Lewis Black on Glenn Beck's Nazi Tourettes

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henever Lewis Black gets angry, I seem to lose control and slip to the floor; rolling back and forth, laughing hysterically.  Black consistently delivers one of the very funniest, and most explosive, monologues to be found. He is one of life's most frustrated critics.  In this video he takes on the foibles of Glenn Beck, and points out how frequently and with what ease Beck kicks over the traces of logic in his zest to Nazi-fy anybody he doesn't like; and perhaps, anybody who is standing around, nearby.  The Beckster hates Obama--- so he finds a similarity to Hitler; and bingo, Obama is Hitler.  Beck doesn't care how far he has to reach, nor how tortured the logic, if he doesn't like you you're a Nazi.  You have a mustache; Hitler had a mustache; therefore, you are Hitler.  Personally, I would say, "Hey, Glenn, say whatever you wish to say in the privacy of your own watercloset in front of your own mirror.  But when you broadcast such garbage to the nation on a channel which insists that it is a news channel, well, you're asking for it."

And when you write and publish a book,  the cover plastered with a ludicrous photograph of yourself in pseudo Nazi-drag, and all you are missing is the riding crop and the monocle, you're asking for all sorts of commentary, none of it positive.  Jon Stewart's on-air deconstructions of the Beck broadcasts, are very funny, too.  As well as spot on.  Breathtakingly so.  The thing is, that Beck, himself, is so over the top with his political madness, that it is hard for comedians to match him for the lurid, not lucid, yet madly comic take on Glenn Beck's twisted version of reality.  I once watched Beck being interviewed by Bill O'Reilley.  It was an astounding revelation to observe how sane O'Reilley looked next to poor old crazy Beck.

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  Jon Stewart Exposes Glenn Beck as a Puppet of George Soros Part !

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Health Care Reform Repeal?

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s it turns out, the Health Care Insurance plan signed into being by then-Republican Governor Mitt Romney, is a winner.  More than 98% of the Massachusetts population is now insured.  That's a very impressive number however you cut it.  And the percentage of children now fully covered is even higher.

Without raising taxes.

So why is it that Congress gave us a lame, corrupt version of a health care reform package which was, in fact, written by the insurance lobbyists?  What a question!  How ungrateful.

Let us begin our inquiry by giving the loudest and ugliest raspberry imaginable, to the Republican Party for their unerring sense of how to fuck-over the American people.  The GOP's hysteria that "Obama Care", as the conservative word-smiths insultingly named it and framed it, (so why haven't the Democrats come up with a way to frame it so it can't be used as a weapon?) would turn our Democracy into a monument to Karl Marx, is totally unfounded.  We knew the GOP leadership were scum buckets, liars and crooks, but we didn't know just how evil they really are. The only real wonder is that so many Americans have bought into Republican lies.  Republicans are nothing more than goons for money.  They offer Americans nothing but another rip-off on behalf of their corporate bosses.  And screw the voters who put them in power.  And isn't it a scream how very many working people seem to love a well-placed kick in the head?

Just to summarize for anyone who might have missed the festivities last spring and summer, Republicans hated everything about the reform bill. They took a good idea and spun it into a socialistic nightmare. The question is what kind of human being would do this?

Let's see:  it was a way to make Obama look bad.  And their number one priority is to make Obama look like the worst loser of the world.  Otherwise they can kiss the White House goodbye forever. If they allow the Dems to do a single thing to help America the GOP loses big time.

On the score of making President Obama look bad, they have won that game; with a little extra help from Obama, himself.

As things stand now, the Republican Party, the party of total corruption, has a very good chance of winning the White House in 2012.  And once they win, we can kiss any Health Care Reform, corrupt or not,  goodbye.♦

 

Daily Dropcap (Jessica Hische) / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

             

On Nazi Israel

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ho does not remember how Vanessa Redgrave stood before the Academy Awards audience and angrily denounced the Zionists as thugs?  For that she was loudly booed.  Things have changed these days.  The world is on to the criminal Zionists.  And yet it is with faint voices that we speak out against Israeli monsters.  I have spoken out condemning Zionism.  I will continue to speak out against the gross criminality of Israeli aggression.  Their crimes are ignored and whitewashed by the American State Department and President Obama's foreign policies which do favor Israel and victimize Palestinians.  And here in the USA there is scarce mention of the inhumanity of the Zionist State toward Palestinians.  Even if there were a solid array of historical evidence which proved, unequivocally, that the land truly belongs to the Jews, and that the Palestinians' claims on the land were unsubstantial; even if that were true, and it is not,  Israel would still be guilty of Crimes against Humanity, policies of aggression and unprovoked, first strike maneuvers against the Palestinians.

For so many decades the world has allowed such atrocities to slide by.  Hey! Nobody wanted to be labeled an anti-semite!  I mean, how can you argue with the idea that God, himself, prefers Jews to all others.  The People of the Book are the Chosen of The Lord.  Right?

