Libertarians think minimum wage is not living in poverty...oh really?!

From my Libertarian friend, known as, 'Internet Esquire':

"Over two-thirds of those working for minimum wage do not live in poverty."

My reply:

"Can you provide links or evidence to support this spurious suggestion? Can you live on $5.15 an hour and NOT live in poverty in today's world?

This is slave labor with just enough meat attached to the bone for predatory capitalists to justify exploiting those that are less fortune or vunerable in order to fill their already overflowing coffers with the money off the broken backs, boiling blood and pouring sweat of 13% of our population. That same 13% that are citizens of the wealthiest country in the world."

This man's manta seems to be,

"Give us your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses..." so we can enslave them over here instead of you enslaving them over there!

I guess "be thy brother's keeper" is not in his play book?

More "accomplishments" of the PNAC & Bush

Frank J. Ranelli


-Ignoring overwhelming evidence from the scientific community that global warming is occurring and it’s not a natural phenomenon.

-Suppression of science and flow of information in order to fit a narrow brand of arcane Christian canon.

-Infiltration of the religious right’s dogmatic agenda into our secular government.

-Refusal to fund and acknowledge the benefits of stem cell research.

-An 8.1 trillion dollar debt, mostly to the Chinese.

-Medicare’s Plan D Prescription drug program that masquerades as a massive windfall for pharmaceutical companies.

-A President who claimed ‘God told him’ to invade Iraq and attack.

God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did, and then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq', and I did." -George W. Bush, June, 2003
# # #

IMO,

When YOU talk to God, that's religion, when God talks to YOU, that's insanity!

Bush Orwellian Watch

"There ought to be limits to freedom."

-George W. Bush
May 21, 1999 as Texas Governor

Comeback of the day....

Rebuttal response from Mikael Rudolph, of Seattle, Washington to the idea, "[that] there are millions of names that could be produced that support the President and his policies."

"Yes. The 29% and shrinking minority who still haven't caught up to the fact that they've been had--lied to from the start. The 29% who consider FAUXNews a reliable source for information. The 29% who consider drug addict Limbaugh a journalist and satanic Ann Colter a human being with a soul."

He goes on further to say:

"The debate here is not whether George W. Bush should be impeached, he should be. There can be no debate for anyone informed enough about the U.S. Constitution, The Bill of Rights, The Geneva Treaty and the Kyoto Accords for starters to know that he (Bush) considers himself above the law and strives for a Unitary Executive/Dictatorship in which he can give all America's resources to his war-profiteering cronies."

Quote of the Day!

Frank J. Ranelli


“Those that oppose dissent and label opposition as unpatriotic are the same men who seek safe harbor from debate and truth, delivering us into blind nationalism, grand arrogance and empty rhetoric.”

PNAC: Mission Accomplished?

As reported in the Washington Post on June 12, 2006:

The doors may be closing shortly on the nine-year-old Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative think tank headed by William Kristol , former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and now editor of the Weekly Standard, which is must reading for neocon cogitators and agitators.

The PNAC was short on staff -- having perhaps a half-dozen employees -- but very long on heavy hitters. The founders included Richard B. Cheney , Donald H. Rumsfeld , Paul D. Wolfowitz , Jeb Bush , I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby , William J. Bennett, Zalmay Khalilzad and Quayle.

The goal was to continue the Reaganite, muscular approach to projecting American power and "moral clarity" in a post-Cold War world, the group's manifesto said. The targets were liberal drift and conservative isolationism.

PNAC and its supporters dominated the Bush administration's foreign policy apparatus and championed a policy to get rid of Saddam Hussein long before Sept. 11, 2001.

In its famous 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton , PNAC said "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime . . . now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy." Clinton was urged to use all diplomatic, political and military means to topple him.

Despite the happy chatter before the Iraq invasion about cheering crowds and bouquets and cakewalks and how the war was going to pay for itself, the signatories wrote that "we are fully aware of the dangers of implementing this policy."

There had been debate about PNAC's future, but the feeling, a source said, was of "goal accomplished" and it looks to be heading toward closing. Former executive director Gary J. Schmitt , who had been executive director of President Ronald Reagan 's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, left recently for a post at the American Enterprise Institute. (Not a big move. Actually, only five floors up from PNAC.) Still, seems like a short century.

