How obama Turned Liberals into Zombies

October 26, 2012

The Neo-Con Democrat
The spectacle of the presidential foreign policy debate, with the republican and democratic candidates stumbling over each other to agree on the use of drones, staying for another decade in Afghanistan, Gitmo and such, was proof once again that barack obama is no liberal.

In fact, obama’s policies of endless war, nation-building, and disregard for international law mark him as a neo-con. With his predilection for assassinations and indiscriminate bombings with mounting ‘collateral damage,’ obama has turned the United States into one of those ‘rogue nations’ our rhetoric execrates.

On the home front, obama has also proven himself no liberal. He readily signed extensions of the Patriot Act and FISA, thus denying us our Fourth Amendment rights and strengthening the surveillance state established by his mentor predecessor, Bush.  obama next took away our right to free assembly by signing the Trespass Law, then negated the Constitutional right of habeas corpus by signing into law the indefinite detention provision of the NDAA.  obama routinely ignores the Constitutional separation of powers, issuing executive orders that contravene the will of Congress, while brazenly ignoring the War Powers Act by starting wars at his fancy.  The obama administration has been the worst in history for punishing whistle-blowers.
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The Corporatist Lapdog
Many on the Right label obama a ‘socialist’, which is slanderous, considering obama’s domestic policy reveals him to be a corporatist lapdog. His greatest achievement, healthcare reform (sic), was in actuality a restructuring of the health insurance market, written by the insurance lobby to benefit the insurance lobby. Forty million Americans are still left without healthcare.

When the big banks were caught in a trillion-dollar mortgage fraud scheme, obama railed loudly against the bankers, then slapped them across the wrist with a $12 million token fine. The much-heralded Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, established by obama crony Elizabeth Warren, has yet to indict a single malfeasor.

Candidate obama promised to ban lobbyists from working in his administration.  President obama has more lobbyists in his White House than any previous administration.

Large campaign bundlers found obama amenable to pulling strings to aid their businesses — for example: an FCC waiver allowing LightSquared to encroach on vital military GPS bandwidths; a billion dollar HHS contract to Siga for a useless vaccine.
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The Sham Green Economy
Vaingloriously, obama predicted his inauguration would be remembered as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”  Yet under obama, the environment has suffered greatly.

Following the disastrous BP oil spill, obama promised to place his “boot on the throat” of that reckless conglomerate, then allowed BP to get away nearly scot free.  Later, obama gave BP the go-ahead to drill in Alaska.

Since 2008, obama has breathlessly told us how he wants to expand “solar, and wind, and bio-diesel”,  and now brags about having doubled the electricity produced by renewables.  That sounds impressive, until you learn that solar and wind still provide a mere 3% our total energy. Four years on, and the US is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

obama’s grand(iose) “Green Energy Economy” turned out to be a boondoggle, a false front to hide kickbacks to obama’s biggest campaign donors. Real renewable solutions do exist to meet a majority of our energy needs, yet obama wasted billions of taxpayer money on Solyndra, Beacon, A123, and a dozen other sham companies that went bankrupt.

At the international climate conferences in Copenhagen and Rio, obama personally intervened to side with China and other major greenhouse gas producers to thwart efforts to curtail global warming, thus ensuring that the oceans will indeed keep rising.

At home, obama refused to implement EPA regulations on air quality.  To his credit, obama was against the XL pipeline before he was for it. To keep up with fellow republican, Mitt Romney, obama is now calling for rapid expansion of offshore drilling, mining of coal, and frakking.
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Letting Down the Common People
On the bread & butter economic positions that for a century defined liberalism in America, obama has let down working families time and time again.

His buyout of GM may have provided temporary relief, but it did nothing to address the endemic flaws in our auto industry. His continuation of TARP was nothing more than a cash bonus to bankers for losing risky bets.

As a candidate, obama promised to end the Bush tax cuts on the rich in his first hundred days. He stalled for two years, then promised to end them in 2011. He now promises to end them sometime in his second term. obama promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. Instead, he added another $5 trillion.

Other than endlessly repeating the words “roads and bridges and schools”, obama has offered no real plan to jump-start a stagnant economy. He amused himself by joking that all those “shovel-ready” projects he was going to fund “weren’t all that shovel-ready, after all.”

