What If They Threw a Convention…

…and Nobody Came?

Looks like we’ll be treated beginning on September 1 to the spectacle of what happens when the Party of Bush/Cheney meets in St. Paul, Minnesota for their quadrennial bash and the inside-the-beltway crowd of insiders decides to stay home, closer to their call-girls (and boys). I mean, Minnesota is so… so… midwestern.

Instead of an all-star lineup and four long days of never-ending party, the focus has been on the number of Republican senators and such who have decided to skip the formalities this year and spend their time trying to save their jobs from increasingly disgusted voters in their home states.

The Associated Press reports that at least six Republican senators are opting out - Ted Stevens of Alaska, who was indicted on felony graft charges last month, won’t be there. Gordon Smith of Oregon has been touting his close working relationship with Barack Obama and John Kerry to his constituents, hoping not to get tossed in the anti-Bush backlash against McSame. Liz Dole of North Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine are both facing challengers who are entirely likely to win. Wayne Allard of Colorado and “Wide Stance” Larry Craig of Idaho won’t be there either. They’re retiring.

George Bush and Dick Cheney will of course be there to speechify their increasingly dispirited troops. Looks like ‘independent’ Joe Lieberman will be attending, probably to accept the VP nomination from McSame that will do more to seal the doom of the modern Republican Party than anything Democrats could possibly think up.

Should be interesting to see who else decides to stay home this year. I’ll report on no-shows as they don’t show.

Links:

Wonkette: Even Republicans Don’t Want to Attend Convention
Six Republican senators to skip GOP convention

You’ve Just Gotta Be Proud…

Wow. That’s a real photograph of our dear President representing America at the Olympic Summer Games in Bejing. Pay particular attention to the look on daughter Barbara next to him… Even as Chinese police are slaughtering protesters north of the city and censoring internet access for people from all over the world. Some athletes and journalists covering the games can’t even get their own blogs…

Just for coming-in-January nostalgia’s sake, check out the rest of these fun photos over at Gawker. At the very least it’ll make you not feel so bad about those debate drinking games where you have to chug every time John McCain mentions being a tortured Vietnam veteran or Obama says “we can.”

Link:

Gawker: Bush Looking Drunk at the Olympics

Oh John, You Handsome Cad!

Well folks, it’s 8-8-08, which of course means it’s the End of the World. Right on cue, it’s revealed that John Edwards, best-looking Presidential Wannabe in this nation’s history, was revealed today to have enjoyed an extramarital affair. Might even have fathered one of America’s many (a majority these days) “fatherless” bastards. Wow. I’m so not frothing.

No, we don’t use the word “bastard” anymore to talk about REAL fatherless children. We call him or her our “Love Child.” It’s been that way since the 1960s, becomes more popular every year. Yet the leftist Democratic blogosphere goes absolutely ballistic over this non-news, as if the socialist-leaning, populist, progressive population is this country isn’t the exclusive enclave of Hippies who managed to live through those glorious ’60s (and their children, and their grandchildren, many/most of them fatherless or on step-father #4 by now).

Suddenly they’re all strict Old Testament moralists of the Pharisee variety, buying fake beards and arming themselves with stones. It’s just enough hard core, disgusting hypocrisy to make me sick to my stomach. Get a life, people!

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Anthrax Terrorist: Take 3… Um… 4

…Nobody believes the gub’ment anymore

Sure, there have been tin-foil hat conspiracy theories aplenty for as long as anyone alive can remember. The Jewish bankers got together with the German Illuminati and plotted the ‘New World Order’, getting its first nail in the coffin in 1913 with the Federal Reserve, going straight from there to instigating WW-I with a well-planned assassination in Sarajevo, culling the first wave of accumulated wealth in 1929 to start the Great Depression, which could only be alleviated in the end by WW-II.

And they needed an excuse to overrule America’s strong isolationism at the time, so they didn’t bother to do anything about the incoming Japanese fleet as it sailed en masse toward Pearl Harbor. Not exactly a “false flag” operation, but certainly despicable. REAL false flag operations got famous when the wholly fictional Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ allowed the US military to ensconce itself in perpetuity in South Vietnam, admittedly (by several ‘memoirs’ since, by people who could know) for the purpose of testing the nifty new armaments and chemical warfare agents amassed when they ‘forgot’ to cut the wartime military budget after Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war.

Then there was 9-11. A textbook case made for tin-foil speculation, undoubtedly. Huge skyscrapers imploding perfectly from jet fuel in the upper stories, a whole different, un-damaged skyscraper that mysteriously collapsed in the same fashion late that afternoon for no apparent reason, a hole in the danged Pentagon but zero signs of anything that might have caused it, etc., etc., etc. I doubt anybody’s unaware of the grand conspiracy theories for that dreadful day.

