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WilliamPitt
WilliamPitt's Journal
WilliamPitt's Journal
June 30, 2012
There are times when I just...
Duelling concepts.
From the comments section of my most recent Truthout article: "i am thankfull that i am one of the people who have been brain washed by fox and friends, at least now i know the truth about this president of ours. A socialist, lier. At least fox gives both side of the news not just the kind people want to hear. The only person i fear is this dictator that we have leading this great country of ours , and bringing it down from the most respected country in the world to where most people in the world hate the United States. If your wise you shouls listen to Fox. Because if Obama gets elected again, this countr is DOOMED!!!!!"
From history, by way of Winston Churchill: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
From me: (facepalmheaddeskheaddeskfacepalmderpderpderpderp)
Yeah, no, really, that happened. Again.
June 29, 2012
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Friday 29 July 2012
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
- Oscar Wilde
I was polishing the local bartop with my elbows the other day next to a naturalized Irishman who works as an electrician. He asked what I did for a living, and I winced a little before telling him, "I write politics," because I knew what was coming. As ever, when I let people know what I do while in the confines of a drinking establishment, I was immediately subjected to a sustained violation of The First Law Of The Bar: "Thou shalt not talk of religion or politics here."
Such moments are normally excruciating for me, pretty much entirely because the absolute last thing I want to do while nursing a whiskey and watching a ballgame is talk shop. This time, however, was different. My new friend regaled me with a succinct, accurate and scathing assessment of his adopted country - "Millions of people need work, the infrastructure of the country is falling down around our ears, but no one in power seems able or willing to put one and one together and solve two problems with one stroke," he railed at one point - before summing it all up with a single, perfect, devastating brick.
"America," he said, "has a war on drugs that doesn't work. It has a war on poverty that doesn't work. It has a war on crime that has only managed to fill its prisons. It has wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that didn't work. You want to fix everything that has gone wrong? There's only one answer: America must declare war on America."
My new friend did not pay for another drink the rest of the night.
Absolutely God damned right.
America must declare war on America, against the fusillade of divisive nonsense that passes for political discourse these days, provided with full corporate sponsorship by a small cabal of rich people via the "mainstream" news media they own from top to bottom. Americans must declare war on America, on the America this fortunate few would create with zeroes to the left of the decimal on their secret donation checks, on the America these reavers and traitors seek to make in their own corrupted, bloated image.
I have made this point time and time and time again, but it bears repeating once more: the single greatest strength the far right and their paymasters enjoy is their utter and complete lack of shame. They will say anything - literally anything - to gain an advantage in any debate, and be damned to whoever takes a screwing in the process.
(snip)
As if all this were not enough already, that small cabal who helped deliver us to this diseased and deranged estate has the perfect answer to all the problems before us: a plastic-fantastic fraud of a multi-millionaire, named after a kitchen utensil, who was against everything he stands for before he was for it before he was against it, who made his money killing American jobs, whose wife tries to connect with the common people by wearing $900 t-shirts on national television, and whose family claimed a $70,000 tax deduction for owning a doped-up horse.
America must declare war on America. You, me, and everyone we know with brain one in our heads and the best interests of the country at heart need to charge the ramparts, stand our post, and refuse to take even one step back.
The Supreme Court is rewriting the Constitution on the back of a corporate pay stub, Congress has made itself more useless than nipples on an ice cream cone, the President of the United States has decided he can kill where and who he wishes with a video game, and Colorado is on fire even as the "mainstream" news media gives respectful ear to a Republican presidential candidate who argues that firing firefighters is a bully idea and the answer to all that ails us.
To a great many people's surprise, a majority of the Supreme Court - led by Chief Justice Roberts, of all people - ruled in favor of the Affordable Care Act on Thursday morning. For many Americans, this was a big victory and a tremendous relief, but in truth, the law does not nearly go far enough. Senator Bernie Sanders said it best: "In my view, while the Affordable Care Act is an important step in the right direction and I am glad that the Supreme Court upheld it, we ultimately need to do better. If we are serious about providing high-quality, affordable healthcare as a right, not a privilege, the real solution to America's health care crisis is a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. Until then, we will remain the only major nation that does not provide health care for every man, woman and child as a right of citizenship."
This issue is one of a multitude facing this nation today, and there is only one way to get it done.
America must declare war on America.
Stand your post.
The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10033-america-must-declare-war-on-america
America Must Declare War on America
America Must Declare War on AmericaBy William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Friday 29 July 2012
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
- Oscar Wilde
I was polishing the local bartop with my elbows the other day next to a naturalized Irishman who works as an electrician. He asked what I did for a living, and I winced a little before telling him, "I write politics," because I knew what was coming. As ever, when I let people know what I do while in the confines of a drinking establishment, I was immediately subjected to a sustained violation of The First Law Of The Bar: "Thou shalt not talk of religion or politics here."
