'TORTURE MEMOs'
I voted for Obama, thinking he would get us out of Iraq, thinking he would pursue criminal charges against the Bush regime for torture policies (see the TORTURE MEMO---how would you like your son or daughter to be subject to that cruel and inhuman treatment?) and spying against the citizens of the U.S.

I was wrong. Obama seems hell bent to appease the Republicans and drink their tea.

With such policies of continued appeasement of criminality and ignoring the law, we have everything to fear.

Jim

Deliverance from the Fox in the Hen House
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The verge of bankruptcy brought me to California. Spurred by a boom-and-bust cycle in western Colorado, packing up the kids and the trailer and moving further West was the only way to survive.Looking back now, dueling banjos play the tune from "Deliverance" in my head, providing levity -- for a brief moment. But the parallels between then and now are no laughing matter.
Place: Western Colorado.
Time: Early 1980s.
Political situation: Arab oil embargo; President Jimmy Carter initiated the Synfuels Corporation -- a publicly-funded investment bank designed to free Americans of dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
Plan: Pump 88 Billion dollars of tax payer's money into Synfuels to encourage domestic fuel production. In Colorado, it was oil shale, a sedimentary rock that can be heated to release hydrocarbons that can be distilled into synthetic oil.
Problem: Heads of major oil companies flooded into Grand Junction with joy abundant, an implausible plan, and both hands held out. Trusting those in the oil industry to find alternative forms of domestic fuel was not a good idea. Jimmy Carter trusted the fox to guard the hen house.
Thus, the oil shale industry was born, bringing tens of thousands of people and hundreds of businesses to western Colorado. By golly, it was a boom! Towns with names such as Rangeley and Rifle were born -- prosperity for all! Reporters were silent.
But this is where the Rorschach test pattern, which looked like a picture of progress and hope at first, began morphing into demonic ink blots painting a long-term picture of despair. We reporters had not put the pixels together...yet.
Ronald Reagan got elected, proclaiming big government was the problem, not the solution, and some key government subsidies were, according to Mr. Reagan, part of that problem. By 1986, the Synfuels program was terminated and the flow of money stopped.
But it was too late. Mountains were bombed and giant grain mill-sized distilleries were filled with shale rocks containing precious fossil fuel.
I witnessed it all as a very green cub reporter. Just 24 years old when the Synfuels program peaked, I found myself gazing up at the skyscraping retort with breathless awe other reporters/cheerleaders openly shared. We hoped it would work. People in Grand Junction were happy and buying lots of everything, including advertising on radio and television.
The retorts roared and shook from the intense heat "experts" assured us would easily seduce the fuel from the shale. What came out? Well, to be proper, it was the sound of deflating tires. To be Colorado Crude, it sounded like a wet fart.
Those who speculated on the rapid boom, those who built the buildings and homes and businesses supporting tens of thousands of newcomers to western Colorado went suddenly, and shockingly, bust.
One acquaintance, who built a high-rise to house oil company executives, took the elevator to the top of his boom-time building and threw himself off. A temporary millionaire, he died a pauper. Does this sound familiar? At this point, the boom was in the rear-view mirror and the only things in demand were a U-Haul trailer and an on-ramp to Interstate 80. The housing market collapsed, jobs evaporated, and my girls and I hit the road -- arriving in the Bay Area, which, ironically, was booming.