Well, hold on there.  Not so fast.  Let us look at some of these things.  Like the Old Testament.  Where the stories of Moses come from.  Well, new archeological evidence points to some disputes which say that many of the Biblical personnages, such as Moses, and Joseph, were in fact, Egyptian Pharaohs, whose very names are cognates of the Biblical characters. You can check this out yourself, but it's beyond the scope of this post go into it.   Also, in the case of Moses story of his birth and discovery by a princess of Egypt, the baby in a basket floating in the bullrushes and then brought up like a royal.  It turns out that is a story which actually belongs to an earlier Babylonian king by the name of Sargon.  The Jews served as slaves in Babylon until their release and then once in the wilderness they kept Sargon's story but applied it to their own hero, Moses.  Moshei!  

So a lot of fudging has been done to embellish those Hebraic stories.  And even the Ark of the Covenant may be yet another fiction elided or conflated from an earlier culture.  The Ark, after all, was kept in the Temple of Solomon.  The Temple of Solomon was burned to the ground by the Romans.  The legend of the Knights Templar is that they discovered the remains of the Temple and somehow recovered the Ark.  But that is the stuff of Hollywood.  So?

Who knows?

So that any claims made cannot be made as if  Biblical stories are factual.

Now, it's the Israelis themselves who are more anti-semitic in their actions than anyone.

What is happening, then, is the end of Jewery, itself.  If you constantly abide outside of the code of Judaism, then how can you claim to be what you are not?  Survivors of the most hideous concentration camps have the stamp of authenticity about them. If you survived Auschwitz, you are a Jew and nobody can say different. And your critique counts far more than those who, by virtue of the time and place of their birth, escaped the unspeakable suffering of the holocaust.  You may be a Jew by birth and inclination, but you are not a Jew like these guys are Jews.  They know what is Jewish, and what is Nazi.  And they know it like nobody else.

So what we have here, in the video below, is a survivor of crushing horror of ghastly Auschwitz, Hojo Meyer, speaking out against the appalling policies of Zionist Israel.  He goes much further, saying Israel's policies are antithetical to the entire set of principles which constitute Judaism.  And then he speaks the unspeakable:  that the state of Israel is based on the principles of the Nazis.  The only difference being that Palestinians are now the victims; and the Israelis their persecutors, as were the Nazis of the Third Reich toward the Jews.

So terribly tragic!              

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Daily Dropcap (Jessica Hische) / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Why does the Media Not Want to Talk About This?

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omething is very wrong about the TSA use of body scanners which are being sold to Airport Security throughout America, and the Tranportation Security Agency.  The seller is none other than Michael Chertoff, the former head of the TSA, at a cost of more than $150,000 per machine.  That is a lot of profit to Chertoff.  This is a waste of our tax dollars when you consider that bomb sniffing dogs are preferred by the FBI at their own headquarters, and by the US Army in Baghdad.  Dogs cost about $8,500 in total.

So what gives?

Is this whole issue about Michael Chertoff making a profit?  It certainly has nothing to do with making Americans safer at airports.  This video is a good one which explains what is at stake.

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Oops! Where Did I Put That Nine Trillion Dollars?

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f anyone is still asking themselves how and why Alan Grayson,  Representative from District 8 in Florida, one of the precious few men in the US Congress who asks really pertinent questions of the Federal Reserve Banks' Inspector General, was targeted by the banking lobby to bite the dust, you will see the answer in this video.

The issue he is pursuing is very simply,  what ever happened to the Nine Trillion dollars that was given to the Fed.  Yes, we know about the $700,000,000,000 of bailout money.  But what about this amount, 9 extra big ones, that's twelve zeros with a 9 before them, which nobody ever mentioned to the press; or perhaps the media just neglected to investigate.  

"9 Trill?  Hey, Ben? You know anything about that 9 trill?"   

"Uh...which 9 trillion izzat?  I don't nuffing about no 9 trillion."

"Unh...OK, then.  See that, Congressman Grayson?  Nobody don't know nuffing about no 9 trill."

Apparently such things are still not to be mentioned in polite company.  I wonder why.  

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The moron replacing Grayson, I keep forgetting his name, ah, yes, Daniel Webster, is a religious nut; believes in suppressing women, and will function as nothing more than a goon who will do as he is told by the Republican bosses.  

Obviously the big money who own the Republican and much of the Democratic Congress, couldn't leave a loose cannon like Grayson in Congress to expose their filth and lies.  So they want to play hardball.  Fine with me.  

Let them choke on this:  the capitalists, themselves, will bring about their own destruction.  Even as they fight it tooth and nail, the oligarchy will step so far over the line, that  as in Latin America, communism will become the inevitable outcome of their corruption.  And I say this with great sadness. 

We had all hoped that capitalism would work for everyone.  

That is what Adam Smith actually envisioned:  A Free Market with perfect equality and perfect freedom.  And Smith was very careful to spell out those last two conditions of a Free Market.  And for awhile it looked like it just might work out that way.  But greed is a human condition which arises whenever a person is placed next a great deal of money.  Then there can never be enough.  The rich get richer because they are driven not only to have their own legitimate money, but they are compelled to devise ways to steal from the pockets of the poor.  Smith, also, in the same book, The Wealth of Nations, said that a nation is only as wealthy as its poorest citizen.  Could this be the real reason that the minions of the crooked wealthy hate America so much?  

