If you want to royally tick off New Yorkers, try telling us what to do.
That's probably why the police stopped trying to enforce the jaywalking laws here years ago (as opposed to Washington, DC, where I once got one too many tickets and was sent to pedestrian school).
And that's why in the weeks after 9/11, my favorite sign was the one that appeared in the windows of Italian-American neighborhoods near where I live downtown. In bright red, white, and blue, it read: "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. You got a problem with that?"
So imagine how pleased many of us were when told by conservatives -- most of them from out-of-town -- that we should be very afraid that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of his Al Qaeda henchmen will be put on trial here in New York City, just blocks from the scene of their horrific crime, the World Trade Center.
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Subject: President Obama vs airhead Palin
Can you believe it? Sarah Palin is all over the news selling her not to be believed book, and Our President doing peace making in Asia hardly a blip on the radar. Where was he shown with the troops, honoring him as he honors them? Where? Oh, but Foux Noise made fun of him 24/7 as he payed respect to the leader who hosted his visit. Helping right along are the silly talking heads, as Limbaugh, crazy Beck and their crew of republican misfits. Is this all they have? Yep! Rupert Murdock backs those who are not worthy to walk in our Presidents shoes, and mimics everything hateful they spew about our President.
Yet Sarah the bimbo, they spout as their canidate for President. Are they for real? Yes they are,because the Republicans latch onto anyone they can, who can make outrages statements about President Obama, and at this time Palin is the name of the game. Will the Republicans ever come out of their evil fantasy world? Not in our lifetime. Fantasy is their comfort zone. President Obama is the adult, that these bullys, called Republicans have to bring him down. They have nothing else to offer the American people but smoke and mirrors.
Tragedy/Comedy: Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expressions of grief. Elbert Hubbard, The Note-Book, 1927
Tragedy was the election in 2000 due to election fraud and the partisan, political interference of the U.S. Supreme Court that will forever tarnish that court. After that, it was one tragedy after another for eight long years.The Bush GOP members of Congress are talking about the trials in New York regarding 9/11 as being dangerous. The world is dangerous today because of the Bush GOP regime and their acts of terrorism around the world, using as an excuse, the word, terrorism, as in "fighting terrorism." Every act of violence is an act of terrorism. Just ask the victims. Bush, right after 9/11, bombed and killed close to 5,000 innocent people in Afghanistan. People, who had nothing to do with bin Laden or 9/11. Think about that number of deaths due to revenge. An action to please the blood thirsty people in this country at the time. No leadership at all in that action. It was cold-blooded murder.
Bush and Cheney had two to three months of warnings before 9/11 and took them seriously enough to warn friends not to fly commercial flights, such as Ashcroft and Willie Brown to name a couple who confessed of being the recipients of such warnings. Just as we Americans experienced for eight long years of the Bush/Cheney GOP leadership . . . no thought as to what their actions or lack of actions would cause to others, including the airlines. Why no accountability? Why do the Bush Republicans get to pick and choose what they want to remember about history? They remember 9/11, but fail to remember that if Bush had been a responsible resident of the White House, and had the American people and the airlines been warned, 9/11 most likely could have been prevented.
"Fifteen very bad things Republicans would do if they got their selfish way -- Always the political instrument of moneyed elites, and a retrograde societal force, the GOP today is more negatively impactful than ever. Its agenda, if fully implemented, would prove catastrophic." With all due respect, I'd say we're sitting in the middle of catastrophe right now and if left up to the Repuglicans and their radical religious base, we'll all be knocking on the doors of heaven or hell, whichever you prefer! These guys want to see Armageddon, and the sooner the better, because they believe they will be taken up to heaven body and soul! How's that for a hapless bunch of souls with an overinflated ego???
What if we all just stopped working? All of us -- just stopped going to work and started living the lives we talk about and long for? What if we all just stopped getting in our cars and driving through the horrific traffic that leaves us angry and spent before we even get to work? What if we all just stopped waiting for the bus that never comes or when it does, comes an hour late? What if we all just stopped going to jobs where we are bullied, harassed, disrespected, used, abused, threatened with the loss of our livelihoods and health insurance and then thrown out anyway like last week's garbage when the expiration date you didn't know they had stamped on your back comes due? What if we all stopped being afraid of losing our possessions, liberated ourselves from them and in doing so became free in a glorious way we never dreamed existed?
What if we all stopped talking about how much we hate working and did something about it?
Who says we have to work? Who says we have to give ourselves up to a system designed by others to exploit us for their own profit, destroy our spirit, and turn us against each other as we scratch and claw in vain to eke a living from it? Who says we must sacrifice our minds, our health, our precious time, our humanity to be rewarded every two weeks with green paper that, even as we so desperately need it, keeps us enslaved? Who says we have to do this?
