and
Looking back at 2000, I am surprised that there were not "faithless electors" who would put principle before party to insure that the candidate with the most popular votes, Al Gore, would actually win the election. Although it seems logical that the person with the most votes should win, and for most offices does, for the most important elected position the winner is the person who gets the most votes in the Electoral College, an antiquated leftover from the 1700s.
I was sure in 2004. Sen. Kerry was going to defeat the incumbent, GWB. (Kerry was Swiftboated.)(I even bought a copy of the book Unfit For Command, planning to read it after Kerry's victory.)
I was sure going into 2008. The general election would be Hillary vs Rudy, with Ralph Nadar as a third candidate, perhaps with NYC Mayor Bloomberg as a fourth candidate; there was a group called Unity 08, which was said to be a Bloomberg nomination/election vehicle. I never thought a virtually unknown 1st term US Senator whose only previous government experiance was as an Illinois State Senator, would be able to defeat Hillary, whose office from 1993 to 2000 was in the White House, and had served a full term, and been re-elected, as a US Senator
So, given my track record.....here goes: McCain will win after Obama is RevWrighted. (Played continuously, "No, No, No, Not God bless America, GOD DAMN AMERICA!", with a reminder that Rev Wright was Obama's pastor for 20 years, peformed his marriage, and baptized his children.)(Comments about Obama's friends in the Weather Underground, and the Nation of Islam, plus Father Pfleger and Tony Rezko will hurt, too.) NOTE: I'm not the only one who called it wrong! John Ross, who is usually right, predicted a 1972 McGovern style rout of Obama after the Palin for VP nomination.
9-3-08: After watching Gov. Sarah Palin 's speech
at the Republican convention, I seriously think I was watching the first female
President! Not that I think McCain will die and Palin will take over. I just
think McCain will retire after one term, and Palin will have impressed people
so much that she will run in 2012 and easily defeat Hillary, who is not about
to give up just yet. Palin is by far the most impressive politician I have ever
heard. Her selection by McCain will win the election even without Rev Wright
and former Weather Underground members
Bernardine Dohrn
and Bill Ayers* dragging
Obama down.
*According to Sean Hannity on 10-30-08:
Ayers wrote a book called "Prairie Fire", which was dedicated to,
amongst others, Sirhan Sirhan, the man said to be the killer of Robert F
Kennedy.
10-2-08: The Palin-Biden VP debate may very well be remembered as the turning point of the 2008 election; Obama had been gaining in the polls after the economic mess and the failure of the original bailout plan in the House. Palin came across as at least equal to Biden with his decades in the Senate.
10-18-08(CMA): It began with the collapse of Bear Stearns, then the
bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, then the federal loan bailout to AIG. As the
economy teetered, and the Secretary of the Treasury
Hank_Paulson proposed a
700 billion+ bailout (TARP) of
bad mortgage paper, people got scared. Suddenly Obama's "change"
message sounded good, nevermind that Obama has exactly zero experiance in
"fixing the economy", or in anything else related to being CEO of the
USA. Sure, Obama is *smarter* than George W Bush, but there are a lot of people
in Congress that can say that. Personally, I think that America will regret
electing a first term Senator with no administrative experiance. (Was it Sen.
Clinton or Sen. Biden who said, during the Democrat primaries, that the
Presidency is not a place for on the job training?)
My own mild gripe with Obama is that after McCain challenged him about not
wearing a US flag lapel pin, Obama's public appearences were very heavy
on US flags. First rule of politics: do anything, say anything, promise
anything to get elected.
Will the next two years after the election be known as The Grand Triumvirate (Pelosi, Reid, and Obama)? (Is the USA about to plunge into UK/Canada style socialism? Obama DOES have redeeming virtues; he is more honest than the last two Presidents, and he will restore the Bill of Rights to it's pre-GWB status!)(More honest than GWB, "Saddam has WMD", "The USA does not torture" and WJC, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman", but I really dont believe Obama's claim that he never knew what Rev Wright was preaching. Obama is a politician, and as such has to rewrite his past history when necessary to win elections.)
Of course, I'd rather have the Libertarian Party(not really a fringe group anymore; Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian, raised a lot of money and got a lot of votes in the Republican primaries, even after Sen. McCain had the nomination clinched. Two of the main candidates for the LP nomination were a former Republican Congressman (Bob Barr), and a former Democratic US Senator(Mike Gravel):
Best line from the 2008 election, so far: "I'm not President Bush. If
you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years
ago." -McCain to Obama 10-15-08.
CMA#2: According to John Ross's
10-24-08 column, Palin thinks the Earth is less than 6,000 years old; a
religious view called
Young Earth
Creationism. (Archbishop Ussher
thought the Universe was created in 4,004 BC.) Scratch what I said about
Palin being the first female President.....too bad; Palin is a smart,
successful, self made woman, the kind I like. She did not become successful by
marrying a future President, like Hillary, or by being born to a future
President, like GWB, or (you know, maybe) Caroline Kennedy.
If Palin runs for President in 2012, I
will support her. She may be a religious oddball, but we are going to need her
after four years of Obama. (I do not think she is the "convert everyone to
my religion" type, more the "live and let live" type.)(the
libertarian case for Palin)
Note: Best (and funniest) ad of the whole 2008 election: In Alaska, there
was a convicted felon running for re-election to the US Senate. Someone ran an
ad showing a picture of the man, with the caption "Ready To Serve",
followed by prison doors closing over the man's picture. More than a week after
the election, this race is still too close to call, but it seems certain that
if the incumbent wins, he will be expelled from the Senate. (Republican Sen.
