Could Susan Rice be the only Thorn in the Rose Garden?

President Obama in the Rose Garden with Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton at his side.

UPDATE - See This Link To Rachel Maddow's Blog for recent revelations that the Director of Intelligence had originally chosen not to publicly implicate Al Qaeda in the Benghazi attacks.  For this reason, Susan Rice cannot be held accountable for that particular fact being omitted.

It's now been just one and a half weeks since Obama's reelection was made clear.  Our nation gave us a "Forward Mandate" and simultaneously, we gave the President a vote of confidence.

But is he maybe too confident?

I'm thinking he is... and he just might be shooting from the hip a little too soon in regard to Susan Rice, our nation's ambassador to the U.N.  Just today, the President chastised the Tea Party Republicans for going after Rice in their conspiracy theories about Benghazi and the incident that happened there.  The President has made it clear that he believed the attack to be "terrorism" by definition - but the conspiracy hullabaloo has not ended with that.

“If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me,” said the President. “And I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received and to besmirch her reputation, is outrageous.”

Right-wing operatives now want to pin the tail on the donkey.  They want to make the President and his administration accountable for the deaths of Navy Seals and State Department officials.  The fringe Republicans who claim to have supported Hillary Clinton in 2008 are now feigning concern that she has "fallen on the sword" for Obama and his "terrorism condoning" administration.  How convenient that they can just separate her from that administration when it best suits them, right?

However - the point is that they are going after Rice.  They say that the attack in Benghazi had nothing to do with the propaganda film against Muslims which Rice claimed to be the impetus.  They say that Rice used the attack in an effort to wag her finger at Christian America and reduce terrorism to a mere difference in opinion.

I am almost inclined to think they could be right about that.

Susan Rice was indeed the first person to tell America's media that the attack was a response to our own anti-muslim propaganda.  If the Benghazi attack and the outrageously offensive video were unrelated to each other, we deserve at this point, to know that.  Obama has won his re-election and he can only benefit further from the truth being made clear.

Rice has been silent on the matter and has not stepped forward to defend the supposed intelligence that she made us all privy to. However, she did reiterate the same talking point on ABC a number of times without first informing the American people that her husband is the executive producer of that very media outlet.  Now who's spreading propaganda?

As a liberal Democrat, I have not quite been as convinced as President Obama has to trust Susan Rice and I have my own reasons for that... You can read all about that here.

But my views on gay rights are not the only thing that puts me at odds with Susan Rice. I am not fond of political animals who think only of their prospects on election day... and I think that just might describe Rice perfectly. At the time of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, Rice reportedly said, "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?"

I am very happy that the President has won his reelection, but I don't know that we need him to tangle with John McCain again unless he's really sure that Susan Rice is not playing him for a rung on the ladder.

Worthy Adversaries | What Obama is REALLY Up Against in November

My friend Monica had an interesting little video clip on her blog this morning that shows the much maligned "liberal gotcha media" in action... Soledad O'Brien from CNN gets tough with John Sununu over the difference between his claim that Obama has cut Medicare for seniors and the reality that a Democratic plan would actually just do some funny math and subtract from some kind of future savings.  We've seen this before when it comes to the Right Wing budget hawks... They take any savings that Democrats can muster up and chalk it up to a "heartless cut to essential programs"... which of course, never turns out to be the case and then the other shoe drops and it was THEIR cuts that turn out to be the harmful ones.

This is an example of the more obvious and predictable propaganda that we expect from the right in every election... Most of America just tunes it out.  But this year, there are much bigger truth-benders out there that voters won't immediately be able to put a finger on.

In 2010, I highlighted the funding behind Tea Party anti-healthcare reform demonstrations and how astroturf shills would dress up as doctors and nurses and "regular concerned citizens" and scream at our legislators about dystopian Nazi death panels...

We later learned that we could place a big chunk of the blame for those demonstrations on Koch Industries, a chemical company that hates regulation of any industry... and probably hates a black guy sitting in the White House as well.  But one, more obvious culprit sort of slid under the radar to most of America... That, would of course, be the insurance industry...  See, when we talk about "the insurance industry", we're talking about a collective alliance between all different types of insurance.  Health Insurance, Auto Insurance, Life Insurance, Homeowner's Insurance... They've all got each other's backs and they don't have yours! Everybody knows it's a racket... and everybody is intimately aware of how much that racket is costing them.

