Really, haven't we as a species advanced beyond the way countries ran a thousand years ago? You could take a King from a thousand years ago and make him Defense Secretary and you' end up getting the same shit. Can't we think in terms of the good for all humanity? There happens to be big money in it and its all what we want for our chunk of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

-90% Jimmy

He's putting the interests of the country ahead of his own political interests. That's a very honorable thing for any modern Washington politician to do!


All the people running the country in Washington seem to do is create stuff for us to worry about, while we are all pretty horrified with the economically harsh way of modern life already.

We got enough to worry about struggling to hang on to what we've managed to earn for ourselves already. So many of us are closer to the brink of losing it all and giving up on our dreams of happiness and replacing them with a life of grey spirit crushing economic servitude.

On top of that, they make our lives even worse!

-90% Jimmy

Fifty years from now, there will probably be statues of heroic patriot Mark Klein peppered about the USA. Klein, you may remember, revealed the NSA's secret room in San Francisco and the man that helped trigger the dismantling of the overblown police state apparatus that had been under construction for many years prior. We honor a patriot that steered America back to check and balance Democracy.

-90% Jimmy

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-weirdest-things-weve-learned-since-911_p2/

It is amazing that a humor magazine is more spot on about 9-11 than our entire main stream media.

Our governments continued over-reaction to 9-11 is like curing dandruff by decapitation, as my hero Frank Zappa has said in Senate Testimony about Rock Record Ratings.

Our government USED 9-11 to construct a totalitarian fascist police state. If they wanted to "keep us safe", they could have been not so criminally incompetent to let it happen in the first place.

In rational world, 9-11 would be discussed in a rational measured context. 3000 dead by collapsing skyscrapers and commercial airplanes auguring into the ground at 600 mph is truly horrifying, but.......

"That same year in the United States: 71,372 died of diabetes. 29,573 were killed by guns. 13,290 were killed in drunk driving accidents" *

America looses about 500,000 a year by heart disease alone. In terms of logic, our governments over-response is absurd. In terms of allocation of resources, shouldn't they work on stuff that kills 500,000 a year as a start? Terrorism on American soil, if you start at Dec 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor) and continue to the present, has produced about 7,000 casualties over a span of 74 years. That's 95 people per year for this time slice. If you had half a trillion dollars to solve a problem, would you direct it toward avenging and preventing the loss of 95 souls per year or would you spend it to try to prevent the deaths of 500,000 per year just from heart disease instead? Or for preventable causes like guns and drunk driving, would you spend that half trillion to bring gun deaths down from 29,000 per year to perhaps below 100, "saving" 28,500 lives a year from gun violence alone. If we want government "Run like a business" (which I don't advocate) then in terms of their mission "to keep us safe", they are doing an abysmal job.

-90% Jimmy

*http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/13/we-shouldn-t-treat-terrorism-the-way-we-treat-bathroom-falls.html

I prefer aspiring to the higher principals they taught me our country was based on, back in my 1960 to 1972 public school days.

We have become everything they taught us was bad about communist Russia in those times. Who knew that 40 years later we would allow our country to take the form of communist Russia, totalitarian police state wise.

Sure, they aren't using this infrastructure in earnest, YET, but why the hell do they keep building it?

They also taught us that it's illegal for real good reasons to never use the military against it's own citizens. Boy has that changed.

I've never wavered in my revulsion to all the extra constitutional stuff the Obama admin has done not the least of which is to carry on with the Unconstitutional GWB train wreck of democracy policies.

I am repelled by the if Obama violated the Constitution it's OK because he's one of us memes.

Larry Summers? WTF? Why should I like that stupid plutocratic weasel just because Obama seems to? At least Elizabeth Warren and Alan Grayson are still fighting for progressive values in earnest.

-jim

In basic logic, facts and mathematics.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1017&pid=123706

The chances of my own government wrecking my life are about 100,000% greater than my being a victim of a terrorist attack.

