Lies and the lying liars who tell them

I’ve decided I’m not going to listen to the president’s sales pitch for yet another war with a Muslim country that poses no threat to us after hearing his secretary of state angrily lie, “We are not talking about going to war!”

If this administration is going to deem cyber attacks an act of war and then declare that cruise missile strikes are not, it’s not worthy of trust.

Syria bombing: so urgent, we can't upset Congressional holiday

The Obama administration's position on the situation in Syria can be summed up as follows: it's an *URGENT* moral imperative that we bomb Syria in order to (insert one of: punish Assad/protect civilians/send a message/keep our word/effectuate regime change). That's why it's going to wait a week and a half until Congress gets around to reconvening rather than bother them on their long holiday weekend.

Government criminalizes those who shine light on its crimes

In America, when the government commits crimes, it’s the people who reveal those crimes who are treated as criminals.

Only days after President Obama assured us that the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program was in compliance with the law, The Washington Post has revealed that the program is actually a serial law-breaker.

Thanks to leaks provided by Edward Snowden, the paper reported that, according to the NSA’s own audit, the agency violated thelaw ‘thousands of times’ in the 12 month period of 2011-12.The NSA chief waved this off as nothing more than mere oversights. Do you think Snowden could get away with the same argument?

The head of the special secret court charged with oversight of the NSA’s activities has conceded that his ability to provide proper oversight isquite limited.

The statecan violate the law repeatedly and with complete impunity, but it’s Snowden who is the most wanted man in the world for publicizing these crimes.

This is yet another piece of evidence that, contrary to liberal self-delusion, the Obama administration is just as criminal as its predecessor.

Update: Looks like the UK government follows the same path. The Huffington Post reports that the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald was detained at London's Heathrow Airport under the country's Terrorism Act. Greenwald has been a high-profile critic of the UK's and US' attacks on civil liberties and has been instrumental in expose their abuses.

Majority oppose Obamacare... but not in the way you probably think

A CNN poll reports that 54% of Americans oppose Obamacare. But the dynamic is not as simplistic as the “tea party” or Obama partisans would have you believe. 

It reports only 35% of Americans think Obamacare is ‘too liberal.'

Nearly 1/3 of all opposition to Obamacare is by those who, like myself, think it is ‘not liberal enough.’

This reality probably isn't something you've ever heard in the mainstream media's narrative.

Obama is a terrorist president? Liberals don't care either way.

NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday ran an interview with Gregory Johnsen, author of a book about the US bombing campaign in Yemen and the way its massively undermined America's national security. The author points out that when the bombing campaign began, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula counted only 200 members; now it's many times higher. This is because all the 'collateral damage' caused by the bombings has created a massive amount of resentment and thus new recruits for the armed organization.

In Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald highlights a despicable practice of the Obama administration. It not only does 'regular' bombings of suspected terrorists but it also specifically targets funerals and those who've come to the aid of victims in earlier bombings. Greenwald points out that this is a signature tactic of Hamas and other groups designated 'terrorist' by the very same US government.

It really shows how tribal and devoid of principle American *voters* have become; we can't blame it all on politicians. If the Nobel Peace Prize winner had done this as a member of the conservative tribe, liberals (or what passes for them in this country) would have taken to the streets in indignant outrage demanding that this abominable president be impeached and tried for war crimes. And rightly so.

But because he did so as a member of their tribe, there is a deafening silence amongst so-called liberals while they entertain themselves mocking whichever irrelevant figure happens to be designated the right-wing buffoon of the week.

Pay no attention to the main behind the curtain

New York public radio reports that hours after speaking out in favor of campaign finance reform, NY Gov. Cuomo attended a $20,000 a plate fundraiser. It's well-known that he is joined at the hip with the big business lobbying group The Committee to Save New York. This might why Cuomo is doing a lot of talking on campaign finance reform, but zero acting... sorta like his fellow Wizard of Oz Pres. Obama and Citizens United. The pair is counting on liberals paying more attention to their words than their actions, which is usually a good bet.

Obamacare: like solving hunger by mandating everyone eat three meals a day

Today, the US Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA), often called by critics ‘Obamacare.’

The simplistic dichotomy peddled by the mainstream media is that if you oppose Republicans/The Tea Party, you support Obamacare. If you oppose Democrats/Pres. Obama, you oppose Obamacare. Everything’s neat, simple and tidy. Anything that varies from that easy narrative is pretty much ignored. Frankly, MSM journalists should have read some of the discussions my friends and I participated in today. A progressive hating on the ACA, a libertarian praising it... the nuance would make their heads explode.

