craigslist | politics in baltimore

The Politics of Bitterness

2008-07-23T12:49:25-04:00

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/the_politics_of_bitterness.html

Barack Obama, it turns out, has a knack for undermining his own political strengths.

He was supposed to be the post-racial candidate. But he has associated himself for decades with a tradition of black liberation that views all of American life through the prism of pigment. His response to criticism on this count has been, in essence: The bitterness of my church is historically understandable but misdirected. You know me. I'm better than that.

Obama was also supposed to be the Democrat who finally "gets" religion, after a series of Democratic presidential candidates who seemed to suffer from a theological disability. But now, in the suddenly indispensable Huffington Post, we learn of Obama's unguarded reflection on Middle American economic anxiety: "It's not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

During Sunday night's CNN "Compassion Forum," Obama tried to smooth this statement over with the observation that "Scripture talks about clinging to what's good." So, evidently, in hard economic times, people find shelter, comfort and refuge in religion -- and anti-immigrant sentiments and antipathy to people who aren't like them. All those tried and true sources of American strength and steadiness during a crisis.

This is the downside of eloquence and intellect -- a belief that anything can be explained and thus explained away -- a temptation to substitute cleverness for remorse.

It is generally a bad political idea for a candidate to psychoanalyze swing voters, who tend to view their beliefs and motivations as more "real" than the deceptions and illusions of the political class. Few would enjoy being a pinned and wriggling specimen in Professor Obama's seminar for San Francisco Democratic donors.

But the setback is more than political. One of Obama's genuine contributions had been a renewed, liberal appreciation of the role of religious motivations in politics. His 2006 speech at a Call to Renewal conference in Washington recognized that the religious impulse has uncontainable political consequences. "Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King -- indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history -- were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause.

So to say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition."

In 2006, Obama argued that religious belief was authentic, well-intentioned and essential to the common good. In San Francisco, however, he seemed to slip into a crude academic Marxism, claiming that religion is an epiphenomenon, the outgrowth of deeper social trends; that the deepest realities of politics are economic instead of moral; that God and guns, bitterness and bigotry all somehow distract Middle America from real issues of justice.

During Sunday night's forum, Obama dismissed this interpretation as inconsistent with his life story. "It is very important to understand ...that I am a devout Christian, that I started my work working with churches in the shadow of steel plants that had closed on the south side of Chicago." In other words: You know me. I'm better than that.

Looking back over recent months, there is a common thread in Obama's response to both the Wright revelations and his "bitter" gaffe. In his Philadelphia speech on race, Obama talked of "the anger and the bitterness"
of Wright's oppressed generation. He referred to "a similar anger" existing within "the white community" that politicians have routinely exploited on issues such as crime and welfare. America, in this view, is beset by anxiety and fear and resentment and racial stalemate, which can be overcome by Obama's broad understanding and audacious hope.

A part of me wants to believe. Racial discrimination is the poorly healed scar of American history, and Obama's election would be a happy arrival on a national journey that began with African-Americans considered only three-fifths of a person.

But Obama's political approach is wearing poorly. Obamaism seems to consist of the belief that the candidate transcends the understandable but confused anger of black and white Americans. And so Obamaism requires an unfavorable comparison of the American people to Obama himself.

This message is inherently prideful: I understand your bitterness and confusion, but I don't reflect it. You know me. I'm better than that.

The problem is: We really don't know Obama very well.

RE:Political Finger Pointing

2008-07-23T11:58:22-04:00

You're quick to criticize but you offer no alternative.

I'd like to know your definition of what Zionism is.

In return, I'll give you my definition of a islamo-fascist!

Political Finger Pointing (in front of your computer )

2008-07-23T10:46:15-04:00

You guys solve nothing bickering back and forth. Both parties suck. Neither party cares about Americans, only the tax dollars they suck you dry for. Both parties work for the corporations and a Zionist agenda. Wake up already! And don't go calling me a racist. I know the difference between Zionism and Judaism. Huge difference!

Love is the answer.

RE:impeach now!

2008-07-23T09:36:07-04:00

Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans?

Only a far-left radical socialist would think it's OK to communicate with know terrorist with no questions asked. Shame on all of you!

Do you think Bush has a task force assigned to you? You truly are stupid!

I'll make sure your case manger knows about your activity on craigs list, Ha Ha....

RE,RE: Drilling

2008-07-23T09:20:14-04:00

Hum! If we start drilling now, it won't help us TODAY.

Do I have that right?

What liberal ran city school did you flunk out of?

So we shouldn't do anything unless it will benefit us TODAY. Great I'll stop saving for my kids college. Can't help them now, right?

I'll stop running after work, running won't help me live longer TODAY!

I'll cancel my Bay tags, can't save the Bay TODAY!

Alliterative energy won't help us TODAY either, dumb ass!!!!

me..me..me.. now...now...now..
me..me..me.. now...now...now..
me..me..me.. now...now...now..
me..me..me.. now...now...now..
me..me..me.. now...now...now..
me..me..me.. now...now...now..
me..me..me.. now...now...now..
me..me..me.. now...now...now..
me..me..me.. now...now...now..

impeach now!

2008-07-23T08:56:53-04:00

Would someone please give bush a blow job so we can impeach him? Maybe the repugnican poster here would like the job?