Then, just a week later, some journalists and a congresscritters received letters in the mail containing weaponized anthrax spores and badly printed notes from what we were told was just another Arab terrorist. Only that wasn’t true either, as quickly became known. Why, it turns out that the weaponized anthrax spores came from the US Army’s own bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

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When You’re Sick of Surrogates

…making a total ass of their candidate…

Getty

Time Magazine informs us that the Debate Monitors for the upcoming (and never too soon) Presidential debates have been announced. Now we can look forward to more one-on-one between Barack Obama and John McCain without having to roll our eyes on campaign surrogate gaffes enough to go blind.

For the first debate on Friday, September 26 at the University of Mississippi in Oxford the moderator will be Jim Lehrer, executive editor and anchor of the PBS NewsHour. Always a delightful presence, calming influence and rational analyst.

The second debate will be between Vice-Presidential candidates - whoever those turn out to be - on Thursday, October 2 at Washington University in St. Louis. Gwen Ifill, senior correspondent for the NewsHour and managing editor of PBS’s Washington Week will preside. Another excellent choice.

The second debate between Obama and McCain is a Town Meeting format on Tuesday, October 7 at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Our fave Tom Brokaw of NBC News will officiate. Should be fun!

The third and last Presidential debate (and you thought McCain was serious when he offered to do Town Meetings every week back in the day, didn’t you?) will be held on Wednesday, October 15 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York with Bob Sheiffer presiding. Sheiffer, CBS News chief Washington correspondent and host of the weekly Face the Nation broadcast, is a bit more partisan than the others, but should turn in a good performance at that very late stage of the campaign.

Anybody want to offer odds on what the point spread will be by October 15th?

Most Questionable Power-Grab Yet

…this one is ominous!

Yahoo News reported: White House unveils intelligence powers overhaul.

“Unveils?” Is this some sort of proposal? Nope. It’s a done deal, no oversight or even prior notice required…

The action by Bush provoked bipartisan anger among House of Representatives lawmakers who said they were not properly consulted or briefed on the planned changes.

“We were only shown the document after it was complete and on its way to the president for his signature,” said Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee.

“Given the impact that this order will have on America’s intelligence community, and this committee’s responsibility to oversee intelligence activities, this cannot be seen as anything other than an attempt to undercut congressional oversight,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the panel.

So. What exactly does this done deal include? Over at AFP the story is entitled: Bush orders overhaul of US intelligence. But don’t bother, it’s mostly a pro-fluff piece. Better is the offering by Raw Story: Watchdog: Bush turning intelligence agencies on Americans…

“This kind of concentrated power, exercised in secret, is a lit fuse with our Constitution likely in danger of being burned,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington legislative office.

Another interesting analysis appears in cskendrick’s DKos diary, Who Needs Congress? Bush Reorgs Intel Services by Decree. The logical next question for any citizen concerned about civil liberties, the US Constitution, and things like the orderly transfer of power to the next duly elected President is,

Are they doing this for Barack Obama’s benefit?

P.S. Check out Pulitzer winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s report in the New Yorker (analyzed at Think Progress) about how VP Dick Cheney proposed a “false flag” operation to provoke war with Iran To Provoke War, Cheney Considered Proposal to Dress Up Navy Seals as Iranians and Shoot at Them. Is it likely these guys are tired of All The Power In The World yet?

Killing People for Fun and Profit

Stephanie Woolhandler, M.D. of Harvard Medical School testified before the President’s Council on Bioethics this past week about her experiences with [non]health care in Amerika. The council was created in 2001 to ‘advise’ the president on bioethical issues arising from advances in biomedical science and technology. 

Single-payer, “Medicare for All” type reform is drastically needed as the US falls farther and farther away from the so-called ‘Modern World’ in terms of the general health, life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality rates, and the sheer number of hard-working citizens who will die without any medical care at all because they simply have no access and cannot afford it.

“I’ve seen people die because of co-payments and deductibles.”

There are an estimated 47 million Americans with no insurance. And as more and more of them are losing their jobs and their homes as the economy descends into depression, that number will rise dramatically. An estimated 18,000 Americans Die every year because they have no health insurance or money to pay thousands of dollars’ worth of deductibles and co-pays for the junk insurance they do have. Fully one half of personal bankruptcies in this country are the result of getting sick or injured. 76% of those filers HAD insurance when they got sick or injured, but the deductibles and co-pays bankrupted them anyway.