Only by heavy manipulation of workforce statistics has obama been able to claim he is finally a “net job creator.”  Two-third of those new jobs are low-wage. Household wealth has sunk 39%. Sixty percent of mortgages are under water.  One in five Americans still can’t find a job they can live on.  While unemployment soared, obama fiddled and diddled. His insipid “jobs bill” was a pastiche of hiring incentives and retraining programs already long proven ineffective. At best, it would have created a million jobs; independent analysts calculated it would have created practically none.

While ordinary Americans suffer, obama has been content to blame his inability to do more on the intransigence of Congress. Yet obama had no trouble working with both Dems and Gops to sign a slew of so-called “free trade” treaties that in truth expedite the off-shoring of hundreds of thousands of American jobs. obama has spent 50% more time on the golf links than in economic briefings.

obama promises to protect Social Security and Medicare.  Yet his “payroll tax cut” robbed S.S. of 16% of its funding. Had his putrid “jobs bill” passed, it would have cut S.S. funding by half, and gut Medicare with half a billion dollars in reckless cuts. To underwrite obamacare, $700 million will be taken from Medicare.
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The Zombie Left
Among the Left, all but the most severe kool-aid addicts admit that obama has been a major disappointment. Still, they plan on voting for him as the ‘lesser of two evils.’  ‘We must protect women’s rights’, they implore.  Are not the right to a speedy trial, to protection from illegal search and seizure, to due process, the rights of women as well?  So long as obama remains president, the Left condone unliberal affronts they would never tolerate from a republican president.

To assume that in a second term obama will suddenly ‘get it’, or miraculously change his nature, is folly. Things would get even worse. True, Romney’s plan to fix the economy will also fail. But obama’s bolloxes have ensured that the country will give the GOP a shot, if not now, then in 2016. Massachusetts survived one term of Romney; America can, too.

The Left, however, cannot survive four more years of obama. In service to obama, the Left now advocate jingoism in foreign policy, and a surveillance state at home. The Left now accept zero progress on jobs or economic fairness, and mutely watch as corporate criminals go unpunished. Thanks to obama, liberals and progressives have abandoned protecting the environment and the fight for universal healthcare. The Left are nothing but mindless zombies, so long as they remain under the sway of obama’s false promises and lies.
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Vote Like a True Liberal
 Now is the time for all true liberals to do their duty. To stand up for liberal values by voting for a candidate that also stands up for liberal values. barack obama is not that candidate.

Jill Stein is a true liberal. Her New Green Deal is a comprehensive plan to revitalize the American economy and restore American liberties. Patterned on FDR’s successful programs, Stein’s New Green Deal is a bold yet eminently feasible solution to our pressing problems, a solution that relies on the best liberal principles.

On November 6th, vote as a true liberal. Say ‘enough!’ with the lesser-of-two-evils crap. Vote for Jill Stein.
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(c) 2012 by True Liberal Nexus. All rights reserved.

5 Comments | barack obama the deceiver, BP Oil Spill, Constitutional Law, Corruption, Democratic ineptitude, Economy, Elections, Environment, Kool-Aid drinkers, Proglodytes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Matt

Lunatic Fringe

February 28, 2011

But a few short months after gaining access to political office, the Tea Party is revealing itself as a demented fringe whose values clash with those of main-stream America.  TP legislators in Congress and several state houses have put forth legislation to:

  • Redefine rape as not rape
  • Kill childhood nutrition programs
  • Privatize all schools
  • Destroy unions
  • Legalize assassination of abortion doctors
  • Sell off public utilities
  • De-fund the EPA and FTC


Repealing the Truth

The cuts to the EPA are not about reducing deficits.  Their purpose is to end regulation of pollution and carbon emissions by the coal and oil industries (the very same industries, it so happens, who bankroll the TP.)  All unnecessary hindrances to commerce, the TPers argue, as they insist Global Warming is a hoax, an international conspiracy.

Last year, Michele Bachmann incited her constituents to armed resistance of any government policies that fight climate change.  This month, the GOP-led House voted to cut funding (all $2.3 million) of the IPCC, calling the highly respected, non-partisan, Nobel-peace-prize-winning, international science body, “corrupt” and “nefarious”.

The Montana legislature is now considering a bill which declares that “global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana.”

Last week on Capitol HIll, TPers in both houses introduced legislation (under the Orwellian title, “Energy Tax Prevention Act”) to “repeal” (sic) the EPA’s “scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare.”

That’s right, folks — the Tea Party is solving Global Warming by declaring it illegal.


Space Man

In New Mexico, new TP governor Susana Martinez named geologist & former Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt to head her state’s Department of Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources.  Schmitt is a verifiable lunatic, and not just because he was the second-to-last man to walk on the moon.

