deadissue.com

Did I call this or what?  Worse than just Iran (in the mail), we’ve got “allies” (rich scumbags in charge of countries full of oil and uneducated, jobless, mosque-folk) now shifting cash reserves from dollars to euros.  Don’t expect this to get a moment of domestic air-time…I’ll keep my eyes peeled for more developments. 

As of right now, Southeast Asia continues to fund the cost of runing our government and a parasitic military industrial complex (over 40% of all federal $ spent), but as others sell off their reserves for euros, the value of what these countries currently hold diminishes.  We can raise interest rates, but whatever it takes to satisfy buyers following a sell-off of dollars will certainly not benefit the United States.      Continue reading →

With a higher cap and McGuinest already going to the Browns, it seemed automatic that Belicheck would have enough cash to lock this guy up.  The franchise tag was used on him in the past, and perhaps that’s the reason he’s going to Indy…regardless, I’m about to drink myself stupid over this.  Cheers.

A shiny gold donkey to whoever knows what inspired me to use this title.

With mid-terms coming up soon, I wanted to share this list I came across at my local library:

• 1933   Unemployment Relief
• 1935   Social Security
• 1938   Minimum Wage
• 1944   GI Bill
• 1945   United Nations
• 1947   Marshal Plan
• 1949   NATO
• 1964   Civil Rights Act
• 1965   Medicare
• 1965   Voting Rights for all
• 1965   Head Start
• 1965   Federal Aid to Education
• 1967   Freedom of Information Act
• 1993   Family Leave Act
• 1990’s   Federal Aid to Education
• 1990’s   BUDGET SURPLUS

By my count, there are quite a few things on this list that the Republican Party is either against or is currently cutting while in power:  Balanced Budgets (let alone creating a surplus), Social Security (GOP has hated this from the jump), Minimum Wage, United Nations (sending Bolton pretty much says it all), NATO (GOP bashed Clinton for participating in NATO missions), Head Start & Federal Aid to Education (funding reduced under Bush)…

This list represents what I’m proud of in terms of being an American, and in a lot of ways, it’s why I vote Democrat in most elections. 

My favorite non-political site on the net.  As wide a variety of music in every format you could imagine.  Here’s a sample, in fact, the newest torrents as of today.  Any music fan will find something to their liking here.  100% legal, free, not for profit and kick ass!  Check It!  And make sure you show your appreciation to the community by keeping your share ratio up.     Continue reading →

I trust that Al Skinner knows what he’s doing, but during most of the game today with Pacific, I was questioning how he could leave the freshman Rice out there, especially after the kid had taken bad shots, turned it over several times…OK, but I’m a fan, on my couch…and in the second overtime, Rice hit his first three after five misses, and BECAUSE Skinner left him in there, the next few years of BC basketball will be better than if he hadn’t.  Sean Marshall, starting 2, had run cold since the North Carolina game in the ACC tourney, one basket for the junior, who I was crying to be sent back in from 5 minutes left in the 4th quarter, throughout the two ovetimes. 

That’s why I’m on the couch and Skinner is…

Without the money for a dish, I’m at the will of the local station, and at first it upset me that Nevada-Montana wasn’t shown, but then Winthrop ended up giving #2 seeded Tennessee a run for their money.  Should have won actually, if it wasn’t for a phenomenal shot at the end…in fact, neither team deserved to win based on the last 5 minutes. 

GOOD MONEY:  Take Witchata St. over Tennessee in the next round…the spread will be less than 5 (my estimation), and Tennessee isn’t doing ANYTHING this year! 

I’m a father (this is Chris), Right Thinker is a father…generally you’ll find the two of us engaged in a literal knife-fight, but every once in a while it’s important to call ‘truce’ and take a moment to celebrate…

Sweet sweet Susan with her daddy

 More pictures of Susan Byrne: Continue reading →

This interlude between conference tournaments and the dance has opened up my curiosity concerning one subject in particular, the Iraq War. 

