Dennis Kucinich's Proposals

The Bush/Paulson bailout is immoral.

Kucinich advocates starting at the bottom by helping the struggling homeowners first.

He proposes a new tax on every stock transaction--so that Wall St. bails out Wall St.

OMG: Palin can’t name one magazine/newspaper she reads

More of that totally unfair, "gotcha" journalism.

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John McCain - Lost in Space

My link mysteriously disappeared. Here it is, restored:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/325.html
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/325.html

DEATH PENALTY for CORPORATIONS

Corporations are not people, yet the Supreme Court endowed the corporation with personhood, resulting in the hijacking of our country's laws, foreign policy, and now, they have made an attempt at taking 1/3 of our national budget. They will be back. This failure is temporary.

In the struggle for influence over the laws of the land, corporations are the 1-ton giants in the room. Every once in a while, a David comes along to put a giant in its place, but the larger they get, the more likely it is that the giant destroys its critics.

This personhood status HAS to be reset so that the government is brought back to serve the people. Maybe we should pass a law that says whenever a corporation is responsible for a death, that the company should be dissolved. The CEOs lose their golden parachutes--CORPORATE DEATH PENALTY.

Note that I oppose the death penalty for *people* in all cases. But I can certainly see a use for the death penalty as a way to disband a corrupt company. In fact, It would result in every employee helping to police the safety of their products, perhaps making everyone safer.

CALL TO ACTION: General Strike Nov 2-4

http://www.votestrike.com/banking_reform

EXCERPTS from the VOTESTRIKE site:

Taking the day off, not buying anything. That part is easy. What's the hard part? Spreading the word, getting the message out, reminding The People that they have the power to shut it down.

Yet what you need is not marches, demonstrations, rallies or wide associations; all of them are important. What you need is direct action. The sooner people understand that, the sooner we'll begin to change things. --Arthur Scargill

General strikes shut down the normal operations of a city, state, or nation for a period of time. These strikes aim to force action on a single issue or broader set of concerns.

Public protest is an important part of democracy, just like a free press, a judiciary, and congress. A general strike does NOT have to be violent. It is a matter of CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, NOT VIOLENCE. You are NOT going to school. You are NOT going to WORK. You are NOT shopping. You do NOT have to be violent to NOT do those things.

March legally. Protest legally. Our causes are many but it's time to make our voices as one.

The strike targets key issues facing the American public, issues that have not been addressed in any meaningful way by any branch of government. Unions, corporations, & the major parties have failed to deal with pressing matters of war & peace, income inequality, crime & punishment & the meaning of citizenship itself, it has fallen to the American people to set things right!

McCain v. McCain

John McCain and "Alternate Energy": Fact Checking the Debate

During the presidential debate, Sept. 26, John McCain claimed, “I voted for alternate fuel all my time… No one can be opposed to alternate energy, no one.” But John McCain's own record suggests he may be confused about how he has voted, not just once or twice, but 23 times against renewable energy.

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USA or USSR?

http://images.salon.com/comics/boll/2008/09/25/boll/story.gif

Why $700 BILLION?

"It's not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number."

-- A Treasury spokeswoman, quoted by Forbes, on why the bank bailout will need $700 billion. 

A Nation of Idiots - by James Moore

As everyone is now observing: This election is our nation's intelligence test. Let's hope we don't flunk. (this time)

And now, a superb column by James Moore, included in its entirety --with a link to the Web site, Huffington Post, and his bio at the end.

Don't let them tell you this economic meltdown is a complicated mess. It's not. Our national financial crisis is readily understood by anyone who has seen greed and hypocrisy. But we are now witnessing them on a profound, monumental scale.

Conservative Republicans always want the government to stay out of business and avoid regulation as long as they are making lots of money. When their greed, however, gets them into a fix, they are the first to cry out for rules and laws and taxpayer money to bail out their businesses.

Obviously, Republicans are socialists. The Bush administration has decided to socialize the debt of the big Wall Street Firms. Taxpayers didn't get to enjoy any of the big money profits on the phony financial instruments like derivatives or bundled sub-prime paper, but we get the privilege of paying for their debt and failures.

Let's just consider the money. The public bailout of insurance giant (becoming a dwarf) AIG is estimated at $85 billion. According to one report, that's more than the Bush administration spent on Aid to Families with Dependent Children during his entire time in office. That amount of money would also pay for health care for every man, woman, and child in America for at least six months.

How did we get here?

That's pretty easy to answer, too. His name is Phil Gramm. A few days after the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president in 2000, Gramm stuck something called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into the budget bill. Nobody knew that the Texas senator was slipping America a 262 page poison pill. The Gramm Guts America Act was designed to keep regulators from controlling new financial tools described as credit "swaps." These are instruments like sub-prime mortgages bundled up and sold as securities. Under the Gramm law, neither the SEC nor the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were able to examine financial institutions like hedge funds or investment banks to guarantee they had the assets necessary to cover losses they were guaranteeing.
This isn't small beer we are talking about here. The market for these fancy financial instruments they don't expect us little people to understand is estimated at $60 trillion annually, which amounts to almost four times the entire US stock market.