A fervent denier of GW, Schmitt believes “the ‘global warming scare’ is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making.”  In 2009, Schmitt submitted an unsolicited paper to NASA claiming that, contrary to irrefutable data, the Earth is cooling and that polar ice has returned to 1989 levels.  Schmitt’s paper trots out a series of already-debunked challenges to climate change, then urges a wait-and-see approach until better data can be collected via observatories on the Moon and geological surveys of the surface of Mercury.

In his 2008 letter announcing his resignation from the elite Planetary Society, Schmitt warned that the U.S. would never become a “deep space-faring nation” because “the government-run, politicized K-12 school system will not currently support such [a multi-generational] endeavor.”

Schmitt is both a big fan of, and frequent guest on, the Alex Jones Show, the late-night conspiracy theory & supernatural sightings radio program. It was during a 2009 interview on Jones’ show that Schmitt linked groups like the Sierra Club to the USSR:

I think that there are individuals … who have taken — shall we say captured the environmental movement and turned it into what was previously considered the communist movement. I think the whole trend really began with the fall of the Soviet Union. Because the great champion of the opponents of liberty, namely communism, had to find some other place to go and they basically went into the environmental movement.

Schmitt has a solution to the world’s energy needs: the immediate establishment of private, lunar mining colonies to extract Helium 3 for use in (yet-to-be invented) fusion reactors, a scheme that an MIT report declared “wildly impractical”, with more energy expended on carting the helium isotope back to Earth than could ever be generated.

Schmitt’s presence in Martinez’ administration was intended to lend an air of scientific legitimacy to TP policy. Apparently, Martinez had a change of heart, as Schmitt abruptly disqualified himself by refusing the state-mandated background check.  No doubt a less flamboyantly eccentric GW denier will be found for the post.


Lunatics in Power

TPers claim to be ordinary people, like you or me.  Yet the TP is a minority group whose adherents believe in things like chemtrails, HAARP mind control, global conspiracies, and the existence of Sharia law in Battle Creek.  They twist American History to fit their ideology, and embrace biblical literacy while denying the solid Science accepted by the rest of the world. It’s also a group which hoards gold and ammunition in anticipation of the imminent Armageddon predicted by the likes of Glenn Beck.  Such a group can be described only one way — lunatic fringe.

There’s at least one other instance in recent history of a lunatic fringe coming to power, and things didn’t turn out too good.  Like the TP, that group of lunatics believed an international conspiracy had ruined their nation’s economy.  They too, espoused pseudoscientific theories, and revised History to fit their ideology.  Their political leaders were considered to be crackpots and laughing stocks.  Few took them seriously, but, thanks to substantial funding by a rich industrialist, they were able to win a large bloc of seats in the 1930 Reichstag elections, and take complete control of the government two years later.

Happy days are definitely not here again.


(c) 2011 by ‘tamerlane.’ All rights reserved.

3 Comments | Environment, GOP evilness, tea party | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Matt

Barack the Toxic

September 28, 2010

One key job of a sitting president, especially in an election year, is to conduct oneself in a way that helps your Party win races.  If you’re a popular president, you must tirelessly stump for candidates.  If you’re unpopular, you can still act forceful and in-charge. Even if people disagree with you, their primal instincts will push them toward complying with a confident troop leader.

As president, your legislative calendar should be carefully crafted and timed to boost your comrades fighting for office.  Bills should be introduced that make your guys look good, while forcing the other guys to either dodge or take unpopular stands.  A steady stream of feel-good executive orders & speeches should emanate from the Oval Office throughout the Fall.  “Third-rail” issues should be scrupulously avoided.

Needless to say, obama, neither savvy politician nor experienced legislator, much less a leader, has failed on all these counts.  Ultimately, obama doesn’t care: the common complaint among Democratic candidates this year has been that the White House has told them, in no uncertain terms, that they are on their own.

Even worse than these sins of omission, the obama administration has committed several missteps toxic to an already struggling Democratic party:

Health Care Reform

Way back in 2009, 3/4 of Americans favored health care reform, with at least 2/3 supporting universal single payer.  Possessing momentum, a mandate, and a 60-vote majority, enacting HCR should’ve been a slam-dunk.  Yet the entire Democratic machine stood flat-footed as the nascent TP staged protests against HCR, before belatedly dispatching Nancy Pelosi to engage in a puerile pissing match.  The bill went over like a lead zeppelin in congress, ambushed by blue dogs who’d slipped their leashes.  It was in any case an academic exercise, as the HCR bill exited the White House stillborn; a perverted creation of BO’s secret sessions with industry lobbyists, a Health Care Reform with no “care” and scant “reform” in it.