So here I am a progressive who is disappointed that the ACA is still the law of the land.

Obamacare is akin to solving the problem of hunger by mandating everyone eat three meals a day.

In its decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that health insurance (ACA has nothing to do with health care) is the only private commodity that all Americans are required by law to purchase as a condition of citizenship, as a condition of being.

The health insurance industry is surely sending a huge thank you to the corporate Supreme Court, for this greatly expanded and government-mandated (under penalty of fines) pool of buyers for their racket.

This is a huge step backwards for real health care reform. Liberals, who know in their brains that Medicare for All (single payer) is the real solution to the problem of access to affordable health care, will be neutered for at least the next 20 years. They think Obamacare is just fine. People who think the situation is just fine don’t agitate for something better, especially when it’s completely different.

The ACA also pre-empts further efforts real reform because it gives the private health insurance industry even more of an incentive to preserve the status quo at any cost.

This is what passes for ‘choice’ in America. Mitt Romney and the Republicans are running against a health insurance scheme he inspired. Obama and Democrats are defending a health insurance scheme their hated opponent inspired. This pathetic state of affairs illustrates so perfectly why America needs real multipartyism.

Obama finishing what Bush started: a 'historic assault on American liberty'

This New Year's, with conveniently little fanfare, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. The NDAA would allow the president to indefinitely detain American citizens arrested on American soil. This act by our Democratic president was described by the UK Guardian as a 'historic assault on American liberty'.

This is not only a blatant violation of the 4th Amendment but an affront to the most basic value of a free society: the right to not be imprisoned without charge. The right to due process is one of the oldest recognized rights in western civilization, dating back to the 13th century Magna Carta.

It's a good thing we have a Democratic president and Democratic senate protecting Americans from the abominable assaults on civil liberties perpetrated by the much demonized Republicans. At least that's what the Democratic scaremongers would have you believe.

Thanks a lot you donkeys!

Obama's illegal war in Libya

Here are a couple of articles regarding Pres. Obama's illegal war in Libya...

-Obama rejects top lawyers' legal views on Libya (that the war required Congressional approval): Salon.com

-Obama is bringing America closer to the imperial presidency than Bush ever did: Foreign Policy.

Obama's illegal war

Even the establishment magazine Foreign Policy ran a piece highlighting the illegality of Pres. Obama's war against Libya.

Update: Obama's spokesman offered a defense of the imperial presidency that would have made Karl Rove blush (if such a thing were possible). Liberals would not doubt have burned him in effigy were his name George W. Bush. Instead, the silence of liberals who once patted themselves on the back for being “anti-war” is deafening.

I saw somewhere a Q&A on the War Powers Act and I was going to forward it to Obama and to Congress, but apparently there are actually a few lawmakers who are familiar with the law. 10 of them filed suit against the president and secretary of war for violations of the act.

The deceit of a warmonger

Since liberals rabidly denounced Bush's false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you'd think they'd at least notice Obama's false claims that our intervention in Libya is only to provide humanitarian relief, not to take sides in a civil war. But I guess you get a free pass to warmonger if you have a (D) after your name or have a Nobel Peace Prize on your resume.

Too bad liberals are more likely to get their panties in a twist about the inane rantings of trivial people like Donald Trump or Sarah Palin than anything that actually matters. And they are mystified why the regressive conservative agenda is advancing so fast.

Obama (secretly) deepens US involvement in Libyan civil war

According to Reuters, Pres. Obama has signed a ‘secret order’ authorizing covert US support for the rebels in Libya.

Nice move by the man who promised the most transparent administration in American history. So he breaks his promise on transparency (yet again) but his people aren't even competent enough to keep it secret.

Then again, this was also the same man who said the US attacks in Libya were solely to impose a no-fly zone and protect civilians and implement the UN mandate, not to take sides in the Libyan civil war.

Apparently, he'll say whatever he thinks will make neutered liberals feel warm and fuzzy.

Fortunately, Rep. Dennis Kucinich is not one of those. He asked why the president had time to consult with the international community before launching attacks on Libya but not the US Congress.

Incidentally, the folly of liberals supporting humanitarian interventionism (as I once did) is that it’s based on the premise that militaries can be primarily governed by humanitarian interests. It’s not their raison d’etre nor can it ever be.

