Monster's Ball:

Disclaimer: I do not agree with all of this, but posting it nonetheless. I would be shocked if Obama chooses the nuclear option. I can, however, see the possibility of a conventional option....by Israel.
 

Drawing Back the Veil on the 'Death State'

By Chris Floyd

April 22, 2010 "Empire Burlesque" --   Arthur Silber is back, with piercing insights that rip the veil which even self-proclaimed dissenters still draw across the blood-soaked reality of what Silber aptly calls the "Death State" that has long "wrapped the world in flames" (to quote the preferred method of resolving diplomatic conflicts famously voiced by Abe Lincoln's secretary of state) from its mephitic base on the Potomac.

As always with Silber, you must read the whole piece (and follow the links) to get the full force of the argument, which is nuanced, multifarious and deeply considered, but here is just the briefest excerpt to send you on your way:

I repeat a few words I first wrote at the beginning of 2009...:

    For more than a hundred years, the foreign policy of the United States government has been directed to the establishment and maintenance of global dominance. To this end, violence, overthrow, conquest and murder have been utilized as required ... More and more, oppression and brutalization have become the bywords of domestic policy as well. Today, the United States as a political entity is a corporatist-authoritarian-militarist monstrosity: its major products are suffering, torture, barbarism and death on a huge scale.

I repeat the fundamental point to make certain there is no misunderstanding as to where I stand on this question: as a political entity, the United States is an endlessly destructive monstrosity. The overwhelming majority of people -- including, I regret to say, even many of those who are severely critical of the United States government -- fail to understand this point in anything close to the thorough and consistent manner required. This failure is the result of an earlier one: an inability to grasp fully what it means to revere the sacred value of a single human life.

There is more, much more in the original post -- "An Evil Monstrosity: Thoughts on the Death State"; excerpting it actually does it an injustice. So go there now and read it.

When you've done that, scoot on over to Truthdig, where you will find William Pfaff writing in a similar vein about the bloody deceptions of the Death State: past, present -- and future. Some excerpts:

It is a dismaying reflection that the facilitators of major violence thus far in the 21st century have been lies told by democratic governments. The lies are continuing to be told, about the supposed “existential” menace posed by Iran to Israel, America and (if you believe some European leaders) Western Europe ... Injustice and lies in the Middle East were responsible for unnecessary new wars in the new century, in which the United States took the lead. This time the lies were ideologically motivated and expedient lies—first, that Saddam Hussein bore responsibility for the September 2001 attacks on United States. He did not.

Next was the fiction that Hussein’s government, during the period of U.N. sanctions before 2003, was able to secretly construct nuclear weapons, despite the efforts of Western intelligence to detect them or deter him, and the presence of U.N. inspectors. There were no such weapons. ...

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reportedly sent a secret letter to President Barack Obama in January reviewing the military options available if diplomacy and the new American attempt to intensify international sanctions on Iran fail to produce the desired halt in Iran’s effort, if that is what it is, to build a nuclear deterrent. If Iran does pursue a nuclear capability, once again it is to deter attack. Precisely the same objection exists to theories of Iranian aggression as to those lies put forward in 2002-03 about Iraq posing a nuclear menace to the world. Once more, the threat is a polemical invention, intended to frighten American and Israeli (and European) voters and to prompt a preemptive attack on Iran ...

The release of Gates' memo was part of the usual factional cat-fighting among the militarist courtiers: some want to attack Iran now, some want to wait until later -- or as that great liberal-progressive hero Admiral Fallon once said of the human beings in Iran: "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them." 

For now, most of the factionalists lean toward the Fallon scenario: crush the insects later, when we don't have so much on our plate, and it will be more profitable.

And thus the Nobel Peace Laureate who is temporarily managing the Death State is now pushing hard for even more sanctions on the Iranians for the crime of ... developing a nuclear energy program as allowed by international treaty and inspected to a fare-thee-well by international observers. The defenders of the Nobelist -- I suppose we must call him the Death Laureate -- point to his push for sanctions as proof of his "different" approach to the "threat" of Iran. But what is the reality of such sanctions? Again, Arthur Silber nailed it well, in a piece from 2009:

A sanctions regime is not an alternative to war: it is the prelude to attack or invasion. Moreover, sanctions murder a hideous number of innocent people as surely as more overt acts of war.

Silber then pointed to an excellent article by Stanley Kutler, detailing the last sanctions regime enforced in the Middle East by a hip, progressive president, a topic we touched upon here the other day. From Kutler:

We estimate between 500,000 to 1 million Iraqis died in the 1990s, a very large proportion being children. To what end? Not, Lando maintains, to destroy Saddam Hussein's WMDs but to force him out. ... The CIA badly miscalculated that sanctions, coupled with Iraq's devastating defeat, would result in a military coup, toppling Saddam. Anything but. The sanctions and Saddam's heightened repression insured his survival--much to the frustration of Western leaders ... The sanctions worked only as partly intended: They imposed untold suffering on the population. Americans at the UN blocked a request to ship baby food because adults might use it. They vetoed sending a heart pill that contained a milligram of cyanide because tens of thousands of such pills could become a lethal weapon. The banned list included filters for water treatment plants, vaccines, cotton swabs and gauze, children's clothes, funeral shrouds. Somehow, even Vietnamese pingpong balls found their way to the proscribed list.

Sanctions devastated the country's medical system, once one of the best in the region. Sanctions insured that malnutrition would morph into virtual death sentences, as Lando notes. Babies died in incubators because of power failures; others were crippled with cerebral palsy because of insufficient oxygen supplies. ...

 In late 1994 the New York Times reported on children in filthy hospitals, dying with diarrhea and pneumonia, people desperately seeking food, and Iraq's inability to sell its oil--the country faced "famine and economic collapse." Without doubt, the sanctions consolidated Saddam's power. UN Administrator Denis Halliday wrote that the people blamed the United States and the UN for their travails, not Saddam Hussein. Halliday resigned, refusing to administer a program that he called "genocide."

This is what "tough" sanctions by a progressive, humanitarian interventionist can do. And this is the kind of thing the Iranians have to look forward to -- while they wait to be consumed in a mushroom cloud, that is.

For as we all know, Laureate Obama and his Pentagon warlord recently made the threatened nuclear destruction of the millions of human beings in Iran a centerpiece of their new, "more restrained" nuclear weapons doctrine. As John Caruso notes (see original for links):

Obama is also on the record as stating that "I think we should keep all options on the table" with regard to Iran.  That's the standard language in which US nuclear threats are couched, of course, and US politicians are careful to stick to that formulation in order to allow apologists to argue that they didn't mean what they clearly meant.  But Obama's Secretary of Defense gave the game away in his remarks about the Nuclear Policy Review:

    SEC. GATES: Well, I think that the -- I actually think that the NPR has a very strong message for both Iran and North Korea, because whether it's in declaratory policy or in other elements of the NPR, we essentially carve out states like Iran and North Korea that are not in compliance with NPT.

