They got’er up safely. Glad to hear it; this was a bit of a nail-biter. They’re really gotta do something about those external tanks. They are just not realiable. Here’s hoping Discovery completes her mission and makes it back home in one piece.
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Filed Under : elections by vemrion
Jul.4,2006(from Digg) U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, facing a stronger-than-expected Democratic primary challenge and sagging poll numbers because of his support of the Iraq war, said Monday he’ll collect signatures to run as an unaffiliated candidate if he loses next month’s primary.(/Digg)
Ah, Lieberman — always the turncoat. I would like to see him as an indepedent candidate. Who could he possibly betray then? His campaign manager? His wife?
The Democrats suck on many levels, but one of the areas they suck most is Joe Lieberman. He’s nothing more than a Bush-toady, a toady who enjoys the full support of the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLC is under control of the same people who control the Republican Party — banks, corporations and Big Money.
Sorry for the digg-post. It amuses me with it’s crappy messiness. Ahh… democracy….
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Happy 4th of July; a time to celebrate the hard-won freedom that we no longer have by blowing up a shitload of fireworks.
I guess you could say that July 4th is a bittersweet day for me because I see our situation as being increasingly dire. We are under the thumb of a corrupt, tyrannical regime bent on world domination. Doesn’t exactly make me feel like celebrating. At least we still have the illusion of freedom, which is almost as good as the real thing. They let us continue to pretend to be free, but those days are numbered. In reality, our rights are increasingly being stripped away in favor of corporate interests and government power.
In these troubled times, it’s usually a good idea to try and get some perspective. In this case, let’s look to Britain and find out how they see us Americans:
Most Britons see America as a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent hypocrite.
Hmmm…. harshly worded, but I can’t really find fault with their point of view. But c’mon, it can’t really be that bad, can it?
More than two-thirds who offered an opinion said America is essentially an imperial power seeking world domination. And 81 per cent of those who took a view said President George W Bush hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests.
…And these are our allies, folks. Can you imagine what more fair-minded people think?
The worst part is that they’re absolutely right. Bush is a fucking imperialist. Let’s not dance around the issue, here, okay? We’ll be invading Iran soon, so I don’t wanna hear any bullshit about “spreading democracy around the globe.” What a bunch of crap. The only thing we’re spreading is bullshit.
As a supposed democracy, we’re ultimately responsible for this mess because we (officially speaking) elected George Bush. In reality, that’s probably not the case, but it’s still bad news that he got any votes at all. It’s not very ironic that a man who wasn’t really elected is trying start an empire by pretending to spread democracy around the globe at gunpoint. It’s insanity; it’s ludicrous. It’s hypocrisy and outright deception.
Enjoy your 4th of July holiday. Enjoy your pretend-freedom — ya know, the kind that Bush and Cheney will soon take away in order to fight the terr’rists. Remember not to ask too many questions and be a good little sheep. Let’s all just pretend that the man with a 30% approval rating has a mandate and that he’s a not a lying piece of shit. The important thing is that we have the illusion of freedom, right? That way when Bush claims to spread that American freed0m-juice around the globe we actually believe that might be a good thing. But don’t question it, just watch the pretty fireworks.
Yayy… fireworks!…
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This guy is fuckin’ great:
“Speaking of Satan, I was watching Rush Limbaugh the other day… Doesn’t Rush Limbaugh remind you of one of those gay guys who likes to lay in a tub while other men pee on him? Can’t you see his fat body in a tub while Reagan, Quayle and Bush just … [pee noise] Just standing around pissing on him, and his little piggly-wiggly dick can’t get hard. ‘Ooh, I can’t get hard. Ronnie, pee in my mouth’. ‘Well, how’s that, Rush?’ He still can’t get hard, so they call in Barbara Bush. She takes her pearls off, shoves them up his ass, squats over him, undoes her girdle. Her wrinkled, flaccid labia unfurls half way to her knees, like some ball-less scrotum. ‘Uhh…. uhh…..’ She squeezes out a link into his mouth. Finally, his tiny dick gets half-way hard. ‘uhh-Oooh!’ A little bubble forms on the end of his dick, with a little maggot inside. The maggot pops the bubble, and goes off to join a pro-life group somewhere. Am I the only one that sees that? Thank god I had the insight to notice Rush Limbaugh is a scat muncher; he munches scat.” — Bill Hicks
Fucking right, man. I love this guy’s point of view. He continually bashes the fucking evil, demonic fucktards who rule this planet.