And thus was an eminently popular idea, whose time had clearly arrived, become an albatross draped about the neck of every Democrat running for office, with Martha Coakley the honorary first recipient.

The Oil Spill

As terrible as this disaster was, it nevertheless offered the obama administration a rare opportunity to gain respect, by presenting a striking contrast of executive vigor to Bush’ callousness & ineptitude during Katrina.

Instead, obama ended up looking even more callous and impotent.  Consequently, in the political chess game, Katrina as a dig against the GOP is permanently off the board.    (Maneuverability on this issue was not helped by the self-coronated “Green Economy President’s” advocation a month earlier for expanded offshore drilling.)

Trying to act like he actually cared, BO blurted out some tough guy nonsense about ‘a boot on BP’s throat’.  Which was as convincing as the muttered oaths of the wimp who’s had his lunch money stolen yet again.

A potential fatal blow to the drill-baby-drillers, the oil spill became instead a Democratic failure.  To add injury to insult, a chance to push for accelerating the transition to renewable energy was lost.

TARP

A Bush program that everyone beyond Wall Street utterly abhorred, BO eagerly gobbled up the sloppy seconds.  And, Presto!  The GOP’s plague with the middle class voter, their eternal coddling of the rich & greedy, infected the Democrats as well.

Immigration

A full 70% of Americans favor increased controls on illegal immigration.  Only proglydites, whose vote you presumably already have, and libertarians & capitalists, whose vote you’ll never get, favor illegal immigration. Yet the obama administration went out of its way to combat Arizona’s SB1070 via legal action and public condemnation.  Now, there were many paths to tread on this subject —  decrying racial profiling while simultaneously announcing a cosmetic boost to border patrol, for example, or simply ignoring it — that skirted a controversial, compromising stand.  Instead, obama firmly linked all Democrats with illegal immigration.  Every news story now includes an obligatory reference to ‘conservatives seek stronger border controls, while liberals (!) favor easing restrictions on immigration.’

The Mosque

The political equivalent of a high voltage power line lying in a puddle, sparking and buzzing,  the Ground Zero mosque was unhesitatingly taken up by obama.

Nearly 80% of Americans oppose the construction of that mosque as insensitive and in bad taste.  Yet the administration spent a good two weeks devoting its efforts to defense of the mosque, raising the canards of racism and 1st Amendment rights.  As a result, the Democrats came across as jihadiphile desecrators of hallowed ground.

Legislative Calendar

On Capitol Hill, the White House has chosen to: half-heartedly launch a repeal of DADT without first lining up enough votes; punt on the Bush tax cuts expiration after a three-and-out botching of the accompanying PR spin; threatened to force on its own congressmen a pre-election vote on a GOP-friendly, White House proposal for a $200 billion tax cut to businesses.

The list could go on.

What kind of Party leader repeatedly takes positions that 2/3 to 3/4 of Americans oppose?  One answer is that obama is simply a bungling idiot, & his “handlers” by extension.

Or, realizing BO’s low approvals were irreparable, the White House may have instead consciously chosen to rally its extremist base.   From the Paris Communards to the Moral Majority, this has been a standard, and not altogether unwise, tactic.

Another explanation for obama’s string of toxic stances exists: that he is a manchurian candidate, a trojan horse snuck into the Democratic Party and designed to destroy it from within.  If so, then BO’s intentionally took these toxic missteps (or at least his creators knew he’d take them).

What will it take for the Democratic Party to realize its leader is poison?   Apparently, nothing short of a midterm clobbering.

(c) 2010 by ‘tamerlane.’  All rights reserved.

8 Comments | BP Oil Spill, Democratic ineptitude, Elections, GOP evilness, proglydites | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Matt

Can’t Stand the Heat

July 13, 2010

In Retreat
As a heat wave of record temperatures punishes most of the country, millions of Americans have retreated to the relative comfort of air-conditioned houses and apartments. America’s largely coal- & oil-fired power plants strain to meet the increased demand for electricity. For many elderly in cities like Chicago and St. Louis, the summer swelter will prove fatal.

Another kind of mass retreat can be witnessed every Summer — that of the global warming (“GW”) deniers. For GW denial is a dish best served cold. The deniers find it much easier to get people to swallow their lies and confusion when it’s 21º in Boston (January 21st) than 100º (July 6th). GW denial simply can’t stand the heat.

