Weekend Potpourri 2006-04-23 ... (apologies in advance if you have seen any or all of these already)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Deep-Fried America: Chris Mooney, April 21, 2006 Growing up in New Orleans, I always thought of our local paper, The Times-Picayune, as a conservative, establishment voice, one fond of kissing up to Louisiana's powerful oil and gas interests. In 2000, partly for reasons of energy policy, the Picayune firmly supported George W. Bush over environmentalist Al Gore for president. "That is a big-time pocketbook issue for Louisiana, and it is a compelling reason to choose Mr. Bush," the paper editorialized. "He lives right next-door, and he's an oilman." How times have changed. Exactly three months after hurricane-driven floodwaters enveloped New Orleans, I caught a Times-Picayune editorial on global warming, an issue that had gone totally unmentioned in the paper's 2000 endorsement of George W. Bush for president. The new editorial took the form of a stern rebuke to the Bush administration, expressed in tones that might have made Al Gore himself proud. "Americans have now seen what can happen when rising waters overwhelm a major coastal metropolitan area," wrote the Picayune post-Katrina. "The United States should be leading efforts to combat global warming, instead of straggling behind." Read the entire article here: http://tinyurl.com/msvxh + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + YouTube: “Dear Mr. President” A must-see video: http://tinyurl.com/hvyhw + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Review: Neil Young's 'Living With War' is 'one MFer of a protest album' Jim Cirile, Published: Saturday April 22, 2006 Neil Young wants to keep on rockin' the free world. His new record, Living With War, makes very clear that if the Bush regime is allowed to continue, there may not be a free world to rock for much longer. On Friday, April 21, 2006, Justice Through Music was invited to a secret preview of the entire CD at Reprise Records Burbank headquarters. At 7:30 pm, a small cadre of people were ushered into a special listening room, and for the next 50 minutes, listen we did. Let's get one thing out of the way right now: this album rocks. It's post '80s electric Neil Young at his grunge best, and of the 10 cuts on Living With War, the first eight are mostly uptempo rockers. In fact, this may be the 60-year-old Young's most crossover-worthy album yet, since many of the songs should appeal to fans of bands as diverse as Green Day and Pearl Jam and will likely be embraced on campuses across America. But there's one other tiny thing that makes this record stand out: it is one MOTHERFUCKER of a protest album. In fact, Living With War may just be the Fahrenheit 9/11 of rock. The album kicks off with the tight wistful rocker, "After the Garden." Its strong hook sets the tone by hearkening back to Woodstock - - remember what we were fighting for in the '60s, folks? It's all been dashed. Next up: "Living With War," a good cut that had toes tapping. But the room really came alive with the third cut, "Restless Consumer," a headbanging indictment of both American consumerism and the manipulation of the public by the corporate media. Young breaks into an almost rap-style rant in the choruses, with the refrain, "We don't need no more lies!" No, we do not. The fourth cut, "Shock and Awe," skewers our botched "liberation" of Iraq due to hubris and deliberately falsified intel. By this point it is clear Young is not pulling any punches. The lyrics are sometimes heart-wrenching, sometimes humorous, sometimes laden with uncomfortable truth. … Read the rest here: http://tinyurl.com/nlmww + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + I'm The Decider (Koo-Koo-Ka-Choo) Please wait for the Quicktime Video to load: http://tinyurl.com/hagym + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Illinois State Legislature is Preparing to Drop a Bombshell: Utilizing a little known rule of the US House to bring Impeachment charges by Steven Leser, April 22, 2006 The Illinois General Assembly is about to rock the nation. Members of state legislatures are normally not considered as having the ability to decide issues with a massive impact to the nation as a whole. Representative Karen A. Yarbrough of Illinois' 7th District is about to shatter that perception forever. Representative Yarbrough stumbled on a little known and never utlitized rule of the US House of Representatives, Section 603 of Jefferson's Manual of the Rules of the United States House of Representatives, which allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature. From there, Illinois House Joint Resolution 125 (hereafter to be referred to as HJR0125) was born. Detailing five specific charges against President Bush including one that is specified to be a felony, the complete text of HJR0125 is copied below at the end of this article. One of the interesting points is that one of the items, the one specified as a felony, that the NSA was directed by the President to spy on American citizens without warrant, is not in dispute. That fact should prove an interesting dilemma for a Republican controlled US House that clearly is not only loathe to initiate impeachment proceedings, but