- [FOR “FUNNY STUDENT QUOTES” SCROLL TO END OF POST].
- “Play it again, Sam!”
TRUTH WILL OUT
So, it’s pretty clear. Obama is not Progressive. He’s not a moderate either, but a corporatist similar to Bill Clinton. Obama favors corporatist policy in every significant decision. Three recent examples illustrate the point:
A Bomber Jacket Doesn’t Cover the Blood by Norman Solomon
President Obama has taken a further plunge into the kind of war abyss that consumed predecessors named Johnson, Nixon and Bush. READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/29
Obama Puts Pesticide Pusher in Charge of Agricultural Trade Relations the Center for Biological Diversity
WASHINGTON- Sidestepping a stalled Senate confirmation vote, yesterday President Obama recess-appointed Islam Siddiqui to be chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the U.S. trade representative. Dr. Siddiqui’s nomination was held up in the Senate and was opposed by the Center for Biological Diversity and more than 80 other environmental, small-farm, and consumer groups. More than 90,000 concerned citizens contacted the White House and Senate to oppose the nomination. Siddiqui is a former pesticide lobbyist and is currently vice president of science and regulatory affairs at CropLife America, a biotech and pesticide trade group that lobbies to weaken environmental laws. READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/29-0
Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Looters
Obama has filled his new ‘debt commission’ with Wall Street insiders determined to gut Social Security.
The most generous bank bailout in history has amplified Wall Street’s considerable political influence, and the economic implications of this democratic calamity go well beyond bloated bonuses. Over the past year, the financial propaganda machine has set its sights on Social Security, launching a massive assault on one of the nation’s most important economic programs. But rather than push back against the flawed economic assumptions of the nation’s financial elite, President Barack Obama appears to be advancing their arguments, and is now poised to repeat George W. Bush’s politically perilous efforts to gut Social Security. READ MORE: http://www.alternet.org/economy/146183/obama_packs_debt_commission_with_social_security_looters
MY TWO-BITS
Obama’s pretty much off on the wrong course. He appears to sprinkle “public goodies” up to and including the health care insurance act, which achieve limited but not system change, while shoving our government ever more firmly into corporatist pockets. He listens to Robert Rubin, Ben Bernowski, and Timothy Geithner, the corporate tools who crafted and executed the big rip-off that plunged our country into near-receivership for Bush Jr.. Obama is using the same old tools to craft and execute a brand new disaster.
No special foresight or vision is necessary to see the probable outcome of Obama’s already failed – before even implemented, in some cases – policies and programs. Perhaps our asses will be held up a short while longer to get Obama safely through his presidency and out of office, before we fall on them. His actions are, however, without future, and there is no posterity in them. He plays for the moment, walking with increasing stiffness. He doesn’t bend much any more and turns his whole body and not just his head. Perhaps the candidate of change has been replaced by a corporate android, and the real Obama is locked up in the Whitehouse basement. Perhaps.
Obama’s corporatist allegiance is more significant now because of the time in our history. We are experiencing massive change that we cannot control, but only modify and ameliorate, if possible. In the midst of crisis, he is throwing buckets of gasoline onto the fire. If he capitulates to the worst corporatist thieves every time, we’re screwed blue and tattooed. We might as well give up, but “I hope for the best,” as Jacques Cousteau once said, “although I can’t say why.”
What must be done? Three signs are in my office: “Persevere;” taped to a nearby bookshelf; the phrase “Eschew Surplusage,” Mark Twain’s advice for successful writing – also life as it turns out; and, “Plan your work; work your plan,” self-explanatory: choose a direction and go there.
All sorts of suck-swampwater things need immediate attention. How should we grapple with them? First we list them, then we figure out what to do about them. We will call this our Progressive Agenda. Let’s tell everybody what we’re all about. Let’s come together on a Platform statement that really means something, then develop the legalese and workplans needed to implement it. We must also raise a Progressive Party the likes of which cannot be stopped by the tricked voting machines of the corporatist economic elite who would be our new aristocracy. They may be surprised to know this, but there are a lot of us who despise and will actively resist the Corporate State of America.
Our people must really galvanize, recruit and organize. We are fighting a desperate struggle for our republic. It has been battered, watered down, sullied and insulted, corrupted and trashed, but it is ours and we must do what we can to save it and make it whole and free again. What is a higher long-term priority?
No short-term priority is higher than freeing our airwaves and stopping the rightwing blitz on our democratic debate. The rightist S.O.B.s are moving faster now, spinning ever closer to violence. This is a tricky patch for the republic and the corporatists and tea partiers. According to the old Nazi play book, the rightists need to kill someone to stir the base to an eruption of righteous rage and revenge. Once the magic wall is breached, more blood can and will be shed. The Economic Elite assume they can control this mob. They assume they can control Sarah Palin – she is stupid and probably insane, but they don’t weigh her radical religious zealotry. This bunch of elitists is no wiser about such things than the corporatists who appointed Adolph Hitler Chancellor of Germany seventy-seven years ago. There is an old Chinese saying: “Once every two hundred years, an irate mob shows up on the steps of the Forbidden City.”
That whole Nazi thing? The military-industrial complex of the “Greatest Generation” brought it back home with them after the Second World War; it has been festering and spreading throughout America’s system ever since. Robert Woodward’s book Veil about the CIA clearly shows the progression of “ends justify means” thinking.
Which brings back Obama’s unfortunate corporatism. The corporatist agenda does not favor human survival any more than it does the rest of creation. It is by its very nature “consuming,” and once having consumed without having sufficiently conserved or reserved, it will eat itself out of house and home, and starve to death in the wasteland. End of species. We’ve also changed the planet so much that the scientists are going to declare a new geological epoch; we shall pass from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity is a major factor in changing the planet’s climate and geology. Humanity as a terrestrial disease is about to climax like a great festering boil on the face of the earth, yet the president appoints a leading pesticide lobbyist and opponent of environmental regulation to chief agriculture negotiator in the office of the U.S. trade representative.
Not to worry, we’ve got the problem in the new Toyota fixed. Bio-diesel too.
Climate change is accelerating. The outlook is grim. Oh, look who’s on the Kardashians! Pass the Muscatel.
A “HAPPIER” NOTE:
Who says our teenagers aren’t creative?
Actual Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays
- Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
- His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
- He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a Guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the danger of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
- She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
- She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
- Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
- He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
- The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.
- The little boat drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
- McBride fell twelve stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
- From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
- Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
- Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m., traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
- They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
- John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.
- The plan was simple, like my bother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
- He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a landmine or something.
We must do something about education. Catch ya later, j
- Empire Building and Trust-Busting
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