May Day! May Day! May Day!

May Day! May Day! May Day!

We're going into the sixth year since "Mission Accomplished" and our economy is crashing!

Bring the boys home and our money, too!

Words' Worth

Chaplain's message is as fresh today as it ever was!

Read Kaddish Over Colin Powell

ABC reports that the "principals" of the Cheney-Bush administration approved torture in a series of "Principals' Meetings" at the White House.

The principals allegedly discussed and approved exact, detailed torture scenarios.

They are all disgusting war criminals (under Article 4 of the torture convention) and should be wary of traveling abroad.

Colin Powell, however, is the most appalling--how the might have fallen!

Stick a fork in him, he's done!

Condi & the Goon Show

Why has our most ineffectual Secretary of State ever allowed the Peoples Republic of China to bring in a flying goon squad of PRC internal security police to beat up protesters? Can't our police break heads well enough?

Is Hu on first with our erstwhile VP candidate?

Keep out the foreign goons and dump Condi, too.

Deregualtion by Regulation Alert

WARNING, Will Robinson! WARNING!

Treasury Secretary Paulson proposes new Federal "controls" on financial institutions including taking over regulation of the insurance industry's financials.

In an administration that has never seen a regulation it wouldn't look the other way on when controls on even the most predatory business practices are required, one MUST suspect that Federalizing oversight has the hidden agenda of watering down stricter controls and protections that some of the more enlightened states (such as NY, MA, and CA) may have (just as we saw the Cheney-Bush EPA move against California's air quality control attempts).

DANGER, Will Robinson! DANGER!

Unanticipated Consequences II

The Cheney-Bush Administration has consistently failed to reign in businesses whether it be on product safety standards, food purity inspections, market manipulation, or, notably, predatory lending practices. So we have seen lead-contaminated toys, ethylene glycol-contaminated toothpaste, downer cow school lunches, Enron's manipulation of energy markets, and, most recently, the sub-prime mortgage debacle.

The impact on businesses, on tax revenues, on jobs, and on the lives of Americans has been incalculable, but devastating.

Similarly, the resistance against any form of attempt to rein in the profligate use of energy, particularly gasoline, has seen steady growth in our carbon footprint, increasing pollution, the outflow of petro dollars, and a concomitant inflationary impact across all sectors of the economy--this at a time of economic exigency with the economy in recession and heading for a depression?

The Fed and its Chairman Ben Bernanke have attempted to ameliorate the smothering impact of the subprime debacle by cutting interest rates in hopes of kicking the flywheel of the economy back into motion even at the risk of adding inflationary pressure. This despite the ubiquitous inflationary pressure of oil prices in every sector of the economy.

It seems that one (possibly) unanticipated consequence of this monetarist attempt to rescue the economy from the quick sand by a series of rate cuts is that these rate cuts have become the whiphand of stagflation by providing cheap capital for oil speculators who are driving up the price of a barrel of oil inexorably day by day.

One of the real basics of the problem is that workers' wages have lagged further and further behind (unlike those of senior managers) and our consumer econmy is grinding to a halt as more and more discretionary spending is diverted to energy costs causing slow downs and job losses across all consumption sectors leading to a downward spiral.

The administration's Iraq misadventure continues to gobble up unimaginable amounts of Federal income (and borrowing which leads to increasing debt service and decreasing government discretionary spending--the beast being deliberately starved according to the Neocon design to kill spending for social issues). This leaves to Federal government and the next administration little leeway to resolve these problems and now the US is is even suffering technology trade deficit!

That is why I foresee a depression in the offing.

Unanticipated Consequences

Is the current chronic pollution of the Yangtze River (揚子江 or 長江="Long River") in the People's Republic of China an unanticipated consequence of building the humongous Three Gorges Dam?

Has the dam slowed the currents of the long river and made it much more difficult for natural processes to cleanse the river?

Memo to "Progressives"

In re Obama:

Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home? (Utah? ND? AK?)

What tributaries follow him to DC,

To grace in captive bonds his chariot-wheels?

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

O you hard hearts, you cruel men of home,

Knew you not Bill and Hillary?

Many a time and oft

Have you climb'd up to walls and battlements,

To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,

Your infants in your arms, and there have sat

The livelong day, with patient expectation,

To see Bill pass the streets of DC:

And when you saw his chariot but appear,

Have you not made an universal shout,

That Potomac trembled underneath her banks,

To hear the replication of your sounds

Made in her concave shores?

Scare the Hell Out of 'em!!!!!

VOTE!

It's scaring the hell out of those who would empty our treasury into their cronies' pockets and who erode our Democracy into a dictatorship of an unbridled executive.

Obama's Pig in a Poke

Mr. Obama would have us buy his change-policies-pig wrapped in a beautiful rhetorical poke. Mrs. Clinton has laid out chapter and verse on a variety of issues so that as voters we can hold her feet to the fire of her promises.



Mr. Obama is a wonderful rhetorician, but I am not having pig-in-poke, but feel constrained to question, "Where's the beef?"

AAAAARG! Wrong Again!!!!

Will the media stop with these manipulative, inaccurate, perturbing polls already????

Supreme Court Blocks Suits by Defruaded Investors

Parable: Before the Law


Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.”



At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.”



The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate.



There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”



During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper.



Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?”



The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

Franz Kafka

Abramoff & a National Security Defense

The "accountability" president, who holds teachers accountable for every aspect of the kids they teach, now makes a preposterous assertion that revealing the frequent visits of criminal political- briber and influence-peddler extraordinaire, Jack Abramoff, to his buddies, Cheney-Bush, will reveal "sensitive means and methods for Secret Service protection" of His Shamelessnesses.

Ridiculous, redact the documents under the watchful eye of the court.

This is the continuation of a cover up of the most enormous criminal conspiracy in the long and sometimes embarrassing history of the presidency.

Watch the "liberal" media ignore this one, too.

Taboo

"Recession" has become a taboo word in most of pro-GOP-controlled

media outlets. Bernanke has indicated further rate cuts to avoid the dreaded taboo word! Once again the Fed is as much a part of the problem as the solution.

We are in dire straits due to the Cheney-Bush tax gift to the wealthiest few, the insane Neocon/Cheney-Bush revenge war in the Mideast, the deliberate undercutting of the dollar, globalization pressures, and the obscene waste represented by DoD contracting in Iraq and at home.

Another cut will further exacerbate the situation and will be destructive of start-up operations when the belt is again tightened. Just as Greenspan's fear of inflation and his repeated over-corrections contributed significantly to the DotCom debacle, Bernanke has been helping to burst bubbles caused by lender greed and new financial instruments not understood well either by their creators nor their buyers.

Recession is here and will only deepen.

Blue Water Aspirations

For a nation with blue water navy aspirations, the PRC is playing with fire denying "safe harbor" to others for political reasons.