I AM NOT AFRAID OF TERRORISTS

Rationally, there's a whole lot of other stuff that's going to get me before a terrorist attack. Hell, I'm overweight. That alone has got a tremendously higher probability of killing me than a fucking terrorist! Yet I still find myself going through the Burger King drive through now and then.

As I've seen Thom Hartmann quoted here, more Americans die in bathroom accidents each year than died in the 9-11 attacks. Where oh where are our government total safety awareness surveillance programs for the death traps that are modern American bathrooms?

I demand NSA operated helicopter drones hover outside my bathrooms 24/7 to monitor any potential dangerous activity happening inside my bathrooms!

After all, all our elected officials took an oath to keep us safe!

-90% Jimmy

Let this man be an inspiration to us all that we should publicly repudiate the totalitarian over reach of all our institutions.

All American Wars including the Revolution were supposed to preserve and protect our Liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. They have been stripping us of our Constitutional Rights since 9-11 and this is exactly what the Terrorists wanted. (I'm being facetious. Did the people behind 9-11 ever getting around to telling us why they did it in the first place?)

And a Totalitarian Fascist Police State is what our Government wanted. Just because they have been aggressively building all the mechanisms to have a police state completely in place doesn't mean they will ever use all this stuff against their own citizens, of course!

-90% Jimmy

is using his wits and intelligence to slowly and modestly recraft legislation to be favorable to dems and palatable to repubs. He's getting stuff passed in this era of Repub obstruction and sabotage of our government.

He is reinventing how to be effective in Congress, and without selling out his Congressman with Guts sound bites. Actually, he's not doing too many; Republican Health Plan: Die Quickly, stuff as much as he used to? Probably because he's a big thinker more focused on advancing a progressive agenda than getting unfairly edited in the evening corporate news.

-90% Jimmy

I transcribed it. The original was posted on a facebook zappa info site i belong to, and it appeared to be a first gen copy from a print newspaper. I do not know when he said it, but he disparaged Dems equally to Republics, so I suspect late 70's to early 80's, as he and Gail gave 200G's to the Dems in the early 90's and he transitioned to strongly favoring the Dems towards the end of his life.

Oh for those quaint days of yore when we only had the military industrial complex. For it is now the military industrial congressional surveillance complex. Enjoy. This one has greatest page written all over it!


When a reporter for the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command interviewed Frank Zappa for the commands news syndicate, the story was held by a superior who demanded that Zappa – who had been rather hard on the army – answer one more question: just who does he think will defend the country without the army?

Zappa’s reply: “From what? The biggest threat to America today is it’s own federal government…. Will the Army protect anybody from the FBI? The IRS? The CIA? The Republican Party? The Democratic Party?....The biggest dangers we face today don’t even need to sneak past our billion dollar defense system….they issue the contracts for them.” The interview was not run.



-90% Jimmy

You have choice;

1. Build a surveillance state infrastructure (that shreds the Constitution we've fought many many wars to protect, including the 500,000 dead Civil War) to prevent a twice in the history of America terrorist attack on the US mainland (Pearl Harbor and 9/11) which resulted in the loss of perhaps 6,000 souls. over a 60 year period.

or

2. Develop programs to lower the 500,000 deaths per year of preventable causes. (see link for numerical details) If we assume that death rate has been constant for the last 60 years, then we lost 30,000,000 (thirty million) lives in the same period of time we lost 6,000 to terrorism.

The numerical magnitude of #2 about is 5,000 times greater than #1.

This whole bullshit "War on Terror" is kinda like spending trillions of dollars to prevent death by hangnails instead of death by cancer.

9-11 seems to have been used by our government entirely to repress their own citizens and strip them of their Constitutional Rights! Especially since our conduct in the Middle East since 9-11 is nothing more than a blowback factory to insure we will suffer from terrorism for many generations to come.

we sure got some Machiavellian sociopaths running the planet these days, don't we? Our world leaders are all Dick Cheney's now!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3000300

-90% Jimmy