    

a message from those who dissent

aw Story found this video on their channel on YouTube this morning.  It is a statement of the philosophy of those who believe that Wikileaks is the right way to topple tyranny.  The entire war against Julian Assange on the part of many world governments is very simply, they want to control the Internet.  And Anonymous, believes that free access to the Internet is a basic human right.  The problem is, if they win it will only be a temporary victory.  The forces of evil, of greed, of profit at any price, of croney capitalism, of the craven conservative outlook, is, that they will bide their time crawl out from under the rock when the young idealists of freedom aren't looking.  They will simper and whisper, like Karl Rove, using idiots like George W. Bush and the Evangelical Christians, as their front, to claw their way to the place where they can leverage ultimate power.

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A One Term President...Damn it!

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resident Obama surely knew that the vast majority of Americans, certainly the young liberals who voted to put him in office, wanted him to end the meaty tax cuts for the rich.  Unless he has completely walled himself off from the groundswell of public opinion which has been all but hollered from the  rooftops, how could he not.  Nobel Laureate Economist, Paul Krugman, could not have been clearer in his column yesterday:  "Extend the tax cuts for the rich and we lose Social Security." According to Krugman it is really that simple. And that consequential.  And the destruction of all signs of civilization, at the hands of the rich, is what we are really talking about here.  That was the deal.

So Obama is really the Republican's Poison Pill all along.  This move was too pat.  Too carefully choreographed. The choreographic patterns show too clearly.  Jim Bunning started the ball rolling, with his filibuster blocking the extension of unemployment insurance.  Then somebody else did it.  And then--- Golly whiskers, weren't they sweet, to step aside after making a very important point:  the crippling power wielded by the GOP.

Alas, this is not the first time Obama has betrayed, not only the people, but his own vision.   So it comes as no surprise that both White House phone lines were jammed this morning by angry progressives.

And if they could see where Obama's deal was going to lead to within one and a half years, why couldn't Obama who is so much smarter than many of us?

But then, too, it should hardly come as surprising that he made such a move that would be so toxic to the very people who put him in office.  This has been, as they say, a long time brewing.  Just last week, Republicans were crowing about how they were walking Obama like their pet Bijon puppy.

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So here it is: Mission Accomplished.

America, you lose!

Tea baggers, you lose!

We all lose everything!  Everything gained in the way of being a civilized nation, since the 1920's.

How happy the evil ones are now.

Personally, I find it worthy of note that he speaks so harshly to the very voters who put him in office.  On the other hand, one can't help but observe how sweetly he deals with the Republican insects.♦

Wikileaks: Julian Assange: A Hero of the People?

ries of outrage from the State department!  Hillary Clinton looked stricken and pale, as she sounded dire words threatening everything from war and death, to loss of life and limb, O the brutality!  Oh, Hillary, we hardly knew ye!  Then, of course, the CIA, posing as a a teenage hacker tried to close the Wikileaks site down.  But it re-appeared.  To the consternation of everyone who has been growing very long noses: The Military left it to a Lt. Colonel, saying Assange crossed over some imaginary line in the sand, because of course Lt. Colonels must believe that secrets need to be kept secret even if they are lies because, and would that it were, that only the military thinks this way, and assume it's a valid argument, some lies are just, well, necessary and good. Add to this band of lying dignitaries seen losing it, now, predictably, the morbid right wingers, all of whom hate with undying passion, any kind of central governance--- are now calling on this very government--- which they so itch to drown in the bathtub--- to kill this SOB, Assange. Suddenly, in a stunning about face regarding the Federal government, all is forgiven.  Now they love the government as long as it finds and kills the goddamn traitor/terrorist.  And so far, even the White House is doing its best to frame Julian Assange as the thousand-eyed, fire-breathing terrorist of the moment.  The new enemy of the people!

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But there is another more serious and disturbing reason for cheering the release of these dismal and disgraceful secret documents.  Namely the appalling lies of the State Department.  The criminal behavior toward so-called Ghost Prisoners, by the United States.  These revelations are so shameful they make one ashamed of being an American.  And of course, the worst things happened during the Bush/Cheney administration.  This is a transcipt of an article by Andy Worthington of the The Public Record/ Intrepid New Journalism.  Read on: 

