Waterboard the candidates, let's get the truth, start with Rudy

The next time Michael Mukasey is called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee I suggest that he be strapped to a stretcher, a rag placed in his mouth and water poured in the rag until he begins to answer completely and truthfully the questions put to him by the committee.

Now that waterboarding has become an accepted form of interrogation in these United States, I recommend that it be utilized not only with Mukasey, but with all future witnesses before committees of the congress. I think that there are subpoenas kicking around out there for Condi Rice and other executive department figures who have been less than forthcoming in past appearances, so perhaps as our favorite republican tough guy Rudy Giuliani says, we should question them aggressively.

It might be a good idea if the voting public were able to use the same technique in questioning the presidential candidates on their positions. For the rest of the debates all candidates should be wheeled in strapped to stretchers and aggressively questioned using this simulated drowning method.

Using these methods we may begin to get the truth from our "public servants" and declared wannabes.

This will not work in Atlanta however, they don't have enough water at the moment to achieve any kind of satisfactory results.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

America, Open For Business, Closed To Freedom

Is there any area of our government, over the span of the last seven years, any area, in domestic or foreign policy, national defense, public welfare, the economy, name it, where the average, reasonably informed American might point to success, to signs of progress, of improvement, something, anything, to point to with satisfaction, with pride?

Yesterday I read an article by Steve Benin on the resignation of Karen Hughes from her post as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a mouthful there, and a job for which she was as ill suited and unqualified as the man who appointed her and in which, during her two year tenure, she accomplished little, if anything.

In truth, she accomplished nothing, unless you want to count convincing large portions of the world that all Americans must be as out of touch with reality, as clueless and unthinking as their current Commander in Chief, and at that she excelled, as anyone might, having been dispatched to the Middle East with the rank of Ambassador, but without knowledge of the language, culture, history, religions, and general pet peeves of the various states and peoples of the region.

But Karen Hughes was tapped for her office for the same reasons as all Bush appointees are chosen, not for expertise or experience, not for performance or integrity in public service but for loyalty, for unwavering belief in the Messianic delusions of neo conservatism, and a willingness to march in lockstep, nah, goose step, against all who might disagree or dissent.

As I read Benin's article I had the thought that he might have written a very similar piece about nearly any federal department and the Bush appointees thereto in the last seven years. Which of the various cabinet level branches of the executive department of this country have not suffered greatly under the politically connected cronyism of the Bush/ Cheney administration?

We witnessed it at Justice, the politicization of the office of the Attorney General, the perversion of law and the resulting descent into the barbarity of denial of human rights and torture.

We saw it at Defense, where the best military minds of a generation were ignored in favor of the views of sychophantic careerists who allowed a lying Vice President and a comic opera Commander in Chief and their apparatchiks to lead them over the cliff and into the abyss of an endless and disastrous war.

We have seen time and again the incompetence, indifference and criminal neglect at "Homeland" Security and FEMA.

We have seen heads of federal departments turned into agents of electioneering, where party politics takes precedence over public welfare and the machinery and energy of the state is turned to the furtherance of private goals.

Agriculture, Interior, Commerce, Treasury and the rest are now run by the industries that they are legally bound to restrain, regulate and control in the public interest.

Executive branch departments have been stripped of many of their most dedicated, long serving professionals and replaced with Bush loyalists from business and industry, or, in many cases directly from the most favored campuses, the ivy leagues of Christian evangelism. Regulatory functions have been curtailed, enforcement budgets slashed, and inspection schedules diminished to a laughable degree in nearly every regulatory corner of the federal system.

But this, after all, was the intent, to create central government that would gladly do the bidding of the corporate structure, throw aside all restraints, all regulation and increase its profits and its power.

Nearly every day I encounter a story in the media, a story of illness, injury, death or disaster befalling unsuspecting citizens due to the inattention, incompetence, lack of inspection and failures of enforcement of existing federal laws regulating consumer products, work place safety, environmental prohibitions or other areas where purity, safety and security were once almost taken for granted.

During the last seven years we have devolved into a country whose livestock, produce and other foodstuffs are ridden with bacteria and other contaminants, whose drugs and medical services are becoming untrustworthy, whose ports and borders are dangerously porous, whose bridges and highways are collapsing, whose military is being misused and abused in continuous illegal and futile adventures on behalf of corporate America, whose jobs have largely been moved to other countries and continents, whose pensions have collapsed and whose Barbie Dolls contain enough lead to write a novella. (Or, perhaps, the last paragraph)

The real problem however, the crux of the matter and what may finally deliver us stumbling and stuttering, quavering with dread at the terminus of the road to Fascist hell is the incredible damage that has been inflicted on the American spirit, the American soul, the American psyche. I may be accused of naivete' but in my world, in my mind and in my memory there was a time when the eyes of America contained a great measure of compassion, of kindness, of simple good will.