seriously, read this article - your freedoms are at stake:
Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power
Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate.
Editor's note: This article is part of a Salon investigative series on spying inside the United States by the Bush administration. Research support for the article was provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund. By Tim Shorrock
July 23, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.
While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.
Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA's working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.
The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi's and Conyers' offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses -- and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials. "If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration's attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don't know," says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.
"You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse," says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don't know [the extent of] what laws have been violated."
The parameters for an investigation were outlined in a seven-page memo, written after the former member of the Church Committee met for discussions with the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and other watchdog groups. Key issues to investigate, those involved say, would include the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance activities; the Central Intelligence Agency's use of extraordinary rendition and torture against terrorist suspects; and the U.S. government's extensive use of military assets -- including satellites, Pentagon intelligence agencies and U2 surveillance planes -- for a vast spying apparatus that could be used against the American people.
Specifically, the ACLU and other groups want to know how the NSA's use of databases and data mining may have meshed with other domestic intelligence activities, such as the U.S. government's extensive use of no-fly lists and the Treasury Department's list of "specially designated global terrorists" to identify potential suspects. As of mid-July, says Steinhardt, the no-fly list includes more than 1 million records corresponding to more than 400,000 names. If those people really represent terrorist threats, he says, "our cities would be ablaze." A deeper investigation into intelligence abuses should focus on how these lists feed on each other, Steinhardt says, as well as the government's "inexorable trend towards treating everyone as a suspect."
"It's not just the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program,'" agrees Gregory T. Nojeim from the Center for Democracy and Technology, referring to the Bush administration's misleading name for the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. "We need a broad investigation on the way all the moving parts fit together. It seems like we're always looking at little chunks and missing the big picture."
A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as "Main Core," the database reportedly collects and stores -- without warrants or court orders -- the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security. According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as "an emergency internal security database system" designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."
Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no direct knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have been used by the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, the NSA's use of the database, they say, may have triggered the now-famous March 2004 confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department that nearly led Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and other top Justice officials to resign en masse.
The Justice Department officials who objected to the legal basis for the surveillance program -- former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel -- testified before Congress last year about the 2004 showdown with the White House. Although they refused to discuss the highly classified details behind their concerns, the New York Times later reported that they were objecting to a program that "involved computer searches through massive electronic databases" containing "records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans." According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main Core, which he first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in government and the private sector, says there are strong indications that the Bush administration's domestic surveillance operations use Main Core.
Hamilton's company Inslaw is widely respected in the law enforcement community for creating a program called the Prosecutors' Management Information System, or PROMIS. It keeps track of criminal investigations through a powerful search engine that can quickly access all stored data components of a case, from the name of the initial investigators to the telephone numbers of key suspects. PROMIS, also widely used in the insurance industry, can also sort through other databases fast, with results showing up almost instantly. "It operates just like Google," Hamilton told me in an interview in his Washington office in May. Since the late 1980s, Inslaw has been involved in a legal dispute over its claim that Justice Department officials in the Reagan administration appropriated the PROMIS software. Hamilton claims that Reagan officials gave PROMIS to the NSA and the CIA, which then adapted the software -- and its outstanding ability to search other databases -- to manage intelligence operations and track financial transactions. Over the years, Hamilton has employed prominent lawyers to pursue the case, including Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general and secretary of defense who died in 1999, and C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush. The dispute has never been settled. But based on the long-running case, Hamilton says he believes U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main Core database. Hamilton was first told about the connection between PROMIS and Main Core in the spring of 1992 by a U.S. intelligence official, and again in 1995 by a former NSA official. In July 2001, Hamilton says, he discussed his case with retired Adm. Dan Murphy, a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA. Murphy, who died shortly after his meeting with Hamilton, did not specifically mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSA's use of PROMIS involved something "so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem," Hamilton told me. He added, "I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding to Main Core." Hamilton also provided copies of letters that Richardson and Gray sent to U.S. intelligence officials and the Justice Department on Inslaw's behalf alleging that the NSA and the CIA had appropriated PROMIS for intelligence use.
Hamilton says James B. Comey's congressional testimony in May 2007, in which he described a hospitalized John Ashcroft's dramatic standoff with senior Bush officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, was another illuminating moment. "It was then that we [at Inslaw] started hearing again about the Main Core derivative of PROMIS for spying on Americans," he told me.
Through a former senior Justice Department official with more than 25 years of government experience, Salon has learned of a high-level former national security official who reportedly has firsthand knowledge of the U.S. government's use of Main Core. The official worked as a senior intelligence analyst for a large domestic law enforcement agency inside the Bush White House. He would not agree to an interview. But according to the former Justice Department official, the former intelligence analyst told her that while stationed at the White House after the 9/11 attacks, one day he accidentally walked into a restricted room and came across a computer system that was logged on to what he recognized to be the Main Core database. When she mentioned the specific name of the top-secret system during their conversation, she recalled, "he turned white as a sheet."
An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that "8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect" and, in the event of a national emergency, "could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention."
The alleged use of Main Core by the Bush administration for surveillance, if confirmed to be true, would indicate a much deeper level of secretive government intrusion into Americans' lives than has been previously known. With respect to civil liberties, says the ACLU's Steinhardt, it would be "pretty frightening stuff." The Inslaw case also points to what may be an extensive role played by the NSA in financial spying inside the United States. According to reports over the years in the U.S. and foreign press, Inslaw's PROMIS software was embedded surreptitiously in systems sold to foreign and global banks as a way to give the NSA secret "backdoor" access to the electronic flow of money around the world.
In May, I interviewed Norman Bailey, a private financial consultant with years of government intelligence experience dating from the George W. Bush administration back to the Reagan administration. According to Bailey -- who from 2006 to 2007 headed a special unit within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence focused on financial intelligence on Cuba and Venezuela -- the NSA has been using its vast powers with signals intelligence to track financial transactions around the world since the early 1980s. From 1982 to 1984, Bailey ran a top-secret program for President Reagan's National Security Council, called "Follow the Money," that used NSA signals intelligence to track loans from Western banks to the Soviet Union and its allies. PROMIS, he told me, was "the principal software element" used by the NSA and the Treasury Department then in their electronic surveillance programs tracking financial flows to the Soviet bloc, organized crime and terrorist groups. His admission is the first public acknowledgement by a former U.S. intelligence official that the NSA used the PROMIS software.

According to Bailey, the Reagan program marked a significant shift in resources from human spying to electronic surveillance, as a way to track money flows to suspected criminals and American enemies. "That was the beginning of the whole process," he said. After 9/11, this capability was instantly seen within the U.S. government as a critical tool in the war on terror -- and apparently was deployed by the Bush administration inside the United States, in cases involving alleged terrorist supporters. One such case was that of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Oregon, which was accused of having terrorist ties after the NSA, at the request of the Treasury Department, eavesdropped on the phone calls of Al-Haramain officials and their American lawyers. The charges against Al-Haramain were based primarily on secret evidence that the Bush administration refused to disclose in legal proceedings; Al-Haramain's lawyers argued in a lawsuit that was a violation of the defendants' due process rights.
According to Bailey, the NSA also likely would have used its technological capabilities to track the charity's financial activity. "The vast majority of financial movements of any significance take place electronically, so intercepts have become an extremely important element" in intelligence, he explained. "If the government suspects that a particular Muslim charitable organization is engaged in collecting funds to funnel to terrorists, the NSA would be asked to follow the money going into and out of the bank accounts of that charity." (The now-defunct Al-Haramain Foundation, although affiliated with a Saudi Arabian-based global charity, was founded and based in Ashland, Ore.) The use of a powerful database and extensive watch lists, Bailey said, would make the NSA's job much easier. "The biggest problems with intercepts, quite frankly, is that the volumes of data, daily or even by the hour, are gigantic," he said. "Unless you have a very precise idea of what it is you're looking for, the NSA people or their counterparts [overseas] will just throw up their hands and say 'forget it.'" Regarding domestic surveillance, Bailey said there's a "whole gray area where the initiation of the transaction was in the United States and the final destination was outside, or vice versa. That's something for the lawyers to figure out." Bailey's information on the evolution of the Reagan intelligence program appears to corroborate and clarify an article published in March in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that the NSA was conducting domestic surveillance using "an ad-hoc collection of so-called 'black programs' whose existence is undisclosed." Some of these programs began "years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach." Among them, the article said, are a joint NSA-Treasury database on financial transactions that dates back "about 15 years" to 1993. That's not quite right, Bailey clarified: "It started in the early '80s, at least 10 years before."
Main Core may be the contemporary incarnation of a government watch list system that was part of a highly classified "Continuity of Government" program created by the Reagan administration to keep the U.S. government functioning in the event of a nuclear attack. Under a 1982 presidential directive, the outbreak of war could trigger the proclamation of martial law nationwide, giving the military the authority to use its domestic database to round up citizens and residents considered to be threats to national security. The emergency measures for domestic security were to be carried out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army.
In the late 1980s, reports about a domestic database linked to FEMA and the Continuity of Government program began to appear in the press. For example, in 1986 the Austin American-Statesman uncovered evidence of a large database that authorities were proposing to use to intern Latino dissidents and refugees during a national emergency that might follow a potential U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. During the Iran-Contra congressional hearings in 1987, questions to Reagan aide Oliver North about the database were ruled out of order by the committee chairman, Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye, because of the "highly sensitive and classified" nature of FEMA's domestic security operations.
In September 2001, according to "The Rise of the Vulcans," a 2004 book on Bush's war cabinet by James Mann, a contemporary version of the Continuity of Government program was put into play in the hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when Vice President Cheney and senior members of Congress were dispersed to "undisclosed locations" to maintain government functions. It was during this emergency period, Hamilton and other former government officials believe, that President Bush may have authorized the NSA to begin actively using the Main Core database for domestic surveillance. One indicator they cite is a statement by Bush in December 2005, after the New York Times had revealed the NSA's warrantless wiretapping, in which he made a rare reference to the emergency program: The Justice Department's legal reviews of the NSA activity, Bush said, were based on "fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government."
It is noteworthy that two key players on Bush's national security team, Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, have been involved in the Continuity of Government program since its inception. Along with Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's first secretary of defense, both men took part in simulated drills for the program during the 1980s and early 1990s. Addington's role was disclosed in "The Dark Side," a book published this month about the Bush administration's war on terror by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer. In the book, Mayer calls Addington "the father of the [NSA] eavesdropping program," and reports that he was the key figure involved in the 2004 dispute between the White House and the Justice Department over the legality of the program. That would seem to make him a prime witness for a broader investigation.