Such moments are normally excruciating for me, pretty much entirely because the absolute last thing I want to do while nursing a whiskey and watching a ballgame is talk shop. This time, however, was different. My new friend regaled me with a succinct, accurate and scathing assessment of his adopted country - "Millions of people need work, the infrastructure of the country is falling down around our ears, but no one in power seems able or willing to put one and one together and solve two problems with one stroke," he railed at one point - before summing it all up with a single, perfect, devastating brick.
"America," he said, "has a war on drugs that doesn't work. It has a war on poverty that doesn't work. It has a war on crime that has only managed to fill its prisons. It has wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that didn't work. You want to fix everything that has gone wrong? There's only one answer: America must declare war on America."
My new friend did not pay for another drink the rest of the night.
Absolutely God damned right.
America must declare war on America, against the fusillade of divisive nonsense that passes for political discourse these days, provided with full corporate sponsorship by a small cabal of rich people via the "mainstream" news media they own from top to bottom. Americans must declare war on America, on the America this fortunate few would create with zeroes to the left of the decimal on their secret donation checks, on the America these reavers and traitors seek to make in their own corrupted, bloated image.
I have made this point time and time and time again, but it bears repeating once more: the single greatest strength the far right and their paymasters enjoy is their utter and complete lack of shame. They will say anything - literally anything - to gain an advantage in any debate, and be damned to whoever takes a screwing in the process.
(snip)
As if all this were not enough already, that small cabal who helped deliver us to this diseased and deranged estate has the perfect answer to all the problems before us: a plastic-fantastic fraud of a multi-millionaire, named after a kitchen utensil, who was against everything he stands for before he was for it before he was against it, who made his money killing American jobs, whose wife tries to connect with the common people by wearing $900 t-shirts on national television, and whose family claimed a $70,000 tax deduction for owning a doped-up horse.
America must declare war on America. You, me, and everyone we know with brain one in our heads and the best interests of the country at heart need to charge the ramparts, stand our post, and refuse to take even one step back.
The Supreme Court is rewriting the Constitution on the back of a corporate pay stub, Congress has made itself more useless than nipples on an ice cream cone, the President of the United States has decided he can kill where and who he wishes with a video game, and Colorado is on fire even as the "mainstream" news media gives respectful ear to a Republican presidential candidate who argues that firing firefighters is a bully idea and the answer to all that ails us.
To a great many people's surprise, a majority of the Supreme Court - led by Chief Justice Roberts, of all people - ruled in favor of the Affordable Care Act on Thursday morning. For many Americans, this was a big victory and a tremendous relief, but in truth, the law does not nearly go far enough. Senator Bernie Sanders said it best: "In my view, while the Affordable Care Act is an important step in the right direction and I am glad that the Supreme Court upheld it, we ultimately need to do better. If we are serious about providing high-quality, affordable healthcare as a right, not a privilege, the real solution to America's health care crisis is a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. Until then, we will remain the only major nation that does not provide health care for every man, woman and child as a right of citizenship."
This issue is one of a multitude facing this nation today, and there is only one way to get it done.
America must declare war on America.
Stand your post.
The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10033-america-must-declare-war-on-america
June 29, 2012
It's an easy thing to know what you're against, quite another to know what you're for.
What are you for?
June 28, 2012
:large
SCREEN GRAB of CNN's Epic Dewey-Defeats-Truman FAIL
https://twitter.com/dorseyshaw/status/218345509700644865/photo/1/large:large
June 26, 2012
TPM
The progressive activists who put the public option at the heart of the health care reform debate in 2009 and 2010 will return in 2012 to press Democrats to back a single-payer system if the Supreme Court throws out the Affordable Care Act on Thursday.
For progressives, Medicare for all — or a similar approach — was always the ideal way to address the soaring costs and widespread un- and underinsurance that defined the country’s broken health care system. But Democratic leaders believed an approach along the lines of Mitt Romney’s reforms in Massachusetts would stand a better chance of attracting Republican and conservative Democratic support in Congress, and foreclosed on the single-payer model without giving it any legislative consideration.
To keep single-payer supporters in their coalition, though, Democrats pledged to fight for a Medicare-like public option that would allow consumers the opportunity to buy insurance directly from the government. They ultimately abandoned that idea as well.
That’s why the same disappointed activists aren’t sweating Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling. If the health care law fails, they believe it will open up a whole new set of political and substantive opportunities for liberals.
The rest: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/supreme-court-obamacare-single-payer-medicare-for-all-romney.php?ref=fpa
Public Option Advocates To Push Medicare For All If Supreme Court Strikes ‘Obamacare’
Public Option Advocates To Push Medicare For All If Supreme Court Strikes ‘Obamacare’TPM
The progressive activists who put the public option at the heart of the health care reform debate in 2009 and 2010 will return in 2012 to press Democrats to back a single-payer system if the Supreme Court throws out the Affordable Care Act on Thursday.
