Oregon, Hillary... Fabulous

There’s a t-shirt design contest over at HillaryClinton.com. This one is ... fabulous.Friday night open thread.[...]

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Friday Night at 8: Heritage

Obligatory YouTube -- The Harptones "OOH Wee Baby":I was reading NLinStPaul's essay, Full-Blooded Americans and I read the linked article as well as the comments in the article, most of which agreed that heritage and culture and background were very[...]

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Friday Orchid Blogging

Renanthera

I took this shot at a show a while back. It's stunning. And ungrowable, by me at least. I wouldn't even dare. You have to grow them in wood slat baskets. Yeah, right. It's hard enough explaining the orchid lights (read: pot lights) to the neighbors. I don't need wood slatted baskets hanging from the ceiling. Anyway, this is truly one of my favorites. Exotic, stunning, creepy, but also beautiful. Enjoy :-)

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Iraq/Arab Papers Sat: Army Enters Sadr City

According to al-Jazeera and Elaph, the truce agreement signed last week to end the battles in Sadr City may have finally entered into effect.

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http://www.iraqslogger.com/index.php/post/5834

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LOVE and War

{As I've just posted on a number of interactive blog sites}

Daniel Zwerdling, of NPR, continues his reporting on the Treatment of our returning Military Troops, you know who they are, maybe, those who those 'Support The Troops' magnetic ribbons, now rarely seen, are meant for. Or the significance of those 'Lapel Flag Pins' the politicians and some others harp about, the politicians who Praised a Coming Invasion of anothers little Country but didn't have the the time, nor will, to do their jobs in Oversite, Funding, and simple Investigation!

There's a formidable group of warriors out there - and they're fighting America's military. Spouses of troops who have come back from the war with serious mental health problems have made it their mission to force the military to give the troops the help they need.

In the process, they've transformed themselves from "the silent ranks," as the military traditionally calls wives, into vocal and effective activists.

Why are these wives, and some husbands, Fighting for what is Due, from a Country that Cheered on an Invasion and Occupation of an Innocent Country and People!

Where are the 'Lapel Flag Pin' wearers, the ones Hired to Represent?

Military Wives Fight Army to Help Husbands

It's left to those who understand their Love for their partners who now are battling the demons inside, brought on by the Death and Destruction of War and Occupation. Partners who cannot wage the battles of their memories by themselves, that Love brings on a strenght and focus to do the Fighting Needed, fighting that should have to be done!

You can Listen to Zwerdlings latest outstanding report from NPR's All Things Considered by clicking on the link which will bring up the NPR Player.

Tammie LeCompte meticulously filed every Army document about Ryan LeCompte in chronological order in binders. Senate aides say these bulging binders helped convince them that Army officials were mistreating her husband.

Tammie, and her husband, two tour Iraq Veteran, are the main subjects of this recent report, but they are the voices of the many who are finding themselves in roles never expected!

Carissa Picard, founder of a national group called Military Spouses for Change, has never met Tammie LeCompte, but she recently launched a Web site {their recent interactive blog} specifically to teach spouses how to pressure the military to give proper care to returning troops with health problems. Picard says Tammie's own battle reflects how wives across the country have transformed themselves into advocates in order to save their own husbands.

Any military/veterans wives, husbands or family members feel free to visit the Blog Link and sign up to use and view, Carissa and the others would Welcome you.

By the time Ryan LeCompte was transferred to Walter Reed Army Hospital in late 2007, he was hardly walking or talking - or even eating on his own. He spent most of his time slumped, staring at the floor.

Click on the link above to listen to how Ryan, through neglect of the Military, VA, and Country, got to the point of this description of what Zwerdling found when visiting Ryan.

Click on the link above that to visit the NPR page to read more and find the backlinks as well.

By late last year, Tammie seemed on the verge of a breakdown. She says she was borrowing money from relatives and friends. She looked and sounded exhausted, as she juggled raising their children and fighting the Army - and serving as a full-time nurse for Ryan. "I've got too many worries," she said at the time, fighting back tears. "I'm worried about my husband. I'm worried about my kids. And there's not 10 of me. I'm only one person."

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"Media Matters"; by Jamison Foser

Thumbs on the scaleDuring a speech to the Israeli parliament yesterday morning, President Bushattacked Barack Obama, comparing him to Nazi appeasers for the Illinois senator'swillingness to hold discussions with Iran.One problem: Bush's speech came just hours after The WashingtonPost reported thatBush's defense secretary, Robert Gates, saidthat the United States needs to "sit downand talk with" Iran. Not only that, Gates added, "We can't go to adiscussion and be completely the[...]