Getting a full picture on Bush's intelligence programs, however, will almost certainly require any sweeping new investigation to have a scope that would inoculate it against charges of partisanship. During one recent discussion on Capitol Hill, according to a participant, a senior aide to Speaker Pelosi was asked for Pelosi's views on a proposal to expand the investigation to past administrations, including those of Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. "The question was, how far back in time would we have to go to make this credible?" the participant in the meeting recalled.
That question was answered in the seven-page memo. "The rise of the 'surveillance state' driven by new technologies and the demands of counter-terrorism did not begin with this Administration," the author wrote. Even though he acknowledged in interviews with Salon that the scope of abuse under George W. Bush would likely be an order of magnitude greater than under preceding presidents, he recommended in the memo that any new investigation follow the precedent of the Church Committee and investigate the origins of Bush's programs, going as far back as the Reagan administration.
The proposal has emerged in a political climate reminiscent of the Watergate era. The Church Committee was formed in 1975 in the wake of media reports about illegal spying against American antiwar activists and civil rights leaders, CIA assassination squads, and other dubious activities under Nixon and his predecessors. Chaired by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, the committee interviewed more than 800 officials and held 21 public hearings. As a result of its work, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which required warrants and court supervision for domestic wiretaps, and created intelligence oversight committees in the House and Senate.
So far, no lawmaker has openly endorsed a proposal for a new Church Committee-style investigation. A spokesman for Pelosi declined to say whether Pelosi herself would be in favor of a broader probe into U.S. intelligence. On the Senate side, the most logical supporters for a broader probe would be Democratic senators such as Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who led the failed fight against the recent Bush-backed changes to FISA. (Both Feingold and Leahy's offices declined to comment on a broader intelligence inquiry.) The Democrats' reticence on such action ultimately may be rooted in congressional complicity with the Bush administration's intelligence policies. Many of the war on terror programs, including the NSA's warrantless surveillance and the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," were cleared with key congressional Democrats, including Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Rockefeller, and former House Intelligence chairwoman Jane Harman, among others.

The discussions about a broad investigation were jump-started among civil liberties advocates this spring, when it became clear that the Democrats didn't have the votes to oppose the Bush-backed bill updating FISA. The new legislation could prevent the full story of the NSA surveillance programs from ever being uncovered; it included retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that may have violated FISA by collaborating with the NSA on warrantless wiretapping. Opponents of Bush's policies were further angered when Democratic leaders stripped from their competing FISA bill a provision that would have established a national commission to investigate post-9/11 surveillance programs.
The next president obviously would play a key role in any decision to investigate intelligence abuses. Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, is running as a champion of Bush's national security policies and would be unlikely to embrace an investigation that would, foremost, embarrass his own party. (Randy Scheunemann, McCain's spokesman on national security, declined to comment.)
Some see a brighter prospect in Barack Obama, should he be elected. The plus with Obama, says the former Church Committee staffer, is that as a proponent of open government, he could order the executive branch to be more cooperative with Congress, rolling back the obsessive secrecy and stonewalling of the Bush White House. That could open the door to greater congressional scrutiny and oversight of the intelligence community, since the legislative branch lacked any real teeth under Bush. (Obama's spokesman on national security, Ben Rhodes, did not reply to telephone calls and e-mails seeking comment.)

But even that may be a lofty hope. "It may be the last thing a new president would want to do," said a participant in the ongoing discussions. Unfortunately, he said, "some people see the Church Committee ideas as a substitute for prosecutions that should already have happened."

RE:DRILL HERE, DRILL NOW (Don't listen to the lies)

2008-07-23T08:43:01-04:00

Drilling Ourselves Deep In a Hole

By Firmin DeBrabander

21/07/08 "ICH" -- - At one point in his masterful People�s History of the United States, Howard Zinn reflects upon the unspeakable carnage wrought by the Conquistadors in South and Central America, all in the pursuit of gold, and wonders at how those obscene riches sustained imperial greatness� for barely a hundred years. All that bloodletting, enslavement, massacres -- genocide in places -- for a temporary wealth that quickly vanished on the stage of history.

It reminds me of our current oil craze: in one century we have plundered billions of years of stored hydrocarbons, and what do we have to show for it? Fleeting prosperity�one that is hardly shared by all�a highly volatile Middle East, and awesome ecological devastation that will require centuries of recovery.

And now, as the age of oil finally signals its inevitable demise, our president and his allies in Washington announce that their grand response is � to drill for more oil. Congress and the president are of course reacting to public hysteria from rising prices at the pump. But expanding domestic drilling is an inane proposal. Actually, it is reckless and tragic.

Until this week, Washington has largely chosen to ignore the real reason behind the dramatic rise in oil prices. Congress ripped Wall Street speculators for driving up the price of a barrel, but economists have long agreed that the major culprit is increasing demand in China, India and the developing world. Congress now appears to have realized that global demand is the problem; however, this is a problem that cannot be drilled away. Any increase in global oil supply is destined to be quickly outpaced by skyrocketing energy demands.

Domestic drilling can only diminish gas prices if that supply were guaranteed for domestic use alone. This appears to be the underlying assumption of the current congressional push for expanded domestic drilling. And it is laughable. Contracts for drilling in Alaska and off our coasts will likely go to US-based firms, like Exxon or Conoco, which are also transnational corporations, and thus, in no way compelled to restrict retail to the US market. If expanded domestic drilling succeeds in lowering our gas prices -- even marginally -- five years from now, while gas prices abroad remain robust, we all know well where Exxon will shop its Alaskan crude.

This call to expand domestic drilling is again the temptation to delay the inevitable: the transition to renewable energy and sustainable lifestyles. Oil is ecologically condemned, but also economically condemned, for it is a limited resource: its inevitable destiny is to become more expensive�and then run out. Accordingly, those nations that best prepare themselves for a post-petroleum world will be best positioned economically for the future.

In Belgium recently, where gas flutters around nine dollars a gallon, I was impressed that people hardly complain. Belgians do complain about Americans, however, and our frenzied reaction to fuel prices that are still less than half what they pay. Belgians have long gotten used to high fuel prices. And they have long adjusted to them. Belgian towns, even the newer neighborhoods, are compact and walkable; they are crossed and interconnected by competent public transportation. Sidewalks and bike paths line the roads, which are populated by all manner of tiny cars such as we hardly see in the US. Europeans are already prepared for oil scarcity � and demise even, as the famed Autobahn in Germany is now lined with solar panels.

There is little sense that the powers that run this country are similarly forward thinking. Five years later, it is now apparent that the war in Iraq was largely spearheaded by this administration to secure an enduring source of oil. I do not have space here to review the ample evidence supporting this. It is enough to cite the shamefully generous long term contracts for western oil companies in Iraq that are now coming to light.

In his latest book, former World Bank director Joseph Stiglitz claims that the war in Iraq will end up costing three trillion dollars. Imagine if that amount had been dedicated to researching and sustaining the transition to renewable energies. A mere trillion dollars would have gone a long way towards remodeling American suburbia for lifestyle and transportation changes such as I witnessed in Belgium. Instead, we have sacrificed unimaginable funds (from future generations, Stiglitz tells us), and tens of thousands of lives (at least) for a resource that is soon to be economically irrelevant!

In this light, this administration�s Iraqi venture is shockingly shortsighted. And now, in proposing that we sully pristine Alaskan wilds and our fragile coastal shelves in the name of oil, the White House threatens to keep living its lie. China is undertaking a massive initiative to install solar powered water heaters on urban homes; Brazil provides 40% of its domestic fuel use from homegrown sugarcane ethanol. We, on the other hand, aim to squeeze more oil from a taxed planet, and further entrench ourselves in our sorry addiction. This nation�s repeated gambles on oil will likely cost American prosperity�and superiority�in the 21st century.

Firmin DeBrabander, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Maryland Institute College of Art

RE: Drilling (Republican propaganda )

2008-07-23T08:36:41-04:00

More drilling so we can have more gas to charge you $4+ a gallon for. This bastards don't care about your families - they just care about their billions of dollars.
You want to know why Gas is so high - thank Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al. & McCain and his buddy Phil Gramm.
Drilling here WILL NOT ease the gas price right now or EVER. Eliminate the Enron loophole and that will bring energy costs back down to a reasonable level. Let a bunch of oil men hijack our country and this is what you get - an energy policy that benefits the oil men! IF WE SPENT HALF THE MONEY WASTED IN IRAQ ON RENEWABLE RESOURCES (SOLAR, WIND, BIO-FUELS) WE WOULDN'T BE IN THIS PICKLE NOW. The sad thing is that it was an unnecessary war to take control of their oil reserves and to drive UP the oil prices to the benefit of these oil robber barons. McCain and Gramm just helped to game the system to ensure high profits.

Click here and watch this segment to see the who is responsible for the Enron loophole and our current problems at the pump.

Click here and see who is at fault for our mortgage crisis.

Click here to see Bush's knowledge on the economy.

Click here BUSH 2.0's, I mean McCain's pastor problem.