And Senator Phil Gramm wanted it completely unregulated. So did Alan Greenspan, who supported the legislation and is now running around to the talk shows jabbering about the horror of it all. Before the highly paid lobbyists were done slinging their gold card guts about the halls of congress, every one from hedge funds to banks were playing with fire for fun and profit.

Gramm didn't just make a fairy tale world for Wall Street, though. He included in his bill a provision that prevented the regulation of energy trading markets, which led us to the Enron collapse. There was no collapse of the house of Gramm, however, because his wife Wendy, who once headed up the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, took a job on the Enron board that provided almost $2 million to their household kitty. And why not? Wendy got a CFTC rule passed that kept the federal government from regulating energy futures contracts at Enron.

If John McCain gets elected and chooses Phil Gramm as his Treasury Secretary, which many politico types see as likely, they will be able to talk about the good old days when Gramm was in congress and McCain was in the senate and they were in the midst of the Savings and Loan crisis.
The S and L scandal, which may look precious when compared to our present cascade of problems, isn't hard to understand, either. But it is impossible to take John McCain seriously on our current financial Armageddon since he was dabbling in the historic collapse of 747 S&Ls that occurred during Ronald Reagan's era. In the early 80s under the Republican president, congress deregulated the savings and loan industry in much the same way that Gramm made sure there were no laws hindering our current financial malefactors on Wall Street. S&Ls simply lobbied until they had less regulation and then began making rampant, unsound investments.

The guy who was going the wildest with financial freedom was Charles Keating, who headed up Lincoln Savings and Loan of California. Because the S&L industry had managed to get congress to increase FDIC insurance from $40,000 to $100,000 on deposits, the irresponsible investing of people like Keating began to put taxpayer insurance funds at great risk of loss. Keating placed money in junk bonds and questionable real estate projects and because so many other S&Ls started acting the same way the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) began to push for a regulation that limited these dangerous speculative "direct" investments to 10% of an S&L's assets.

And Keating didn't like it; he called on a private economist named Alan Greenspan, who promptly produced a study saying that there was no danger in "direct" investments.But that didn't convince the FHLBB and as further scrutiny showed Lincoln Savings and Loan was making even more historically bad investment decisions, a federal investigation was launched.
So Keating called his home state senator John McCain.

McCain and four other US senators (known to history as the Keating Five) met with Edwin Gray, then chairman of the FHLBB. McCain had been hesitant to attend but had reportedly been called a "wimp" behind his back by Keating. The message to the FHLBB and Gray from the Keating Five was to lay off Lincoln and cool the investigation. Gray and the FHLBB did not relent but Lincoln stayed in business until 1989 when it collapsed with the rest of the S&L industry. The life savings of more than 20,000 elderly investors disappeared with the failure of Lincoln. Keating went to prison for five years.

Charles Keating was John McCain's pal. They met in 1981 and Keating dumped $112,000 in the McCain campaign bank accounts between '82 and '87. A year before McCain met with the FHLBB regulators, his wife Cindy and her father, according to newspaper reports at the time, invested about $360,000 in one of Keating's shopping centers. The Arizona Republic reported McCain and his wife and their babysitter took nine trips on Keating's private jet to the Bahamas to stay at the S&L liar's decadent Cat Cay resort. The senator didn't pay Keating back for the plane rides until years later when he was under investigation.

McCain wasn't found guilty of anything but bad judgment, which is an historic understatement. Republicans, who led deregulation of the S&L industry, delayed the bailout until after the 1988 election to make sure George H. W. won the White House. The cost to taxpayers for helping these 747 bad actors in the S&L industry was finally estimated at $1.4 trillion. If the bailout had begun in 1986 instead of after the presidential election, the cost would have been contained at $20 billion.

And now the Republicans who engineered our present crisis and got us into the S&L debacle of the 80s are before us saying the markets need regulation. No, actually, they don't need regulation. Why don't you Republican capitalists who believe in the free markets get out of the damned way and let them work and allow these various financial nuthouses be crushed by the weight of their own stupidity? When it is all over, we'll have sane and sober people create laws to make sure it doesn't happen again, assuming we survive this chaos.

Also, while you are handing out our tax money to idiots on Wall Street, save a little of the long green for the unemployed auto and construction workers and all of the other people who have lost their jobs because you were too stupid to notice what Phil Gramm was doing and you were convinced everything was going to be just fine because the markets work.
These, then, are the people -- the Republicans -- who want to run our government for four more years. John McCain isn't just one of them. He rides their jets. He takes their campaign donations. He makes them his campaign advisors. And he tells us to trust him.

He must think we are a nation of village idiots.

Hell, maybe we are.

--James Moore

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/a-nation-of-village-idiot_b_127340.html

WHY would Palin refuse to fund rape kits? Here's your answer

I suppose that when most of us who are fortunate not to have been the victim of sexual assault hear the word "rape kit", we tend to think of it specifically in terms of forensic analysis and examination--DNA collection, trauma, that whole sort of thing.But rape kits also contain...emergency contraception.

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Barak Obama: for the Badass-impaired

Kudos to 23/6 , Some of the News, Most of the Time

What Happened to the Media?

