July 29, 2013

unlike sniveling cowardly Greenwald - Biden and Clinton stand by their Iraq War and Patriot Act

support. The same can be said for Kerry and almost every prominent Democratic Party leader. They - unlike the treacherous Greenwald They have shown that true leaders don't apologize and don't say they were wrong.

To add insult to injury Greenwald - not only turns on Bush and the Iraq War and the Patriot Act he writes a whole bunch of books and articles and gives a whole bunch of talks against all of it - even when Bush was still in the White House and the war in Iraq was still raging away.

It seems that he thinks that just because someone is in a powerful position - that they are supposed to be criticized -

2008 Bill Moyer interview with Glenn Greenwald about the George W. Bush legacy

http://billmoyers.com/content/glenn-greenwald-on-the-george-w-bush-administration-and-the-rule-of-law/

He also wrote three books about the George W. Bush Administration; The New York Times-bestsellers How Would A Patriot Act? (2006) and Tragic Legacy (2007), and his 2008 release, Great American Hypocrites.

July 29, 2013

Smearmaster Glenn Greenwald's smear campaign against George W. Bush

AS they say - haters are going to hate and smearers are going to smear. Glenn Greenwald did not begin his smear career with President Obama - he was doing it way back before Obama came to the White House. It seems that he thinks that just because someone is in powerful position - that they are supposed to be criticized - Imagine that!~!


2008 Bill Moyer interview with Glenn Greenwald about the George W. Bush legacy

http://billmoyers.com/content/glenn-greenwald-on-the-george-w-bush-administration-and-the-rule-of-law/

He also wrote three books about the George W. Bush Administration; The New York Times-bestsellers How Would A Patriot Act? (2006) and Tragic Legacy (2007), and his 2008 release, Great American Hypocrites.

July 26, 2013

salon.com: Forget Weiner: There’s a real progressive for NYC Mayor By Joan Walsh

Bill de Blasio tells Salon he'll break from Bloomberg, end racial profiling and tax the rich to fund preschool


Bill de Blasio (Credit: Reuters/Keith Bedford)

The day the latest Anthony Weiner scandal surfaced, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg vetoed anti-racial profiling legislation, a young woman was murdered in the East Harlem housing project where mayoral candidates had stayed two nights earlier, and Bill de Blasio held a press conference to talk about his work to block the closing of two New York hospitals – which wound up dominated by questions about Weiner.

That’s mostly been the story of de Blasio’s campaign since Weiner jumped into the mayor’s race in May and immediately became City Council President Christine Quinn’s top rival. While the exhibitionist former congressman still has progressive fans from his days shouting about health care reform on Fox and MSNBC, de Blasio is the genuine progressive in the race, with bold stands on police controversies and economic inequality that set him apart. Still, he’s been stuck in the middle of the pack in the polls, behind Weiner, Quinn and former comptroller Bill Thompson, who lost to Bloomberg in 2009.

New York magazine, in a largely admiring profile of de Blasio, called his campaign “easily the most intellectually coherent and focused when it comes to inequality… but his wonky ideas are also in danger of getting lost in Weinermania” – and that was before the latest revelations of Weiner’s sexting habits after he left Congress.

Yet de Blasio, New York’s Public Advocate, may be the beneficiary of Weiner’s latest troubles: In the Wall Street Journal/Marist College poll released Thursday – the first poll taken after the new sexting news — Weiner had dropped far behind Quinn, and de Blasio had climbed into a tie with Thompson at 14 percent. He was in second place among voters who said they were likely to vote in the city’s Democratic primary — significant, because unless a candidate gets more than 40 percent of the primary vote, the top two vote-getters will compete in a run-off — though polling experts say surveys consistently undercount the African American Thompson’s support, which is how he came close to upsetting Bloomberg in 2009.

New York, the laboratory for the New Deal, hasn’t had a Democratic mayor in 24 years, since Rudy Giuliani displaced David Dinkins in a city riven by racial tension and fear of crime. De Blasio got his start working for Dinkins and has been a voice for a renewed New York liberalism ever since, serving on the City Council before becoming Public Advocate. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Chirlane McCray, who is African American, and their two children Dante and Chiara, who attend public schools.

read the rest of the article including an interview:

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/26/forget_weiner_theres_a_real_progressive_for_nyc_mayor/

July 26, 2013

Paulbot nut Sen Ron (Paul) Wyden comes unhinged - explodes into wild conspiracy theory while giving

speech at the Center for American Progress - a "think tank" just like the Cato Institute is a "think tank" located in the same metropolitan area as the Cato Institute where crank "journalist" Glenn Greenwald has spoken.

Like something straight out of Alex Jones:



With a wild crazy gleam in his eye - this relatively unknown Senator from Oregon or Washington or one of those relatively unknown states starts incoherently rambling about how "we will regret it" if something isn't done to restrain "the surveillance state" - an institution clearly existing only in his fanciful imagination.