Click here for a detailed summary of how "heir leader" has ties to the Nazis.

Click here for for a list of recent Repugnican perps that have all been caught doing things that Jesus might think twice about forgiving.

There is no easy option other than to vote out the bastards (the rethugnican oilmen and the blue dog, spineless "democrats" that are their little bitches). The reason congress's approval rating is so low is that they don't have the balls to stand up to these thugs. We need strong leaders that will stand up to the corporate elite - not appease them. Vote your wallet for a change. Vote out the republicans and their spineless enablers.
the blue collar sage, a proud EX_republican

REX2:DRILL HERE, DRILL NOW

2008-07-23T07:42:02-04:00

Funny, oil prices started to drop hours after Bush's big speech about drilling! I wonder why that happened.

Big oil?

Why is it that the left is so jealous of successful people instead of working hard to become successful themselves?

You're all a bunch of bottom feeders looking for a free ride!!!

RE:DRILL HERE, DRILL NOW (MANIPULATION BY BIG OIL)

2008-07-22T18:48:35-04:00

THE ONLY REASON PRICES ARE DROPPING IS THAT BIG OIL IS SCARED THAT WE ARE GOING TO VOTE OUT THEIR BUTT-MONKEYS ( THE REPUBLICANS ) IN NOVEMBER. THEY WILL CONTINUE TO DROP UNTIL ELECTION DAY (JUST LIKE THE LAST 3 ELECTIONS ) THEN THEY WILL START TO SKIE AGAIN. THE ONLY THING THAT NEEDS DRILLING IS SOME SENSE INTO THAT WE LITTLE CONSERVATIVE MIND OF YOURS....

DRILL HERE, DRILL NOW...UPDATE

2008-07-22T13:20:41-04:00

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9230R0G0&show_article=1

Light, sweet crude for August delivery fell $4.56 to $126.48 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Earlier, the contract dropped as low as $125.63.

Stop bitching and do something!

Barbara Mikulski
http://mikulski.senate.gov/Contact/contact.cfm

Ben Cardin
http://cardin.senate.gov/contact/

Contact a Legislator
http://mlis.state.md.us/mgaweb/mail32.aspx

Obama, New Movie

2008-07-22T10:55:22-04:00

http://hypemovie.com/index.html

RE:Economics for dummies..F-

2008-07-22T08:20:46-04:00

I give the person you copped this from an F-

Obama's economic plan,

tax, tax, tax, regulate. tax, tax, tax, regulate. tax, tax, tax, regulate.

Obama is to the left of Jimmy Carter, fuck that far-left radical socialist!

I hope Jesse gets his little commie nuts!!!!!

Economics for dummies

2008-07-22T07:34:12-04:00

The best thing to happen to John McCain was for the three network anchors to leave him in the dust this week while they chase Barack Obama on his global Lollapalooza tour. Were voters forced to actually focus on Mr. McCain's response to our spiraling economic crisis at home, the prospect of his ascension to the Oval Office could set off a panic that would make the IndyMac Bank bust in Pasadena look as merry as the Rose Bowl.

"In a time of war," Mr. McCain said last week, "the commander in chief doesn't get a learning curve." Fair enough, but he imparted this wisdom in a speech that was almost a year behind Mr. Obama in recognizing Afghanistan as the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. Given that it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get Mr. McCain's attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer's learning curve was faster than his.

Mr. McCain still doesn't understand that we can't send troops to Afghanistan unless they're shifted from Iraq. But simple math, to put it charitably, has never been his forte. When it comes to the central front of American anxiety -- the economy -- his learning curve has flat-lined.

In 2000, he told an interviewer that he would make up for his lack of attention to "those issues." As he entered the 2008 campaign, Mr. McCain was still saying the same, vowing to read "Greenspan's book" as a tutorial. Last weekend, the resolutely analog candidate told The New York Times he is at last starting to learn how "to get online myself." Perhaps he'll retire his abacus by Election Day.

Mr. McCain's fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated on video by whining about "a nation of whiners." The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama's connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate's numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.

Just two weeks before publicly sharing his thoughts about America's "mental recession," Mr. Gramm laid out equally incendiary views in a Wall Street Journal profile that portrayed him as "almost certainly" the McCain choice for Treasury secretary. Mr. Gramm said that the former chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was "probably the most exploited worker in American history" since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the "billions" he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell.

But no one in the news media seemed to notice Mr. Gramm's naked expression of the mind-set he'd bring to a McCain White House. And few journalists have vetted the presumptive Treasury secretary's post-Senate history as an executive at UBS. The stock of that banking giant has lost 70 percent of its value in a year after its reckless adventures in the subprime lending market. It's now fending off federal investigation for helping the megarich avoid taxes.

Mr. McCain made a big show of banishing Mr. Gramm after his whining "gaffe," but it's surely at most a temporary suspension. When the candidate said back in January that there's nobody he knows who is stronger on economic issues than his old Senate pal, he was telling the truth. Left to his own devices -- or those of his new No. 1 economic surrogate, Carly Fiorina -- Mr. McCain is clueless. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a supporter, said that Mr. McCain's latest panacea for high gas prices, offshore drilling, is snake oil -- and then announced his availability to serve as energy czar in an Obama administration.

The term flip-flopping doesn't do justice to Mr. McCain's self-contradictory economic pronouncements because that implies there's some rational, if hypocritical, logic at work. What he serves up instead is plain old incoherence, as if he were compulsively consulting one of those old Magic 8 Balls. In a single 24-hour period in April, Mr. McCain went from saying there's been "great economic progress" during the Bush presidency to saying "Americans are not better off than they were eight years ago." He reversed his initial condemnation of mortgage bailouts in just two weeks.

In February Mr. McCain said he would balance the federal budget by the end of his first term even while extending the gargantuan Bush tax cuts. In April he said he'd accomplish this by the end of his second term. In July he's again saying he'll do it in his first term. Why not just say he'll do it on Inauguration Day? It really doesn't matter since he's never supplied real numbers that would give this promise even a patina of credibility.

Mr. McCain's plan for Social Security reform is "along the lines that President Bush proposed." Or so he said in March. He came out against such "privatization" in June (though his policy descriptions still support it). Last week he indicated he isn't completely clear on what Social Security does. He called the program's premise -- young taxpayers foot the bill for their elders (including him) -- an "absolute disgrace."

Given that Mr. McCain's sole private-sector job was a fleeting stint in public relations at his father-in-law's beer distributorship, he comes by his economic ignorance honestly. But there's no A team aboard the Straight Talk Express to fill him in. His campaign economist, the former Bush adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, could be found in the June 5 issue of American Banker suggesting even at that late date that we still don't know "the depth of the housing crisis" and proposing that "monitoring is the right thing to do in these circumstances."

Ms. Fiorina, the ubiquitous new public face of McCain economic policy, adds nothing to the mix beyond her incessant display of corporate jargon, from "trend lines" to "start-ups." Before she was fired at Hewlett-Packard, its stock had declined 50 percent during her five-plus years in charge. She missed earning projections -- by 23 percent in one quarter -- much as she now misrepresents both the Obama and McCain records. This month she said Mr. McCain wanted to require insurance plans to cover birth control medications along with Viagra, when in fact he had voted against it.

Ms. Fiorina received a $42 million payout (half in cash) from H.P., according to a shareholders' subsequent lawsuit. With this inspiring rsum, she now aspires to be Mr. McCain's running mate. So does the irrepressible Mitt Romney, who actually was a business whiz before serving as Massachusetts's governor. Beltway wisdom has it that the addition of such a corporate star will remedy Mr. McCain's fiscal flatulence.

But Mr. Romney, while more plausible than Ms. Fiorina, is hardly what America wants at this desperate time. His leveraged buyout dealings as co-founder of Bain Capital induced plant closings, mass layoffs and outsourcing. If Mr. McCain truly intends to "put our country's interests" above politics and reach across the aisle to move the nation forward, as he constantly tells us, why not go for a vice president who's the very best fit for the huge challenges at hand?

The obvious choice would be Michael Bloomberg -- who, as a former Republican turned independent, would necessitate that Mr. McCain reach only halfway across the aisle, and to someone who is his friend rather than a vanquished rival he is learning to tolerate.

