Emma Berry

Archive for the ‘The Insane’ Category

AND NO BETTER WAY THAN TO COMPARE THE TWO DISASTERS OF KATRINA AND THE BP OIL SPILL

Katrina was an example of the type of disaster that the federal government is specifically tasked with handling. And for most of the 90s, it was very good at handling them.

But when George Bush became president and Joe Allbaugh became director of FEMA, everything changed Allbaugh neither knew nor cared about disaster preparedness. For ideological reasons, FEMA was downsized and much of its work outsouced.

When Allbaugh left after less than two years on the job, he was replaced by the hapless Michael Brown and the agency was downgraded and broken up yet again. By the time Katrina hit, the upper levels of FEMA were populated largely with political appointees with no disaster preparedness experience and the agency was simply not up to the job of dealing with a huge storm anymore.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion is almost the exact opposite.

• There is no federal expertise in capping oil blowouts.
  
• There is no federal agency tasked specifically with repairing broken well pipes.
  
• There is no expectation that the federal government should be able to respond instantly to a disaster like this.
  
• Unlike hurricanes, there never has been. For better or worse, it’s simply not something that’s ever been considered the responsibility of the federal government.

In the case of Katrina, you have the kind of disaster that can be addressed by the federal government. In the case of the BP spill, we’re faced with a technological challenge that can’t be. They could hardly be more different.

But there is one way in which they’re similar.  Katrina would have been an immense disaster no matter what. But it was far worse than it had to be because a conservative administration, one that fundamentally disdained the mechanics of government for ideological reasons, decided that FEMA wasn’t very important.

Likewise, the BP blowout was made more likely because that same administration decided that government regulation of private industry wasn’t very important and turned the relevant agency into a joke.

If you believe that government is the problem, not the solution, and if you actually run the country that way for eight years, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But we shouldn’t pretend it’s inevitable. [SOURCE]

Now we have the wacko from Nevada.  Sharron Angle the Tea Party Wacko who is challenging Harry Reid telling us that little girls raped by their fathers should just buck up and make lemonade out of lemons.

This is the same idiot who wants to do away with social security and Medicare.  One thing is certain, Ms. Angle must have plenty of damn money or she would never suggest such a thing.

ANY ONE WHO IS STUPID ENOUGH TO VOTE FOR SHARRON ANGLE DESERVE TO HAVE THEIR VOTER’S REGISTRATION CARD TAKEN AWAY FROM THEM

On the right-wing Alan Stock Show in June, Angle suggested that “a young girl raped by her father” deal with the “horrific situation” by making lemons into lemonade:

STOCK: What do you say then to a young girl, I am going to place it as he said it, when a young girl is raped by her father, let’s say, and she is pregnant. How do you explain this to her in terms of wanting her to go through the process of having the baby?

ANGLE: I think that two wrongs don’t make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15

We need to pass legislation now to outlaw genetically-engineered seeds.

Monsanto’s genetically-engineered seeds are designed to remove the need for tilling the land to keep the weeds away.

Instead the farmers must buy the herbicide ROUNDUP from Monsanto.  So, in addition to the seeds, they must also purchase ROUND UP.  So the whole purpose for genetically engineered seeds is to increase the sale of chemicals from Monsanto.

The problem with this overuse of ROUNDUP, as with the overuse of any herbicide, is similar to the overuse of an antibiotic.  Only instead of resistant viral strains, in the case of overuse of herbicides we have super weeds that are resistant to any herbicide. Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near ubiquitous use of Roundup has led to rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds. Farmers throughout the East, Midwest, and South have been forced to spray their fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand, and return to more labor intensive methods like regular plowing as a result of the RR superweeds. “We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Eddie Anderson, a farmer from Tennessee, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years.

Most people who aware of the issue are not comfortable with herbicides/pesticides on their food in the first place, let alone in increasing amounts

It should be noted that laboratories that Monsanto employed to do their glyphosate testing, Industrial Biotest Laboratories and Craven Labs were charged with fraud, “Laboratory fraud first made headlines in 1983 when EPA publicly announced that a 1976 audit had discovered ’serious deficiencies and improprieties’ in studies conducted by Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT).’ Problems included ‘countless deaths of rats and mice’ and ‘routine falsification of data.” Craven Labs was charged with “‘falsifying laboratory notebook entries’ and ‘manually manipulating scientific equipment to produce false reports.’ Roundup residue studies on plums, potatoes, grapes, and sugarbeets were among the tests in question…the owner of Craven Labs and three employees were indicted on 20 felony counts. The owner was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $50,000; Craven Labs was fined 15.5 million dollars, and ordered to pay 3.7 million dollars in restitution.

SOURCE FOR FACTS:  WIKI

President Obama might do well to remember the words of President Truman:  “If you give the people a choice between a Democrat who acts like a watered down Republican and a Republican, they will pick the real thing every time.”

