Inside the Israeli Land-Grab -- The Real News Network

Via:

Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed the Israeli government's support of the settlement movement by planting a tree in each one of the three biggest settlement blocks in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Despite the Israeli government's support, funding, and approval of settlers, they are often presented in the media as in conflict with the state and the army. In this report, The Real News' Lia Tarachansky looks at this claim through a recent lecture by Shir Hever, an economist with the Alternative Information Center. A perfect example of the methodology Hever describes can be seen in the settlement of Kedumim which lies adjacent to the Palestinian village of Kaft Qadum. The Real News spoke to the village council of the Palestinian village and the associate mayor of the settlement about how they've expanded and the impact this has had on their lives.

I have frequently stated my view that Israel will NOT accede to a "sovereign" Palestinian State because, from the point of view of the Israeli State-qua-State, it would be fatal, for a variety of reasons, to do so. Of course, unfortunately, it will also b e fatal NOT to do so. The only difference is in the time it takes for the State to unravel.

Holy Fuck! We're Wholly FUCKED!

So who are you gonna believe, the President of the United States, or your own lyin' eyes?

Why do I ask?

Well, during the SoTU speech on Wednesday, Prez. Shamwow said he wanted to hear from people on a better approach to health care reform that will

"bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses."

Guess what? There is a way of covering every single individual in the whole country that is

1) much less expensive, 2) deficit-friendlier, 3) more expansive and inclusive, 4) strengthens existing programs, and 5) reins in corpoRat abuse

And all of you already know the name of this wondrous panacea. Spell it with me, now:

S I N G L E P A Y E R!

Which, for some utterly incomprehensible reason has not only been taken off the table, but the remains of which seem to have been incinerated with the trash.

And now the President's 'security' forces are arresting the more vocal advocates who want to exercise the constitutional right to seek relief from their grievance...

No, really!

I'm stoned a lot, so somebody remind me if I'm making this up, but I could have SWORN that during the campaign, "thePrez" as candidate PROMISED to restore the Constitution, to overturn the pernicious precedents of the Busheviks restraining public remonstrances to the Oligarchs.

Did I make that up out of wish and anticipation?

Anti-Social? Think about it.

Dear Diary

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by socialist electricity
generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the socialist clean water provided by the municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on the socialist radio to one of the FCC regulated channels to hear what the socialist National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using socialist satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

I watched this while eating my breakfast of socialist US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the socialist drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

Etc.

Good vid...DOTOF™ to FBer JN Thomas.

Bulletin From The Dept. Of You Just Can't Make This Shit Up Fast Enough To Stay Ahead

DoD Calls For "Dept. of Strategic Deception."

No, really.

And it will have two divisions: Internal and External

No? Well, okay, I might be making that part up, though I have no proof one way or the other, and knowing the NatSecState as I do (I was fledged in the USAFSS and the NSA, in the '60s), I have no reason to DOUBT that it would strategically deceive both the indigenes and the rest of the strategic world.

The Defense Department needs to get better at lying and fooling people about its intentions. That’s the conclusion from an influential Pentagon panel, the Defense Science Board (DSB), which recommends that the military and intelligence communities join in a new agency devoted to “strategic surprise/deception.”

Tricking battlefield opponents has been a part of war since guys started beating each other with bones and sticks. But these days, such moves are harder to pull off, the DSB notes in a January report (.pdf) first unearthed by InsideDefense.com. “In an era of ubiquitous information access, anonymous leaks and public demands for transparency, deception operations are extraordinarily difficult. Nevertheless, successful strategic deception has in the past provided the United States with significant advantages that translated into operational and tactical success. Successful deception also minimizes U.S. vulnerabilities, while simultaneously setting conditions to surprise adversaries.”

The U.S. can’t wait until it’s at war with a particular country or group before engaging in this strategic trickery, however. “Deception cannot succeed in wartime without developing theory and doctrine in peacetime,” according to the DSB. “In order to mitigate or impart surprise, the United States should [begin] deception planning and action prior to the need for military operations.”

Doing that will not only requires an “understanding the enemy culture, standing beliefs, and intelligence-gathering process and decision cycle, as well as the soundness of its operational and tactical doctrine,” the DSB adds. Deception is also “reliant … on the close control of information, running agents (and double-agents) and creating stories that adversaries will readily believe.”

Such wholesale obfuscation can’t be done on an ad-hoc basis, or by a loose coalition of existing agencies. The DSB writes that ”to be effective, a permanent standing office with strong professional intelligence and operational expertise needs to be established.” I wonder: what would you call that organization? The Military Deception Agency? Or something a bit more … deceptive?

