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POPSFort Hood 'ticking timebomb' shooter Major Abu Nidal remains in under armed guard and in a coma amid the FBI probe into the killing of 13 and the wounding of 31 at the US army base. On Sunday an ashen-faced and paranoid-looking ex-President Bush toured the camp, muttering incoherently and barking orders as if he was still in charge. General Colon Bowel is on a phishing trip somewhere near the Azores.
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POPS Lucid Links 11.09.09 Only when you get to Obama’s page do you learn that Obama a) wasn’t president, and b) didn’t make any speech at the site of the Wall last year when he campaigned for the U.S. presidency in Europe. In remembrance on the 8th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, our president …. sent Joe Biden to Ground Zero in New York City. Deliberate ignorance: The British press was out front (HT Hot Air) in telling the world that the perpetrator of the Fort Hood attack “worshiped at a mosque led by a radical imam said to be a ’spiritual adviser’ to three of the hijackers who attacked America on Sept 11, 2001.” That the attack was jihad-inspired is not open to real dispute. Meanwhile, the PC-addled American press does all it can to minimize the enormity (HT Mark Finkelstein at NewsBusters) of what occurred at Fort Hood and makes excuses for the perpetrator, even to the point of claiming that he might (even though he never experienced
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POPSFormer UK Ambassador: CIA Sent People to be ‘Raped with Broken Bottles’ Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan's natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. "The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan," Murray noted. "There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's what it's about. It's about money, it's about oil, it's not about democracy."
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POPSUSA Prepares to Attack Russia in 3 or 4 Years? “I would also like to pay your attention to the fact that the US Military Academy at West Point has recently launched extensive courses to study the Russian culture and language. They started teaching the Iraqi culture and the Arab language three years before invading Iraq.
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POPSDEATH MATCH cancelled Are you disappointed? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh and we have nothing else to spend our time on these days..........How boring.
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POPS The Obama Work-Out War-weary Obama manages a decision … more golf! Boston Herald: WASHINGTON - President Obama has outperformed former President George Bush in a key area - he’s hit the links as many times in nine months as Bush did in nearly three years, political Web sites reported. Politico, a political news and gossip site, and the Chicago Tribune’s The Swamp, reported that CBS’ Mark Knoller - who documents presidential statistics - Tweeted Sunday, “Today - Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24. Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months.” The Swamp noted that after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Bush quit golf, saying, “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf . . . I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal . . . ” Come on, guys. Iraq was different. That was Bush’s war. Afghanistan? That’s Bush’s other war! http://www.julescrittenden.com/2009/10/27/golf-for-we-not-for-thee/
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POPSTea Party Movement's New Target :The GOP
They feel they were had by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who urged them to stomach earmarks for the good of the party; by George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, who urged them to stomach a massive expansion of education and Medicare for the good of the party; and by the rest of the Washington gang that collaborated in the largest expansion of government in their lifetime for the good of the party. Erick Erickson, founder and editor of the conservative RedState blog, said grass-roots activists are done listening. “Republicans are going to have to come our way,” he said, before going on to trash NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele for backing Scozzafava. Their “level of disingenuousness ... is disgusting,” Erickson said. His influential blog is now calling for Sessions to get the boot from the NRCC as a penalty for mishandling the race. Erickson’s bombast may seem overboard, but it captures the dep
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POPSGuess Who Wants to Control the Internet? On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart took up the issue of "net neutrality" and Senator John McCain's efforts to create one of those ironically named pieces of legislation that sounds like it is going to deliver something good -- in this case "Internet Freedom" -- but would actually make the Internet suck out loud, forever and ever. Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/27/jon-stewart-takes-on-net_n_335517.html
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POPSOne person's perception.............. So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive? Can't think of anything? Don't worry. He's done all this in 5 months -- so you'll have three years and seven months to come up with an answer...! go to gather.com for rest of the list.