    And basically, all options are on the table when it comes to countries in that category, along with non-state actors who might acquire nuclear weapons.

    So if there is a message for Iran and North Korea here, it is that if you're going to play by the rules, if you're going to join the international community, then we will undertake certain obligations to you, and that's covered in the NPR. But if you're not going to play by the rules, if you're going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table in terms of how we deal with you.

So let's put this together:

   1. The Nuclear Posture Review (PDF) declares that "the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations."

   2. Gates says this language is specifically intended to "carve out states like Iran and North Korea."  And for these states, as Gates stated repeatedly, ...

   3. ..."all options are on the table."  So Gates is explicitly threatening that the United States may use nuclear weapons to "deal with" Iran and North Korea.

   4. Finally, Obama reiterated both his and Gates' threat that "all options are on the table" when he said his administration's purpose is to "sustain our nuclear deterrent" for Iran and North Korea, furthermore stating that this threat is intended as an "incentive" to those nations.

To summarize: the Obama administration has just made an explicit nuclear threat against Iran and North Korea, for the political goal of coercing them into complying with the US interpretation of their NPT obligations.

This is the Department of Defense's official definition of terrorism:

    terrorism

    (DOD) The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.

So the "threat of unlawful violence...intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political" is terrorism.  Or in other words, by the DoD's own definition, Barack Obama is a terrorist—and given that his threats involve the use of nuclear weapons, it follows straightforwardly that Obama is more specifically a nuclear terrorist.  And not only is he a nuclear terrorist; as the one person who has access to a massive nuclear arsenal, the stated willingness to use it outside of the realm of direct self-defense, and the power to follow through on that threat, Barack Obama is currently the only nuclear terrorist on the entire planet.

Nuclear terrorism is of course the logical endpoint of a Death State. And as Caruso rightly notes, Barack Obama constantly, ceaselessly threatens Iran with nuclear destruction -- and has done so from the very start of his campaign for the presidency. The continual, open threat to murder millions of innocent, defenseless human beings is indeed "an evil monstrosity" -- one so gargantuan that very few people seem able to grasp its reality.

But Silber sees through, and sees true. We are once more in his debt for fixing our eyes on the sulfurous essence of Death State, behind all the sound and fury of the factional squabbles of our most monstrous elites.

 

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Is The Supreme Court Moving to the Right.....

Under Obama?

I doubt it matters much whom he nominates, there will be a fight with this GOP.

 Supreme Court Shift to the Right?

Friday 09 April 2010

by: Ruth Marcus, Op-Ed

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Khaz, Hayley Austin)

Washington - Here is an unsettling thought for those who waited eight years to have a Democratic president appointing judges: Barack Obama could well end his first term with a more conservative Supreme Court than the one he inherited.

This is, I hasten to admit, premature speculation -- even with the not-so-surprise announcement that Justice John Paul Stevens, the anchor of the court's liberal wing, is retiring.

First, the president's only nominee so far, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, has not even finished her first term. Where she turns out to be on the ideological spectrum in comparison to the justice she replaced, David Souter, is unknown.

Second, the accuracy of this conjecture will depend hugely on who the president selects to fill the vacancy.

Finally, as the examples of Souter (named by President George H.W. Bush) and Stevens (selected by President Gerald Ford) demonstrate, predictions about a new justice's future performance can make weather forecasting look like an exact science.

Nonetheless, it's entirely possible that a more conservative court could be Obama's paradoxical legacy -- particularly if he only serves a single term. The likelihood of the court shifting to the right is greater than that of its moving leftward.

In part, this could have been predicted even before Obama took office. It reflects less about him than it does the identity of the departing justices, one liberal followed by another. The next oldest justice is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 77. Conservatives are reaping the benefits of Bush father and son having selected justices who were relatively young. Justice Clarence Thomas was 43 when tapped, Chief Justice John Roberts was 50, and Justice Samuel Alito was 55.

It would likely only be in the case of a departure by 74-year-old Justice Antonin Scalia -- not likely to occur voluntarily during Obama's presidency -- or Justice Anthony Kennedy, 73, that the president would have an opportunity to dramatically alter the court's ideological makeup.

But there's little in Obama's record as president to suggest that he would expend enormous capital to secure the most liberal possible justice. From the point of view of liberal groups, Obama's nominees to the lower federal courts have been, overall, disappointingly moderate.

In selecting Sotomayor, Obama acted with an eye less to ideology than to ethnicity; the selection does not offer much of a clue into what the president is looking for, as a matter of constitutional interpretation, in future justices. The conservative howling about Sotomayor's alleged radicalism had as little basis in reality as do the parallel assertions about Obama.

As Tom Goldstein of ScotusBlog put it after analyzing Sotomayor's appellate record, "Our surveys of her opinions put her in essentially the same ideological position as Justice Souter." From her conduct on the bench so far, there's no reason to change that assessment.

By contrast, it's likely, although not certain, that a Stevens replacement will be more conservative than the retiring justice. If so, this would be largely in line with history. In an interview with Jeffrey Rosen for The New York Times Magazine in 2007, Stevens noted, "including myself, every judge who's been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell (chosen by Richard Nixon in 1971) has been more conservative than his or her predecessor." Stevens excepted Ginsburg, who replaced the more conservative Byron White.

In any event, Stevens' replacement is almost certain not to be as influential a player on the left as the departing justice. As the court's senior associate justice, Stevens spoke immediately after the chief justice during the court's discussion of cases; he had the power to assign opinions and some influence with swing justices such as Kennedy and, before her departure, Sandra Day O'Connor.

I'm not arguing, by the way, that Obama would go wrong by picking a Stevens successor likely to edge the court to the right. Indeed, there is a plausible argument that a justice viewed as more centrist might have more chance of bringing along conservative colleagues on a particular issue. Two of those mentioned as possible replacements, Judge Merrick Garland of the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia, and Solicitor General Elena Kagan, are viewed as more moderate than Stevens. Either would be a superb choice.

But my prediction stands: The court that convenes on the first Monday in October is apt to be more conservative than the one we have now.

Ruth Marcus' e-mail address is marcusr@washpost.com.

(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group 

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Obama, Russian president sign arms treaty

It's a step in the right direction.....