Romney vs. Bloomberg is not a close contest. Bloomberg L.P. has roughly three times the revenues and employees of Bain & Company, where Mr. Romney ultimately served as chief executive. Mr. Romney rescued the Salt Lake City Olympics while running it in 2002, but Mayor Bloomberg revitalized New York, the nation's largest metropolis, after the most devastating attack in our history. The city he manages has more than twice the budget of Mr. Romney's state.

Yes, Mr. Bloomberg is a closet Democrat and an alpha dog who doesn't want to be a second banana. And his views on gay civil rights and abortion would roil the G.O.P. base. But Mr. Romney shared some of those same views before he flip-flopped, and besides, these are not ordinary times. Millions of Americans are losing their homes and jobs. Whole industries are going belly up. The national crisis at hand, not yesterday's culture wars, should drive the vice-presidential pick.

Mr. McCain reminds us every day how principled he is. That presumably means he'd risk a revolt by his party's dwindling agents of intolerance and do everything in his power to persuade Mr. Bloomberg to join his ticket in the spirit of patriotic sacrifice. The politics could be advantageous too. A Bloomberg surprise could impress independents and keep the television audience tuned in to a G.O.P. convention that will unfold in the shadow of Mr. Obama's address to 75,000 screaming fans in Denver.

But this is fantasy political baseball, not reality. Mr. McCain, sad to say, hung up his old maverick's spurs the day he embraced the Bush tax cuts he had once opposed as "too tilted to the wealthy." And Mr. Bloomberg? It's hard to picture a titan who built his empire on computer terminals investing any capital, political or otherwise, in a chief executive who is still learning how to do, as Mr. McCain puts it, "a Google."

Do you know where your tax dollars are? (Baltimore County)

2008-07-21T16:17:32-04:00

What do designer sunglasses, a decorative tire cover and a raincoat have in common? - Baltimore County employees charged them to the public dime using county-issued credit cards
http://www.examiner.com/a-1497126~Report__Employees_used_Baltimore_County_credit_cards_for_personal_items.html

Obama Acts Like Obama-All Double-talk

2008-07-20T23:21:09-04:00

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/8911

True to form, Barack Obama�s explanation a few months ago of his reasons for leaving Trinity Church are a model of double-talk. (And the remarkably passive media pack doesn�t make it very hard for him to avoid further scrutiny.) He has, he explained

�tremendous regard� for the church community, but said he could not live with a situation where everything said in the church, including comments by a guest pastor, �will be imputed to me, even if they conflict with my long-held, views, statements and principles.�

And he would have remained in a church for two decades where regularly people spoke out in ways which conflicted with his principles because . . . why, exactly? We don�t know. And no one in the press thought to ask.

But it gets worse. ABC reports:

He insisted that Trinity itself is not a church worth denouncing. �I�m not denouncing the church and I�m not interested in people who want me to denounce the church, because it�s not a church worthy of denouncing, and so if they�ve seen caricatures of the church and except [sic] those caricatures despite my insistence that that�s not what the church is about, then there�s not much I can do about it.�

Yes, remember Obama does not do denouncing. There is nothing a Wright or Pfleger or Ayers can do which deserve condemnation. Unless, of course they visit the National Press Club and critique his sincerity.

And Obama concedes that:

[A]t the start of the campaign he never would have expected this much scrutiny to be put on his faith, �which we knew there was going to be some things that we didn�t see coming, this was one. You know I did not anticipate my fairly conventional Christian faith being subject to such challenge and such scrutiny. Initially with emails suggesting that I was a Muslim, later with you know the controversy that Trinity generated.�

This one gets the trifecta for dishonesty, or perhaps cluelessness. First, it is, of course, not the case that his Christian faith is being questioned. I know of no commentator, critic, or political opponent who has done that. What is at issue is his propensity to hang out with hatemongers who suggest his current post-racial theme is a pose. Second, he apparently lacks any cultural or political compass if he really believed that Wright et al. would not become an issue. Was it self-delusion? Or is he so out of touch with average Americans that he was unable to predict what would be deeply offensive to millions of Americans? And finally, notice how he impugns the motives of those who raise concerns about his association with Trinity. They are on a footing, in his book, with those perpetrating the �He�s a Muslim� canard. But the former are not perpetrating a lie. They are discussing and probing the beliefs, sincerity, and character of the man who wants to be President.

The Trinity cast of characters and Obama�s reaction to them have been more revealing than more a dozen-plus debates, all the speeches, and just about anything that has happened in over a year of campaigning. It might be even more revealing if the media would take their role seriously and press Obama on some of these obvious points. But Obama, however inadvertently, has done a fairly good job of letting us know how he makes both political and moral judgments. And that is perhaps the most important thing to know about a potential President.

You just wait!

2008-07-18T14:31:09-04:00

Don't get mad when this hits the fan!

RE:President Obama needs to see this!

2008-07-18T10:50:49-04:00

President Obama should have these people Executed?

So much for free speech!!! Isn't it funny how sensitive the left is, what a bunch of feminized bitches!!!

Ha Ha fuck Yo'Bama!!!!!!!

I would point out that sportswearbymail.com also has anti-McCain and anti-Hillary shirts but you're a far-left radical socialist like Obama, so what would be the point?

President Obama! What a joke!!!!

Obama Flip-Flops Leave the Race Tied (Baltimore)

2008-07-18T08:14:42-04:00

Obama Flip-Flops Leave the Race Tied

By: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

After almost six weeks of a constant Obama lead, generally in the five to seven-point range, Scott Rasmussen�s daily tracking poll records two consecutive days of a tie race (July 12-13) and a one-point Obama lead on July 14. What happened to the Democrat�s lead?

Part of the slippage is Obama�s fault and part is McCain�s gain.

Obama has carried flip-flopping to new heights. In the space of a month and a half, this candidate � who we don�t really yet know very well � reversed or sharply modified his positions on at least nine key issues:

# After vowing to eschew private fundraising and take public financing, he has now refused public money.

# Once he threatened to filibuster a bill to protect telephone companies from liability for their cooperation with national security wiretaps; now he has voted for the legislation.

# Turning his back on a lifetime of support for gun control, he now recognizes a Second Amendment right to bear arms in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.

# Formerly, he told the Israeli lobby that he favored an undivided Jerusalem. Now he says he didn�t mean it.

# From a 100 percent pro-choice position, he now has migrated to expressing doubts about allowing partial-birth abortions.

# For the first time, he now speaks highly of using church-based institutions to deliver public services to the poor.

# Having based his entire campaign on withdrawal from Iraq, he now pledges to consult with the military first.

# During the primary, he backed merit pay for teachers � but before the union a few weeks ago, he opposed it.

# After specifically saying in the primaries that he disagreed with Sen. Hillary Clinton�s proposal to impose Social Security taxes on income over $200,000 and wanted to tax all income, he has now adopted the Clinton position.

Obama�s breathtaking flips and flops are materially different from McCain�s. While McCain had opposed offshore oil drilling and now supports it, the facts have obviously changed. Obama�s shifts have nothing to do with altered circumstances, just a change in the political calendar.

As a candidate who was nominated to be a different kind of politician, Obama has set the bar pretty high. And, with his flipping and flopping, he is falling short, to the disillusionment of his more na�ve supporters. One wag even called him the "black Bill Clinton," a turnaround of the "first black president" moniker that had been pinned on Bill.

Meanwhile, McCain and the Republicans have finally found an issue, oil drilling, exposing how the Democrats oppose drilling virtually anywhere that there might be recoverable oil. Not in Alaska. Not offshore. Not in shale deposits in the West.

The Democratic claim that we "cannot drill our way out of the crisis in gas prices" begs the question of whether, had we drilled five years ago, we would be a lot less dependent on foreign market fluctuations.

The truth is that the Democrats put the need to mitigate climate change ahead of the imperative of holding down gasoline prices at the pump. If there was ever a fault line between elitist and populist approaches to a problem, this is it. In fact, liberals basically don�t see much wrong with $5 gas. Many have been urging a tax to achieve precisely this level, just like Europe has done for decades.

Obama said that he was unhappy that there was not a period of "gradual adjustment" to the high prices, but seems to shed few tears over the current levels. After all, if your imperative is climate change, a high gas price is worth 10 times a ratified Kyoto treaty in bringing about change.