Read More

What was the name of that nefarious group inside the Pentagon that Rumsfeld tried to start, the Office of Strategic Influence, and got convicted felon/GoPoP operative John Poindexter to run it? Rumsfeld bragged that though he was forced to nominally close the thing, it continued operations well into 2008...

Is this s'morez of that yummy "change we been a waitin' fer?"

The Negro Really IS "Bat-shit-fucking-CRAZY"

Clarence ("Unca") Thomas.

Nuff said? You think so? You don't know the HALF of bone-deep, bat-shit, motherfucking, neo-Con crazy.

Thomas actually dissented from the majority, while voting concurrence in the "Citizens United" decision. He dissented from the majority because in his estimation the decision didn't go far ENOUGH in utterly subverting the entire idea of popular sovereignty.

No, really!

"...Specifically, he argued that the court was wrong to continue requiring that the sponsors of political advertising disclose who paid for them,," according to the citation on Salon yesterday under the heading "This Week In Crazy." Not content with murdering the ideas of public scrutiny and accountability for the contents of political speech, he wants to let the murderers walks anonymously among us. We pick up the story from Salon:

That's right. Thomas came out against the principle of transparency, and for the right of corporations to spend millions of dollars to influence public policy without having to tell anyone what they were up to. It's hard to imagine a less democratic stance.

Thomas did have his reasons, however. He blamed the gays. In the heated war over Proposition 8 in California, he wrote, any individual who contributed as little as $100 in favor of the ban on same-sex marriage was required to disclose his or her name and address to the public, and thus opened themselves up to harassment.

Some opponents of Proposition 8 compiled this information and created Web sites with maps showing the locations of homes or businesses of Proposition 8 supporters. Many supporters (or their customers) suffered property damage, or threats of physical violence or death, as a result. ...

I cannot endorse a view of the First Amendment that subjects citizens of this Nation to death threats, ruined careers, damaged or defaced property, or pre-emptive and threatening warning letters as the price for engaging in "core political speech, the 'primary object of First Amendment protection.'"

To be fair, writing at the Sunlight Foundation blog, Daniel Schuman notes that there is some precedent for challenging disclosure by individuals when there is the potential for harassment.

It stems from attempts by the KKK to get membership lists of NAACP contributors during the civil rights era so that the Klan could attack the organization's supporters. With firebombs. But that's a far cry from disclosing corporate donors.... Also, unlike in the civil rights era, criminal behavior such as that engaged in by the Klan will be prosecuted by the state, and likely can be deterred.

To recap: In order to protect Californian opponents of gay marriage from harassment, which is best handled by legal prosecution, Thomas wanted to let corporations spend as much as they want on influencing public policy without ever having to identify themselves. I'll outsource the kicker to Adam Bonin, writing at DailyKos.

Too often, Justice Thomas gets accused of being an unthinking automatic second vote for whatever Justice Scalia says. Untrue. He's his own unique sphere of wrongness, and not even Scalia, Alito, Kennedy or the Chief Justice were willing to follow him on this one.

Everybodfy Saw It Coming, But It's Still A Shock That The SCROTUS Has Become So Blatant

In the New Yorker, attorney and legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin calls it "Bad Judgment."

The basic ruling in yesterday’s five-to-four Supreme Court decision was straightforward and, in many ways, predictable. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and his four conservative colleagues almost invariably rule in favor of corporate interests, and the Citizens United case was no exception. The Court ruled that corporations (and labor unions and other organizations) have the right, under the First Amendment, to participate in political campaigns by spending as much money as they want on behalf of political candidates. In other words, companies can produce commercials and buy time to support or oppose candidates for office.

Two thoughts.

First, Republicans will benefit, of course. Corporations have vastly more money than unions, and corporations by and large prefer to support the G.O.P. But the spectre of Exxon buying time to support Barack Obama’s opponent in 2012 seems unlikely to me. Presidential campaigns are high-profile and generally well-funded; Exxon (or its ilk) would probably not make much difference—and likely draw a consumer boycott with a controversial choice.

The much bigger implication of the decision is likely to come in judicial elections. In the states that elect judges (about two-thirds of them), most voters pay relatively little attention to the races, but the contests, especially for the state supreme courts, tend to be vicious and expensive. Corporate interests often have a huge stake in the outcome, because most personal-injury lawsuits and other civil cases are handled at the state level. The whole notion of electing judges is tawdry and awful; Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has devoted a great deal of energy, during her retirement from the Supreme Court, to urging states to move to appointive systems. Corporate freedom to dump untold amounts of money into these races will make bad systems worse.

