I’m all tore down
I’m all tore down
Standing up tall
With my back flat on the ground . . .

Watching Thee One strut around saluting people who are actually in the military doesn’t help . . .

Commander-In-Chief – - Gag.

I been balling a shiny black steel jack-hammer,
been chippin’ up rocks for the great highway,
live five years if I take my time,
ballin’ that jack and a drinkin’ my wine.

I been chippin’ them rocks from dawn till doom,
while my rider hide my bottle in the other room.
Doctor say better stop ballin’ that jack,
if I live five years I gonna bust my back, yes I will.

. Easy Wind.

Onofre’s arm , that’s a riot!!

Yesterday my 12 year old son was telling me about an exercise he had done in school. The students were shown pictures of only the eyes of various people. From their impression of the eyes they were to asked to describe what they thought the person was like from a list of adjectives like angry, happy, rich, poor, etc. My son described one of the set of eyes as belonging to an angry rich guy. It turned out that the eyes belonged to Obama. I howled when he told me this. However, the teacher was apparently not as amused as I was. Out of the mouths of babes.

From “Naked Capitalism.”
Bank-Favoring Censorship by our Corrupt Cowardly Congress

Harper’s Magazine has written up the lengths to which the authorities will go in censoring views that dissent with what is the unstated official policy: that no demand of the banking industry is too unreasonable not to be catered to.

The object lesson is the gutting of the falsely-branded derivatives reform bill. It arrived with a loophole so large you could drive a truck through it, namely that customized derivatives were not covered. So this bill will do nothing to impede the growth of complex opaque products; in fact, it encourages it, since banks will have no oversight if they tweak a product so that is can be deemed “customized.” It was further weakened by excluding most of the banks in America and by excluding a whole swathe of end users. The final insult was making the derivatives clearing house self-regulating.

The hearings on the bill had testimony scheduled only from what amounted to industry flacks. Someone apparently realized at the 11th hour that that might not go over with the correctly angry public too well. So less than 24 hours prior to the session before the House Financial Services Committee, an invitation was issued to Rob Johnson, a former managing director at Bankers Trust Company and former economist at the Senate Banking Committee and Senate Budget Committee.

So what transpired? As Ken Silverstein recounts:

Johnson, who came last, offered the only serious critical viewpoint… After about five minutes of his testimony, Congresswoman Melissa Bean—another industry-funded committee member who chaired the hearing because Frank was absent—had heard enough. “I’m just going to ask you to wrap up because we’re running out of time,” she told Johnson.

Johnson gamely continued. “When I hear the testimony today that are largely financial institutions and end users, I believe that I represent a third group that comes to the table, which is the taxpayers, the working people of the United States,” he said.

“I do need a final comment,” Bean interjected seconds later.

That put an end to Johnson’s testimony. “I was just called to this hearing last night, so I will provide detailed comments on your bill and a statement for the record that will finish my comments,” he concluded.

So what happens next? The House Financial Services Committee has refused to publish his testimony, offering “the dog ate my homework” level excuses, first that they hadn’t gotten it, then that it was in the wrong format, then that their IT department was experiencing difficulties (always a good one when real reasons are running thin). The last one was pure Catch-22: that he had gotten his written testimony in too late.

You can read his statement, which is obviously too offensive to powerful interests for it to see the light of day in any officially-sanctioned venue, at the Roosevelt Institute.

“Drone strikes are terrorism”

There we go. We are right back to the 90′s when we spent a million for a tomahawk missile to blow up a $100 tent. The thing that these cultures resent above all else is the premise that we can operate at a level so far above them and their inferior nomadic ways. And here we are using technology to strike at them by just pushing a button. If this doesn’t fuel the desire to strike back, I don’t know what will. Think about it, if you were living in the desert in a tent and not knowing when the next remote control airplane will strike, and not knowing why or where the strike may come… It would tend to make you hate and hate deeply. Add to that a cleric that will say these remote controlled toys are tools of Satan and we have fertile ground for a holy war.

Where’s BO’s side-kick in her buffalo plaid? Some rodeo clown is missing his britches!