You know.....very few people seem to actually listen to one another. Everyone seems to have their minds made up who's side their own and the other side is wrong. It doesn't seem to matter what's right for the majority of the people....what's right for the country? Everyone seems to be dropping sound bytes and verbal assaults on the other side. I'm 59 years old and I've never seen this in my life. It reminds me of what McCarthyism must have felt like. Give Obama a break...he is the elected president. Give him and those elected officials a bit of time to do their dang job. Stop with all the hate, slanderous accusations and take a deep breath. Maybe listen up a bit.

Here's a little story:

A man was thirsty, so he asked for a drink of water. A second man obliged by shoving a firehose down his throat and turning it on full blast.

"What's the problem? Water isn't harmful. Living things can't live without it!"

Oh - one more thing- having gotten onto the topic of RFK here, he said one thing that got a chuckle out of all of us which was, 'Don't change your light bulb - Change your politician.'

I still can't believe tha folk don't recognize that there are folk worse than Holy Joe LIEberman AND they are unadultered DEMs:

Mary Landrieu
Michael Bennet
Max Baucus
Mark Begich
Kay Hagan
Ben Nelson

Check out and see where your Senators stand at http://www.progressivepunch.org/ or some other such website.

I wasn't sure where to write this, so I added it here. Yesterday, after hearing about Sen. Collins'/ Republicans' action to delete pandemic funding from the last budget bill, I called our illustrious MN Rep. Michele Bachmann with the following spontaneous rhyme. I know it's not Whitman, but it gets the message across:

An Ode to Michele Bachmann

Mercury, arsenic and the swine flu
are part of nature too.
They're still not good for you,
just like CO2!

Read George Lakoff's The Political Mind. Explains why conservatives (and progressives) do what they do. Lakoff uses the metaphor of the family to explain the major difference between the two ways of looking at politics, and main theme running through both parties. We need to understand what he calls the Strict Father and Nurturant family models (guess which is which), in order to understand conservatives and progressives and begin framing progressive values (the real American values) in ways that work.

I had a very old friend who was in the Resistance during the war, caught by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck. When she was dying I sat holding her hand while she cried like a child telling me that when she came home after the war she had not had the courage to see the family of one of her best friends to tell them how she had died, leaving them to the worst thing of all, not knowing.

During a roll call her friend had done some little thing and the Nazis had turned the dogs loose on this girl; they chewed off her breasts and she bled to death on the ground in front of the barracks.

Fifty years later this brave extradinary woman was weeping on her death bed because of what was done to her and her friends, suffering from guilt, she who had suffered so much herself.. From time to time she told me some horror when something brought it back from the hole where she kept them buried but this seemed to be a last convulsion that she could no longer hold inside her.

Britain's torture of Obama's grandfather

Hussein Onyango Obama, a British soldier in the second world war, was locked up as a Mau Mau rebel in Kenya
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/deadlineusa/2008/dec/03/obama-grandfathe...

Thom,

This is a well-meaning article, but rebooting the system will require much more that mere regulation and redistribution; the system is fatally flawed, and requires comprehensive, fundamental, structural reform. Anything but this will not do the job, and we will be revisiting these repeated crises all over again.

Think about this basic inconsistency of the present system: financially the world is living on drafts upon the future (the credit/debt-money system); economically it is living on the products of the past. Without having to go into mathematical proofs, the empirical evidence shows that the resulting effects of this are:

1. total prices increase at a faster rate than incomes are distributed to pay them;

2. the increasing shortfall is filled with increasing accumulations of debt.

This is the reason why current levels of debt are about (at least) 1.5 times more than the amount of money, and the divergence is growing.

This is obviously an impossible situation; over time it can only get more impossible, until at some point it becomes terminal.

It is a tragic game of cat-and-mouse, except the mouse (income; money) is trying to chase the cat (prices; debt)! The cat keeps getting bigger relative to the mouse, and at some point the cat will turn and swallow the mouse whole.

The root cause of this unsustainable and terminal situation is the credit/debt-money-creation mechanism, what was traditionally called 'fractional reserve banking'; this is the snake in the house, which must be gotten rid of, otherwise it will keep biting, and eventually kill all the inhabitants.

The debt-money machine is a Terminator; it is automatic and set to destroy humanity. We made it, we have to change it.

Regulating a Terminator machine without changing the way it works is obviously not a solution.

There are many so-called monetary reform proposals which suggest doing everything and anything but get the snake out of the house.

The only serious monetary reform solution I am aware of for the USA is the American Monetary Act, developed by the American Monetary Institute, and based on the research of over 3,000 years of history, i.e. based on the facts of human experience. This draft legislation contains the 3 essential elements of meaningful reform that will deliver a lasting solution:

1. It restores the monetary system to society, but does NOT nationalize the banking system (this would be very dangerous; combining the present banking system with the law-making system could risk a totalitarian tyranny).

2. It keeps banks doing banking, but stops banks from being able to create money using 'fractional reserve' methods (this is what always brings us to repeated crises).

3. It introduces additional money into the economy in beneficial and accountable ways (this means what is physically possible and socially desirable can always be made financial possible, without fuss or favor).

I trust you will be able to see the vital importance of making this solution known to as many people as possible.

Thank you.

Hey Thom, just thought I'd let you know that every bond holder for GM is wealthy like Bush. I'm a 62 year old widow who had $10,000 in GM bonds. Today that bond value is under $1,000. I was advised that corporate bonds were a safer bet than stocks so I've taken a hit with GM and CitiGroup. So much for that advice.

lol no kidding B roll even just today, finally all my Republican family has been including me in their dialog about how the media has not reported how a Russian built an honor to 911 victims - see it yourself here. These relatives are just now figuring out what the media does not report as they are finally now on line. for ppt, google zurab tesereteii vladimir putin present to the United States 911

So I sent them the link to the Cat Stevens Slide show and some other things including this passage from John Perkins:

In general, "Things are not as they appear. NBC is owned by General Electric, ABC by Disney, CBS by Viacom, and CNN is part of the huge AOL Time Warner conglomerate. Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Most of our newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses are owned- and manipulated - by gigantic international corporations.

Our media is part of the corporatocracy.

The officers and directors who control nearly all our communications outlets know their places; they are taught throughout life that one of their most important jobs is to perpetuate, strengthen, and expand the system they have inherited. They are very efficient at doing so, and when opposed, they can be ruthless. So the burden falls on you to see the truth beneath the veneer and to expose it. Speak it to your family and friends; spread the word.

From page 260 Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. John Perkins.