“All hands on Deck!”

“I’m an old Navy pilot. I know when a crisis calls for all hands on deck,”¹⁰ Sen. McCain said recently in explaining why he was temporarily suspending his presidential campaign and calling for postponement of the first debate between himself and Democratic candidate Barack Obama, which eventually occurred as scheduled. At the one time in his life when he was faced with a real crisis on deck, we now know, McCain left the crisis to others and descended to safety below.

….and so…..go read this story, your eyes will be opened, the scales will fall.

Whatever the circumstances of the fire’s origins, McCain did not stay on deck to help fight the blaze as the men around him did. With the firefighting crew virtually wiped out, men untrained in fighting fires had to pick up the fire hoses, rescue the wounded or frantically throw bombs and even planes over the ship’s side to prevent further tragedy. McCain left them behind and went down to the hangar-bay level, where he briefly helped crew members heave some bombs overboard. After that, he went to the pilot’s ready room and watched the fire on a television monitor hooked to a camera trained on the deck.

 

Palin was against Darfur before she was for it.

During the Palin-Biden Debate  Palin said she helped Darfur while she was Governor, but Alaskans beg to differ with her.  Check out this story at the Huffington Post.

Sarah Palin was called on to divest State Funds from Sudan in 2006 by Congress. She did nothing.

Sarah Palin was aware of the press coverage and postcard campaign in 2007. She did nothing.

Sarah Palin knew when the Save Darfur Coalition met with her staff in 2007. She did nothing.

Sarah Palin found out when House Bill 287 was filed in 2008. She did nothing. She changed her position in 2008, a year and a half after first being asked.

So, Governor Sarah Palin, in fact, took no leadership role to fight for Darfur divestment. She dismissed pleas for help.  (Until it was convenient for her politically)

And Now, with that all important spin machine, and she is potential VP looks like she was for it all along………

Lordy, Liar Liar, pants on fire!!  Do they ever stop?

 

It’s Happening all over America!

It’s Happening all over America!
by Lorelei Jackson

Tampa, Florida – Last night, all over America, people gathered in their homes, in convention centers and anywhere a television was available and Cafe Hey was no exception.   Cafe Hey is a tiny coffeehouse opened less than one year ago on the outskirts of downtown Tampa. It’s also just a few miles from the University of Tampa where so many young people care and participate in the politics of this country.   Nevertheless, the cafe packed in its’ small space over fifty people of all ages, both democrats and republicans to watch this most important debate.

Cheong Choy and Anne Vela, co-owners of Cafe Hey, graciously opened up their facilities as a community hub for its patrons and broadcast the Obama/McCain debate.  Choy used his personal computer to link up and project the debate on a large screen set on one side of the room. Chairs and a few tables lined the rest of the room.  They served coffee and snacks and even allowed  the patrons to bring in their own “drinks”.  I saw one table with wine and beer.  Vela told me that she wanted to do this “forum” for the people and for her patrons to come together for civilized dialogue to discuss politics.  It reminded me of the old time block parties where people gathered to talk with their next door neighbors discussing pertinent issues of the day and socializing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lorelei-jackson/its-happening-all-over-am_b_130366.html

 

The Wall comes tumbing down….

Given that Enron-linked….

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E0D81038F934A25752C0A9649C8B63
..former senator, McCain economic advisor, and mortgage-industry-specializing banking lobbyist Phil Gramm…

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24844889/
…has been credited as mover and shaker behind the very law that allowed the current financial meltdown to happen, I’d love to hear what McCain and Gramm think should be done to solve this crisis?

http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20080701_Dave_Davies__A_few_minutes_with_McCain.html
As of yet, of course, their only response is to deny that any of it is significant. No problem, everything’s fine. Sure, people are losing their homes to foreclosure; sure, investors are being wiped out. But hey, aside from that, everything’s peachy.
Nonetheless… since McCain has indeed pegged Gramm as “one of the smartest person in the world” when it comes to economics, I’m dying to find out what Phil Gramm thinks should be done to fix the problem that Phil Gramm and the other lets-deregulate-everything Republicans helped create.

Apologies, but had to swipe this comment from the washingtonpost voices blog.

Its “fundamentally” priceless.

 

“Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.” – Palin

The pastor who clashed with Palin Baptist minister Howard Bess, who wrote a book Palin wanted banned and who fought her on abortion and gay rights, says the country should fear her election.

Bess is unnerved by the prospect of Palin — a woman whose mind is given to dogmatic certitude — standing one step away from the Oval Office. “It’s truly frightening that someone like Sarah has risen to the national level,” Bess said. “Like all religious fundamentalists — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — she is a dualist. They view life as an ongoing struggle to the finish between good and evil. Their mind-set is that you do not do business with evil — you destroy it. Talking with the enemy is not part of their plan. That puts someone like Obama on the side of evil.

