US rejects UN call to abolish death penalty

GENEVA — The United States dismissed international calls Tuesday to abolish the death penalty as friends and foes alike delivered their recommendations on how Washington can improve its human rights record.

“While we respect those who make these recommendations, we note that they reflect continuing policy differences, not a genuine difference about what international law requires,” Koh told the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council.

Makes me ashamed of my country.

We do not consider patriotism desirable if it contradicts civilized behavior.
Friedrich Durrenmatt

I was sadden to discover that Bush would not be visiting my fair city on his “Interview with a sociopath” book tour. And before you accuse me of delusional name calling, read this:

Antisocial personality disorder is specifically a pervasive pattern of disregarding and violating the rights of others. Diagnostic criteria for this disorder state that this pattern must include at least three of the following specific signs and symptoms:

* A lack of feeling guilty about wrong-doing

Only takes three for a diagnosis? The Bush years were all of these on parade, in glorious high def on our TV screens every night. I could link to examples of each, but there is no need. Either you understand that we tolerated- nay, exalted- a monster in our midst, or you don’t. Either you gritted your teeth in ashamed rage at what passed for American values for those eight years, or you slept comfortable in your xenophobic blindness, thankful that daddy was fighting the bad guys.

I recall sitting silently in a crowd watching the grotesque cable news dramedy that surrounded the death of Gerald Ford, a punchline of a president, feeling repulsed that we were supposed to lionize a man who let Nixon walk, and green-lighted the genocide in East Timor. It was 2006, and you’d think by then my ability to be repelled by our national spectacle of ignorance would have been used up; after two stolen elections, two illegal wars and of course the off Broadway version of the Reichstag Fire, but no, I was still able to feel disgust, indignation, and shame at what most around me accepted as normal.

I feel the same today watching George Bush parade his personality disorder across the country, sitting down with Oprah or Matt Lauer, uttering statements such as “Damn right! I committed a war crime” or how his lowest moment of his Presidency was having his racism acknowledged in the public square by a rapper. These are the words of a sociopath, a person devoid of a moral code and completely lacking empathy for his fellow man, but if you mention that he wears the Emperor’s New Clothes of a war criminal, people look at you as if you are completely deranged. But they think this guy is a patriot.

It is seductive to ponder just getting over it, as if such a thing were possible. How I wish that I could just simply not care that our nation is less a functioning democracy but rather a cult of personality , subject to the greedy whims of the grifter ruling elites (thanks, Matt Taibbi), forced to accept as reasonable and sane petty despots such as grandstanding nitwit Darrell Issa, who of course sat on his hands for eight years while Bush ran roughshod over the world, Cheney committed treason, and our national wealth was loaded-figuratively and literally onto pallets and handed off to the richest among us.

Yes, I’m sad that Bush won’t be signing books in my town. I would hope that for $35 and a wait in line I could stand face to face with the man, summon my inner Kayne, and tell him that not all of us are fooled, that some of us recognize him to be a disturbed tyrant who should be hung from the neck till dead. That he made me ashamed to be American, if he was what the world saw when our flag got raised. To tell him that if there was any justice in the world, his final days would be full of the same suffering he visited upon Fallujah.

But for that they would consider me uncivilized.

Are you surprised that these programs are under attack? The same forces that went after the unions in the 1980s, that relentlessly pushed free-trade agreements while manufacturing jobs evaporated, and that destroyed housing values in the 2000s— they’re on the prowl again. If Social Security and Medicare are cut, finance and insurance companies will skim the cream—the wealthier, healthier participants—while leaving everyone else to fend for themselves. Social Security and Medicare, they think, are easy prey, once we’ve been softened up by scare stories about how they’re on the “brink of bankruptcy” and we “can’t afford them.”

It isn’t true, of course. Social Security and Medicare can’t go bankrupt, just as the Pentagon can’t. They’re not in some separate bank account or lockbox—they’re government programs that we either choose to pay for or don’t. And not only can we afford them, they’re a bargain, providing modest comfort and decent care to people who would otherwise financially burden their families—or die.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
George Orwell

Rand Paul will probably, amazingly, be the next Senator from Kentucky. How nice of him to give us a glimpse of what to expect once he and his ilk are installed in the corridors of power.

Now I know full well- or at least I hope- that Rand Paul didn’t give marching orders to his goon squad to stomp Move On.org activists heads on the curb, but you’re known by the company you keep. In this case, an overzealous nitwit who, ironically, is known for wearing “Don’t Tread on Me” stickers, who is high in Paul organization, did the dirty work.

But don’t think that this person was an alone in thinking Lauren Valle deserved to get her head stomped:

She’s a professional leftist activist.

And what did this oh so scary “professional activist” do that makes her a candidate for such a violent reaction? Oh heavens, she protested oil companies in Louisiana after the spill- as all sane people should have. She graffitied an Alaskan bound oil tanker. In short, she gives a shit. And this, according to some, justifiably provokes a physical reaction.

The Tea Partiers spout all sorts of chin music about “liberty” and “freedom”, but when the rubber meets the road (or the spray paint hits the oil tanker) they suddenly find sedition in every word. These are people who pee themselves over “Sharia law” but insist that children should be allowed to pray in schools- but only to that lily white hippie looking dude in the picture on the wall, of course. They call rebroadcasting their own words akin to terrorism.