Progressive Auto Insurance has recently been exposed for putting money into the legal defense of vehicular manslaughterers in a desperate attempt to avoid paying out on policies that it created.  You know Progressive, right?  They have that cute liberal-looking chick named Flo in all of their advertisements...

I hate to break it to ya, America... but Flo and the GEICO gecko are manipulative assholes.  There, I said it... These much beloved icons of TV advertising are hiding a sleezy underbelly of cutthroat political propaganda that you can't even fathom.  Click here to see who REALLY best represents the interests of GEICO...

Progressive Auto Insurance, if you recall, was rumored to be the principal source of funding for the gay rights advocacy group called GetEQUAL.  GetEQUAL spent way too much time maligning other gay rights advocates and Democrats in congress to have been truly helpful in repealing DADT and fighting for equality.  Now many of the activists were not privy to these politics at the time they started screaming at the President through bullhorns - but that's how Tea Party-style astroturf works... You can get well-intentioned individuals to do some pretty counter-productive things if you really put your mind to it.

Moving right along... another massive propaganda front against the current President of the United States is being mounted by the FORMER President of the United States... You didn't really think that George W. Bush went anywhere did you?  Of course not... and he's not going to sit on the sidelines in this election.  Over 70% of Romney's Foreign Policy ministry is made up of old Bush pals... This is not a fact that Romney wants you to be overly familiar with.  It's a reluctant alliance... Bush was never really fond of Romney in the beginning but the good people of Salt Lake City, Utah proved just tricky enough to finally secure their guy as the Bush Dynasty's latest incarnation.  What does an alliance with Bush get you?  One hell of a new "Swiftboat" campaign... complete with Bush loyalists like Chad Kolton and a bunch of Navy Seals who will pretend that Obama's "loose lips" are sinking their ships...
Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc. (or "OPSEC" for short) has all the same trappings as The Swiftboat Veterans For Truth but with a little more of an authoritative air.

Of course, this would be Bush's contribution to the dialogue because one of the group's main objectives is to show that Obama is taking too much credit for the killing of Osama Bin Laden, which has been a wound that Republicans just can't stop licking.

Finally and perhaps the most destructive wing of the Republican Ministry of Propaganda that is active in the 2012 election cycle would be the small lobbying groups who control larger groups of ideologically driven special interest groups... These include, but are not limited to, Richard Berman's Center for Consumer Freedom, The Rand Center (which calls for "a revolt against today’s intellectual mainstream"), ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Commission), NRA (National Rifle Association) and the Family Research Council (FRC).  In their alliances with right-wing "think tanks", these lobbyists produce massive quantities of anti-Democratic propaganda on a daily basis.  They all work in tandem to create special right-wing "talking points" and then saturate the mainstream media with them. Many of the people associated with one of these groups are often associated with the others to varying degrees as well.

One of these very well orchestrated projects was "Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day" which disguised itself as a response to an impending boycott from LGBT persons but which actually ended up serving to create a new right-wing media personality out of a Chick-Fil-A employee named Rachel.  (To read in detail how they pulled THAT one off, click here.  To watch Rachel join Fox News in a senseless refutation of "Obamacare" on behalf of all women, watch here.) 

Another project that these groups have been working on, which is truly frightening, is "The Real George Zimmerman".  George Zimmerman, as everyone now knows is the white/hispanic guy who stalked, shot and killed an unarmed black teen named Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Before that event had even entered mainstream news in any meaningful way, a few websites popped up online which presented a self-defense theory on behalf of Zimmerman.  The creepy problem with this concept is two-fold: 1)  Zimmerman hadn't even made a self-defense claim at the time and was in hiding while President Obama among others advocated on Trayvon Martin's behalf. 2) The claims being made (supposedly by objective 3rd parties) were all based on smearing the victim's character and circumstantial "evidence" which would later become the key points in Zimmerman's defense when he was finally arrested on charges.  The smears, which sought to incriminate Martin in his own murder were entirely based on the victim's race and repeatedly invoked statistics about African Americans and crime levels in the United States. 