I don't know about you, but I did not sign up for this. I did not agree to get up every morning and work for people who see me as less than they are, who feel that my needs and rights as a human being could not possibly be the same or as important as theirs. I did not agree to work in jobs that dull my mind, force me to hide my intelligence and heart, turn everyone into unhappy wage slaves who exist solely to profit others. I did not agree to work for companies that have no bottom line except "MORE." I did not agree to work for companies that engage in unethical and probably illegal conduct and that terminate loyal employees simply because those $1 million partner bonuses might be a little less this year. I did not agree to work for companies where incompetence, stupidity, venality, and amorality are rewarded and loyalty, initiative, kindness, and sound ideas are scorned. I did not agree to be part of a system that makes us all less than caring and peaceful human beings. Work should not cost us our sanity and our common humanity. Yet it does and we let it. How did we get to such an unhealthy and destructive place? Why do we continue to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of greed (theirs) and stupidity (ours)?
Have we lost the capacity to dream and the ability to distinguish between matters of substance and what Jon Stewart refers to as “our obsession with the trivial?” Have our leaders let us down or have we failed to demand enough of them and provide vigorous support for them? Between the vitriolic outbursts of teabaggers and the political realities of trying to accomplish something in an excessively partisan environment a wall of resistance has grown up that has slowed movement to a crawl. For some that is the goal, for others it is the ultimate defeat.
On a recent Bill Moyers Journal scenes from actress Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman show “Let Me Down Easy” dramatized events in the lives of people she had met and interviewed across the nation. There was a particularly compelling vignette of the way things are for people who lack power and means. At a medical facility in New Orleans following the collapse of facilities in the wake of Katrina, a health-care professional is stunned by the forbearance of patients who lack electricity and most other amenities.
Doubtless you recall all those plucky reassurances from the Democratic establishment earlier this month about what sure looked like political bloodbaths in Virginia and New Jersey. In the former's gubernatorial contest, the Republican victor annihilated the Democratic loser among independent voters by a prodigious 31 points; in the latter, by nearly 30. But, comforted the establishment, Those races don't mean a thing, nothing to see here folks, move along, it's just some local trouble with no wider implications.
You knew it was humbug then. And now, reports the Politico, the establishment is finally 'fessing up. Those races weren't offering idiosyncratic, mystical tea leaves to be interrupted by personal whim; they were unmistakable foghorns of doom.
"I saw the Mayor of New York said today, "We're tough. We can do it." Well, Mayor, how are you going to feel when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist? How are you going to feel when it's some clerk -- some innocent clerk of the court -- whose daughter or son is kidnapped? Or the jailer's little brother or little sister? This is political correctness run amok."
Kidnapping, huh. Not killed or wounded, stabbed or beaten, but kidnapping. Why is Rep. Shadegg so intrigued about kidnapping?
Perhaps because Rep. Shadegg knows a thing or two about kidnapping. After all, Shadegg was the representative who kidnapped, er, "borrowed" Maddie, daughter of his chief of staff, to use as a prop to argue against health care reform.
FOX attempted to cover a Palin book signing in Michigan, and Gregg Jarrett, a member of FOX's alleged straight-news team, describes the video played as "just coming into us" when it pretty clearly had nothing to do with a book signing and everything to do with a campaign appearance from last year. Once again, FOX had been caught telling lies on TV.
Few people would wonder why Lou Dobbs ended up off of CNN's nightly lineup, but who would have thought his post-CNN interviews would make him appear reasonable? It would take someone asking questions so outrageous and unreasonable that the furiously conservative beliefs espoused by Dobbs would come across as sensible. Fortunately for Dobbs, FOX News has no paucity of such extreme characters, and this time, Bill O'Reilly, the BuzzFlash Media Putz of the Week, took the lead to help make Dobbs look better.
In an interview shortly after Dobbs departed from CNN, Bill O'Reilly had an early opportunity to inquire about Dobbs's reasons for leaving CNN, including bits where O'Reilly clearly tries to bait Dobbs into complaining about the "liberal management" at CNN that O'Reilly felt ran Dobbs away. Dobbs, however, managed to evade those traps and actually spoke well of Joe Klein and other members of CNN management. Dobbs even goes so far as to partly blame himself for their ratings decline since he was a part of the lineup, a distant cry from the sensationalist interview O'Reilly had hoped to have. By the end, O'Reilly could hold back no more and decided to make the interview less about politics and more about theology.
O'Reilly: Final question. Barack Obama--is he the Devil?
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