HAMMERNEWS- Michael Hammerschlag

Current Political Commentary by journalist Michael Hammerschlag; Thoughts on foreign policy, Republican outrages, liberal strategies, science by 8 year correspondent in Russia/Ukraine over 22 years and longtime commentator; Website: http://HAMMERNEWS.com

Sunday, January 16, 2011

1st PERSON SHOOTERS, LEAKING TRUTHS, HOT WET + WILD, HAMMER COMES DOWN, PYRRIC REPEAL OF HEALH CARE, QE2

1st PERSON SHOOTERS

While the whack-job Loughner wasn't an obvious politically motivated assassin, his pet obsession- personal currency (huh), and the need to return to gold and silver.. is shared by the new head of the House Financial Services Com. of Monetary Policy, Ron Paul, and has long been a fixation of anti-government types. According to On Point Radio, the gibberish about Government mind control through language comes straight from a militant-linked character David Wynn Miller, and the worthlessness of money and eternal value of gold and silver come from Glen Beck's endless promotional sermons.

Personally I wish the crowd had dispatched this puke, had they pummeled him to death, the next insane imbecile might have second thoughts about validating their vacuous lives with a gun. We don't need to see his manic leering face and lunatic ideas for months on TV, and the media shouldn't even repeat his name or photo- he should be a non-person, since every bit of publicity + fame could lead more nutcakes to emulate him. One argument for easy-carry laws is that other gun-toting people will take out a maniac like him (which probably has some truth- a citizen responder with a gun almost shot the guy who had picked up the gun after Loughner was disarmed)- where were they, and where were the other heroes while he unloaded 30 shots? It fell on some woman to rip away his new clip.

I guess the days of easy access to Congresspeople will end, like tours of the White House- still mad I didn't do it with my Senator's ticket after helping save Billy-Boy from Impeachment in '99, but 8am was too early in the unheated DC hostel.
Here's a great article on the malignant craziness of AZ by the guy who wrote that great Dust Bowl book: The Hardest Times.

RADIO GAGA

The question is whether Obama will step up and put a stop to the sickness of right wing radio/TV threats by simply instructing Mueller or Holder to bust the next scumbag to publicly threaten any Government or public figure, or go to the tape- 5 of the worst offenders could be arrested tomorrow. Beck’s repeated tirades provoked one lunatic shooter to go after the harmless philanthropic Tide Foundation, Rush Scumbaugh puts out 3 hours a day of 90% lie demagogic attacks,  and a neo-Nazi Obama-hater in  2009 killed 3 Pittsburgh police officers.  There are clear and severe laws against this and the mystery is why they haven't been applied- all authorities have cringed in cowardice against the power of right wing hate-mongering broadcasting. Some prominent arrests would put a huge damper on RW hate speech.

Or have the FCC levy multi-million dollar fines for every violent threat- even Repubs like UT. Sen. Bennett have been subject to some of the most virulent threats. Imagine during Bush's era, if anyone had publicly threatened him on the air- the show would have been yanked immediately. Instead of targeting the problem, I hear some nonsense about Obama now proposing an Internet ID- will a Constitutional professor really be the one the establish the total surveillance state.

There must be more strict screenings for mentally disturbed gun purchases- by simply using more anecdotal statements and testimony of insane, bizarre and antisocial behavior. And who needs a 33 bullet clip, unless you are going to war. And absolutely, permitting open guns (with "Blood of Tyrants" signs, no less) anywhere near national political gatherings should be instantly squelched, and an example made of armed diseased "protesters".

Palin's attempt to be "Presidential" managed to jam her cloddish snowboot into her insipid trap again with her “I am the victim” narcissism, and  Blood Libel comments, which I'm sure she had no idea of the actual meaning. Not too many minorities in her Alaska to 'splain things, Lutcy. After her election map targeted Cong. Gabrielle Giffords with rifle cross-hairs, she suffered intense reprobation- she now sports a 53% disapproval.


LEAKING TRUTHS

Assange's motivations are not completely clear; and as a possible public servant, I'm uncomfortable with total exposure of, say, intricacies of Mid-East peace talks, or military doctrines. He had a bizarre childhood, being dragged around Australia by his mother for 5 years in hiding because of a custody dispute, and lived on Magnetic Island.  But it's clear, while maybe a criminal hacker, he is also a journalist revealing and exposing all types of government and military malfeasance- just the chilling casualness of our drone execution/murders- nothing could enrage tribal people more than the implicit cowardice of robotic joystick killings from the other side of the world. So we should all support him, as more revelations come out from Wikileaks- next is an eyeopening dump from BoA, which should expose their massive Mortgage fraud machinations and maybe finally provoke some prosecutions somewhere for the Crisis (as they call it here). Here's hoping he has some smoking gun of the initial Iraq Invasion Conspiracy- somebody must pay for ordering the casual deaths of 300-500,000. Taking on the entire power of the United States, Assange is guaranteed of a life of misery, and every tool will be directed against him.

But in revealing all these diplomatic cables, Assange, as planned, became the most famous man in the world, and as crap draws flies, power and fame draw women, which Assange, being a normal guy, wasn't going to resist. In that situation, with various ladies proffering themselves, men will test the limits of their power and sometimes act as cads, knowing their "loves" are temporary and not interested in the man. This seems to have happened with his hostess, who was so horrified by his "rape" that she continued to sleep with him for a week, and brag about her proximity to the whirlwind! Apparently he failed to use a condom , or it broke. Big deal, but in Sweden, which is more American than America in some of the worst ways, maybe a crime. Initially the women just wanted him to take an AIDS test, which he stupidly refused, though legally, agreeing could have been used as proof of sex for the next stage of the possible persecution. [I had similar power in the heyday of the Russian early 90's ($1 =$110 in Rubles), when movie star gorgeous women would just tell their boyfriends or husbands, "I'm going with him" after a few seconds, but the pervasiveness of Soviet evil and natural conservativism made me limit my adventures; and being kidnapped by gun-toting thugs in St. Petersburg as the SU literally collapsed put a big crimp in my American swagger.]