Ted Stevens did lose after all the votes were counted.)(Stevens'
conviction was vacated after the election, when the new Attorney General
Eric Holder decided to drop the charges.)
Proving that the Democrat Party has its problems, too, incumbent Congressman
"Dollar
Bill" Jefferson of New Orleans, the guy who had $90,000 (in marked
bills) in his freezer, was also defeated. On 8-5-09, Jefferson was convicted by
a jury on 11 of 16 counts.
http://www.obamacrimes.info/justthefacts.html
(Seen here: "According to Barack H. Obama's Kenyan grandmother, Barack,
Jr. was born in Mombosa, Kenya and she was present during his birth.
")This would make BHO, Jr constitutionally ineligible to be President. It
says at this site that a lawsuit has been filed with the Supreme Court to
prevent Vice President Cheney, as President of the Senate, from certifying
Obama's victory in the Electoral College.
(Snopes.com: Is
Barack Obama a natural-born citizen of the U.S.?). (The United States
Justice Foundation is still, July, 2009, trying to get a court hearing to get
Obama declared legally ineligible to be President, see
here. But in the highly unlikely
event that Obama were to be removed, Biden would become President, and the
President would still be just as leftwing. It has even been suggested, very
quietly, that Gaffe Czar Joe Biden is to Obama what Spiro Agnew was to Nixon,
someone nobody would want to become President.
(It shouldn't even matter where someone was born! As long as a person is
a real US citizen, that should be enough. (The Head Birther, Phil Berg, says
here that Obama is not a US
citizen.) I'd guess the Founding Fathers put that "natural born
citizen" line in the constitution so that some Brit couldn't sail over to
the new country and run for President. The
"Birthers" would
accept a man as President if his Mexican or Canadian mother stepped over the
border long enough to give birth in a US hospital Emergency Room, even if that
man had spent most of his life in Mexico or Canada?)
Supposedly the "birthers" did get a court hearing on 9-8-09, it says
so
here.
I haven't heard any news about Biden taking the oath of office yet!
Equal time: This article argues that John McCain would have been ineligibe, also, as he was born in the Panama Canal Zone, which was never a part of the United States.
Obama wanted to appoint:
NM Gov. Bill Richardson, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Energy, as Secretary of
Commerce.
Obama has appointed:
Bill's Wife, as Secretary of State,
Bill.s Chief of Staff, as Director of Central Intelligence,
IT'S BILL'S THIRD TERM!
Obama has also appointed a man to be Treasury Secretary (Tim Geithner), who
only pays his back taxes when he gets appointed. (People like
Irwin Schiff and
Kent Hovind(a/k/a
"Dr. Dino";
his
wife was alsp convicted) who don't pay their taxes end up in federal prison
after defying the IRS; Geithner gets a good job where the IRS is part of the
department he is head of.)
Obama had also wanted to appoint
Tom Daschle to be
Secretary of Health and Human Services. Daschle also paid his back taxes when
appointed, but later withdrew his name.
Obama's second choice for Secretary of HHS,
Kathleen Sebelius
also paid her back taxes when appointed.
Obama had also wanted to appoint
Nancy Killefer,
formerly a high Treasury Dept appointee when Bill Clinton was President, to the
newly created position of
Chief_Performance_Officer.
Killefer also had tax problems and withdrew.
Obama has also appointed over 30 "Czars",
who have great power, do not have to be confirmed by Congress, and are
answerable only to Obama. I *think* the "Czars" are roughly
equilivilent to "Asst to the President".
Gee, I wonder if Rod
Blagojevich will get a job, too, now that the Illinois Senate has fired him
from his previous job?
Post election analysis: Objectively, the most qualified person to be
President was Rudy Guiliani, twice elected Mayor of New York City. Tied for
least qualified: Hillary and Obama, neither of whom had ever run a city, or a
state, or a large federal agency. Being in the US Senate for 30 years(Biden) or
22 years(McCain) would at least have given them some famaliarity with the US
government, but only Palin had actual administrative experiance in running a
government.
Note: if you change a baby's diaper, you have "change". But soon
enough, the new diaper is as dirty as the old one. (Don't kid yourselves. The
only real change that Obama can personally deliver is to change the DNA of the
person sitting at the desk in the Oval Office. That Obama will bring
sunshine,
lollipops, and rainbows to all is right up there with the myth that
"Mussolini made
the trains run on time".)
"There's nothing in the streets
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-by
And the parting on the left
Are now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight"
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" -The Who,
"Won't get fooled again"
Obama has continued the same anti-terrorism, anti civil liberties, GWB policies he campaigned so strongly against. I agree with whoever said that people who are willing to sacrifice liberty to get security deserve neither. (Yes, I belong to the ACLU, and am a hardcore civil libertarian.) The Guantanmo Bay Indefinate Detention Without Charge Or Trial Center remains open. If it was a crime for Germany to hold people in places like Dachau without charge or trial, isn't it a crime for the US? And if it was a crime for GWB to do it, isn't it still a crime for Obama to do it? (This is an old American custom. After Pearl Harbor, President FDR had 110,000 Japanese Americans interred in "War Relocation Camps" indefinately for the sole crime of having Japanese ancestry. In 1988, the USA finally apologized and gave the surviving detainees $20,000 each.)(I *think* there is something in the Constitution about not depriving a person of freedom without "due process of law", and I don't think that a decree from FDR is "due process".) Someone, I think in the ACLU, has suggested that indefinate detention without charge or trial is a form of torture, and torture by the US government is illegal, regardless of who the President is. Gitmo still holds dangerous terrorists like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who admitted under torture that he was the brains behind 9/11, as well as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and personally beheaded Daniel Pearl. Had he not been caught, he would also have brought down the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Empire State Building, and would have killed former President Carter! (That the prisoners at Gitmo are treated much better than the prisoners at Dachau were is irrelevent. Being deprived of a basic human right without anything remotely resembling due process is not all right, even if Gitmo was a four star Hilton Hotel.)(ACLU: "On Monday(8-24-09), Attorney General Eric Holder made the long-awaited announcement of the appointment of a special prosecutor to conduct a preliminary investigation into whether federal laws were violated during the interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody.")