If you asked most insiders prior to his election in 2000, “How much expertise and wisdom will Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld bring to the table in terms of national defense and foreign conflict?”, the answer would be “a lot”.  What Bush did back then was the right thing, as the best thing an executive can do for himself is to surround him/herself with competent people who know what the job is and how to get it done.  He put his faith in these two people who he had known and looked up to for many years, and who’s to say that had any of us lived in his shoes, that we wouldn’t have made the exact same choices? 

Because the Iraq War is failing, but the more I read, the more I’m becoming convinced that it wasn’t the mistakes that were made along the way as much as the mission was impossible to begin with.  Given an invasion with the ‘proper’ amount of troops, subtract the Abu Gharib debacle and let’s say that even half of the graft that’s taken place didn’t happen…it’s still unlikely that this mission would ever have succeeded. 

Most of this has to do with the arbitrary lines drawn, which initially made Iraq the country it is today, having crunched together three ethnic groups who probably never wanted to be nationalized together in the first place.  Then you add in decades of the minority group in power, a reality that will never be forgotten by the Kurds and Shiites whose families suffered under the arrangement, and the chances of bringing these people together at all, let alone at gunpoint, was undeniably risky from the start. 

How would Bush have known all of this?  Well, he might have listened to his father and Powell instead of Cheney and Rumsfeld, but let’s not forget that the neoconservatives had been writing about how easy it would be to accomplish this mission for years.  The division began when Bush Sr. decided against invading Iraq following the first Gulf War, and the folks who thought we should have, they never stopped talking and writing about it. 

Bush was convinced that his father was wrong and that it would be possible to topple Saddam and install a democratic government, while also having the US cost covered by Iraqi oil revenue, that they would be happy to provide seeing as we liberated them.  We all know how it turned out, and subsequently the pages of National Review and The Weekly Standard have sworn off neoconservatism as a failure.  The political heavies like William Buckley have called the effort a failure, and ideas are shifting towards another ‘great idea’, most likely having to do with with something other than education, health care or national debt. 

Regardless of all this, Bush trusted in the ‘ideas’ of these men he grew up admiring, and in his shoes it most likely seemed like the only thing to do.  He was duped.  I hope he figures this out sometime soon. 

For quite a long time Iran was under wraps, defeated by Hussein in the 80s after their army was attacked with weapons that literally melted the flesh right off of their bodies. Like an ‘old time religion’ story, fire fell from the sky and the people were terrified, resigned to return home and mind their own business for a while. And so it went for a number of years, with Saddam to the west, under pressure from the rest of the world to prove that he didn’t have any more of the ‘Sodom and Ghamorah’ juice in stock, meanwhile speaking deceptively in ways that made Iranians think he still did. It was this threat that kept Iran under control for about 20 years, and thanks to the United States of America, the monster and his liquid fire are no longer a threat. Listen to the words of our leaders, and you’ll hear them celebrating Iraq’s liberation and the freedom we so graciously rewarded them with in 2003. Knowing how little anyone involved in the planning of this war actually understood these people, their religious, cultural and historical differences, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the southern majority of Shia feel a stronger connection with Iran than the people of their own country. And why should it be any other way? How many mosques have to be blown up before it dawns on them that Sunni-Shiite love is more of a pipe dream than reality? American optimism causes me to rethink this last question, but then I simply remember the number of stories I’ve read in the past few weeks where one side or the other has lined up twenty or so fellow Iraqis and executed each one of them with a gunshot to the head. Shiites awoke a couple days ago to find four of their own, executed with gunshots to the head, then strung up with rope and hung by the neck in the center of town for everyone to wake up and see. Morticians in Baghdad have been threatened with death in recent weeks, saying that if they were to release the number of corpuses delivered to them with gunshot wounds to the head, they’d end up on the pile. And as our ’stay the course’ brain-dead-elite split hairs on what does or does not constitute a ‘civil war’, the heavies back in Iran are sitting back, enjoying translated episodes of Seinfeld, waiting for America’s money to dry up. Of course they’re supplying arms, explosives and forged ballots to Shiites, but those acts are mere drops in the bucket compared with the daily bleeding of 2 billion or so dollars out of the pockets of future generations in America. Clearly, time is Iran’s best friend now, while reality has become the United States’ worst enemy. Likely anticipating air strikes, a special brand of cowardice perfected by America, I’m probably safe in saying that the leaders of Iran could care less whether they come or not. Civilian casualties don’t really matter to either side of this potential conflict, and regardless of who dies or how many, Allah’s bound to remain alive and well for many years to come. And that’s what’s really important here, that in the end everyone’s able to get down on his or her knees and know for a fact that ‘their God’ is pleased. Well, it’s either that or something to do with pipelines and whether or not oil is traded globally in dollars or euros. Buried amongst piles of stories pointing out what everyone already knows, that Iran is insane and the Iraq war is not going well, there was a piece I read that had to do with Iran deciding to trade their oil in euros rather than in dollars. And this is the point where religion, IEDs, dirty money and nukes go right out the window. Because if oil were to be traded in euros rather than dollars all of a sudden, this entire effort, from the shady diplomacy of the 80s, to Desert Storm, to our current situation in Iraq, becomes an undeniable failure all at once. If this possibility hits the mainstream press, and Iran is determined to make such a change, you can nuke up a bag of popcorn and get ready for another instalment of ’shock and awe’. Because push and shove are quickly approaching, and Iran has become much too in love with itself in the past year. Yes, America delivered to them a gift they had once thought only the death of Saddam could produce, and like a new sports car, they’re still out there trying to see how fast it will go before the engine blows. In the meantime, all of us should take some time and consider whether or not we’re comfortable with loving Iran as much as they love us right now.