Lesson learned: Had reporters done some research and reporting, we might not have lifted our pom-poms with so much enthusiasm when the oil companies came to call. We did not have Google's library at our fingertips, and Grand Junction's Mesa County library did not have books explaining the particulars of oil shale. Oil shale was never a promising source of crude and it was used mostly at that time by backwards Eastern European countries with dictators -- places Like Romania -- where, if one was lucky enough to have a fireplace, the shale rocks were used like coal.
If only I had known then what I know now: that corporate greed is insatiable and when coupled with a little collusion from the government, the little guys paying taxes get a good butt-kicking.
Today, those working to get Wall Street out of trouble are the same people who used to run it. They cannot conceive of any plan other than shoring up an already broken, corrupt, inadequate, unpatriotic, every-man-for-himself system.
Putting Wall Street "experts" in charge of changing Wall Street is much like putting oil company CEOs in charge of finding alternatives to fossil fuels. Is the fox loose in the hen house again?Concerned and cautious of those who criticize without offering potential solutions, here are two from a gal who's seen one too many booms turn into boondoggle.
Most Americans work for corporations. Most corporations require employees to invest their retirement money in the stock market. That should stop. (I hear you gasping!) It's the employees' money; let them do what they want to with it. We now know that even giants fall.
On the housing front, empower average, regular workers, the real worker-bees of this top-heavy management world. Challenge the workers of this country to put their rage and sense of impotence aside and help. How, you ask? Here's one plan.
Why not give those willing to buy repossessed homes at bargain basement prices a one-time pass on capital gains taxes? Construction workers now drawing unemployment checks could do their magic on fixer-uppers and, without paying capital gains, they might be able to sell them and make a few bucks. It's a lot like the formula the "go-to guys" who started this mess are using.Finally, here's my most defining boom and bust cycle lesson. The size of the government has doubled since 1995 and the number of investigative journalists watching over that government has, well, dwindled. That's a formula for more greed and corruption.
Warnings need special delivery from reporters before the tsunami hits and the strumming of the banjos delivers us to despondency. Reporters cannot be government and corporate mouthpieces.
As I write this, down the block from my home sit two repossessed homes. A wonderful, older couple -- both former hippies -- built the homes with their own hands. Strangled by mortgage payments they could not make, they threw the keys on the banker's desk, packed up the U-haul, hugged the neighbors goodbye, and pulled out the driveway looking for the nearest freeway on-ramp. Waving goodbye, I heard the banjo play.
Painfully Ironic P.S: There is talk of reviving the oil shale industry.
Financial Crisis
The Recession
Economy
The verge of bankruptcy brought me to California. Spurred by a boom-and-bust cycle in western Colorado, packing up the kids and the trailer and moving further West was the only way to survive. Looki...
The verge of bankruptcy brought me to California. Spurred by a boom-and-bust cycle in western Colorado, packing up the kids and the trailer and moving further West was the only way to survive. Looki...
More in Politics...