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POPSMove over Woodrow Wilson!!! Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame. More info at www.americanthinker.com
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POPSSorry Ass News For A Sunday Morning Did you ever pick up a newspaper and wished you hadn't? Well that's what happened to me this morning. It wasn't an actual real time Newspaper but in today's world it was a Newsdig but I still wished that I hadn't clicked! First it was a, Health Care {NO} Reform won by the Health Care and insurance Industry. Then the gloom and doom news from Afghanistan. It's enough to make you put on a pair of rose colored glasses or stick your head in the sand. But alas, I can't do that, because then I would become part of the (Sarah Palin - Michele Bachmann et al ) crazy lunatic fringe mob on the right! :eek:
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POPSObama's big change: He moves America to the Right Maybe this is why Glenn Beck thought it was better that Obama got elected over McCain. McCain may have continued to "blur the lines" but with Obama in office, the difference in ideology of the Republicans is Stark and Bold... Let's hope Republicans and Conservative Independents can capitalize on it.
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POPSReal men don't read D.C. pundits
Even worse than Krauthammer's column today, though, was David Brooks in the New York Times. Partly it's because Brooks likes to pretend to be open-minded and reasonable, while spouting neocon talking points, and occasionally liberals get pulled in by him. But today was trademark lazy ideological Brooks. As Glenn Greenwald notes, unbelievably he bragged about "doing what journalists are supposed to do" -- which he defined as talking to a handful of anonymous pro-war sources, who uniformly criticized Obama's inaction to date on McCrystal's troop request. That's some brave shit. Not quite David Rohde brave, but hey, he made the calls! If it was unanimous, that means he didn't call retired Marine Matthew Hoh, who resigned from a civilian post in Afghanistan this week because he said we can't win, and our presense is only fueling the insurgency. Hoh told the Washington Post's Karen de Young he's "not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love" and that he believes
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POPSBush passed the test George Bush's biggest accomplishment according to his demon father was the way he handled 9/11. Then he SMILES when he refers to "this 9/11." Let's see: 1. Endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan 2. Trillions of dollars wasted - with big portions of it going to Bush cronies 3. A complete gutting of the Bill of Rights And there is still no credible information on what happened that day: Building 7 collapsing, US air defense shut down by Cheney's order, no plane debris at the Pentagon, and on and on it goes. "He passed the test."
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POPSCharles Krauthammer: The Three Envelopes 
I suppose, explain away his own, well, yearlong drift on Afghanistan. This compulsion to attack his predecessor is as stale as it is unseemly. Obama was elected a year ago. He became commander in chief two months later. He then solemnly announced his own "comprehensive new strategy" for Afghanistan seven months ago. Obama is obviously unhappy with the path he himself chose in March. Fine. He has every right -- indeed duty -- to reconsider. But what Obama is reacting to is the failure of his own strategy. There is nothing new here. The history of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is a considered readjustment of policies that have failed. In each war, quick initial low-casualty campaigns toppled enemy governments. In the subsequent occupation stage, two policy choices presented themselves: the light or heavy "footprint." In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we initially chose the light footprint. This was the considered judgment of our commanders at the time,
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POPSThe Bush-Rove-Schwarzenegger Nazi Nexus In 2000 and 2001 the Columbus Alive published a series of articles documenting further links between Bush, Sr. and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his own fascist networks in Japan and Korea.
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POPSU.S. Health Insurance Price Fixing!
Like the bank scams on Wall St. and elsewhere much of it happen when lawmakers, like George Bush especially, removed rules and regulations that allowed banks to sell products that had no real value or sell default insurance when they didn't have the cash to pay off. Like a lot of politics it's not Left vs. Right -- it's the SuperRich exploiting the taxpayers and middle classes and getting special advantages for themselves. Now this has been revealed in the U.S. Health Care Insurance business. It's been revealed --- after months and months of discussion (and previous years of efforts) that this business has an exemption from laws about price fixing and other business collusions.! Dang! It took us this long to find out! It's been like this for all our lifetime! (most of us). They make the biggest bucks --- they make the greatest profit of any USA business -- and they have and keep this exemption to fair play rules that would require fair play competition! We need to restore f
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POPSAlternate Iraq War Universe … Obama Won! Never mind that the surge was initiated by President George Bush, and the current withdrawal was negotiated by the Bush administration with a sovereign, elected Iraqi government which his actions allowed to come into being, in place of the prior despot he had deposed, while Democrats, including Obama, were howling for abandonment. Obama deserves some credit, of course. For staying Bush’s course and throwing his own boneheaded pandering demands for a precipitous pullout under the bus. OK, I thought Friedman had got about as weird as he could. Silly me. This next step is particularly important, which is why we cannot let Afghanistan distract U.S. diplomats from Iraq. Remember: Transform Iraq and it will impact the whole Arab-Muslim world. Change Afghanistan and you just change Afghanistan. Fascinating. The big clamor for the last few years of course has been that Iraq was distracting us from Afghanistan, and now every jackanape out there, to include Friedman . . .
