100 Slaves 100 Enemies

Kos responds to a fund raising email from the DNC & Obama.

Really? All we have to do is send the DNC $5 and we get ponies?

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This is so freakin’ obnoxious I can hardly stand it. We are about to get a turd of a “reform” package, potentially worse than the status quo. We have the insurance industry declaring victory, Republicans cackling with glee, and the administration is using that piece of shit to raise money?

via Daily Kos: State of the Nation.

found via Michael Moore on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MMFlint

Usage: President Obama’s decision to send 34,000 more troops into Afghanistan will prove to be a Brobdingnagian calamity.

Brobdingnagian brob-ding-NAG-ee-uhn , adjective; 1. Of extraordinary size; gigantic; enormous. Origin: Brobdingnagian is from Brobdingnag, a country of giants in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Word of the Day | Wednesday, November 25, 2009 | Dictionary.com.

And what exacerbates anti-American sentiment, and therefore the threat of Terrorism? “American direct intervention in the Muslim world” — through our “one sided support in favor of Israel”; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, “the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan”

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We can’t combat Terrorism by sending our military into Muslim countries. Doing that only exacerbates the problem, since it inevitably intensifies the anti-American sentiment that enables and fuels the terrorist threat. All of that is so basic. It’s been empirically proven over and over during the last decade. It’s not Noam Chomsky or Al Jazeera pointing out these basic truths, but instead, a 2004 Task Force handpicked by Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon to review and assess the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism efforts, principally the wars they were waging in Afghanistan and Iraq.

via Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com

Interesting to note that it’s the Republican numbers slipping that are causing the overall all-time low support for the war in Afghanistan. Democrats’ support for the war is at 23%. Why is the Democrat who got elected as president not following his base, but instead obeying the wishes of Republicans who support this war at 62%?

If McCain had been elected, it would have been fair for him to say that he is in Afghanistan, because that’s what his base wants. What’s Obama’s excuse?

That still wouldn’t make our presence in Afghanistan legal, but McCain could at least claim that he’s following democratic principles for deciding whether or not to stay in Afghanistan.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Tuesday morning indicates that 39 percent of Americans favor the war in Afghanistan, with 58 percent opposed to the mission.

Support is down from 53 percent in April, marking the lowest level since the start of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The poll suggests that 23 percent of Democrats support the war. That number rises to 39 percent for independents and 62 percent for Republicans.

“Most of the recent erosion in support has come from within the GOP,” said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director. “Unlike Democrats and independents, Republicans still favor the war, but their support has slipped eight points in just two weeks.”

Poll: Support for Afghan war at all-time low – CNN.com.

Shepard Fairey drops a line about his latest Obama image this time appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone. He makes the valid point that we cannot just sit back and wait for any politician to fix things for us. We have to take action ourselves.

However, I think that the Rolling Stone cover actually illustrates how difficult that will be. Fairey puts all this work and thought into the cover and includes the bold question (pardon me while I close the Netflix pop-up ad that is blocking my view of the web site I am trying to look at), “Will he take bold action or compromise too easily?”

It’s a good question. Unfortunately, I find myself distracted by the little banner Rolling Stone has chosen to put in the upper right hand corner, blocking out part of their own name: MICHAEL JACKSON THE LATEST REVELATIONS.

If I were cynical, I would say, “We’re doomed.” But I’m not so I’ll just say, “Easier said than done.”

Shepard Fairey: Helping Obama Write the Unwritten Future.

New York City has been constructing a park in the sky. What used to be a structure for freight trains that would run overhead has now been transformed into The High Line.

The Beatles catalog has been remastered.

Dean Baker reminds us that anyone who did as bad a job as The Federal Reserve (e.g. causing 10 million people to lose their job) would be fired.

Glenn Greenwald discusses the depressing fact that Attorney General Eric Holder will only be investigating low-level interrogators instead of the authors and enablers of the torture memos. And in an unrelated update at the end of this post Greenwald reiterates:

last month, the Obama White House adopted the Bush/Cheney view of White House secrecy to insist on its right to conceal the identity of coal executives visiting the White House to discuss clean air policies. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent today notes that the Obama White House is now doing something similar but worse: namely, refusing to disclose the list of health care industry executives with whom White House officials have been meeting to discuss health care policy — even as Obama’s vows of “White House transparency” remain on the White House website.