In this last example, the "hidden agenda" is not merely freeing a supposedly "innocent" George Zimmerman - it is much more complicated than that.  ALEC and the NRA have heavily lobbied Florida's government to enact laws like the now infamous "Stand Your Ground" rule of self-defense - an adjustment to the Castle Doctrine.  The laws are far reaching and even nonsensical in their deregulation of firearm combat. The idea is that weapons manufacturers can use "panic" in the media to encourage more people to purchase firearms.  A shooting like the one in Colorado at a movie theater can be turned into a reason to DEREGULATE gun ownership and encourage MORE people to carry concealed weapons around with them for supposed protection.  However, the Stand Your Ground law fails to protect anyone at all and that becomes obvious when the Zimmerman/Martin case is considered.  In order to dust away their own tracks and act like nothing shifty is going on, the NRA and ALEC need to do their very best to see it that the case goes down the way they want it to... as mere self-defense.  They know that Zimmerman will have to go to jail - that is almost completely unimportant to them.  The most important thing that the NRA and ALEC want, they've already achieved (as of yesterday), which is legally disconnecting the case from "Stand Your Ground".  Another thing they hope to accomplish is putting enough racially motivated suspicion on the case to further implicate President Obama with the concept they've created from scratch - "black males who are going to get away with things if you let them".

Michelle Malkin's Minions Go All "PETA" on Me

I may have cast a metaphorical stone at Michelle Malkin, it just wasn't the first one thrown... She's been in the stone-casting business much longer than I have and she's mastered the curve ball.

So, I've had a little bit of fun with Twitter lately, but overall, I've been unimpressed.  In the Southeastern United States - where Twitter is waaay more popular than it is anywhere else, you just have way too many knee-jerk conservatives using it as a place to rant about Barack Obama or black people in general...  When filling all 140 characters of a "tweet" seems like a daunting task, Twitter is just your size. It's a "safe place" for people who have been bullied on the playgrounds of their own imaginations.

Now don't let me mis-characterize good southerners and twitter users as racist unnecessarily... They hate lots of things aside from black people.  One thing that I've learned about them is that they  REALLY  hate an organization  called PETA.  Now, I've been wanting to talk about this guy who started the "We Hate PETA" movement for quite some time now, but the subject is so overwhelming that I usually just end up linking to his wikipedia page and hope that people "get it".  

He's a lobbyist for every industry that relies on the mass, unregulated killing of animals (and sometimes people) without compassion. With some sort of satanic stroke of brilliance, he decided to start the "PETA Kills Animals" website... Now he didn't have any sort of foundation for this claim, initially, but that had never stopped him before... Eventually, people filled in the gaps for him and now "PETA is sorta connected to some people who may or may not partake in the occasional observance of animal death".

Now, let's introduce healthcare-hater Michelle Malkin to those of you who are not familiar with her... Those of you who don't have Twitter accounts, that is...  Malkin is best known as America's least professional yet most noteworthy Twitter user and Fox News' "go to girl" for any adverse coverage of non-white people in America.  She's been described as a "self-hating", "unstable", "Tea Party mouthpiece" and "liar" on more than one occasion by more than one person.  (Don't disappoint me... follow those links I just gave you!)

She says horrible things about people and makes sweeping generalizations about liberals, welfare recipients and Obama supporters all the time... She's turned it into an art form.

Now, the other day, I know all 40 of my Blogger followers just clamored to read my post about how Twitter can be used for cyberbullying... In it, I mentioned Michelle Malkin but I should have gone into more detail... she actually sort of invented it and turned it into an artform with a website called "Twitchy.com"....

Twitchy.com harnesses the power of Twitter and uses as a Human Flesh Search Engine to inspire people to attack others on Twitter based on their most thoughtless and insensitive tweets.  Of course, since the site is run by Michelle Malkin and her Andrew Breitbart adoptees... their most offensive tweets are missing from the front page.  They will tweet something so outlandish (like the idea that liberals are praying for the fire in Colorado to consume good Christians) and then filter through all the angry responses in order to find the most ill-conceived "loss of cool" commentary and repost it for the Tea Party to gawk at and use as a "hit list".  It is what I call... "Michell Malkin's Pretty Hate Machine".  Here's a post where she even holds Zach Braff accountable for what other people are randomly tweeting to him and falsely accusing racism on the part of Braff who apparently sees what we all see in Clarence Thomas.