Wikileaks Reveals Reasons To Dismiss US Claims ‘Ghost Prisoner’ Aafia Siddiqui Wasn’t Held In Bagram Posted: 05 Dec 2010 11:45 AM PST Aafia Siddiqui In sifting through the avalanche of US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, only theGuardian, in the Western media, has picked up on cables from Islamabad relating to the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who disappeared with her three young children in Karachi on March 30, 2003, and did not reappear until July 17, 2008, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, where she was reportedly arrested by Afghan forces for acting strangely, allegedly carrying a bag that contained a list of US targets for terrorist attacks as well as bomb-making instructions and assorted chemicals. When US soldiers turned up, Dr. Siddiqui then reportedly seized a gun and shot at them. Although she failed to hit her targets, at point-blank range, she was herself shot twice in the abdomen, and was then rendered to the United States, where she was put on trial for attempted murder, and was convicted and given an 86 year sentence in September this year. Dr. Siddiqui’s supporters, and many commentators — myself included — who have examined her story have, for many years, had reason to doubt the official narrative about her capture in 2008, and her whereabouts for the previous five years. While both the Pakistani and US authorities repeatedly denied that Dr. Siddiqui was in their custody between 2003 and 2008, and this is reiterated in one of the cables released by Wikileaks, in which US diplomats in Pakistan stated that “Bagram officials have assured us that they have not been holding Siddiqui for the last four years, as has been alleged,” several former prisoners — and one still held — have stated that they saw her in Bagram. The following exchange is an excerpt from an interview conducted by former prisoner Moazzam Begg with Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, after his release from Guantánamo in February 2009: Moazzam Begg: When you were in the Bagram Detention Facility after being held in the “Dark Prison,” you came across a female prisoner. Can you describe a little bit about who you think she is and what you saw of her? Binyam Mohamed: In Bagram, I did come across a female who wore a shirt with the number of “650,” and I saw her several times, and I heard a lot of stories about her from the guards and the other prisoners over there. Moazzam Begg: And these stories said what about her, in terms of her description and her background? Binyam Mohamed: What we were told first … we were frightened by the guards not to communicate with her, because they feared that we would talk to her and we would know who she was. So they told us that she was a spy from Pakistan, working with the government, and the Americans brought her to Bagram. Moazzam Begg: So you think they spread the rumour that she was a spy … that would have kept you away from her and apprehensive towards her? Binyam Mohamed: Basically, nobody talked to her in the facility, and she was held in isolation, where … she was only brought out to the main facility just to use the toilet. But all I knew about her was that she was from Pakistan, and that she had studied, or she had lived in America. And the guards would talk a lot about her, and I did actually see her picture when I was here a few weeks ago, and I would say she’s the very person I saw in Bagram. Moazzam Begg: And that’s the very picture I showed you of Aafia Siddiqui? Binyam Mohamed: That’s the very picture I saw. Moazzam Begg: There have been all sorts of rumours about what happened to her — and may Allah free her soon — but part of those rumours include her being terribly abused. Do you have any knowledge of what abuse she might have faced? Binyam Mohamed: Apart from her being in isolation — and the fact that I saw, when she was walking up and down, I could tell that she was severely disturbed — I don’t think she was in her right mind — literally, I don’t think she was sane — and I didn’t feel anything at that time, because, as far as I was concerned, she was a hypocrite working with the other governments. But had we known that she was a sister, I don’t think we would have been silent. I think there would have been a lot of maybe even riots in Bagram. In March 2010, at a rally organized by the Justice for Aafia Coalition, former Guantánamo prisonerOmar Deghayes stated that, as well as Binyam Mohamed, Hassan bin Attash (a former child prisoner who is still held in Guantánamo) and Dr. Ghairat Baheer (a former “ghost prisoner” held in various secret prisons in Afghanistan) also described seeing Aafia Siddiqui in Bagram. Omar said, “They told me how she cried and sobbed, how she screamed and cried and banged her head, in despair and sorrow.” The Justice for Aafia Coalition has also been gathering other testimony about Dr. Siddiqui’s presence in Bagram from other sources, locating the following statement by Abu Yahya al-Libi, who escaped from Bagram in July 2005, which resonates with the recollections of Binyam Mohamed, Hassan bin Attash and Dr. Baheer: There is a woman from Pakistan. She stayed two complete years in solitary confinement in Bagram prison among more than 500 men. She would go out to the bathroom, led by the Americans, placing his hand on one of her shoulders, and the other hand on her back, and her hands and feet chained together, and she is treated in exactly the same way as a man … even in her clothing, the orange suit that the brothers wear in Guantánamo and the mujahideen in Bagram. This woman stayed there until she lost her mind, until she became insane, hitting the door and screaming, all day and night, and those ones all they do is make it worse by calling her by her number 650, that’s the number she had in the Bagram prison… “What’s the problem?” And she didn’t find a person to talk to. She is in solitary confinement, in front of her is a solitary room belonging to a man, on her side is a solitary room belonging to a man, and next to her is a solitary room belonging to a man, She didn’t find a woman to talk to, she only sees men … so the woman lost her reasoning and her mind and she stayed in this condition for two complete years… probably no one knew anything about her. In addition, two of Aafia Siddiqui’s three children have stated that they were also held in custody during the period that their mother’s whereabouts are unexplained, adding another chilling dimension to the story. Although it is feared that Suleman, who was just a baby in March 2003, was killed at the time of her capture, her eldest son Ahmed (who was seven at the time) and her daughter Mariam (who was five) eventually reappeared. Ahmed, who was seized with his mother in Ghazni in July 2008, and was released to his mother’s family in October 2009, issued the following statement about his capture and his lost years: I do not remember the date but it seems a long time ago. I remember we were going to Islamabad in a car when we were stopped by different cars and high roof ones. My mother was screaming and I was screaming as they took me away. I looked around and saw my baby brother on the ground and there was blood. My mother was crying and screaming. Then they put something on my face. And I don’t remember anything. When I woke up I was in a room. There were American soldiers in uniform and plain clothes people. They kept me in different places. If I cried or didn’t listen, they beat me and tied me and chained me. There were English speaking, Pashto and Urdu speaking. I had no courage to ask who they were. At times, for a long time, I was alone in a small room. Then I was taken to some children’s prison where there were lots of other children. The American Consular, who came to me in Kabul jail, said, “Your name is Ahmed. You are American. Your mother’s name is Aafia Siddiqui and your younger brother is dead. After that they took me away from the kids’ prison and I met the Pakistani Consular, and I talked to my aunt (Fowzia Siddiqui).” Mariam did not reappear until April this year, when unidentified men delivered her to her aunt’s house. Now 12 years old, she was identified as Aafia Siddiqui’s daughter (and Ahmed’s sister) through DNA tests. At a press conference, Senator Talha Mehmood, the Chairman of the Senate Committee for the Interior, reported that Mariam “was recovered from Bagram airbase in the custody of an American — in the Urdu language press, an American soldier — called ‘John.’ He also said that she had been kept for seven years in a ‘cold, dark room’ in Bagram airbase.” Although this story has not been independently verified, and it may be that Mariam was held in some other facility, no other explanation has been provided to explain her whereabouts for the previous seven years. These are just some of the reasons to doubt the assertion made by US diplomats in Pakistan, in one of the cables released by Wikileaks, and also to doubt the conviction with which Declan Walsh followed up on the cable, writing in the Guardian, “Contrary to claims by supporters of Aafia Siddiqui, the controversial Pakistani neuroscientist was never imprisoned at the Bagram military prison in Afghanistan, the embassy cables suggest.” Other reasons to doubt the assertion include previously reported shadiness on the part of diplomats, who initially told the journalist Yvonne Ridley (who has spent many years doggedly pursuing the truth about Dr. Siddiqui) that no women had been held in Bagram, although it was later revealed that they had lied. Shortly after the incident in Ghazni, Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Greene, a spokesperson for Combined Joint Task Force 101, which manages the Bagram base, “said that a woman had been held at Bagram in 2003, but that woman, identified only as ‘Shafila,’ was released.” This was a fascinating insight, because the timeframe involved — during 2003 — appears to confirm that the witnesses cited above, who saw a woman at Bagram in 2004, were not mistaking Aafia Siddiqui for this other poor woman, whose whereabouts are, of course, unknown. Even more significant is the well-chronicled failure of senior Bush administration officials to keep State Department officials in the loop about almost anything of substance to do with the “War on Terror.” In 2009, when I interviewed Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, Wilkerson told me, in no uncertain terms, that the State Department had been excluded from correspondence relating to the conduct of the “War on Terror,” although the team gathered around Dick Cheney — a “War Council” consisting of just six men — had been monitoring the State Department’s responses to the results of Cheney’s activities. Wilkerson said: I understood that there was a team, I understood it was highly placed and probably under the Vice President, I understood that it was membered in almost every aspect of the interagency group that dealt with national security, I understood they had a strategy, I understood they were ruthless in carrying out that strategy, and I understood that I was a day late and a dollar short, because they’d beaten me to the marketplace. But it took me a while to figure that out. I even figured out that they were reading my emails, but I wasn’t reading theirs. Another reason for doubting the diplomats’ denials concerns the timing of Dr. Siddiqui’s capture, and its place within the bigger picture of the capture of supposed “high-value detainees” who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture in a variety of secret prisons, including, in many cases, a secret facility within bagram. Whether accurately or not, it has been claimed that Dr, Siddiqui had remarried, before her capture, and that her second husband was Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi), a nephew of the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Dr. Siddiqui was seized just four weeks after KSM, and four weeks before Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and it is easy, therefore, to see that a confession extracted under torture from KSM — when he was beingsubjected to waterboarding on 183 separate occasions in a secret prison in Poland — could have led to Dr. Siddiqui’s capture, which, in turn, could have led to the capture — perhaps through information also extracted through the use of torture — of Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. If this sequence is correct — and it certainly makes a lot of sense — then it is appropriate to conclude that Dr. Siddiqui was held as a “ghost prisoner” in a secret prison, and it does not take too much reflection to realize that, as a result, her mysterious reappearance in Afghanistan in July 2008, the implausible story of her attempts to murder US soldiers (even though no fingerprints were found on the gun), her rendition to the United States rather than facing justice in Afghanistan, the sham of a trial that focused only on the murder attempt, and not on the terrorist materials allegedly found on her at the time of her capture, and the disproportionately large sentence are all part of a cover-up, designed to dispose of a used-up “ghost prisoner,” who knew too much — and was, conceivably, too horribly abused — to be released. ♦