By the CNN Wire staff

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: President Obama says U.S., Russia pursuing "responsible global leadership"
• NEW: Russia's Dmitry Medvedev calls treaty a "win-win situation" for the two countries
• Pact cuts number of nuclear weapons held by U.S. and Russia by about a third
• Obama will have dinner with heads of government from 11 countries during trip

Prague, Czech Republic (CNN) -- President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday signed a major nuclear arms control agreement that reduces the nuclear stockpiles of both nations.

The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty -- known by its acronym, START-- builds on a previous agreement that expired in December.
The agreement cuts the number of nuclear weapons held by the United States and Russia by about a third.

"This day demonstrates the determination of the United States and Russia -- the two nations that hold over 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons -- to pursue responsible global leadership," Obama said after the signing.

"Together, we are keeping our commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which must be the foundation for global nonproliferation."

Medvedev called START a "win-win situation" for the two countries.

"This agreement enhances strategic ability and, at the same time, allows us to rise to a higher level of cooperation between Russia and the United States," he said.

The two leaders talked about a range of nuclear issues, including Iran, in their meeting before the signing ceremony.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said he hopes Congress will ratify the treaty with a large bipartisan majority, as it has with previous arms control treaties.

"We are hopeful that reducing the threat of nuclear weapons remains a priority for both parties," Gibbs said.

The full treaty and its protocols will be posted online at some point Thursday, Gibbs said. Brian McKeon, a senior adviser to the White House's National Security Council and deputy national security adviser to the vice president, will lead the administration's ratification effort, Gibbs said.

Administration officials will begin briefing members of the Senate on Thursday on the particulars of the treaty.

Gibbs said Obama was also briefed on the situation in Kyrgyzstan, where the opposition claimed control of government Wednesday after deadly protests across the country.

Obama will have dinner with heads of government from 11 countries -- Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The highlight of the two-day trip is the new treaty with Russia, which is another step in nuclear arms relations between the former Cold War adversaries. Its signing comes two days after the Obama administration announced a new U.S. nuclear weapons policy and four days before Obama convenes a summit of 47 nations on nuclear security issues.

"It significantly reduces missiles and launchers," Obama said of the new treaty, which lasts for 10 years. "It puts in place a strong and effective verification regime. And it maintains the flexibility that we need to protect and advance our national security, and to guarantee our unwavering commitment to the security of our allies."

Obama has made nuclear nonproliferation a major priority of his presidency, prompting criticism from conservatives who fear the president will weaken the U.S. nuclear deterrent against possible attack.

"We believe that preventing nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation should begin by directly confronting the two leading proliferators and supporters of terrorism, Iran and North Korea," according to a statement issued Tuesday by Arizona's two Republican U.S. senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl.

"The Obama administration's policies, thus far, have failed to do that and this failure has sent exactly the wrong message to other would-be proliferators and supporters of terrorism."

According to information released by the White House, the new treaty limits both nations to "significantly fewer strategic arms within seven years" of its signing. One of the limits: 1,550 warheads.

"Warheads on deployed ICBMs [Intercontinental ballistic missiles] and deployed SLBMs [submarine-launched ballistic missiles] count toward this limit and each deployed heavy bomber equipped for nuclear armaments counts as one warhead toward this limit," the White House said.

There also are limits on launchers.

The treaty also lays out a "verification regime" that includes on-site inspections, data exchanges and notifications, the White House said.

"The treaty does not contain any constraints on testing, development or deployment of current or planned U.S. missile defense programs or current or planned United States long-range conventional strike capabilities," according to the White House.

Obama said the agreement is part of an effort to "reset" the U.S. relationship with Russia.
"With this agreement, the United States and Russia -- the two largest nuclear powers in the world -- also send a clear signal that we intend to lead," the president said. "By upholding our own commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, we strengthen our global efforts to stop the spread of these weapons, and to ensure that other nations meet their own responsibilities."

Negotiators have been working since April 2009 to wrap up the "follow-on" to the 1991 START agreement. Talks were difficult, with disagreements over verification, including on-site inspection of missiles that carry nuclear warheads.

A U.S. official with knowledge of the talks earlier said that negotiators had found "innovative" ways to verify what each side has. Verification will be a top issue politically because the U.S. Senate and the Russian parliament will each have to ratify any agreement.
Russian officials at one point objected to the Obama administration's plans to build a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe. Specifically, they were angered by news leaks from Romania that it had agreed to allow missile interceptors to be installed in that country.

The issue, according to arms control experts, was resolved by including nonbinding language in the START treaty's preamble stating that there is a relationship between offensive and defensive weapons; however, the treaty itself deals only with limits on offensive weapons systems.

This resolution could help placate U.S. critics who want no link in the treaty between offensive and defensive weapons, arguing that it might be used to try to limit a U.S. missile-defense plan.

The new treaty would be the first pact related to arms control since the end of the Cold War, experts have said, setting the stage for further arms reductions that will tackle thorny issues such as what to do with nondeployed warheads that are kept in storage, tactical nuclear weapons and further cuts in missiles and launch vehicles.

Some of those issues are expected to come up at the nuclear security summit in Washington on Monday and Tuesday.

Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/04/08/obama.russia.treaty/index.html?hpt=T1

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Did Obama Sandbag His Own Health Care Bill?

I do not agree with this article, but as is my wont I posted it anyway. This is the kind of left that annoys me, generally. 

No one, not even Barack Obama, can expect to clean up the corrupt mess that is D.C. in just a few years, It will take decades, unless the American people are ready to vote out every incumbent on the ballot and deal with a totally dysfunctional, due to ineptitude, government for about four years. 

One must play the game to change it. Admittedly it takes a very strong character to do that and not get caught in the corruption trap. The change must come from the voters by insisting on publicly funded elections and strict, enforceable laws governing lobbyists. Until then we do not have a Democratic Republic.

We must also insist on a paper trail where voting is concerned.

By David Michael Green

April 05, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- So Barack Obama got his change. Other people can even believe in it if they want. I regret to say I remain unimpressed. And that’s about the nicest way I know how to put it.

In fairness, I will say two things about this bill that redound well for him. First, passing major health care legislation in America is hard. In fact, governing this country in any real respect is hard, just as the Founders intended it to be. For a century, presidents have tried and mostly failed bring some sense to health care in America. Give Obama credit for succeeding at a very tough task, where others have imploded. (Except, of course, you can call anything “health care reform”, and then take credit when it passes, which is kinda what happened here. Putting a ham sandwich through Congress is not such a big thing, no matter what it’s labeled.)

The other positive note about the bill concerns a good deal of its content. If you take it at face value – which may constitute a serious mistake by the time the industry vampires manage to twist and shred the restrictions supposedly imposed on them by the bill – it does seems to have some laudatory and much needed features. Even progressive critics of the legislation, if they’re being fair, have to admit that adding tens of millions of people to the ranks for the insured is no small thing. Nor is blocking the disease profiteers from their most egregious practices, like refusing care to people for pre-existing conditions, or dumping those who’ve paid premiums for decades at precisely the moment they start making claims. These changes – if they are real and they stick – will literally improve people’s lives massively, sometimes saving them altogether, and we should not hesitate to say so.

All that said, there are two problems with Obama’s signature piece of legislation: What is, and what could have been.

What this bill is, at its core, is a giant gift to massive predatory corporations who are as far removed from pursuing the public interest as regressive politicians are from the human genome. That’s really bad news, for at least two reasons. The first is that we as a society find ourselves, yet once again, crafting legislation to service the greedy few rather than the hundreds of millions of ordinary folk just trying to get by. You can see that pretty readily in this bill, which ties itself in knots of absurdity in order to avoid grappling with the obvious problem at the core of the world’s richest country spending twice what anyone else does, only to produce one of the crappiest health care systems among developed countries. The obvious, glaring, 800 pound gorilla in the room is that we do health care as an industry in America, for the purpose of profiting investors and corporate managers, not for purposes of making people well. If you’re trying to reform a badly broken system without touching its core problem, you’re like an alcoholic, blaming the boss for firing you and the wife for kicking you out of the house – anything to avoid taking real responsibility for your trail of disaster.

What that means in the case of health care legislation is that you’re gonna create ‘exchanges’, mandate purchase of private insurance, subsidize people to buy that mandated insurance, diminish existing health care programs, tax health insurance benefits, and avoid at all costs a government-run actual competitor to the wasteful and expensive private insurance programs. All in order to do reform without actually doing reform.

The second reason that passing this particular piece of legislation is especially pernicious is that it suggests to people that there can be no serious braking of corporate power anymore. The only hope (short of revolution in the streets) for countering the massive accumulation of power that the moneyed class has acquired in contemporary America is a public sector holding the ultimate trump cards. Corporations do whatever they want, and are presumed to pursue their narrow self-interest (another, more basic, formulation we need to address as well). But the reason this is tolerable, according to the historical and theoretical frame, is that they are controlled and even licensed to exist by the state. And the reason that works – again, theoretically, at least – is that the state is an instrument of the people. What we are facing today in this health care disaster is the unspoken but still profound realization that this concept – what we might describe as the Enlightenment formulation for democratic governance – has expired under the weight of private power. Put more starkly, greed has now triumphed entirely over democracy.

So Obama and the Democrats – the alleged party of the people, mind you, as opposed to those Wall Street hacks in the GOP – wrote a bill that takes a system whose fundamental flaw is the profitization of human beings’ most intimate and core vulnerabilities, and they exacerbated that problem, literally forcing tens of millions of Americans to buy a grossly flawed private product they probably don’t want, under peril of government-imposed penalty. If the great governance theme of our historical epoch is, as I believe it to be, the capture of the state for purposes of private enrichment, there can be no greater example than this bill. No longer content with simply using the state to aggregate the wealth of working people to facilitate its easy transfer to elites, this bill marks a frightening step further. Here we have corporate interests using the state (again, under the control of the nominal people’s party, no less) to now engage in coercive ‘marketing’ on their behalf. A big and bold line has been crossed with this legislation, and it does not bode well for the future. Welcome to our brave new world.

Barack Obama would surely respond that politics is the art of the possible, and we progressives disappointed with his legislation are disastrously unrealistic about what can actually be accomplished in the contemporary political climate, as opposed to what we might want. But we now know for sure that Obama was never remotely interested in the progressive agenda, to the point that he made sure liberals never had a seat at any negotiating table, and even the compromise position of a public option, let alone the real progressive solution of single payer, was given away at the start of negotiations, not at the end. And with who were those negotiations held? You? Me? Dennis Kucinich? Bernie Sanders? No. They were held with the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, conservative Democrats funded by those industries, and a Republican Party that never missed an opportunity to piss on the president, to the point that it went out of its way to create those opportunities when they didn’t exist.

The most astonishing thing about the whole exercise, for me, has been the gross failure and raw incompetence of the White House when it came to selling health care reform. As the bill continued to sink into the miasma of putrid unpopularity last summer, buckling under a serious of monstrous lies expressed with the most profound vitriol, Obama and his team did nothing. Could these really have been the same people who ran the letter-perfect campaign of 2007-08? Could these really have been professionals who had lived through the era of Reagan and Bush 43, both of whom demonstrated so clearly how to sell a presidential agenda in our time, even one that sucked horrifically?

So you have to wonder, at the risk of descending into paranoid conspiracy theories, if this wasn’t Obama’s game all along. Could he have been so devious as to purposely deflate the very movement he had at his disposal, letting just enough air out of the balloon to pass a bill, but not enough to upgrade it from a minimalist corporate affair to a genuine progressive reform? Through this controlled evisceration of his own base – if that was indeed his game – Obama was able to claim the prize of health care reform, whilst simultaneously carrying forward the corporate agenda in that domain, and obliterating a nascent progressive movement rising up from the ashes of a decade of catastrophic regressive failures. A pretty impressive hat trick, if that’s your game.

Is this too far-fetched a theory? Consider what we know. We know that Obama never fought for his bill until the end of the line, standing by and instead allowing it to be eviscerated. We know there was substantial public support, minimally for a public option, even though there was not a single prominent voice out there advocating for it, and yet the administration effectively torpedoed it, while claiming to be open to the possibility. We know that Obama never mobilized his own base, including his massive email database from the campaign, to fight for health care reform. We know that this is the president who took complete care of the Wall Street banks, using taxpayer dollars to bail them out, one hundred cents on the dollar. We know that he has meanwhile done nothing for the millions of non-elite Americans who are suffering badly today from layoffs and foreclosures. We know that he has populated his administration’s economic team almost entirely with the same Goldman Sachs predators who have wrecked the global economy through two decades of deregulation, legalized scams, and taxpayer guaranteed reckless bets. And more. We could go on from here, but I think the point is made. Is it so far-fetched to imagine that the same person who did all these things also made a strategic decision to thread a health care policy needle by actually clipping his own wings sufficiently such that only the corporate version of supposed reform was seen as a politically viable option?