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’

“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'”

The concept that a heart-beat away from the presidency could be this person who believes that man walked with the dinosaurs is appalling.  Will she hurry the Rapture of the Christians with an Apocalypse?  Can you see the hand poised…..to strike nuclear Armageddon?

 

Proof Positive, Media Mouthpieces for Republicans

Can anyone with a straight face now say that the media is “liberal”. Can anyone say media is not driven by the republicans?

Scarborough just made the most outrageous statement ever made on national TV, in effect, saying they will only talk about what republicans wish to talk about. Scarborough…republican who once ran on that ticket in Florida.

There never was any doubt in my mind, but now its been said by….wait for it…….the republicans.

What a tragedy for the American people.

The people we entrust with telling us the “facts” really no longer care and will tell us what they want to tell us.

September 10 edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe Scarborough: Media will talk about “[w]hatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive”

Summary: After likening cable TV to “a 500-pound guy looking for a 100-pound burro to get on” and then “rides it until it dies,” Chris Matthews said to Joe Scarborough, “I want to ask you, what will we talk about two days from now?” Scarborough replied: “Whatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive.”

 

Are the American people smart..or not so smart?

From the Huffington Post I read the following excerpt from a story with the title “We’re Gonna Lose this Frickin’ Thing”:

So what is this house advantage the Republicans have? It’s the press. There is no more fourth estate. Wait, hold on…I’m not going down some esoteric path with theories on the deregulation of the media and corporate bias and CNN versus Fox…I mean it: there is no more functioning press in this country. And without a real press the corporate and religious Republicans can lie all they want and get away with it. And that’s the 51% advantage.

Think this is some opinion being wryly posited to titillate other bloggers and inspire dialogue with Tucker Carlson or Gore Vidal? Fuck that. Four corporations own all the TV channels. All of them. If they don’t get ratings they get canceled or fired. All news is about sex, blame and anger, and fear. Exposing lies about amounts of money taken from lobbyists and votes cast for the agenda of the last eight years does not rate. The end.

Adam, get a grip! Even if democrats “frickin” lose there is always next 4 years. How many times can a republican government beat and bloody the country before the country has had enough. My guess is two/three terms. Just hang on to your sanity and the republicans will eventually shoot themselves in the foot. (they always do, then dems take over and bring the country back into the real world again)

You are right however, about the 4th estate. We the people fight back on blogs, on online opinions. We know that the news is nothing more than fluff anymore. Take refuge in the fact that there is a large percentage of people that now do not even watch that non-existent 4th estate. The garner their news from the Internet from many many places, researching for themselves! Why? Because they KNOW that the news is skewed and they are tired. They want facts and they can now go and get those facts for themselves, they do not have to depend on the media that was for so many years something all Americans tuned into at 6:00 to see, say, Huntly and Brinkly. They trusted them to give Americans the facts. I will say it again, we no longer trust the media.

But, the democrats are not going to lose, so that scenario is a moot one. Eighty percent of this country is very tired of the republican antics, tired of the republican lies, tired of the republican thieves. That leaves just twenty percent that likes LIARS AND THIEVES AND CROOKS. Go figure. This year, this time, it WILL NOT WASH. Too many Americans have seen the liars for what they are.

 

No state power is more fearsome than the power to imprison: Habeas corpus – McCain wants it gone!

The purpose of a writ of habeas corpus is to cause a government to release a prisoner or show through due process why the prisoner should be held.

…The day after the Supreme Court ruled that detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo are entitled to seek habeas corpus hearings, John McCain called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” Well.

…the Supreme Court’s ruling only begins marking a boundary against government’s otherwise boundless power to detain people indefinitely, treating Guantanamo as (in Barack Obama’s characterization) “a legal black hole.” And public habeas hearings might benefit the Bush administration by reminding Americans how bad its worst enemies are.

…McCain, co-author of the McCain-Feingold law that abridges the right of free political speech, has referred disparagingly to, as he puts it, “quote ‘First Amendment rights.’ ” Now he dismissively speaks of “so-called, quote ‘habeas corpus suits.’ ” He who wants to reassure constitutionalist conservatives that he understands the importance of limited government should be reminded why the habeas right has long been known as “the great writ of liberty.”

The above are excerpts from George Will’s column on the Washington Post.

BUT….

What does Obama say? Read this from the Senate Floor in 2006:

That is the true genius of America–a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles; that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm; that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. …..

Without hearing a sudden knock on the door. I bring this up because what is at stake in this bill, and in the amendment that is currently being debated, is the right, in some sense, for people who hear that knock on the door and are placed in detention because the Government suspects them of terrorist activity to effectively challenge their detention by our Government…

…I would like somebody in this Chamber, somebody in this Government, to tell me why this is necessary. I do not want to hear that this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy. I know that. I know that every time I think about my two little girls and worry for their safety–when I wonder if I really can tuck them in at night and know that they are safe from harm. I have as big of a stake as anybody on the other side of the aisle and anybody in this administration in capturing terrorists and incapacitating them. I would gladly take up arms myself against any terrorist threat to make sure my family is protected.