9-21-09: Bill O'Reilley said on his show today that Obama is continuing the practice of "rendition", where prisoners are secretly transferred to another country. I didn't believe that Obama would continue this GWB practice, so I looked it up, and it's true! Obama OK With CIA Rendition
9-28-09: Oh, Great! Obama wants to continue various aspects of GWB's so called "Patriot Act". More of that "change we can believe in"!
Give me that old time fascism,
It's good enough for me!
It was good enough for Adolf,
It was good for Benito,
It was good for Francisco,
And it's good enough for me!
Here comes some new fashioned fascism: the cybersecurity act of 2009, which would allow the President to "suspend" the Internet.. Bush and Cheney would have loved this! So will the philosophical heirs of Dr. Goebbels and Reichführer-SS Himmler! (It's S.773, introduced on April Fools Day by Sen Jay Rockefeller(co-sponsered by Sen. Olympia Snowe.) (EFF page about the cybersecurity act, which apparently gives the Secretary of Commerce power to control the flow of information.)
Louisana Gov. Bobby Jindal gave the Republican response to Obama's first address to a joint session of Congress, and was panned by much of the media. So I looked him up. I had heard of him, and heard that he was Indian American, which I misheard as "American Indian" (ie. "Native American"). He has black hair and dark skin, but his parents were from India. Jindal was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and apparently was accepted by both Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School, but went into politics instead. Jindal does not have Obama's "rock star" status or Obama's crowd pleasing oratory, but he has something much more important, BRAINS + experiance running a government. Yes, Obama is smart, but his political positions suck. Is it 2012 yet?
Obama has kept his promise to wind down the Iraq war. Unfortunately, he is
transferring the war to Afghanistan, even though the real enemy is in Pakistan.
This reminds me a lot of the quagmire of Vietnam.
(In 1968, Richard Nixon had a "secret plan" to get the US out of
Vietnam, part of the plan was the
"Vietnamization
of the War"; fourty years later, Obama ran on a promise to end the war in
Iraq; he then transferred troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, where they were to
build up the Afghan military. In 1969, US troops were coming home in caskets
from SE Asia; fourty years later, US troops are coming home in caskets from SW
Asia. Hopefully there is a helipad at the US Embassy in Kabul, like there was
in Saigon. This is "change we can believe in"?) I remember this
slogan from the late 1960s:
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS! BRING THEM HOME NOW!
4-06-09: Obama does not want to refer to what happened to
Armenians in Turkey in
WW1 as
"genocide",
because that might offend the Turks. It was "genocide" when Obama was
Candidate Obama. What's next? Don't refer to the Holocaust as genocide because
that might offend the Germans?
Back in 2007, House Speaker Pelosi stopped a
House
resolution to call it "genocide".
Armenian_Genocide
Denial
Non
use of "genocide" during the Bush administration
"How could civilized human beings do this to other civilized human
beings?"-attributed to Elsie Douglas after seeing the movie
Nazi Concentration Camps at
the (IMT, Major War Criminals)Nuremberg Trial, 1946.
(Obama did promise to call it "genocide" See
First
100 Days: Obama's Promises Broken.)
4-24-09: Obama states publically that the Armenian Genocide did happen. (I have read about the Armenian Genocide, and it was especially barbaric, in some aspects more barbaric than the Holocaust; the raw body count of Armemians was 1.5 million, compared to 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.)
4-29-09: I have got what Bill O'Reilly called "Obama fatigue"! This guy has been on television constantly since he announced his candidacy back in 2007. (According to someone on Fox News on 8-14-09, in Obama's first 206 days in office, he has only NOT been on TV 8 days.) His "press conferences" are scripted; with known, friendly questioners, and no follow up questions. I don't even listen to an Obama speech anymore. An Obama speech is basically a no intellectual content infomercial (advertising), and my response to all TV advertising is the MUTE button.
"Borrowing and spending more is not the solution to too
much borrowing and spending!"- Melissa, the owner of
PlanetaryBillOfRights.org
Melissa has also supplied this ".Bullcrap-to-English Translation Guide to
government doublespeak":
"Public Schools"=Government schools
"Redistributing the wealth"=Socialism
"Public Option"=Socialist Medicine
“Social Security”=Socialist Insecurity (AKA “The World's
Greatest Ponzi Scheme”)
"Consumers Choice"=Socialist Medicine
You can re-brand bull crap but it's still bull crap
What Will the Future Bring Under Obama?-by Ali Sina, an ex-Muslim.
If you are on a ship that is sinking, and the owner replaces the Captain, who then replaces the department heads, you are still on the same crappy ship, and it is still sinking. But you got "change"! As the ship sinks, you can scream "Yes, we can!"