Republicans can drive a truck through the gap between this elite opinion and the need for ordinary people to afford the journey to work in the morning. And, with a 16-state media buy, the Republican Party and the McCain campaign are doing precisely that.

If Obama softens his aversion to drilling, it may be the final straw for some of his liberal supporters. Where would they go?

Nader is still a possibility. But McCain can attract liberal votes. He doesn�t need to bleed Obama only from the right. His own stands against drilling in Alaska and torture of terror suspects and for immigration reform make him suspect on the right, but quite acceptable to the left. If moderate liberals are disgusted by Obama�s obvious attempts at chicanery and repositioning, they might just cross the aisle.

� 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

infection and disease

2008-07-18T01:46:00-04:00

Medical science is losing the fight against new forms of infection and disease.

The Healing of the Nations www.davidbenariel.org

President Obama needs to see this!

2008-07-17T21:31:22-04:00

President Obama should have these people Executed!
I can't believe that they are allowed to sell these. I found this website (http://www.sportswearbymail.com) that sells T-shirts with sayings like "Who Shot Obama?" and "I is U President!" unbelievable. I thought the New Yorker Magazine Cover was Bad. This tops that! They say they are just Capitalist on their website. Now I know why President Obama like Socialism. I say it is just Republican Cracker Propaganda. I don't know, do people wear these.I hear in New York the kids are buying them up like crazy. Kids need Parenting and so do the Parents.

Obama camp need some travel money? * see why (Baltimore)

2008-07-17T14:35:34-04:00

Obama walk Fundraiser - see why

TkHtIESd cIPSp ZAi RRYEsAaLJLcYo wFFUCNgNNYK tVHIWDFEfOi

(a) Citizens are equal before the law without discrimination because of sex blood language social origin or religion (b) Equal opportunities are guaranteed to all citizens according to the law whose voice was familiar to Indiana high school basketball fans of the 1950s and 60s The legendary announcer The school song played twice in the Hickory/Linton game is not Milan's but Manchester High School's located in responding to the call of our religious and national leaders and the insistence of our great religious authorities and our leaders and our reformers we went by the millions for the first time in our history to the ballot box men and women young and old on If a page was recently created here it may not yet be visible because of a delay in updating the database matter may flow in and out of the system boundaries The first law of thermodynamics for open systems states 97972095

Oil tumbles for 3rd day

2008-07-17T14:23:48-04:00

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D91VOG6G0&show_article=1

Light, sweet crude for August delivery was down $4.08 at $130.52 a barrel before midday on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices have fallen about $14 in just the past three days.

Let's drill people!

THE PROPHET

2008-07-17T09:12:17-04:00

The black helicopters are on the way!!

I would remind you of the Clinton administrations actions in Iraq.

I would remind you of the 17, 18 or 19 UN resolutions.

I would remind you that the entire industrialized world thought Iraq was a threat.

I would remind you of the speeches made by liberals like John Kerry and Al Gore before 911 about the dangers of Iraq.

I would remind you of all this and more but like all crazy far-left socialist, you just won't get it!

RE:ABS,NBS,CBS........

2008-07-17T08:39:26-04:00

The media is a conservative front to push their neo-con agenda. They shouldn't be allowed to wear the stars & stripes.
You and the rest of the reich-wing, with your blind patriotism is the same as the idiots that allowed Hitler to rise to power.
wake up, fools!

Stop it, stop it now!

2008-07-17T08:39:09-04:00

Stop recycling, it will not save the earth TODAY!

Stop saving for retirement, it will not help you TODAY!

Stop eating healthy, it will not help you TODAY!

Stop reading to your children, it will not help them TODAY!

If we shoulden't drill here, drill now because it won't help us today then why should we do anything unless it will give us instent gradifcation?

Me, Me, Me....Now, Now, Now

Bush's Democracy, a shame for FACISTS, Aristacrates (THE PROPHET)

2008-07-17T08:31:01-04:00

Isn't it amazing how right wing facist can cry anti Bill Of Rights, when it comes to semi auto matic weapons, but when break the constitution to go to war on lies, deceit,manipulating the truth, and down right murder, torture, and GOD knows, this the right wing sees OK> they would rather impeach a excelent President over a Blow Job, which is not a stranger to republicans and democrates, but a liar, treasonist murderer, thats OK. THEN THEY CRY JESUS CHRIST> The very thing he preached against, they do. Not only are they liars, but they invoke Gods name in thier vain attempt to decieve themselves,and try to convince you Gods in favor of what they do. They are the very pitiful example of DEMOCRACY. Personally I do believe that BUSH was absent to many times when DEMOCRACY was taught. This mans view of DEMOCRACY, would be the envy of all facist. You can believe what you want, but this complete airhead that is in office knows nothing of DEMOCRACY except how to use it to push his facist agenda. True democracy protects all its people, not just men, but all the people and is not up to be used to as a camoflag for his facist agenda. If you really think this man has any idea of how to run a Democracy you and Him better get your brains out of mouthballs. Look at the state of the union. He says its good, yea good for him, and the Aristocrates.That, I thought we did away with in the revolution.

prices fall over $10 in 2 days

2008-07-17T08:16:26-04:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080716/ap_on_bi_ge/oil_prices

Drill here, Drill now!!!

Barbara Mikulski
http://mikulski.senate.gov/Contact/contact.cfm

Ben Cardin
http://cardin.senate.gov/contact/

Contact a Legislator
http://mlis.state.md.us/mgaweb/mail32.aspx

Re2: and oil drops 49 (Glen Burnie)

2008-07-16T22:38:19-04:00

http://baltimore.craigslist.org/pol/757011154.html

Incorrect. The price dropped because there are 3 million barrels more of light sweet crude in the US supply this week than expected. A surplus almost always means a sell-off in the market.

Don't come back with the this is liberal democrat BS, I'm neither.

Phil Gramm - McCain's number 1 man (Love those family values...)

2008-07-16T21:25:15-04:00

Phil Gramm May Be Gone, But His Porn Lives On
Phil Gramm's recent disparaging of "a nation of whiners" complaining about a "mental recession" did more than offend the sensibilities of economically struggling Americans. His gaffe also served as a reminder that McCain had appointed one of the most reactionary, venal, and destructive political figures in recent times as his top econ man. By Sunday, the damage to the McCain campaign had grown so severe it announced that Gramm's role had been significantly reduced.

Phil Gramm attempted to invest $15,000 in "Truck Stop Women." His money ultimately helped produce a film portraying Richard Nixon wandering nude around the White House.
Gramm was an accident waiting to happen. Indeed, his gaffe represents little more than a scrap in the massive heap of wreckage he has left in his wake. Gramm's own presidential campaign in 1996 was among his most high-profile casualties. In order to win a whopping total of 8 delegates, the charisma-challenged Gramm had to spend $20 million, or about $2.5 million per delegate. This experience curiously translated into a job as one of McCain's key political advisors.
But first, Gramm returned to the Senate, where he was lobbied intensely by one of his major campaign contributors, Enron. Enron enjoyed easy access to Gramm's office; the senator's wife served on Enron's board of directors and Ken Lay was his 1992 campaign co-chair. Gramm rewarded his financial angels in 2000, slipping the "Commodity Futures Modernization Act" into a omnibus spending bill just as Congress headed off for summer vacation. His amendment instantly enabled the creation of a shadow banking system -- "weapons of financial destruction" in the words of Warren Buffet -- that directly contributed to the current mortgage foreclosure crisis. Millions of Americans have suffered as a result of Gramm's machinations. While the destruction Gramm has caused is felt across the country, little is known about the seedy business schemes that preceded his political career. Before Gramm joined the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed to call for the defunding of the NEA, before he attacked an opponent for taking money from a gay rights group, and before he was interviewed by the white supremacist Southern Partisan magazine, Gramm was an avidly active investor in soft-core pornography movies. Gramm's journey into porn began in 1973, when his brother-in-law, George Caton, rushed to tell him about an exciting low-budget soft-core production called "Truck Stop Women." A promo poster for the film boasted of its buxom stars: "No Rig Was Too Big For Them To Handle." Caton, who was in charge of fundraising for the production, asked Gramm to become an investor. To entice his brother-in-law, Caton showed him scenes of Playboy Playmate of the year Claudia Jennings displaying her bare essentials (she is naked throughout much of the film).
These scenes "really got Phil titillated," Caton told journalist John Judis in 1995. Gramm enthusiastically cut Caton a check for $15,000. Because the film was oversold, however, Caton returned his brother-in-law's money, offering him an investment opportunity in an upcoming feature.
The following year, Gramm sent Caton a check for $15,000, this time to finance the production of "Beauty Queens," a soft-core flick about pageant judges having sex with contestants. But at the last moment, the director of "Beauty Queens," Mark Lester, decided to shelve his production to make the sequel to his "Tricia's Wedding," a comedy starring the drag queen troupe, The Cockettes.
Gramm contributed at least $7500 towards the sequel, a satire of the Nixon White House called "White House Madness" that featured the crazed president wandering around the White House in the nude. Gramm never saw that money again. Shot in ten days on a soundstage crudely modeled after the Oval Office, "White House Madness" tanked at the box office.