Check out this great video of Robert Kennedy Jr:
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/326.html

This is a link to the index of the rest of the great videos on the Brasschecktv.com site. They are doing excellent work getting the word out!

http://www.brasschecktv.com/index.php

Hagel On Palin: ‘I Think It’s A Stretch …'

In an interview with the Omaha World-Herald, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) questioned whether John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, has the experience to be president of the United States.

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Which Team Would You Hire?

If You were The Boss... Which team would you hire?

With America facing historic debt, multiple war fronts, stumbling health care, a Weakened dollar, all-time high prison population, skyrocketing Federal spending, Mortgage crises, bank foreclosures, etc. Etc., this is an unusually critical Election year.

Let's look at the educational background of the candidates and see what they Bring to the job:

Obama:
Occidental College - Two years.
Columbia University - B.A. Political science with a specialization in
International relations.
Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

Biden:
University of Delaware - B.A. In history and B.A. In political science.
Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)

Vs.

McCain:
United States Naval Academy - Class rank 894 out of 899 (meaning that,
like George Bush, McCain was at the bottom of his class)

Palin:
Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester
North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study
University of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester
University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. In journalism

Which Sign Is YOUR Favorite?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/9/14/103042/902/965/597033

Vote in the poll after viewing all of the great signs.

Michigan Republicans plan to foreclose African American vote

The Michigan Republicans' planned use of foreclosure lists is apparently an attempt to challenge ineligible voters as not being "true residents."The scheme would, of course, disproportionately affect African-American families in the area, who are more likely to vote Democratic, and more likely to be in foreclosure as a result of sub-prime loan.

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John McCain Sends MISLEADING ABSENTEE BALLOTS to Citizens

John McCain Sends MISLEADING ABSENTEE BALLOTS to Democratic voters with a "trick" that would invalidate their votes. Yeah, that's honorable.

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Has Big Oil Paid for Your Senators?

Nico Pitney: 'Thrown Away Flags' Story False, Dem Convention

This story (originating from Faux Noise, are you surprised?) is already being used as a right wing talking point. Get the word out ASAP that it's not true!

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Flash bangs, smoke grenades and a mass RNC arrest

New Anti-McCain Ad

Nico Pitney: 'Thrown Away Flags' Story False, Dem Convention

This story (originating from Faux Noise, are you surprised?) is already being used as a right wing talking point. Get the word out ASAP that it's not true!

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Arresting Journalists an Official Policy at the RNC

St. Paul police chief John Harrington outlined his policy towards reporters covering demonstrations in a September 3 press conference. Arrest first, ask questions later: Harrington told Amy Goodman that the police can't possibly be expected to differentiate between protesters and credentialed journalists covering protests.

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McCain - Palin. Thoughts on a Bad Start.

If Republicans have to lie, spin, and cover up the Truths that expose Sarah Palin's divergence from so many of the Republican Party's stated values--family first, abstinence as birth control, no earmarks, getting rid of corruption--what does the future hold with these two in power? It seems to me a very bad way to start the next four years.

If Republicans have already made multiple allowances for his-and-her previous bouts of corruption, what would the future be like with these two in power?

Haven't we just gone through the last 8 years, making allowances for that guy you thought you'd like to party with?

The Republicans have already lost. This year, they've lost their core. And even if they lie, cheat and steal their way to victory (which is also allowed under the Republican code of ethics, apparently), they won't be getting the kind of leadership that they want. The right has already forgiven too many fundamental flaws in their presidential team, and this at a time when they should have maintained the highest standards for their choice of leaders.

For a candidacy that claims they put the country first, it sure smells like they put their party uber alles.

The Trail-- More Rep Lies by Their Best New Liar Candidate

One of the most compelling anecdotes in Sarah Palin's repertoire is that she auctioned off the Alaska governor's jet on eBay after taking office -- a swift move made by a reformer hoping to clean up the excesses of her predecessor.

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Sarah Palin ‘affair’: big media stays quiet as ‘lover’ named

While America's respectable media focus on John McCain's acceptance speech to the Republican faithful, blogs and gossip sites continue to lead the feeding frenzy surrounding the National Enquirer's allegation, reported here yesterday, that McCain's running mate Sarah Palin had an affair with her husband's business partner.

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Amy Goodman Arrested at RNC

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar were arrested by the Minneapolis Police Department. Charged with conspiracy to riot. Footage from Rick Rowley and Brandon Jourdan.

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Amy Goodman Arrested at RNC

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar were arrested by the Minneapolis Police Department. Charged with conspiracy to riot. Footage from Rick Rowley and Brandon Jourdan.

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MOVIE: The American Ruling Class

You must see "The American Ruling Class," a documentary that is running on The Sundance Channel.

 ____________________________

"Money to get power.

Power to protect money."

 

~Slogan of the Medici family

Helen Thomas Is My Hero

Helen Thomas, the Grande Dame of the White House Press Corps

Palin Almost Recalled As Mayor

Firing public officials for personal reasons seems to be a recurring theme for Sarah Palin. Vetting Palin is getting to be more interesting.

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