Just listen to the words of this crank:

To make matters worse... Now with Paulbot Dem Congressman John (Rand Paul) Conyers joining forces with the full fledged Republican Paulbots - we seem to have a Paulbot majority in the Democratic Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives --- no wonder the nuts on DU are all cracking:

FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 412

H R 2397 RECORDED VOTE 24-Jul-2013 6:51 PM
AUTHOR(S): Amash of Michigan Amendment No. 100
QUESTION: On Agreeing to the Amendment

Party Affiliation----Ayes----Noes----NV
Republican-----------94-----134-----6
Democratic----------111------83-----6
Independent
TOTALS-------------205-----217----12 [/blockquote

July 24, 2013

Over all, is it a good thing that Edward Snowden released these documents to the media?

(Credit: Reuters/Bobby Yip)

July 24, 2013

Glenn Greenwald addresses Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago

July 24, 2013

What do you make of the shocking allegations about political spying that Russ Tice - former NSA

analyst has made?


In case you are not familiar - with former senior NSA analyst Russel Tice's allegations - here is an interview on RT:

July 23, 2013

Do you consider alarm over the extent of government surveillance to be a paranoid conspiracy theory?

July 23, 2013

I lost my wallet today with more than $800 and all my important stuff inside.

I don't normally carry that amount of cash on me - of course. But my 2002 Camry is down because the head gaskets are blown and a little home Filipino shop is fixing it and I can only pay them in cash which I happened to have on me at the time. When I got home from work in the AM I started to look everywhere. But wallet was no where to be found. Of course at first I thought I must have absent mindedly misplaced it somewhere - but still it was no where to be found. All I could think of is that maybe, just maybe it could have fallen out of my pocket while I was in a Taxi coming home from work. Fortunately, I have that Taxi drivers cell phone number stored on my cell phone - so after a few minutes more of panicking and looking everywhere for a third or forth time - I gave him a call. He said that he was inside his house right at that moment - but he would go and check right away - So for another five minutes or so I went back to my panicking. Then my cell phone rang - and the Taxi driver - a Bangladeshi gentleman named Manik - announced - "Oh, Sir, I found it and I will bring it back to you right away." I have NOT felt so relieved in a long, long time. So about 10 minutes later he pulled up into my driveway where I was waiting for him and he graciously handed me my wallet - back with the $800 and all my credit cards, drivers license and all kinds of other important stuff completely intact. I immediately offered to give him a very big tip - to which he immediately refused. But recalling that he is a Muslim and this is Ramadan I thought perhaps he will accept some gratuity if I put a little bit of a religious holiday spin on it. So, I said to him, "Manik this is a special Ramadan gift for your family." Well, that seemed to have worked and he graciously and gratefully accepted the $60.00 I handed him. Well, that was one nerve wracking hour or so I had this AM.

July 22, 2013

Crazy traitor leaker got Congress to notice vast surveillance state By Alex Pareene

Pols from both parties are all of a sudden demanding more transparency and pushing reforms. Thanks, leaks!


(Credit: Reuters/Bobby Yip)

There is a guy, a famous guy, who lives now in a Russian airport or something, no one is really sure, but everyone in the media (and lots of people not in the media) cannot stop fighting and arguing about this guy. Some people say he is a jerk and crazy and bad and others say he is a hero and super cool. Either way, mean jerk or cool hero, this guy that everyone won’t shut up about is actually responsible for the first major public displays of Congressional opposition to the unchecked surveillance state in 35 years or so.

Congress has always had a handful of privacy advocates and true civil libertarians. But for many years in political Washington it has been considered foolish and perhaps a bit treasonous to suggest that our intelligence agencies are even slightly overzealous in their collection of all information possible about everything on the globe. That is still the general consensus, but as McClatchy’s Washington Bureau wrote on Friday, there are suddenly a bunch of members of Congress who actually want to rein in the NSA.

The last time a significant number of Washington politicians favored additional restrictions on intelligence-gathering and surveillance powers was in the immediate aftermath of the Church Committee reports, in the mid-1970s. Since then, Congress has practically abandoned its oversight power over the intelligence communities, and it’s only gotten worse since 9/11. Fighting terrorism trumped privacy every time Congress was asked to expand government spying powers. For much of the last dozen years, civil libertarians weren’t just ignored by the political establishment, they were vilified. When Democrats took full control of Congress, they still rubber-stamped Bush’s surveillance programs.

So what happened, exactly? Well, the American people learned a bunch of scary sounding stuff about how much data the NSA is collecting, on everyone. They learned this because of illegal leaks of classified information, to reporters, from the guy everyone is fighting about. Everyone can keep fighting about the guy, I guess, but no one can now say that the guy’s leaks were entirely gratuitous. Because before the leaks, people who were alarmed at what the intelligence agencies could be up to were ignored and politicians who had pretty good notions of what they could be up to (or who could’ve learned what they were up to if they cared to) weren’t concerned.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/22/crazy_traitor_leaker_got_congress_to_notice_vast_surveillance_state/?source=newsletter