7-16-09: If you like waiting in line at the DMV, you will love waiting in
line for ObamaCare. If you want something done better, just get the government
to do it! Canadians with A. money and B. life threatening medical problems come
to the USA for treatment now. Under ObamaCare, US and Canadian citizens will be
equal......both can die waiting in line. Now that's "Change We Can Believe
In". I got a t-shirt at
Conservative
Paradise(I am NOT a conservative, I'm certainly not a fan of an
emotionalist infotainer like Glenn Beck, alrtough I have enjoyed his exposures
of the President's Czars, and his
"return
of Reverend Wright" piece; I can appreciate intellectual conservatives
like William F.
Buckley, Jr. and
Fred Barnes
.) that says "1-20-13 Hope for Change". The way things are going,
Change may come sooner. Bill and Hillary made a big push for HillaryCare in
1993, got nowhere even though they controlled Congress, and were routed in the
1994 Congressional elections. That was how Newt Gingrich got to be Speaker of
the House, and eventually made possible the
impeachment
trial of Bill. In 1993, Bill actually said, in essence, that the passage of
HillaryCare was essential to the health of the economy. It wasn't. I suspect
that ObamaCare will die like HillaryCare did. To a member of Congress, who gets
paid over $150,000 a year (It's really hard work! Fly to DC on Tuesday, sit in
meetings Wednesday, fly home on Thursday), re-election is Job One; Healthcare
reform, or party loyality are distant seconds.
7-21-09: "We must pass ObamaCare now!! Hurry HURRY HURRY HURRY*HURRY*
HURRY DON'T READ
THE BILL.
Just pass it; you can think about it some other time. You will like the bill.
Trust me."
It's probably not fair to call it
ObamaCare. The 1,000+
(later 2,000+) page bill being considered in the House was not written by
Obama's staff, but by Democrat House majority staff under Speaker Pelosi.
(Obama reportedly does not want a repeat of the Clinton strategy, where the
Clintons' staff wrote the bill.) One of the main bills being considered in the
Senate was Ted Kennedy's bill, but the new main Senate bill was crafted by the
Gang of Six, and
announced by Sen. Max Baucus. Obama himself laid down broad outlines orally,
but "the devil is in the details".
Big Brother-Care
Looms Large, includes a link to a PDF(Adobe Reader) file with the text of
the 1,000+ page House bill. I assume that all of our Representatives in
Congress will spend their August vacations reading this, so they will know what
they are voting on in September! Yeah, right, LOL! If bills actually get
through both houses, the final bill out of a conference committee will probably
only marginally resemble the original bill. Remember, if the final bill really
sucks, the whole House is up for reelection in 11/10, just over a year away.
Since the US President is not elected for life, even Obama must come before the
voters in 2012.
And here it is!http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.3200:!
The full text of H.R.3200 (The 1,000+ page House bill.)
And here it is #2http://docs.house.gov/rules/health/111_ahcaa.pdf
.! The full text of the revised House bill, now HR.3962 at 1,990 pages
and dubbed PelosiCare.
(Lest anyone think I am just anti-Obama, I personally agree with the
Libertarian
Party response to Obama's 9/9/09 address to a Joint Session of Congress,
and see as the biggest logical hole in any plan to cover everyone: Where are
all the extra doctors and other health care professionals going to come from?
Wouldn't "rationed health care" be inevitable?)(Hey, I know! We could
greatly expand the definition of "Doctor" to include
"Alternative
medicine" practitioners. It's "choice"! If you want to treat
your cancer by flying to Lourdes or
Fatima or
La
Salette and hoping for a miracle, the government chould buy your plane
ticket.)(Other forms of Faith healing are
available!)
In a rare Saturday night session on 11-7-09, the House passed
HR.3962,
220 to 215 On Thursday and Friday, there was an
Emergency House Call
demonstration, organized by .Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.)!
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” — Margaret Thatcher
7-22-09: Obama talks about the "spirit of self sacrifice" that moved the servicemen buried at Arlington National Cemetary. It was nonsense when referring to the (drafted) men who died in Vietnam, and it is still nonsense today, when joining the military can be a last resort job for the unemployed. I do *not* deny that the men who fought against the Axis powers in WW2 were "keeping the USA safe", but saving S Vietnam from N Vietnam, saving S Korea from N Korea (Korean_War). or saving Kuwait (First Gulf War) and the Iraqi people (Iraq_War or 2nd Gulf War) from Saddam, is not "keeping the USA safe". And seriously, is overthrowing the old (Taliban) Afghan government and protecting the new (corrupt, election-rigging) Afghan government from the Taliban "keeping the USA safe"? (On 8-9-09, the US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice(no relation to Condoleezza Rice), says "yes" on CNN. This country, which successfully resisted a superpower, the USSR, is essential to the security of the USA? Uh-huh, just like defeating the Viet Cong was in the 1960s! Oh well, Susan Rice was a child in the 1960s; she may change her mind as more and more US troops die due to her boss' continuing GWB's war.) Bring the troops home alive, and let's have no more troops come home in caskets. Three-Five-Zero-Zero(the meaning of 3-5-0-0)......Country Joe McDonald's I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag , written for Vietnam, but still painfully appropriate today. (List_of_anti-Vietnam War songs, still brings back bad memories.)
The liberal suicide march; speculates that the 2010 election will be a rerun of the 1994 election.
8-5-09: Has someone tried to mislead you about "Health Insurance
Reform"? Let us know. Write to inform@gestapo.gov (In more primitive times, you could
only turn bad guys in to the police. Now, you can report them to someone in the
White House!)(Big Brother Barack is watching you!) Just in case someone reading
this does not recognize sarcasm, the real email address for a Thought Police
snitcher is
flag@whitehouse.gov (The Ministry of Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda has created a website to give the Truth about
"Health Insurance Reform": healthreform.gov)(Definition: If you
agree with ObamaCare, you are telling the truth; if you disagree, you are
either an insurance company shill, a misanthropic spreader of lies, or even
worse, you work for FOX cable news!)