Corporate media hides Obama envoy’s ties to Mubarak regime

The Independent had a revealing article on Pres. Obama’s envoy to Cairo, who came out strongly in favor of Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak remaining in power despite a popular revolt against his autocracy. The British paper pointed out that the retired diplomat, Frank Wisner, works for a New York and Washington law firm which works with none other than the Mubarak regime, the Egyptian military and some of the country’s leading oligarchs.

The paper added that The New York Times ran a glowing profile of Mr Wisner in its pages two weeks ago – but mysteriously did not mention his ties to Egypt.

It’s worth noting that when this sort of thing happened during the Bush regime, liberals bayed for blood...

An –ism is bankrupting this country, but it’s not socialism

The theory behind socialism is the redistribution of wealth to make society more economically equal. Even critics of socialism cite this as its main flaw (or at least the means required to achieve this goal). And yet income inequality, already high in this country, is surging even faster.

It just goes to show that people calling President Obama a ‘socialist’ haven’t the slightest clue what the term signifies and merely use it as a generic insult devoid of any meaning.

His policies and results are nothing like what socialists actually advocate. Did Marx ever advocate taking money from the working class and giving it to banks, as TARP did?

Let's get serious, please.

And speaking of cluelessness, let’s talk about the people who wave their arms hysterically and claim that things like foreign aid for poor countries is taking food out of the mouths of America’s poor. This graphic and its numbers intrigued me.

What it shows is that combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (not including the huge amounts of other military spending) cost 37.4% more than what is spent on arts funding, Amtrak, public housing, Head Start, the EPA, NASA, Pell Grants, foreign aid and national parks COMBINED.

People are right that an –ism is bankrupting this country, but they have the wrong one. It’s not socialism. It’s militarism.

"We Have Talked The Problem To Death" (guest essay)

Editor's note: During the current health care debate, Canada's national health insurance program known as medicare has come under attack from opponents of real reform. The program provides health insurance to all Canadians and does so quite a bit less expensively per capita than our own system. Quite a bit of misinformation and outright lies have been told about the Canadian medicare system. A local businessman, who actually lived in Canada and knows the system first hand, shares his thoughts about how the Canadian system really works.


"We Have Talked The Problem To Death"
by Matt Funiciello

Regarding health insurance reform, Barack Obama was quoted today as saying, "We have talked this problem to death." It's enough to make a reasonably-informed, active citizen run screaming into the woods.

As someone without health insurance, as someone who spent more than a dozen school years living in Canada with its fantastic health care system, and as a small business owner tasked with providing HMO coverage for my fellow employees, I am very upset at this latest betrayal by the Democratic Party and its leadership. If I was a Democrat or if I had voted for Obama, I would be absolutely enraged! He is touting mandatory, overpriced heath insurance in place of meaningful, universal health care reform.

The folks who run the faux-left corporate lobby group known as the Democratic Party are now responsible for all kinds of terrible policies, both foreign and domestic and they simply can't blame Bush anymore. For Obama to now pretend that he and his party care about the 100 million Americans who lack appropriate access to health care transcends the corrupt and enters the realm of the criminal. Lack of access health care kills 22,000 people in this country every year. That’s seven and a half 9/11s! Think about that. Let that sink in for a moment.

I have written about the answer to this problem frequently. I have spoken at rallies in support of what I know to be the right answer. I have supported political candidates who support that answer and would use it to save 22,000 American lives every single year (along with barrels of money).

The "answer" I am referring to is Single-Payer Health Care (Improved Medicare For All - H.R. 676). Every American would be completely covered and it would actually cost less than we are already spending for unconscionably bad, non-universal, heath insurance. There are currently 50 million Americans totally without health insurance but there are also 40-50 million more who are considered "undercovered." Our profit-driven, criminal, health care system is currently ranked 38th in the world.

Canada has a single-payer system and they don’t have any cases of people losing their homes due to medical bills... because there are no medical bills. Progressive taxation pays all the costs.

Canadians don’t build two hospitals ten miles apart from each other in small towns and then wonder why their health care costs are so high. They build and support one hospital and figure out how to most effectively transport patients to said hospital. It' a system based entirely on patient care and efficiency, not on profit.

Canadians live THREE YEARS longer than we do! If their system is so damned terrible (as Fox TV and the NY Times tell us on an almost daily basis), how is it possible that they are healthier than we are? How could their infant mortality rate be almost half what ours is?