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POPSUS Press Freedom Improves At the bottom of the list were Turkmenistan, North Korea and Eritrea "where media are so suppressed they are nonexistent," said Reporters Without Borders. Iran dropped to No. 172 from No. 166, with Reporters Without Borders saying the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had fostered a paranoia about journalists and bloggers. "Automatic prior censorship, state surveillance of journalists, mistreatment, journalists forced to flee the country, illegal arrests and imprisonment -- such is the state of press freedom this year in Iran," the group said. The ranking was compiled from hundreds of questionnaires completed by journalists and media experts around the world and reflecting press freedom violations that took place between Sept. 1, 2008 and Aug. 31, 2009. The complete ranking can be seen at www.rsf.org/en-classement1003-2009.html Read more at source.
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POPS Waiting For Godot “The thunderstorm is there and it’s kind of brewing and it’s unstable and the lightning hasn’t struck, and hopefully it won’t,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.” Last week the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., gave voice to the concerns of those in the military when he issued a terse statement criticizing Mr. Obama’s review of Afghan war strategy. “The extremists are sensing weakness and indecision within the U.S. government, which plays into their hands,” said Mr. Tradewell’s statement on behalf of his group, which represents 1.5 million former soldiers. Last August, in a speech to the V.F.W., Mr. Obama defended . . .
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POPSDo our brains interpret our values and beliefs as facts (objective truths)?
Such messages caused activation in the brain region that is responsible for error detection. So in other words (and yes, I am grossly simplifying here), it was as if people's brain's were indicating "error, error, error; this message does not compute." This is consistent with research by Emily Pronin (psychology professor at Princeton University), which shows that people of all beliefs see their own beliefs as LESS biased than others. In other words, republicans see themselves as less biased, and so do democrats, and for that matter, so do mailman, coperate CEO's and homeless people. I think this goes a long way in explaining the depth and extent to which people defend their beliefs. Perhaps, Berger and Luckmann are right; we do live, in some sense, in alternative forms of reality. Sure, we all know a rock won't bite us and 2 + 2 = 4, but what I "know" (George W. Bush was lousy) is not what many Republicans "knows" (George W. Bush was a good president).
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POPSBush's pre-emptive strike doctrine to be canceled by Obama The only difference is that now we have cowards running our country. Last week Russia reiterated their right for not only preemptive strikes, but nuclear preemptive strikes, to defend the country. Tell me this trojan horse president is not an enemy of the state.
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POPSMedia Ignoring Conservatives' Return to Dominance of Political Book Market In September of that year, the Boston Globe proclaimed liberals "triumphant" against "conservatives' decade long hold on popular culture." Yes, it seemed such wonderful liberal values were finally en vogue. Barnes and Noble, reacting to the outpouring of Bush-bashing literature in August of 2003 announced that it would set up ‘political science/cultural affairs' tables at its stores to feature the newest partisan works. But conservatives have reclaimed their hold on the Times's bestseller page. The closest any of the top 15 hard-cover non-fiction books gets to a defense of liberalism or the Obama Administration is In Fed We Trust by David Wessel "The books from the left strike me as an obvious reaction to Bush," conservative commentator Tucker Carlson told the Associated Press in 2003. "And for people who buy them, it's a way of voting against him in an off-election year." With Bush gone, liberals no longer have a blatant target at whom to direct a coordinated
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POPSObama’s Tripling of the National Debt in Pictures In 2009, Washington will spend $30,958 per household "the highest level in American history" and under President Obama’s budget, the figure will rise above $33,000 by 2019. The public national debt" $5.8 trillion as of 2008" is projected to double by 2012 and nearly triple by 2019. Thus, America would accumulate more government debt under President Obama than under every President in American history from George Washington to George W. Bush combined. To put that $1 trillion dollars into perspective, have a look at what it looks like! http://izismile.com/2009/03/10/can_you_imagine_one_trillion_dollars_6_pics.html
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