This question reminds us, inevitably, that the greater tragedy of the health care reform process is not what was, but what could have been. I confess that it probably is a bridge too far to imagine Americans today being compelled to give up their private health care plans in order to be forced onto a universal public single player plan, however sensible that would be for the country, and however obvious a choice it would be if we could go back in time to when the current system was first developing. But I don’t think any such system needs to be imposed on people. Why not have simply made Medicare available to all, with subsidies for those who need financial help? People would then vote with their feet. I mean, which would you rather have: an expensive plan that provides lousy coverage, is allowed to ditch you when you actually get sick, wastes one out of every three dollars on bureaucracy, exorbitant CEO salaries and profit, and makes you spend hours on end dealing with paperwork just to get your contracted coverage, or a simple, super-efficient, rock-solid government plan, where you pick any doctor you want and get any treatment you need, no hassle, no mountain of paperwork, no questions asked, and no worries about denial of care when your life is in peril?

Like I said, people vote with their feet. You don’t need so much to crush the parasitical health care insurance industry, you only need to give people a better alternative and the option to select it. Which is why, of course, even the anemic public option being floated had to be destroyed at all costs. And which is why it was, by Barack Obama just as much as the army of insurance industry lobbyists swarming Washington like a plague of angry locusts. So much for all the complete bullshit rhetoric about the free market and competition. Competition and a free market is the last thing industries want when the lobby in Washington for antitrust exemptions, subsidies, tariffs and other trade barriers. Real competition would be death. The same tea party lunatics who go to crypto-Klan rallies and complain bitterly about the inflated power of the federal government know damn well what works and what doesn’t, which led some of them to scream at members of Congress last summer, “Keep your damn government hands off my Medicare!”

I have no doubt that Obama could have gotten far more than he did from this bill. Its management in Congress was embarrassing. Its marketing to the public was nearly entirely AWOL. The villainization of the genuine villains who – either for greed, power or spite – have stood in the way of literally saving some 45,000 lives per year never happened. The articulation of a civil rights-like moral clarion call demanding that America live up to its potential, and Americans to their responsibility to each other, was never sounded. The strong-arming of members of Congress to fall in line or get their asses kicked by party leadership didn’t happen. The use of the bully pulpit to go over the heads of Congress and move the people to demand a little legislating in the public interest for once was nowhere to be seen. A mobilization of the huge mob of motivated and excited citizens who put Obama in the White House last year in the name of genuine change never occurred.

Given that polls show something like sixty percent support for the minimal progressive solution of a public option already just sitting there, imagine what would have happened had any of the above occurred. Imagine what would have happened if all of the above had occurred?

I suspect Barack O’Corporate imagined just that.

And I think that, far from mobilizing support for his health care bill, he made sure to sandbag it.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net ), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net .

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Obama's U.N. Sanctions Push

IRAN

After long resisting calls to join in sanctions efforts aimed at the Iranian nuclear program, "China signaled to its partners on the United Nations Security Council that it is ready to consider a council resolution" in favor of sanctions. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "affirmed late Monday the participation in Iranian sanctions talks of China, seen as the most hesitant member of the so-called 'P5-plus-1' -- the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany that are negotiating with Tehran." On Wednesday, the six major world powers -- the United States, Russia, France, Great Britain, Germany, and China -- agreed "to begin putting together proposed new sanctions on Iran over its suspect nuclear program after China dropped its opposition." U.S. and other Western diplomats are "also pressing hard on two non-veto-wielding Council members, Turkey and Brazil, both of which have publicly questioned the usefulness of sanctions, to at least abstain on any final vote." President Obama predicted on Tuesday that he would be able to persuade the United Nations to "move forcefully" against Iran with new sanctions within weeks, not months. "The fact that Beijing has agreed to discuss these steps is bad news for Tehran," writes Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar. "This is why Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dispatched the top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, to hold talks with the Chinese government." State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the United States wants to focus on financial holdings of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, as part of a resolution that puts an appropriate bite on the Tehran government but spares the Iranian people undue hardship. The Iranian government remains defiant that sanctions will not halt its nuclear program.

'AN INTELLIGENCE COUP':
Earlier this week, ABC News reported that an Iranian nuclear scientist "who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, had defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States." Intelligence officials called the defection of scientist Shahram Amiri "an intelligence coup" in the continuing CIA operation to spy on and undermine Iran's nuclear program. In a recent report (pdf) to Congress, the CIA concluded that "Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so," but also restated its previous conclusion that "we do not know whether Tehran eventually will decide to produce nuclear weapons." While the upcoming National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is expected to revise some of the key conclusions of the 2007 NIE -- which held that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen -- the news that the United States has had custody since last June of a key Iranian nuclear scientist raises questions about how drastic those revisions might be. ABC reports that Amiri "has been extensively debriefedThey say Amiri helped to confirm U.S. intelligence assessments about the Iranian nuclear program." Obama told CBS that "all the evidence indicates" that Tehran is trying to get the "capacity to develop nuclear weapons." since his defection by the CIA, according to the people briefed on the situation.
 
CONSERVATIVES COMPLAINING:  
For eight years, the Bush administration failed to effectively confront Iran's nuclear ambitions, yet many former Bush officials and supporters are now criticizing the Obama administration for the same thing. Former (recess-appointed) U.N. ambassador John Bolton, a long-time advocate of bombing Iran, said Thursday that Obama is "naive" in thinking more sanctions against Iran will stop its nuclear program. "This additional round of sanctions will have no material impact," Bolton said. Likewise declaring the new sanctions to be "failing" even before they've been adopted, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute described the options as: "Either Iran gets a nuclear weaponpreparing to accept an Iranian nuclear weapon. However, another Weekly Standard writer, Reuel Marc Gerecht, has credited Obama's approach with putting pressure on the Iranian regime, writing that "Obama could rightly claim that his outreach policy toward the Islamic Republic helped create the tumult that we've seen" since Iran's June 12 elections. Similarly, journalist David Ignatius, a long-time Iran watcher, wrote that "White House officials argue that their strategy of engagement has been a form of pressure, and the evidence supports them." and we manage the risk, or someone acts to eliminate the threat" through military force. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol declared Obama's engagement policy a failure and accused the administration of
 
FORGING EFFECTIVE PARTNERSHIPS:  

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-senator Obama clearly stated that a secondary benefit of his Iran engagement policy was the creation of greater international unity and focus on the Iranian nuclear problem. "If it [negotiation with Iran] doesn't work," Obama said during the first presidential debate, "then we [will] have strengthened our ability to form alliances to impose tough sanctions" on Iran. That strategy seems to be working. Russia had been a skeptic of sanctions, but has now indicated a willingness to consider them. In late March, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that Iran was allowing an opportunity for mutually beneficial dialogue with the West to "slip away." "The [Iranian] regime has become more isolated since I came into office," Obama said in an interview with CBS News. "Part of the reason that we reached out to them was to say, 'You've got a path. You can take a path that allows you to rejoin the international community, or you can take a path of developing nuclear weapons capacity that further isolates you.'" Center for American Progress analysts Sam Charap and Brian Katulis wrote that Obama's "emphasis on collaboration and shared responsibilities constructed a new foundation for global security co-operation, which will extend beyond reining in Iran's nuclear program. In little over a year, the engagement policy has revived America's influence and leverage and created a diplomatic infrastructure that will make America more secure." As Rudy DeLeon, Winny Chen, and John Gans wrote in a 2008 report (pdf) for the Center for American Progress, "diplomacy, when integrated with other policy tools," provides "a powerful force multiplier for advancing U.S. interests."
 


There is nothing civil about civil wars!

The Obscenity of War

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_obscenity_of_war_20100330/

Posted on Mar 30, 2010

By Amy Goodman

President Barack Obama has just returned from his first trip as commander in chief to Afghanistan. The U.S.-led invasion and occupation of that country are now in their ninth year, amid increasing comparisons to Vietnam.

Daniel Ellsberg, whom Henry Kissinger once called “the most dangerous man in America,” leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg, who was a top Pentagon analyst, photocopied this secret, 7,000-page history of the U.S. role in Vietnam and released it to the press, helping to end the Vietnam War.

“President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to nominate this as Obama’s war,” Ellsberg told me recently. He cites the “Eikenberry memos,” written by U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, which were leaked, then printed last January by The New York Times.

Ellsberg said: “Eikenberry’s cables read like a summary of the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan. ... Just change the place names from ‘Saigon’ to ‘Kabul’ ... and they read almost exactly the same.”

The Eikenberry memos recommend policies opposite those of Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, who advocated for the surge and a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Eikenberry wrote that President Hamid Karzai is “not an adequate strategic partner,” and that “sending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable.” Petraeus and McChrystal prevailed. The military will launch a major campaign in June in Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar. Meanwhile, with shocking candor, McChrystal said in a video conference this week, regarding the number of civilians killed by the U.S. military, “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” U.S. troop fatalities, meanwhile, are occurring now at twice the rate of one year ago.

Tavis Smiley has a PBS special this week on one of the most powerful, and overlooked, speeches given by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The address was made on April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before King was assassinated. The civil rights leader titled his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” and controversially called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

The press vilified King. Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” Smiley told me: “Most Americans, I think, know the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Some Americans know the ‘Mountaintop’ speech given the night before he was assassinated in Memphis. But most Americans do not know this ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech.” Smiley added, “If you replace the words Iraq for Vietnam, Afghanistan for Vietnam, Pakistan for Vietnam, this speech is so relevant today.”

Like King, Obama is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, Obama mentioned King six times, yet defended his war in Afghanistan. Princeton University professor Cornel West, interviewed by Smiley, said of Obama’s Nobel speech, “It upset me when I heard my dear brother Barack Obama criticize Martin on the global stage, saying that Martin Luther King Jr.‘s insights were not useful for a commander in chief, because evil exists, as if Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t know about evil.”

In early March, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, offered a resolution to end the war in Afghanistan, saying: “We now have about 1,000 U.S. troops who have perished in the conflict. We have many innocent civilians who have lost their lives. We have a corrupt central government in Afghanistan that is basically stealing U.S. tax dollars.” The resolution was defeated by a vote of 356-65. A Washington Post poll of 1,000 people released this week found that President Obama enjoys a 53 percent approval rating on his handling of the war in Afghanistan.

The public is unlikely to oppose something that gets less and less coverage. While the press is focused on the salacious details of Republican National Committee spending on lavish trips, especially one outing to a Los Angeles strip club, the cost to the U.S. taxpayer for the war in Afghanistan is estimated now to be more than $260 billion. The cost in lives lost, in people maimed, is incalculable. The real obscenity is war. Ellsberg hopes that the Eikenberry memos will be just the first of many leaks, and that a new wave of Pentagon Papers will educate the public about the urgent need to end Obama’s war.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

© 2010 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Iran, Israel and an Obama Miscalculation in the Works?

We shall see. I hope Obama is right.

By Alan Hart

March 31, 2010 "Information Clearing House" - -President Obama’s apparent desire to “move forcefully” against Iran with new sanctions “within weeks, not months”, makes me wonder if he is calculating that he will be in a better position to put some real pressure on Israel, and possibly bring about regime change there, if he can successfully bully Iran into playing the game his way. If that is what Obama is thinking, he could be setting himself up (or is being set up?) for another humiliation.

On one level of argument there is a case for saying that if he could persuade Tehran to meet his requirements on the development of its nuclear program, he could then say to Israel something very like, “I’ve neutralized the Iranian threat, now you must give an absolute priority to making peace with the Palestinians.”

Leaving aside for the moment the matter of Iran’s response to more aggressive bullying, the problem with that way of thinking is what it ignores. Israel’s leaders and AIPAC are playing up the Iranian threat not because they truly believe that a nuclear armed Iran would pose a threat to the Zionist state’s existence, but because it, the asserted threat, is an effective way of limiting the White House’s freedom to pressure Israel. The point?

Even if Obama did succeed in getting what he wants from Iran, that would not improve his chances of bringing Israel to heel, with or without regime change. So from that perspective, Obama would end up being humiliated again. But there is a much worse, even catastrophic scenario.

What if moving quickly and forcefully with new sanctions on Iran did not bring about a policy change in Tehran?

Obama would then have painted himself into a corner where his options would be either to say, in effect, “We’ve got to live with the fact that Iran might possess nuclear weapons,” or to give Israel the greenlight to attack Iran and risk the U.S. being drawn into a war which might not end until the whole Middle East was in flames and the global economy had been completely wrecked.

That would be quite some miscalculation.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Is America Becoming a Third World Country?

Judging by my Comcast service, I would say yes. Egypt isn't this bad.

When It Comes to Innovation,
  By Arianna Huffington

March 31, 2010 "Huffington Post" --  Is America turning into a third world country? That was the provocative topic of a panel I took part in last week at a conference sponsored by The Economist entitled "Innovation: Fresh Thinking For The Ideas Economy."

Once upon a time, the United States was the world's dominant innovator -- partly because we didn't have much competition. As a result of the destruction wreaked by WWII, the massive migration of brainpower to the U.S. caused by the war, and huge amounts of government spending, America had the innovation playing field largely to itself. None of these factors exist as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.

America now has plenty of countries it's competing with -- many of which are much more serious about innovation than we are. Just look at the numbers:

A report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation looked at the progress made over the last decade in the area of innovation. Out of the 40 countries and regions it examined, the U.S. ranked dead last.

A study on innovation by the Boston Consulting Group concluded that America is "disadvantaged in several key areas, including work force quality and economic, immigration, and infrastructure policies."

In 2009, patents issued to American applicants dropped by 2.3 percent. Those granted to foreign-based applicants increased by over 6 percent.

Why are we falling behind like this? For one thing, we've lost our educational edge. America once led the world in high school graduation rates. We are now ranked 18th out of 24 industrialized countries.

And the percentage of 15-year-olds performing at the highest levels of math is among the lowest. South Korea, Belgium and the Czech Republic, among others, have at least five times the number the U.S. does.

Plus, we are no longer investing in innovation. Until 1979, around 50 percent of all research and development funds were provided by the federal government. That number has fallen to 27 percent. And, during the 1990s, the bottom fell out of U.S. funding for applied science, dropping by 40 percent.

The economic crisis is also taking a toll on innovation. Venture capital investment in the U.S. for the first three quarters of 2009 was $12 billion. Over the first three quarters of 2008, it was $22 billion.

These numbers may not place us in the third world ... yet. But the trend is not a good one.

Adding to the problem is the sense that America's best days may be behind us. Many economists and historians are warning that our current economic downturn has created a new normal. That the country will never be the same. Things are, of course, going to be different. But that doesn't have to mean that they are going to be worse. However, if we don't get serious about innovation, they will be. When it comes to our approach to innovation, we desperately need some innovation.

For starters, we need to kick our high-speed Internet plans into high gear. A robust, broadband-charged, countrywide information superhighway is going to be key to staying ahead of the innovation curve.

As FCC Chair Julius Genachowski explains, broadband isn't just important for faster email and video games -- it's the central nervous system for democracies and economies of the future:

Broadband is indispensable infrastructure for the 21st century. It is already becoming the foundation for our economy and democracy in the 21st century... [and] will be our central platform for innovation in the 21st century.

How indispensable is it? In a study of 120 countries, researchers found that every 10 percent increase in broadband adoption increased a country's GDP by 1.3 percent.

Unfortunately, when it comes to broadband, America is also falling behind.

In 2001, the United States ranked 4th among industrialized countries in broadband access. By last year, we had dropped to 15th. As for average broadband download speed, we rank 19th.

Nearly 93 million Americans still don't have broadband in their homes. And while 82 percent of those who attend college in the U.S. have access to broadband, only 46 percent of high school graduates do.

To help close the widening gap between us and the rest of the digitally connected world, the Obama administration has proposed a National Broadband Plan, with the goal of increasing broadband access from around 65 percent currently to 90 percent by 2020.

The proposed plan would make high speed broadband available to 100 million Americans by 2020, and ensure that every high school graduate is digitally literate.

This sounds great. But 2020? Given that we're already behind, how about initiating a broadband version of the Manhattan Project? If it's truly a priority, and, as seems obvious, important to national security and the relative position of the United States in the world, why put it off for a decade?

Another focus of innovation is the green economy. One proposal that would jumpstart green innovation is the creation of a Green Bank, which, according to John Podesta and Karen Kornbluh, would "open credit markets and motivate businesses to invest again," and "enable clean-energy technologies -- in such areas as wind, solar, geothermal, advanced biomass, and energy efficiency -- to be deployed on a large scale and become commercially viable at current electricity costs."

Such a bank would also help loosen the available credit for small businesses, and establish the reliable source of funding entrepreneurs need to know will be there if they devote themselves to green technologies and start ups.

Fortunately, such a proposal is already making its way through Congress. Reed Hundt, the former FCC chair under President Clinton, is now the head of a group called the Coalition for Green Capital, whose goal is "to establish a government-owned, wholesale, non-profit bank that would fill the void that exists in clean-energy legislation in America today." Hundt is currently joining Congressman Ed Markey in trying to make the Green Bank proposal part of the next jobs bill. Which makes sense, since, according to Hundt's group, a Green Bank would create about four million jobs by 2012.

Another area ripe for innovation is our immigration policy -- particularly when it comes to granting visas to foreign-born entrepreneurs.

Great ideas come from all over the world, and if we don't welcome the people with those great ideas and make it easy for them to come here, they will go elsewhere. Indeed, they already are going elsewhere. Right now the U.S. has an immigration limit for skilled workers of 65,000, and an additional 20,000 slots for those with advanced degrees from U.S. universities. This kind of rigid cap doesn't make sense in today's world. The "visa process has been plagued with backlogs resulting from this quota," says Jonathan Ortmans, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. "As a result, high-skilled immigrants are looking for opportunities elsewhere in an increasingly competitive global labor market, taking their innovative ideas with them."

Enter the people behind startupvisa.com, a group with an innovative proposal for increasing America's share in the global idea marketplace. They want to make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to come to America and start job-creating business.

Our current law allows foreign investors to get a visa if they start a business in the United States with $1 million in capital that creates at least 10 jobs here. The venture capitalists behind Start Up Visa want to shift the emphasis from foreign investors to foreign entrepreneurs who can get funding from American investors. The idea is to reward good ideas. And by requiring those with good ideas to first get foreign funding, you make it more likely they will just decide to create their companies someplace else too.

This proposal is also in the legislative pipeline. The Start Up Visa Act is co-sponsored by Sens. John Kerry and Richard Lugar. Their bill would create a two-year visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who are able to raise a minimum of $250,000, with $100,000 coming from a qualified U.S. angel or venture investor. After two years, if the immigrant entrepreneur is able to create five or more jobs (not including their children or spouse), attract an additional $1 million in investment, or produce $1 million in revenues, he or she would become a legal resident.

Kerry and Lugar made their case in a recent op-ed:

At a time when many are wondering whether Democrats and Republicans can come together on anything, there is at least one area where we're in strong agreement: We believe that America is the best country in the world to do business. And now is the time to reach out to immigrant entrepreneurs -- men and women who have come from overseas to study in our universities, and countless others coming up with great ideas abroad -- to help drive innovation and job creation here at home.

The senators, who hope to pass the measure this month, are positioning it as a jobs initiative, not an immigration reform initiative, and hope to include it as part of a larger bill aimed at helping small businesses add jobs. "This bill is a small down payment on a cure to global competitiveness," Kerry told BusinessWeek.

These, of course, are just three ways of promoting innovation. But they are prime examples of what we need if we are to shake off our complacency and avoid the slow slide to third world status.

America is rich with resources -- both natural and human -- but we can no longer afford to utilize them so inefficiently. We can't afford to be the only nation in the industrialized world in which half the country doesn't have access to broadband. We can't afford to allow other nations to take the lead in creating a green economy. And we can't afford to keep making it so hard for people with job-creating ideas to start their businesses here.

