Desperate for Democracy

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker renews jabs; Democrats end talk about negotiating… click for link.

We Did It My Way

Let’s not lose sight of how we find ourselves in the pickle that we’re in at the moment…Dick and W are trying very hard to rehabilitate the record of service while we continue to reap the rewards of their leadership.

What Conservatives Really Want
by George Lakoff   (Truthout Op Ed)                                                                                             The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women’s rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting and on and on.
Budget deficits are a ruse, as we’ve seen in Wisconsin, where the Governor turned a surplus into a deficit by providing corporate tax breaks, and then used the deficit as a ploy to break the unions, not just in Wisconsin, but seeking to be the first domino in a nationwide conservative movement. Deficits can be addressed by raising revenue, plugging tax loopholes, putting people to work and developing the economy long-term in all the ways the president has discussed. But deficits are not what really matter to conservatives.                                                                                         Go here to read the rest of this excellent piece.

JUST BLAME IT ON THE BLACK GUY

Check for daily posts until Election Day!

It’s not difficult to observe that there is some pretty heavy disappointment in the current state of the U.S. and in the direction that we are heading. The republicans and tea-partiers point fingers and attempt to shift blame to the Obama administra tion for the shape we’re in, while pretending it wasn’t them or their backers that got us where we are today. Is our collective memory that short? Perhaps we’ll find out on election day…

Who Discovered America?

October 12 1492…a fantastic voyage that become historical fantasy is comemorated by millions of unquestioning American’s across the land. Google: Piri Reis Map for an interesting story.

Tea Party Gothic

Drowning in the Gulf

Last week David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, pointed out to Barak Obama that BP shouldn’t be singled out for penalty because, basically they really only took advantage of existing laws and a climate of Let the Dollar Dictate how business is done. Yep, the Bush adminstration had a long time to weaken and eliminate industry and business safeguards meant to protect the public and the planet. You’ll remember that the Minerals Management Service was one of those agencies that during the Bush years was staffed by “friends of the industry” and later exposed as being a little too cozy with those it was supposed to “manage”. (For an update on the MMS scandal see here http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2010/04/mms-scandal-where-are-they-now-deepwater-horizon-edition.html )

 The Bush Boys set us up, and now those who supported them are pointing fingers at Obama. But the decision to employ the dispersants that BP used in order to play down financial responsibility is another matter entirely, and one that overshadows the “spill” itself. We supposedly went to war in Iraq over “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. What has been done to life in the gulf area?  http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/20/epa_whistleblower_accuses_agency_of_covering

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/07/21/epa-lies-bp-gulf-oil-spill-water-samples-exposed/

The  poster above was created a couple of years ago… the situation at hand makes it far more relevant than I could ever have imagined at the time.    “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana

Beyond Psychotic

  We live in a country where corporations have gained so much power that they can do what they wish. (Check out: http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/ ). Equating  “national security” to allowing oil corporations only concerned with their own profits to harvest and sell back to us our resources is bizarre, to say the least.

Here’s a great article by Riki Ott about the consequences and toxicity of the BP gulp spill cleanup and how that compares to the Alaskan Exxon disaster of 1989: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/at-what-cost-bp-spill-res_b_578784.html