"The only thing the United States is able to do a little after 2040 is pay interest on massive and growing federal debt," Walker said. "The model blows up in the mid-2040s. What does that mean? Argentina."
But aren't we Americans special? Didn't our fearless leader Dick Cheney tell us that deficits don't matter?
"No republic in the history of the world lasted more than 300 years," Walker said. "Eventually, the crunch comes."
Think about how little sense this makes in terms of national defense against potential foreign invaders.
But then, think about how much sense this would make if the principle focus of our military was not defense at all, but something else entirely.
[...]
...given that the power elite have clearly been working hard to destabilize the United States, one is forced to wonder whether a break-up is actually part of the plan. And that they are getting ready to arm the Confederacy against the North.
Yup. That's the plan. We are now five years into the Vendetta Era, designed and produced by Rove & Co.
Karl Rove, the political and therefore de facto policy head of the US government under the Bush administration, is leading a bunch of disgruntled and thin-skinned plantation owners in Christian vestments. Everything they've done, from deposing the evil dictators Saddam Hussein and Dan Rather to elevating the Swift Boat liars and orchestrating these military base closings, is based on some long-standing private vendetta or another and not the public interest.
Who would have thought that a wealthy unskilled cokehead cheerleader would be capable of so much damage in such a short amount of time?
At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.
People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.
And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.
Many of the participants in this blog have graduate school educations. It is damned near impossible to go to graduate school in any but the most artistic disciplines without having to learn about the basics of social research and its uncanny accuracy and validity. We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, thaty's why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush's favor. Coincidence? Of course not.
Karl Rove isn't capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it. The silence of traditional media on this subject is enough to establish their newfound bankruptcy. The revolution will have to start here. I challenge every other thinker at the Huffington Post: is there any greater imperative than to reverse this crime and reestablish democracy in America? Why the mass silence? Let's go to work with the circumstantial evidence, begin to narrow from the outside in, and find some witnesses who will turn. That's how they cracked Watergate. This is bigger, and I never dreamed I would say that in my baby boomer lifetime.
That was so well put I felt compelled to reproduce it in full from the Huffington Post.
COVINGTON, La. -- Hired by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., historian James Lide descended on this quiet hamlet last year and began digging into the 170-year-old records of Citizens Bank of Louisiana, a predecessor of the New York bank.
After 3,500 hours of research, he confirmed what his client didn't want to hear: Between 1834 and 1861, Citizens had secured loans with mortgages on land -- and thousands of slaves.
The leather-bound financial books also offered a remarkably detailed window into the financial dealings of plantation owners, most notably those of Bernard de Marigny, one of the richest men of the epoch, whose gambling habit catapulted at least 62 slaves into the bank's books as collateral for borrowed money.
"What he was doing was the modern-day equivalent of rolling over your credit-card debt," says Mr. Lide.
J.P. Morgan's unusual odyssey into the history of slavery began after Bank One, which it acquired last year, financed a bond issue for the city of Chicago in May 2003. The move triggered a city rule, called the Business, Corporate and Slavery Era Insurance Ordinance, that requires companies doing business with the city to disclose any ties to slavery.
[...]
After months of research, Mr. Lide and his team submitted a detailed report to the bank, listing the slaves attached to the mortgages and the foreclosures that led to the Citizens' slave ownership, as well as those of another Louisiana bank of the era, New Orleans Canal & Banking Company. All in all, the two banks linked to J.P. Morgan used more than 13,000 slaves as collateral and wound up owning about 1,250 of them when borrowers defaulted.
J.P. Morgan responded swiftly, issuing a public apology for the actions of the two banks. It also established a $5 million scholarship fund for African-American students from Louisiana.
Financial attitudes to slavery generally resemble military policy toward homosexuality: don't ask, don't tell.
Kudos to the City of Chicago for asking and forcing the banks to tell.
Abu Unaccountable. Consider the paradox of Bush personally approving the demotion of Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, the only general to be punished in connection with investigations into detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. She alone was set up to take the fall for the interrogation policy that the White House approved and his staff actively promoted (at the same time they were preparing the entire Iraq invasion on the premises of bogus WMD).
As her lawyer said, "They're saying she's the only senior leader that had any part in this, but they're saying she didn't have a direct part in it. I think they're trying to have it both ways. They are severing the chain of command right at her eyeball level, and not letting it go higher."
But the chain of command does indeed go higher, much higher...
WASHINGTON - Nearly $100 million in Iraqi reconstruction cash — which was supposed to be handed out by U.S. workers in shrink-wrapped bricks of new hundred-dollar bills — can't be accounted for, federal auditors reported Wednesday.
A criminal investigation into possible fraud in a handful of cases is under way to determine what happened to some of the $96.6 million that was earmarked to rebuild south-central Iraq, according to a new report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.
The money came from Iraqi oil sales and other local revenues, not from U.S. taxpayers*, and it was supposed to be distributed by the main financial office of the U.S. rebuilding effort in Iraq.
*The reason the war wasn't supposed to cost $200+ billion was it was to be funded by Iraqi oil sales.
So U.S. taxpayers paid for someone's $100 million party — in conveniently shrink-wrapped cash, no less — after all. God knows we didn't spend it on body armor or emergency radios that work.
Now we learn that Anne's mother Nancy Heche is with the despicable Focus on the Family "Love Won Out" effort ("promoting the truth that homosexuality is preventable and treatable"): "As a single parent who experienced the international media rush during her daughter Anne Heche’s highly visible relationship with Ellen DeGeneres, and a widow who endured her husband’s diagnosis of and subsequent death from AIDS, Nancy brings a spiritual focus to the effects of homosexuality in a family."
Note to Nancy Heche: Sorry for your troubles, but just because your family was totally fucked up doesn't credential you in any way to provide answers to others. Many, many families don't feel the need to "prevent" or "treat" the "effects" of homosexuals in their midst. Instead, they simply love and accept them. Actual compassion is a natural act once you free yourself of the crazy "truths" you have chosen to believe.
The arrogant conceit of Nancy Heche's otherworldly approach leads us to believe that she too is from another planet and speaks directly to God, just like the product of her vast parental insights: her daughter Celestia.
Movers and shakers in the hundreds turned out at Blaffer Gallery on the University of Houston campus Thursday night for the launch of the cultural week "Lyon via Houston."
The Texan-French Alliance for the Arts kicked off the cultural exchange with the opening reception at the gallery featuring the work of French photographer Alain Bublex.
Lynn Wyatt, Susie Criner and Maria and Neil Bush were among those admiring the photography and celebrating the upcoming week of cultural events with its French accent.
7 PM - 9 PM Opening Reception, Alain Bublex, Plug-In City: Houston, Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston French Philosopher Bruce Bégout will lecture at 6:00PM
Bruce Bégout is a French writer and philosopher as well as philosophy lecturer at the University of Picardy. In his lecture, Bruce Bégout will discuss the role of the motel as archetypal architecture of American suburbia.