###

If their mission is truly accomplished, which I doubt they are close to being done, a "heckava job" they have done. Let's take a look at a few of their "accomplishments":

- 2,520 American soldiers dead (as of June 27, 2006)
- More than 18,250 soldiers wounded and maimed
- Over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians killed
- 290 Billion dollars spent on an war of lies
- Two deeply divided countries; The U.S. and Iraq
- NSA warrantless, illegal spying on U.S. citizens
- Massive data mining of phone and bank records of U.S. citizens
- Congressional corruption at an unprecedented level (see Tom Delay, et al.)
- Despicable torture of detainee suspects
- A president firmly entrenched above the law (See Bush's lying and ignoring to follow the 1978 FISA law)
- Emasculation of Congress as a co-equal branch of government (See Bush's 750 signing statements)
- Suppression of civil liberties, invasion of privacy & free speech
- Two stolen elections and massive voter fraud
- The Katrina response debacle
- Three dollar per gallon gasoline
- 45 million American's without health care
- Obscene tax breaks for only the ultra-wealthy
- Finally, the re-birth of fascism, American style!

Fine, fine job! Their next project needs to be entitled,
"How to destroy, divide and bankrupt a nation of money and conscience in five, easy years."

(To learn more about the PNAC and their ties with Bush even BEFORE the 2000 election, please see: Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President)

Bush Orwellian Watch

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."

-George W. Bush, Washington, D.C.
June 18, 2002

The Eight People You Will Meet in Hell!

From the Dick Cheney Survival Bible, here is a fitting list of the eight most likely people you will meet in hell:

Alberto Gonzales
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has been Bush's loyal Tio Tomas ever since way back in the earliest days of the Texas governorship. His servitude has been richly rewarded by Bush appointments: from general counsel to then-governor Bush to Texas Secretary of State, then to the Texas Supreme Court, then counsel to President Bush in 2001 and finally to U.S. attorney general in 2005. Demonstrating a Orwellian disregard for the constitution he is supposed to uphold, he dutifully engineered Cheney's torture policy, has covered Cheney's ass by keeping secret the details of his Energy Task Force, and has stood in resolute defense of the administration's warrantless spying on U.S. citizens.

Karl Rove
Karl Rove, White House senior policy adviser and master of the dark arts, is also known as "Bush's brain." He started making a name for himself in 1970 at the age of 19 when he used a false identity to create fake campaign flyers discrediting a competitor. He used the same technique for Bush's run against then-Texas governor Anne Richards implying she was a lesbian, again for Bush's 2000 presidential nomination battle against Senator John McCain implying he fathered a black child out of wedlock, and in the 2004 presidential election, on a grand, electoral scale, putting anti-gay measures on ballots in key states to bait right-wing fundamentalists. Most recently he is said to have illegally leaked the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak, apparently intending to discredit her husband, who had attacked the Administration's evidence used to justify the Iraq war. Rove never let morals or national security get in the way of maligning someone's character.

Katherine Harris
Florida Congresswoman Katherine Harris is the former Florida secretary of state who made sure Bush won in 2000 by stopping the hand recounts. She won her first election to the state Senate in 1994 thanks to illegal contributions from a Florida insurance company and went on to sponsor legislation in 1996 to benefit the company. She was elected in 1998 as secretary of state, a position in which she faced allegations of misconduct because of lavish spending on overseas travel. But nothing matched the conflicts of interest and unethical behavior she displayed in the 2000 presidential election, hiring a firm that purged 65,000 names from the voter rolls and turned hundreds of people away from the polls. The vast majority of them African-American? What a coincidence! Looks like she's now having a tough time in the Florida U.S. Senate race. Even the Bushes have been looking for someone stronger. But they still haven't repaid their debt to her. The vice presidency might be their chance.

