NDAA - Natural Disposition to Apprehend Americans

Meh... Bad title... This whole post is just an excuse to re-post of a Facebook rant I wrote tonight. It has everything to do with this blog, in that our tax dollar supported government is doing shit that is most-certainly not in our best interest... This is far more political than I like to go with this blog, but at least I show that my intent is non-partisan (even though the hate is directed at the current president).

Straight to the rant:

A post and some responses led me to write an Obama is better than Bush comment on a friends wall. In it, I referred to wars and Bin Laden - easy pickin's for a Obama vs. Bush thread. However, with my bent on moderation and the necessity for more political parties and less polarization, I couldn't go out like that. So, I took a minute to articulate my main hate on Obama too. Having finally put words to a thought that has been bugging me for a few weeks, I thought I'd cut'n'paste 'n' share:
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Why Obama should indeed be shown the door:

1.) He is the first president in the history of our great nation that signed a bill into law allowing the federal government to apprehend and detain any one of us as long as they want. The only requirement is that they claim the detention is based on suspicion of "terrorism or supporting terrorists." That he signed it 'reluctantly' is irrelevant. That the current administration may never use this power is irrelevant. That our government can abduct us and make us disappear is unacceptable.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/317046

2.) The federal government has equated cannabis use as terrorism in the past. In an ad ran by the Office of National Drug Control Policy during the Bush years, "Sharing a joint in your friend's back yard" was described as support of terrorism.
http://www.cannabis-marijuana.com/drugterrorist.html

Put 1 and 2 together and we are not that far away from the government rounding up pot heads and detaining them indefinitely, without charges, without the ability to defend themselves in the courts. While this is extreme and highly unlikely, Obama's signature on that bill make this a possibility. That some future administration, in even more polarized times may take up the mantle of ending the war on drugs once and for all, is a possibility that seems unimaginable today.

Again, I point out that we need more options because it is starting to feel like 1984 up in here. With republicans we're screwed, with democrats we're shafted. Either way, I'm not loving it, no matter how many times McDonalds tries to tell me otherwise.
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After reviewing the cut'n'paste, I realized it is a bit centered on cannabis users. While some of the best people I know regularly use cannabis, I'm trying to illustrate the truly profound depth of this law. While it is easy to draw the connection to highlight the contrast between everyone's favorite pot head and people who support terrorists, I'm not just talking about hungry people that don't feel like getting off the couch to find food. The vagueness of the terrorism charges is intense and by being forbidden due process, the government cannot be held accountable. A sitting administration can round up its opposition, claim terrorism, and lock them up. Period. No review. No chance to call bullshit. Nothing. Gone for good with no avenue for recourse.

Not acceptable. We need to be far more pissed off about this than we are. Screw the 99% vs. 1%... The Patriot Act didn't even go this far. This is the kind of thing we expect from China, Russia, or Saudi Arabia. This is not what we expected the founding father's vision of freedom in our country to turn into.

THIS is whyipaytaxes.

Of the people, but not for the people

This is it, folks... We've lost control of our government.

You guys will remember this little thing we liked to call the TARP, right? Everybody got their britches in a bundle over the "unprecedented" amount of $700 BILLION to be loaned to Wall Street to ostensibly avoid worldwide economic collapse.. Nobody liked it, but at that time, Bush was the lamest of ducks with at least one foot out the door and something [supposedly] HAD to be done.

That the economy eventually collapsed in every realistic and measurable way is irrelevant, but I certainly had to bring it up.

Notice my use of the quotes around "unprecedented" in the paragraph above. I use these quotes because there was plenty of precedence. In fact, the very same banks we bailed out were already into us for a LOT more than $700 BILLION at that time!

Prior to the TARP, the Fed had already made loans to the banks at a total cost that amounted to $7.77 TRILLION! In your face, puny little $700 BILLION.

Bullet points. Too frustrated to make paragraphs:

Magnitude

• $7.7 TRILLION is more than half the value of everything our country produced that year
• Our 6 largest banks turned their share into $13 BILLION in profit
• Morgan Stanley alone borrowed enough ($107 BILLION) to pay off a tenth of nation's delinquent mortgages
• Bank of America took $91.4 BILLION of these secret loans while simultaneously taking $45 BILLION from the TARP funds
• Banks that were declared too big to fail grew even larger
  
• Our largest banks enjoyed more profits in the last 2.5 years than they did in the 8 years preceding the crisis
• All the while, they continue to spend MILLIONS lobbying to derail or weaken laws designed to keep them in check
  

Transparency

• The loans to the banks were undisclosed
  
• The profits earned by the banks were undisclosed
• Shareholders, the "owners" of the banks were not told (Where did the profits go?!?)
  
• Taxpayers, the people that have given the authority to the Fed to watch over our money were not told
• Congress, which was actively writing an overhaul to our financial regulatory system was not told
• These loans were provided with no protections or guarantees for the taxpayers
  

THEY LOANED OUR MONEY VALUED AT MORE THAN HALF OF EVERYTHING OUR COUNTRY CAN MAKE IN A YEAR TO PRIVATE COMPANIES WITHOUT EVER TELLING ANYONE! The Fed knew, the Bank Managers knew. Not even the owners of the banks knew!

THIS is whyipaytaxes.
read more:Wall Street Banks Earned Billions In Profits Off $7.7 Trillion In Secret Fed Loans Made During The Financial Crisis(tp)

Alaska v The Environment

You'll remember Bush's bittersweet move to simultaneously point out that even though polar bears are a threatened species because they are losing their natural habitat to global warming there is nothing can be done to save them because no one can sue the mega polluters to deal with the problem. Good times...

Since then, the State of Alaska has been suing to strip the polar bears of their protected status. I'm not sure what their logic is, but apparently having the bears as a protected species is a matter of State interest that deserves a significant amount of its attorneys' attention.

But that is not why I am writing. As it turns out, environmentalists have been more successful at eliminating the special 'no one's fault' rule than Alaska has been at eliminating the threatened species status of the bears. Soon a judge will be making the ruling and it appears that the unique protection against lawsuits will be eliminated and this pisses Alaska off.

So, last month, the State of Alaska approved $1.5 MILLION to develop a campaign to gain broad support from the rest of the country to let the bears perish unchecked.

It must be nice to be the most federally supported state in the Union because it leaves a lot of money lying around to fight the federal government!

THIS is whyALASKANSpaytaxes.

Oil for sale

Now that we've spent $683,942,908,585.08 (according to the zFacts ticker and links to the left at the top of this page at 2:22AM CST) on 'liberating' the Iraqis, its time they start reaping some of this fine Oil Money they been hearin' all about.

What do we get in return? Shoes thrown at us.

The Headline Reads:
Iraqi oil for sale in TV auction(bbc)
A goddamn auction between giants such as Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil for the rights to rape and pillage the land and oil reserves being aired on TV. This must be an exciting moment for them. (The Iraqis) (Well, the suits too...)

Aw fuck it.

THIS is whyipaytaxes.

Here's some fun quotes:
The US budget for Iraq in FY 2007 came to $4,988/Iraqi. This is triple Iraq's per-person GDP. It's like spending $121,000 per person ($484,000 per family of 4) in the US. Why not just bribe the whole country?

"If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem." — George W. Bush, Jan. 2001

What happened to kicking somebody's ass and taking their stuff? All the war, none of the spoils?

Prosecutorial Incompetence

All charges against Alaska's favorite Senator, Ted "Why don't you ask my wife about that" Stevens have been dropped. Turns out, the team on the job from Bush's DOJ dropped the ball, time and again, blatantly. Almost seems as though they tried it. (technically, they didn't try it, but...)

Stevens roams free after decades of trading government contracts for personal favors and now we're paying for a big ol' investigation into the DOJ's incompetence...

This is whyipaytaxes.

On a side note, I sat with a friend this evening who is experiencing the frustration of a prosecutor unable to do his job. I won't go into the whole story and obviously leave out some key details, but...
Basically, this guy got busted on his third DUI 2 years ago. He demanded a jury trial, as is his right, and court date after court date has gone by. Today was to be the Big One, the jury was called and all. But the trial got delayed yet again because the prosecution was unprepared. They still had a few affairs to get in order.
1.) Had HE been the one unprepared, they would have thrown him in jail.
2.) While awaiting trial, he is being forced to submit to regular urine tests, twice weekly. This will not credit him as any sort of probation served.
3.) They called out the jury for that? Man, those must've been some pissed off jury members...

Imagine living your life knowing that on a special date in three months you might go straight to jail. On that special date, they say, well, maybe on this new special date, in three months.

Ya did a heckuva job, Coxie

Like putting a horse breeder in charge of federal emergencies, Bush had also put a guy against regulating wall street in charge of regulating wall street. The results is a federal agency that investigated Madoff several times, but couldn't find evidence of any wrong doing.

One of the weekends in which we went from oh fuck to we're fucked, the weekend the Fed bailed out BearStearns, the head of the SEC couldn't be bothered with silly little financial crises, oh no. Instead he gave a speech at the birthday party of a friend and had to sleep it off the next day. A few days later, he went on his long planned Carribean vacation.

One of the main guys responsible for avoiding financial meltdown was nowhere to be seen as the economy melted down...

THIS is whyipaytaxes.

