BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

cross-posted from stellar fellow female blogger: UPPITY WOMAN! --------------- Petition here. Also please refer to my previous post entitled “I can’t find the missing 2.2 Trillion!“ Next time you hear the Republicans and/or Democrats,your cold, fear-mongering President and their hitman Alan Simpson throw around the bullcrap, remember this petition. It affects you, because even if you are not a senior, that 2.2 Trillion Congressional thieves have skimmed into the General Fund all these years is your money too. These people are thieves and they don’t know how to wiggle out of their thievery, so they have decided to punish their victims instead. Petition text: SOURCE To the United States Congress Whereas, Congress for more than a quarter century has been engaged in a shameful Raid on Social Security surpluses and leaving behind IOUs written to itself; and Whereas, Social Security no longer is running regular annual surpluses; and Whereas, Congress must take im...

from the great UPPITY WOMAN, another spot-on post!: If the Republican "Values Summit" (AKA Zealots who could stand some work themselves instead of meddling into other people’s lives ) is any indicator, I want to go on record right now and lay odds of 15 to 1 in favor of an Obama second term. I don’t think the Republican Party understands that running under the “ I am not Obama ” banner isn’t going to get them very far. But alas, they cannot resist recycling the same old people as potential Presidential candidates. Sarah Palin didn’t even show up, which is not surprising, because if Republicans actually think people Like Newt “I know everything there is to know about everything” Gingrich is going to let that happen, they are more out of touch than I imagined. Between the events she is not invited to and the ones she decides not to attend, it’s pretty clear that this is not a member of the inner circle. Sorry folks, but by 2012, Palin might have a daytime talk show or...

Republican Sex Scandals a Sign It's Time to End the Family Values Wars Republicans and Democrats should keep private lives private and divorce politics from "family values" By Robert Schlesinger An Oklahoma state legislator recently divined the cause of our economic funk. We are paying the price, according to a resolution state Rep. Sally Kern is sponsoring, for becoming a "world leader" in pornography, same-sex marriage, divorce, and other "forms of debauchery." It will come as no surprise that Kern is a Republican (a "Kern-servative" at that, according to her website). If the states are indeed the national parties' farm teams, the Sally Kerns of the world will doom the GOP. Republicans can no longer afford to lustily fight the culture wars, and it's time for them to sue for peace on the marriage front. The phrase "family values" first entered the political lexicon in the 1976 Republican platform, according to William Safir...

from the astute and on-point Deadenders: Here’s a guest post by Out of Hand Mary to tide you over till I get pissed off at something besides the driver in front of us. As deadenders has told us many times, “Both parties suck.” I certainly can’t argue with that. But, as Uppity Woman told us disenfranchised Dems after May 31, 2008, when many wanted to run Hillary on a third party ticket, there has never been a successful third-party bid for the White House. And that includes Theodore Roosevelt even after he’d already been president and ran on the Bullmoose Party.. Further, there is no national Independent Party. “Independent” designates something different in CA than it does in NY or FL. There is no Constitution Party. There is no We The People Party. And there is no national Woman’s Party. Maybe we can make these parties a reality in the future, but establishing a new political party takes tons more time and money than we have now. With obama and his Congress, our backs are up again...

Alex Isenstadt As President Barack Obama tried to sell the American Medical Association today on his health care overhaul, the top Senate Republicans launched a familiar line of attack. They warned of rationed medical care, lack of patient control and government bureaucracy. “The American people will not stand for rationed health care,” Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl said Monday. “We believe that a one size fits all approach is the wrong approach." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, in a floor speech scheduled for this afternoon warned that what Americans "don’t want is a Washington takeover of health care along the lines of what we’ve already seen with banks, insurance companies, and the auto industry. Americans don’t want a government-run system that puts bureaucrats between patients and doctors." Kyl and McConnell introduced a bill today that would bar the federal government from using "comparative effectiveness research" — which, Kyl charged in a news ...

By David Harsanyi Unity: n. the state of being one; oneness -- especially when your chosen political party happens to win an election. Barack Obama is now my president. Though I wonder whether irascible Democrats who rode around with those snazzy bumper stickers reading "He's not my president" for the past eight years realize the irony of their call for national harmony. Let's hope there's none. Winning elections is one thing; governing is quite another. It is impossible to deny that Obama ran one of the sharpest, most diligent and exhilarating campaigns in modern American history or, for that matter, that the liberal wing of the Democratic Party has won a resounding mandate to run the country. That only means we need a robust and principled opposition. My children continually are lectured by well-meaning adults about the mystifying power culled from our differences, the strength we derive from our disparate upbringing, and the power of diversity. So why, one wond...