Those days are gone. Under the current regime the eyes of America, official America, the America of the ruling oligarchy are now filled with hunger, with avarice, with an insatiable lust for resources and power, for wealth and influence. America's eyes are no longer the warm welcoming eyes of Lady Liberty but the cold calculating gaze of the largest and most dangerous predator to ever stalk the planet, a predator to be feared and distrusted, to be resisted at all costs.

The eyes of Americans, our citizens, our electorate are filled with a mixture of apathy and fear, of meekness, a cowering attitude and a shuffling posture which is all too heavily reflected in their parliament.

America, in the brief span of my lifetime and largely in the span of a single decade has devolved into a killer of humanity, a dream slayer, despoiler of freedom, a destroyer, the destroyer of America.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

The "Hitler Comparison"

George Bush, Adolph Hitler, Josef Goebbels, Josef Stalin, Mengele, Heinrich Himmler,Naomi Wolf

The "Hitler comparison" should be shouted from the rooftops, as should the Goebbels comparison, the Himmler comparison, the Mengele, Stalin, Torquemada, Beelzebub comparisons and all the rest. If it struts like a Nazi, talks like Nazi, tortures like a Nazi and wages aggressive and illegal war like a Nazi... it's not a duck.

Eighteen months or so ago I wrote a post comparing Bush, Cheney and the boys from PNAC to Hitler, to the Nazi hierarchy and to the wonderful folks who gave the world kristallnacht, the terror bombings of Guernica, of London and conducted history's magnum opus of human carnage, the holocaust, the destruction of two thirds of the Jews in Europe and millions of other "undesirables."

I took a moderate amount of heat for what one local (Dayton) commenter called my "classlessness," and received a few surly EMails from people who are probably, to this day, driving around with "Bush/Cheney" bumper stickers on their Cadillac and Lexus SUVs but since I want so badly to be loved and admired, (or at least not ignored) I resolved to try to avoid using the "Hitler Comparison" after that.

I saw it used by others on the blogs and, guardedly, in the MSM, witnessed their reception of similar treatment and I realized that a taboo (see Godwin's law) had been created. "Disrespectful to the office of the President," some cried, "diminishes the horror of the holocaust and the brutality unleashed on Europe's Jews by the real Hitler," cried others, "the ultimate ad hominem attack," wrote one academic seeking to show that such comparisons were childish , demeaning to those who offered them and "kills dead," scholarly internet discussions.

As the months dragged on and the war escalated, the deaths, the casualties, the carnage mounted, the attacks on dissent increased, civil liberties began to erode and disappear, as the regulatory bureaucracy and the judiciary were stripped of independent professionals and replaced with ideological partisans, as tens of billions of dollars of American taxpayers cash simply disappeared into the black hole of "privatization" and reason itself came under constant attack, I couldn't help myself, I began to use the "Hitler Comparison" more often in my various rants.

I don't pretend to scholarship, or journalism, I'm an old carpenter, not an academic, I'm content to be a pamphleteer. As long as the feedback tells me that people are reading my electronic leaflets, not ripping them from under their wiper blades and kicking them to the curb, if I sense that they are following the links, I find a small measure of hope, not a lot, just enough to make me look forward to coffee and another batch of leafleting in the morning.

The war..s continue, and as the fervor grows for another, in Iran and more evidence of official "misdeeds," of lies, of outright criminality, of incompetence, rampant cronyism and fraud continue to seep out from under the closed doors of what has developed into the most secretive, insular, antidemocratic administration in the history of the Republic, the "Hitler comparison" has grown in my mind and, I believe, much of the public's to the point that we need to repeal the "Godwin law" and popularize the idea in the hopes that by holding up the mirror to the tyrant we may drive him from our shores. I'm serious, we need "Hitler Comparison" T shirts, by the millions.

Sunday night I watched Naomi Wolf on PBS as she was interviewed about her recent book by "guest interviewer" Viet Dinh, a former Assistant Attorney General, and principle author of the Patriot Act, greatly admired by none other than Rupert Murdoch, in other words, as Adol George W is wont to say, no cream puff. Ms Wolf more than held her own, after all, she knows her book and the research on which its based and defended it well against a wholly predictable neo-con cross examination.

Her book may represent, albeit in a much more scholarly and reasoned way, the ultimate in "Comparisons," (I confess I haven't yet read it) She says that she charts the closing of various previously open societies, from Hitler to Stalin to Pinochet and on to our current rapidly closing system, and finds the comparisons striking, the trends frightening, ant the peril, imminent enough to cause her to run around the country like a latter day Paul Revere shouting that the redcoats brown shirts are coming, while making astute "comparisons" between current and past events, motives and personalities.

It is, of course, a book tour and yes, the object is to sell the book but there is much more here, I hear a clarion call in her voice and feel truth in her message.

Would that several million people, Germans perhaps, in 1933, 34 or 35 had been possessed of the poor taste and "classlessness," had been willing to succumb to the gaucherie of loudly and publicly comparing Adolph Hitler to... well ..what the hell, lets go for it.. Adolph Hitler, I wonder what result might have ensued. Or, back in the USSR, had Russians stood up and said "hey this Stalin guy is becoming a real Hitler or maybe even a Stalin," how many of the fifty million Russian dead might have been spared, the cold war, arms race avoided, at least greatly reduced.

There is a responsibility of those who govern to speak truth to the governed, but, when they fail in that responsibility, there is a greater responsibility on the part of the governed to speak truth to power, to spit in its eye and to dethrone it as necessary to insure the continuity of the rights, freedoms and welfare of the public, for that is what finally matters, not the government, nor the corrupt interests of the criminal oligarchs that it represents.

I listened to the GOP candidates a bit the other night, a little goes a long way with these birds, and heard the words "personal responsibility" several times, a phrase which is nothing more, on Republican lips, than a code word for racism, sexism and a continuation of the war they have waged against the "lesser classes' for all of modern history.

I agree with them in this sense, it is time for a large percentage of the population to take personal responsibility for themselves, for their country, to unite in the name of freedom, in the name of economic, political and spiritual liberty, to rise up and seize control of the whole package, the big damn shebang, to wrest control from the five percent who have kept them enslaved, who have enforced ignorance and poverty and to throw aside the twenty percent who guard the prison.

It may be "classless" and a violation of "Godwin's law to "Compare" George Walker Bush, the arrogant young scion of eastern establishment wealth and power, grandson of Senators and son of Presidents, cowboy of windshields and owner of chainsaws, to the beer swilling gutter scum of the beer halls of Munich and Berlin but I'm afraid it is unavoidable, it is inescapable, obvious, and it is historically necessary.

Terrorism? 9/11? The attack on the World Trade Center was their Reichstag fire, the invasion of Iraq, comparable to the blitzkrieg into eastern Europe. They share the same motives and ideology, the same vision, they exhibit the same compassion, and wield power with the same ruthless disregard for the lives, for the welfare and dignity of common humanity.

Make no mistake, these people, the architects of the last six years of international turmoil, of domestic division, of war and death, of crushing despair and hopelessness, are Nazis, perhaps not yet in the full bloom of adulthood, not yet grown to the evil proportions of their twentieth century predecessors, but they have emerged from their larval stage and are prepared for full flight, They have all the weapons, they lack nothing, nothing, but to complete their rewriting of our laws and of course, they need those handsome uniforms.

The only thing that can prevent them from fulfilling their wretched and terrible goals of oligarchy, universal slavery and domination of the world is your voice, your derision, your hand, raised in resistance, your lips mouthing a simple no.

Hurry, I think the uniforms have been ordered.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

The President's Saturday Radio Address, Who's To Blame For London Terror Threats?

My fellow Americans

After spending nearly 400 billion dollars ousting Saddam and the Taliban, eradicating al Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations and creating a Model for future Middle East Democracies in Iraq, after vastly improving the lives of the Iraqi people by turning on their electricity and water service, creating a safe and secure environment for them to pursue their lives, rebuilding their schools and hospitals and other critical infrastructure and after getting their oil flowing freely to the export markets, to enable their return to national solvency, you might think that they would be grateful.

But no, last week they returned  to their old ways, proving that Iraq is still the center of the axis of evil just as Dick and Rummy and Wolfie and Me and Turd Blossom  have said from the beginning.

Now this is hard work, in other words we've been working hard to defeat the haters, the evil ones, I like to call them the Islamo-fascists. The ones who hate freedom.

We have made good progress, why, some Iraqis are still scrubbing that purple ink off their thumbs and as Dick (I call him Mister President) likes to say, the insurgents were in their last throes, in other words they were like a pitcher in the sixth inning after too many fast balls, their arms were tired. Why you could go out for dinner and a movie almost anywhere in the Green Zone.

As soon as we turned our backs, as soon as we took a deep breath and a well deserved short break before we began taking our American largesse, I like to call it our Great Ship of Freedom, into the desert in Iran and give the Iranites the same opportunities we gave the Iraqis, or the Afghanians or that the Israelians are even now graciously giving to the Lebanalese, the Iraqis struck again.

Just as they did in the days and months leading up to the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, there they are again, planning and plotting with al Qaeda to bring down dozens of our airliners over the Atlantic.

And, as some uninformed people at that time, I like to call them Democrats, tried to lay a large portion of the blame for 9/11 on the Saudis, many of the same voices are now being raised against them again, along with another of our most stalwart allies in the war on the evil ones, the Pakistanians.

When will these people understand that the Saudis are our friends, why, their fathers and grandfathers went to college with ours in Texas for God's sake, we were associates in the oil business before Saddam did his first contract killing. The Saudis learned the ins and outs of oil exploration and exploitation at the University of Texas studying the magic of the Texas Railroad Commission just as we did. I appreciate the Saudis, they work hard, they're entrepreneurs, like me and Mist... the Vice President.

And the Pakistanians, they're our closest ally in the war on terror, they've been hunting Osama and his henchmen everywhere they aren't for years, just as diligently, just as tirelessly as OJ hunts Nicole's real killer on the golf courses of Florida. They are always just one step behind him. If that guy slips, they'll be on him like a pair of wet Frye boots.

We didn't spend 400 billion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting Islamic Fascism, and building shining pillars of Arab democratic opportunity, and more hundreds of millions in Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin and a score of other good, God fearing, "Red States" protecting truck stops, skating rinks, and petting zoos, to turn around and hurl blame and insults at our friends the Saudis or the Pakistanians. America is true to our friends, in other words we're loyal to the hand that feeds us.

No, the main problem has always been Iraq, they had weapons of mass destruction and proven ties to al Qaeda, and, they tried to kill my Daddy, and now that we've managed to eliminate Saddam and insure that Iraqi oil will stay in the ground for awhile, we face still more dangers with Ahmadinejad in Iran, and his Hezbollah hirelings in Beirut, which is in Lebanon, these are countries with leaders who we know have worked closely with al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and other evil ones.

We have the evidence. The Pre.. Dick showed it to me, in other words, I've seen it. It's being guarded by six Patriotic American Oil Company Executives around the clock. Those guys work hard, they're entrepreneurs too, and they're in Dicks office all the time.

This evidence is highly classified and locked safely in Dick Cheney's office safe next to our secret comprehensive national energy policy, and the secret plan to save social security, right there next to the secret maintenance schedule for the Alaskan Pipeline.

Dicks got all this stuff, Turd Blossom's got a lot of stuff too, I like to call it political capital, and we'll bring it out at the appropriate time, in other words, when it's timely, like in October. Heh,heh.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust



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Rust Never Sleeps

"Oil Company Expert" Demonstrates Use Of
"State Of The Art High Tech Equipment"
To Clean Up Oil Spill

The Alaskan Pipeline, or one of BP's feeder lines connecting to it is suddenly so rusty that it has to be shut down indefinitely, causing an instant 8% drop in US production capacity.

This fact translates into an instant and enormous revenue loss for Alaska, and:

The event will be followed by an instant double jump in gas prices and an instant double secret jump in oil company revenues.

Now, I'm not an oil expert, (Beer is my area,) I have never been fond of the flavor of "Crude Light", although I once drank some Old Milwaukee and found it somewhat reminiscent of 10w40 when served stale, at room temperature, in a dirty glass. But I digress.

We have known since the late seventies that "Rust Never Sleeps" because Neil Young warned us of the fact. I think Neil was warning us of one, or more, of the following (A) Punk Rockers (B) The Reagan Administration or (C) Patty Reagan and Patty Smith)

The oil experts weren't listening at the time though, they were busy vibrating with giddy anticipation over the coming anti- regulatory, pro business, "pillage the public treasury" policies of the arriving hordes of free market, hate government, "where's mine," rampant assed Republicanism.

I think that was about the time that construction was beginning on the Alaskan Pipeline which was approximately when this sudden rust problem began ... suddenly, twenty five or so years ago.

Experts seldom listen to anyone, not even Neil Young, partially because they are too busy expounding on their area of expertise on CNN or one of the other twenty four hour "Repeat The White House Talking Points Like A Mantra" outlets, but mostly because experts wouldn't seem very "experty" if they went around from network to network just .... listening.

This explains why "BP", which once was an acronym for "British Petroleum," until their public relations people changed it to "Beyond Petroleum," although their recent quarterly profit reports may lead the public to believe that it really means "Beyond Petroleum Jelly."

But, again, I digress. I started to say that the oil and energy experts were so preoccupied with the coming of the "Post-Great Society, Hallelujah, Cal Coolidge is Back, Land of Milk and Honey." that they didn't hear Neil's warning.

With the rise of the twenty four hour news channels the demand for talking experts in many fields became so great, and the pay so lucrative that there were almost no experts left to serve and guide crucial areas of our society, such as the energy industry, or the military, or elder statesmanship.

At this point in time, or as Yogi Berra says, "now," the problem has become so acute that we can't fight a war effectively because all the really good Generals have become Senior Military Analysts on TV.

The only Generals left are the sycophants that we often see around Bush or Rumsfeld these days, like Peter Pace, whose shameless ass kissing almost makes me ashamed to have been a Marine.

The shortage of experts problem became painfully apparent a few years ago when the LA Prosecutors Office discovered it couldn't gain a conviction in a criminal case because all the really great Lawyers (like Greta Van Susteren) were either Senior Legal Analysts on Wolf Blitzer or Bill O'Reilly's staff or consultants on one of the several dozen CSIs or LA Laws which now crowd the cable channels.

So it was, in the oil industry, that, while the corrosive forces of Rapid Arctic Pipeline Oxidation were working twenty four hours a day at their insidious task of suddenly destroying the pipeline infrastructure, most of the energy experts were busily engaged in explaining to TV audiences how oil markets work, diagramming the "Law of Supply and Demand" and finding other ways to cover up their aberrant greed and criminal behavior.

Not all of them were on TV, great numbers of these well oiled cats had been employed by the Bush Administration to make sure that the energy and oil industries, with their all the attendant environmental problems of their oil fields and refineries, pipelines and supertankers, were less regulated than, say, amateur fishermen or golf pros.

Thousands of other energy experts were hard at work in government agencies, or in the quasi private sector on the public dime, refuting Al Gore's silly ass claims about Global Warming and many more were busily searching for important evidence concerning Noah's Ark, The Shroud of Turin, and that ridiculous, on the face of it, heretical "Darwinian" nonsense.

When all the experts in an industry are completely preoccupied with things like "trees" they tend to lose sight of things like "forests," so we shouldn't be overly harsh with them for not noticing that the Alaskan Pipeline had suddenly rusted away, causing the spillage of "four or five barrels" of oil.

There were some warning signals,(aside from Neil Young's somewhat irritating, nasal, whining, social portents) which might have made them sit up and notice, like the recent, (March 2006) spillage of 267,000 barrels (that's barrels, not gallons) by the same company "BP" as in "Blowout Pipelines?" in another of its Prudhoe transit lines, which is still shutdown.

Examination of the lines in the most recent spill found that the pipeline walls had suffered losses in wall thickness of as much as 70 to 81%

BP said that this level of "corrosion-related wall thinning appeared to exceed BP criteria for continued operation."

I would think so.

Not being an expert I might have thought that the allowable limits for loss of wall thickness would be much lower, say twenty or thirty percent, at which point red flags would be raised, alarms would ring out, and teams of experts would be summoned.

I might also have thought that the 267,000 barrel spill in March would be much more reason to shut things down and fix them than the more recent spill of "four or five barrels." I was wrong, another indication that I should remember my "place" and stick to "Beer."

The only variables that I can think of that have changed since this past March are the worsening Civil War in Iraq, the onset of proxy war we have started with Iran in Lebanon, the steady drop of Republicans in the polls, and the proximity of election day. Hmmm.

But, as I'm, admittedly, not well versed in these technical matters I guess I'll just have to trust the oil people and our government that is so diligently regulating the oil industry and their activities, and fervently protecting the public interest.

When they next get together, these folks from the Bush Government and Big Oil, perhaps at their next family outing, after the potato races, and potato salad, the hob nobbing and the apple bobbing, they will attack these problems, and using all their skills, expertise, and the competence that has become a hallmark of the GW Bush Administration, they will rapidly correct them.

Yes, I'm sure of it, they will correct these problems, with all dispatch, quickly, suddenly, in fact, at the speed of .... rust.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

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Is WaPo "Sleeping Over" On K Street?

In a "News" story in The Washington Post this morning
"An Estate Tax Twist Reverses Party Roles On Minimum Wage" Staff Writer Jeffrey Birnbaum leads with one of the most disingenuous paragraphs I have read in a major newspaper in awhile:

For years, organized labor has worked hard to raise the minimum wage, while business groups have campaigned to block such a change. This week in the Senate, however, the AFL-CIO is pushing to kill the wage increase while practically the entire business lobby is demanding that it pass.

Perhaps the word disingenuous isn't strong enough, in fact my departed Quaker Grandmother would have said, "why that Jeffrey is full of beans." My equally departed Grandfather would have agreed with her, but not being cut from quite the same Quaker mold as Grandma,he would have differed with her somewhat on the nature of Mr. Birnbaum's stuffing.

Either way the statement is simply untrue and Birnbaum and his employer are, or should be fully aware of the fact.

Either they are trying to follow John Stewart into the "Faux News" genre and making the attempt without benefit of Stewart's wonderful sense of humor and unique talent for satire or they are in Grandma's phrase "full of beans."

The Democrats and the AFL-CIO are not fighting against an increase in the minimum wage at all and the Republicans are not fighting for it, any more than they are fighting for anything else that doesn't directly benefit the top several percent of those they represent.

Oh the hell with it Grandma, I'm not a Quaker at all, I think the Post and Birnbaum are twisting the truth and this story is just a another sad lie.

The most cursory examination of the AFL-CIO website would have been enough to convince anyone of the organization's solid and long held stand in favor of minimum wage increases in general, and their belief in the current crying need for this particular long delayed raise for entry level workers.

The AFL-CIO has been running a series of articles this summer under the banner "America Needs A Raise." They have repeatedly called for the passage of an increase in wages in this session of congress and have repeatedly pointed out this bill as the legislative fraud that it is.

I have excerpted or linked to a couple of them here and here on my website. I have read several others and ....

(As I was writing the last sentence, my email alarm lit up with the news of yet another of the AFL-CIO's articles by the aforementioned Mike Hall. It seems that the Senate may have a cloture vote vote this evening on a motion to proceed on this issue. The AFL-CIO is calling for a vote against the bill but for the wage. Read it here.)

The fact is that the bill that was passed last week by 230 cynical, and "on the take" members of the House was a disgusting and deceitful fraud which increases the minimum wage with one hand and steals it back with the other by offering another 750 billion dollars in tax cuts and other quasi legal boondoggles to the already bloated millionaires among us. Read Mike Hall's article of August 1 on this on the AFL-CIO blog.

While you're there do a search of the site for "minimum wage" and after reading what you find reread Jeffery's lead paragraph and tell me that he is not living in the same parallel reality as the majority of the modern Republican party.

There has been no "Role Reversal." Republican's are simply trying to steal a march by passing a fraudulent wage bill before the election and make it more palatable to their multi- millionaire masters in business by allowing them to expropriate another trillion dollars or so in federal revenue over the next decade, while partially making up for the loss by stealing from the tip jar of the person who served your lunch today.

(For two related articles concerning workers and tips go here and here.)

As Lyndon Johnson used to say, They're pissin' in my boots and tellin' me it's raining."

The Democrats on the other hand want a stand alone wage bill, unburdened by giveaways to the wealthy or any of the other economy weakening sleights of hand, shell games and poison pills included in the shameful bill passed last week by 230 graft sucking thieves and liars in the House of Corporate Representatives.

There is a quotation toward the end of the article worth noting:

"Every closely held business in America today is either affected by the death tax or could be affected by it," one top business lobbyist said. "At the same time, less than 3 percent of the country's workers get paid at the minimum wage." In addition, the lobbyist said, "people in the business community understand that it is valuable to Republicans standing for election in November to demonstrate that they have compassion for folks at the lowest end of the economic ladder."

Where this K Street Fat Cat Corporate Shill gets his 3 percent figure I don't know, I suspect that the real number is easily two to three times that high, but no matter. If the number is only 3 percent that's 5 million people, people, many with families, including children, honestworking people, working for far less per year than that fat cat lobbyist quoted above or the venal, corrupt congress person he sleeps with makes in one month.

The Senate is now called upon to show that it has the simple political courage to stop this legislative flimflamery and kick this stinking cow pie out of the yard, which will leave the way open after recess, for the introduction of real legislation that if written with the intent to improve the lot of the least compensated among us will benefit millions of hard working honest Americans, and bring economic and social benefits to the rest of us.

Nothing else is acceptable. As Birnbaum correctly points out our Legislative Houses of Happy Hookers have denied an increase for nine long years. During this time inflation, the ever increasing greed of Corporate America and the economy wrecking foreign and domestic misadventures and follies of the Republican majority have eaten away at the already pathetically meager buying power of the miserly wages that millions of our working poor suffer under.

It is worth mentioning that during this time the same congressional swine have every year increased their own pay through "automatic cost of living increases" to the tune of thirty five thousand dollars above what they made nine years ago, or more than three times the current annual income at the minimum wage.

They have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps Gucci Loafer Tassels to a quite comfortable figure of more than $165,000 annually. They "earn" as "public servants" about three thousand dollars more in one month than the minimum wage earner sweats for in a year.

These figures are approximate and do not include their lavish and often padded expense accounts, the best health care and pension plan the public's money can buy, the dozens of other congressional perks, and all that they are able to steal with the help of their well heeled corporate constituents and the lobbyists whose laps they dance on.

Jeffery Birnbaum and the Post are as cognizant as I am of the fact that the political poles have not reversed themselves on this issue or any other issue. They are also well aware of the role that corporate money plays in congressional politics and I'm afraid they have become too enamored of it.

Further, I believe they need to carefully examine their motives and standards, if they continue to print such transparently biased and twisted nonsense, I will have to wonder if they are waking up with their hair tousled and legs all tangled amid the filthy and fetid bed linens of the same K Street Money Masters where so many of our "public servants." find themselves on most mornings.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

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Bush In Jail, A Pet Dream

The Presidency or Regency of George Bush the Lesser is nothing more or less than a vast carefully crafted criminal enterprise.

The Bush Administration and it's extended crime family has taken organized crime from the mean streets and ethnic social clubs of urban America and transferred it high above those meager environs into the steel and glass, leather and mahogany world of the American Corporate boardroom.

The scale of the criminality of the members of this nefarious organization would make the most experienced and successful Mafiosi or Asian or Russian gangster weep with wildly envious frustration.

No criminal organization in history has had the raw and overwhelming economic power, the political clout, the global reach, the enormous public relations network, the military might, the cooperation of law enforcement and the assortment of like minded corrupt compatriots in the church, the press and nearly every institution of society.

This is the "Military Industrial Complex" that Dwight Eisenhower warned against nearly half a century ago, but in that ensuing span of time it has grown into something that I doubt even Ike could have anticipated. It's a "Military Industrial Complex" on steroids.

Eisenhower wasn't the only one to provide advance warning of the rapine now being unleashed on America and the rest of the hapless world, the culprits themselves have loudly announced themselves publicly and proudly for as long as I can remember.

Get government off our backs was the clarion cry in the 64 election. The conservatives' hatred of government was equaled by their love for business, ahh the idea of a marketplace unfettered by government regulation, free from public scrutiny, allowed to operate without the threat of legal sanction, or environmental strictures, made many a Conservative of the sixties wax poetic. It was the era of Bill Buckley's sweetest dreams.

Their hatred of government was also equaled by their hatred for the people in whose name the Government was constituted. People weren't meant to rule, they have no standing, the government, if we have one at all should be run by and for business, after all they are the ones with an ownership stake in America. Wage earners should not have that kind of control.

People were only necessary as low cost labor to keep the machines turning, the trucks loaded and moving, and as consumers for the products of the company store, at compound interest, of course.

It would be self defeating to allow these same people to have any real control over the government, it would only lead to control over business.

America at the time was reawakening to it's own true values. The values which brought about a Bill of Rights in the face of bitter conservative opposition in the eighteenth century were about to finally force America, well into the twentieth century, to recognize that Black people were full citizens, and Gee, Women too, that every person was entitled to economic justice, that there was more to promoting the common good and the pursuit of happiness than hard scrabble, dog eat dog, dollar twenty five cents an hour, wage earner competition in some sweat shop.

America discovered it's conscience, it was the age of Aquarius, Pete Seeger's folksy dream.

The Republicans were put to bed in 64 but they didn't sleep, they festered, they fed in the dark on the societal schisms of Vietnam, on laughter they saw as license and sexuality they defined as sin. They fed on violence, assassinations, riots in the streets, on civil unrest on a scale that hadn't been seen since the twenties.

They rose from their slumber singing their songs of derision for the people and their government, and they sang their poison to the people, they sang a melody of racism and class war and the "Greatest Generation" sang along.

My Father's Generation turned it's back on America and elected the first criminal federal administration in my lifetime, the President who "was not a crook."

J Walter Thompson was in the White House, Pat Buchanan was in the EOB and the great Silent Majority, Hard Hat, Propaganda Machine was born.

Build for war. Sell bombs, think plastics.

It was Brown and Root's ultimate revenue stream dream.

Having enjoyed the fruits of middle class America, having lived the good life on years of well paying union jobs the "Greatest Generation" turned their back on the unions, on the party that helped to build them, on younger workers, on their own children and bought into the big Republican lie.