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The Obamapalooza World Tour

Jerusalem and Berlin

Berlin

Jerusalem

Now, THAT’s how you woo the world! Our erstwhile allies are all pretty darned tired of being bullied. Maybe it’s not too farfetched to hope that Americans might finally get tired of being bullied too.

The Bushies (including John McCain) reacted to Obamapalooza just as everyone paying attention would expect. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice issued orders the night before Obama left to State Department employees in all the scheduled tour stops that they must not attend any speeches or events or aid Obama (or the other two US Senators on the tour) in any way when they’re in-country. But since assisting US leaders - or even arranging their events, as has been done for McCain’s travels - when they’re in-country is part of the diplomatic corps’ job description, most pointedly ignored the orders.

This is going to be a fun election.

Health Insurers On The Warpath

As the economy continues to slip deeper into recession and the Presidential race becomes ever more one-sided in favor of real change, America’s Health Insurance Plans [AHIP] are hitting the road to defend their practice of “Murder By Spreadsheet.” Or, as one energetic activist calls the offensive, the Deceive America Tour.

AHIP is the trade and political lobbying association of DC insiders and overpaid executives for the health insurance industry. The industry that has wrecked health care delivery by bankrupting public hospitals, been targeted for racketeering suits under RICO, routinely refuses to pay claims while throwing families into bankruptcy, and continues to cripple American business competition in foreign trade with nations whose businesses do not hold primary responsibility for citizens’ health care costs.

2007 estimates of the number of uninsured Americans reached more than 75 million adults - 42% of all adults age 19 to 64 were uninsured or ‘underinsured’ - and the US has fallen to 47th in the world on life expectancy at birth. This week AHIP launched its Campaign for an American Solution tour in Columbus, Ohio, purporting to have A Plan to cure America’s health care woes without having to pay for any sick people’s actual health care or forego their profit margins, golden parachutes, luxury limousines and multi-million dollar salaries.

AHIP calls it a “listening tour” outreach, which means they’re quite likely to encounter some loud protests wherever they go in this effort to protect their bottom lines from reality. The speculative futures market in human suffering is just far too lucrative to lose, and the insurance hacks illegally practicing medicine these days have no intention of backing down.

Please check out the tour schedule for when these folks will be coming to your area, then you may wish to contact one of the single-payer activist groups listed below to lend your presence to the protests. It’s well past time for America to join the modern world.

National Organizations:

Physicians for National Health Program
Guaranteed Health Care [California Nurses Assn/Nat. Nurses Organizing Committee]
Health Care Now
Everybody In & Nobody Out

Everybody In & Nobody Out supports state organizations working at the grassroots level for universal care, and offers links to those state organizations. You can also find lists of state groups in your state at the other national organization sites.

Brainless Neocon “Think Tank”

…advocates Bush as “President-for-Life”

No, it’s not a joke from the late-nighters, or even one of the stand-ups at Comedy Central. A Cheney-linked neocon “think tank” called Family Security Matters issued an article last August by Philip Atkinson, opining that G.W. Bush would fail the country if he didn’t declare himself “President-for-Life” and refuse to step down next January to let his duly elected replacement take the reins of the executive branch.

The article, entitled Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy, was removed from the Family Security Matters website - and its author disappeared from an author list that includes such brainy luminaries as Newt Gingrich, Ed Koch, Michelle Malkin and Dick Morris, no doubt due to coverage at the time at Rogue Government, and lately in the progressive blogosphere in such places as Daily Kos, and at-Largely. Luckily (or not, depending on how strong your stomach is), MadCityRag caught the whole thing before it disappeared.

Some of the juciest tidbits are true keepers, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves why we should care about the U.S. Constitution and the democratic republic gifted to us by our wise founding fathers more than 230 years ago when the citizens of this new nation threw off the shackles of crazy King George. For instance…

President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.

No, thanks. Atkinson goes on to suggest that Bush should also copy Julius Caesar and order the army to simply kill everyone in Iraq so it could be repopulated with Americans as a 21st century colony. We’ve known for a long time that neocons are anti-Americans with seriously traitorous leanings, but it’s good to remind ourselves occasionally just how insane they really are. Yet another juicy tidbit to leave readers with…

Democracy is clearly an enemy of not just truth, but duty and justice, which makes it the worst form of government. President Bush must overcome not just the situation in Iraq, but democratic government.

Mister <27% WILL step down on January 20, 2009 as his elected successor is sworn in to the office of Presidency. Now, he can throw a hissy fit and chain himself to one of the White House pillars, but it won’t work. I’d suggest his smartest move would be to go ahead and fly down to his private ‘preserve’ in Paraguay about a week early and just skip the ceremony. Otherwise he just might find himself (along with his puppeteer Dick) being shuffled unceremoniously off to The Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity.