Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Five former leaders of the free world say YOU should pay for disaster relief

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Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama, Bush, and Bush
THAT’S RIGHT. Five US ex-presidents, so-called most powerful men in the world, who each did their most to expropriate the public wealth for the super rich, who denied you healthcare, job security, infrastructure, a clean environment, even peace, every last POTUS son of a bitch, now think the rescue of America’s refinery capitol should be at your expense. Never mind that your taxes will already pay to rebuild Houston. These still-shilling salesmen-in-chief want whatever extra they can squeeze out of the American little person in the name of Christian Charity.

F U and the horseshit you rode in on

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Barack Obama is an impressive speaker and a figurehead to make you proud –if you’re not listening or paying attention to what he’s doing. How sickening the fawning over his last addresses and his supposed legacy. Obama was the antithesis of Dubya, now Trump. Obama was probably the world’s most palatable politician in recent memory, but what he said and did was no less nauseating. And damnable. I can sympathize with onlookers mourning the loss of America’s gloss coat. Trump is the ugly face that is Obama unmasked. The king is dead, long live the ugly disreputable can’t-bear-to-listen-to-him king. Frankly, it wasn’t long into his doublespeak that I couldn’t stand listening to President Obama either.

Dem presidents won’t chose better supreme court justices than Repugs

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NOW we’re told the ultimate reason to prevent a Trump presidency is because he’ll appoint Supreme Court judges who will set progressive movements back for generations. You forget that President Obama’s latest nomination put the lie to that bugaboo. Put it to bed and burned it. Upon the fortuitous demise of one of the most corrupt justices ever, Antonin Scalia, who died literally, in bed with a crony patron, President Obama submitted for consideration as his replacement the conservative jurist Merrick Garland. Garland’s most notable legal achievement was to indemnify the US regime from charges of torture. I’m sure voters in 2008 elected Obama to uphold Democratic ideals not scuttle them. We’re being sold the same pitch with Hillary, really without any basis in fact, that a democrat will attempt to curb the Supreme Court’s antisocial conduct, as exemplified by the Thomas, Alito, Kennedy, Roberts cabal. The Garland nomination has also exposed the other lie, that Trump’s appointments could not be opposed. As we see with Garland still, SCOTUS nominees can be embargoed indefinitely.

Dubya Bush sings The Battle Hymn of the Republic like he’s dancing on John Brown’s grave.

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“He captured Harper’s Ferry with his nineteen men so true.
He frightened old Virginia till she trembled through and through.
They hung him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew.
But his soul goes marching on! — Glory, glory, hallelujah…

It wasn’t the Lord who trampled out slavery. It was abolitionist John Brown. The song which roused Union forces as they marched in the Civil War was JOHN BROWN’S BODY. The lyrics were retooled by Julia Ward Howe as “Mine eyes have seen the glory”, rededicated to God, because Osawatomie John Brown was a domestic terrorist don’t you know.

Former president George W. Bush may have been drunk as he danced on the somber occasion of the memorial to the Dallas police killed by modern avenger Micah Johnson. But Dubya, alone among the traitor crew, let us see the true spirit of mockery that Howe’s makeover propaganda represents. Servicemen gave their lives for an honorable cause while their rulers converted their anthem, an appreciation for a true moral example, into praise for entrenched higher authority.

Today our leaders let fellow unrepentant war criminals bite their thumbs at us fools. The old abolitionist’s unquenched passion should haunt us still, if we weren’t robbed of his memory: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in his grave–”

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in his grave.
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in his grave.
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in his grave.
His soul goes marching on!

Those are the Goddamn lyrics.