Originally published on the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition.


Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and thedefinitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog atandyworthington.co.uk.

Why Capitalism Isn't Working

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eality intrudes on the neatly wrapped economic theories of Croney Capitalism.  No matter what the Milton Friedmanites tell us about how great Uncle Milty's theories are, the actual results out here in the real world are, in a word, disastrous.  It is disastrous that so many Americans are losing their homes to foreclosure by a predatory banking system.  It is disastrous that Wall Street is having its greatest season of profit at the expense of so many working Americans. After all, it was Main Street who bailed out Wall Street, not the other way around.  All economic roads since Reagan have led to what we see now--- a depressed American landscape.

Even back in Adam Smith's day, he noted in The Wealth of Nations, that the Free Market system would not work unless the environment in which it found itself, was based on perfect equality and perfect freedom.  We have only to see that George Bush and Dick Cheney are still strolling the boulevards and neither is on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, not to mention numerous treasonous assaults on the US Constitution, as you and I would be, (on trial, that is, if not already incarcerated) if we so much as smoked a joint.  Both Bush and Cheney were liars, cheats, and frauds.  So we can dispense with the idea of equality under the law and the idea of perfect freedom, applies only to the monied elite.

But if that doesn't do it for you, let's take this.  Let us say that the Free Market is, in reality, an imaginary carrot dangling before the eyes of the more-than-ready-for-the-glue-factory-horse of greed and profit. There is no such thing as a free market and there cannot be. Take Liz Claiborne clothes for example.  Made in Indonesia with a labor cost of 74¢ per hour, product costs as much as $4 to produce then is shipped to the states and sold for about $150 per item.   Since product does not truly reflect value, one asks why corporations must be subsidized on a regular basis by the Federal government.

By now we have seen the real strategy of the giant corporations and banks is to privatize profits and socialize losses.  In case that phrase did not make a sufficient impression and passed right over your head, let me say it again:


The real strategy of Giant corporations and banks is to Privatize Profits and Socialize Losses.

So. What the elite and the Republican Party, and all who agree with them really want, is Socialism for only the rich. 

It is not for nothing that corporations and banks are commonly characterized as pigs at the trough.  They want their socialism but none for you.  You are that stupid little consumer whose only function, according to the corporations and the banks, is to go shopping and buy tons of crap that you would be better off without.  


And finally, here is the big secret that the government doesn't want you to be thinking about.  The Whitehouse and the Congress of the United States of America belongs to , and is ruled by, the corporations and the banks.  So if Obama isn't quite living up to your expectations don't blame him.  He is dancing as fast as he can to hide the fact that he is the puppet of the banks and corporations.  So the Federal government doesn't want you thinking about the fact that they have this nasty little secret and if Wikileaks tries to publish the appropriate documents which will expose the real state of affairs here in Amerika, Julian Assange will end up a dead man.  So you will only hear that secret from someone like me and this blog, and a few other truth tellers like Alternet, Common Cause, Democracy, Now.  So the secret is safe.

The big problem with this arrangement is that is spells the "F" word.  As in fascism.  As Mussolini said "Fascism is better called Corporatism."  And who would know better than the man who invented it?

Fascism is the form of government under which we, in the USA, now exist.

That grotesque and growing segment of the American population known loosely as T-Baggers, who typically accuse Obama of socialism, and of fascism, actually are so ignorant in every sense of the word it beggars the imagination.  Obama is very far from a socialist.  Given his behavior during the BP fouling of the Gulf waters,  he may be closer to a fascist.  His heart seems to bleed for the poor dear giant corporations, whose headquarters are not even in America.

The T-Baggers choose to ignore the long and not so bright history of Corporate Welfare.

The videos here, present a version of economics that is fundamentally closer to what is actually happening in the world than anything you may have encountered thus far.

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Learning from Wikileaks

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bama's reaction, at least his public reaction, to the Wikileaks situation is not enviable.  He seems perfectly content to let CIA torturers slide on by with nary a tap on the wrists; and has been firm on the "no impeachment" for George W. Bush who is a bona fide war criminal and if this were a nation which lived with the rule of law,  he would have been tried in a court of law, and been serving a life sentence.  If not a firing squad.  Not only did Bush lie about the Iraqi governments possession, or rather, lack of possession, of weapons of mass destruction, and suppress the recommendations of the best CIA analytical intelligence in order to coax Congress to approve his invasion of Iraq.  But now there are whole segments of conservatives who deny he ever did anything out of the way.

"He never ever lied," one chanted.

"Carpet bombed Iraq? Never.  You must be thinking of Clinton."  This was a response from a yet another troll on YouTube.

So I Googled it.  I typed in George W. Bush and the carpet bombing of Iraq.  Google brought back 88,000 articles and mentions of Bush carpet bombing Iraq.  I posted the results on the YouTube page in answer to my 2 trolls.  Never heard from them again.  

Add to this, the fact that George W. Bush and Cheney consistently abused executive privilege, on any number of counts.  for one thing, and this is really enough to bring Bush to a court of law: by classifying the fact that they bypassed the FISA court to spy on Americans.

Now we find verification in the Wikileaks documents, that the US has been lying in its diplomatic relations with the world. It has been working with Israel to commit genocide in the Gaza Strip. No wonder Hillary Clinton is so pissed off about Wikileaks.  And Obama, and the State Department.  And the CIA.  And on and on down the line of Federal agencies.  As well as the military.

If they prefer secrecy to truth, let them burn.

As Noam Chomsky says in the video, in this great interview with Amy Goodman, "What the official response to the Wikileaks exposure really does tell us is that the upper level government officials, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, really hate democracy and with a bitter hatred."

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It is so very interesting that Chomsky is quite enthusiastic, for Chomsky, about the leaks.  Of course it is important to remember that Chomsky was one of the two or three people who worked with Daniel Ellsberg to index the Pentagon Papers, which caused such an uproar so many decades ago.  And which led directly to the ceasefire on the part of American soldiers and their departure of Viet Nam.  Ellsberg had the crooked leadership of America by the short hairs. Now all of America knew they had been lied to all along.  And the Hippies, the peace niks, were right!