Second, it has long been a staple of conservative thought to criticize “judicial activism”—the practice of unelected judges imposing their own policy judgments to overrule the will of the people’s elected representatives. But it is hard to imagine a more activist decision than the Citizens Union case. Congress passed the McCain-Feingold law, and President George W. Bush signed it, in the knowledge that the Supreme Court had repeatedly blessed restrictions on corporate political activity.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion blithely overturned Court precedent, and rejected the work of the elected branches—all in service of the bizarre legal theories that (1) corporations have the same rights as human beings, and (2) spending money is the same thing as speaking. This was judicial activism of the most egregious kind. Indeed, it wasn’t as much a judicial opinion as it was Republican talking points.

Read more: (Emphases supplied--W)

Remember Roberts' solemn, pontifical assurances at his confirmation hearings that he was a respector of "stare decisis?" He was under oath, and obviously perjured his feculent ass, which ought ot be grounds for impeachment, and would be if Roberts were a Dim appointment and the Congress were as predominantly Puke as it now is Dim...

Me? I just want to pull his legs off him like the filthy, verminous, lying dung-beetle he is.

If I will have one real regret on my death-bed, should I pre-decease any of the Opus Dei mob now defiling the highest Court in the Land, it will be that I have not lived long enough to shit in the mouths of this crew of theo-fascistic CorpoRats...

I Bet You Thought There Wouldn't Be Expenditure Caps On Health Insurance, Dincha?

Where COULD you have gotten that idea? I, myself, could have sworn Prez. Shamwiow and the Dims in Congress had solemnly sworn that there would be no caps--yearly OR lifetime--on private insurance provided under the terms of the Congressional Health Insurance Parasite Bail-out Act of 2010 (or whenever). I, myself--and you, too, had you failed to notice the changes inserted into the bill without ANY fan-fare back in December--would have been wrong.

They're fixin' to fuck us over again, big time, as usual. Even though Prez. Shamwow insists he and the Regime are trying to negotiate the closing of this "loophole," you'd have to be a lunatic to believe that even if he DOES, ther are plenty of other "loopholes" through which the Health Insurance Parasites (HIP) can insert the ass-fucking screws. How many people do YOU think the HIP now employs to scan the bill for any and every niche or crack or hole through which they can extract you life's-blood?

Upon the revelation of the loophole in December, the WhiteHouse issued statements claiming they were opposed to the loophole, according to CNN at the time:

"The president has made it clear that health insurance reform legislation should prevent insurance companies from placing annual limits on health expenditures that can force families into financial ruin," said White House spokesman Reid Cherlin. "We will continue to work with Congress on this policy."
The loophole in the Senate bill reversed a previous version of the plan that would have prevented insurance companies from establishing such limits, according to three Democratic aides who spoke to CNN earlier Friday.

A month later and the offending loophole is still in the bill. Here's the (rest of) story, via The Hill:

Lawmakers protest healthcare bill’s caps on benefits over policyholder's lifetime
By Jeffrey Young - 01/16/10 02:34 PM ET

A cadre of Democratic lawmakers and patient groups is urging congressional Democratic leaders to abandon plans to permit health insurance companies to set lifetime limits on their customers’ benefits. (WTF? Why do the "leaders" need to be "urged" to do what they had promised a year ago?--W)

In letters sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the other senior Democratic lawmakers authoring the final version of healthcare reform legislation, 29 House Democrats and seven Senate Democrats press the leaders to adopt the House’s take on the bill, which would prohibit insurers from establishing a dollar cap on how much they will pay out during a policyholder’s lifetime. (I'll bet it was a VERY STERN LETTER, too, innit?--W)

"Individuals with chronic diseases and disorders must not be impeded in accessing necessary health care nor should they be impoverished with unreasonable lifetime limits on benefits,” Democratic Reps. Patrick Kennedy (R.I.), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.) and 27 colleagues wrote Friday. Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan (N.D.), Al Franken (Minn.) and five other senators wrote a separate letter Thursday.

Sixty-three groups, including the American Heart Association, National Kidney Foundation, Easter Seals and groups representing cancer, brain and spinal cord injury, and other patients penned a similar letter on Jan. 8.