“Lying” in Wait
 The deniers needn’t worry about losing strategic ground over the Summer. They take full advantage of the tendency of the human brain to continue to lend credence to a falsehood, even after it has been exposed as untrue.  Come winter, when November blizzards have made the public forget August scorchers, the deniers will spread some more lies. No matter that the unprecedented severity and wild fluctuation of recent Winter weather actually confirms GW — the deniers have tarnished the term “climate change” with an unfounded stigma.

For victory in their guerrilla war against Reason, it’s not necessary for the deniers to convince the public that GW is not real. It’s enough to instill sufficient confusion and doubt to prevent concerted efforts to combat the causes of GW, which coincidentally are the source of so much wealth to the deniers and their patrons.

Climategate-gate
 Just released is the Muir Russell Report, commissioned by the British government to investigate the work of the researchers of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Old emails from the CRU scientists were hacked, and the seemingly damning quotes extracted from them were hyped as “climategate” – proof that GW was a hoax.

In contrast, the report finds of the CRU scientists:

  • “rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt”
  • “behavior has not prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers”
  • “were not in a position to withhold access to data or tamper with it”
  • “showed no evidence of bias”

On the CRU analysis of data, the report concludes that:

  • the analysis “ is robust to a range of station selections and to the use of adjusted or unadjusted data”
  • its ”level of agreement between independent analyses is such that it is highly unlikely that CRU could have acted improperly to reach a predetermined outcome”
  • “data derived from tree rings is not misleading”
  • “the references in a specific e-mail to a ‘trick’ and to ‘hide the decline’ show no evidence of intent to paint a misleading picture”
  • CRU ”did not withhold the underlying raw data”
  • there is “no evidence to substantiate allegations that there was subversion of the peer review or editorial process”

The only critique leveled at the CRU scientists was that they failed to “display the proper degree of openness” and “displayed unhelpfulness in responding to requests” for data access.

Bottom line: the real hoax was “climategate” . Nothing’s changed; we’re still in deep trouble, GW is still real and it’s still real bad.  You’ve surely heard all about this, as FOX News will be broadcasting about the Russell findings as energetically as they covered “climategate”.  No?  Well read the truth for yourself:

Muir Russell Report

Climategate scientists cleared of manipulating data on global warming

In fact, the ice caps are melting much faster than scientists previously believed, at what are described as “runaway” rates.


Like Cancer

For decades, the tobacco industry successfully sowed doubt as to the carcinogenic effect of cigarettes. Faced with a report by doctors saying cigarettes were bad for you, the cancer deniers would simply crow, “Yeah? Doctors also told us leeches were good!” For every hundred stories of an Auntie Em who succumbed to emphysema in her mid-fifties, the cancer deniers only needed one tale of an Uncle Ernie, the chain smoker who lived to ninety. One freak snow storm in Atlanta serves as the climate version of the ninety year-old chain smoker. That the GW deniers are using the same devious tactics as the cancer deniers should come as no surprise, because in most cases, they are the very same people.

Mental Insulation
 Insulating your house is one of the best ways to ameliorate heat and cold, and a concrete, simple way to fight GW. This Summer, while you’re sweating and cursing the heat, may we recommend a little mental insulation against the coming wave of GW denier lies. On a piece of paper or in a note card, write down how you feel about this heat. Record the date and the temperature. Then read the links above on the Russell Report. Write down your thoughts and assessment of them. Then place your note in an envelope, address it to yourself “to be opened during first Winter storm.”

We all live busy lives, and are inundated with too much information, most of it shoddy. Let’s not get distracted, and let’s not forget — climate change is a serious threat. We need to keep the fight against it a priority, twelve months of the year.

(c) 2010, by ‘tamerlane’. All rights reserved.

4 Comments | Environment | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Matt

A Joke

July 12, 2010
Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, invites Barack Obama to do a flyover of the Gulf oil spill in BP’s private plane.  Along with them are Bill Clinton and a young Greenpeace volunteer.  As they’re flying over the spill, the engines catch fire and the plane begins to hurtle uncontrollably toward the sea below.

The pilot calls back to the passengers: “We’re going down!  I’ll keep flying as long as possible so you can save yourselves.  Bail out now!”

But, because BP cut corners, there are only three parachutes for four passengers.

Hayward quickly snatches the first parachute.  “I’m the only person in the world with the expertise to solve this oil spill” he says, and jumps out.