The uglier the the secrets the more the governing leadership screams about being exposed.  I love Chomsky's comment about Sarah Palin.  "I don't know how much she understands..."  Thing is, he isn't trying to be funny.  Nor does he intend his comment to put her down.  That isn't the way Chomsky operates.  From her comment on the Wikileaks documents, it seems she doesn't really understand anything.  Face it Sarah, dear, you're at your best as the usual beauty pageant queen.♦

you may have noticed something new, here...

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If you have been to this site before or you're a subscriber,  you are in the right place:  The Savage Pen is now We the People.  I don't remember now what made me do it.  But, suddenly, We, the People seemed like the right name and The Savage Pen seemed old and not quite right.  I toyed with name In Your Face.com but the name is too, well, in your face.  So, We, the People, it is going to be.

I would welcome any insights, reactions and feedback on the improvements. I think they are improvements, anyway.  And I hope my readers will as well.  New artwork for the page and site title.  It took better than ten tries to get it right.  10 different versions including a piece of artwork of the U.S. Constitution.  To make it look old and like parchment.  Then searching for the right background.  I like the cosmos as a background; it seems to rise above petty politics, and take us out into the Universe to set the atmosphere for transcendent Truth and values, against which even politics finally must be measured. ♦

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So You Think You Live In A Democracy

Russ Baker is an investigative journalist, perhaps among the last of his kind, as mainstream media no longer investigates anything anymore.  Lack of public interest in real-honest-to-God journalism, added to declining readership and revenues are among the reasons.  Baker investigated the Bush family for five years to gather material for his explosive book, "Family of Secrets, The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last 50 Years".


This book becomes a goldmine of information to counter the lies which appear on every page of Bush's new "Autobiography."

Skull and Bones ll

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ere, JFK speaks of the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University, which, as will later be seen, is opposed to the aims of American freedom and and the Constitutional rights which are guaranteed in the United States Constitution.  The entire aim of the Skull and Bones is to gather and protect power and wealth.  And to keep them in the hands of the few.  If the American people truly understood the real meaning of this society they would insist on its destruction.  Yet, now, we have the ignorant masses, many of whom imagine that they and their families, will one day acquire the very same power and wealth.  The trouble with that outlook which is promoted by the system all around us, is that the same group which now holds the power and wealth is dedicated to ensuring that you never will advance that far.   All wealth and all power belongs to to this group and to them and their descendants alone.  They are the money behind the anti-American and obscenely racist, white supremacy groups.  Before the JFK video is another.  The first in a well documented series which investigates the inner workings of Skull and Bones.

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The Real Republican Agenda for 2012

GOP Seeks to Kill What's Left of the Economy

epublican Mitch McConnell's public utterances about how the entire agenda of the GOP for the next two years will be focused on removing Barrack Obama from office gives me indigestion.  For openers, the man is a known liar of absurd proportions.  Though I am sure he isn't lying about this issue.  I throw in the attribute of liar simply to give a quick sketch of the man's character.  He's worse than reprehensible.  But one must credit him for sticking to the tightly worded GOP script.  When the GOP's treasonous highly paid wordsmith, Frank Luntz, put out the message that Republicans needed to defeat the Democratic sponsored Wall Street Reform bill, by associating it with the Iraq war and tax increases, McConnell was the first one out of the gate talking to the press about--- you guessed it--- how the bill would aggravate the war and would certainly increase taxes. He quoted Luntz--- word for word.  And he said it all with a straight face.  But one must give Luntz his due: the American people drank it down like it was Kool Aid and they had a powerful thirst.

Given Obama's deeply disappointing, submissive mutterings the day after midterm elections, about how we all ought to get along, and how the White House is so looking forward to working with the newly promoted John Boehner, as speaker of the House and all the rest of the screwballs in that party I have misgivings about the next two years.  What America is looking for now is for Obama to grow a pair and kick the tar out of the GOP.  They certainly do it to him.  And then they claim that they are acting on behalf of the American people.

They are not!

The GOP's real agenda is to destroy, in the next two years, what shreds and shards of an economy are still viable.  And then to blame the ensuing destruction all on Obama.  And all the time they will be putting people out of work and denying them any kind of sustenance, such as unemployment insurance, they will be making mealy mouthed speeches about how Americans need see what damage Obama has done to the economy.  That is what Mitch McConnell is really saying when he speaks of removing Obama from consideration in 2012.  And the worst part is that Republicans are people devoid of conscience.  For the last several decades they've been  hammering out a mix of capitalism based on a twisted understanding of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand.  They didn't read Adam Smith.  Nor Milton Friedman.  But they did read the puerile fantasies of Ayn Rand.  Rand was a great and persuasive novelist and piss-poor philosopher.  Milton Friedman's ideas look good on the page but simply do not work out in real life, except to a select few.

Had they read Adam Smith they would have seen that Smith qualifies his vision of a Free Market with the chilling comment that it will only work in a nation where perfect equality and perfect freedom exist.  In this fascist corporatocracy, which America has become, such qualifications are laughable.

The Situation is Critical

his has been for too long now, an overpopulated world impoverished by the very fact that it is overpopulated.   The conservative religionists, as a result of the hysteria caused by their irrational belief systems, refuse to allow wholesome and proper sex education. Thus they are directly responsible for the burgeoning explosion of population.