Four years into his trial and he’s stiff before the verdict is decided.  The law, growing at all times, appears to be complicating quite a lot these days.  In fact, experts predict that by the year 2030 it would take approximately 38 years to complete a trial of this magnitude.  

My attraction to the law is such that my primary goal is to never have to step foot in a courtroom.  I can read, and therefore will appreciate this phenomenon from a distance. 

But back to the dead prick experiencing rebirth as a penguin this very moment…Russians are being told that he was poisoned, and knowing how easily they’re taking the restoration of Stalin’s memory currently on full blast, it might only be a few years before they’ve got the Russian population programed well enough to staff a respectable set of death squads.  A self-affirming sence of unity that provides dissidents a timely death to look forward to for not pledging allegience to the flag and REALLY meaning it deep down, from the heart all the way out to the tips of every hair on your body (Moscow has developed a device that can determine this, it beeps, has a couple of lights). 

Nationalism to the tune of “Stalin and Milosevic got a raw deal”…if a poll is done that says up to half of the Russian population backs up this sentiment, will we assume that it’s because they’re worshiping Allah?   

Deadissue.com…Journalism, Journalism…Deadissue.com

OFFICIAL SAYS SHIITE PARTY SUPPRESSED BODY COUNT   By Ellen Knickmeyer  Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 9, 2006; Page A01

Vanity Fair got Abramoff to sit down for a while, with all his documents, photographs and whatnot…here’s the segment I got my hands on:

Newt Gingrich, whose spokesman Rick Tyler tells Margolick that “Before [Abramoff’s] picture appeared on TV and in the newspapers, Newt wouldn’t have known him if he fell across him. He hadn’t seen him in 10 years.” A rankled Abramoff says “I have more pictures of [Newt] than I have of my wife.” Abramoff shows Margolick numerous photographs: “Here’s Newt. Newt. Newt. Newt. More Newt. Newt with Grover [Norquist, the Washington conservative Republican Über-strategist and longtime Abramoff friend] this time. But Newt never met me. Ollie North. Newt. Can’t be Newt … he never met me. Oh, Newt! What’s he doing there? Must be a Newt look-alike.… Newt again! It’s sick! I thought he never met me!”