The reaction to the Watergate scandal and the public airing of the bottomless corruption of the Nixon Agnew Crime Family brought a few brief years respite from the conservative onslaught on America, but as always the conservatives were waiting in the wings.

When next a major speaking role opened up they offered up a rapidly aging hack "B" actor whose conservative credentials included nearly tripling the size of State Government in California (although they didn't present it quite that way) and the same "Greatest Generation" that gave us Richard Nixon now gave us eight years of towering, blathering, mediocrity and homespun homilies.

Fortunately he slept through large portions of his second term. This was the era of Bonzo's wet dream.



Daddy Bush entered the White House on a carpet greased with Saudi Arabian Light Sweet Crude and proceeded to make money for fellow Bonesmen and associates all over the world but the Dictator that he helped prop up in Iraq while he played second banana to the Great Communicator reared his ugly head and in trying too hard to stay on the Saudis' good side, he got on the electorate's bad side, but he and Jim Baker had laid the cornerstone for what would become his somewhat addled son's turn at the trough, and so entered Bill Clinton.

Peace and prosperity, eight years worth, which drove the conservatives absolutely batshit, howling, moon barking insane. The rumors and lies told by conservatives about this man, the constant, concerted attempts to derail his presidency already fill a million pages.

But more than sugar plumbs danced in Billy's imagination and he decided to wreck his presidency his own damn self.

This was an era high dry cleaning expenses.

Which brings us back to the current and most blatantly criminal Presidency/Regency of all time.

The underachieving, draft dodging, little preppy snit that the Supreme Court rammed down our public throat began his career as Regent by, most probably, suborning election fraud in the State of Florida.

He went on to begin staffing federal regulatory agencies almost without fail with cronies and cronies of cronies who came directly from the industries that they were supposed to be regulating.

By the end of his first term there was not a chicken coop in the federal government that wasn't being carefully guarded by a fox.

The revenue that began to flow into Republican coffers as a direct result of this approach to staffing was phenomenal. Businesses were very grateful and they showed it the way it counts.

The more they received the more they gave and now just a few years later they virtually own the government.

Dedicated people who had spent their lives protecting the people's interests from unethical sharks in the criminal business community and those in government who aided them left government service in droves because they were prohibited from doing their jobs.

After 9/11 after ascertaining that most of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia he decided to attack Iraq.

Hell, why not Mexico, or Paraguay, They were as deeply involved in the terrorist attacks as was Iraq and they apparently had the same quantities of WMDs.

No, it had to be Iraq, no matter what evidence had to be fabricated, the neo cons had already done the planning, the estimates were all done the contracts ready to sign, all the defense buddies were lined up at the trough, with Halliburton at the head of the line.

Oh God, the money in this deal was going to be enormous, like nothing in their lives. The death and destruction involved? Hey booby, we're talkin' billions here, American Kids dying by the thousands, maimed by the tens of thousands, driven half nuts by the hundreds of thousands? We're talking tens of billions in profits here.

Young George and his neo con mentors had to go to war in Iraq, the outcome of the 04 election would require enormous outlays of cash and the defense beast had to be appeased with lucrative contracts to keep the money flowing.

Public money going out to private interests and the rake backs coming in and filling the conservative coffers to overflowing, guaranteeing a nice long profitable war as long as they can control the public relations side of the equation "Terror, Freedom Democracy" "Fight them over there so we don't......"

The whole self serving deceitful mantra repeated over and over again. Keep the poll numbers within reason, keep the contracts flowing, just a couple more years and we'll own the whole damn country.

Tens of billions in profits, hell, maybe hundreds.

How profitable, depends on where you sit I guess, If you're the CEO of Halliburton or General Dynamics, you're sitting pretty, in clover, up to your tits in cool green, or gold or bearer bonds.

If you're a taxpayer or the grandchild of a taxpayer you've been saddled with a burden of debt that will never be paid. You will pay interest on your debt your whole life to enable these criminals to leave the table with their profit.

If you're a nineteen year old Marine who has just been cut neatly in half by someone's idea of religion or another's idea of democracy and you're facing a lifetime of under funded conservative neglect sitting in an antique wheel chair in a VA hospital, the perspective may be radically different still.

Bush and his Criminal Family, yeah, they hate government. They hate government, which is why they're so abysmally bad at it from a public point of view.

The duty of government according to these conservative thieves is to take public money and turn it to private use.

They're proud of their philosophy. They have think tanks to refine it.

I would like to see them all in handcuffs.

That's my pet dream.

In November we have a chance to defeat this carrion filth, and begin the process of putting many of them in prison for theft, murder, crimes against humanity and criminal stupidity.

Please help me fulfill my dream.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

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