Under the House-passed healthcare reform bill, insurance companies would be prohibited from establishing annual or lifetime limits on benefits. Although the Senate-passed bill also forbids annual limits, it would permit lifetime limits in existing insurance plans by “grandfathering” those policies while forbidding new plans from establishing them.

Throughout the debate on healthcare reform, Democrats have routinely promised their legislation would free people from the anxiety that high medical bills would lead to financial ruin, prompting some lawmakers and patient groups to protest when the lifetime caps were introduced into the bill this autumn. (WTF??? "Some" lawmakers complained? WASF (WeAreSoFucked)--W)

“By preserving lifetime limits, patients in grandfathered plans will be left behind as strong patient protections are extended to those who are newly insured,” the senators wrote.

The House letter is signed by the leaders of two prominent Democratic caucuses: Reps. Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.) and Lynn Woolsey (Calif.), the co-chairpeople of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; and Rep. Barbara Lee (Calif.), chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Other members of both caucuses are also represented.

In addition to Dorgan and Franken, Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Carl Levin (Mich.), Bob Casey Jr. (Pa.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and Barbara Boxer (Calif.) signed the Senate letter.

Would you care to bet that existing "pre-existing condition" bans are "grandfathered in, too? Me neither...

Creationism -- Ricky Gervais/Eddie Izzard

Double header/slam dunk...

These have been around a while, but in my mind it never goes stale. Ricky Gervais is one of the two funniest comix in Britain (the other being Eddie Izzard, sopeaking of whom):

"It's Not 'Your' Money": So Good It Deserves Repeating

by Ian Welsh
You also didn’t earn most of it.

It seems like every time I discuss taxation, some libertarian will waltz in and say “it’s my money and I don’t see why the government should be able to take it.”

So let’s run through why, no, it isn’t your money. We’ll start with two numbers. The income per capita for the US in 2005 was $43,740. The income per capita for Bangladesh was $470.

Now I want you to ask yourself the following question: are Bengalis genetically inferior to Americans? Since not too many FDLers think white sheets look great at a lynching, I’ll assume everyone aswered no.

Right then, being American is worth $43,270 more than being Bengali and it’s not due to Americans being superior human beings. If it isn’t because Americans are superior, then what is it?

The answer is that if it isn’t individual, it must be social. On the individual but still social level, Americans are in fact smarter than Bengalis because as children they are far less likely to suffer from malnutrition. However not suffering from malnutrition when you’re a baby, toddler or young child has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the society you live in and your family–two things you have zero influence over (perhaps you chose your mother, I didn’t.)

Bengalis won’t, on average, get as good an education. They won’t get as much education either, since every child is needed to help earn a living as soon as possible. For most Bengalis there’s no room for having the extended childhood and adolescence westerners are used to, which often stretches into the late twenties or even early thirties, amongst those seeking Ph.D’s or becoming doctors or lawyers.

When a Bengali grows up the jobs available aren’t as good. If he or she starts a business it will earn much less money than the equivalent American business. If he or she speculates in land and is very successful, they will still be much less rich than an American would be.

One could go on and on. I trust the point is obvious — the vast majority of money that an American earns is due to being born an American. Certainly the qualities that make America a good place to live and a good place to make money are things that were created by Americans, but mostly they were created by Americans long dead or they are created by all Americans working together and are not located in the individual.

Now the same is true of the really rich. Forbes keeps track of the world’s billionaires, and almost half of them are in the US. This is because US society and the US government in particular, is very set up to create billionaires. Your odds of being a billionaire take a massive jump if you’re born in the US. Your odds of being a billionaire if you’re born in Bangladesh? Essentially zero. Now one could point out that billionaires are still so rare that the odds are always essentially zero (how many billionaires in your circle of friends?) Nonetheless the US in 2005 had 371. Germany, with the second most, had 55.

Bangladesh, you won’t be surprised to hear, had zero.

If you’re a billionaire in the US, you’re a billionaire in large part because you live in the US.

So, if you’re American, a large chunk of the reason you make a lot of money (relative to the rest of the world) is that you are American. The main cause of your relative wealth is not that you work hard, or that you’re innately smarter than members of other nations (though you may be since you weren’t starved as a child). It’s because you had opportunities given to you that most people will never had, and those opportunities existed due to the pure accident of your birth or because you or your family chose to come to the US. The same is true of most first world nations.