Abramoff saying something doesn’t really equal much in my mind, but when the guy has pictures, it really looks bad.  This article is going to be a doozy!  (available outside of NYC and LA on the 14th)

This month’s ‘Itchy’ goes to a collection of very rich men whose contribution to my peace of mind has been a disaster this past week.  Making money hand over fist, they now insist that the percentage of revenue going to the players does not move from around 56%, where it’s been for quite a while now already.  Nobody will dispute that NFL players have it worse than any other American professional sports atheletes.  No guaranteed contracts, restrictions on movement, club’s ability to franchise one player per year and of course, the fact that once injured badly, the team has ways to get out of paying in the long run. 

With this in mind, a compromise of 58% would have been acceptable last week most likely, but when you’re dealing with people who look like this:

I’m counting on Bob Kraft to take one for the team here and figure out how to get a deal done, but he’s only one man.  Having taken the lowest revenue franchise, a perenial laughing stock – the Patriots – and doing what he’s done with it, I can completely understand his reluctance to further cut up the pie with owners who have no clue, but the league is only going to survive if those with more not only do what’s best for themselves, but for the NFL as a whole.

Issue #1 is the player revenue percentage and Issue #2 is big markets kicking profits to teams like Arizona.  Since the league is showing no signs of slowing down popularity-wise, assumption should be that revenue will increase year to year, and by 2011 (the next labor talks), 58% might feel like a bargain. 

Seriously…if half of the NFL owners died tomorrow, there would be businessmen there to take over in no time.  Without the players, there is no league! 

On the first deadissue.com post concerning the UAE ports deal, the question ‘why’ was asked within the thread and my answer was:

”WE HATE UNIONS” is the motto of the Bush presidency.

I was disagreed with, and we all know that during the first week of this story, unions weren’t brought up or part of the most used talking points from either side.  To me, it seemed like the unions were pretty much all it was about at first, then the tidal wave of babble hit…and the unions were still the first thing I thought of.  “Management” of the ports means just that, and who better to stick it to organized labor than a company run by foreign dictators?  Indeed, it made too much sense. 

Alas, the year 2006 is an election year, and while a GOP dominated Congress has exhibited a ‘reward executives/ignore workers’ tendency, to come out and actually say that they were against dockworkers unions would most likely be the final nail in the coffin.  Clearly, the only way RNC talking points would contain any mention of unions is if everything else had failed to get the job done.

Karl Rove even distanced himself from the decisionmaking behind this deal with UAE, because the last resort (bringing up the unions) has a snowball’s chance in hell of saving the day.  It’s been a no-win issue since the first story was written on it…regardless, the cult went ahead and served the kool-aid:

Nobody cares…cliche is easy for an actor, you’re not fooling anyone.  Act like you’ve BEEN THERE…take a page out of Richard Seymour’s book…

“GOT A BROKE BACK?  GET A MATTRESS AT SLEEPY HOLLOW IN AMHERST”  (ad’s on once an hour, 3 seconds)

Having to deal with all that…

Watching the documentary of Cash Playing San Quentin on CMT and it hits me, this idea that they’ve got scripts, budgets and perhaps actors already selected just waiting for the most famous living Americans to kick the bucket.  How creepy would it be if Jamie Foxx somehow already knew he had the Ray Charles role before the guy actually died? 

One of the perks that comes with living in a blue state is the amount of information I’m provided prior to purchasing food for my family.  Generally I try to steer clear of products heavy with preservatives, use fresh ingredients whenever I can and always go with fish caught at sea rather than grown in a farm.  One Discovery Channel documentary on farmed seafood would convince anyone reading this to do the same, but hey, it’s only what we’re putting into our body, so what’s the big deal, right?

States determine what information must be provided to consumers, but with WalMart having become the nation’s top grocery seller and a Congress more apt to operate as an extension of the market than respresentative of the people, the lobbists have finally managed to get legislation in the works to strip the states of this right:

“This bill would strip state governments of the ability to protect their residents through state laws and regulations relating to the safety of food and food packaging,” the attorneys general wrote.
The obvious target, they said, is California’s Proposition 65, a law passed by voters requiring companies to warn the public of potentially dangerous toxins in food. The law has prompted California to file lawsuits seeking an array of warnings, including the mercury content in canned tuna and the presence of lead in Mexican candy.