Fans of Michelle Malkin are likely to believe the following "truths" to be self-evident:

1. Guns should be purchased, used, sold and waved around without any regulation.
2. Liberals, Blacks, Gays & Democrats are all in the same category of "undesirables" who are seeking "free stuff" from them.
3. The aforementioned "libtards" don't deserve healthcare or really even to live. They are "sick", "diseased" "sycophants" and hateful, racist non-people.
4. All animals except puppies are best served on a bun.
5. PETA Kills Animals and that's unforgiveable...

Do we see a glitch here?  I hope so...

Now let's skip right along to the comment I left and why...  After personally triggering what she hopes will be the new "monicagate" for President Obama,  Malkin got distracted by a forest fire in Colorado... This forest fire is serious business and there have already been many victims... Not the least of which, Malkin will have you know, is her little Zebra-Striped Finch named "Tweety" (not-so-ironically). 

"Sad News" she tweeted... Tweety died, supposedly from smoke inhalation. Now, I'm gonna go out on a limb here (see what I did right there?) and say that Malkin tweeted about Tweety more for the benefit of her insurance policy than for her followers to be "sad" about.

But nevertheless, a finch named Tweety has expired and the world must know about THAT.

So the following day, when Malkin discovered that the Red Cross was posing some competition to her with their coverage of #WaldoCanyonFire, and while those who were tired of praying for her bird decided to look elsewhere on Twitter for solutions to the disaster, she decided to tweet about those "despicable" liberals again. Twitchy/Michelle said it was all about those liberals who were sending their gay prayers to the dark one for good Christians to be consumed in the very fires that claimed dear Tweety's life!

I took the bait... I tweeted back...

Oh, the faux outrage and concern for humanity that ensued! I won't re-post the death threats. But here are just a small FEW of the hundreds of tweet-backs that I received in what had instantly become the busiest night my sad little twitter account has ever seen...

Comments written in GREEN are my thoughts added while reading them...

but wait... there's more... (click to view larger)...

In almost every single case where the Twitchy.com fanatic had claimed that I was insensitive, heartless, crazy, and death-worshiping, their preceding and following tweets were hypocritical examples of exactly that.  I won't repost the racist and homophobic ones... but trust me, they're filed away in case any of these folks become the next George Zimmerman...

Now, I find it necessary, before I let you go, to also tell you 3 more things... First, from the very first one, almost every reply and re-tweet that came in was at least slightly mischaracterizing what I said... some even went so far as to suggest that I was hoping Michelle Malkin's children would die...

Secondly, this was not the first time I tweeted to Michelle Malkin... I've reasonably replied to her tweets countless times in the past and never received any sort of recognition of receipt.

Lastly, I am not a bird or animal hater of any sort... I have about 8 wild birds that frequent my backyard because they know I always leave food and water out for them... They include a Mourning Dove named Lucy (for her exaggerated facial expressions like Lucille Ball), a couple of blue jays (one is named Alphie or "Alpha 1" for his similarity to Air Force One), some almost-English-speaking wild green parrots and even a couple of Cardinals...

The difference between myself and Michelle Malkin's fanbase, is that I shoot birds with a camera and they shoot them with guns...  The rest, they say... "is for the birds".

6 Ways That the Republican War on Women Is a Real War

There are Six Significant Ways That the Republican War on Women (RWoW) is a Real and Dangerous War:

1. Women are dying.
2. Soldiers are on the front lines.
3. Congress declared the war.
4. Propaganda is used to gain public sympathy.
5. Additional funding is sought from the public.
6. Women are questioned as to their allegiances.

Women are dying.

Let it be known far and wide that war kills people. In this case, the casualties are primarily but not limited to women. The first to die in the Republican War on Women (RWOW) are in the lower economic class. Take for instance, 29 year-old Anna Brown, who died in a St. Louis jail cell after being refused treatment at a local hospital and having the police called on her for trespassing. Her story is one of the private sector in healthcare refusing to do for a woman what it is required by law to do. The police of St. Louis made it a crime for Anna to seek medical help. One can only assume that this might happen to men too.

Women around the world (including the United States) die every year due to botched do-it-yourself abortion procedures where medical expertise is not sought. But the shocking truth is that these deaths are not only acknowledged legislatively, but even encouraged. Under the Bush administration and with a Republican-ruled Congress, the Food & Drug Administration considered the effects of a medication that poor women were using to induce abortion at home. Though more than 10 years of research has overwhelmingly shown that Cytotec is a safe way to induce abortion when administered correctly during normal pregnancies, the Food and Drug Administration has never approved this particular use. What the FDA did, in fact, recognize was the drug's use by obstetricians to induce contractions in routine deliveries – a method which they know causes extreme hemorrhaging and risk to both the baby and the mother's lives.