 

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Did John Boehner Confirm for his base that......

.....our president is the Antichrist? 

Probably. I grew up around what we called hard-shelled southern Baptists. I remember hearing that Dr. King was a communists and a trouble making n---ger from the pulpit. This crowd, whether Boehner realizes it or not, are much worse and, yes, they are dangerous. 

I've listened to their "theology" on Teevee and I believe that Mr. Boehner ought to know he people to whom he is talking with buzz words like Armageddon. Some of these people are unhinged and would think nothing of murdering the "son of the beast" and, I might add, tearing this country to pieces.

Because that is exactly what will happen if they try to or manage to kill Obama. The USA will burn.

KAREN MOORE FOR BUZZFLASH
Armageddon is not just a Word, Mr. Boehner.

When asked whether he thought his use of the word “Armageddon” could cause people to do crazy things like spit at members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Minority Speaker of the US House of Representatives John Boehner said, “Armageddon is just a word."

Yes it is, and so are bonsai, kamikaze, revolution, n------r, f-----t, Taliban, secession, states rights, rap songs, sermons, sin, apocalypse, Jesus, cumquat, God, and jihad.
They are all words and they all mean something to whoever is speaking and maybe something totally different to those who hear his words. There are collections of JUST words, like: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, The Bill of Rights, the Torah, the Koran, the Communist Manifesto, the Dictionary and the Bible. They are all just WORDS.

You cannot say that the teenage Christmas Eve bomber was influenced by a radical cleric of Islam and therefore all Islamic clerics should be suspect and then say that the words of Christian clerics, politicians, parents, teachers or rap singers mean nothing and do not ever provoke anyone to wrath.

Islamic terrorists and clerics, Christian ministers, Congress and the Ku Klux Klan do not use Vulcan mind transfers; they use WORDS, just like the ones Rep. Michelle Bachmann used when she said she wanted her constituents to be “armed and dangerous."
She could have said, “I want my constituents to be informed and vocal”, but since she is the one doing the informing they are out of luck. I have heard the best of the hell, fire and brimstone ministers who were less terrifying at describing hell than most of the GOP leadership are at describing the Health Care Reform package.

Every leader from Hitler to Billy Graham has used words to influence people, so Mr. Boehner the word Armageddon does mean something. It may mean nothing to you, but to most Christians it brings on visions of something, the End Times.  And the Republican base is Fundamentalist Christians for whom the word "Armageddon" is message received, loud and clear.

Another pre-civil war quote that comes to mind is the last paragraph of Lincoln’s first inaugural address;

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

How happy would he be that we are still fighting over "states rights," but this time it is because they believe the first African American president is a "socialist" who wants to force affordable health care on everyone and they are not willing to let him try?   

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Quarter of Republicans Think Obama May Be the Anti-Christ

LiveScience Staff

LiveScience.com livescience Staff

livescience.com Thu Mar 25, 1:07 pm ET 

 

Americans have some extreme views of President Obama, with a new controversial survey suggesting that 40 percent of adults believe he is a socialist, and about a quarter of survey participants thinking the president is a racist, anti-American and even doing things Hitler did.

The whammy: 14 percent of Americans say President Barack Obama may be the Antichrist. When split by political party, 24 percent of Republicans and 6 percent of Democrats viewed the nation's leader in this way.

The results come from an online Harris Poll involving 2,320 adults who were surveyed online between March 1 and March 8 by Harris Interactive, a market research firm. Respondents were read each of 15 statements and asked whether they thought they were true or false. The sample of people was selected from among roughly 4 million people who agreed to participate in Harris Interactive surveys and are given "modest incentives," according to Harris. The results were then weighted to reflect the composition of the U.S. adult population. [Infographic Compares Views]

The accuracy of the poll has been questioned widely in the blogosphere. Polls are never free from error, with sampling bias and question types leading to flaws. Online polls, in particular, raise questions about bias.

"The thing about sampling is no sample avoids bias," said Humphrey Taylor, chairman of the Harris Poll, Harris Interactive. "The question is can you identify and correct for the biases that are in there. We have a sizable team that does that and nothing else."

Here's the percentage breakdown of respondents' views of President Obama:

• 38 percent say he wants to take away Americans' right to own guns.
• 32 percent say he is a Muslim.
• 29 percent think he wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government.
• 29 percent think he has done many things that are unconstitutional.
• 27 percent say he resents America's heritage.
• 27 percent say he does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him to do.
• 25 percent say he was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president.
• 25 percent say he is a domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitutions speaks of.
• 23 percent say he is a racist.
• 23 percent say he is anti-American.
• 23 percent say he wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers.
• 20 percent say he is doing many of the things that Hitler did.

When broken out by political party, results showed some stark differences. For instance, the majority of Republicans believed the president is a Muslim and a socialist, while around 40 percent believe he is a racist, someone who resents American heritage and "wants terrorists to win."

Forty percent of Republicans, compared with just 15 percent of Democrats, think Wall Street pulls his strings.

When Harris' Taylor saw the results he told LiveScience he was "flabbergasted. I would've guessed the numbers would've been a lot smaller than that."

He added, "It means that very large numbers of people are misninformed not only about President Obama but many things in modern life."

No Kidding. I am not the least but surprised. Isn't anyone paying attention?

The findings lend support to, and in fact were done to verify, themes in John Avlon's new book "Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America" (Beast Books, 2010).

"This poll should be a wake-up call to all Americans about the real costs of using fear and hate to pump up hyper-partisanship," Avlon said after reviewing the findings. "We are playing with dynamite by demonizing our president and dividing our country in the process. Americans need to remember the perspective that Wingnuts always forget - patriotism is more important than partisanship."

While extreme, there's a chance some respondents weren't even sure what a Muslim is, for instance. Research reported in 2008 suggested Americans have inaccurate views of Muslims: Many think the Islamic religion is associated with violence and religious extremism, and perhaps even terrorism. In addition, seven in 10 Americans in that study admitted they know very little about the Islamic religion.

• Who Is the Antichrist?
• 7 Great Dramas in Congressional History
• Top 10 Conspiracy Theories

This story was updated at 12:35 p.m. ET to include details about the polling methodology.

• Original Story: Quarter of Republicans Think Obama May Be the Anti-Christ

LiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We take on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style. Check out our science videos, Trivia & Quizzes and Top 10s. Join our community to debate hot-button issues like stem cells, climate change and evolution. You can also sign up for free newsletters, register for RSS feeds and get cool gadgets at the LiveScience Store.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!