Obama now dons a parachute, and before bailing out declares, “I’m the smartest president ever –  only I can figure out a solution to this disaster!”

The Greenpeace volunteer turns to Bill Clinton and solemnly says, “You take the last parachute.  I’m just one activist.  But you head a large international charity, and you have the experience, resources and the compassion to do something about this terrible tragedy.”

Clinton chuckles as he pats the Greenpeace volunteer on the shoulder.  “Grab a ‘chute, kid,” Bill drawls, “the ‘smartest president ever’ just leapt out of the plane wearing your backpack!”

5 Comments | BP Oil Spill, Environment, Satire | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Matt

BP Must Die

June 23, 2010

— If an auto mechanic, to cut costs, intentionally installed defective brakes in a car, and the driver & passengers later died in a crash, would you let that mechanic investigate the accident scene?

— If a mother & father had their children repeatedly detained for abuse and neglect, would you allow them to be foster parents?

— If your neighbor callously let antifreeze drain onto the sidewalk, and your pet drank it and died, would a simple apology do?

BP, an incorporated entity, is happy to be treated as a person for the purposes of taxation and campaign contributions.  It’s time BP be treated as the sick, psychopathic and extremely dangerous individual it truly is.

One dead pelican: $25,000. Getting away with murder: priceless.

BP:

– Has a record of rampant safety violations, the worst in a bad industry;

– Knew it had no way to stop a leak if one of its Deepwater wells blew;

– Released a strategy plan lifted verbatim from Exxon’s useless Alaska plan.  BP didn’t even care that the plan mentions walruses;

– Lied repeatedly about every detail of the spill, and continues to lie;

– CEO Tony Hayward parties on his 52′ yacht while endangered animals die by the thousands, and millions of peoples lives are ruined;

– Has assured its investors that it will pay no more than $6 billion in damages;

– Is burning sea turtles alive at sea, thus saving $25,000 per turtle in EPA fines.

Lethal injection, electric chair, firing squad – that’s how we kill a person who is a psychopathic murderer.  And the punishment for the individual perps, from Hayward on down, must be severe.   But the way to put a corporation to death is to seize its assets, and revoke its charter.   The seizure’s easy to do — the president could simply issue an executive order.  Since BP has openly said it doesn’t intend to pay for more than a tiny fraction off the havoc it had wreaked, only a fool would forego seizing its assets ASAP.   And then BP must die:  revoke its charter, hand over its operations permanently to the government.

Good riddance.

(c) 2010 by ‘tamerlane.;  All rights reserved.

Leave a Comment » | BP Oil Spill, Environment | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Matt

BP is Burning Sea Turtles Alive

June 22, 2010

In an effort to make its spill look less horrific, BP is setting fire to surface oil which has been cordoned off by shrimp boats carrying booms.

Tony Hayward, serial killer

Ongoing efforts to rescue endangered sea turtles trapped in the oil were shut down by BP as it interfered with the burns.  The captain of one of the rescue boats explains in an interview how BP ran him off, forcing him to leave numerous turtles trapped inside the burn cordon.

The Endangered Species Act metes out stiff criminal penalties, including imprisonment and $25,000 per death, to anyone responsible for killing a member of an endangered species.

Rescuers are putting on ice every animal they find killed by the oil.  So BP can actually save money by roasting the turtles at sea, instead of risking a rescued turtle might later die.

If you discovered someone setting the neighbor’s dog or cat on fire, and assuming you did not bash in their skull on the spot, what sort of punishment would that sick monster deserve?

In an earlier era, BP’s assets would have been seized, its leaders imprisoned — or tarred & feathered by the mob.   America has grown soft and weak, doped out on SOMA.  All we can do about this nightmare, it seems, is grumble under our breaths.

BP is a sociopathic entity; its executives & management are twisted murderers.   Their punishment must be swift, it must be ruthless, it must be complete.  If obama continues to aid & abet their killing spree, he must be impeached.

(h/t littleisis)

4 Comments | BP Oil Spill, capitalism, Environment | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Matt

Earth Day Matters

April 22, 2010

Today celebrates the fortieth Earth Day.  Often given short shrift as a hippie/vegan indulgence, Earth Day is important, and should be celebrated — as one does the Fourth of July or Yom Kippur — properly and thoughtfully.

It’s no exaggeration to say that nothing is more important than the Earth.  We’d be SOL without it.  We need to treat it with the respect, verging on veneration, it deserves.  An holiday once a year in its honor is the least we can do.

