a crazy scheme (gun-running on one hand, ObamaCare on the other) that no commonsense individual would ever consider for a moment put into play despite protests, disaster ensuing by leaps and bounds, deliberately ignored because the scheme "has to work," a climax amounting to complete collapse, with the protagonist (Holder, Obama) acting as if none of it has anything to do with him, as if he can simply walk off without so much as a word spoken.
Obama believes exactly that. So pure is his arrogance, so exalted his narcissism, that he will do nothing to defend himself out of the conviction that no such thing is required of him. That he, among all human beings alive in the second decade of the third millennium, does not need to respond under any circumstance. This is the difference between Obama and previous administrations -- Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan worked like stevedores to overcome Watergate and Iran Contra, Nixon with no success while Reagan at last put it behind him. But Obama, exactly like his appointees, doesn't think he has to make any defense at all. He truly believes that he can't be touched. (The other difference between these scandals and earlier ones is that hundreds have died as a result of this administration's activities.)
This is pure arrogance, and it is a hallmark of nemesis. Because none of this is going away. The current scandals will continue to snowball, and there will be more coming over the next months as the seeds scattered by Obama in his first years burst into bloom. (As this is being written, there comes word of a DreamWorks scandal busting open, involving Joe Biden; the Chinese; and, for all I know, the guy who thought it was a good idea to make a picture out of John Carter of Mars.) They have had three years to germinate and spread. As the campaign heats up, so will the scandals.
Obama will then find himself in the lonely place -- the place where the naked soul comes face to face with machinery of fate itself. A place that a man cannot walk out of, where no excuses can be made, where no explanation will ever suffice. By the time it's all over, the election may well be the least of Obama's worries.
The Greeks gave us a complete picture of a very basic human predicament, arising out of the personal flaws and failings of the individual. A portrayal that still speaks to us because its basic elements remain unchanged even with the passage of millennia. We are seeing it repeated in our time. It will be a terrible spectacle. But it will also be just.
J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/05/obama_meets_his_nemesis.html at May
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"Washington cannot exist without conflict. Now that the "Muslim threat" is wearing thin, Washington is stirring up a conflict with China. Washington is sticking its nose into every dispute China has with its neighbors and building up its military presence in the Asian-Pacific. As I wrote in my previous column, a China threat is being created as a long-term threat to take the place of the former Soviet threat."
Disinformation On Every Front
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
May 4, 2012
Some readers have come to the erroneous conclusion that the Matrix consists of Republican Party disinformation as if there is no disinformation from the left. Others think that propaganda is the business of Obama and the Democrats. In fact, propaganda from the right, the left and the middle are all part of the disinformation fed to americans.
If I may give some examples: The other day Chuck Colson, one of the Nixon officials imprisoned for Watergate crimes, died. This gave NPR the opportunity to relive the Nixon horror.
What precisely was the Nixon horror? Essentially, there was no such thing. Watergate was about President Nixon lying about when he learned about the Watergate burglary.
When Nixon learned about the burglary, he did not act on it prior to his reelection, because he reasoned, rightly, that the Washington Post would blame him for the burglary, although he had nothing to do with it, in the hopes of preventing his reelection.
By going along with a cover-up, Nixon enabled the Washington Post to make an issue of the precise date on which Nixon learned of the burglary. White House tapes indicated that Nixon had learned of the burglary before he said he learned of it. So Nixon had permitted a cover-up and had to go, but what was the real reason?
What was the Watergate burglary? We don't really know. A group of men including former CIA operatives were hired by the Committee to Re-elect the President to break into a Democratic campaign office in the Watergate complex. We don't know the purpose of the burglary. Some claim it was to wire-tap the telephones in the belief that the Democratic Party was getting re-election money from communists in Cuba or elsewhere. Others claim that the burglars were looking for a list of call girls, that compromised a White House official, as his fiancee was allegedly one of the call girls.
Looking back from our time during which Bush and Obama have deep-sixed the US Constitution, violated numerous US and international laws, and behaved as if they were caesars unconstrained by any law or any morality, Nixon's "crimes" appear so trivial as to be unremarkable. Yet, Nixon was driven from office and is regarded as a criminal.
What was Watergate really about?
I doubt we will ever know. But I can offer one possible explanation. Nixon, like John F. Kennedy before him, alarmed the military/security complex with his plans to withdraw US troops from Vietnam (Vietnamization) and his determination to open communication with communist China and improve relations.
As President Eisenhower warned in his last address to the American people, conflict brings power and profit to interest groups that benefit from conflict. Nixon, like Kennedy before him, was perceived as a threat by these powerful interests, because he was working to reduce conflict.
James W. Douglass in his documented book, JFK and the Unspeakable, attributes the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service. Douglas reports that these powerful government institutions were concerned by Kennedy's refusal to approve Operation Northwoods, to back the CIA's invasion of Cuba, and to confront the Soviets militarily over the Cuban missile crisis and by Kennedy's plans to end US military intervention in Vietnam. JFK also told his brother Robert that after his re-election he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces.