No Child Left Behind - Mission Accomplished

Tom Toles

War on Drugs - Mission Accomplished

Bush touts successes in fight against drugs(th)
Bush Claims Success In War On Drugs(hp)

Peace in the Middle East - Mission Accomplished

A smattering of todays headlines (12/28/08) from BBCs Mid East and South Asia News Pages provided as evidence of Bush's success at bringing peace and security to the Mid-East. (and a headline from Bloomberg to highlight that in spite of the BILLIONS we've given their military, the Pakistanis are moving their troops FROM the Afghan border where we need 'em TO the Indian border for bullshit posturing)

Massive Israeli air raids on Gaza
Israel set for prolonged Gaza op Israeli F-16 bombers hit targets across the Gaza Strip on Saturday, killing at least 227 people, local medics say. (Guess who sold them the f-16s?)
Taleban 'will kill school girls'
Many killed by Baghdad car bomb
Afghan police die in suicide bomb
Bomber targets Sri Lanka capital
Clashes mark final Kashmir poll
Pakistan MPs urge India restraint
US warning on South Asia tensionThe United States has urged India and Pakistan to avoid unnecessarily raising tension amid reports of troop movements to the border.
India Steps Up Diplomatic Pressure as Pakistan Redeploys Troops (bloomberg)

Just remember, when you hear Bush talk about how he's brought peace and stability, he simply means we haven't had an attack on our soil since the last one. I'll be the first to admit that these headlines weren't directly caused by Bush, but he's the one out there pumping up his legacy. Perhaps if he wasn't spending so much time and resources trying to talk the world into believing he did a bang up job, I wouldn't have felt it necessary to spend this much time pointing out that we're not out of the woods yet...

Bush on His Record(wsj)
"therefore the two-state solution led by a Palestinian Authority that recognized Israel has now come to be."
"broader "freedom agenda" in the Middle East. That agenda, he says, is working, [...] is really the only practical way to provide long-term security"

Bush stands by his time in office(bbc)

‘Good’ progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace: Bush(tin) (12/20/08) Bush said that there has been a “good deal” of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process despite the failed effort to reach a settlement before he leaves office.

(anyone remember in January when Bush actually thought he'd have the Israelis and Palestinians singing Kum Bay Ya by the end of this year because he held a meeting for them in Maryland?)
Bush: Israeli-Palestinian peace possible within a year(th) (1/4/08)

Presidential Media Blitz to point out how good he was, because we would have never noticed it without his help...

THIS is whyipaytaxes:
"In my line of work you gotta keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kinda catapult the propaganda." - Dubya, May 24, 2005

Mission Accomplished

I pay taxes to ensure my C-level frat boy turned president can afford to go strut around the devastation he created talking about how proud he is of causing the devastation. I wonder, if as Air Force One came in for a landing they unfurled a Mission Accomplished banner behind it.

And, I know I'm not 'reporting' a damn thing here, but god bless the Iraqi with the balls to get in Bush's face in spite of how unfurled he had his pretty feathers. (Think peacock)
I like that the second shoe was dedicated to the widows. To me that makes the point right there.

Kudos for Maliki throwing himself into harms way in an attempt to protect dubya from the second shoe... (not sure the point I am trying to make, but I am being sarcastic)

Iraqi Journalist Throws Shoes At President Bush(npr)

A presidential victory lap without a clear victory...

THIS is whyipaytaxes.

P.S.'s:
bbc explains a bit about shoe-ing in the Arabic world

Quotes from the assailant:
Shoe 1: "This is a gift from the Iraqis. This is the farewell kiss, you dog,"
Shoe 2: "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq,"
(Thanks LA Times (not a lot of reporters cared what he actually said!))

Support from commoners around the world. People in every country, including ours admit they wish they could throw their shoes at Bush. (See reader comments, also read comments of related stories at Al Jazeera)

Perhaps I take too much pleasure in this little incident. Perhaps Bush started a war based on lies that has killed hundreds of thousands of innocents. Perhaps my evil enjoyment pales in comparison.

Gee, 20 Nations get together

The leaders of the nations with the worlds largest 20 economies got together over the weekend and had an all around great time putting on a dog and pony show. I mean, it must've been a lavish affair. If the room they met in was as extravagant as this, we must have paid a fortune on their hotel rooms...

Fabulous people in fabulous surroundings, I'll bet there were some pretty fabulous decisions made, decrees declared, and policies instituted, no? Sure they didn't just do this at the UN because no one really needs the poor people to get involved anyway. They're poor, they probably don't even know what economy means...

Here's a summary list of what they 'accomplished' (Leaders welcome G20 action plan(bbc)):
1.) We're gonna reform the IMF and World Bank.
(Bold move. Making changes to a 70 year old bank.)