Submitted by Lullaby Academy on Wed, 02/11/2009 - 8:10pm.
from The Huffington Post...
Obama: Reopen the 9/11 Investigation -- Part 1by Melissa RossiFebruary 10, 2009
Patrick Leahy has a point when he urges President Obama to open investigations about the Bush administration. However, he's not pointing at the issue that we need to start with. Namely, September 11th. What really happened? More than a few people know - and I am not alone in calling for those who know to start talking and fess up. Let's not let this go the way of the JFK assassination - and whether with subpoenas or on their own volition, I demand that Dick Cheney, George W. Bush - both of whom refused to testify under oath during the 9/11 Commission proceedings -- Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Larry Wilkerson, George Tenet, Robert Mueller and the rest - as well as Bill Clinton and Al Gore (both of whom also refused to testify under oath) -- start talking, and in a public arena. And I'm calling on the Obama administration to open up a probe and unravel the web of deceit.
Before we tuck the Bush administration into bed and hiss, "Nighty Night, you lying scoundrels," before we go on to lock the door on that heinous era of American history, we do indeed need to probe what happened under their watch. But the event that most concerns me is what happened on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Oh yeah, that's history, old news, the 9/11 Commission figured it all out, right? Except that members of the 9/11 Commission say it was "set up to fail" and that the investigation was severely hampered. So do assorted former members of the CIA, who demand a fresh look at the events of that day.
So, President Obama - leader of a new era in the United State - serve your people: pull out that can opener and pry open that can of worms.
In following posts, I will outline some of the most mysterious coincidences and events that deserve re-examination - and there are many, including how strange things happen whenever Dick Cheney's around and the missile defense program is slated to be cut as I note here and here. But let's start with the premise that all was not told, and we deserve to know the truth about this catastrophic event that so changed the world -- and boosted the military budget to new highs.
While the Obama administration is fresh - and even though we're all grappling with this economy - I urge Americans to demand that this be a top priority, and not to let Obama shrug off this "mystery" that was cloaked by his predecessor.To be continued....
Obama: Reopen the 9/11 Investigation -- Part 2by Melissa RossiFebruary 11, 2009
So many dastardly acts were committed during the Bush administration (many of them by the Bush administration) that it's hard to nail down the worst. Senator Patrick Leahy recently suggested formation of a "Truth Commission" to investigate the interrogation, torture, and shredding of civil liberties that occurred as part of the Bush administration's "War on Terror" and as Sam Stein reported here directly approached Obama about opening investigations.
I humbly suggest that the Obama administration should start by investigating the event that set the dominoes tumbling and would so shake the world that it would lead to a panicked Congress giving the previous administration a blank check for military funding (which now chomps more tax dollars than anything else in the government budget including Social Security) and a steadfast nod to questionable military adventures that sucked us into a black hole (Iraq and Afghanistan), while Congress effectively shut its eyes to the erosion of Americans' rights, the boosting of power of the executive office, the gagging of the press, and a nonstop disinformation campaign to hoodwink the American people - as well as the Bush administration's approval of extreme treatment of suspects and prisoners that might constitute war crimes.
I'm still troubled by September 11, 2001. Not merely the terrifying events of the attacks that day, but the fact that it still hasn't been fully explained. It could be and it should be. The Bush administration never came clean with "what really happened" - but the Obama administration needs to set history straight on what unfolded that day, and detail the role played by the Bush administration in it.
As more new information has emerged contradicting the official 9/11 Commission report or appearing to fill holes in it - reports about finding the black boxes of the hijacked airplanes, inconsistencies about Flight 93 (did it explode from a bomb onboard, was it shot down, or did it indeed crash as a result of the passenger rebellion?), contradictory reports about the identities of the hijackers and other reports that point to a number of Cheney-commissioned war games ongoing that day that the Bush administration never fully brought to light - and as the weakness of the 9/11 commission itself has come into the public arena -- the Obama administration owes it to the American people to reopen that can of vipers and in this sifting through the events try to figure out what really happened to debunk the fallacies - be they conspiracy theories that don't hold water or the suffocating blanket of disinformation continually dropped on Americans by the Bush administration.
Only with a new investigation into 9/11 can the needed light be shed on this dark moment. This time we need a commission:• that is properly funded (the previous commission started with a piddly $3 million budget compared to $50 million to investigate the Space Shuttle disaster ),• duly empowered (the previous commission, noted its co-chair Lee Hamilton "had a lot of trouble getting access to documents and to people" and was hesitant to use its subpoena power),• given unfettered access to needed information and parties (Bush, Cheney, Bill Clinton and Gore refused to testify under oath),• with members that owe and want no favors to or from the parties involved (executive director of the 9/11 commission Philip Zelikow had been vying for a job with the Bush administration when he served on their transition team in 2000-2001 and post-investigation was appointed to the weighty federal post of counselor of the State Department in 2005).• Willing to "name names" and point fingers• Conduct its hearings in the light of day - not behind closed doors - and make interviews part of the public record.
To aid future historians and to help the American people understand what truly unfolded over the past eight years, to set the record straight and answer the many unanswered questions, we need to petition Obama to spend but a few million dollars to dig further into the details of 9/11. And as part of that investigation, the investigation needs to look long and hard at how the Bush administration's (particularly Dick Cheney's) preoccupation with missile defense, which it was making the number 1 focus of its lobbying efforts, directly influenced the tragedy that unfolded on that tragic Tuesday in September 2001.
Melissa Rossi is the author of What Every American Should Know about the Middle East and What Every American Should Know about Who's Really Running the World, among other books in her series with Plume/Penguin Books.
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You guys know what to do...
Spread this far and wide. This is a breakthrough in the left-hood gatekeeper community. The blocks could start falling real quick now.
The biggest obstacle has been the taboo of the topic. This may help push it through and force it to be confronted in which we know what happens then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikb4WG8UJRw&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcurrent%2Ecom%2Fitems%2F89943802%2Fblue%5Fgold%5Fworld%5Fwater%5Fwars%2Ehtm&feature=player_embedded