Green Eagle

This is tremendously positive news , just reported in the New York Times ) and I'm sure everywhere else: "WASHINGTON — President Obama stunned the world and paused his march to war on Saturday by asking Congress to give him authorization before he launches a limited military strike against the Syrian government in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack. In an afternoon appearance in the Rose Garden, Mr. Obama said he had decided that the United States should use force but would wait for a vote from lawmakers..." I say this not because I believe much of the blather being slung around by Republicans about the Constitution, which they care nothing for when it stands in their way, but because this forces the reflexively anti-Obama Republicans into a corner of their own making:  Do they vote against the will of their insane core voters and give Obama the permission to use military force, or do they deny him this power, thus effectively bringing to a final end the six...

I guess we've all heard the line about bad generals fighting the last war.  I can't believe the readiness of the press, politicians on both sides of the aisle and the usual blabbermouths on TV to engage in this ludicrous behavior. I just saw Chris Hayes, who passes for a liberal on MSNBC, interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson about the advisability of allowing Obama to take action against Iraq.  For those of you who have forgotten, Wilkerson was an aide to Colin Powell, who was instrumental in preparing Powell's utterly false presentation to the United Nations, which preceded the Bush administration's initiating one of the greatest military blunders in the history of mankind.  Wilkerson blamed all of the endless falsehoods of that speech on the CIA and military intelligence. The truth is that any person with half a brain could have known the moment that speech was delivered, as I did when I sat watching it, that it was nothing but a pack of lies.  I remember Powell sho...

If it weren't so sick.  Here's Donald Rumsfeld: "Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who helped sell Congress and the American people on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under former President George W. Bush, believes the Obama administration has failed to justify any potential military intervention in Syria." You know, the concept of "no shame" has been taken to heights by today's Republicans that the world has never seen.

Well, here's the newest excuse the Republicans have come up with to push their bogus impeachment drive:  If Obama takes any action on his own in Syria, without begging Congress for approval, he's violated the Constitution and therefore deserves to be impeached. Fine.  Barack, go to Congress today and ask them to immediately vote to give you war powers like they did for that miserable failure George W. Bush.  Let's just see how many Republicans vote yes and how many, following their supreme program of never going along with Obama on everything, vote no. If they refuse to give him the power to do anything, that will make it clear who really wants to try to deal with problems, and who is only interested in macho posturing and electoral politics.  And it will surely get Obama off the hook for doing nothing in Syria. Simple enough.  I'm sure our do-nothing Republicans will be able to deal with this easily.

I must admit that, for a few weeks, I've just been so sickened by the slime dumped on the country by the right, that I've kept away from the wingnuts.  Well, I took a look today, and they seem to be back to their usual idiotic, furious form, so here we go: Heather Ginsburg, Town Hall:  "Jindal Takes Down 'Radical Left' in Latest Keystone Speech" The radical left- something which does not really exist in the United States, unless you can find a few million committed Stalinists hiding away somewhere.  Or unless you consider centrist, business-friendly Democrats like Obama the radical left.  In which case, right wing guys, yeah, you're taking them down, but only in the sense that you are taking the whole country down with you. By the way, Bobby Jindal... one more ignorant Republican moron, who passes for an intellectual, because it's all they've got. Town Hall:  "Gun Rights Supporters Hold Open-Carry Rally" Big deal.  I mean really...

As readers of Green Eagle may remember, I have been confidently predicting since the election of Obama that the Republicans would do whatever they could to impeach him and kick him out of office.  This malicious phenomenon seems to be catching people by surprise, even though it should have been obvious that, after Republicans impeached Bill Clinton without cause, in the greatest abuse of Congressional power in our history, and paid no price at all for their criminality, they would soon enough decide that it was their right to destroy any Democratic President, without any grounds except their insistence that it is their right to run the country regardless of the will of the American people. Well, the pot is well and truly boiling now.  Here are some excerpts from a New York Times article today, summing up some of what is going on among people who claim to be legitimate leaders: "WASHINGTON — Representative Kerry Bentivolio, a freshman Republican from Michigan, has a legi...

I am sorry to report that we took Pico, our parrot, who has appeared at the top of this blog since it started, to a store called The Perfect Parrot in North Hollywood to be groomed, and while grooming him they killed him. He was a very sweet and friendly bird.  We had him for many years and loved him dearly.  I don't think I have the heart to start over again with another bird.