The NAFTA Three Amigos are about as funny as their Hollywood namesakes

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Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau and Enrique Pena Nieto telling their despairing citizens not to fear free trade –Martin Short couldn’t get a bigger laugh! And I think we’ve got a litmus test for professional integrity. The free trade isn’t cut and dry, principly because it’s too big a lie. The TPP is today’s turbocharged shakedown model and up until just recently the media refused to talk about, and never critically. Trumpish isolationism is a buggaboo by which conservative supporters are being labeled racists protectionist xenophobes. The media can harp on these things and be half right, but the real litmus test for unmasking patronizing condescention is the BREXIT. When amigo leaders, pundits and now counter-culture gadflies on the Comedy Channel are mocking the movement that broke the EU, you can be certain their moral character is being laid bare for you, and it’s rubbish. Now Donald Trump is making statements that the facist media can only pretend are extreme. He wants to withdraw from the TPP and he wants to renegotiate NAFTA. The media have buried Trump’s seven point plan with the spin that he’s likened the TPP to “rape”. Apparently that’s hyperbole, though exactly how unlike rape is it? Don’t say it trivializes sexual violence if you won’t honestly report how free trade, debt, “austerity”, and corporate hegemony ravage democratic economies.

I’m pretty sure PRIVILEGE is voting for a warmongering sociopath to feel good about having a first woman president.

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Oh, really, so it’s “privilege” to support Bernie Sanders because he will take votes away from Hillary and thus enable a Trump presidency? Is it privilege to vote for Trump just for the entertainment value of seeing what the blowhard will do? Who is the only candidate with a direct record of mass murder and banksterism? I’ll assert it’s wildly privileged to inaugurate Hillary Clinton, just as you did Barack Obama, for the token victory of a first whatever, at the cost of giving the US regime a public mandate for more war and imperialism. Remember how we used to believe the world didn’t hate us ordinary Americans, just our fraudulently elected president? Now you want to elect the Bush-est of evils. Privilege is knowing the most formidable military in the world will kill untold thousands of darker-skinned others for the sake of your security.

Sorry Rage, Trump Ain’t the Machine

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Immortan DonaldThere’s news from Cleveland, about to host the 2016 RNC Republican National Convention. Rage Against the Machine is planning a reprise of the show they PUT ON for DNC 2008 where they harnessed teen angst against America’s dystopian future (thus against its corporate party conventions) but FOR Barack Obama.

In 2008 the House of Bush was already falling. Now it’s 2016 and this time Immortan Joe is the ascendant Donald Trump apparently. Because Trump is a thought-criminal and troll racist, it seems that all pop, sub, and call-out culture agents agree that the next US president must not be Trump. I find it not in the least ironic that the machine thinks so too.

Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello is scheduling an encore performance of Denver’s DNC 2008, another counter-subversive star turn for the Democratic Party. In 2008 Rage quelled unrest to smooth the reception for Change Double-Agent Barack Obama. The corporate TM Rebels want to do the same for Hillary, this time directing their indignation at social injustice provocateur Donald Trump.


In 2008, Rage harnessed teen and counterculture angst and hitched it tightly to a stake in the mosh pit, a political assembly agitated but meant to go nowhere. Rage threw a free performance which drew thousands from the streets, as if a Rage concert memory would match the excitement of a protested convention. Of course those who were waylaid will never know. Even seasoned activists fell for the lure because Rage promised afterward to lead their stadium audience straight to the Pepsi Center to confront Obama and the DNC.


Not what happened. RAGE appointed Iraq Veterans Against the War as their favored antiwar agitants, whose MO has always been commemorative not rebellious, crowd participation encouraged only under a strict chain of cammand. With the IVAW, Rage members led the audience on stations of the cross “march” across downtown Denver exhausting protest energy and converting participants into spectators. It looks like Morello intends to do the same thing for Cleveland.

And I have no doubt they’ll succeed. Already social justice movements are feeding the trolls as if Donald Trump wasn’t merely another Westboro blowhard. Radicals from Antifas to Zapatistas think Trump is the face of US Fascism and must be stopped. Trump does spout ignorance and racism, though he hasn’t bombed or executed anyone. Does Trump embolden American racists and zenophobes or is that the machine’s framing?

Must Trump’s idiocies be rebutted? Must, for example, the Westboro Baptist Church be counterprotested? Normally everyone gets the wisdom of not feeding the trolls.

