Found this HERE

You know, I’ve studied history, I’ve read about America and you know something, if it weren’t for liberals, we’d be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren’t fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.

What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn’t given us anything we didn’t have and it wants to take away our freedoms.

The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man’s path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?

Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. “Globalism” which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.

For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn’t. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn’t enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.

Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.

Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.

It’s time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.

It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.

Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America’s defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.

It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?

– If Texas were not in the Union, the Democrats would currently have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate — or at least they would once Al Franken gets seated. This is because, in a 98-seat Senate, only 59 votes would be required to break a filibuster.

– If Texas were not in the Union, the Republicans would operate from a significantly weakened position in the House, since the net 8-vote advantage their congressional delegation gives them in the state (they have 20 seats to the Democrats’ 12) is by far their largest.

– If Texas were not in the Union, George W. Bush would never have become President in 2000 — not because he’d be constitutionally ineligible (Bush, despite his Texas twang, was born in posh New Haven, Connecticut). Rather, he wouldn’t have had enough Electoral Votes to defeat Al Gore.

– If Texas were not in the Union, Barack Obama would have won the Electoral College 389-147 instead of 365-173 (note that there are two fewer votes total, because there would be two fewer Senators). The vast majority of Texas’ electoral votes would be redistributed to lib’rul states like California (which would go from having 55 electoral votes to 59) and New York (34 rather than 31):

By NEDRA PICKLER – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday threw out a lawsuit questioning President Barack Obama’s citizenship, lambasting the case as a waste of the court’s time and suggesting the plaintiff’s attorney may have to compensate the president’s lawyer.

In an argument popular on the Internet and taken seriously practically nowhere else, Obama’s critics argue he is ineligible to be president because he is not a “natural-born citizen” as the Constitution requires.

In response last summer, Obama’s campaign posted his Hawaiian birth certificate on its Web site. But the lawsuit argues it is a fake and that Obama was actually born in his father’s homeland of Kenya, even though Hawaiian officials have said the document is authentic.

“This case, if it were allowed to proceed, would deserve mention in one of those books that seek to prove that the law is foolish or that America has too many lawyers with not enough to do,” U.S. District Judge James Robertson said in his written opinion.

The lawsuit didn’t even use Obama’s legal name but called him “Barry Soetoro,” the name he went by while attending elementary school in Indonesia. It’s one of many that has been filed claiming Obama is ineligible to serve as president.

Robertson ordered plaintiff’s attorney John Hemenway of Colorado Springs, Colo., to show why he hasn’t violated court rules barring frivolous and harassing cases and shouldn’t have to pay Obama’s attorney, Bob Bauer, for his time arguing that the case should be thrown out.

Defying a major blizzard, students plan to take the Capitol by storm, with more than 2,500 ready to be arrested. Read story at NewsCloud.

Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading.

Neely’s comprehensive account runs to roughly 15,000 words. It was compiled by law students at the University of California at Davis and can be accessed here. Three things struck me in reading through the account.

First, Neely and other guards had been trained to the U.S. military’s traditional application of the Geneva Convention rules. They were put under great pressure to get rough with the prisoners and to violate the standards they learned. This placed the prison guards under unjustifiable mental stress and anxiety, and, as any person familiar with the vast psychological literature in the area (think of the Stanford Prison Experiment, for instance) would have anticipated produced abuses. Neely discusses at some length the notion of IRF (initial reaction force), a technique devised to brutalize or physically beat a detainee under the pretense that he required being physically subdued. The IRF approach was devised to use a perceived legal loophole in the prohibition on torture. Neely’s testimony makes clear that IRF was understood by everyone, including the prison guards who applied it, as a subterfuge for beating and mistreating prisoners—and that it had nothing to do with the need to preserve discipline and order in the prison.

Second, there is a good deal of discussion of displays of contempt for Islam by the camp authorities, and also specific documentation of mistreatment of the Qu’ran. Remember that the Neocon-laden Pentagon Public Affairs office launched a war against Newsweek based on a very brief piece that appeared in the magazine’s Periscope section concerning the mistreatment of a Qu’ran by a prison guard. Not only was the Newsweek report accurate in its essence, it actually understated the gravity and scope of the problem. Moreover, it is clear that the Pentagon Public Affairs office was fully aware, even as it went on the attack against Newsweek, that its claims were false and the weekly’s reporting was accurate.

Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture.

from Information Clearing House

Tell these guys to get some balls.

Majority Leader Harry Reid
(202) 224-3542

Majority Whip Dick Durbin
(202) 224-2152

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
(202) 225-0100

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer
(202) 225-4131

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn
(202) 226-3210

The message:

“The Republicans have zero credibility on the economy.”

Paraphrase President Obama:

“Please reject the Republican theories that got us into this mess in the first place.”