Richard Pombo
U.S. Representative for California's 11th Congressional district, Republican Richard Pombo is the nation's No. 1 enemy of the environment. He openly dreams of wiping out the Endangered Species Act, selling off national parks and monuments, handing public lands over to mining companies and drilling for oil off every coastlineÑall for the sake of our children. He portrays himself as a champion of "private property rights" because he has no regard for public lands or the public good. He has been rewarded by several "all-about-me" organizations-Ñthe United States Business and Industrial Council, the National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Chamber of CommerceÑ-for his activism in reducing government regulation, taxation, and spending on all those things that benefit others. He is also author of "This Land Is Our Land," a book that advocates private property rights; the "our" refers to ranchers like him who own the land.

John Bolton
John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made a name for himself in the Bush administration by fighting to exempt the U.S. from the International Criminal Court and torpedoing the enforcement of the Biological Weapons Convention. He also made a name for himself in political circles going out of his way to crush dissent. "He abuses his power and authority with little people," said a former State Department intelligence chief at his Senate confirmation hearing. He wants to move the United States out of the United Nations and the United Nations out of the United States, positions that have earned him the contempt of his peers at the UN.

Bill Frist
Tennessee Senator Bill Frist became Senate Majority Leader after Trent Lott was driven from the position in 2002. Frist is currently under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for having dumped millions of dollars worth of a company's stock which were supposedly in a blind trust two weeks before the company took a huge financial hit. The company happened to be his family's Hospital Corporation of America. Frist is perhaps best known as a physician whose method of performing a medical exam on a brain-dead woman is to watch her on videotape and declare from afar, "Looks good to me." Now that's the type of commitment to quality and integrity we need to replace Cheney.

Rick Santorum
Arch-conservative Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has based his career around family values. Accordingly, as the number three Republican in the Senate, he has worked hard to block any increase in the minimum wage, deny health care for poor families, shift the tax burden from the wealthiest one-half a percent and effectively sabotage public education. And he's been outspoken in his defense of family values from any and all things gay, a word which is for him synonymous with bigamy, polygamy, incest and bestiality. But, hey, he believes that intelligent design is an intelligent alternative to evolution. So he must have evolved intelligently--from what?

Antonin Scalia
Possibly the most evil man in America, the associate justice of the Supreme Court has made it clear that he loathes minorities, women, gays, the American constitution, Democrats, Al Gore, and just about everything else that interferes with his world view, which would be completely at home with some of the villains in The Da Vinci Code. Recently he flipped the bird to journalists in Boston, proving that his manners off the court are as crude as they are on the court.

For more, please visit: The Dick Cheney Survival Bible

Do-It-Yourself Impeachment...

Impeach for Peace, a Minnesota-based impeachment group, has researched a method for impeaching the president using a little known and rarely used part of the Rules of the House of Representatives ("Jefferson’s Manual"). This document actually empowers individual citizens to initiate the impeachment process themselves.

Impeach Bush Yourself Now!

Quote of the Day!

Frank J. Ranelli


"As a nation, we can no longer accept arcane dogma and deception from bellicose, belligerent men too myopic to produce a progressive and peaceful vision of the world. People of this nation must leap beyond logic, accept the unthinkable as not only possible but probable. That ‘probable’ being oppression laced with theocracy has taken root in our nation’s Capitol."

Conduit of Control: Rumsfeld and Cheney’s Quest for Supremacy Exposed

Why the war in Iraq is utterly immoral, illegal and based on a false speculation, trumped-up allegations and shear, utter lies.

Frank J. Ranelli


On June 20, 2006 PBS’ Frontline showcased a scathing and gravely damaging expose’ that took us into the shadows of a dark, brooding war scheme concocted by Vice-President, Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld shortly after 9/11. How after the events of 9/11, “Vice President Richard Cheney seized the initiative. He pushed to expand executive power, transform America's intelligence agencies and bring the war on terror to Iraq.”

Cheney and Rumsfeld, left-overs from another failed attempt at an Imperial America, are aptly painted as sulky, sore-losers after the forced resignation of their then, Commander-in-Chief, Richard Nixon. Both men felt that the executive branch and the office of the president had been emasculated. Over the next two decades, Cheney and Rumsfeld would skulk in relative obscurity, serving in Congress and different cabinet positions for other neoconservative presidents absent a “galvanizing event” that would catapult their perverse cause to the forefront of America’s agenda. 9/11 would change that, catching sleepy Americans and its Congress off-guard. Cheney and Rumsfeld each set forth on an undertaking to reclaim the highest office in the land, rebuild the monarchy of mayhem they had begun with Nixon and the Vietnam War and to solidify the “unitary executive theory” in their latest plant to the presidency, George W. Bush.