Obama Hiroshima visit not first time US president returns to scene of war crime

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We’re told President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima will the first by a sitting US president. Hiroshima being where America demonstrated its first atomic bomb. Ranked by scale of civilian casualties, Hiroshima has multiple sister cities who could share the honor of being sites of the greatest single day attrocity beneath US bombers. Travelogue wise, if there isn’t a sign saying “Washington slept here” obvously everywhere has a first for American presidents, so what makes Hiroshima newsworthy? Let’s agree as the objective of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, Hiroshima was the most calculated. Nagazaki was the reproductive test serving as reprise for the international stage. Obviously President Obama’s next visit should be to Nagazaki as proof that paying tribute via presidential visitation doesn’t amount to an apology, expression of regret, or even recognition of a lesson learned. The gesture may be a nod to self-reflection but it’s not guilt. What Obama is doing is taking a bow. The imperial pageant of unending curtain calls, for an old show called gunboat diplomacy.

Atomic bomb

Human rights for even Anders Breivik

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In retrospect, awarding the newly elected Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize was about as smartly ambitious as it gets. Everyone knows humanitarians don’t do it for the reward. A Nobel Prize is wasted if there’s not some eligible sociopath who might be influenced with the pressure to behave themselves. President Obama’s Nobel medal was an experiment in paying it forward. Who knows how much more bloodthirsty Obama might have gotten with his drones had not the Nobel committee tried to extort him with its higher expectations? The Nobel award givers took a lot of ribbing for their foolishness from those of us who weren’t idealist enough. AND SO IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE when Norway’s mass murdering overachiever Anders Breivik sued his jailers for abusing his human rights because he wasn’t getting sufficient visitors in his cushy prison suite, that the Norwegian supreme court would rule Breivik was right.

Of course they did. If you’re not going to give a death sentence to a crazed bigot who guns down 76 children, if you’re not going to throw him in a hole but instead give him a spacious accommodation, if instead of a life sentence you let him pursue university studies and limit his incarceration to twenty some years, then you don’t want to isolate your prisoner from human contact if it might appear even as a semblance of solitary confinement. Because lesser cultures do that.

Lesser capitalist flagship states isolate, execute and torture. I so appreciate that Norway wants to set a high bar, but I despair that the land of Guantanamo and waterboarding and indefinite detention and ILLEGAL detention and rendition and extrajudicial assassination and no habeus corpus can’t even see this bar to reach it.

Ask the candidates: who, as president, vows to jail Obama, Clinton and Bush?

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If Americans really want to differentiate which presidential candidate represents change, a good question would be, which will prosecute America’s celebrity war criminals? Who, among them, will jail past leaders guilty of crimes against humanity?

Obama 2008 didn’t do it. President Obama didn’t even close Guantanamo, end torture, or disarm drones. By failing to curb Pax America’s wars of aggression, Obama too should now stand in the docket. Wasn’t it hoped, as Bush and Cheney helivac’d from the White House, that Obama’s “change” meant calling that chopper back for a return to accountability? At minimum, superficially? Justice didn’t happen, Obama didn’t want to look back, and the villains remain to foul the political discourse as foils to perpetuate high crimes and to normalize the forgiving of greater trespasses.

Is American exceptionalism fathomless? ISIS hasn’t grown out of the terrible twos yet already John Kerry wants to charge it with genocide; not to haul ISIS perps before the Hague –extrajudicial assassination by drone circumvents that– but because genocide law holds that those who do not condemn it are its accessories.

How far does culpability reach among our active enablers of war crimes? It extends into our pool of candidates certainly, but how far? Does Senator Bernie Sanders, at one edge, consider himself an accessory to the crimes of past and current administrations? It’s possible Sanders voted against the wars, interventions and regime changes, but will he prosecute those who did not?

Donald Trump stands on the periphery as well, avaritic criminality is not alas a purview of the International Criminal Court, but he does seem an unlikely candidate for honoring the rule of law let alone conscience.