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Reid, Senate Dems Win FEC Standoff

The long standoff over Bush's FEC nominee, Hans von Spakovsky--Bush's chief operative on voter suppression--has ended with a win for the Dems. Spakovsky has withdrawn his name from consideration.

The move follows Harry Reid's offer earlier this week:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday that President Bush has two options to break the ongoing standoff with Democrats over nominations to the Federal Election Commission: either withdraw the controversial nomination of Hans von Spakovsky or force Senate Republicans to agree to votes on individual FEC nominees.

"Despite your commitment that you would accept and agree to individual votes on each of the pending nominations, including Mr. von Spakovsky's, Republican Senate leaders indicated last week that they intend to continue to block such votes," Reid said in a letter to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten.

Here's Reid's statement on today's news:

"I welcome the President's decision to withdraw the controversial nomination of Mr. von Spakovsky.  It is an action I have repeatedly urged the President to take for more than six months.  Democrats stood united in their opposition to von Spakovsky because of his long and well-documented history of working to suppress the rights of minorities and the elderly to vote.  He was not qualified to hold any position of trust in our government.

"His withdrawal today is a victory for our electoral process.  With Mr. von Spakovsky now removed, I anticipate that we will be able to swiftly put a functioning FEC in place.  That too is what the American people deserve."

(More discussion in Matt Keener's diary.

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Playing The Nazi Card

"See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

- George W. Bush

"How fortunate for leaders that men do not think."

- Adolph Hitler

In an incredible escalation of rhetoric for even the desperate neocon fascist Bushreich the invocation of the shameless accusation that Barack Obama and Democrats are akin to Nazi appeasers in front of the drooling assembly of Likudnik war freaks gathered together in The Knesset to festively celebrate the 60th anniversary of Zionist oppression was a thing of ugliness and awe. The Bush-Cheney-Neocon Axis of Evil have now taken Jew baiting to the apex of audacity and in signature fashion for this bund of criminals who have used 9/11 as an opportunity for their evil little coup d'etat to hijack America in order to implement a domestic police state and wage the war of civilizations against those evil Muslims. Yet another of those timely Osama bin Laden tapes just happened to follow in the wake of Bush's sulfuric vapor trail and he even had his old gray beard back this time.

Now that the dreaded Nazi card is out and flying around I find it entirely appropriate to set the record straight over many misconceptions that may be held about the version of revisionist history that the administration and their army of seasoned propagandists are out there selling and that which is more accurate. I have to give a good deal of credit to bloggers this time as well as to certain progressive radio hosts who had in the past been reluctant to drag the Nazi skeletons out of the Bush family closet. Even the overly cautious Buzzflash who for the second in their second amazing headline of the week (the first was a piece on the lie of Flight 93 and the shoot down order that exposed the great Todd Beamer "Let's Roll" myth as the malodorous bucket of festering pigshit that it always has been) linked to a Huffington Post piece by the great Larisa Alexandrova entitled All The President's Nazis (Real and Imagined) in the form as an open letter to Le Enfant Terrible which was absolutely scathing in a well deserved and long overdue calling out on the filthy fucking double dealing Hitler worshipping swine Bush family. This is particular part is dead on and a shot directly across the bow of Bush's Bismark armada:

Dear Mr. Bush,

Your speech on the Knesset floor today was not only a disgrace; it was nothing short of treachery. Worse still, your exploitation of the Holocaust in a country carved out of the wounds of that very crime, in order to strike a low blow at American citizens whose politics differs from your own is unforgivable and unpardonable.

Then seguing into...

Your family did not stop with supporting fascists and Nazis abroad, did they Mr. Bush? Surely you must know of your grandfather's role in the treasonous plot of 1933 to overthrow democracy in America? Let me remind you Grandpa Bush -- that is to say, your grandfather -- wanted fascism imported into the United States, or as you now call this type of transformation, "exporting democracy." Prescott went so far as to subsidize a coup attempt in order to achieve his dream of a fascist America (see BBC report below):

Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by right-wing American businessmen. The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush's Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression. Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to America.

In other words, not only was your grandfather a self-professed fascist, he was a Nazi sympathizer and a war profiteer who should have stood trial at the Hague instead of buying his way into the US Senate. He was also a traitor, twice over.

And in beautifully closing the piece Larisa went for the throat...

Yes, you are an anti-Semite

Would you say no, you are not an anti-Semite? Consider your own words when you thought no one was keeping score:

"You know what I'm gonna tell those Jews when I get to Israel, don't you Herman?" a then Governor George W. Bush allegedly asked a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman.