One of the most awe-inspiring discoveries made about the Republican Presidential candidates in the 2012 election so far has been the far reaching grasp they have on the mental health industry under the guise of religion under George W. Bush's “Faith Based Initiatives” program. Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry were all discovered to sit on boards, take ownership of or otherwise run pseudo-healthcare rehabilitation facilities that focus on teenagers and children. A majority of these supposedly “troubled” youths are female and “at risk” for lesbianism or abortion according to their religious “therapists”. At least two of these girls are known to have died under rather ominous circumstances.

Related News: Recent Fire-bombings of Abortion Clinics on Rise Again In Florida and Wisconsin.

A Christian Fundamentalist Holding a Sign
Celebrating the  Murders  of Women at a
Democratic Event in  Arizona.

Soldiers are on the front lines.

On July 28, 2005 a female 'soldier' named Jamie Leigh Jones was stationed in Baghdad by a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root (called “KBR” in short) as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. On this day, Jamie Leigh Jones was, according to her and many witnesses (to varying degrees at various stages of the saga that was yet to come), gang-raped and then subsequently locked in a shipping container without access to a phone by her colleagues at KBR.

Three years after her rape (I refuse to use the word “alleged” on principal here), Jones lost her case against KBR and was counter-sued by the military-industrial contractor to the tune of $2million for what they claimed was a “frivolous” lawsuit. (A federal judge did at least dismiss those counter-claims). While the case was lost quietly, in comparison to the swell of outrage that finally led up to it, it is worth noting that none of the defendants were deemed innocent of having sex with Jones. Her case was lost primarily due to insufficient evidence that the sex was not consensual. Photos of the trauma to her vagina, anus, ruptured breast implants and torn pectoral muscles were not-so-mysteriously missing from the evidence collected by her colleagues themselves (the very defendants in the case).

Congress (30 white, male Republican Senators) Declared This War.

Jones' case against KBR (and thereby against the United States, considering the nature of their business), although certainly the most high-profile is not the only rape nor sexual discrimination case against a military-industrial contractor. What came to light in her 3-year struggle to face her attackers in a court of law was the audaciously horrible “mandatory arbitration clause” in her contract with KBR. KBR argued successfully that they had the right to deny Jones the ability to sue them for any reason at all. This contract, which was commonly administered to most contractors at the time, defied the very nature of justice and demanded that all legal disputes, no matter how severe or how outrageous the offense, would be handled “in-house” by the company itself – effectively giving persons wronged by the company NO RECOURSE to defend themselves legally.

One Senator, Democrat Al Franken, from Minnesota, had a serious problem with this injustice and drafted legislation which proposed that the United States stop doing business with companies that required such an egregious erosion of civil liability. When it came time for a vote on the Senate floor, the bill passed with bipartisan support. All were in favor of protecting women from becoming the Jamie Leigh Jones' of the future... Everyone except for the 30 White Male Republican Senators who voted against the measure. One such Senator, shockingly, was John Sidney McCain, whose daughter Meghan is exactly Jones' age.

The outcry and backlash from the public was widespread but short-lived. 30 White Male Republican Senators had essentially voted (albeit unsuccessfully) to legalize rape... Let the War Begin.

Pro-War Propaganda is Issued By Governmental Pundits and The Media

In any war, the real nucleus of the battle is known to be over “the hearts and minds of the people”, as George W. Bush famously noted. For that purpose, political propaganda is employed. There are currently no better propagandists in the world than our Republican party here in the USA. To illustrate this, there are far too many examples to simply list without format. The blogosphere is riddled with senseless arguments ranging from biblical scripture to ad hominem attacks against democratic female legislators and liberals. To provide this point with some citation at least, I've randomly selected a few of the most obvious attempts to culturally re-frame the RWOW as an acceptable and justified movement.