We also need to stop treating our home like one giant paper plate.  Over at the Clinton Foundation, they have an Earth Day page with four interactive links: 1) a climate quiz; 2) a climate change primer; 3) info on local efforts to combat climate change; and 4) a one-day Q & A forum hosted by Bill Clinton.

The quiz is typical Clinton ingenuity/synergy: for each person taking the quiz, $2 will be donated toward supplying the people of Haiti with solar flashlights.  Not just today, but every day, the Clinton Foundation is engaged in concrete, pragmatic and eminently achievable efforts to stop climate change.

Preserving our Earth, our only home, is something we can do, and must start doing in earnest.  Keep that in mind today.

(c) 2010 by ‘tamerlane.’  All rights reserved.

2 Comments | Environment | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Matt

Next Time, Nominate a Democrat

March 31, 2010

In yet another move worthy of a republican president, the Fraud in the White House today reversed the ban on offshore drilling on the Eastern seaboard.  He ought to have waited until tomorrow, April 1, national “I voted for obama” Day.

There’s a good reason the ban was there in the first place: offshore drilling is terribly dirty and inevitably leads to leaks, spills, and irreparable damage to ecosystems.  Floridians have always supported the ban, realizing their state benefits far more from tourism at its shores than it could ever gain from some rigs in its waters.

The president gave this rationale for lifting the ban:

“given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth, and produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy.”

Or was it Sarah Palin I heard saying that?  It’s so hard to tell.

The trouble with offshore drilling, or drilling in ANWR for that matter, is:

1.  It’s a drop in the bucket and won’t really help;

2.  The minor benefits have already been deemed unworthy of the cost;

3. There is no “ramping up” to renewable energy going on.

The last point is another area where this false messiah of the progs is acting like a republican.  He promised us green jobs in a green economy, in a green society where we all kept our thermostats at 60º, drove Subarus and Priuses powered by “coexist” and “Love Your Mother” bumper stickers.  Instead, all we get is the same, low-bar MPG standards, pushed out years so Detroit has plenty of time to get their lazy, incompetent asses around to it.   In other words, the exact kind of bone a republican president would throw us if he wanted to avoid real change.

The progs who delivered us this Trojan Turd still won’t wake up.  We get a republican’s approach to FISA, to DADT, to finance industry reform.  We get a carbon-copy of Shrub’s Iraq and Afghanistan policy, and a clone of Nixon’s health care.  And now we get Palin’s energy policy.

So I have a firm request for my proglydite brethren:  sometime before the next Democratic primary, stop filling your huge intellects with useless shit like the antioxidant powers of mache greens, or memorizing the score to Giselle, and instead learn logic, and grow a bullshit-meter while you’re at it.  Then, next time, maybe the Democratic Party can nominate a Democrat.


(c) 2010 by ‘tamerlane.’  All rights reserved.

4 Comments | Democratic ineptitude, Environment, Kool-Aid drinkers, proglydites | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Matt

Wild Horses Can Be Dragged Away

January 22, 2010

by ‘tamerlane’

In response to widespread public protest, the Bureau of Land Management has put the brakes a controversial plan to relocate 32,000 of a total 59,000 wild mustangs and burros from their protected Western ranges to private lands in the Midwest and East.

The BLM had claimed that, because the range could support less than 27,000 horses, the relocation was necessary to: 1) prevent devastation of the fragile desert ecosystem; 2) spare the horses slow deaths from starvation; 3) reduce the mustang program’s costs, which had risen from $39 million to $50 million in the past year.

Living Symbols

Under the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, passed unanimously in 1971, wild mustangs were granted protection “from capture, branding, harassment, or death” and were “to be considered in the area where presently found, as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands.”

Mustangs were deemed worthy of this special protection as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” that “contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people.”


A Thriving Natural Balance

The Director of the BLM  was charged with ensuring the mustang’s protection, but was given broad powers “to achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance on the public lands. He shall consider the recommendations of qualified scientists in the field of biology and ecology.”  Relocation, contraceptives, and the destruction of diseased animals was sanctioned, but sales, direct or indirect, to slaughterhouses were forbidden.

Every year, ostensibly to control overpopulation and range degradation, the BLM holds auctions of captured mustangs & burros.  Helicopters are used to stampede the horses toward wranglers with lassos, who load them onto trucks.  In each roundup, a significant number of horses are injured, break legs, or are trampled.

“Own a Piece of Our Western Heritage!”