“I’m sorry if anyone here is Catholic. I’m not sorry if you are offended, I’m actually sorry – just the fact that you’re Catholic. Gotta be one of the most ludicrous fucking beliefs ever. Like these vampire priests sink their twin fangs of guilt and sin into you as a child and suck your joy of life out of you the rest of your fucking existence.”
. . .“The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love. That’s the message we’re brought up with, isn’t it? Believe or die! ‘Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.'”
. . .No matter what promises you make on the campaign trail – blah, blah, blah – when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist, capitalist scumfucks that got you in there, and this little screen comes down… and it’s a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before, which looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll…. And then the screen comes up, the lights come on, and they say to the new president, ‘Any questions?’
“Just what my agenda is.”
Ah. Good stuff.
“Take mushrooms, folks, and squeegee your 3rd fuckin’ eye. MTV’s cloudin’ it over, okay? TV is like taking black paint to your eye. Take mushrooms. What do you think, mushrooms are here by accident? You think that’s an accident?” — Bill Hicks
How come I didn’t know about this guy back in the 90’s? This is totally the thought-train that my brain was on (and still is). He really did die too young.
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Greg Palast is hinting that the presidential election of the successor to Vicente Fox is being stolen as we speak:
We’ve said again and again: exit polls tell us how voters say they voted, but the voters can’t tell pollsters whether their vote will be counted. In Mexico, counting the vote is an art, not a science – and Calderón’s ruling crew is very artful indeed. The PAN-controlled official electoral commission, not surprisingly, has announced that the presidential tally is too close to call.
Calderón’s election is openly supported by the Bush administration.
On the ground in Mexico city, our news team reports accusations from inside the Obrador campaign that operatives of the PAN had access to voter files that are supposed to be the sole property of the nation’s electoral commission. We are not surprised.
This past Friday, we reported that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had obtained Mexico’s voter files under a secret “counter-terrorism” contract with the database company ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia.
Mexico has a long history of corrupt elections. The PRI has stolen more elections than George Bush could dream of stealing. Let’s hope things turn out to be fair… but I doubt that will be the case. Greg Palast has more on his blog.
Personally, the ChoicePoint involvement sounds suspicious to me, but it’s notoriously hard to determine if elections are fair or not. I’d be interested to hear what the international observers (if they were let in) say about the election.
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“All right, you’ve covered your ass now” is what George Bush said to the CIA agent who flew out to his ranch specifically to warn him about intelligence concerning the presidential daily brief entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
On Aug. 6, a CIA official brought the infamous “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” memo to Crawford, to read it out personally to the President and make sure he got the warning. Bush sat in silence as the briefer delivered his fell message. Duty done, the agent awaited the president’s orders, or the president’s guidance, or the president’s questions. He got nothing but a curt, snide dismissal: “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”
That was it. Bush had nothing else to say about this stark threat of impending slaughter. He had no questions, no advice; the “Commander-in-Chief” had no commands. Just smirking contempt. “You’ve covered your ass.” You’ve gone through the motions, you’ve played your part in the charade, just like me – now get lost.
Even if you give Bush every benefit of the doubt here, even if you put the most charitable construction possible on his behavior – although his proven record of duplicity and malevolence deserves no such charity – even with all this, the very best you could say of his reaction is that it represents a blood-curdling degree of depraved indifference and criminal negligence, worthy of Nero.”
Bush is a real card isn’t he? Funny guy. What kind of games are they playing over there in Washington, D.C.? “You’ve covered your ass” is not an appropriate response to a grave terrorist threat from one of America’s supposed top enemies. What’s going on here? Are we to assume that our president is so surly and callous that he just doesn’t care? Or does it run deeper than that, perhaps into the murky land of “fore-knowledge”?
It’s hard to tell. But one thing is for sure: Bush simply is not competent to run this country. He should be impeached immediately, without delay.
But those Republicans sure do stick together, don’t they? Jeeze, sometimes you’ve got to wonder about their fabled ability to fall in line. Does Karl Rove have incriminating pictures of every single one of them or what? C’mon! Grow some balls, guys (and gals). GW is a menace and we need to impeach him forthwith. Perhaps during the hearings we will find out what really happened in the run-up to September 11th.
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Is there anything better? It’s past 7 but the sun is still up. Best of all, I don’t have to work tomorrow. I’ma head out to da beach. See ya later.
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Koizumi loves Elvis a lot! This story is pretty damn hilarious:
It was Bush’s first visit to Presley’s white brick mansion.
“My first visit too,” Koizumi said, standing in a gaudy, wood-paneled den known as the Jungle Room where Presley hung out with his buddies. “It’s like a dream – with President Bush and Presley’s daughter.”
