Lou Dobbs Almost Calls Condi A "Cotton Picker"

From the Huffington Post

Lou Dobbs visited Wolf Blitzer in the "Situation Room" on Friday and railed against Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice for saying that race is still an issue in America because it was an American "birth defect."

Dobbs dismissed Rice's very notion, claiming race is no longer an issue in a society as diverse as modern day America. "The reality is, this is the most socially, ethnically, religiously, racially diverse society on the face of the earth," Dobbs said. "Now, Wolf, we don't make enough of that in the national media. We listen to some idiot say you can't talk about race."

Then Dobbs tripped over his words, as he declared, "Not a single one of these cotton...[stammering]...these just ridiculous politicians should be the moderator on the issue of race."

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Controversial LeBron James Vogue Cover

Ever since Vogue put basketball star LeBron James on its cover — only the third man, and the first African American man, to gain that distinction — the cover has sparked discussion. Critics have slammed Vogue for "perpetuating racial stereotypes," depicting the "dangerous black man" running off with a beautiful white woman (model Gisele Bundchen).

Now, Sportsfilter blogger Rogers Cadenhead (via Portfolio.com's Jeff Bercovici) uncovered a possible (likely) inspiration for the Annie Liebovitz shoot: a famous World War I recruitment poster from 1917.

The poster, which shows a gorilla and says "Destroy This Brute," would seem to justify any sort of outrage over the racial stereotypes perpetuated by the Vogue cover.


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Did John McCain Collaborate with the enemy in Vietnam?

Let the swiftboating begin!!!

Why aren't we allowed to criticize Israel?

There seems to be such a taboo in the media about anyone or any story that is critical of Israel. Witness the recent attacks on the Obama campaign via activities by his ex-pastor that was considered "Anti-Israel". Remember the vicious treatment that Jimmy Carter got for mentioning the words "Apartheid" and Israel in his book title? Candidate after candidate has to pay lip service and claim his blind allegiance to that state... and why? why is it the "kiss of death" to be critical of Israel.

Israel is by far the largest recipient of our tax dollar funded foreign aid, shouldn't we able to question the actions of that state? A lot of damage has been done in our name (and at our expense), yet we can't seem to questions anything in public without being castrated as social pariahs... Why is it much easier to criticize Israel in Tel Aviv then it is in Washington DC?

Here is what I know:

- Israel has maintained one of the longest occupations in modern history controlling the fate of over 2 million palestinians

- Israel is the only nuclear country in the area with no open access to their inventory and no signatures on any non-proliferation agreements

- Israel maintains one of the largest concentration camp style prison in the world known as Gaza. And yes, that's exactly what it is if you look at the living conditions of people there.

- Israel maintains an apartheid style system in the West Bank with separate roads and services for different groups.

- Israel continues to deny the right of return to over 2 million refugees spread all over the world for more than 50 years... can you imagine living in shanty towns and tents for over 50 years??

- Israel maintains a racial based system of government based on the failed ideology of Zionism. An ideology that at heart is based on racist nationalism granting rights to one "ethnic" (or is it religious?) group only

- While Israel claims to be living in the constant fear of terrorism, the death ratio of Palestinians vs. Israeli is roughly 13 to 1. Yet, somehow, they are the victims, and our media pushes that notion on us (and we wonder why the world hates us).

- Israel has TWICE invaded its northern neighbor, Lebanon and continues daily violations of its air space. Complaints to the UN are constantly blocked by, guess who?, the USA.

This list can go on longer, but I think I made my point.

So why, knowing all that, it is still a major faux pas for anyone to question our relation with Israel. And please don't give me the "You're an anti-semite" line... Being critical of Israel does not make one an anti-semite or a self hating Jew. Why is it that at a time when the US is heavily involved in a huge mess in the middle east, that our politicians, thinkers, activists, do not dare discussing the issue that is at the heart of the conflict?

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SADDAM HANGED FOR BUSH’S CRIMES

Below you will find enough evidence that George W. Bush is the enemy of the Iraqi people, not Saddam Hussein as he would like us to believe…

While the majority of Iraqis know that the current Sunni-Shiites tension did not exist before 2003, no one can deny that after five years of U.S. occupation, sectarian tension is now a reality. Sectarianism is another disaster that was brought to Iraq by the war and occupation of Iraq.

The U.S.-led invasion did not only destroy the Baath political regime, it also annihilated the entire public sector including education, health care, food rations, social security, and the armed forces. The Iraqi public sector was a great example of how millions of Iraqis: Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, Muslims and Christians, religious and secular, all worked together in running the country. The myth that the former Iraqi government was a “Sunni-led dictatorship” was created by the U.S. government. Even the Iraqi political regime was not “Sunni-led,” let alone the rest of the public sector. A good way to debunk this fairy tale is through a close look at the famous deck of cards of the 55 most wanted Iraqi leaders. The cards had the pictures of Saddam, his two sons, and the rest of the political leadership which most Iraqis would recognize as the heads of the political regime. What is noteworthy is that 36 of the 55 were Shiites. In fact, the two vice presidents were a Christian and a Shiites Kurd.

Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians also have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion on March 20, 2003, although estimates of a specific figure vary widely because of the difficulty in collecting accurate information.

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Hannity Denies Association With White Supremacist

Why are they Angry?

White Pator comes to the rescue of Obama and Wright

All I can say is WOW!!!

Condi Rice's State Department Spies on Barack Obama?

From The Huffington Post

Operatives from one of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's web of privatized contractors within the State Department, which includes Blackwater, on at least three occasions scrutinized Barack Obama's passport information probably in search of something that could be used against him politically in some unforeseen way, and provide ammunition for well-timed leaks.

The political nature of this latest episode is clear from the fact that the dates of the breaches were January 9, February 21, and March 14, which correspond with the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic debate in Texas, and the day the Jeremiah Wright story became major news.

If Rice's State Department had its "security" breached when Obama's passport information was pilfered on January 9 then why didn't it set off alarm bells right then and there? Why wasn't this first breach brought to her attention and an investigation launched?

And why were two other breaches able to occur on February 21 and on March 14?

The episode represents a major security breach of a VIP who is currently running for president, which raises the question of whether or not the Bush White House was informed of this violation of Obama's privacy rights.

Are we to believe that these contractors "routinely" combed Obama's passport information without recognizing the fact that he is currently a presidential candidate?

Was it just incompetence like when Condi Rice missed the President's Daily Brief of August 6, 2001 entitled: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the United States?" Or is it something more sinister like Karl Rove cooked up for the Justice Department and the politicization of the U.S. Attorneys?

Congress must begin its own inquiry into this potentially grave abuse of federal power. We cannot allow the federal machinery to be used in political warfare.

The Hillary Clinton campaign also has some explaining to do since Maura Harty, who was President Bill Clinton's ambassador to Paraguay, resigned her post with the Bush State Department between the second and third breach of Obama's passport information.

Pat Buchanon says slavery is the best thing to happen to black people

From Daily Kos Barack Obama's speech this past week illuminated aspects of the racial divide in this country in a nuanced and respectful manner. This speech offered an opening for dialogue. Pat Buchanan has offered his response.

America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Buchanan amazes with a tone deaf defense of white resentment by claiming slavery is the best thing that ever happened to black people in a posting on his website yesterday. Buchanan's contribution to this dialogue is as appalling as Obama's contribution is appealling.

Buchanan continues by dismissing a host of government programs designed to assist the working poor and our least advantaged citizens as giveaways to the African American community.

N]o people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Conservative commentators like Buchanan and right wing media outlets like Fox News continue to foster white resentment for political gain. They perpetuate the myth of the social safety net only benefiting people of color or illegal immigrants. Their aim is to engender bitterness among "honest, hard working, tax paying" whites.

America’s New Slavery: Black Men in Prison

Excerpt
A new American slave trade is booming, warn prison activists, following the release of a report that again outlines outrageous numbers of young Black men in prison and increasing numbers of adults undergoing incarceration. That slave trade is connected to money states spend to keep people locked up, profits made through cheap prison labor and for-profit prisons, excessive charges inmates and families may pay for everything from tube socks to phone calls, and lucrative cross country shipping of inmates to relieve overcrowding and rent cells in faraway states and counties.


Advocates note that the constitution’s 13th amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery in the United States, but provided an exception—in cases where persons have been “duly convicted” in the United States and territory it controls, slavery or involuntary servitude can be reimposed as a punishment, they add. The majority of prisoners are Black and Latino, though they are minorities in terms of their numbers in the population.

According to “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008,” published by the Pew Center on the States, one in nine Black men between the ages of 20-34 are incarcerated compared to one in 30 other men of the same age. Like the overall adult ratio, one in 100 Black women in their mid-to-late 30s is imprisoned.

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Four US soldiers killed in Iraq

Excerpt Four more US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, bringing the death toll since the invasion in 2003 close to 4,000.

The US military said that in the latest incident on Saturday, three soldiers died when their vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb north-west of Baghdad.

Another soldier died from injuries sustained in an attack south on Friday.

The latest deaths would bring the total of US fatalities to 3,996, according to a count kept by the independent website icasualties.org.

What the Wright issue is really about: "Black privilege"

I doubt that the majority of those upset by Rev. Wright's statements honestly believe that Obama is a closet Black Panther who will make Louis Farrakhan his secret aides-de-camp while in the White House. Obama's life story, personality, and political record make him more vulnerable to the "Uncle Tom" label than the "Angry Black Man" one. So why are some people so upset about Wright?

Quite simply, they think it's yet another case of Black Privilege, of how Blacks can get away with things that Whites can't. These people constantly refer to events like the OJ Simpson trial, the Duke lacrosse scandal, and the Imus controversy as great injustices perpetrated upon Whites by an oppressive Black oligarchy. Add to the fact that these Blacks are also allegedly stealing jobs and college spots via affirmative action, and you've got a swelling of White resentment. To these people, they look at Tiger Woods and see that all racial chasms have been fixed, and that any further gripes from the Black community amount to nothing more than whining.

