I agree with Krugman, but I’ll show you the photo that made me lose faith in Bush:
Photo by: Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle / AP
It is singer Harry Connick, Jr. praying over the dead body of a grandmother in the devastation of the New Orleans Superdome. TEN THOUSAND AMERICANS were stranded in the Superdome, for days, without plumbing, trash disposal, even fresh air.
Our President was up in the air, looking weak and impotent, while a singer was down below with his hand on the dead body of someone’s mother and grandmother, giving her a blessing.
Texas is infamous for running the largest slave markets in the United States. I understand that many neighborhoods had this type of covenant, but this one kept it until 2000? Only 8 years ago? No one caught it in the 43 years that it was in force? It went into force in 1957. It wasn’t stricken with Civil Rights legal changes?
I wandered thru the Dallas Freedman’s Cemetery,
which commemorates slaves who were freed.
You might not remember, but Texas didn’t free its slaves when Lincoln did TWO AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER. Texas waited until June 19th, 1865, hence the Juneteenth Celebrations.
This cemetery is near a freeway. Not in a gated community. These statues are at the front, outside the Cemetery: they represent the magnificence of Africans on their own land.
And here are the representations of what happened, when they were stolen away, dragged onto slave boats and carried to America.
Here’s the statue that sits at the center of this special place of remembrance:
Because this history is still so raw, and our Former President is buying into an enclave where the only allowed non-whites were live-in servants when he was put in as President 8 short years ago, Bush should publicly address and disavow the history of racism at his new home. 15 of 17 homeowners signed a petition to strike the offensive clause from the Meaders Estate ownership covenant in 2000 and it was so stricken in 2001. You can read the original covenant and its 2001 addendum, here.
Traffic has increased, as gawkers look on the President’s future home… Here’s what police say: “When the Bushes are here full time, I imagine we’ll be here full time,” said Officer Michael Bratcher of the Dallas Police Department, who was directing traffic.
I wonder where the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas City Government were until 2000?
The Big Three CEOs — Richard Wagoner of General Motors, left, Robert Nardelli of Chrysler and Alan Mulally of Ford — went begging on the Hill. (By Chip Somodevilla — Getty Images)
There are 24 daily nonstop flights from Detroit to the Washington area. Richard Wagoner, Alan Mulally and Robert Nardelli probably should have taken one of them.
Instead, the chief executives of the Big Three automakers opted to fly their company jets to the capital for their hearings this week before the Senate and House — an ill-timed display of corporate excess for a trio of executives begging for an additional $25 billion from the public trough this week.
The photo of the Auto Execs caught my eye.
Have you noticed lately how the huge majority of business leaders asking for bailouts are old, white guys? Now my dad was an old white guy, my brothers are white guys, my sons will be old white guys, but its such a cliche in business that the old white guys parade around at the top of corporations, unable to understand or have empathy for their customers.
These guys had thousands of chances to whip their companies into new paradigms. They’ve known we need smaller cars with better gas mileage. But they wanted to sell big, huge tanks. So they did!
Now they’re flying private jets, at a fuel/carrying cost of $20,000, to ask for bailout money from overburdened Americans, the same Americans who’ve been looking for smaller, less costly cars! Excuse me? NO.
They should have taken Greyhound. Or carpooled. But they don’t pay their own transportation costs, so they have no idea how the rest of us live.
I took this photo at my kid’s sporting event: a huge luxury SUV, with GOP and Support our Troops stickers, pulled up and onto a curbed red zone, so the driver wouldn’t have to park in the parking lot like the rest of the families.
Same thoughtlessness as these auto execs, flying their huge planes in while their employees are wondering how they’ll survive the winter.
We don’t torture, according to White House Press Secretary Dana Perino in a press conference today. For the umpteenth time, she states:
Hmmm: we only ‘interrogate terrorists to protect the country from imminent terrorist attack’. That’s why you see these soldiers SMILING as they taunt their captives.