9-16-09: (Or you could even be a RACIST!
Jimmy Carter
said so on 9-15
or 9-16. Before becoming President, Carter had been Governor of Georgia, and
his Lt Gov and predecessor as Gov was segregationist Lester Maddox, so Carter
had first hand experiance with racists.)(Bill
Cosby agrees with Carter)
On Monday, 8-17-09, it is reported the snitcher email address no longer works.
On Tuesday, there is a new reality check section on the
White House site, which does include a "contact us" link.
8-11-09: I'm starting to think that Obama really put his foot in his mouth. This whole "report fishy statements" is shockingly 1984ish. It's hard to believe that the media savvy White House staff could make such a boneheaded request. (Posters than mock flag@whitehouse.gov)
8-15-09: People who are old enough to have participated in the 1967 Summer of Love or the 1969 Woodstock Art and Music Festival will remember Senator Joseph McCarthy and will remember the House Unamerican Activities Committee(HUAC)! Let's bring back HUAC and haul misinformation spreaders before Congress and ask them, "Do you now, or have you ever, tried to mislead people about Health Insurance Reform?"
8-17-09: Other ideas: use the software used to build the Great Firewall of China to block external misinformation, and adapt porn blocking software to protect children from misinformation.
8-20-06: Sliding Support for Afghanistan War Means Obama Must Polish His Pitch "We've got to make sure that we are really focused on finishing the job in Afghanistan, but it's going to take some time." -BHO. Sounds exactly like something LBJ would have said about Vietnam in the mid-1960s. It's really scary to remember that the US involvement in Vietnam was started by an idealistic young Democrat President, JFK, sending a few military advisers to prop up the corrupt S. Vietnam government, and ended with over 47,000 US dead (US battle deaths).
The hopeless unwinability of a war in Afghanistan (Just like Vietnam!)
"Thus Obama’s dilemma: Accept a longer, bloodier war with little hope of ultimate victory, a decision that could cost him his presidency. Or order a U.S. withdrawal and accept defeat, a decision that could cost him his presidency."-Pat Buchanan, Obama at the Rubicon.
"And its five six seven
Open up the pearly gates
There ain't no time to wonder why
Whopee we're all gonna die!"
and
"You can be the one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box"
-Country Joe McDonald
Get out of Afghanastan? (covers both sides)
9-1-09: Fox News,
Why
the Obama Administration Will Implode In Weeks. Interesting; I doubt that
it will literally implode, but I do think that Obama is in over his head. Being
really smart, really good in Law School, and really popular is not the same as
being really competent. The ability to win elections does not equal the ability
to govern. Actually, if GWB had been good at governing, BHO would probably not
be in the White House today. Gees! One of the "Czars" (the "Green Jobs
Czar") turned out to be one of
"the government
knew about 9/11 in advance." guys, who would deny actually believing
that stuff. Gees #2! Obama has named a man to be
"Regulatory
Czar", Cass
Sunstein, who thinks that animals should be able to sue in court. Gees#3!
The so-called
"Diversity
Czar", Mark
Lloyd has advocated a new form of affirmative action: white media
executives should step down to make room for minorities. Gees#4!
The
safe school Czar praised NAMBLA figure
Harry Hay. I can see why
Obama would not want to have these Czars confirmed by the Senate. The
distinguished Senators might start to question the judgement of the man
appointing these Czars.(Helpful hint: before naming Czars, have some staff
member do a search on the name to see if anything *strange* pops up. There must
be someone in the White House with Internet access that knows how to use
Yahoo.) YIKES! The White House Communications Director
Anita Dunn has Mao
Tse-tung as one of her favorite political philosophers. Good old
Chairman Mao is estimated
as being responsible for the deaths of
30 to 58 million
people. (Chairman Mao is estimated to be #2 in 20th century mass murderers,
behind Stalin but ahead of Hitler.)Where does Obama find these people?
"In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of
Incompetence." -The Peter Principle
9-14-09: LOL! There used to be a "Backwards Bush" site, counting down the exact time until GWB's term ended. Now, Sean Hannity, at his site, has a countdown clock, days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the 2012 election! (I'm no big Hannity fan. I thought his show was much better when it was "Hannity and Colmes". Colmes is smarter than Hannity, but unfortunately raw IQ does not automatically generate either common sense or valid philosophical views.)
Personal note: I have been following US national politics since the 1960 Richard Nixon vs John F Kennedy presidential election; I still have my flashy "Experiance Counts Vote Nixon-Lodge" button. 1960 was my first exposure to "Being handsome and articulate with a pretty wife and two cute kids trumps actual experiance," (Nixon was VP from 1952 to 1960) I have never seen such a popular person alienate so many so quickly.(After less than a year in office there is a big impeach obama store(I'm sure they know there are not the votes in the House to impeach, or the votes in the Senate to convict.) And it's not necause Obama is black. (Another personal note: I have always wondered if the authors of the lyrics in Colored Spade in the musical "Hair" thought they would live to see one of the things a black man can be called is "President of the United States".)The days of Jim Crow are dead and buried; the USA really is a post racial society. The differences between the "races" are mostly cultural, not genetic.