Still, would it hurt to ask? An independent party candidate might have the only acceptable answer. Who, as president, will honor humanity’s highest laws? Who will hold state terrorists accountable?

Obama nominates TORTURE JUDGE Merrick Garland to U.S. Supreme Court

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Elect a Democrat to the presidency to ensure progressive Supreme Court nominees. Elect a Democrat to end wars and prosecute war criminals. Elect a Democrat so we can close Guantanamo. After two years President Obama is finally hinting he’ll close Guantanamo (though missing the point, he’ll imprison its inmates elsewhere). The wars are not only ongoing, American troops are quietly mobilizing for a significant upcoming deployment, and Dick Cheney and ilk are still on television being consulted as experts. AND as concerns favorable supreme court justices, Obama has just nominated another moderate, Merrick Garland, who in his stint as appellate judge, defended George W. Bush’s torture and detainment policies in Guantanamo.

Oh you are so going to feel the burnie

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Remember all those highschoolers and college students activated for Obama 2008, subsequently thoroughly BURNED OUT by the zero yield of Hope or Change for all their effort? It’s happening again on campuses across the country and yes it’s hard not to celebrate their optimism this time around again, even though they’re backing the same corporate party and same promises that have always corraled leftward idealists for the capitalist slaughterhouse. What tragic irony that their catch phrase is “Feel the Bern” because who is going to be feeling that pun ultimately? I’ll cheer them on because good intentions should always be rewarded, but I’m going to start calling their candidate BURNIE.

Bernie Sanders Hope and Change 2.016

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Bernie Sanders two point oh sixteen
YOU’RE WELCOME. The same civic dutyists activated by Obama 2008 are already in the trenches for Bernie, making no apologies, showing no insight about the nowhere they delivered voters the first time around. In effect, the Obama deadheads have found a new phishy bandwagon, and it reeks of the same neoliberal speciousness. Who would have thought an old white guy would be the new hope change candidate? Bernie Sanders is the Democratic Party, itself the good-cop half of the corporate capitalist imperialist machine. Bernie didn’t “win” the Democratic candidate debate, the winner was the Democratic Party, which came off favorably compared to the lunatic GOP. These days the GOP is condemned by whoever is showrunning Election 2016 to play the bogeyman to the lesser of lessers. Cue Bernie Sanders. Though he talks a great game, he’s never walked it. Bernie wants a political revolution, but it’s a counter-revolution in populist clothing.

President Obama concedes there is no mechanism for punishing rich rapists.

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In light of the unsealed deposition where Bill Cosby admitted to procuring Quaaludes to facilitate raping young women, a reporter asked President Obama if the celebrity’s Freedom Medal could be revoked. There is no mechanism to do so, was Obama’s reply. Not one pundit asked if there wasn’t a precedent to seek a remedy within the justice system or law enforcement or department of corrections. Not all Bill Cosby’s assaults fall beyond the statute of limitation, if even that should apply to rape.

Whose flag opposes the anti-slavery stipulations in the TPP trade treaty?

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We’re demonizing the Civil War era Confederate Battleflag for defending slavery while the victorious DC regime profits by slavery and protects it still. Team Stars and Stripes opposes amendments to the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement that would prohibit signatory nations from exploiting slave labor. The Rebel flag stood for slavery, the US flag stands for it.

President Obama tells undocumented transgender Jennicet Gutierrezas that the White House is not her house.

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So President Obama silenced a heckler by telling her “This is my house”, sorry, um, no. Immigrant and LGBTQ rights activist Jennicet Gutierrezas was vetted by security and was a guest of the president, to engage as a host would hope his guests might. The theme was Gay Pride! According to Obama, an invitation to the White House means you eat his hors d’oeuvres and drink his booze and shut your mouth or be thrown out. I doubt President Obama was saying anything more important than Gutierrezas, who spoke up for the plight of transgender deportees. In fact Obama misspoke. To his First Daughters he can say “you’ll follow my rules when you live in my house”, but to a fellow American it’s not his house but OURS.

