Rob Shvern on Politics

What does John McCain’s history and character tell us about his style of leadership?

In 2002, former U.N. weapons inspector and military intelligence analyst Scott Ritter discussed the “Iraqi threat” that he said was built on a framework of lies.

His assessment of how the war and occupation would go has been correct. The conclusion he anticipates is of concern.

It is no surprise that the Kurdish problem in Iraq was more complex than the government or media let on. Neither was Saddam the mythological creature they told us he was.

Former Senator John Edwards has endorsed Republican frontrunner Senator John McCain and explained ending his campaign for the Democratic nomination.

“As the presidential field narrows,” Sen. Edwards said at an afternoon news conference, “I just didn’t feel there would be room in the race for two white males who favor leniency for illegal aliens, who opposed Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, who fight man-made global warming, who support limits on so-called free speech in political campaigns, who have worked to hinder approval of conservative judicial nominees, and who stand against the Bush administration’s desire to torture terror suspects with waterboarding.”

Mr. Edwards added that, while he’s young enough to run for president 10 more times, the septuagenarian Sen. McCain “may have only five or six more shots at it.”

While Mr. Edwards played down speculation that he might bring balance to the ticket as Sen. McCain’s running mate, he noted that it would be “a once-in-a-lifetime thrill to team up with an actual Vietnam war hero.”

MSNBC is a proud subsidiary of GE, a bomb maker. Only pro-war politicians are permitted to discuss their views and argue about the vastness of their war support. All other views, such as opposition to war, are called “extreme” and cannot be considered.

John McCain has clarified his platform. He says jobs are never coming back, illegals are never going home, and we are doing to start a lot more wars.

You might remember a few weeks ago when McCain said he would like to stay in Iraq for 100 more years. He is now open to staying in Iraq for 10,000 years.

Hillary Clinton has promised to keep troops in Iraq until at least 2013 with at an estimated deployment of at least 75,000.These forces will be used to “fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.” Clinton’s policy is estimated to cost almost 5 trillion dollars.

You might remember that in the months before the March 2003 Iraq invasion, the Bush administration estimated the Iraq war would cost no more than $50 billion, but a recent Congressional Budget Office estimate warned that the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could total $2.4 trillion through the next decade, or nearly $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country.

How well is the country doing? The decider tells us about the events of the day.

So at the start of our modern presidential campaigns, all of the talk is about who raised the most cash from transnational investors who don’t give a damn about this country or its people.

Next, corporate media cited the lack of campaign funding for Kucinich as the reason they did not cover him. “Hillary has more money from the nuclear mafia and Medical industrial complex than any other candidate” they recognized, “so we have to give her tens of millions of dollars of free coverage.” Same for all of the corporate CEOs; Clinton, Edwards, Obama.

All that free publicity for the CEOs moved their polling numbers up until, voila, corporate media could exclude Kucinich because he was not as well known. Finally, they simply refused to let him into the debates.

When Kucinich was allowed into debates and got brief chances to speak, the audiences went wild. It was a rare time when a candidate spoke to their issues, the public interest. This forced other Democrats to move toward Kucinich positions, at least in rhetoric, to win audience share.

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2886.shtml

More on how the media determines which candidates to promote here.

Former FOX reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre discuss being forced to censor truthful information about Monsanto and it’s cancer-causing hormone Posilac that endangers non-organic milk sources. Monsanto threatened to remove advertisements from FOX if they publicized the harm caused by Monsanto products such as Posilac, Roundup, Aspartame, and others. A jury awarded the FOX reporters damages because they had been pressured to broadcast “a false, distorted or slanted story” and fired for threatening to blow the whistle but an appeals court agreed with Fox that it is technically not against any law, rule or regulation to deliberately distort the news on television.

FOX and other news agencies exist to make money, not to provide information to the public or inform them about important matters. This is why news is primarily a source of entertainment rather than information. Corporations do not have social interests, only profit interests.

Who should America elect in 2008? Pollster Frank Luntz could spin this brilliantly!

Patrick Buchanan writes about the state of the economy:

Our political parties seem oblivious. Republicans, save Ron Paul, are all promising to expand the U.S. military and maintain all of our worldwide commitments to defend and subsidize scores of nations. Democrats, with entitlement costs drowning the federal budget in red ink, are proposing a new entitlement – universal health coverage for the near 50 million who do not have it – another magnet for illegal aliens. Moody’s is telling America it needs a time of austerity, while the U.S. government is behaving like the governments we used to bail out. California has already hit the wall. With an economy as large as a G-8 nation, the Golden State is looking at a $14 billion deficit in 2009 and a $3 billion shortfall in 2008. Gov. Schwarzenegger has called for slashing prison staff by 6,000, including 2,000 guards, early release of 22,000 inmates, closing four dozen state parks and a 10 percent across-the-board cut in all state agencies. The Democratic legislature is demanding tax hikes, which would drive more taxpayers back over the mountains whence their fathers came. To stave off recession, the Fed appears anxious to slash interest rates another half-point, if not more. That will further weaken the dollar and raise the costs of the imports to which we have become addicted. While all this is bad news for the Republicans, it is worse news for the republic. As we save nothing, we must borrow both to pay for the imported oil and foreign manufactures upon which we have become dependent. We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy. We sat still as Japan protected her markets and dumped high quality goods into ours and China undervalued its currency to suck jobs, technology and factories out of the United States. Now, China and Japan have $2 trillion in cash reserves. The Arabs have an equal amount of petrodollars. Both are headed here to spend their depreciating dollars snapping up U.S. assets – banks, ports, highways, defense contractors. America, to pay her bills, has begun to sell herself to the world. Its balance sheet gutted by the subprime mortgage crisis, Citicorp got a $7.5 billion injection from Abu Dhabi and is now fishing for $1 billion from Kuwait and $9 billion from China. Beijing has put $5 billion into Morgan Stanley and bought heavily into Barclays Bank. Merrill-Lynch, ravaged by subprime mortgage losses, sold part of itself to Singapore for $7.5 billion and is seeking another $3 billion to $4 billion from the Arabs. Swiss-based UBS, taking a near $15 billion write-down in subprime mortgages, has gotten an infusion of $10 billion from Singapore. Bain Capital is partnering with China’s Huawei Technologies in a buyout of 3Com, the U.S. company that provides the technology that protects Pentagon computers from Chinese hackers. This self-indulgent generation has borrowed itself into unpayable debt. Now the folks from whom we borrowed to buy all that oil and all those cars, electronics and clothes are coming to buy the country we inherited. We are prodigal sons, and the day of reckoning approaches.