Bush, first lady Laura Bush and Koizumi drove through the gates of Graceland in a shiny, black limousine adorned with the flags of both nations. It was as if they were making a formal diplomatic visit.
After they got out, the scene turned surreal.
Here was Bush, who didn’t stop off at the Taj Mahal while in India, touring the home of a music star who died in his bathroom of heart disease and drug abuse in 1977.
Instead of walking down red carpets to review troops, Bush and Koizumi strode over green shag that lined the floors and ceiling of the den. Instead of elegant furniture and chandeliers, Bush and Koizumi posed for photos in a room decorated with white ceramic monkeys and wooden chairs with armrests carved in the shape of animal heads.
Aw, c’mon! What’s wrong with ceramic monkeys! I’m tellin’ ya – monkeys are fuckin’ great. Everybody loves monkeys. You can’t go wrong with monkeys. Hell, that’s why I named this blog Electric Monkey Pants. If it’s got monkeys in it, it’s gotta be good, right?
I find this scenario improbably hilarious. I don’t even have any of my customary Bush-bashing as I think it’s decent of him to do a favor for Koizumi like this. Koizumi’s involvement with the Iraq War not withstanding, I think it’s he a pretty cool guy for a politician.
The whole thing sounds totally bizarre. I wish politics were always this weird and interesting. Mostly it’s depressing and hopeless. But Koizumi has brightened my day with his appreciation of Elvis. Rock on!
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So says this article about the Brotherhood of Man:
With the help of a statistician, a computer scientist and a supercomputer, Olson has calculated just how interconnected the human family tree is. You would have to go back in time only 2,000 to 5,000 years – and probably on the low side of that range – to find somebody who could count every person alive today as a descendant.
Unless that person didn’t reproduce. But it is a fascinating facet of human reproduction that it takes 2 people to make a new human. It’s kinda funny to think about – it’s a magical process, creating a human from nothing, springing forth new life in the womb of a woman.
Turn that idea around and you realize that we have a lot of relatives if you go back far enough:
It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman’s family has African roots.
How can this be?
It’s simple math. Every person has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Keep doubling back through the generations – 16, 32, 64, 128 – and within a few hundred years you have thousands of ancestors.
It’s nothing more than exponential growth combined with the facts of life. By the 15th century you’ve got a million ancestors. By the 13th you’ve got a billion. Sometime around the 9th century – just 40 generations ago – the number tops a trillion.
Of course, that 1 trillion figure include a lot of “overlap.” We’re all interrelated, which is a beautiful and scary thing.
I don’t think the math is 100% accurate simply because human history is more complicated than that. And there were efforts by many different peoples to ensure racial (or religious) purity by rigidly controlling who their sons and daughters could marry.
In fact, some of those pure lines could still be largely untainted even today. Who knows if that’s the case, but I’m not sure we have a common human ancestor unless you go all the way back to Abraham.
It means when Muslims, Jews or Christians claim to be children of Abraham, they are all bound to be right.
“No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu,” Olson and his colleagues wrote in the journal Nature.
Ideas like this tend to give the stories of Abraham a little more credence. Who knows, maybe we are all related to one guy. What a stud.
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Filed Under : 9/11, fascism, Federal Reserve, inflation, MSM, neocons, NSA, Shadow Government, spying by vemrion Jul.1,2006It now sounds like the NSA approached AT&T about setting up a domestic spying ring well before 9/11. Bush previously claimed that 9/11 was the impetus behind the decision, but it sounds like he’s just a fascist by nature:
The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.
The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation’s largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.
“The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,” plaintiff’s lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. “This undermines that assertion.”
The lawsuit is related to an alleged NSA program to record and store data on calls placed by subscribers. More than 30 suits have been filed over claims that the carriers, the three biggest U.S. telephone companies, violated the privacy rights of their customers by cooperating with the NSA in an effort to track alleged terrorists.
Well, this probably comes as a surprise to anyone who thinks Bush is a real conservative. The neocons are called neo-conservatives because they’re not really conservative. They’re actually quite a radical bunch and they came into office with a very forward-looking plan to reshape the world and America’s place in it. While you certainly can’t call them liberals, the conservative label doesn’t fit either. That’s why I like to call them neo-fascists. It describes their intent and their methods so much better than the other, more conventional terms.