The Three Biggest Myths about off shore drilling (Reality)

2008-07-16T16:14:30-04:00

The Three Biggest Myths the Bush Administration Wants You to Believe About Offshore Drilling By Faiz Shakir, The Progress Report. Posted July 15, 2008. Conservatives are preying on concern over gas prices by propagating false myths that drilling for oil off our coasts will lower the cost of gas.
This story was written by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, Benjamin Armbruster, and Brad Johnson.
Yesterday, citing the "squeeze of rising prices at the pump," President Bush rescinded the presidential moratorium on offshore drilling.
The moratorium on lease sales in the Outer Continental Shelf was established in 1990 by his father, George H.W. Bush, in response to the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill and extended by President Clinton.
Bush's action pressures Congress to follow him in "capitulation to the oil companies" by lifting their moratorium, which must be renewed annually. In response, Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) said at a press conference that Bush "is invoking the specter of another WMD: wells of mass deception."
At the Huffington Post, activist Martin Bosworth wrote, "Americans are smarter than we are often given credit for, and many of us do realize that destroying precious environmental resources and wildlife reserves to allow more domestic drilling is a psychological panacea -- a placebo to make us feel like 'something is being done.'"
However, polls show increasing support for expanded offshore drilling. Conservatives are preying on Americans' concern overskyrocketing gas prices by propagating false myths that drilling for oil off our coasts will allow us to "pay less" at the pump, that it's "environmentally safe," and that drilling is already underway by communist China. Because "only real beneficiaries will be the oil companies that are trying to lock up every last acre of public land," their political allies must resort to selling falsehoods.

MYTH #1 -- 'DRILL HERE, DRILL NOW, PAY LESS'

Newt Gingrich's 527 organization, American Solutions, is promoting a "Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less" campaign, collecting over one million signatures on its petition to Congress to act immediately to lower gasoline prices" by authorizing the exploration of proven energy reserves" off our coasts. American Solutions is funded by right-wing Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who wants Americans to place another bad bet on oil drilling. As the Energy Information Administration (EIA) has explained, "access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030." But because United States demand for oil far outstrips production -- we consume 25 percent of the world's supply but have two percent of the proven reserves -- further exploitation of domestic resources will not have a long-term impact either. After 2030, the EIA found, "any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant." There are numerous ways to immediately affect prices, from use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to improved oversight of the oil markets. Over the long term, we must fight global warming and break our addiction to oil through modern technology like plug-in hybrids and smart growth planning.

MYTH #2 -- CHINA ON OUR COASTS

Conservatives from Rudy Giuliani to Dick Cheney have repeatedly claimed that the United States needs to start drilling for off-shore oil because China is taking "American oil" off the coast of Cuba, just "60 miles off the coast of Florida." Cheney exhorted, "Even the communistshave figured out that a good answer to high prices is more supply." That same day, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) wrote that Castro was allowing drilling "45 miles from the Florida keys." Rep. George Radanovich (R-CA) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) have also raised the specter of Chinese drilling just off U.S. shores. However, this modern invocation of the Red Scare the claim is completely false. As Cheney was forced to acknowledge, "no Chinese firm is drilling" off Cuba's coast. Talking Points Memo has recorded the large number of conservatives hyping the false story.The Washington Post's Ben Pershing said the China/Cuba oil drilling claim is the "myth that keeps on giving," calling it "just too juicy not to repeat."

MYTH #3 -- 'NOT A DROP WAS SPILLED'

Offshore drilling advocates know that the specter of oil-slicked beaches would doom their campaign, so they are desperate to wish its environmental impact away. Yesterday, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) claimed "not a drop of oil was spilled during Katrina or Rita." This myth has been told again and again by the likes ofGov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, Mike Huckabee, George Will, and Bill O'Reilly. There were, in fact, major onshore and offshore spills due to the hurricanes. According to the official Minerals Management Service report, the hurricanes caused 124 offshore spills for a total of 743,700 gallons, six spilling 42,000 gallons or more. The largest of these spills dropped 152,250 gallons, well over the 100,000 gallon threshhold considered a "major spill." In addition, the hurricanes caused disastrous spills onshore throughout southeast Louisiana and the rest of the Gulf Coast as tanks, pipelines, refineries and other industrial facilities were destroyed, for a total of 595 different oil spills. The nine million gallons reported spilled were comparable with the Exxon Valdez's 10.8 million gallons, but unlike the Exxon Valdez, they were distributed throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and other Gulf Coast states, many in residential areas.

RE: Operation oil& Oil drops - REPOSTED (the truth has a liberal bias!)

2008-07-16T16:08:57-04:00

RE: Operation drill here now Drilling here WILL NOT ease the gas price right now. Eliminate the Enron loophole and that will bring energy costs back down to a reasonable level. Let a bunch of oil men hijack our country and this is what you get - an energy policy that benefits the oil men!

Click here and watch this segment to see the who is responsible for the Enron loophole and our current problems at the pump.

Click here and see who is at fault for our mortgage crisis.

There is no easy option other than to vote out the bastards (the rethugnican oilmen and the blue dog, spineless "democrats" that are their little bitches). The reason congress's approval rating is so low is that they don't have the balls to stand up to these thugs. We need strong leaders that will stand up to the corporate elite - not appease them

RE:Rex2,re:oil drops/Operation drill

2008-07-16T11:34:01-04:00

The conservative MEdia, to funny!!

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 or CFMA (AKA) Enron Loophole was signed by President Bill Clinton in December 2000 not President Bush. Don't let little things like facts get in the way of your agenda!!!

Nice try, DUMB ASS!!!

The "loophole" was enacted in 7 U.S.C. �2(h)(3) and (g) of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, signed by President Bill Clinton in December 2000. It allowed for the creation, for U.S. exchanges, of a new kind of derivative security, the single-stock future, which had been prohibited since 1982 under the Shad-Johnson Accord, a jurisdictional pact between John S.R. Shad, then chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and Phil Johnson, then chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_Loophole

The real problem couldn't be 40's years of far-left Eco-socialism, Nooooooooo!

RE:Re,re:oil drops/Operation drill

2008-07-16T09:47:10-04:00

Again - a typical right wing hit job - take the conversation away form the real problem. The Enron Loophole is the reason we have $4+ gallon gas. This is brought to you by Bush, McCain, & co. Enerergy needs to be REGULATED BY SOMONE OTHER THAN THOSE WHO PROFIT FROM IT - IT IS A CONFLICT OF INTEREST!! It is like having a doctor that is the beneficiary of a $1,000,000 life insurance policy on the patient he is trying to save - that patient is as dead as fried chicken. Look up the enron loophole and who is repsonsible for it (McCain!). The conservative MEdia pretty much has a blackout on that story. The conservatives are the only sheep I can see.

Re,re:oil drops/Operation drill

2008-07-16T09:11:19-04:00

As a Marylander, your stupidity is embarrassing!

You should go to the library and learn a little about economics and how market forces work.

Obama IS!!!! a crazy far-left socialist and will be 10 times worst for this great country then Jimmy (I HATE THE JEWS) Carter!

Get off your lazy ass, stop winning, and make something of yourself.

RE:Richard Matthews Campaign Needs Your Help

2008-07-16T08:44:31-04:00

Please help that campaign raise the money it needs have his head examined.... Matthews is a republican! Please help him get the help he needs to end his affliction. Only massive behavior modification and expensive brain surgery will help him to start to think for himself. Send us your money!