When the journalist, Ken Herman, replied that he did not know, Bush reportedly delivered the punch line: "I'm telling 'em they're all going to hell."

Only an anti-Semite would think this type of humor is acceptable. Did you tell the Jews of Israel they were going to hell? No, instead, you told them that American Democrats are Nazi sympathizers and in an act of sheer indecency, the right wing Likud party orchestrated the greatest applause you ever got. For shame!

What this blind adoration finally proves to me is that the right-wing regime that has overtaken Israel cares nothing for its people, its heritage, and the tragic history that they now honor by applauding a man whose family-fortune was built on the bodies of their loved ones. Like their Republican (and Lieberman) counterparts in the United States, Likud does not represent its people, rather, it represents its owners. Likud has traded Israel, its Jews, their heritage and history for the same golden calf purchased and sold by the far-right wing in the United States.

I am ashamed of you Mr. Bush. I am ashamed of those who applauded your political porn played out against the hallowed backdrop of the Holocaust. I am ashamed of those reporters with you, who between them could not muster the moral courage to call you out on your ugly rhetoric and ask you about your own family Nazi ties. You are, sir, the most abhorrent human being of my lifetime. I dare say, in the lifetime of this nation.

Now THAT was an impressive fucking blast and long overdue. Bush has really outdid himself this time but we have all known for years just what sort of a fucked up subhuman walking, talking poster boy for abortion but this is truly fucking outrageous even by Bush's standards. The man is a stinking, gut sucking vulture with the morals of a dirt-hugging Texas rattlesnake and a soul so dark and fetid that Hell wouldn't take him because even Satan has some standards unlike the scumbags who run the Republican party.

But I digress...

Anyhow, let's start with the Nazi thing itself because Emperor Bush of all people should be intimately familiar with this because it was his granddaddy, Prescott Bush who personally profited from his work and association with the Union Banking Corporation which was a conduit for businesses that financed the rise of the murderous regime of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party. So egregious was their assistance and complicity in building the murderous war machine of the Third Reich that UBC was shut down and had their assets seized by the government under the Trading With the Enemies Act . No wonder that the Bush family and the extremist right-wing fascists who control the Republican one-party government has so much hatred towards President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A government that the Bushes have been major players in and have had at least one member in control or in a position to influence the Oval Office and U.S. policy for nineteen (at least officially) of the last twenty seven years of the period of the decline of the American Empire of stupidity, sin and shit.

This is fascinating stuff that unfortunately due to the nature of our pathetic national media is little known and normally would earn one the stigma of being affixed with the dreaded 'tin foil hat' but it is all out there for those seeking to know the truth about the true history of this most despicable and treacherous of American families that are the Bushes. Grandpa Bush and his company served as agents for Fritz Thyssen the German industrialist known as "Hitler's Angel" who was indispensable in providing the financial backing and carried clout that would create what was then the strongest military machine in the world as well as the most bellicose. While the Bush-Nazi links received no attention domestically in our neutered, corporatist media here is an article from the London Guardian "How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power" and here is a link to another excellent piece by investigative journalist John Buchanan that is entitled Bush Nazi Link Confirmed that was published in the New Hampshire Gazette. The Nazi skeleton is but one of a great number in the Bush family closets and potentially the most damning of all, especially in the face of the strident language used by the current Bush regime in seeking to marginalize dissenters and tar them as ideological sympathizers with those who were appeasers and facilitators of the most vile despotic regime of the last century. Incidentally there is a lot more regarding dealings with the Nazis by both the Bush family and their cronies as well as American corporations and the intelligence community that granted amnesty to former war criminals to use them as assets in Eastern Europe as well as Central and South America. But that is a bigger can of worms than I intend to open in this post so it will have to wait for another time.

And now that the Nazi card has been played in a most ostentatious manner by the Bushists maybe it is finally time to begin to bring up that which is most obvious in that it is the current leadership of this country that has far more in common with the Nazis than most would be able to accept. See if any of this sounds familiar: The nation's leader seized extraordinary powers after a 'terrorist' attack; a leader who holds a cult-like sway over a large percentage of the population and was not elected by a majority when he came to power; leader belonged to a secret society (Thule / Skull and Bones); a special act was passed enabling the leader to subvert the constitution during a prolonged state of emergency; a vaguely defined enemy; surveillance and searches without warrants; the use of religion as justification (Gott Mit Uns) and the propagation of a belief that God had chosen the leader and the people for a special purpose; control of the press; ever present propaganda; the use of the term "Homeland" (Heimat) to describe the country; us versus them ("with us or against us") mentality; the persecution of homosexuals and other minorities deemed inferior; organized crackdowns on liberals and intellectuals; the changing of the definitions of science and history to suit the agenda of the regime; the consolidation of power through corporate alliances; construction of detention facilities for vague 'new programs'; centralized security apparatus; labeling of critics and dissenters as traitors and using ethnic divisiveness to identify enemies of the state.