Oh, the poor food producers.  Forget about someone like me who actually takes the time and purchases certain good based on where it comes from or how it’s made, consumers are there for the corporations, not the other way around!  That’s the message if this bill passes, and from then on when I go to the store to buy haddock, shrimp or salmon, it’ll be a spin at the roulette wheel as to whether or not the fish lived out it’s life surrounded by it’s own waste and that of the other 50 abominations it’s lived a cramped life amongst. 

Republicans, this is what they’re all about unfortunately.  Watch this thing pass with flying colors, and then we’ll have politicians and food-sponsored reports from think tanks all saying that farmed seafood pumped with steroids is just as good as what you’ll find in the ocean.  Like global warming, many many idiots across the country will see someone of authority, wearing their team jersey, telling them that it’s all a ‘hoax’.  Soon, if you doubt the methods of the food America produces, you’re unpatriotic.   

Not the toughest thing adjusting to, but when a traffic light in the center of town is still blinking yellow a week after it went first went out, reality sets in like a big soft Vilseck-Hampstead-Macadamia Nut cookie.  Questions spring up two or more times a day when I hit the once safe intersection now hooked on mayhem, turning us all into raccoon-eyed junkies, tapping the gas and thinking twice, again, again, “FUCK!”, again, again…

Something I love about deadissue.com and blogs in general is that a spoof topic like ‘Faking Your Own Death’ can somehow spawn a debate on abortion, of course after veering into the rhelm of animal rights and whether or not we should kill bears. 

This is a topic that has a special way of affecting each of us emotionally, and for as long as I’ve been alive on this earth, nothing seems to get the blood boiling quite like a good ol’ fashioned abortion debate.  My own experience as a militant pro-lifer provided a cause I was able to champion outside the rhelm of numbers or facts, and as I grew older and further away from fundamentalist religion, numbers and facts gained more and more relevance with each passing year.

As a society, policy effects us as a whole and at times individually.  The policy question as I see it in terms of abortion is ‘legal or illegal’.  My position is based entirely on the statistics available, and here are a few samples of what happens when abortion is criminalized:

For proof that criminalizing abortion doesn’t reduce abortion rates and only endangers the lives of women, consider Latin America. In most of the region, abortions are a crime, but the abortion rate is far higher than in Western Europe or the United States. Colombia – where abortion is illegal even if a woman’s life is in danger – averages more than one abortion per woman over all of her fertile years. In Peru, the average is nearly two abortions per woman over the course of her reproductive years.

In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.

It’s a matter of science to me, and the day someone on the pro-life side of the argument can produce a study or example somewhere else in the world where abortion is illegal and it doesn’t adversely affect society as a whole, it’ll be a first.  Continue reading →

Driving my wife’s car today, I listened to a good deal of talk radio, and my brain is feeling the squeeze.  Sean Hannity was discussing the UAE port deal with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and the discussion was something I hadn’t experienced in right-wing talk in a long time.  Both agreed that the simple argument that one private corporation from the UK cannot be compared with one run by a Middle East dictatorship.  Bush’s primary defense has been to label those who oppose the deal as being racist against Arabs, and as far as he’s concerned, every bit of data we have available to compare the UK and UAE in terms of freedom of the press, civil rights, etc. don’t apply.  Basically his position ignores the fact that the United Arab Emirates is a country that posts a lowest possible score when it comes to human rights, as well as the fact that it’s government has supported Osama Bin Laden and Al Quada.  Looked at side by side with his “you’re either with us or against us” statement regarding the War on Terror, there’s absolutely no spin imaginable that could square his position with reality.  Sean Hannity of all people believes in what I’ve just written here 100%, and said so over the radio about fifteen minutes ago. 

That said, his criticism of the deal is characterized politically as a mistake based on having not brought more people into the discussion beforehand.  The mistake basically being that the negotiations were done out of the public’s view, and that dissenting points of view were ignored along the way.  Nevermind the fact that Bush-Cheney have made every single critical decision since gaining power in this same exact way, in Hannity’s opinion, the fact that Democrats are politicizing this deal is what he’s most angry about. 