1. A female Republican legislator in Florida blames child rape-victims for dressing “like prostitutes”.
2. Due to pressure from Tea Party astroturfers, Republican legislators in Michigan spend weeks on end and countless public dollars on a law forbidding a kind of abortion that they admit is not even practiced in the state to anyone's knowledge. The procedure that they have incorrectly termed “partial birth abortion” is really called dilation and extraction and is only used by abortion doctors in 1/5 of one percent of all procedures and only when medically necessary.
3. An anti-abortion activist group called LiveAction sets up fake “sting operations” in which they target female employees of Planned Parenthood. Many professional women have their careers ruined by “Brietbart-style” video editing in which the public is falsely led to believe that Planned Parenthood is in cahoots with the perpetrators of human trafficking and sex-slavery.
4. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), and Connie Mack (R-FL) all vote against their own best interests and against the interests of their female constituents by voting against the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2009. Fortunately, thanks to a Democratic Majority and the vote of only ONE Republican woman (Ileana Ros-Lehtinen), the bill passed anyway and now women must be paid equally for doing the exact same job as a man.
5. Florida Representative and amateur pundit Allen West launches a full-scale attack (in writing no less!) against Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz after she dared to call his judgment into question regarding detrimental cuts to Medicare. West sent out public emails that termed his female colleague “the most vile, unprofessional and despicable member of the US House of Representatives”, “not a lady” and “a coward” who “wants a personal fight” and needs to “shut the heck up”.
6. Georgia's Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss is also a legislator-pundit hybrid who advocates the most extreme measures to deal with the most insignificant of problems. When his office isn't busy sending death threats to gay bloggers, they are advocating legislation which would make it illegal to use your car for the purpose of driving a woman to a clinic known to have performed abortions.
7. Republican blogger and ALEC propagandist Michelle Malkin has given birth to what she calls “the war on conservative women” (her feeble yet not-too-timid attempt at counter-spin) and in a nutshell, this is just a steady stream of tweets (every 5 minutes, depending on the day) on her Twitter account which attack Hilary Rosen, the Democratic pundit who dared to question Ann Romney's fitness as her husband's appointed expert on “Women and the Economy”.

Stay Tuned Tomorrow for 6 Ways That RWOW is a Real War Part II – Funding and Allegiance

Occupy Rachel Maddow?

An interesting discussion has begun on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show Facebook Page:

OccupyWallSt.org Chat Hijacked by Angsty Teenager With Control Issues

This sounds like a headline from the Onion, I know... But for the last week, I've been updating my facebook friends on Occupant News from anywhere I can find it... The OccupyWallSt.org chat function has been a good resource up until an hour ago.

I talked to a moderator named "@usotsuki" this morning who was pretty cool. We both prefer Madonna's old early 80's tracks over Lady Gaga's newer rehash of the same vibe.

Before that another user in Houston (huestonepress) had been desperately trying to get an area newspaper to cover the large-scale occupation going on over there... Here's one of their YouTube videos, reflecting that the streets of Houston, Texas have been uncomfy and loud:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXBC0zr9GtE

A few days ago, a user named "SteveJobsZombie" advertised his new easy-to-use "Outsource My Job" App to the barely bemused occupants and we learned that arrests are beginning to slow down.

A plethora of links to Occupy news articles, videos and artwork have been shared over the past week and a half and every 5 minutes a student interrupts the conversation to say "I am writing a report for school and I need to know what this is all about..."

A Ron Paul supporter posted a brilliant and hilarious video that more clearly explains the "End The Fed Bank" philosophy and a group of Democratic Occupants in Chicagoland are pushing the "Move 2 Amend" agenda which would add a consitutional amendment that defines corporations as "not people".

Together, we all decided that we didn't think it was a great idea for our "leaderless movement" to be given "leaders" by the business media... We deciphered which photos of police brutality were really from Occupy Wall Street and which ones were not... And I promoted an Occupation of Boca Raton on Thanksgiving.

The Beginning of the End...

But then, without warning, I was banned by a moderator (and so were my roommates and anyone else on our network) by an overzealous moderator named "@catsup". No more connection to the main chat offered anonymously to Wall Street Occupants... just like that.

I got to where I could chat up the moderator of the service (@catsup) who I'm told was something called an "NT Tech" and asked him why I was banned... His reply was that I was caught "electioneering for Obama" and that I was "an agent of Wall Street"... Which is HILARIOUS if you really know me...

He called me an "astroturfer" and told me that I have a "listening problem" because I had revealed that I wasn't too fascinated by Dr. Cornel West's "I hate Obama because that's so cool these days and I'm black" video.