The right-wing view that Kennedy was too soft to stand up to communism was intensified when it was learned that Kennedy was working with Nikita Khrushchev through back channels to defuse the Cold War. In his "A Strategy of Peace" speech (June 1963), Kennedy announced the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the suspension of atmospheric nuclear testing.
"What kind of a peace do we seek?," Kennedy asked. "Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war." With his words and deeds, President Kennedy made himself into a threat against the interests of the military/security complex.
There was enough suspicion of JFK's assassination that yet another president assassinated by another "unhinged lone gunman" might raise more eyebrows. Nixon was disliked by the media, which made him a good candidate for political assassination. The Watergate burglary provided the opportunity. The Washington Post did the job with reports of "Deep Throat" meeting with reporters in spooky underground parking lots after midnight. Little, if any, information of consequence was contained in these reports. Instead, the newspaper's reporting transferred the spooky danger of the deserted parking garages to Nixon and an aura of evil was attached to Nixon that eroded his support.
It is interesting that it is only presidents who work to reduce conflict who become targets for assassination. Reagan's anti-Soviet rhetoric was strong enough to fool the left-wing, but the military-security complex knew of Reagan's intention to end the Cold War. The CIA, formerly headed by Reagan's vice president, opposed Reagan's plan to put the pressure of an arms race on the creaking Soviet economy. The CIA argued that the centrally planned Soviet economy allowed the Kremlin to control investment and that the Communist Party could allocate whatever percentage of Soviet GDP to the military as was needed to win the arms race. In other words, the CIA argued that the US would lose the arms race if Reagan raised the stakes as a means of bringing the Soviets to negotiate the end of the Cold War. Did the CIA really believe this, or was the military/security complex trying to keep the profitable Cold War stalemate going?
Washington cannot exist without conflict. Now that the "Muslim threat" is wearing thin, Washington is stirring up a conflict with China. Washington is sticking its nose into every dispute China has with its neighbors and building up its military presence in the Asian-Pacific. As I wrote in my previous column, a China threat is being created as a long-term threat to take the place of the former Soviet threat.
Moving on to another topic, americans are told that education is the answer to unemployment. Get that university degree and live happily every after.
As RT recently reported, the truth is that more than half of recent US university graduates are unemployed or very underemployed. So much for the mantra that "education is the answer."
"Education is the answer" serves the colleges and universities who want the tuition payments. It serves the companies who make student loans. It helps the offshoring corporations disguise that they are the main cause of unemployment.
Education is not the answer when high value-added, high wage manufacturing and professional service jobs, such as software engineering, are moved offshore in order to enhance short-term profits for shareholders and multi-million dollar bonuses for CEOs, while domestic employment and purchasing power are destroyed. Unless American university graduates can emigrate to China and India, there is no one to employ them. Yet, we still hear the call to run up student loan debts beyond the ability of salaries to repay the loans.
Professional tradable service employment in the US is so scarce that the University of Florida has abolished its computer science department. As few of the graduates can find employment, the university has reallocated the department's budget to football, a paying sport.
Americans plugged into the Matrix are programmed to believe that they have correct information provided by a varied and "independent media." In fact the media is owned by 5 or 6 mega-media companies run by corporate advertising executives and Washington.
Recently, Bloomberg gave us the report that "Japan, Denmark and Switzerland are among the countries to rally this week to [IMF chief] Lagarde's call for a bigger lending capacity beyond the current $380 billion to shield the world economy against any deepening of Europe's debt turmoil."
This Bloomberg report is nonsensical. The loans are not shielding the world economy. The loans are shielding the private banks from their own mistakes at the expense of the world economy. The Bloomberg report shows how completely the Western media is involved in forcing ordinary peoples to subsidize private bankers. It could not be more clear; yet, there is no embarrassment at Bloomberg for serving as the bankers' propagandist.
Indeed, there is only honor. Serving the Matrix is where lie the rewards. Those who oppose the Matrix are the outcasts whose efforts might, as in the film, save the race of humans from the domination of evil, or else, if they lose, confine the outcasts to prosecution and death.
Across every front Americans are fed lies. The official media line is that the Japanese Fukushima nuclear threat from the earthquake and aftermath is well contained and over. However, the fact of the matter appears to be that an amazing radioactive inventory of both spent and unused fuel rods is in damaged cooling pools that could suffer collapse at any time (especially if there is another earthquake), thus releasing enormous radioactivity (reference link). This possibility presents a greater threat than the initial molten cores of the reactors themselves. Michael Chossudovsky points out that the media is yet to acknowledge the widespread contamination resulting from the Fukushima disaster, and there may be worse to come.
But who cares? Back to the Matrix and the "reality show."
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/05/04/disinformation-on-every-front/
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