You might correct me to say that Gutierrezas was not a citizen-subject but an undocumented immigrant, to which I say, the greater the shame on President Obama, smug in his disregard for those with no agency.

I applaud Gutierrezas who braved the President talking over her, and defied a crowd of Pride celebrants drowning her out with the three-beat chant normally the repertoire of anti-activists. The other guests showed no solidarity but laughed and applauded President Obama’s condescending repartees. The event left Gutierrezas heartbroken.

Have you seen the footage? Obama is a dick. And goddamn the Pride celebrants who immediately booed Gutierrezas. One might think they were being feted at the White house for their activism.

When the president threatened to have Gutierrezas “taken out” I cannot have been the only one to wonder if Obama dispatches his Kill List with the same callous mirth.

“Going postal” takes aeronautic twist: Campaign reform whoop-whoop de doo

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Common American highschoolers have eclipsed what used to be the purvue of disgruntled post office workers: GOING POSTAL. Norwegian post-adolescent Anders Breivik could even be said to have “killed it”. So leave it to a mail carrier to set the new trend in making a mess of things to make a point. Retired mailman Doug Hughes thought outside the semi-automatic box to conceive an unconventional package delivery system for his letters to Congress. Hughes piloted a gyrocopter unto the White House grounds as his take on Mister Smith Goes to Washington and we wish him all the best. Hughes has a website The Democracy Club and because he didn’t kill anyone, or because his issue is merely campaign finance reform, the site was not taken down and the media is not calling his material a manifesto. Whoop-whoop whoop-whoop-de-doo. The White House nevertheless sidestepped the topic. When asked what President Obama thought of Hughes’ stunt to call for campaign finance reform, the president was said to remark: “what’s a gyrocopter?”

Hillary is declaring her candidacy. Are we ready for another white president?

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Hillary Clinton
Not that another token Black president would be better. Was it really worth it, having a first Black president, considering he expanded the Neoliberal nonsense instead of curbing it? Why do we now expect a token woman will deliver our hoped-for, bait-and-switched change? Especially from a woman who comes from within the establishment. As with Barack Obama’s brief stunt in the Senate, we’ve had a glimpse of Hillary’s record already. It’s awful. It’s corrupt. Hillary Clinton behaves like she’s beyond the law or morality. She’s a Neoliberal, Zionist, loan officer for the bankers. I know feminists want a female president. Everyone would like to see a woman in the White House. I don’t know any position of authority in which I wouldn’t be more confident to see a woman. Maybe even ANY WOMAN except Hillary. How about let’s hold a lottery instead of an election. Ladies only. African American women only. Draft Cynthia McKinney 2016.

President Obama’s “off-script” SOTU rejoinder began with a scripted pause

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SORRY FOLKS. If you think President Obama went “Off Script” at tonight’s State of the Union Address, ask yourself why he punctuated “I have no more campaigns to run” with a HANDS-CLASPED PAUSE. In the context of his prepared remarks, that sentence was a lead-in, not a paragraph unto itself. Watch it againt and you’ll see that Obama’s pause was a trap to goad opponents to applaud so that he could “ad-lib” his crowd-pleasing “I know because I won both of them.” Prescripted mishaps are common devices to garner sympathy for embattled performers. Given that White House speechwriters anticipated a hostile reception, you’d think they would otherwise avoid lines that fed the antipathy, especially a throw-away line of exposition. Both setup and punchline added no substance to Obama’s remarks, except to grandstand.