So let there be no doubt: Spying on us and taking away our liberties was the plan from day one. They didn’t suddenly become radicalized by 9/11 — they claim that continually and that’s bullshit. They hope that we were changed by 9/11, but it didn’t affect them in the same way. Shit, the neocons probably threw a party after 9/11 because suddenly everything they’ve ever wanted was within reach. They can continue building their American Empire without a lot of whiny opposition (or so they thought! Bloggers can whine better than anyone!) and they no longer had to pretend to care about the Constitution. When you look at who benefited most from 9/11 the neocons are on the top of the list. They certainly faired better than the mythical Al Qaeda (which is CIA anyway).
We live in dark times. Can’t trust our own government. Our government has been stolen out from under our noses and most people have no idea why or how. I can answer that quite easily. Why? Power. How? The Federal Reserve System. That’s a gross oversimplification, but the fact remains that the Fed enabled the private banking class to control our government from afar. Just think about it: A private institution, in the middle of our government (inaccurately named “Federal”) that controls our money supply. The government depends on the Fed for it’s power because in the capitalist system the bankers are king. Shit, you’d be king too if you could take a dollar and turn it into ten dollars just by loaning it out ten times. That’s the way banks work; fractional reserve banking is a huge scam:
Banks make money by literally creating money out of thin air, nowadays exclusively deposits rather than bank notes. This sort of swindling or counterfeiting is dignified by the term “fractional-reserve banking,” which means that bank deposits are backed by only a small fraction of the cash they promise to have at hand and redeem. (Right now, in the United States, this minimum fraction is fixed by the Federal Reserve System at 10 percent.)
Fractional Reserve Banking
Let’s see how the fractional reserve process works, in the absence of a central bank. I set up a Rothbard Bank, and invest $1,000 of cash (whether gold or government paper does not matter here). Then I “lend out” $10,000 to someone, either for consumer spending or to invest in his business. How can I “lend out” far more than I have? Ahh, that’s the magic of the “fraction” in the fractional reserve. I simply open up a checking account of $10,000 which I am happy to lend to Mr. Jones. Why does Jones borrow from me? Well, for one thing, I can charge a lower rate of interest than savers would. I don’t have to save up the money myself, but simply can counterfeit it out of thin air. (In the nineteenth century, I would have been able to issue bank notes, but the Federal Reserve now monopolizes note issues.) Since demand deposits at the Rothbard Bank function as equivalent to cash, the nation’s money supply has just, by magic, increased by $10,000. The inflationary, counterfeiting process is under way.
The nineteenth-century English economist Thomas Tooke correctly stated that “free trade in banking is tantamount to free trade in swindling.”
Read the whole article. It’s a great primer on how inflated and fake our whole economy is. Anytime there’s inflation your money is suddenly worth less. But whoever created that new money just got a sweet deal. He just swindled you and it’s all completely legal. He can swindle you again and again and you’ll never know his name or look him in the eye. You’ll never get a chance to get your money back either. Our entire economy is one big scam.
So, who benefits from all of this? Bankers and criminals, of course (is there a difference?). Over the years they have grown powerful and they are getting extremely tired of the constitutional roadblocks in place and they would very much like to be rid of our pesky civil liberties. So it should come as no surprise that Bush has been a tyrannical, fascist, wanna-be dictator from day one — he is very much a scion of the criminal banking class (he was born in Connecticut, not Texas) and his goal has always been to increase the power of the Shadow Government that sprung up after the creation of the Fed. The Shadow Government includes the military-industrial-complex (which itself includes the NSA, CIA, the Pentagon as a whole and Congress) along with the Fed, the FBI, the ATF and various other tentacles of contr
ol (like the media). Not everyone who works at the NSA is part of this Shadow Government, but the problem is that most people don’t even know it exists — so how can they fight against it?
Spread the word. The Shadow Government is basically a takeover attempt by the banking cartel and their criminal buddies. Events like 9/11 will continue to happen until they are removed from power.
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Interesting idea. I’m curious to see how it plays out. I certainly support the introduction of a major third party to destroy the two-party duopoly we currently have. We’ll see how they do. They’ve certainly got to get the word out, but of course, they’re focused on 2008, not the 2006 midterms.
Isn’t a top down approach kind of a lark, though? If there aren’t any Unity congressmen, any Unity president is going to have a tough go of it – centrism or no. The other parties simply do not want any competition.
I thought freedom was all about choice. A choice between two pro-corporate parties doesn’t seem to be much of a choice at all.
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About time man. Yeesh. I’m looking forward to it, I dunno about you, but it’s been a long week. Didn’t work too much, but I’m recovering from weeks of stress and busy-ness. It will be nice to chill out a bit.
Hope everyone out there has a great weekend.
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Posting tweet...