Think about that for a second now.  His position, as well as many on the right-wing, is that the deal should not go through and that the President is wrong, yet somehow it’s equally wrong for the minority party to use it for political gain?  What are Democrats supposed to be doing?  They disagree with the policy, voice their dissent, are agreed with by almost everyone on the other side of the aisle, but shouldn’t gain any political points at the same time? 

Alright, I’m talking about someone as partisan as they come, but how can anyone rationally disagree with this decision and not walk away from it questioning: 

1. Where President Bush’s loyalty lies, with the people or his business associates 
2. How serious Bush really is about spreading freedom and democracy, with it being so easy to overlook an ally’s human rights abuses
3. How many other decisions have be made based on similar values, like have been exposed here

You can’t have it both ways.  Politically you either have to support this deal for the sake of the President, who you truly believe in – OR – disagree and accept the fact that political ground is going to be lost because of it. 

Because the larger issue here has nothing to do with ports or security, but the idea that a corporation is somehow a higher entity than a government.  In Iraq the conservative vision has been put in place, with a 15% flat tax and an idea that the Iraqi citizens should not look towards government for services and protection, but instead to the coporations that operate within their communities.  That being the case, electricity cannot be counted on consistently for more than 8-12 hours a day in some areas, drinking water is not widely available and the corporations that were supposed to fill in these gaps are acting consistently with what we all understand to be a corporation’s nature…to make money!  Not the fault of these business entities that they were assumed to have the ability or desire to provide what a government should, the very concept of what a government should and should not provide it’s people is the issue here.

So of course a third world dictatorship with a horrible human rights record is seen with the President’s eyes as entirely seperate from the corporation they own and operate.  It’s the ideology that’s been bought into by the right-wing of our country for decades now.  Continue reading →

Cartoons, your version of Islam is 1% different than mine, western culture is making me horny and I don’t like it…whatever your reason for becoming a mass murderer, may I offer a bit of advice?  Get to work on killing the royal families already!  Monarchy had it’s day, and mankind has since evolved. 

Believe it or not, mass amounts of people realized one day that if they all just work together, they can kill off every last member of the royal family and finally get a chance to run their own country.  You’ve got the killing part down, but like Europe in the 100 years war, you’re stuck in the cycle of ‘kill that person over there because my king and his holy advisor said it was a good idea’. 

Never realizing that both the king and his holy advisor are stealing food from your table, as they did to your parents and their grandparents before them, it’s obvious that a lack of education is to blame here.  These people in the Middle East and some parts of Africa simply fail to grasp the whole ‘strength in numbers’ concept. 

The same can be said for their apparant inability to realize that ‘spiritual leader’ can and does often equal ‘greedy bullshit artist’.  Here in America we just recently uncovered an entire generation of priests who were having sex with the altar boys and getting away with it.  While that’s horrible, it’s been years since American preachers have been able to convince people to riot.  In fact, the last uprisals inspired by religion here involved non-violent protest. 

With that in mind, Ghandi was busy smacking around the Brittish empire using that exact same method over 50 years ago, and here you folks are still killing your neighbors like it’s the year 1200!  It’s time to step back and realize for once that a common enemy does exist, and regardless of what you’re hearing down at the mosque, it’s not your fellow peasant countryman. 

It’s the rich folk who’ve been keeping you down for centuries.  People of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Pakistan, Egypt…it’s time to smarten up and get real about this thing called life.  Your leaders have been playing you for fools for hundreds of years now, and it’s high time reality played a roll in the violence over there.  Your kings don’t care about Allah, they care about money.  It’s never going to change unless you take them out.

America isn’t going to solve your problems, neither is Allah.  We do more to keep these people in power than any other nation in the world.  As far as we’re concerned, if the oil stays cheap, your royal families can keep you down forever.  Torching an oil field, a neighbor’s house or their mosque isn’t the answer.  

Demand education, jobs, security, clean water and uninterupted electricity.  When your leaders fail to provide these things, if you can’t vote them out of power, take them out the old fashioned way!  That’s what we did here in America in 1776, and look where we are now.