Bush says ‘this government does not torture people’:
I know we’re supposed to feel ’safer’, but I find it extremely creepy that our government spends so much time and money on this technology, instead of green infrastructure, or feeding our hungry, or providing health insurance to uninsured American children…
The Secret Service is tasked with protecting the President of the United States from assailants; and given that President-elect Obama has already been the target of assassination plots they may have their work cut out after January. But they have more than earpiece radios and armored limos to help them; the Secret Service can call on the very latest technology. Documents from a recent court case indicate that they have advanced directed-energy devices which are highly classified.
You may remember Donald Friedman, who claims that government agencies are misusing non-lethal directed-energy weapons. It’s easy to dismiss him as a crank. But his obsessive digging has turned up valuable information. For instance, one of his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests unearthed a 1998 U.S. Army program looking at a microwave device to beam sound directly into the target’s skull which the rest of us had missed. (The same technology underlies the Medusa non-lethal weapon.)
Now he’s found something else. Friedman’s current court case involves attempts to extract information about any directed-energy weapons such as lasers and microwaves used by the Secret Service. Do they really have anything of the kind? A “Motion for an Enlargement of Time” (in other words, a request for a few more weeks) by the Secret Service’s attorney indicates that they have something, and it’s pretty secret:
“Plaintiff’s FOIA request is for document [sic] concerning directed energy technology that is very sensitive. Some of this documents [sic] pertain to research conducted by divisions within defendant agency that is used to carry out its mandate to protect very high government officials. In fact, in one case, the documents… could not be mailed but had to be hand carried interstate.”
So what is this “sensitive” technology? We don’t know for sure, naturally. But we can sure speculate…
Now, we’ve talked before about the Secret Service’s interest in laser dazzlers as a means of protecting the White House against suicide attacks by light aircraft, dating back to 1998. We don’t know if dazzlers have ever been deployed, but that would certainly explain some of the secrecy.
Portable dazzlers would also be a good way of dealing with potential snipers without the risk of harming bystanders. Other agencies also have an interest in covert dazzlers. Ex MI6 agent David Tomlinson claims a laser strobe was proposed for an assassination attempt on Slobodan Milosevic in 1992 by dazzling his chauffeur at a crucial point and causing him to crash. (Conspiracy theorists claim that a laser dazzler was used to assassinate Diana, Princess of Wales — but any bright flashes more likely came from photographer’s flashguns.)
A portable version of the truck-mounted Active Denial System — the Pentagon’s “pain ray” — might be used to similar effect. It could cause an assailant to flinch for a vital second, giving agents an opportunity to get the President out of the line of fire, without having to shoot into a crowd. Raytheon has been working on a rifle-sized version of the Active Denial System for some years, but nothing has been heard of it recently.
Another likely candidate is a directed-energy device to neutralize suspected improvised explosive devices, or IEDs — something that produces an intense, narrow beam of microwaves to fry the electronics. Tomlinson also claimed that MI6 has “sophisticated radio transmitters that would knock out the electronics of the limo at the press of a button, causing the airbags to inflate.”
Presidential protection is likely to include a range of jammers to stop remote bomb detonation, and possibly remote-controlled aircraft attacks. With all this jamming, interference can occur and make radio communication impossible — if you leave any frequency clear, the bad guys might use it to send a detonation signal. So perhaps the Secret Service may have a microwave voice-transmission system as an emergency backup when radio communication is impossible. This would allow them to beam instructions to agents at a distance. At a pinch it could also be used to distract a would-be assassin — having a voice suddenly booming inside your head should put off most snipers (though they might have a few voices in there already).
We know that the Air Force has looked at microwave sound as a non-lethal weapon, and long-range acoustic systems like LRAD are already in use by the military and others. So a Secret Service microwave sound system is not totally, completely out of the question.
Donald Friedman may yet manage to get more information about secret directed-energy weapons. All we know so far is that they exist… Unless anyone out there can tell us more?
I’m not feeling safer. According to an Amnesty International blog by Dalia Hashad, marketing of this new Taser system to police is going to further frighten Americans from dissenting.