There are no longer enough of any natural resources to go around.  And what few resources there are, such as oil, metal, air and potable water, are being claimed by giant corporations as if all the earth's natural resources belonged to only the wealthy.  And what do they do with these resources which are in fact the only true wealth?

They squander them.

When the Amazon Rain-forest goes, the quality of air on earth will be vastly diminished in a way that is near unthinkable now.  All of our options are about to be severely reduced.  And more than half of the rain-forest, which is the lung of the earth, the essential organ which makes life possible, is already gone. What was once rich and fertile land of the Amazon Basin, is fast becoming a dry, useless desert.

The fact that so many people cannot see or confront these realities attests to the pervading insanity.

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Since there is no other way to deal with this overpopulation, which only increases exponentially, and in itself will bring about the death of the earth, itself, as a viable planet, and sooner, not later, several groups, working in secret, comprised exclusively of the very rich and powerful, are initiating a drastic plan to rid the earth of a very significant portion of the planetary population by starving the peoples of the earth to death.  And those who do not die of starvation will be poisoned.

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Monsanto, which originally promised to be the solution to the world's hunger problem has shifted its mission, so that now Monsanto is the venue of delivery of the poison.  And the American federal government supports all of this.  Granted, it is an extreme response to the failure of reason.  Given these failures of reason to reduce population or else all the sooner suffer inevitable extinction, abortion of unwanted fetuses is an extreme but necessary measure to which we, as a civilization, have been reduced.  It really is that simple.♦

Milton Friedman Got It Wrong

Nobel Prize Winning Economist's Disastrous Ideas 

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t has taken me a very long time to get to what exactly it was that Milton Friedman was talking about. When you know where these foul ideas of the Repukes come from, it is easier to understand them. Milton Friedman, is the most radical economics thinker since Karl Marx. Like Marx, the ideas look so good on paper. Too bad his work doesn't work in reality on a large scale. Friedman is responsible for the 3 foul ideas which guided the Ronnie Reagan Administration, and which were directly responsible for the huge foul up of the American economy.

Here, in a nutshell, are Friedman's most damaging and ineffective ideas:

• First, All government is too large.
• Maximize profit in any way you want. (Even if it means selling defective product.  Not to worry, the law prohibits the public from paying for your defective product with a defective check.)
• De-regulate De-regulate De-regulate

I do have to agree with Friedman on one thing:  Namely, the legalizing of all drugs.  However, like so many others, I got there all by myself, without help from Friedman.  

f the Tea Baggers, who are mainly funded by the Koch brothers, not to mention the Republican Party, do win in elections throughout the several states so that the GOP really does take back Congress, we will know for sure that the Supreme Court of the United States has truly destroyed Democracy in America.

And for all time.

We know that power once gained will not be willingly returned.  That is an axiom of the politics of power.

With its' disastrously partisan ruling on Citizen's United the Supreme Court has undone, literally hundreds of years of careful legislation which was designed to preserve freedom and Democracy in America.  

Their first treasonous action was to interfere with the presidential election in 2004.  That was, as any good citizen can tell you, a coup d'etat, and most definitely not a valid, nor even constitutional activity of the Supreme Court Of The United States.  They stopped the counting of the legitimate votes in Florida, thereby nullifying the votes of those citizens, but then had the affrontery to appoint George W. Bush. the most destructive president ever of the US Constitution.  He shredded the Constitution in such a way that we still have to repair.
Hidden in the fog of the Military Commissions Act was the cancellation of Posse Comitatus. Now the Citizen's United ruling.  And although President Obama has spoken out against this ruling, for my part I deeply believe that those judges who ruled for it must be impeached and disgraced in every way.  It was not merely a bad ruling, but it is treasonous to the entire spirit of Democracy in America.



Any rational American now knows that the wrong headed Republican ideas have single handedly led to the disaster in which we now find ourselves. The Banksters and Wall Street and the vast army of corporate lobbyists who bought the U.S. Congress. The ghost of Milton Friedman litters our country: Small or limited Government has been the cry of Republicans since Ronald Reagan and what they actually do is expand the government but they do it in ways that accomplish their goals. More military. And trickle down economics which turn out to be a patently invalid theory. Bush cut taxes of the rich and we now have fewer jobs than ever before. They lie outright when they claim that any smallest bit of this mess is President Obama's fault. It is all Bush, Bush, Cheney, and Bush.  This being true, one asks, how could any rational human being vote for a Republican again.

Answer:  Big money can do anything it wants.  We are seeing that played out  everywhere now.  On TV all the expensive attack ads, and on the Internet on the websites of most heretofore liberal forums and message boards such as Alternet.  Anything for a buck.

And for most of the elite, the U.S. Constitution is in their way.  They want it all.  And none for you.  You are nothing but a wage slave.  A serf!  Nevertheless, its as if nobody remembers such trivial details.  Many people are angry at President Obama, (because the GOP noise machine has been so active and so noisy decrying his every move.) and at the Democrats--- who deserve very harsh criticism for their lack of action in the past four years.  Which means these low-information voters will vote for--- you guessed it, any nearby Republican or Tea Bagger, no matter how insane the ideas they may spout.

Once again, I tremble for my country. ♦