does not even want to thoroughly investigate any of the five items brought up by the Illinois Assembly as high crimes and/or misdemeanors. Should HJR0125 be passed by the Illinois General Assembly, the US House will be forced by House Rules to take up the issue of impeachment as a privileged bill, meaning it will take precedence over other House business. … Read all about it here: http://tinyurl.com/nyeaz + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Former German Minister Says Building 7 Used To Run 9/11 Attack: Guide the planes in, then destroy the crime scene Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet.com | April 21 2006 Former Helmut Schmidt cabinet member, 25-year German Parliamentarian and global intelligence expert Andreas Von Bülow says that the 9/11 attack was run by the highest levels of the US intelligence apparatus using WTC Building 7 as a command bunker which was later demolished in order to destroy the crime scene. Speaking to The Alex Jones Show on the GCN Radio Network, Von Bülow said that "the official story is so wrong, it must be an inside job." Von Bülow discussed the special software programs that allow the CIA to track suspicious stock market movements in real time. Record put options placed on United and American Airlines in the week before 9/11, a speculation that the stock would crash, clearly indicated inside foreknowledge of the impending attack. "If the stock market has very strange movements immediately they take care of this and they had a lot of tapes and the lawyers told the people destroy these tapes." Continue reading article here: http://tinyurl.com/z5mky + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Campgrounds face closure: From the Casper, Wyoming StarTribune:\ By BRODIE FARQUHAR, Star-Tribune correspondent Saturday, April 22, 2006 LANDER - - Tucked away in a corner of the U.S. Forest Service Web site are plans and documents which could lead to the closure of hundreds of campground water systems and ultimately, hundreds of campgrounds themselves throughout the national forest system. The time-hallowed practice of fetching water from a hand pump - - for preparing meals, washing dishes or washing dirty kids - - may become a thing of the past. Like a small-town post office, where people meet and talk, the campground hand pump is where campers meet and talk, forming friendships that can last a weekend or a lifetime. That could all disappear in a few years, said primitive recreation advocate Scott Silver, executive director of Wild Wilderness in Bend, Ore. What would replace those basic water systems and campgrounds? According to Silver, they’d be replaced by fewer, but bigger developed campgrounds, featuring more expensive and complicated water systems, operated by for-profit concessionaires. … Read the full article: http://tinyurl.com/ja9yr + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Worst President in History?: One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush By SEAN WILENTZ, posted April 21, 2006 George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history. From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty - - and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office. Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton - - a category in which Bush is the only contestant. … The full article is on Rolling Stone: http://tinyurl.com/kv2cy + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Pretend medicine: Let's play doctor! (No, it’s NOT kinky!) Posted Friday, April 21, 2006 by Mike Adams Conventional medicine, as practiced today, is actually pretend medicine. Doctors and drug companies pretend to make patients healthier by giving them drugs. The FDA pretends to protect the safety of the public. Medical journals pretend to print only rigorous, scientifically-sound research papers. Drug companies pretend to care about the lives and health of patients. Non-profit disease front groups pretend to be searching for the cure while, in reality, most of them are only searching for more ways to recruit patients into conventional medicine treatments like drugs, surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. How do we know it's all pretend? Aside from all the junk science, corruption, fraud, collusion, conflicts of interest and intellectual dishonesty that characterizes modern medicine, there's one more all-important thing to consider: The results. If modern medicine really worked, and wasn't just pretend, wouldn't we be the healthiest population in the world? Seriously. We Americans pay more for health care, per capita, than any nation in the world. We take more drugs, undergo more surgical procedures, and log more hospitals visits than anyone else. If the drugs-and-surgery approach to medicine actually produced healthy human beings, shouldn't we be the healthiest people on the planet? But look around. We are the most diseased people on the planet. We have more disease, disorders and illness than any population that has ever been observed in the history of human civilization (aside from plagues and the like). The reason is because the medicine being practiced today is pretend medicine. … Full article: http://tinyurl.com/ogdzr + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Real ID: by Justine Nicholas We’ve all heard the expression, "Politics makes strange bedfellows." Well, few pieces of legislation have ever shown the truth in this adage more than HR 418: the so-called Real ID Act. As you may recall, last year HR 418 was hidden in a military ("emergency," in post-9/11-ese) spending bill for which Congress voted. The Real ID Act mandates, among other things, that - - beginning next year - - states conform to standards set by the Federal government for issuing driver’s licenses and other state-issued documents. These documents, as well as others, would be embedded with a so-called "blue chip" that would contain a person’s medical and credit history as well as other personal information. US Passports issued after September 1, 2005 already contain such a chip. The legislation also calls for a system of points - - as most states already have - - for obtaining new identification. As an example, in New York a passport counts as four points and toward the six required to obtain a driver’s license or non-driver’s ID. Such a system would be implemented nationwide as a result of HR 418. States and other jurisdictions that issue identification cards have been given the option to opt out of such a system. However, it’s not yet clear as to whether identification such as driver’s licenses from such places would be usable in other parts of the nation. The bill can also deny a person the right to new documentation because the information on one current document doesn’t match that on another. For example, many people change their names because of marriage or other legitimate reasons. Such a person may have, for example, one name on her birth certificate but another on her driver’s license, passport or even on her Social Security card. ... Read more about Big Brother here on Lew Rockwell: http://tinyurl.com/p38xu + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Apartheid, Bush style: The Republican rape of New Orleans: 4/19/2006 3:07:18 PM More pitiable than being a Democrat in President George W. Bush’s America is to be an African-American Democrat. And even more pitiable than that is to be a poor African-American Democrat. But perhaps the most pitiful political state of all is to be a poor, African-American Democrat from New Orleans. “Ethnic cleansing by inaction.” That’s how Democratic congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts characterizes the Hurricane Katrina recovery plan for New Orleans endorsed by Bush. The plan offers too little money, too late in coming, making a mockery of his vigorous promises to rebuild the city. There is not sufficient funding to rebuild the still-inadequate levees that last year failed to protect the city. And this year’s hurricane season is just weeks away. Fifteen of the city’s 22 hospitals are still closed, including those that care for the most needy. About 20 of the city’s 117 schools are functioning. And toxic waste still laces the landscape. New Orleans is about to have its first municipal election since Katrina. And it will be a neat trick. Fewer than half of the city’s 460,000 residents have returned. The vast majority of those who are still refugees are African-American. But Bush’s Department of Justice sees no reason why the election should be delayed. After all, if Iraqi and Afghan refugees can vote in makeshift polling places, why can’t the citizens of New Orleans? Let anyone who says Bush doesn’t think of New Orleans in Third World terms digest that reality. … Full article on The Phoenix: http://tinyurl.com/onfpb + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Great Carnac is here There I was, sitting in my sparkling blue turban. Someone handed me an envelope, my job was to determine its contents without opening it. I was told it had sat on Funk and Wagnall's back porch, in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar since noon yesterday. I raised the envelope to my forehead, and within a few seconds, these words came to my mind: "The Titanic, F-sharp, and George W. Bush". I then opened the envelope to reveal its contents. On the card that was inside were these words: "Name a boat, a note, and a dolt." + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Have a great week !!!!! ~~ Suz-Q ~~ * I am a thinking human being; I am not a BushBot ( Ya just gotsta love the bungling bureaucracy!!! ) * click here: http://tinyurl.com/9f7xk * Only 1,002 days remaining until Inaugural Day 1/20/09 * Excellent Music Video: http://tinyurl.com/hvyhw * Funny & Interactive! Use your mouse to move the falling figure if he gets stuck (or, anytime): http://tinyurl.com/cc3du * It's a secret!: http://tinyurl.com/obh35 * click here: http://tinyurl.com/ewc2x * Mark Twain: “The only time the children are safe is when Congress is not in session.” * Jeff Foxworthy: http://tinyurl.com/jm96g * "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." GWBush, 43rdPresident,CNN.com, December 18, 2000 * IMPORTANT!! http://tinyurl.com/cfsrc --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ [RobsList] A progressive group that is part of http://robwire.com You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RobsList" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Robslist -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