Bush, already bellicose and keenly fixated on being a war-time president, deeply disturbed by what he described as “wasted capital” by the elder Bush’s failure to spread a global hegemony during the first Gulf War, became the perfect talking head while Cheney and Rumsfeld “worked from the shadows” to bring the world their latest product borne of the military/industrial machine – the war on terror. As does any other ethereal war, such as Reagan’s war on drugs, it required an antagonist. The chosen adversary would be Saddam Hussein. The same Saddam who, 20 years earlier, the United States helped prop up and fund during the Iran-Iraq war. Now, Saddam would become the centerpiece villain to trot out to the American people, purportedly capable of vaporizing us in a mushroom cloud, compliments of a weapon of mass destruction.

All too malleable was lifetime under-achiever, the newly appointed poster boy for the neoconservatives, George W. Bush. Eager to please and on a “mission from God”, Bush was more than compliant in a Trojan horse charade of tying Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 9/11. The only problem was drudging up enough wobbly evidence to sell the idea of war and blind loyalty to Congress and the American people. Enter George Tennant, the CIA and the “NIE”, an acronym for National Intelligence Estimate. A now dubious report that would be the focal point for Colin Powell’s infamously misleading speech to the U.N. about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction capability. (Later to be proven to have been hastily contrived and poorly researched, leading to the conclusion of Congress that “much of the information turned out to be false” and WMD’s did NOT exist.)

Catching Congress asleep at the switch, freshly baited by the galvanizing events of a national crisis on September 11, 2001, on a vote of 98-1 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House, with only a handful of Congress’ members actually reading the grossly inept NIE, they voted extemporaneously to, “Authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.” Cheney and Rumsfeld now had their trifecta in hand; a go-along-with-the-gig president, the perfect villain in Saddam and Congress’ open-ended invitation to fund an endless war of aggression. The windfall benefit was a busy American public -- suffering from shock and fear, attention deficit and anger and a thirst for blood and revenge.

The result, which the PBS documentary lays to rest ANY doubt of, was a war of aggression with Iraq that was based on colossal lies and fabrications. Saddam clearly had no ties to the 9/11 attacks or Osama Bin Laden. Congress and the American people where lied to and coerced into an unfounded, pre-emptive war -- by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld -- to expand executive power, weaken Congress and spread predatory capitalism and a U.S. imperialist agenda around the world.

The documentary produced by Frontline is not commentary, it's not opinion and it’s not political in nature. Its facts and unfettered truths from the sources that know better than anyone else: CIA operatives that produced and spread the spurious intelligence to bring a pre-emptive war to Iraq, the deaths of thousands of US soldiers and bitterly divided a nation. A war that has cost America its conscience, gave us a dictator instead of a president as a well as hundreds of billions of wasted tax payers dollars. A war that was seen as a galvanizing event, by Vice-President Dick Cheney, to expand war-time presidential and governmental powers and oppress civil liberties under the dark veil of pre-emptive war, propagandized fear and contemptuous, bold lies.

Given such a grand, intricate and well-woven web of deceit, the imprudent rush to rally around the Bush administration with blind patriotism and support an unjust war comes into focus. However, the eyeglass now firmly planted in reverse, critical thinking and a sensible examination of facts, not prideful nationalism and artificially implanted hubris, is required to peel back the endless layers of lies and illuminate the truth. The time is now to lay down your flag, set aside your Bible, suppress your patriotic bravado and open your mind and find out what really happened after September 11, 2001. Every American has the right and the responsibility to learn what YOUR government has been doing the past five years in your name. Each one of us must examine and seriously re-think our views and understanding of the Bush administration’s real ambitions. We are obligated to scrutinize the unmerited war in Iraq, call for the impeachment of Bush and his supporting cast and make it a personal duty to help restore America to a democracy of peace not war. A beacon of hope not fears, a place of progress not oppression and fundamentally free for all.

Learn more and watch the PBS Frontline documentary, The Dark Side, in its entirety at:

FRONTLINE:The Dark Side
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/

(Broadband connection required)