More stuff about Bush's Whore, since yes that is what he was. Ok maybe he was also Rove's Whore but you get the idea....
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022405E.shtml
posted by travellinguist @ 9:18 AM
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So Prince Charles, the Crown Prince of Wales, will be marrying his true love finally. The Queen is not attending the ceremony and the Brit royal watchers are clucking that she might not be attending because she is the head of the Church of England and this is a wedding of two divorced people.... This is not the first time the divorce issue has come up. There was talk about whether Charles could become King because of his divorce... Well this is why this is so funny. The issue of divorce and the King (or Future King) is not new. Silly Brits, the only reason why you have a Church of England is because your King Harry (Henry VIII) wanted to get a divorce, and installed himself as the head of the new Church of England PURELY for this reason (ok, and also to steal all the Catholic Church lands). It is pretty silly to say that Charles couldn't become King (and thus head of the Church of England) because of his divorce or that that is the reason why the Queen won't attend (because of her role as Head of the Church) when you frankly would have no Church of England for them to lead if not for the philandering ways of one of your kings. Get some perspective (and no the Queen should not wear a pants suit either- for those of you who remember that "scandal" of January 2003)!
You should be devoting your time to helping shame your government into shaming MY government for our horrendous acts around the world. The USA is really screwing up a lot of things: world stability, the environment, world court etc, and you are worried about Prince Charles getting married without his mum in attendance... Then again I only know about this because OUR media is covering it so clearly we are also pretty silly.
Memo to the Today Show, President Bush had a RINGER in the White House Press Corps who also happened to be a prostitute!!!!!!! Why are you talking about who will or will not attend Prince Charles' wedding!
posted by travellinguist @ 4:52 AM
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So it seems that Bush wasn't content to pay off supposedly "reputable" columnists/journalists like Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher. Bloggers better ones than I am clearly have discovered that the so-called Jeff Gannon, a White House reporter famous for lofting softballs at the present during Press Briefings which he would hit out of the park and preen like Peacock was actually a male prostitute of a different name. Just amazing. Even more amazing is that with all the scandal that arose when Jayson Blair was caught lying not a single major news service has picked up on this or even comment on it. Heck even US News and World Report columnist John Leo who spent his entire column praising Bloggers for causing Vernon Eason of CNN to resign by uncovering remarks he made in Davos, Switzerland failed to completely mention the skill with which Bloggers uncovered the story about a male prostitute who, while using a fake name somehow gained access to White House Press briefings... Given this era of security paranoia. It is amazing that someone could do such a thing, especially since Congress failed to give this "Jeff Gannon" guy the same credentials....
I guess it might wrong of me to imply that the White House let this guy in deliberately to ask Bush the softball questions he appreciates best, but then again this is the President who has held the least open press conferences of any president in history and during War Time no less. My only satisfaction is that the truth of his lies, deception, fascist-style manipulations will eventually become public and I have a long life to watch his reputation properly sullied in mud as the most dangerous, evil president in our nation's history. Yes, even more criminal and worse than Nixon, even more reckless and stupidly "optimistic" than Hoover and certainly more corrupt than even that other famously corrupt Republican administration under U.S. Grant. I hope conservatives realize that they are planting the seeds of the DEATH of their movement since the more the play around the more it will require totalitarianism to maintain and that is one thing we won't stand for.... I hope.........
posted by travellinguist @ 8:23 AM
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The WSJ in their brilliant fashion once again opined that it was crazy to look for an Exit Strategy now that Iraq had held elections.... Fascinating because I thought our mission in Iraq was to find weapons of mass destruction which we didn't find so thus we have already overstayed our mission. I am glad for Iraqi elections and glad that with a government in place we can leave. We should never have gone incidentally but now we can leave.
The WSJ also seemed to ignore the Democrats contention that the insurgency in Iraq was against the US presence! UM how stupid are these money people. The insurgency is against us, the US, and if we left Iraq the people who hate us would have no more reason to kill us. They still might want to kill those who collaborated with their invaders but I guess that is the decision many Iraqis made to work with us. It is also amazing that we feel like we have to "train" the Iraqi armed forces... Last I checked they had a military and we dissolved it. In other words they had people with military training. If none of those are available then no wonder we are in such a fight there because they means that all the people who have military training are fighting against us. If not then President Bush is lying to us again just to keep troops there long enough for us to secure the oil spigot! Hmm war for oil.... No not us.....
The last stupid point from the Wall Street Journal is that we don't Honor the sacrifice of soldiers who died by leaving. So does this mean that the soldiers that die from now on are Honoring the sacrifice. I think that adding more US bodies to a pile of dead doesn't quite honor the dead it just creates more death and more misery, but hey what do I know I am just a Latino kid whose people are dying there in big numbers. I am not a big WSJ editorial writer with millions of bucks and not even a sniff of military duty in my family. I guess it is easy to talk about honoring sacrifices through more sacrifices when your family and friends won't have to be sacrificed on the pyre.