Immigrants understand this very well. There’s a reason why Mexicans, for example, are willing to risk death to cross the border. Their average income is $7,310, compared to the US average income of $43,740. They won’t make up all the difference just by crossing the border, but they’ll make up enough that it’s more than worth it. They haven’t personally changed, they don’t work harder now that they’re across the border. They aren’t smarter and they aren’t stronger. They just changed where they lived and suddenly the opportunities open to them were so much better that their income went up.

So let’s bring this back to our typical Libertarian with his whine that he earned it, and the government shouldn’t take it away. He didn’t earn most of it. Most of it is just because in global terms, he was born on third and thinks he threw a triple. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to work for it, but it does mean most of the value of his work has nothing to do with him (and Ayn Rand aside, it’s almost always a him).

Now what a government is, in a democratic society, is the vehicle that the population as a whole chooses to use to organize collective action. Government is, imperfect as it is, the closest approximation to the “will of society” that we’ve got.

Since the majority of the money any American earns is a function of being American, not of their own individual virtues, the government has the moral right to tax. And since those who are rich get more from being American than those who are poor, it also has the moral right to take more money from them.

More importantly than the moral right, it has the pragmatic duty to do so. The roads and bridges that government builds and maintains; the schools that it funds, the police and courts that keep the peace; the investment in R&D that produced the internet; the sewage systems that make real estate speculation possible, and on and on, are a huge chunk of what makes being American worth so much more than being a Bengali. Failure to reinvest in both human and inanimate infrastructure is like killing the golden goose, and America, for decades now, has not been keeping its infrastructure properly maintained, let alone building it up.

And money itself is something that government provides for its people. It’s not your money, it’s America’s money and it’s a damn good thing too. If you don’t believe me, try issuing your own money and see how many people accept it. Some will, because what money is, when an individual issues, is an IOU. I’ve written a few in my life. In every case the person I gave it to was less happy to receive it than he would have been to get some nice crisp dollars. And I rested my IOU’s on dollars — I promised to repay in my country’s currency. If you don’t want to do that you’d have to issue an IOU saying “I will repay you with a bundle of rice” or gold, or a service. And then you come to the question of enforcement (one thing even libertarians admit the government should do) because what if I refuse to meet the conditions of the IOU. Even an IOU is based on the sanction of the government, if it isn’t it’s worth only as much as the good will of the person issuing it or the strong arm of the person holding it.

So no, it isn’t your money, and it’s a good thing it isn’t. And while you may have worked your butt off for it, you also didn’t earn most of it. The value you impute to yourself “I’m worth my 80K salary” is mostly a function of where you live, of where you were born and of who your parents are.

(Originally published Feb 9, 2008.)

Saved From The Memory Hole: Naomi Klein & "The Shock Doctrine"

Circa, 2007 (DOTOF™ to Facebooker Brad Hoffman)

Sunday Dummies

Well, to be fair, they're not just bone-fucking-stupid on Sundays...

Capital Punishment

This won't stop executions in the USofA. I doubt that anything will stop them, short of another SCROTUS decision--which is utterly inconceivable under the current composition of the Court, and which awaits at least one replacement among the GOP clones wrung onto the Court but the fascisti the last 30 years.

However, apparently the ALI (American Legal Institute), which has provided the penumbra of legitimacy to the revanchist motives of the citizen-executioners for the past 50 years has thrown in the towel, according to this report by Laura Flanders' "F-Word" blog at The Nation:

Death Penalty Supporters Concede Defeat
posted by LAURA FLANDERS on 01/07/2010 @ 10:03am

We saw a lot of bad death penalty-related news last year--the probable execution of innocent men in Texas, the attacks by a prosecutor on the Medill Innocence Project students at Northwestern University, and the horrific failed attempt at an execution in Ohio.

But the year also brought this news: the American Law Institute, which has been credited with creating the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, apparently pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it last year.

This could represent a significant shift away from putting prisoners to death in the U.S. A Berkeley law professor quoted in a New York Times story about A.L.I. called the group the death penalty's "only intellectually respectable support."

The Institute did not decide formally to oppose the death penalty as some of its members apparently wanted, but in a statement last October conceded there are "intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment."

Seems to me, that's tantamount to saying there's no way for state killing to be done fairly or right.

A study by the A.L.I. apparently pointed to problems that have been well known to death-penalty opponents for years: racial disparities in sentencing and application, expense, politics and the potential -- not so potential as we saw last year -- that the state would execute the innocent.

Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham for the death of his children in a fire that an investigator ruled accidental, not arson. The decision by the A.L.I. comes too late to save him or others like him but it might give death penalty supporters pause. It's certainly a shot in the arm for opponents. Maybe 2010 will be the year that the country wakes up to the same intractable instutitional, not to mention moral, obstacles that A.L.I. found, finally, to legalized killing by the state.

I keep referring to a study I read, probably in The nation, about 15 years ago, which reported that, among those (approximately 70% of) Murkins who favored capital punishment, more than HALF of them would not prohibit it even with affirmative evidence that the State occasionally executed innocent citizens.

Sibling Rivalry, Cliques, and The "Superior" Party.

The dynamic between Dims and Pukes is a combination of two dysfunctional systems: a high school clique system and a ritzy country club…

The Dims have no clout (or no “Klaudt,” either) because they are that wing of the Party of Property which is designated for the “losers”: the poor, the marginalized, the despised, the down-trodden, the needy, people-of-color, immigrants, the minimum-wage, etc.

Whereas the Pukes are the designated party of the Winners: bidness, power, money, heredity, privilege.

The Dims, of course, function to only ‘nominally’ represent their designated constituency. They’d much rather be part of the cool crowd, so they dick over their designated supporters every chance they get, to demonstrate their bona fides for the Owners and those members of the Senior class whom they wish to emulate…

The Dims are in a really hard place. They are the "designated" Party of the "losers." But their sympathies and affinities are with the "winners'" wing of the Party of Property, and they chafe at the need to be seen to 'represent' those whom their instincts regard as their 'inferiors.'

That's the real reason the Dims cannot pull off the legislative stunts that the Pukes seem to specialize in: they lack standing, in that judicial sense. Their 'constituencies" have no real power, influence, or authority. So the "Party" which represents those losers lacks the "authority" to rebuke the Pukes (and the Owners for whom the Pukes are mere avatars), even if they had the will (which they do not).

The Viewers At Home

For as much of it as Murkins consume, they are astonishingly naive about the technologies of persuasio in which TV specializes, and their own susceptibilities to such technologies. Teenagers used to assure me they were immune to advertizing/propaganda, while solemnly or fiercely protecting their "brand"--Coke, Ford, Coors, Doritos, etc--from the claims of partisans of other brands that their version of the branded thing was in all ways superior, and they in all those ways superior to their antagonists...

CrAP 101--Creationist Astronomy Propaganda

The pilot episode of 'CrAP Debunked'. If you liked this video, please help to spread it. Various images/videos produced by ESA/NASA/ESO.

See, also:
http://www.youtube.com/thunderf00t
http://www.youtube.com/potholer54
http://www.youtube.com/potholer54debunks
http://www.youtube.com/aronra
http://www.youtube.com/donexodus2
http://www.youtube.com/cdk007

CrAP 102: Prepare to Worship Me!

Refurbishing GOPuke "Cred"

I readily acknowledge that I am more cynical than most, and so to me the ‘cleansing’ of the GOPuke rep seems inevitable. They still own the lap-dog SCUM (So-Called Unbiased Media), the corporate boardrooms which own and run the newsrooms of the nation, and the whole of the immense advertizing/propaganda apparati. They control the agenda, no matter what Prez. Shamwow and the clownish Dims do to recapture it.

Indeed, Prez. Shamwow’s ascendancy--from no-recrod Senator to the top seat at the table--may and can be easily read as the effort by the Owners—the Bosses, Oligarchs, and Aristos, the Landlords—to provide the (white) voters, who had become restive under the last vestiges of the Busheviki, a reason and a way to forget how much they had grown to despise the (also white) Busheviks.

In selecting Prez. Shamwow, the Owners accomplished the necessary propagandistic sleight-of-hand to give these disaffected (white) voters a (non-white, ergo easwily despised)) president onto whom the angry whites could/can transfer all of that stored animosity from the last 30 years. This is the bubbling rage and frustrationj experienced by the (mailnly white) middle class since Raygun and his bidness coup-plotters uncoupled wages from productivity and began the systematic indenture of the 'middle class' to the credit 'industry.' Pres. Shamwow is in many ways a sacrificial goat to assuage the sins of the oligarchs without seeming to accept any blame.

It’ll work like a charm.

The thing of which I am uncertain is how long the Owners will give Pres. Shamwow to accomplish his real mission, which is administering the coup de gras to the New Deal by gutting Social Security. It may need the second term of Murka's first non-White Chief Exec to accomplish the core mission. But the Owners are already smirking at the thought that it will be a 'descendant' of those marginalized people who benefitted most from the New Deal who will administer the killing shot...