In short, I was dealing with a 'King Baby' who was DEEPLY relishing this moment - probably his first taste of absolute authority - the power to ban someone and let them appeal to him in order to return. From the leaderless movement, there arose not just a leader but... for a moment... a fascist dictator and anything not sufficiently hateful toward Obama was mere "judenlettern".

Now that @Catsup is in charge over at the OccupyWallSt.org website, there are no Democrats allowed.

What was my grand offense, you might ask?

I simply told other people in the chatroom that Obama tried to tax the 1% for us on Thursday but his plan failed when a couple of "Blue Dog Democrats" joined Republicans in voting it down... Which is true.

The Genesis of the "Tea Party Patriots"

The Heritage Foundation and FreedomWorks are the two main "think tanks" associated with protesting healthcare reform. The differences between them are as follows:

Heritage Foundation is much larger and ingrained in US Government and Media than FreedomWorks. They specialize in media manipulation and dissemination of propaganda but they also help to organize protests and faux townhall-style activism.

FreedomWorks has more control over the actual protesters and activists than Heritage Foundation does because they specialize in rallies, robo-calls and ground-level training.

Read more on the Heritage Foundation here and here and especially here.

Another anti-healthcare reform advocacy group that works closely with the Heritage Foundation and in much the same manner is FreedomWorks which you can read about here and here.

The Supreme Court Ruling on Contributions is Outrageous

This opinion by Jarrett Terrill appeared in the The Florida Agenda newspaper on February 4, 2010.

On January 21, The Supreme Court of the United States did something unthinkable. (Well, at least the 5 who had been appointed by one of the Bush's did...) They overturned campaign finance laws in a decision known as "Citizens United V. Federal Elections Commission".

When a Supreme Court decision is reached, it sets a precedent, which becomes "the law" as we know it. The plaintiffs in this case, Citizens United, were a rag-tag group of Republican propaganda artists who wanted to make a negative documentary about Hillary Clinton and play it on TV before the primary election in 2008. They said the US Government had denied them their "freedom of speech" by not allowing their corporation to fund their smear film without forming a political action committee, known as a PAC.

PACs are necessary to fund campaign ads because they ensure that only those members of a corporation who wish to donate will do so and that the general funds of a corporation or publicly traded company are not used against the wishes of the stockholders, employees or union members. Citizens United wanted to fund the film and its broadcast out of pocket, ignoring maximum donations allowed to a political campaign.

Here's what's wrong with the way the Supreme Court handled this case:

Citizens United was not even trying to overturn campaign finance laws, they were only trying to claim that the laws did not apply to their propaganda film which they were referring to as a "documentary" instead of a campaign ad. This means that the conservative members of the Supreme Court used the case of Citizens United as a catalyst to legislate campaign financing from the bench, which is not in the enumerated powers of the judicial branch of government.

Secondly, the ruling and opinions of the conservative justices who blatantly thumbed their noses at the Constitution did not even match up with the subject at hand. For instance, Clarence Thomas gave a lengthy opinion in which was arguing for the rights of anti-gay marriage petitioners to to sheild their names from public record in order to avoid social outcasting and retribution. The transparency of state legislative initiatives has nothing to do with campaign finance laws at all, and Clarence Thomas clearly has no business sitting on the Supreme Court of the USA if he is unable to tell the difference.

Thirdly, the case is not a "freedom of speech" issue, as the conservative justices claim. The First Amendment only applies to citizens of the United States; corporations are not people. By allowing a corporation the right of unlimited campaign financing and not placing the limits of maximum allowed donations on the corporation, the Supremes are trying to ensure that Blackwater, Halliburton, Wal-Mart and MSNBC can stock all 3 branches of Government with their own appointees because independently funded persons cannot afford to compete in terms of campaign spending.

But at last, the most disturbing and glaringly obvious problem with this new law that the Supreme Court has audaciously written from the Bench is that it allows foreigners to have more influence over the candidates who run for office in America than her own citizens do. Because the largest, wealthiest corporations are multi-national conglomerates, the Supreme Court is trying to ensure that China, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia all get a vote in our government.

This Supreme Court decision goes against the very concept of Democracy, against the Constitution and obliterates any chances of an elected official being a voice for anyone except the corporation which hired them.