Prosecutors initially dismissed it, but hey, if you prosecute the most famous man in the world, you become the most famous prosecutor (the most corrupting job), and one can't underestimate hundreds of thousands of dollars motivation from US intelligence, military, or corporate powers bent on vengeance. Why he surrendered in England is bizarre- it would have been tactically better to stay on the move and wage a campaign in the press, till things settled down and most other countries wouldn't have arrested him in what was obviously a vendetta. Reports are he was directed to appear. But maybe the threat from America was so serious that he thought he should fight it in the most civilized country, ALTHOUGH England doesn't have a 1st Amendment. And the preposterousness of $370,000 bail over this BS charge shows how firmly in the American camp the Brits are (though Asange brilliantly wrote a PO Box as an address in court). Sweden is a strange place- sex can be as casual as a cup of coffee, but still it is usually more honest and level-headed than this (despite supposed Dragon Tattoo evil), and the fact even they are being rolled into vindictive judicial abuse is evidence of the massive political forces as work- JA has enraged a giant and embarrassed many around the world. Too many want to make Julienne fries out of him, and I don't give him much chance of cleanly escaping.

HOT, WET, and WILD

Big surprise-2010 was the hottest year ever but also the wettest, confirming projections that the increased heat would vaporize massive amounts of water. Devastating floods in Australia, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Pakistan, Columbia, Eastern Europe show monstrously destructive storms will be a fixture in our roasting world. The good news- increased cloud cover will reflect more heat; the bad news- water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas (by total effect); note see Venus, aka Hell (though that's CO2). Sadly, the curve only gets steeper from here.




DELAY FOR DELAY’S TRIAL OVER, BUT JUSTICE STILL DELAY’D
THE HAMMER COMES DOWN

The venal and contemptible Tom Delay, who was single handedly responsible for ramming through the impeachment of Bill Clinton, sending the Cong. Staffers “voter”/rioters to scare the Miami Election Board into shutting down the recount that may have given America the real elected President: Al Gore (with the hour late Broward Co. recount), received 3 years prison for his acceptance of corporate money in TX to illegally redistrict the state in mid-decade (money laundering, maybe the most mild acts of his turnstile pay-to-play extortion operation, where Repub-only lobbyists had to pony up $300K to just walk in the door ).

However, given the constitution of the Extreme Court, whose ruling that unlimited secret corporate cash was as American as apple pie, has reduced USA to Nigeria-level corruption, and this case falls firmly in into that realm- I don’t expect the Exterminator to spend a day in prison.

I extensively investigated Florida 2000, and the margin of Gore’s Florida victory has grown in my estimation from 20-40K to 40-80K- just the 42% inaccurate illegal Felon Purge mysteriously doubled later in number to some 92,000, vastly Democratic!!! If any of the ten crooked things Bushmen did had been reversed, Gore would have been Prez, and if the Extreme Court had had a speck of honor, they would have said OK, we don’t want to decide this, but if you insist- Florida has so many irregularities that it is EXCLUDED, and BASED ON THE FACT OF GORE WINNING THE ELECTORAL VOTE (without FL) AND THE COUNTRY BY 540,000 votes, HE HAS THE MORAL PRESUMPTION OF VICTORY …. And is the next President. The Supreme Repubs decided differently in an insane decision that would have invalidated every national election ever held in US history, because they said "the standards were different", using a civil rights measure to deny blacks the President they elected. Funny, if you weren't one of the half million-odd people killed in Bush's insane Iraq Invasion.

Read the whole detective story about all the mistakes that night that whipsawed the world, cost America eternal disgrace, maybe $6 trillion, 500,000 dead in Iraq; allowed OBL to escape, and Afghanistan to become a quagmire.

----Meanwhile, hard by the lush Ocala National Forest, 20 miles west of Daytona in Deland, a silver, battery-powered credit card-sized memory card in an Election System AccuVote 2000 optical ballot-scanning machine had lost its mind, recording negative 16,022 Gore votes, 2813‡ extra Bush votes, and 9,880 for the Socialist Workers candidate in one Volusia Co. precinct (#216) that had only 585 registered voters----


Pyrrhic Victory in the House


Repubs displayed their contempt for the non-rich and new Tea Party extremism by repealing the Obama Health Care bill in the House (w 3 Dems) in a cheap display of political theater, despite polls showing 64% support the bill or want it stronger. Repubs lie so often that the country doesn’t want the Bill that they ultimately believe it. Of course, it will go nowhere, the Dem-controlled Senate won’t even bring the Bill up for a vote.

The hypocrisy of Repubs on controlling the exploding deficit was evident in the “compromise” on maintaining the Bush Tax Cuts (50% for the rich) even for the superrich, which would add another trillion of red ink to the budget over the next decade, and Obama’s achievements in extending unemployment will add another $700 billion. If that weren’t enough to devalue the dollar, the Fed decided in another mysterious and experimental process, to issue another trillion-odd dollars of unsupported cash in the 2nd Quantitative Easing or QE2 to goose the economy. Jeez, if they're going to do this, why not put it all into alternative energy: wind + solar farms, electric cars, fuel cells with the slogan that Obama should have used for $300-400 billion of the stimulus: US ENERGY INDEPENDENT BY 2020 , meaning no foreign sources- easily sold as a nat. security issue, which it is.