Hope for the future:All the President's Czars; argues that if the Executive Branch is encrusted with/ immobilized by Czars and turf warfare, maybe Obama will be unable to implement "change"!
9-25-09: And now we have elementary school children singing "The Barack Obama Song"!( lyrics)(lyrics to both Obama Praise songs}Get them while they're young!
The Tea_Party_protests on 4/15(Tax Day), 7/4(Independence Day), and 9/12 in Washington, DC(the final stop on the Tea Party Express), show that the USA has not turned to the Left, it has just elected a popular leftist Democrat as a response to an unpopular Republican.(Michelle Malkin on the crowd size on 9/12....2 million?)(Tea Party Nation is sponsoring a One Year Notice Party on 11-7-09..Just one year until our "Representatives" in Congress get their pink slips!)
10-4-09: The economy continues to falter. Unfortunately for Obama, the "It's all Bush's fault! Things were much worse than I realized when I took office" and "it would be much worse without my wonderful policies" excuses only work for awhile. Talk of a second stimulus bill is absurd when only about 40% of the first stimulus bill has been spent (40% according to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.) The first stimulus bill was rushed through in an "emergency measure to prevent catastrophe/crisis" atmosphere. Greenspan also thinks the jobless rate will go above 10%. What was that percentage that Obama said would not be exceeded if the stimulus passed? 8%?
11-03-09: Voters in Virginia and New Jersey reject Obama approved and campaigned-for candidates for Governor. Many Democrat House members in marginal districts start making plans for new employment after the 11/2010 election. Seeing her Speakership in jeopardy, Pelosi spins: "We did win a seat in Congress when the Republican withdrew and endorsed the Democrat. It was a Victory! We win!"
Not to worry! Rumors that the 22nd Amendment will be repealed so that Obama can run for re-election indefinately are just rumors: See snopes.com Bill to Repeal the 22nd Amendment The USA is not like.Venezuela, where a strongman can rule by decree and get himself exempted from term limits by a vote of the people. Amending the US Constitution is an elaborate process, requiring a 2/3 vote in both House and Senate, and ratification by the state legislatures of 3/4 of the States.
Postscript: One really good thing that came out of the 2008 election: After seeing now Secretary of State Clinton melt down publically when asked what her husband thought, imagine a President Hillary Clinton responding to this from an important foreign Head of Government: "When your husband was President, he told us that......" Obama probably doesn't like everything about being President, but he doesn't "lose it" on camera.
Bill for First Dude 2012!..... Here is the scenerio: Obama listens to his
Generals just like LBJ did.... US gets bogged down in land war in SW Asia
....More and more soldiers come home in body bags.... Obama's popularity
nosedives like LBJ's did.... Hillary decides to be the Eugene McCarthy/Bobby
Kennedy of 2012.... Hillary gets revenge on Bill by putting him in the First
Lady's office in the East Wing.
Why this is plausible: Obama was born in 1961; was 2 years old when John F
Kennedy was shot and LBJ became President, and has no personal knowledge of LBJ
and the traumatic Vietnam disaster, so, having no military experiance whatever,
he listens to the Generals, who assure him that victory is possible if the US
just shovels enough bodies over to Afghanistan. At least Obama has reversed the
GWB policy of returning dead soldiers very quietly. To be fair, I doubt
seriously that a President Hillary Clinton would do in Afghanistan what LBJ did
in Vietnam.
.The June-?, 2009 Iran Uprising
Times and dates below are all Far West USA(Pacific Time Zone); same as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the rest of California.(According to the world clock, when it is just after midnight in LA, it is just before noon in Tehran, which is 11.5 hours ahead of LA.)
6-20-09: The demonstrations in Tehran, Iran: When I heard about the Basij, I thought, "it's a reincarnation of the Sturmabteilung (SA)". The SA was uniformed NSDAP(Nazi Party) quasi-military "Brownshirts" goons who brawled with opponents prior to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933. The (plainclothes) Basij militia, along with the (uniformed) "security forces" and "riot police" provide muscle to enforce the policies of the Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Khamenei)(not to be confused with the previous Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini). In Iran, the Supreme Leader has the real power; the President of Iran does not have the authority that the President of the United States does. Hitler's title of Führer tranlates into "Leader" in English. ("Der Führer"="The Leader") Dealing with Iran will be a big test of Obama's abilty to be President. (The Basij has been blamed for the shooting death of Neda, whose fate was captured on video(links to the video of Neda's death; not for the squeamish), posted online, and broadcast on television by CNN, preceded by a "parental warning"; CNN has also broadcast a video of the former Crown Prince (Reza Pahlavi), the son of the former Shah, breaking down emotionally on camera when mentioning Neda.)(During the Vietnam War, a man named Nick Ut got a Pulitzer prize for his photo of Kim Phuc; if the person who took the Neda video can be identified, that person deserves a Pulitzer, too.)
6-22-09AM: Obama does not want to publically support the demonstraters in
Tehran. Instead, he holds another of those ridiculous photo op signing
ceremonies. You hold the most important office in the world, people are dying
in the streets of Tehran, and you are already running for reelection? What
would Ronald Reagen do if he were President now? He didn't hesitate to openly
oppose a nuclear armed Soviet Union, which was a far greater threat to the USA
than some fascist thugs in Iran.
I looked it up; in my dictionary, Webster's, it is "Teheran", the
capital of Iran, but in common usage it is "Tehran".