Then along comes this Reverend Wright, a sort of Mike Huckabee of the left (good man, says decent things most of the time, but has a tendency to go off the deep end from time to time). They are absolutely incensed that a Black man can get away with having a pugnacious Black preacher, while a White man probably couldn't get away with having a pastor who blamed Blacks for economic and social woes. Their limited cognitive abilities can't look beyond the immediate past and present to the historical perspectives of the Black and White experience, and how Black and White politicians aren't exactly interchangeable. Here, how about a deal? McCain gets to have a White version of Jeremiah Wright, but he has to do so in a country where Whites were enslaved for centuries, Jim Crow-ed for one more, and where no White man has EVER been remotely close to winning the White House.

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Five Years of a Disastrous War and the Bills are Coming Due

It’s appropriate that on this week of the fifth anniversary of the criminal US invasion of Iraq, we are also seeing several other things: the death toll of American troops in that doomed adventure is rising past 4000, the economy is sliding into a recession which could be deep and long, and the financial markets are teetering on the edge of a possibly historic collapse.

The conjunction of all of these dire things is no coincidence.

The war on Iraq was a predictable disaster from day one, when the administration tried to do it on the cheap, using less than half the manpower that Bush’s own generals said would be needed to control the country after the inevitable collapse of its government and military. But of course the US had to conduct this war on the cheap because the country was never really behind the war in the first place. It was a war that was "marketed" to us like a risky financial investment or a badly designed new car. The idea was to close the sale and get away from the deal as quickly as possible, leaving no office forwarding address.

The problem was that Iraqis, the victims of our attack, didn’t cooperate. They didn’t lie down and play dead. They decided to resist our effort to take over their country and run it like a retail gas station. So now the US has wasted over $500 billion in a country trying--and failing--to gain control over a country no bigger than a mid-sized state, battling against resistance forces armed with homemade bombs, obsolete grenade launchers and Vietnam-era AK-47 rifles.

But because the Bush/Cheney administration could never admit to Americans what this war would be costing, and has cost, all that money has been borrowed. As for the deaths and the tens of thousands of injuries, the government has hidden these, flying in the casualties in the dead of night and burying them quickly and as quietly as possible, while sticking the wounded in closed off VA hospitals and rehab centers, from which the press, for the most part, are barred (if they even bother to try and do a story).

That need to hide the truth means that the real cost of the war is running into the trillions of dollars, because of the interest on the debt, and because of the the future costs of providing for all those who are injured.

The war in Iraq has helped to bankrupt this country, which, to be honest, is the state we’re in when the US, year in and year out, is buying more than it is selling, leaving creditor nations like China, Japan and Saudi Arabia owning trillions of dollars in debt that cannot be repaid. It has also distorted the economy. By pushing up the price of oil to record levels of above $100/barrel, a result of uncertainty about supplies, plus the virtual removal of Iraq, the world’s second or third-largest oil-producing region, from the market, not to mention the jeopardizing of the entire oil supply through the Persian Gulf, which accounts for over 20 percent of the world’s oil, the Iraq War has thrown the US economy into a slump, while at the same time pushing up inflation.

In order to keep things going in the face of all this, the administration and the Federal Reserve for years have kept mortgage rates low and encouraged homeowners to borrow on their home equity in order to keep spending, and thus the whole system, afloat. That gambit has now run its course, with the housing bubble finally bursting.

It would seem that there is little left to keep the economy going.
The housing crisis has left the nation’s banks and investment banks holding trillions of dollars in assets that are actually worth only a fraction of their face value. So rickety is the system that over the weekend, as the Federal Reserve worked frantically to prevent the collapse of Bear Stearns, the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank, there was real fear of a total collapse of the finance system, ala 1929. Such a thing could still happen, when the next bank or investment bank comes a cropper.

Consumers, for their part, are spent out.

And the war continues apace, the bodies, and the bills, piling up.

President Bush is saying it was all worth it. Cheney, touring the Middle East while trying to drum up support for what would be a catastrophic and even more criminal attack on Iran, is saying that the “progress” in Iraq has been “phenomenal.” And John McCain, the addled, past-his-sell-date Republican candidate for president, is committed to continuing this madness for another century, even if he cannot remember who the US is fighting over there (he confused the so-called “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” group--all Sunni--with the Shia militias and had to be corrected by his travel buddy, Sen. Joe Lieberman).

It’s a somber anniversary. Five years of a war that never should have happened. A country destroyed. America on the ropes economically. A million Iraqi civilians dead. 4000 American soldiers killed and another 20,000 maimed.

At some point, the American people will finally say they’ve had enough of this madness, manipulation and malfeasance.

The question is what will be left of this place when they finally put a stop to it and bring the troops home to a jobless economy.

The hucksters and flim-flam men who produced this mess have had their fun and are preparing to run off with their winnings. We should really organize a pitchforks and torches march on the White House and Congress and run them out of town on rails, tarred and feathered, while we can. They’ll be hard to track down once people realize how we’ve all been had.

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Obama's Speech on Race on Video

Full Text Here