Obama Never Learns From His Mistakes

Cenk Uygur:

President Obama thought compromise, conciliation and agreement with Republicans was the correct path in his first term. He was dead wrong. The correct course is to be as progressive as possible and argue strongly for your own principles (if you have them). The country is on your side. Look at almost any poll on any issue, the country sides with the progressive position -- tax the rich, stop the wars, don't cut Social Security or Medicare, and on and on. And after all this, I'm not sure President Obama has learned anything at all from this debacle. He now says he's sure they'll work with him if he gets a second term. Come on! Didn't we just see this movie?

Walt Disney's Feed The Birds - Mary Poppins (1964)

The original anti-bank song and movie...just fabulous beyond words.

Strasbourg Flag

A souvenir from our recent trip flying at our Fire Island house.

Mike Dawes - Somebody That I Used To Know (Gotye) - Solo Guitar

Occupy Will Be Back (But You May Not Recognize It)

Chris Hedges:

Our dying corporate class, corrupt, engorged on obscene profits and indifferent to human suffering, is the guarantee that the mass movement will expand and flourish. No one knows when. No one knows how. The future movement may not resemble Occupy. It may not even bear the name Occupy. But it will come. I have seen this before. And we should use this time to prepare, to educate ourselves about the best ways to fight back, to learn from our mistakes, as many Occupiers are doing in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and other cities. There are dark and turbulent days ahead. There are powerful and frightening forces of hate, backed by corporate money, that will seek to hijack public rage and frustration to create a culture of fear. It is not certain we will win. But it is certain this is not over.

Robert Mangabeira Unger - "Beyond Obama"

Sunshine...Hooray!

Photo: Frankfurt, Germany The monsoon appears to be over...it's sunny at the beach today.

Divisiveness And Religious Fanaticism

I believe much of the divisiveness in the world is caused by religious fanaticism...After 95 years on this planet, I have come to the conclusion that the human spirit can never be crushed, no matter how cruel the oppressor or fanatic the belief.

Actor Kirk Douglas, age 95.

The Corrupt American Political System

As I wrote to a good friend this morning, we have a hopelessly corrupt political system in this country, one that more often than not produces compromised candidates and one that presents no real choice to the electorate. We also have an uneducated and backward populace purposely kept that way to facilitate the corporate-military-police state complex that is in power. Elections are theater. Both Obama and Romney are the candidates of the corporations. There is no real left in this country due to the corrupt nature of the two party system. We are sinking ever more into a police state with our freedoms being eroded in the name of protecting us from terrorism. The terrorists have won if you look at the measures we've adopted since 911...the so-called "Patriot" Act, which Obama extended, the NDAA, which Obama signed, the "Departmemt of Homeland Security," yet another layer of police state enforcement on top of Treasury, DEA, CIA, and the FBI. How many national police forces do we need? Last year Occupy found out how the new level of US police state enforcement works when efforts to disrupt, interfere with, and control legal protests were coordinated at the federal level. More people need to wake up and resist what we are becoming as a country before it is too late, if it is not too late already.

David Guetta - Without You ft. Usher

Obama Policy Failures

A person on Tumblr points out that Obama has done the following: 1. Reinstating the Patriot Act after vigorously campaigning against it. 2. Refusing to investigate or prosecute any of the Bush/CIA officials who ordered and committed torture - blocking investigations of war crimes is a violation of international law. 3. Continuing to use torture by proxy and the extrajudicial transfer of “prisoners” to secret CIA black sites. 4. Signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 as it was, which expands Executive authority to include the power to order the U.S. military to arrest and detain U.S. and non-U.S. citizens, and makes it nearly impossible to close GITMO, among other very serious violations. 5. Assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son via drone strikes without due process of law and emphasizing the Executive’s “legal right” to convict individuals without judicial review. 6. Continuing to deny habeus corpus to prisoners outside of Guantanamo. 7. Continuing to employ State Secret’s Privilege and expanding its use. 8. Expanding Homeland Security’s authority to lease under a private contractor, media monitoring and data collection, including personally identifiable information and “items of interest.” 9. Embracing racial profiling as official policy. 10. Continuing warrantess surveillance of activist groups, particularly religious groups (mostly Muslim), anti-racism groups, leftist groups, etc. 11. Criminalizing whistleblowing which does not threaten national security. 12. Expanding the “War on Terror,” which may be the Obama administration’s most egregious violation of civil liberties - the most blatant policies being drone strikes/military targeting of civilians in non-war zones and indefinite detention programs.