These are thugs. These are people who sat silent for eight years as the Texas Tyrant ran roughshod over our Constitution, cranked up fear campaigns to ensure public support for his illegal wars of conquest, gutted the regulatory infrastructure that keeps us safe, and pandered to Bible waving nitwits. No, all these valiant patriots sat silent until a Negro got elected, and then suddenly the Tea Party sprang into life, all ready to protest a man who is simply Bush, 2.0.

Now, the only good I see in the prospect of a Rand Paul or Sharon Angle getting elected is roughly that which I see occurring now with Obama supporters, basically, that these people are going to wake up a year or so down the road and realize hey, these people we voted for, volunteered for, they haven’t done a thing they’d say they would do. And hopefully that disgust will translate into them investigating who actually runs this country- that would be Wall Street and the military- and working to change that.

But frankly, I don’t hold out much hope for the Tea Party. Their entire driving force is fear of demographics. They were raised in a country (or so they were allowed to believe) that was just like they- white, heterosexual, and conservative. That world never really existed except in raw numbers, and now even that numerical advantage is slipping away. By 2050, non-whites will make up half our population. And that terrifies the aging whites- “The Real America” in the words of Gov. Half Term. They see the writing on the wall (or the oil tanker, as it were). A black man as president. Pot to be legal. Gays to marry. A mosque down the street. Their jobs are gone- not because Obama did anything, of course, but because every president since Reagan has allowed big business in this country to dodge taxes and regulations in a mad dash for profits. Profits that they then hoovered out of the system, gutting America. And they are mad. And scared.

Scared enough to stomp a “professional Leftist”s head to curb.

Forever.

One out of every 34 Americans who earned wages in 2008 earned absolutely nothing — not one cent — in 2009.

Ponder on that.

And this:

Johnston writes that while the number of Americans earning more than $50 million fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 in 2009, those that remained at the top increased their income from an average of $91.2 million in 2008 to almost $519 million.

The wealth is astounding, says Johnston. “That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!… These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.”

We have been robbed. And it ain’t over yet.

The documents were not sloppy and they were not processed sloppily. They were created and treated exactly as planned. They did it because they thought they could get away with it. They had enough money to buy off any legislator or Judge, or so they thought. But it isn’t working out that way. It’s not the first time these mega-banks have stepped on a land mine and it won’t be the last, as long as we allow them to grow into such behemoths such that that ascribe to themselves the qualities of government or God.

Billions of dollars stolen, thieves in plain sight. Anyone wanna wager on the odds of anyone going to jail? Hell, we bought a house this year, might want to check on our paperwork…who knows?

Continue with Why The Paperwork Appears “Sloppy”

Feds searched Daily Kos, NPR for threats to Obama, memo reveals

In the lead-up to President Obama’s inauguration, federal investigators conducted a major sweep of online social networks in search of threats.

Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of “friends” link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know. This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.

Just what “fraudulent activities” would those be, you think? Seeing as how Obama had the feds target supposed liberal groups, he wasn’t looking for “threats”…but rather, anyone discussing his regime in a negative light. And now we find this out? On the eve of an election where his party, gelded as they are, face getting their clocks cleaned by a bunch of hot topic half wits who have less interest in governing than my dog? Why now?

Chilling effect : situation where speech or conduct is suppressed by fear of penalization at the interests of an individual or group.

Mortgage Mess May Cost Big Banks Billions

After scratching their heads for weeks over how much the foreclosure mess will hurt banks’ bottom lines, investors got out their calculators Thursday to tally the potential costs — and sent bank stocks plunging.

Inside the investment houses, several traders said nerves were frazzled further by worries that banks could face much bigger mortgage related losses, not from foreclosures, but because of questions about how the money was lent in the first place. If it turns out that mortgages were bundled together and sold improperly, more holders could sue the banks and force them to buy back tens of billions in mortgage-backed securities.

Add to this the millions of vacant strip malls, office parks, and half-built, never finished, never should have been started buildings sitting dormant and not generating any income, and you have the makings for an even larger meltdown of our financial system than we saw before.

Wonder how much its gonna cost us this time? How much can Wall Street extort from us- for their own fuck up?

Ann Coulter may face voter fraud charges: report

An elections commission in Connecticut will soon decide if conservative pundit Ann Coulter will face felony charges over allegations of voter fraud in the 2002 and 2004 elections, reports Brad Friedman at BradBlog.

The State Elections Enforcement Commission will vote Oct. 14 to decide whether to pursue charges based on a complaint made by Daniel Borchers, an activist with Citizens for Principled Conservatism. Borchers cited a report in the New York Daily News alleging that Coulter illegally voted in Connecticut in the 2002 and 2004 elections by way of absentee ballot from her home in New York.

Ah yes. Head cheerleader for the political movement that has no regard for democracy at all. Typical.

Spent the weekend in the Big Apple, and plastered everywhere were signs admonishing the citizens to turn in suspicious behaving persons or packages.

Guess NOLA just don’t give a shit:

FBI, DHS, New Orleans police ignore citizen bomb warning

Despite global terrorism jitters and the ubiquitous homeland security plea to “Say something if you see something,” New Orleans police, the FBI and DHS all ignored the repeated warnings of a concerned citizen Tuesday about a large, unattended suitcase in the city’s famed French Quarter.

“Nobody answered after 15-20 rings,” he said, so he hung up.

Read the rest of it for a prime example of security Kabuki.