I believe that Obama’s win shows America’s desire to get back to an interactive democracy. This crazy apparatus should not be part of community policing.
Here’s the perfect video of the stupidity of Tasers, from FAILBlog. Notice the cop who tases himself is tasing someone who is MOTIONLESS, ON THE GROUND!
The US government has been jerry-rigging statistics like the CPI for a decade, effectively lying to us about the financial instability of our money system. According to the government’s abandoned formula, we’ve been in a recession since at least 2007, but have been stumbling for years. So a governmental admission like the one on Huffington Post today is insulting to the middle class who work hard, pay taxes and struggle to get by, because they’ve been ‘hurtling’ for years.
In his book, BAD MONEY, Kevin Phillips says: ‘The debt the United States has been piling on in the last few years has provided only 30-40 percent as much stimulus per dollar to the national economy as did the debt added twenty-five or forty years ago. Why? Because money borrowed in 1970 or 1984 to be spent on factories, new jet fighter aircraft, teachers, or interstate highways had a lot more grassroots impact than money borrowed by ten thousand hedge funds to double the leverage of their various self-serving speculations.”
My read from this book is that Phillips says that the CPI is now made up of a strange mix of things to avoid showing that regular Americans have been suffering the ravages of inflation for years: Instead of counting in your mortgage payment, property tax, home insurance and declining property values, the CPI includes a formula for ‘what you could rent your home for’. It does not count things like increased cost of travel, food and living expenses but does give itself a deduction for the money we’d spend if banks charged us more fees. Its ridiculous.
We need a simple message from some politician that will tell the truth: “Hey, America? This is how it is. We’ve overspent. We have no money. We know you have very little money and that we’ve wasted your tax dollars. But we’re in a recession, have been for a few years. The way out is going to involve a bit of sacrifice from you and us. You hold your belt tight but also take care of your neighbor. We’ll stop spending on crazy things and we’ll make sure basic services are kept up and that we put all our weight behind what will get us out of this and so many other messes, GREEN JOBS. We’ll bail out parts of the auto industry, but only those who make and sell GREEN CARS. No more tax deductions for anything but GREEN. No more throwing good money after bad. That way, you can feed yourself and your family. The economy will have a boom. Global warming will arrest. We’ll slow our dependence on foreign oil. And money will flow into the pockets of workers. Where it will be spent back in the economy.
US Corporations go around the world and take the most valuable assets from many foreign countries, then sell the products and pocket the profit. The US does not acknowledge that other countries own their water, diamonds, gold, oil, seeds, rainforest land, etc. We go in, set up huge private security perimeters, milk the asset and are SHOCKED when brought to the table for negotiations about how to share the wealth we’re taking from the indigenous peoples.
Here’s Sarah Palin, explaining that ‘each Alaskan owns’ her state’s oil reserves and should be paid when oil companies suck it out of the ground.
Hey, wait a minute! Alaskans are Americans. I’m an American. She’s taking my tax dollars for the Bridge to Nowhere, Why don’t I get some of that money?
And wouldn’t America be a better global citizen if our businesses and government paid citizens of other countries when we appropriated their most valuable assets?
The world is becoming more and more connected, while some Americans are trying to create false divisions between us. Elizabeth Dole’s new ad made me laugh! GODLESS!!! GODLESS!!! If you say it enough times, its like yelling FIRE in a crowded North Carolina theater.
Its not her opponent’s voice yelling GODLESS at the end, its an unidentified disembodied voice.
I imagine that North Carolina, with its tobacco farms growing for an addicted worldwide audience (http://www.agr.state.nc.us/markets/commodit/horticul/tobacco/) and North Carolina’s tobacco economic impact at over $7.0 billion, is as concerned with the economy, loss of water due to global warming and the global financial crisis as with the GODLESS!
This is what happens when previously vital and creative leaders, like Elizabeth Dole, leave all their values stashed in a locker somewhere in the hopes that they can scare the voting public into re-electing them. They forget to lead and instead stand in the dark yelling FIRE!