For progressives, Medicare for all — or a similar approach — was always the ideal way to address the soaring costs and widespread un- and underinsurance that defined the country’s broken health care system. But Democratic leaders believed an approach along the lines of Mitt Romney’s reforms in Massachusetts would stand a better chance of attracting Republican and conservative Democratic support in Congress, and foreclosed on the single-payer model without giving it any legislative consideration.
To keep single-payer supporters in their coalition, though, Democrats pledged to fight for a Medicare-like public option that would allow consumers the opportunity to buy insurance directly from the government. They ultimately abandoned that idea as well.
That’s why the same disappointed activists aren’t sweating Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling. If the health care law fails, they believe it will open up a whole new set of political and substantive opportunities for liberals.
The rest: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/supreme-court-obamacare-single-payer-medicare-for-all-romney.php?ref=fpa
June 20, 2012
#10 will crush you.
21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity
http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/pictures-that-will-restore-your-faith-in-humanity#10 will crush you.
June 20, 2012
“I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released," an expert tells Salon
By Jordan Michael Smith
Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.
The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.
Let’s start there. In 2000 and 2001, the CIA began using Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Afghanistan. “The idea of using UAVs originated in April 2000 as a result of a request from the NSC’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism to the CIA and the Department of Defense to come up with new ideas to go after the terrorists in Afghanistan,” a 2004 document summarizes. The Pentagon approved the plan for surveillance purposes.
And yet, simultaneously, the CIA declared that budget concerns were forcing it to move its Counterterrorism Center/Osama bin Laden Unit from an “offensive” to a “defensive” posture. For the CIA, that meant trying to get Afghan tribal leaders and the Northern Alliance to kill or capture bin Laden, Elias-Sanborn says. “It was forced to be less of a kinetic operation,” she says. “It had to be only for surveillance, which was not what they considered an offensive posture.”
The rest, read it: http://www.salon.com/2012/06/19/new_nsa_docs_reveal_911_truths/
Salon.com: "New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims"
New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims“I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released," an expert tells Salon
By Jordan Michael Smith
Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.
The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.
Let’s start there. In 2000 and 2001, the CIA began using Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Afghanistan. “The idea of using UAVs originated in April 2000 as a result of a request from the NSC’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism to the CIA and the Department of Defense to come up with new ideas to go after the terrorists in Afghanistan,” a 2004 document summarizes. The Pentagon approved the plan for surveillance purposes.
And yet, simultaneously, the CIA declared that budget concerns were forcing it to move its Counterterrorism Center/Osama bin Laden Unit from an “offensive” to a “defensive” posture. For the CIA, that meant trying to get Afghan tribal leaders and the Northern Alliance to kill or capture bin Laden, Elias-Sanborn says. “It was forced to be less of a kinetic operation,” she says. “It had to be only for surveillance, which was not what they considered an offensive posture.”
The rest, read it: http://www.salon.com/2012/06/19/new_nsa_docs_reveal_911_truths/
June 19, 2012
Tahrir Square fills again as protesters contest Egypt's military rule
Thousands of people gathered in Tahrir Square Tuesday to protest a move by Egypt’s military rulers to limit the authority of the incoming president and extend their own power past the end of this month, when they had promised a full handover to a civilian government.
Many of those who turned out were members or supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidate, Mohamed Morsi, has claimed victory in the first presidential race since the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak. Some secular groups joined the protests as well.
Protesters decried the military's power grab, while some celebrated Mr. Morsi's perceived victory with fireworks.
"This is a military coup against the people," said protester Galal Osman. "We want the president that we elected to have all the powers of his office. We want to write a constitution without the military interfering. You can't have 19 unelected men subverting the will of the people."
The rest: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2012/0619/Tahrir-Square-fills-again-as-protesters-contest-Egypt-s-military-rule
...walk like an Egyptian...
...pssst...Tahir Square...again...
Tahrir Square fills again as protesters contest Egypt's military rule
Thousands of people gathered in Tahrir Square Tuesday to protest a move by Egypt’s military rulers to limit the authority of the incoming president and extend their own power past the end of this month, when they had promised a full handover to a civilian government.
Many of those who turned out were members or supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidate, Mohamed Morsi, has claimed victory in the first presidential race since the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak. Some secular groups joined the protests as well.
Protesters decried the military's power grab, while some celebrated Mr. Morsi's perceived victory with fireworks.
"This is a military coup against the people," said protester Galal Osman. "We want the president that we elected to have all the powers of his office. We want to write a constitution without the military interfering. You can't have 19 unelected men subverting the will of the people."
The rest: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2012/0619/Tahrir-Square-fills-again-as-protesters-contest-Egypt-s-military-rule
...walk like an Egyptian...
Profile Information
Name: William Rivers PittGender: Male
Hometown: Boston
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 58,179