All that is missing now are the organized pogroms but with the shrill voices of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Michael Savage and the rest of their ilk those could be coming very, very soon. Especially if the polls continue to show a loss of Republican iron-fisted, authoritarian rule once and for all along with the renunciation of the quisling accomodationist DLC because the one thing that the Bush administration and their neocon allies absolutely cannot risk under any circumstances is that all of their hard work in constructing a more subtle sequel to Prescott Bush's buddy Hitler's 1000 year reich will have been for naught and more than a few of those pigfuckers may just end up doing the air dance at some future version of the Nuremburg Trials.

The ultimate horror would be another terrorist attack in the run up to the elections which would allow for Bush and Cheney to implement every provision of the NSPD 51 that would effectively end America as we know it for the rest of our already shot and increasingly miserable lives. Alarmist? I hardly think so given the loathsome actions of this administration and the Republican establishment whose actions have been, well...Naziesque since September 11, 2001. As the wise man George Santayana once said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" and has there ever been a country whose lack of knowledge of the past and the millions who wear their willful ignorance as if it were a badge of honor quite like America in 2006? Here is a very brief history lesson.

Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, his Nazi party was a minority in the legislative body not possessing the two thirds vote that it would take to activate the 'enabling act' which would allow for the leader to pass laws in a time of war or national emergency without the approval of parliament. Hitler wanted to assume total control in order to declare war on the terrorists and the enemies within who were seeking to destroy the German way of life.On February 27, 1933 the building in which the German parliament met was set ablaze under s mysterious circumstances and a man who was a known Communist was found naked and cowering behind the building, taken into custody and eventually executed after a trumped up trial in which the Nazi demagogues railed against the 'terrorist' threat. The party and their leader then used rhetoric, fear and propaganda in order to convince the majority of the populace that they were the only ones capable of shielding them from harm; there was only one catch, they had to forfeit their rights and place their trust the party in order to be safe. This event is commonly known as the Reichstag Fire.

Immediately thereafter, Hitler, Goebbels,Goering and the rest of the extreme right-wing Nazi party used fear mongering to declare a state of emergency which led to the activation of the enabling act that gave Hitler dictatorial powers by allowing the leader to reign unequivocally without the vital check of the oversight of the legislature in the Reichstag...including the powers to conduct secret surveillance against Germans under the guise of protecting them from the 'terrorists' Once the normal democratic processes had been subverted opponents were quickly silenced (either out of fear, execution or having their tickets stamped to the one of the many concentration camps springing up throughout the land) and the legislature and courts were rendered irrelevant to the whims of the leader and the Kool Aid drinking sycophants who were held enthralled by the cult of personality while the remainder of the population was terrorized into compliance and capitulation by the leader's unchecked powers and his willingness to use police state tactics to eradicate all opposition.And the rest as they say is history.

And I will close with an extended passage from Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free which should send a chill up the spines of sane Americans:

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after1933,between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing to do with knowing one is governing.

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it."

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."

You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the universe was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was "expected to" participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. "One had no time to think. There was so much going on." "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your "little men", your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies", without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?"

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

The neo Nazi, Bush administration, their backs to the wall chose to play the Nazi card and now that it is out it is fair game and Americans should take the time to diligently research just how much that those scoundrels and black hearted bastards truly have in common with Hitler's goons. Quite a fucking bit and it's time to stop fucking around with Godwin's Law and start calling a fucking spade a fucking spade for once in our goddamned lives.

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http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=21814

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Outrage overload continues

http://www.lastchancedemocracycafe.com/?p=1370

You have to give George W. Bush credit, in a ?My, that leech certainly sucks blood well,? sort of way. Just when you think he can?t get any lower, he proves you wrong.

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Hahaha! Assassinations Are Funny!

Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.

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Can someone explain to me what the fuck Mike Huckabee thought he was doing here? This is a joke? Fantasizing about someone aiming a gun at possibly the first black president of the United States? And note that he's in Louisville, Kentucky; deep in the heart of  Hillary's (ahem) "key demographic."

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http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=21813

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