indian summer 2010: one hot san franciscan monday

Crap-O-Ameri-Cons!

Republican Economics as Social Darwinism
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2010

John Boehner, the Republican House leader who will become Speaker if Democrats lose control of the House in the upcoming midterms, recently offered his solution to the current economic crisis: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. People will work harder, lead a more moral life.”

Actually, those weren’t Boehner’s words. They were uttered by Herbert Hoover’s treasury secretary, millionaire industrialist Andrew Mellon, after the Great Crash of 1929. (Read On, Americans)

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last september sunday

Crap-O-GOPuppets!

Downhill With the G.O.P.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 23, 2010/The New York Times

Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.

I’ve always liked that story, but the truth is that the party received hardly any votes. And that means that the joke is really on us. For these days one of America’s two great political parties routinely makes equally nonsensical promises. Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic. And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.

Banana republic, here we come.

(Read More)

a sunday of dark age

Crap-O-Christian-inSanity !

(Agora of Tyre/Wikipedia. to see photo in higher resolutions)

Hypatia and the Clash of Civilizations in Late Antiquity
Sunday 19 September 2010
by: Evaggelos Vallianatos, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

When the Greeks spoke of "agora," they meant a place for political discussion, jury trials, and a market. In other words, agora was the center of Greek life.



In October 9, 2009, the Spanish movie producer, Alejandro Amenabar, released a film he pointedly named "Agora," in which he zeroed in the clash of Greek and Christian civilizations in the fourth and fifth centuries in Alexandria, Egypt.

(Right: poster of "Agora" from IMDB.com)

(Left: Hypatia as imagined by Raphael-Wikipedia)

The violent Christianization of polytheistic Greece even redefined agora as just a place for trade, eventually becoming the "free market" of today. (Read More)

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monday monday

Crap-O-Dem0-AmeRica !

Do Not Pity the Democrats
Monday 13 September 2010
by: Chris Hedges | Truthdig | Op-Ed

Chris Hedges, Truthdig: "There are no longer any major institutions in American society, including the press, the educational system, the financial sector, labor unions, the arts, religious institutions and our dysfunctional political parties, which can be considered democratic.... The menace we face does not come from the insane wing of the Republican Party, which may make huge inroads in the coming elections, but the institutions tasked with protecting democratic participation.... Investing emotional and intellectual energy in electoral politics is a waste of time. Resistance means a radical break with the formal structures of American society. We must cut as many ties with consumer society and corporations as possible. We must build a new political and economic consciousness centered on the tangible issues of sustainable agriculture, self-sufficiency and radical environmental reform."
(Read Article)

(Photo: Concentrated Passion)

Marijuana "Prohibition" on California's Ballot
Monday 13 September 2010
by: Kevin Zeese | Consortium News | Op-Ed


Note: Families all across America have been touched in one way or another by the 37-year-old drive to eradicate marijuana use. Beyond the prison overcrowding that has resulted, many young people with promising futures have had criminal convictions stuck on their permanent records.

And, while costing the taxpayers' billions of dollars, the prohibition effort has also strengthened organized crime, much as Prohibition on alcohol did nearly a century ago, factors that have led California to consider a retreat in this "war," as "prohibition" opponent Kevin Zeese notes in this guest essay:

Since the founding of the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973, 15 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana.

That is more people than live in California's 25 largest cities – millions more than live in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Illinois.
(Read More)

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saturday, the 9th 911 day

An Open Letter From a Liberal to The Tea Party

by rjw78741
Sat Sep 11, 2010 at 01:18:57 PM PDT

Dear Tea Party:

I heard you've been studying the Constitution. That's great! The Left loves the Constitution. We have some common ground there. In fact, liberals have been talking a lot about the Constitution for the last ten years. (You might want to check out a short book by Naomi Wolf called "The End of America: Letters to a Young Patriot," published in 2006.)

I can tell you that the Left is feeling frustrated these days, just like you. Believe it or not, we're not well-represented in Washington. We wanted a green energy policy but that has largely been ignored. We wanted a public health insurance option but that was completely excluded from the health care debate. We wanted secret detentions to stop but they haven't. We wanted out of Iraq and Afghanistan but Obama's digging in deeper. We wanted the people who caused the Great Recession to be brought to accountability but they're still being coddled. We wanted to take back government from corporate control but that hasn't happened. They're just not listening to us liberals in Washington!

rjw78741's diary :: ::

I know many of you are hurting from the financial collapse. You've lost your homes, your jobs and your businesses. Many liberals have suffered the same, and we want to do something about it. You are not happy with the way Washington is operating, and neither are we. We feel your pain.

We have so much in common – where we differ is on the facts. But that's good news, too, because the facts can be ascertained if we just put some effort into finding them. You know what? We should work together. Rarely have so many outsiders had so much motivation to effect change.

But before we can work together, we have to settle four major areas of difference: (Read More)

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a lay-back friday in america

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: The U.S. Army, Kevin Dooley, Andrea Campi)

Iraq: The Democrats' War
Friday 10 September 2010
by: Stephen Zunes, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

"With all the attention on the supposed withdrawal of US combat forces, it is important to acknowledge the forces that got us into this tragic conflict in the first place. It was not just George W. Bush.... The responsibility for the deaths of over 4,400 American soldiers, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the waste of nearly one trillion dollars of our national treasury and the rise of terrorism and Islamist extremism that has come as a result of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq rests as much in the hands of the members in Congress who authorized the invasion as it does with the administration that requested the lawmakers' approval." (Read More)

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after the bar-b-q, for some

Crap-O-Crap-O-Lad!!!



The Wealthy Public-Sector Worker: A Myth Debunked
Thursday 09 September 2010
by: Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co.

Whenever the subject of state and local governments' fiscal plight comes up here in the United States, conservatives engage in spittle-flecked denunciations of unions and their crazy pay packages.... I looked at finance data from the U.S. Census and got the composition of nonfederal government spending shown in the graphic on this page. You'll see two things. First, wages and retirement benefits don't take up an unreasonably large piece of the pie. Second, subtracting a few percentage points either in pay or retirement benefits would not actually make a big difference. In the end, this is a phony issue. (ReAd MOre)

HHS to insurers: Don't blame us for your rates
RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
From Associated Press

September 09, 2010 8:44 PM EDT


WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama's top health official on Thursday warned the insurance industry that the administration won't tolerate blaming premium hikes on the new health overhaul law.
"There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a letter to the insurance lobby.
"Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections," Sebelius said. She warned that bad actors may be excluded from new health insurance markets that will open in 2014 under the law. They'd lose out on a big pool of customers, as many as 30 million people nationwide. (REaD MoRE)

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