And for Senator Reid:

“Make the Republicans stand and filibuster if they want to filibuster. No cloture votes!”

from Information Clearing House

Madoff’s
fall has planted the seeds of suspicion. We now doubt those we have
done business with for years. The presumption of trust is gone.

Dcember 20, 2008 “The Nation” — – The
news of Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion fraud has hit the investor/401(k)
class as nothing else — not the fall of Lehman Brothers, not the death
of Bear Stearns, nor the string of insolvency announcements of one
household name after another. Madoff is the blow that did it.

That
Madoff took some of the members of the centimillionaire club to the
cleaners is not what caused the shock. It is the damage done to so many
smaller investor/savers, so many pension funds, so many charities. You
do not have to be one of Madoff’s victims to be affected. Madoff, his
own businesses aside, was a major figure in the world of investments,
of stocks and bonds and securities and exchanges. If the former chairman of Nasdaq is a crook, whom do you trust?

Madoff
has sown the seeds of suspicion everywhere. He has caused us to doubt
men and women with whom we have done business with for years. There is
no way of knowing if someone is a con artist. The presumption of trust
is gone.

Business
depends on trust, trust of all kinds. Trust that when you place an
order with a broker he or she will get you the best price, trust that
your investment or retirement adviser is not getting an under-the-table
kickback to put your old age money into a shoddy annuity.

Trust
is the indispensable element in all businesses. Contractors depend on
subcontractors to get the job done when they say they will; retailers
depend on distributors to deliver on time; lawyers are trusted to meet
filing deadlines, steel fabricators are expected to get gigantic
trusses to the building site exactly when they are needed. Doctors are
expected to put patients’ interests above money considerations; parts
manufacturers are relied on to deliver on time to the factory. Business
runs on trust, and Bernard Madoff has busted it.

So the Wall Street Journal says to its readers, “Could your investment manager be another Bernard Madoff?…
if someone like Mr. Madoff can be accused of running a $50 billion
Ponzi scheme, can investors anywhere sleep easy? Ordinarily, when you
are picking an investment manager or financial planner, you’re given
some common-sense advice. Avoid managers who are unknown, or
unregulated, or come without good referrals, or haven’t been in the
industry long. But none of this would have saved you from Mr. Madoff.
‘This guy had oodles of referrals, at the highest levels,’ notes Duane
Thompson, a managing director at the Financial Planning Association in
Washington. ‘He was [former] chairman of Nasdaq. He’d been in business
since 1960. ”

Fear, confusion and mistrust have been amplified by the absence of government supervision, regulation or policing. The Securities and Exchange Commission admits it did not do its job.

With
the closing down of the old-time pension system, millions of employees
were forced into 401(k)s requiring knowledge of finance, bonds, stocks,
weird-sounding investments and tax law. They have had to make
investment decisions effecting their future with no government
protection against misrepresentation, legal traps laid for them and the
small print obfuscation financial institutions practice on their
customers. The result is the heart-wrenching situation
for millions who fear that they will be living out the last decades of
their lives counting their food stamps and hunting for bargains in the
used clothing bins.

The
Madoff swindle puts the spotlight on the collapse of the 401(k)
retirement plan. The United States is the only advanced nation without
a complete retirement system.

For
401(k)s to have worked, a bull market or at least a flat market was
necessary. It was an unreliable gamble from the git-go, an arrangement
that would fall to pieces when next the market crashed.

Madoff
and the crash underline the powerlessness of the millions. As a matter
of principle, the Republicans defended the unregulated lawlessness that
enabled a Madoff to run his swindles. As for the Democrats, sometime in
the Clinton era they sold their party to Wall Street and now they have
Chuck Schumer to make sure it stays sold.

It remains for President-elect Obama to void the deal and break his party free to help those who have nowhere else to look.

You would think casinos wouldn’t have any trouble getting people to waste their money, but, every week I find myself marking comment after comment as spam. Isn’t there something the site owners can do about this?

You can see the original post here

I Didn’t Vote For Obama Today

Since we first wrote about Obama’s birth certificate on June 16, speculation on his citizenship has continued apace. Some claim that Obama posted a fake birth certificate to his Web page. That charge leaped from the blogosphere to the mainstream media earlier this week when Jerome Corsi, author of a book attacking Obama, repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News.

Corsi: Well, what would be really helpful is if Senator Obama would release primary documents like his birth certificate. The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website. How is anybody supposed to really piece together his life?

Doocy: What do you mean they have a “false birth certificate” on their Web site?

Corsi: The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it.

Doocy: Well, couldn’t it just be a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate?

Corsi: No, it’s a — there’s been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it’s been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It’s a fake document that’s on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce.

Corsi isn’t the only skeptic claiming that the document is a forgery. Among the most frequent objections we saw on forums, blogs and e-mails are:

• The birth certificate doesn’t have a raised seal.
• It isn’t signed.
• No creases from folding are evident in the scanned version.
  