6-22-09PM: In Iran, there is a body called the Assembly of Experts, which according to CNN, has the authority to appoint and remove the Supreme Leader. In Italy, there was a body called the Fascist Grand Council, which could remove, and did remove, "Il Duce" ("The Leader" in English) Mussolini (as leader of the Fascist Party, the Chief of State, the King, then removed him as Prime Minister) in 1943. With Mussolini out, the entire Fascist structure collapsed. Maybe, just maybe........... (Whether the primary opposition leader, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was also approved by the Guardian Council to run for President of Iran, would be radically different is unknown; it would be hard to be worse. Fox News reports that Mousavi has changed his views a lot since the election, which he thinks was rigged.)
6-23-09: Obama finally speaks out. He is not ready to do a "Mr
Gorbachov, tear down this wall." yet, but it will come that if there are
more Neda moments, or a
Tiananmen
Square. Obama's heart is with the dissidents; Candidate Obama would have
condemned the Iranian government as soon as he realized the
Iranian
presidential election of 2009 was fixed. (pollster.com
analyses of fraud in Iran) Obama's desire to negotiate with the Iranian
leadership is as naive as pre-WW2 Britrish Prime Minister
Neville
Chamberlain's negotiation with Hitler, and Chamberlain's belief that the
Munich Agreement meant "peace in our time".
The technical savvy of the dissidents is remarkable. Taking videos with a
cellphone is one thing....knowing how to upload them to YouTube after a violent
incident is another.
6-24-09AM: It stongly suggests in 2009 Iranian election protests that the removal of the Supreme Leader is a real possibility. The Assembly of Experts is Muslim clerics, not wild eyed secular people who want to overthow the Islamic Republic.
6-24-09PM: The freedom loving Iranian government cracks down. Details very
sketchy, as most foreign press has been expelled, and government goons are
seizing cellphones. (Mousavi's Twitter
page; a lot of the news about him, like "If I am arrested, call a
general strike", and "I am ready for martyrdom" is from this
page.) Mousavi has not been seen in days.
Iranians are Persians; Persian men are said to be very respectful of women;
perhaps the very public fate of Neda will move the Assembly of Experts to take
action.
6-25-09: Michael Jackson dies in Los Angeles; news coverage of events in Iran grinds to a halt. Sorry, Iranians, but in the USA, the death of a pop megastar is apparently more newsworthy than the Iranian Uprising.
6-27-09: In between stories about Michael Jackson's life, death, children, estate, et cetera, et cetera, Fox News reports that the Security Police have crushed (open) dissent in Iran.
Note: The chairman of the Assembly of Experts is former President, Ayatollah
Rafsanjani, who is said
to be a Mousavi supporter; Rafsanjani said, about post-election Iran:
"I
don't think that any wakened consciousness would be satisfied with the
resulting situation."
(It says
here
that Supreme Leader Khamenei has cancer and was told in 2006 that he would not
live much longer, and it says that Rafsanjani would be a prime candidate to be
the next Supreme Leader.)
7-5-09: CNN: Iranian clerics dispute election results
7-9-09 AM: 10 years after the
1999
street protests, and 2 weeks after the crushing of open dissent,
Iranians
return to the streets in Tehran.
TIME.com,
Detailed description of the 7-9-09 demonstration
7-17-09: Fox News, Mousavi attends Friday Prayers, where Rafsanjani speaks against government policies
7-17-09: CNN, Rafsanjani calls for release of Iran's post election prisoners, paints an even more defiant view of his talk at Friday Prayers.
7-25-09 AM: A worldwide "Global Day of Action" is today in these cities. This will give non-Iranians a chance to demonstrate publically. Luckily, in the USA and other non-theocratic countries, a person can do this without fear of being arrested or shot. (This group, along with Where Is My Vote-NY, plans another demonstration Sept 23 and 24 in NYC when the man the Supreme Leader designated "President of Iran" will be there for a UN General Assembly meeting.)
7-25-09 PM: CNN, Global protests staged over post-election crackdown in Iran.
7-28-09: Fox News: Iran Releases 140 Prisoners, Closes Prison. At last! Here Mousavi says that abuses now are worse than under the Shah.
7-29-09: TIME.com, Tehran Braces for Another Day of Street Battles. July 30 will be 40 days since the death of Neda. It was a succession of 40 day memorial demonstrations that brought down the Shah in 1979.
7-30-09: More demonstrations in Tehran, including at Neda's grave. The 40
day period is an aspect of Shia Islam; 40 days is the
period of mourning.
" "Was the regime of the shah able to resist the wave of
dissatisfaction by using terror, oppression, censorship, torture, forced
confessions and lying propaganda?" a top cleric Ayatollah Ali Hossein
Montazeri said
in a statement on Wednesday" -seen in
this Fox News
story about the 7-30 demonstrations.
7-31-09: TIME.com, A Brief Euphoria in Tehran: 'We Can Win This' A detailed account of the 7-30 demostrations.
8-1-09: CNN, Trials of Iran election protesters under way Supreme Leader Khamenei did pardon literally thousands of prisoners, however.
8-3-09: Fox News, Wife: Iran Reform Politician's Televised Confessions Were Forced Former VP Mohammad Abtahi "admits" to plotting to forment unrest.
8-4-09: Human Rights Watch: Iran: Show Trial Exposes Arbitrary Detention
8-17-09: Fox News, Iran Chief Judge Hints at Trials for Prison Abuse
8-22-09: CNN, Iran confronts rape, torture allegations Rape of women and men in prison?Mehdi Karrubi, one of the 1979 revolutionaries, who still looks up to the late Supreme Leader Khomeini, writes to Rafsanjani about decidedly Un-Islamic actions. (Karrubi thought that the 2005 Presidential election, when Ahmadinejad was first elected, was fixed.)