You can adopt a mustang for $125.  With a typical, domesticated riding horse costing anywhere from $1,500 to $15,000, that’s a great deal.  ‘Cept your new mustang comes untrained, panicked, liable to smash through fences, and near impossible to handle, much less to ride.  In other words, wild.

I’ve handled numerous mustangs, and am just finishing up a months-long (and successful) retraining of a client’s mustang.  In my opinion, they aren’t worth the effort.  Granted, they have a compact, well-proportioned conformation, good stamina, and strong hooves.  Their exotic look and mystique bring a certain cachet to the owner, especially here out West.  Show riders and advanced amateurs appreciate their brio.  On the down side, their extreme sensitivity demands expert skills and eternal patience, neither of which most horsemen possess.

Sadly, the two types of owners a mustang is most likely to get are the ones he’ll respond worst to: either a so-called “cowboy” with their method of “breaking” a horse through aggression and fear, or a soft-hearted amateur who coddles the horse, expecting it to respond in appreciation for being “rescued”.  Isolated success stories exist, but on the whole, the BLM adoption program has been a dismal failure.  Even with the recent introduction of a pre-adoption training service, the number of takers, never high, keeps dropping.  Many of the captured horses cannot be placed, and those that do often end up passed from one disappointed owner to the next.

Necessary or Just Evil?

“But even with all its drawbacks”, you’re probably thinking, “adoption is a better fate than starvation or culling.”  I’d always thought so, too.  Because the mustangs are overpopulated and will starve if nothing’s done, right?  And, as a non-native species, they destroy the fragile terrain, right?  The news of the proposed mustang relocation led me to do a little research, and what I uncovered belied the BLM claims, and revealed a nefarious motive.

• Through frequent removals, the BLM has reduced the original 55 million acres of mandated mustang range to 35 million, and has leased 95% of that to cattle and sheep ranchers;

• The BLM claims that herds quickly expand beyond a size supportable by their ranges.  Yet the GAO and the National Academy of Sciences found the BLM had intentionally exaggerated the true growth rate by 250%, and that conditions actually worsened on ranges where horses had been removed;

• Mustang numbers largely stabilize without any interference.  Any overpopulation issues that do exist could be resolved by reintroducing the large predators which were exterminated to appease ranchers;

• The vegetation on the designated ranges is more than adequate to support the mustang, but the BLM restricts their water access to as little as 7% of what is available;

•  Field research has shown that ecosystems are actually enhanced and strengthened by the presence of mustangs;

• The wild horse has been a harmonious component of the ecosystem for over 300 years;

• The 28% jump in operating costs was due entirely to the unprecedented capture of 33,000 horses in one year.  Three-quarters of the program costs are now due to caring for the captured horses.

Range War

If the mustang is in no real danger, and poses no threat to the ecosystem, why is the BLM working so hard to remove them?   It’s a battle of numbers and of money.  The 60,000 mustangs have Cheryl Crow, Viggo Mortensen, and Kevin Nealon on their side, plus a few biologists, environmentalists and horsemen.  The 1,000,000 cows and sheep that denude BLM land, for a monthly fee of $1.35 a head, are supported by the wealthy ranchers and their cronies in Congress and the BLM.  The ranchers, along with oil & gas drillers, are eager to get their greedy paws on even more of that practically-free federal land – but the mustangs are in the way.

Via loopholes in the original Wild Horse Act, the BLM is abusing its power to regulate the mustang population, aided by a 2005 amendment, snuck through Congress by Conrad Burns (R-Montana), and signed by President Bush.  The Burns Amendment forces the BLM to sell off every horse 10 years or older, or any horse passed over for adoption three times.  It also revokes the ban on selling mustangs for slaughter, and BLM employees admit off-the-record that as many as 9 of every 10 captured mustangs end up on the killing floor.


Farewell to Mustangs

While public outcry has stalled the massive mustang diaspora, the issue may soon be moot.  Every year, the BLM removes horses from ranges it declares temporarily unable to support them.  The mustangs are never returned, but the cows and sheep are allowed to stay.  In this way, 20 million acres of federal land, which Congress bequeathed in perpetuity for wild horses, has been handed over to private ranchers.

The BLM also has plans to swap most of the remaining 27,000 free-roaming horses with geldings and with mares injected with contraceptives.  Experts note that the wild numbers are already too low, and the herds too isolated, to support a viable population, ensuring the eventual extinction of the wild mustang.

(c) 2010 by ‘tamerlane.’  All rights reserved.

11 Comments | Environment, Ranch Life | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Matt