• In the zoomed-in view, there’s a strange halo around the letters.
• The certificate number is blacked out.
• The date bleeding through from the back seems to say “2007,” but the document wasn’t released until 2008.
• The document is a “certification of birth,” not a “certificate of birth.”
  

Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it’s stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka (who uses a signature stamp rather than signing individual birth certificates). We even brought home a few photographs.

The Obama birth certificate, held by FactCheck writer Joe Miller

Alvin T. Onaka’s signature stamp

The raised seal

Blowup of text

You can click on the photos to get full-size versions, which haven’t been edited in any way, except that some have been rotated 90 degrees for viewing purposes.

The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport: “your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records.” The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version, and you can see the seal above.

The document is a “certification of birth,” also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents’ hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health’s birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response.

The scan released by the campaign shows halos around the black text, making it look (to some) as though the text might have been pasted on top of an image of security paper. But the document itself has no such halos, nor do the close-up photos we took of it. We conclude that the halo seen in the image produced by the campaign is a digital artifact from the scanning process.

We asked the Obama campaign about the date stamp and the blacked-out certificate number. The certificate is stamped June 2007, because that’s when Hawaii officials produced it for the campaign, which requested that document and “all the records we could get our hands on” according to spokesperson Shauna Daly. The campaign didn’t release its copy until 2008, after speculation began to appear on the Internet questioning Obama’s citizenship. The campaign then rushed to release the document, and the rush is responsible for the blacked-out certificate number. Says Shauna: “[We] couldn’t get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we’ve found out it’s pretty irrelevant for the outside world.” The document we looked at did have a certificate number; it is 151 1961 – 010641.

Blowup of certificate number

Some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated about Obama are quite imaginative. One conservative blogger suggested that the campaign might have obtained a valid Hawaii birth certificate, soaked it in solvent, then reprinted it with Obama’s information. Of course, this anonymous blogger didn’t have access to the actual document and presents this as just one possible “scenario” without any evidence that such a thing actually happened or is even feasible.

We also note that so far none of those questioning the authenticity of the document have produced a shred of evidence that the information on it is incorrect. Instead, some speculate that somehow, maybe, he was born in another country and doesn’t meet the Constitution’s requirement that the president be a “natural-born citizen.”

We think our colleagues at PolitiFact.com, who also dug into some of these loopy theories put it pretty well: “It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over.”

In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961:

Obama’s birth announcement

The announcement was posted by a pro-Hillary Clinton blogger who grudgingly concluded that Obama “likely” was born Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu.

Of course, it’s distantly possible that Obama’s grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday. We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat. The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.

Update, August 26: We received responses to some of our questions from the Hawaii Department of Health. They couldn’t tell us anything about their security paper, but they did answer another frequently-raised question: why is Obama’s father’s race listed as “African”? Kurt Tsue at the DOH told us that father’s race and mother’s race are supplied by the parents, and that “we accept what the parents self identify themselves to be.” We consider it reasonable to believe that Barack Obama, Sr., would have thought of and reported himself as “African.” It’s certainly not the slam dunk some readers have made it out to be.

When we asked about the security borders, which look different from some other examples of Hawaii certifications of live birth, Kurt said “The borders are generated each time a certified copy is printed. A citation located on the bottom left hand corner of the certificate indicates which date the form was revised.” He also confirmed that the information in the short form birth certificate is sufficient to prove citizenship for “all reasonable purposes.”

–by Jess Henig, with Joe Miller

Tags: Obama, facts, truth

Have we hit an all-time low yet?

More on “Joe” , er, Sam the non-plumber

I guess it’s no wonder John McCain was so happy to use “Joe the Plumber” as a debate prop last night — he’s a partisan Republican who also happens to be a member of McCain’s old friends, the Keating family.

From Martin Eisenstadt:

Turns out that Joe Wurzelbacher from the Toledo event is a close relative of Robert Wurzelbacher of Milford, Ohio. Who’s Robert Wurzelbacher? Only Charles Keating’s son-in-law and the former senior vice president of American Continental, the parent company of the infamous Lincoln Savings and Loan. The now retired elder Wurzelbacher is also a major contributor to Republican causes giving well over $10,000 in the last few years.

Now I guess we know why Joe is telling the press that Obama is a “socialist” and that the Obama tax plan “infuriated” him. After all, it would hit families like the Keatings and their minions the hardest.

Not to mention that Obama’s economic-recovery plan would put the crimps on influence peddlers like McCain’s old friends, the Keating Five.

But he sure made for a good one-day story.

http://www.newscloud.com/read/Joe_the_Plumber_More_like_Joe_the_Keating_Family_Operative

You guys know what the supposed “Bradley Effect” is, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect
Well, it turns out there a reverse version of it going on. in this version, white voters don’t want to reveal to their other white friends or family that they want to vote for Obama.

“The Bradley effect has mutated. We are seeing it in several states, but the reverse effect is much stronger,”

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1008/A_reverse_Bradley_Effect.html