8-31-09: CNN, Iran prisoner beaten to death, coroner says "More than 100 Iranians arrested in the crackdown are going through mass trials this month. Top military officials have called for faster prosecutions and demanded "swift retribution" for post-election detainees, Iranian media have reported." The phrase "swift retribution" sounds like in the Iranian "justice" system, an arrested person is presumed guilty until proven guilty in a show trial.
FOX News - Iran content center
Remember Neda, a Wiki site.
http://nedairan.com/(A total of 12 pages about Neda, the demonstrations, even the photo ID of a man said to be the shooter, lots of pictures, videos, poems, and articles; literally hours worth of stuff.)(Seeing the original Neda video on CNN in June was a shocker to me. Although I had seen the dead body of a woman I was living with and who died in her sleep, I had never literally watched someone collapse and die bleeding. I will never forget it.)
Human Rights in Iran, includes a very long list of people executed/killed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and notes that after the overthrow of the Shah, judges who were law school graduates were replaced with seminary graduates.
The Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Iran, in English, but there are links to German and Farsi translations; anyone who thinks that women are not second class citizens in Iran should see this.
Advancing Freedom in Iran, shows the hopelessness of Change in Iran.
Where Is My Vote flickr page, has over 1,000 images collected worldwide.
MSNBC: Lives of women in
Iran, says that under Iranian law a woman is only worth half* a man, but
notes that in Saudi Arabia (and other Arab countries), it is even worse, as
women are not even allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. I did notice that Neda was
wearing trousers (blue jeans?) and western style clothing. Might they have shot
her for that?
In Sudan, a
woman can get 40 lashes for wearing trousers.
*that is even less than in the original
US
constutution(Article 1, Section 2), where slaves (black people, mostly)
were worth three fifths of a free person (white people, mostly) for determining
representation in the House of Representatives.
FOX News: Iranian Government Says Neda Soltan's Murder Was 'Staged'. Staged? The protesters or some nasty Western agents killed Neda to destabilize the freedom loving Iranian government? Yeah, Sure! Is telling lies not a sin in Islam? Is it also true that after hand counting over 38 million paper ballots in two hours, the incumbent President (Ahmadinejad) can be declared winner by a landslide? (38 million ballots counted by hand in 120 minutes is about 316,667 counted every minute.)
FOX News: Iran Official Blames Foreign Countries for Protester Deaths! Yes, it was those nasty Western countries, especially the UK, that in some unexplained way caused the deaths of 20 protesters, according to Iran's Foreign Minister.The Iranian ambassador to Mexico says the CIA shot Neda.
There is a long (98 tweets) Twitter stream called IsNedaVideoFake that began June 21. I doubt it, unless maybe some monarchists and former SAVAK agents wanted to unify the opposition in order to topple the clerics. But wait, since the clerical establishment approved all the candidates for President, and since one can never predict the exact outcome of regime change, it seems kind of risky to fake something that happened on a public street in front of witnesses. Maybe it was those nasty Western agents in another effort to destabilize the freedom loving Iranian government!
Back in the good old days, when an oppressive government shot it's own
citizens, all they had to do was supress the press and nobody would ever know.
The song Watching
TV is about the effect of TV and the Internet. Shoot a Neda, and
"the whole
world is watching". The fascists are reduced to impotent "We
didn't shoot her! It was some guy from England" nonsense. During the Third
Reich, the government was able (secretly) to kill millions of people in
extermination camps. That will never happen again.* That "old time
fascism" is dead.
Why
Twitter could subvert government censorship in Iran when other Web 2.0 services
could not
*At least not with conventional means. A rouge country armed with an Atomic
bomb could kill millions of people publically; people who say
"Israel
should be wiped off the map."and "Zionists Are the True
Manifestation of Satan"(Text of
Ahmadinejad speech regarding Palestine), need to be taken seriously,
especially from someone like Ahmadinejad, who believes that
the return of the
12th Imam (and the end of the world) is imminent. The 12th Imam is the
Mahdi. As part of this, Jesus
is supposed to return after the 12th Imam. If this happens, people like
Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are going
to be extremely disappointed. They expect to be raptured into
Heaven when Jesus returns.
9-18-09: Does Iran have "the bomb" now?, and what will Isreal do about it? I strongly suspect that Isreali Intelligence knows, and will tell Obama, just like they knew Saddam had no WMD, and *probably* told GWB. Think about it: Isreal is full of people whose relatives were killed by another hater of Jews, and the most public face in Iran says it didn't even happen. Preemptive first strike time?
9-20-09: Remember MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) during the Cold War between the USA and the USSR? It says here that MAD is Isreal's policy if attacked by Iran. (Unfortunately, the Iranian leadership would probably welcome this....it would make them martyrs and ensure their immediate admission into Paradise.) One (maybe) positive note: the actual Commander-In-Chief in Iran is the Supreme Leader, not President Ahmidinejad. There is a website United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI). A "new large scale war will end with the destruction of human culture and civilization. Nothing can prevent unconfined engineering and science from completing the work of destroying human beings which it has begun in so dreadful a way in this war.” -Albert Speer, former German Minister of Armaments and War Production, at the Nuremburg Trial(IMT) of Major War Criminals in 1946.
11-4,5-09: CNN, Iranians clash with police on hostage crisis anniversary 30 years after Iranian revolutionaries seized the US Embassy in Tehran, dissidents return to the streets.
Above image stated to be public domain at, and copied from www.peacesymbol.org
Orig written 6-24-08, rev 11-08-09