The People’s Climate March will move the United Nations if marchers push it

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I heard a dispiriting conceit at yesterday’s 350.ORG whistestop rally at Denver’s Union Station to cheer climate activists bording the Amtrak Zephyr destined for the New York City #S21 People’s Climate March. This young, otherwise energetic and charismatic environmentalist told the crowd that she did not expect anything to come of the hoped-to-be-massive demonstration but would attend anyway. Ironically this was addressed to supporters who’d already decided not to join the march based I’m guessing on the same logic. Yet we cheered, chanted about the imperative to act, and applauded a successive speaker who added that if world leaders ignored this people’s march, there would follow another and another, ever larger. Hmm. I doubt it. Activism is already showing diminishing returns and drawing numbers to unsuccessful actions doesn’t help. I appreciate not wanting to seem to hold foolish expectations, but I’d rather accept defeat having believed it was not inevitable. The antiwar movement laments the election of Barack Obama because he herded the populist anti-Bush groundswell toward supporting the other corporate war party. But I blame Obama for a larger malpractice: innoculating Americans against hope. Extended generations of altruists lost their cherry to the hope-change-artist and while they wise up incrementally, I have yet to see hopefulness normalize the defeatism. This doesn’t mean that hopefuls don’t keep falling for smooth promises, but the promises are smaller, to be believable. Bill McKibben’s 350 march for example doesn’t even want to make demands, yet insists that your personal attendence will be the biggest impact you can make against climate change. And if the march doesn’t move UN leaders, come back and do it again. Until what? Until world leaders are convinced that the public is serious. Why are we not serious? Should McKibben admit that traveling to New York could be distracting activists from where their bodies really need to be, in front of coal plants, blocking pipelines, and organizing communities against fossil fuel extraction? Pressuring the UN is similarly immediate but we have to apply veritable pressure. If a march is meant to impress, even as a gesture, it must be more than a parade.

Obama launches bold US medical relief program “Soldiers Without Borders”

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The US response to Ebola is “Doctors Without Borders” with a cheaper payroll, serving US imperial needs above all. Okay, the US has been rolling out SOLDIERS WITHOUT BORDERS since Manifest Destiny and the Shores of Tripoli, but President Barack Obama’s initiative to send 3,000 soldiers to fight the Ebola-Zaire virus in West Africa marks the ploy’s most farcical disguise: soldiers-as-peacekeepers-passing-as-doctors. Who knew Specialist 1st Class meant health specialist? If your neighborhood doctor doesn’t accept Medicaid, maybe your local garrison will. Poor President Obama. Most of the national budget goes to the Defense Department, so our federal resources are mostly soldiers! When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In this case, coffin nails, to contain the stricken people of West Africa. They need epidemiologists, we give them boots on the ground.

US Global War On Terror finally drops pretense of not being war on Islam

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We’re AT WAR WITH THE ISLAMIC STATE! ISIS being not merely al-Qaeda in Iraq or Mesopotamia or the Levant, depending on who’s spinning your translation, but terrorists bent on establishing an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria! Someone is going to get an advertising award for the ISIS brand, though it sounds like an episode of Ad Men pitching a concept for Get Smart. What exactly is the West’s objection to an Islamic Califate? We already support the Jewish califate of Israel which has a regular record of far greater atrocities. If Americans are upset by the beheading videos attributed to ISIS it’s because ally Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow its frequent and similarly executed spectacles to be broadcast publically. Well, at least President Obama has abandoned the irrationality of a Global War on Terror, in favor of calling what critics have always known it to be, a War on Islam. When we’re finally candid we can admit we are defending Western imperialism from the forces who oppose usury, exploitation and slavery.

Obama: Yeah, we tortured some folks, and now we’re gonna bomb some folks

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NOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Not another war on Iraq! Not an intervention, not precision bombing, not saving a minority from massacre. If this rescue of Iraqis was about preventing a massacre, the US would be intervening with airstrikes against Israel. Last week President Obama admited that Bush-era CIA interrogation methods were torture. “We tortured some folks,” spoken with the same expectation of impunity as he now launches another illegal war.

State of the Union Address a Pageant of Beltway Cronies, Bullies and Flakes

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Media propagandists can’t conceal the state of the union address for what it was, a pageant of creeps, a pandering freakshow, and a flaunting of the celebration that the American constituancy is peopled by idiots on both sides of the aisle.