Re: and oil drops $9

2008-07-16T08:32:53-04:00

This is just the oilmen running scared that they will lose the election. Right before the '06 elections, gas prices dropped to try to help the rethugs stay in power. Prices will continue to drop until the election - they are trying to buy your vote. It is the equivalent of the mafia's protection money.
Also if you remember back - the oil prices were jacked up before the 2000 race to the benefit of Bushy. Wake up, conservatives - those rich elite are coming for you too.You are ust too blind to see it coming.

and Oil Drops $9!

2008-07-16T08:12:22-04:00

http://kudlow.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjMyNDljNTQ5MThjNWE3YTAzYWYzMmZmNDVmMjA0ZWY=

Bush Says Drill, Drill, Drill � and Oil Drops $9!

In a dramatic move yesterday President Bush removed the executive-branch moratorium on offshore drilling. Today, at a news conference, Bush repeated his new position, and slammed the Democratic Congress for not removing the congressional moratorium on the Outer Continental Shelf and elsewhere. Crude-oil futures for August delivery plunged $9.26, or 6.3 percent, almost immediately as Bush was speaking, bringing the barrel price down to $136.

Now isn�t this interesting?

Democrats keep saying that it will take 10 years or longer to produce oil from the offshore areas. And they say that oil prices won�t decline for at least that long. And they, along with Obama and McCain, bash so-called oil speculators. And today we had a real-world example as to why they are wrong. All of them. Reid, Pelosi, Obama, McCain � all of them.

Traders took a look at a feisty and aggressive George Bush and started selling the market well before a single new drop of oil has been lifted. What does this tell us? Well, if Congress moves to seal the deal, oil prices will probably keep on falling. That�s the way traders work. They discount the future. Psychology and expectations can turn on a dime.

The congressional ban on offshore drilling expires September 30, so that becomes a key date. A new report from Wall Street research house Sanford C. Bernstein says that California actually could start producing new oil within one year if the moratorium were lifted. The California oil is under shallow water and already has been explored. Drilling platforms have been in place since before the moratorium. They�re talking about 10 billion barrels worth off the coast of California.

There�s also a �gang of 10� in the Senate, five Republicans and five Democrats, that is trying to work a compromise deal on lifting the moratorium. So it�s possible a lot of action on this front could occur much sooner than people seem to think.

So I repeat: Drill, drill, drill. Deregulate, decontrol, and unleash the American energy industry. Those hated traders will then keep selling oil as the laws of supply and demand and free markets keep working.

Bravo for Bush. Bravo for the traders.

Operation Drill Here Drill Now

2008-07-15T11:41:53-04:00

Let them know how you feel!

Barbara Mikulski
http://mikulski.senate.gov/Contact/contact.cfm

Ben Cardin
http://cardin.senate.gov/contact/

Contact a Legislator
http://mlis.state.md.us/mgaweb/mail32.aspx

Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!Drill Here. Drill Now!

Barack Obama '08

2008-07-14T12:17:57-04:00

Why do Muslim's hate cartoons?

9/11 Truth / We Are Change Maryland (Baltimore)

2008-07-13T18:39:33-04:00

Anyone interested in going down to Baltimore City with some signs and DVDs to spread the truth about 9/11? I am trying to rally people to help spread the truth about how our government lied to us about their criminal actions on our own soil that has cost us thousands of lives.

Message me if you are interested in re-vamping We Are Change MD!

Rock'n'Register: tickets on sale to promote voter registration! (Harford Community College)

2008-07-11T08:36:12-04:00

Harford Community College's Rock'n'Register will take place on Saturday, September 13, 2008 from 2pm-10pm at the Bel Air Campus. The event will feature 8 Maryland bands and invite political candidates to meet with participants to answer any questions that they have.

Tickets are available NOW! Please e-mail us for more information or speak directly with one of the bands performing at the event.

More information on the event and bands is located at Rocknregister.com

BOO HOO! QUIT CRYING ABOUT ENERGY COSTS (THE PROPHET)

2008-07-10T11:31:24-04:00

IT'S YOUR FAULT.ALTERNATIVE ENERGY AND ENERGY SAVING DEVICES HAVE BEEN HERE FOR MANY YEARS. YOU WON'T GIVE A DIME TO THE POOR IN THIS COUNTRY, BUT YOU'LL GIVE 1/3 OF YOUR WEALTH TO THE OIL RICH NATIONS AND THE OIL RICH COMPANYS. ITS SAD ISN'T IT.WITH YOUR INTELAGENCE AND INDUSTRIAL KNOW HOW, LET ALONE THE RESOURSES, YOU SHOULD OF BEEN OFF FOSIL FUELS DECADES AGO.THE ONLY REASON IS THAT THERE HAVE BEEN OIL OIL RICH POLITICIANS AND CAPATALIST OIL INVESTMENTS, RUNNING THE GOVERMENT THAT YOU VOTED IN. THEY ARE PLAYING YOU AS FOOLS, AND STEELING YOUR MONEY LEGALY, PASSING LAWS TO PROTECT THEM AND THERE INTEREWST, YOU HAVE THE ABILITY RIGHT NOW TO CONVERT 1/2 OF YOUR ENERGY TO NON FOSIL FUEL; RIGHT NOW! TODAY! yYESTERDAY! GET THE MESSAGE! QUIT BEENING A FOOL, START ACTING LIKE THE INDEPENDENT INTELEGENT, INDUSTRIAL, COUNTRY WE REALLY ARE., CAPABLE OF DOING. GO GREEN! NOW!iF YOU ARE WAITING ON THIS GOVERNMENT TO SOLVE THE PROLEM, YOU'LL PROBLY BE IN THE MIDDLE EAST FOREVER AND AT WAR PROTECTING THESE RICH NATIONS, AND ANTI- DEMOCRACY AND ANTI CILVAL RIGHTS,ANTI HUMAN RIGHTS,ANTI WOMANS RIGHT, AND WATCH YOUR SONS DIE AND DIE AND DIE, FOR WHAT DEMOCRCY, THESE NATIONS MAKE A MOCERY OF DEMOCRACY. OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OPFF IMPORTED FOSIL FUEL AND OFF FOSIL FUEL BY 75% IN 5 YEARS. YOU CAN DO IT. DRILLING ON OUR SHORE, YOU WOULD TAKE THE CHANCE OF A SPILL ON OUR BEACHS AND DESTROY OUR E`COLOGY OR EVEN THE SLIGHT CHANCE, IS A GREEDY , LACK OF INTELECT, AND ANTI ENVIREMENTAL. VOTE OUT ALL THE ONES IN CONGRESS WHO HAVE VOTED ANTI-GREEN IN ANY WAY. SEE ITS COMING AROUND AND BITINGB US IN OUR BIG FAT ASS'S. WE AS A COUNTRY NEED TO LOSE MORE THEN FAT. LOOSE THE OIL BABY FOR FUEL. THERE ARE OTHER WAYS TO USE THE OIL WE DO HAVE FOR OTHER PRODUCTS OTHER THEN FUEL. ITS UP TO YOU, BUT YOU BETTER DO IT SOON, BEFORE YOU GET ANOTHER THIEF AND HIS GANG IN OFFICE AGAIN.KISS ME PLEASE, I'M A PRINCE IN A FROGS CLOTHING, AND I'LL TURN INTO THIS RICH GUY, IF YOU BELIEVE THIS YOUR AS MUCH OF A SUCCER AS YOU HAVE BEEN TO THE OIL COMPANYS,OIL NATIONS AND CREEPS LIKE BUSH WHO LICKS THIER ASS'S.

Cut Obama's nuts off!

2008-07-10T09:01:36-04:00

http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=2160631

half black is not black!

RE S.2433 (Get This Guy A Bib!)

2008-07-09T17:26:36-04:00

You swallowed then perpetraited,

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

S.2433, not SB.2433 will not cost anywhere near the $845 billion as right wing blogs are claiming.

This is the statement on the bill from the Congressional Budget Office:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/90xx/doc9082/s2433.pdf > >

This is the text of the bill, with the struck out and added text: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-2433#change-10

The bill is scheduled for full Senate debate, not for vote.************************************************************************

Oh yeah, you're right...let's see.....when was the last time a government
estimate was correct?........nope.......nope.......uh........nope, not that one either.......