Green Eagle can't resist:

Readers of Green Eagle may remember that I like to keep an eye on the Sovereign Citizen movement, which lies somewhere between the teabaggers and Aryan supremacists on the political spectrum.  These jackasses have been responsible for a significant part of the right wing violence in this country, and here they are, up to their old tricks.  At least this time they got caught before killing any police or judges: "LAS VEGAS (AP) — A sting operation stopped a plot to abduct, torture and kill police officers to bring attention to the antiauthority sovereign citizen movement, Las Vegas police said Thursday. David Allen Brutsche and Devon Campbell Newman were arrested at an apartment a few miles off the Vegas Strip before they could carry out a plan to snatch officers, “put them on trial” and execute them in a vacant house, Las Vegas police Lt. James Seebock said. ..They found a vacant house and rigged it with bolts drilled into wall supports, creating a makeshift jail where the...

Here's a story from the Daily Beast about a speech given recently by Antonin Scalia, which of course they carefully refrain from describing the clear meaning of what Scalia is saying: "America has more than its fair share of extremists who believe people need to stock up on guns to fight against tyrannical government in Washington.Add one more to the list: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In a speech in Montana on Monday, the jurist was asked about the Second Amendment and what arms were protected by that provision of the Constitution. That “remains to be determined,” he replied. As one example, he asked if people have a right to “bear shoulder-fired rocket launchers?” Perhaps they do, Scalia suggested. The answer would turn on the historical understanding of the Framers, who Scalia said included the Second Amendment in part to preserve the right of people to revolt against a tyrannical leader." The authors of this piece correctly point out that the ...

The United States has driven off a cliff, and there is no coming back.  The Republican party has now generated such a population of proudly ignorant jerks that they are about to overwhelm us all.  Today's proof?  A survey of Louisiana Republicans reveals that more blame Obama for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina than blame Bush. The following picture has nothing to do with this fact, but what difference does it make anyway? God, we live in a stupid country.

This very exciting news from Media Matters: "Fox News host Mike Huckabee will be the keynote speaker at the Inaugural National Leadership Convention for On My Honor's Youth Adventure Program, an anti-gay program formed in response to the Boy Scouts of America's (BSA) new membership policy permitting openly gay scouts." Actually, I think there already was an organization along those lines.  Here's a picture of it:

Here's an article from Daily Kos about the relationship between school grades and family income, which focuses on a very legitimate problem, but still doesn't get what is going on.  I don't want to focus blame on Daily Kos, because this response is in agreement with the virtually unanimous opinion you hear from the left: "No matter how many times people who actually know stuff about education patiently explain to corporate education policy boosters that poverty is the big factor in student outcomes, they wave it off as irrelevant...So let's just grade their schools and teachers like it's within a teacher's power to overcome all that inequality! Yeah, about that. The Miami Herald has dug into the data on school grades:  Of the 209 schools in Miami-Dade and Broward with at least 90 percent of students receiving free or reduced lunch, 78 percent received a grade of C or worse. Roughly 39 percent of these high-poverty schools received a D or F.  Of the ...

What would have been the world's reaction if Israeli police and military had killed 635 Islamic protesters in one day?

I'm trying to get back to blogging here after a couple of tough weeks starting work on a new show.  The producers never give us enough prep time any more, so we are always in a panic the first few weeks.  Oh well, here's a wonderful quote from the head of the Republican party, Rush Limbaugh: "See, in my humble opinion, folks, if you believe in God, then intellectually you cannot believe in manmade global warming … You must be either agnostic or atheistic to believe that man controls something that he can’t create." Well in the first place, do you have to be agnostic or atheist to believe that "man controls something that he can't create?"   How about a car?  I can't create a car, but I can control one.  I can't create a Stratocaster, but I can control it (well, sort of.)  Anyway, enough with this jackass comment.  The rest of Limbaugh's statement is just as much a pack of nonsense, starting with the idea that Limbaugh actually believe...

This is a nice story: "Aug 12 (Reuters) - Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell on Monday called on the Obama administration to delay the Oct. 1 opening of exchanges where uninsured Americans will be able to buy health insurance until the U.S. government can guarantee the protection of people's personal data. The exchanges, a key element of the president's signature 2010 healthcare law dubbed "Obamacare," will be largely online. In a letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency taking the lead in implementing the law, McConnell said that "Americans should not be forced into the exchanges, and certainly not without these assurances" that personal and financial data will be safe from "hackers and cyber criminals." The Republicans are in a total panic about Obamacare's taking effect.  They are now months away from the time when the American people find...

He certainly is when he has things like this to say: "Don't use the term the other side uses. Who does Barack Obama talk about all the time? The middle class. Since when in America do we have classes? Since when in America are people stuck in areas or defined places called a class? That’s Marxism talk." Even mentioning the middle class makes you a Marxist.  Right wingers like Santorum have licensed themselves to tell the most disgusting lies, and launch the most contemptible smears against anyone who stands in the way of the rich having everything in this country.  And they call themselves religious, moral people. Well, that's a lie too.

I am sick of the utter garbage which Republicans (and others) are slinging regarding the supposed causes of the bankruptcy of the city of Detroit.  It's all the fault of the unions, it's the fault of Democratic city officials, it's the fault of (who else) the poor black people left behind when the whites moved to the suburbs, on and on. Well let me keep my promise and make this short:  The reason the city of Detroit is bankrupt is known to everyone.  It is that the car companies on which this city was built decided that they could make more money by building cars somewhere else- the South, Mexico, China, anywhere that workers were beaten down enough to work for almost nothing.  That's it.  That's the whole story and as I said, we all know it perfectly well.  The greed of the managerial class destroyed the lives of everyone else.  It's the story of the United States the last half century or so, just more extreme.  And it infuriates me to have peo...

Or, the falsehood that wouldn't die.  The latest eruption of this patently phony nonsense, from Senator Rand Paul: "You know, the thing is, people want to say it’s extreme. But what I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year. I mean, that's an extremely bad situation." And we've all heard the constant insistence from the Republicans that Obama exploded the deficit, and that it continues to grow- a claim swallowed whole by much of the mainstream press. Well, time out for a little truth.  Here's a nice, readily available chart of the recent history of the Federal deficit: I added the grey bars to allow you to see what happened to the budget deficit under Republican and Democratic Presidents, going back to Jimmy Carter, whose fiscal mismanagement (according to Republicans) left the Federal government with a deficit (get ready for the shock) of $59.6 billion. As you can see, every Republican administration in the last 35 years h...

This news, from Mexico, from today's Los Angeles Times: "In Mexico, are some above the law? MEXICO CITY — They were two of Mexico's most flamboyant bad boys, symbols for many here of all that was wrong with this country in the 1980s and '90s. Rafael Caro Quintero was a high-rolling drug lord sent to prison for the 1985 kidnapping, torture and slaying of an agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Raul Salinas, the brother of a former Mexican president, was a free-spending playboy. He was convicted, and then acquitted, of the 1994 killing of a top politician. He was also suspected of stealing millions of dollars from the government. But in recent days, the old criminal cases against these two characters have fallen apart, leaving many dismayed by what they perceive as the enduring dysfunction of the Mexican justice system. Even though Mexican officials, with U.S. advisors and millions of dollars of U.S. aid, have focused in recent years on reforming the ...

Green Eagle actually has a job.  I've just started on a new TV show, and as usual, it's crazy at the beginning.  Luckily, politics has been very boring lately, so I don't have much to say.  I'll be back soon enough.

Man, this gets annoying after a while.  Well, while we wait for Republicans to trot out their brand new rebranding- Libertarian Populism, which is all the buzz on the right these days, and which is intended to convince the rubes that it is actually the Democrats who are on the side of rich people- here's some more random idiocy from the right: Jim "Dim Bulb" Hoft, Gateway Pundit:  "UNLIT CHOPPERS IN CHICAGO SKY" And here's the picture Jim uses to illustrate this fact: Jim, I hate to point this out to you, but your picture was taken during the day.  Maybe that's why the helicopters were unlit.  Idiot. Jim continues: "The new normal is to think Hollywood is filming the next big budget, high action, urban assault movie over your home." It is, Jim?  Not where I come from.  We never see "Hollywood" filming the next urban assault movie over our houses.  Of course, maybe that's because we don't live where things like that happen...

Paul Krugman: "...the madness of the GOP is the central issue of our time." Pretty much the whole story.

I was reading some right wing article that made reference to Federalist paper #58.   This is one that I had never read, so I went to take a look at it.  I need hardly state that the content of this Federalist paper, written by James Madison, had absolutely nothing to do with the irrational point that the writer was trying to make.  However, at the end of Madison's essay, there was an amazing passage, which relates directly to the subversive, obstructionist behavior of the Republican party today.  Once again, they love to blab about the Constitution, without taking a moment to find out what it means.  Well, here is Madison.  I think you will find this interesting: 'It has been said that more than a majority ought to have been required for a quorum; and in particular cases, if not in all, more than a majority of a quorum for a decision...In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the...

The open sedition that is all the Republican party has to offer any more continues.  And in the process, the Republicans in the Senate are giving us one more lesson in what a pathetic sap Harry Reid is. When the momentum for filibuster reform was behind him, Reid traded it away for a promise from the Republicans to act responsibly in the future. This, despite the Republicans' long record of extracting concessions in return for promises that are never kept. As I pointed out at the time, despite the Democrats' crowing about what a great victory they had won, in fact they had given up the chance to permanently block the un-American refusal of Republicans to do their duty, in return for three or four nominations being approved.  Well, here we are, right where any sentient political observer knew we would be: "All signs are pointing to a total filibuster by Republicans of President Obama's three nominees—Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard, Robert Wilkins—to the critical...