“Oil rigs don’t cause spills?”, Mr. President.  Has Dick Cheney been slipping you some of his special Halliburton kool-aid?

What If the Tea Party Were Black?
Imagine that hundreds of black protesters descended on DC armed with AK-47s. Would they be defended as patriotic Americans?

I don’t think so.

Tim Wise has written a very thought-provoking article that explores this very possibility.  I recommend that all Americans read it–especially Tea Party fanatics.

Tell me that the Tea Party isn’t racist-based.  Oh, it’s different when it’s us white folk.

SOURCE FOR ARTICLE

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Matt Taibbi of The Rolling Stone has also written a thought-provoking article on Goldman Sachs and the greed of those who adhere to the novelist Ayn Rand’s philosophy of greed that appeared in the Guardian titled ” The lunatics who made a religion out of greed and wrecked the economy“.

Last summer Taibbi wrote an article about Goldman Sachs that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in which he called the bank a “great vampire quid wrapped around the face of humanity.  Taibbi and I are on the same side of the fence with the people who believe that Goldman Sachs is a criminal enterprise that earns its billions by bilking the market, the government and even its own clients in a variety of complex financial scams.

Of course those who belong to the Ayn Rand cult argue that Goldman isn’t guilty of anything except being “too smart”–what utter immoral rot to praise a criminal for successfully ripping off millions of people.  Americans who revere Ayn Rand need to be reminded that this woman wrote fiction–quite literally. The official genre for every thing she wrote is fiction. To base an economic philosophy on the writings of an author who wrote fiction for a living is truly insane.  It is nuttier than the croquet game from Alice in Wonderland in which flamingos are used as wickets and hedge hogs for balls.

I am not surprised that Republicans oppose the Obama Administration and that they lie.  They have a long history of telling outrageous lies.  It is the Republican Party who created the big lie about Weapons of Mass Destruction.  They knew exactly what they were doing.

As Bob Burnett pointed out in an article today in the Huffington Post the Republican master plan is hauntingly reminiscent of Hitler’s Big Lie philosophy: “Never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” It’s based on the immoral stance: “the ends justify the means.”

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, the GOP big lie program started rumors that Obama had not been born in the US, was a Muslim, and palled around with terrorists. It worked! A recent Louis Harris poll of Republicans found that 67 percent “believe that Obama is a socialist.” 57 percent “believe that Obama is a Muslim.” 45 percent believe that Obama “was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president. .  . ”

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Frankly, I don’t agree with the Louis Harris poll.  Just because 67% of the Republicans SAY that they believe Obama is a socialist, this does not mean that they BELIEVE that he is.  After all, they are a part of liars.  Why would anyone fall for the answers that they give on a poll?

There are no doubt some wackos from the fringe who actually think that Obama is a socialist who does not have American citizenship, but not the leadership and the wealthy people who run the party.

THEY KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE DOING–JUST LIKE THE ONES WHO PERPETUATED HITLER’S BIG LIE.

THEY KNOW.  The Republican Party leadership have turned out to be a group straight out of an Orwellian playbook and ordinary Americans who fall for their rhetoric may live to regret the day.  As these are the people who would prefer to mold our democracy more along the lines of the terrorist regime for the rich that was run by the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

About one-half of the Tea Party’s excessively wealthy leadership such as the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch fully realize that they are lying to the masses. They know EXACTLY what they are doing. The other half like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are clueless opportunists who could care less because of the money they are raking in and the attention they are getting. The saddest thing of all are the American people who are being duped by these lies and believe that these people actually represent them when in fact they are being used.

The irony is that the Koch brothers who have heavily funded the Tea Party Movement and stirred up all their right-wing hate would not have been able to do this if their own father had not made so much money during the 19020’s and 1930’s building refineries and setting up the oil infrastructure in Stalin’s Communist Russia.

But then big Wall Street capitalists have always made money from dictators—it’s part of their evil exploitative history. Standard Oil was working with the Nazis up through December of 1941 and many say that they continued these business relationships throughout the war.

Charles and David Koch–the Wingnut Brothers who bankroll the Tea Party Movement would not be able to without assistance from Joseph Stalin.

As most educated Americans know, the Koch family is the biggest financial backer of the Tea Party.  We also know that the Koch brother are the 19 richest people in the world.

However what some may not know is that the Koch family might not be the billionaires they are today were it not for the godless empire of the USSR. Yasha Levine has written a well-researched article on the topic that appears in the AlterNet.  It is titled “The Roots of Stalin in the Tea Party Movement“. I highly recommend reading this well-researched article.

The Koch family who bankroll extreme right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society, Americans for Prosperity, and the Tea Party movement made a pile of money working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930’s building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.

How about that?  Looks like instead of putting mustaches on President Obama’s posters, it would be more fitting if Tea Party enthusiasts wore the mustaches themselves, or perhaps carried posters of the Koch brothers sporting the mustaches.