2.) They've agreed to agree to a world wide free trade agreement by the end of next month.
(Someone should have told these clowns that we've been trying and giving up on trying at the Doha Round since 2001 and just because we squeezed their happy asses into chairs in a square doesn't mean we're magically gonna reach an agreement because they said so.)

3.) We need to improve financial market transparency and force the banks (and other firms) to provide complete and accurate disclosure.
(Nonsense. We can trust them... Though, I guess if 20 clowns sitting in a square say so, maybe we should think about it...)

4.) We're going to come up with incentives for banks that prevent risk taking.
(Do they think they can just make risk go away if they wish it hard enough? Sorry, but the very fabric of our economy is risk. There are no certainties, every business, every decision is a risk. But if you say no more, then...)

5.) Everyone make a list of the institutions in your country that would endanger the world economy if it collapsed.
(Homework? Psshhht, these conferences are so hard! I for one think that if my checking account at Chase collapsed, it would be a catastrophic event. How do I get it on the list of economies waiting for a handout?)

6.) Everyone go home and strengthen your financial regulatory regimes.
(Yes. One thing they've decided to do is: Try Harder.)

7.) I can't even summarize this one. taking a "fresh look" at rules that govern market manipulation and fraud.
(A group of grown men have gotten together to solve a financial crisis and have agreed to taking the bold step of taking a fresh look at the rules. Case closed.)

In a nutshell: We are going to address the worst financial crisis on a scale that most everyone alive today has never seen or even imagined, a critical, highly volatile mess that is destroying the quality of lives each and every day. We are going to address it with mountains of red tape and paper tiger promises. Lets not forget the thousands, perhaps millions of bureaucratic man hours.

I think W. summed it up best in one last sort of middle finger at the world when he made a speech in 'support' of the meeting but basically said this:

You can get 20 assholes into a room if you want, but you ain't gonna get them to agree to anything!

(Actual quote: "Once you make the decision to have the G20, then the fundamental question is, with that many nations from six different continents, who all represent different stages of economic development; would it be possible to reach agreements?"(Leaders welcome G20 action plan(bbc)))

A couple more things:
Why Obama bailed: He's taking every step he can to claim no ownership of the US economy until he is in complete control of it (as much as a President is in control...). By avoiding this circus act this weekend, he is still clear of empty promises and pointless showboating.

It IS a good thing: Don't let me get to cynical. It was a historic meeting and really IS the only way to get shit done worldwide.

G20 postpones tough decisions and fails to calm markets (tab)

Dog and pony shows on a grand scale...

THIS is whyipaytaxes

Did I tell you the one about the judge that walked into a brothel?

Ok... This one is a bit of a stretch, but... ...
I'd like to take a moment to complain about the fact that I pay Justice Antonin "Rectum? Damn near killed 'em!" Scalia a salary. (Anthony? Antonio?) Now there are a great many reasons I might complain of this and this one is far from the worst of them. Hell, this is one of the few times I agree with him...

Scalia, during a hearing considering whether or not 'fleeting expletives' are OK on radio and TV, has made a wise and definitive decision that will forever be hailed as fair and objective for generations to come when he says:
"Bawdy jokes are OK if they're really good."
No can of worms there, just some good solid Justicing.

I won't even go into the cash we dumped on a hearing full of judges and lawyers from the FCC and the Justice Department getting together to argue with each other about whether or not the American people can handle hearing an occasional 7 Deadly: shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker and tits. (Thanks for embedding those into my head George, R.I.P.) They were also sure to take a few minutes discussing Janet Jackson's nipple. I'll bet a couple of Beavis and Butthead style giggles could be heard immediately following the word nipple.

Unrelated other than by this segue: Another salary I'm proud to have paid is that of Mark "Turn the Page" Foley has announced that he is "Trying to find [his] way back." Thank god... We have a whole new batch of pages that haven't been sexually harrassed by Congress yet.

Paying the salaries of morons...

THIS is whyipaytaxes.

The New War

Why isn't anyone talking about the fact that we've recently invaded Pakistan? Even though we have already done raids into Pakistan, but American media seems to be outright ignoring it! Even my beloved NPR made the situation sound hypothetical while talking about it earlier.

Bush 'approved' Pakistan attacksBBC

From the article:
The US has been carrying out regular military air strikes on Pakistan from Afghanistan, but ten days ago US troops carried out a ground assault for the first time.

Pakistan said the raid in South Waziristan was a violation of its sovereignty and summoned the US ambassador to hear a "very strong protest".

If you ask me, and of course, you didn't, I'd say that foreign forces inside of another country killing people counts as some sort of invasion... And the Pakistanis aren't fond of being invaded.

So, yes, W. has technically started another war before he leaves office. I thought Cheney was going to start his war with the Iranians, but you never can tell! (Maybe we'll get both!)

THIS is whyipaytaxes