So to put none to fine a point on it. Fuck YOU, Wall Street Journal. Perhaps we should ship your whole fucking editorial board to Iraq so you can serve in the military and perform the "honoring" that you are so concerned about!
posted by travellinguist @ 5:39 AM
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I am basically going to say what many of us who've looked at the issue have said. There is no "CRISIS" in social security any more than there was a crisis in Iraq until President Bush lied about it often enough that his "Big Lie" became a sort of social truth.
Let's look at what this plan to save us from this fictional crisis would do. It would take the money that we workers would pay now to support our retired parents and grandparents and invests it in the stock market. The problem is who then would pay for the retirement of our parents and grandparents? They paid into social security for their entire careers with an expectation that they would receive a benefit when they retired, so we'd be denying it to them. Of course we could borrow money to pay for it which is what Bush is proposing.
Borrow money, huh? So much for Bush and his Republican party being "Fiscal Conservatives." What they really are is selfish ideologues more concerned with destroying the legacy of the New Deal than balancing the budget. Borrowing to pay the benefits would add trillions more to a debt that they have already run up to its highest level in US history. How come Republican administrations like Reagan, Bush and Bush II always rack up these extensive debts and yet we let them call themselves fiscal conservatives? It is such bullshit, but meanwhile the so-called "Tax and Spend" Democrats like Bill Clinton end up sitting on balanced budgets. Basically propaganda overwhelms our reality. So anyway, Bush's plan would crush our government under debt and help turn us into an Argentina, Bolivia or Brasil, countries with massive debt loads and perpetual instability, though those three are turning it around so I guess there is even hope for the North American "banana republic" in which we now live.
But it is even worse. If we had had our social security invested in the stock market in 2001 we would have lost some 20% of our retirement money when the market lost some 20% of its value. Sure we are recovering now, but having no money for four years could very well have been the end for many seniors with medication and other expenses to pay (especially since the prescription drug plan has led to inflation in drug prices). No thanks, I would rather have a set retirement figure from social security around which I can plan than a random fluctuating market place that can crash and burn just as I need it strong.... Incidentally one of the reasons for the market's volatility the last couple of years has been the massive government debt, a debt that would go up considerably with privatization.... So you see privatizing would basically add to the very destabilizing forces that make privatization a bad idea in the first place!
But let us go further.... We get this money so we can invest it right? Well we can't invest it wherever we want because though they say they "trust" us with our money they don't trust us enough to make our own investment decisions. The government will decide in which companies and bonds we can invest.... Excuse me.... These Republicans who are so big on government not telling the people what to do, and selling this social security thing as a giving back of money to increase our freedom is going to tell us in which companies we can and can't invest.... How would the government decide which companies are "safe" investments? Would it depend upon how much they spent for the Inaugural Ball? Would they have told us Enron was a safe investment? I mean after all Enron contributed might loads of bucks to the Bush campaign as did Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling personally.... Bush cited them as an example of a good company. Well good thing this particular government pick didn't contain my social security money since it would completely be gone now. So we would have a system where government officials, already too cozy with a Big Business community that basically funds their elections, inaugural balls and other things, decide which of these Big Businesses could receive our social security investment money..... hmmm that seems a little fishy don't you think?!
Let us turn from the problems of the government to the problems of the business. The fictive person that is a "corporation" is a sociopath concerned about profit only while disregarding morals, ethics and human interest. We depend upon fallible humans to restrain the sociopathic tendencies of the corporation, and as we know these fallible humans FAIL to do this fairly often. Furthermore, given the way companies get their favors by essentially bribing government officials it is safe to say the more sociopathic companies would be those that get status as Social Security dollar recipients. In other words we'd be investing in companies who would have demonstrated their ability to profit at the expense of people, so our public money, money given for the public good would actually go towards investments in companies which LEAST have the public good in mind but more the profit margin.
This plan basically take billions of dollars of the public money (money we thought we were putting away in some sort of lock box for the future) and invests it in private companies who have only their own interests at stake (at least in Communism the supposedly "public" money went to supposedly "public" companies) , who have no interest in looking out for us and who are susceptible to corruption and shoddy business practices so that we can have a "secure" retirement. Worse still it does so by increasing our already overbloated debt load, pushing us towards a status analogous with South American oligarchies, and taking away the guarantee of security that this program promised to today's retirees.
Let us hope this program dies a violent and horrendous death for if not, unable to pay our health care in old age, living in a nation which defaulted on its debt, many of us surely would.
posted by travellinguist @ 8:26 AM
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