But as a parent, I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence.

This is not just an entirely fictional scenario, by the way. We have already had reports by the CIA and various generals over the last few years saying that many of the detainees at Guantanamo should not have been there. As one U.S. commander of Guantanamo told the Wall Street Journal:

Sometimes, we just didn’t get the right folks….

To deny habeas corpus to our detainees can be seen as a prescription for how the captured members of our own military, diplomatic, and NGO personnel stationed abroad may be treated. …..

…The Congress has every duty to insure their protection, and to avoid anything which will be taken as a justification, even by the most disturbed minds, that arbitrary arrest is the acceptable norm of the day in the relations between nations, and that judicial inquiry is an antique, trivial and dispensable luxury.

The world is watching what we do today in America. They will know what we do here today, and they will treat all of us accordingly in the future–our soldiers, our diplomats, our journalists, anybody who travels beyond these borders. I hope we remember this as we go forward. I sincerely hope we can protect what has been called the “great writ”–a writ that has been in place in the Anglo-American legal system for over 700 years…

The observations of the judicious Blackstone . . . are well worthy of recital: ‘To bereave a man of life. . . or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.'”

 

Do you McCain? Do you Believe in Hagee?

Reporting on a New Orleans campaign event at which Sen. John McCain was interrupted by a voter’s question about Pastor John Hagee,” CNN‘s Dana Bash aired a clip of Hagee — who has endorsed McCain — saying of Hurricane Katrina, “What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God.” But Bash did not air the portion of Hagee’s comments in which he reaffirmed his previous assertion that Hurricane Katrina was at least in part the result of “sin” that Hagee identified as “a massive homosexual rally.” CNN’s John Roberts and Kyra Phillips similarly noted that Hagee said that “Katrina was God’s punishment for sinful behavior in New Orleans” .

September 18, 2006, edition of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air

HAGEE: All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

(If it’s God doing this, I think we should send a gay pride parade to those very dry area’s in Africa so some FOOD will grow there again!   Think of it, God and the Gay Pride Parade save the starving children in Africa!  What say you Hagee?  You can still say its God sending the flooding, but this time it will be a good thing!)

Okay, God was punishing New Orleans for planning to have a gay pride parade, what on earth did Illinois do last week to deserve that 5.2 earthquake? I read…According to Anagram Commodity Research Crude oil rebounded due to concern that a 5.2-magnitude earthquake in Illinois affected refinery operations. So, I guess God is in favor of oil and “BIG OIL” being sold “sky” high and all us little sinners getting the short end of a dry “dipstick”…har, funny man that God.

How about Virginia what did they do to have God sling down three tornadoes, punishing over 200 with injuries and leaving many more homeless? (not really a hurricane, but since God controls the heavens…)

The governor has declared Bremer, Blackhawk and Louisa Counties in eastern Iowa state disaster areas due to flooding this week. What horrible sins did Iowa commit? (flooding? doesn’t that come from rain from the heavens…)

(I think I know………..those areas are conservative strongholds, lol.  Keep your eyes on the skys Repubs!)

Well Mr Hagee…Mr. McCain, who welcomes the endorsement of Mr. Hagee, what say you both?

Natural disasters or God’s wrath? Don’t be coy, tell us what you really think!

Consider the following pronouncements by Hagee, the man who McCain has proudly introduced as an ally and who has endorsed McCain.

On Jews:

It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day.

And:

How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for his chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings he had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come.

On gays:

All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

Hagee, of course, is also a virulent anti-Catholic, who has suggested that the pope is the anti-Christ, and that Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism was the result of being educated at a Catholic school.

But last week, once McCain assured reporters that, just because Hagee was endorsing him, it didn’t mean he agreed with everything Hagee said, the mainstream media essentially let the matter drop.

No? Really? Wonder why? They sure didn’t drop it in Obama’s case did they?

McCain has not rejected the support of Hagee, and has said nothing about Hagee’s claims that American foreign policy towards Palestine is causing God to attack the United States with terrorists.

Hagee called the Catholic religion ‘The Great Whore,’ the ‘apostate church,’ the ‘anti-Christ’ and a ‘false cult system’? McCain cannot ignore Hagee’s lies any more than he can tolerate his bigotry.

Of course, being a former Baptist, I understand where ole Hagee is coming from.  Hellfire and brimstone, and the Apocalypse are what people like Hagee long for and lust after.

I’m certain though, that people that believe as Hagee does…hell in fact if they believe even a little of what Hagee does….I don’t want them running our country.

Do you McCain?  Do you Believe in Hagee?