In Canada, no one waits 3 hours to have a broken arm looked at nor do they wait ridiculously long periods for necessary surgeries. The insurance companies and the corporate media are LYING TO US. They are LIARS! It's really just that simple. They are keeping as much as 35 cents of every single one of your health care dollars for themselves. If profit margins are a corporation's sole motivation, 35% of the 2 TRILLION dollars spent annually on health care would be a fairly compelling reason to lie, wouldn't it?

There is no profit in Canadian health care. This means that while doctors and nurses make a good living there, they are, by and large, people truly motivated to help their patients, first and foremost. Although their are many doctors who play golf in Canada, I would hazard a guess that very few Canadian doctors go into medicine specifically to support their golf habit. I actually know doctors here for whom golf is the center of their existence rather than the healing arts.

Collectively, Americans spend about $7900 per person per year on health care (private insurance, private bills, Medicare and other subsidized programs). Eliminating all that redundancy and removing profit from the equation allows Canadians to save about $2300 per person while covering EVERY single Canadian. Again, our system leaves about 100 million people in fear that if something goes wrong with a family member's health, they may go bankrupt (and they should be scared because it happens every single day and often to people who think they're more than adequately covered).

I know the popular mythology, oft-repeated, is that Slick Willy (Bill Clinton) and his wife, Hillary, tried "really, really, really hard" to get us real health care back in 1994 but we "just weren’t ready for it as a country."

We really need to stop supporting this kind of nonsensical propaganda. If Bill Clinton had really wanted to pass a national health care plan, he would have done exactly that. He had no more excuse then than Obama has now. To so clearly ignore what a majority of Americans so clearly want is, again, for lack of a better word, criminal.

Clinton had a Democratic congress and the American people behind him and instead of championing the very issue that most likely got him elected, he withdrew from it entirely and left his wife, who had never held a political office, to "fight" for this much-needed change all by her lonesome.

Mrs. Clinton got some great television exposure, playing the role perfectly of proud defender of the people and gaining national attention. Then, just as if everyone inside the beltway knew it was pre-ordained, Congress refused to pass it and it just "went away" for 15 years.

Bill Clinton then went on to do more long-term damage to our economy than, perhaps, any other president in American history. He passed NAFTA, selling our manufacturing base to China, India and Mexico for about twelve dollars and sixty three cents. We will likely never recover and, for this, the Democrats love him and speak nostalgically of the "Clinton era."

Later, when Hillary ran for Senate, she had strangely become the darling of the very same HMOs and the pharmaceutical industry that she had so bravely "fought" earlier on. They supported her campaign with historic levels of donation. Those who refuse to see that the Clintons played us all like a violin are just being willfully ignorant because that's precisely what they did.

The same is true with Barack Obama today. This totally fake progressive (who has far more in common with George Bush Jr. than with JFK) comes to the and says, "We’ve talked this problem to death."

While we may well have talked the "problem"to death, Obama and his ilk have refused to even mention once the "answer" that would resolve the problem instantly.

The insurance companies have invaded Washington in massive numbers, spreading their propaganda like evil seed and infecting our "leaders" with the kind of weak will that only sizable donations can secure. When single-payer advocates arrived at the hearings on health care reform asking why single-payer was not even being discussed, Obama’s idiot henchman, Senator Max Baucus, had them all arrested.

This is "progressive" politics? This is "socialism"? Lets call it "corporatism" instead because that’s exactly what it is. There are few better examples out there of our puppets and puppet-masters at work than our government's absolute insistence, not even discussing the health care answer a clear majority of Americans say they want to see made into policy.

For Obama to say that we’ve "talked it to death" is the worst kind of lie. It is reminiscent to me of Gee Dubya’s "You’re either with us or against us!" rhetoric. It is to suggest that we have exhausted all possibilities and that it is time for action when, in fact, one terrible plan is being sold at the expense of altruism, health and sanity.

Obama’s corporate health care plan will simply force every American to buy bad, overpriced, insurance from the very same weasels who engineered the criminal health care nightmare we currently call "a system." The parallels between this and our bailouts of all of the "financial wizards" who brought us "Depression Part II" are simply astounding.

But, I am not mad at Barack Obama. I knew he was a total sellout from the moment the Democrats gave him that national TV spotlight in 2004.

I am mad instead at all the Democrats who lied to us, promising that they would "hold Obama’s feet to the fire."

They told us that while Obama was far less than ideal as a candidate and that he was far too corporate to be real that we all needed to "Wait. Just wait. Give him a chance. You’ll see. We can do things with him in office. We can move him. We can do it! You’ll see. This is a movement for change."

Where did you all go?