It boggles the mind. From 2000-2004 Karl Rove, Darth Cheney, the Bush Crime Family and their merry bands of Flying Monkeys manipulated, fixed and outright stole two elections. Even after all of America watched Dubya go down in flames in the Presidential Debates -- the voting turned sharply and mysteriously in his favor. Now here we are, 2008. Dubya's finally out the door and the Dems, who have been rending their clothes and tearing out their hair, trying to get some parity and fairness in Election Rules and Proceedings... who have been trying to get various Election Boards into court to own up for what that did in the 2000 & 2004 elections... have done the worst thing possible. Not only did they gang-rape the only Democrat I saw who truly was ready, willing and very capable of handling the Presidency; they are stooping lower than the Republicans ever did in the two prior elections. Elie Wiesel tells a wonderfully haunting story of how he almost became what he hated. He spent ...

On first reading, the language of both the Republican and Democratic and Party platform planks on Israel may seem curiously similar. But there are significant differences in tone and, to an extent, in substance over such issues as the fate of Jerusalem, future borders, and Iran policy, modalities that may become important as the major parties wrangle over the Jewish vote in battleground states. Herewith, a comparison of the two platforms on Israel-related issues, highlighting the differences between them. Jerusalem REPUBLICAN: We support Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel and moving the American embassy to that undivided capital of Israel. DEMOCRATIC: Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel. The parties have agreed that Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations. It should remain an undivided city accessible to people of all faiths. Israel's future borders DEMOCRATIC: All understand that it is unrealistic to expect the outcome of final status negotiati...

From THIS SITE : Greg Mitchell of Legal Pad has had some time to scan the 140-page report on the DOJ investigation into whether the White House illegally used political criteria to disqualify candidates for career positions at Justice. (It's not against the law to do this for positions classified as political appointments, but it is against the law as to positions to be filled by career civil servants. 5 U.S.C. §§ 2301 & 2302.) The report's shocking conclusion: it did. While not much is funny about that, investigators did find this amusing Lexis/Nexis search string that was used to dig into candidates' backgrounds. Some cynics claim this string shows that political criteria were being considered, but you decide: [first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or...

I considered backing McCain. Really. I did. But then 2 lightbulb moments sent me screaming for fresh air (or as fresh as it gets in NYC): 1. During the 2000 campaign, Bush/ Rove's operatives had 'robo-callers' making calls to voters in the Deep South saying things like "did you KNOW that John McCain has an illegitimate black baby?" Just a short time later, during Hurricane Katrina, President Chimpy was in Arizona giving McLame a birthday cake. McCain was hugging and kissing him so much I figured McCain was gonna give Chimpy a "Lewinsky" next. After being crapped on like that - McCain is now Chimpy's BFF. Party or no party, that's whoring. Rove Posse went after not just McCain - but his FAMILY. McCain just bent over and took it and is now in bed with the Neocons to get his ass elected. Not on my vote. 2. John Hagee. Enough said. (BTW - McCain, after saying he was "proud" to have Hagee back him; daring to show his face in New...

There's one thing I hate. Just one. I don't hate anyone outright... it takes too much energy (unless it's Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh. et al) but this covers that. I HATE LIARS. People who lie. People who twist history, time, the truth and manipulate the good hearts & minds of others. Liars. Liars who lie to cover up their misdeeds, lie to smear others and just lie for the hell of it. I HATE LIARS. REMEMBER, THEY ARE LIARS by William Rivers Pitt "No one is such a liar as the indignant man." - Friedrich Nietzsche George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, along with a slew of administration underlings and a revolving-door cavalcade of brass hats from the Pentagon, have been making claims regarding Iraq for many years now. They claimed Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, "enough to kill several million people," according to a page on the White House web site titled Disarm Saddam Hussein....

A cute little piece from commentator, pundit Rachel Maddow. Or, CLICK HERE to View

Looks like the New York Slimes is more than an anti-semitic mouthpiece. It's a bully who runs from big guns like the Neocons and beats up on nice guys like Israel. NY Times Holds Stories Because They're Afraid of Conservatives By Cenk Uygur The John McCain-Vicki Iseman story is not the first article the New York Times has held back for political reasons. They have now done this on at least three occasions: 1. The original FISA story on how the Bush administration was not getting warrants for wiretaps inside the United States. 2. The original story in 2004 that showed Osama bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. 3. The McCain-Iseman story. We had James Risen, the writer of the first two stories on our show [1] back in 2005 and he admitted that they held the Bin Laden story until after the 2004 election because the New York Times didn't want to "get caught up in the politics of it." [2] Another way of stating that is that they were afraid of being calle...

STEPFORD REPUBLICANS All Caught on Tape! by Jeff Cohen "The Stepford Wives" tells the chilling story of once smart, independent women who get abducted and turned into tamed, mindless robots. I have a theory about a similarly subversive process that turns grown men once capable of independent and reasoned thought into robotic extremists. Call them Stepford Republicans. The nefarious transformation always occurs before the individual gets close to becoming a Republican president or vice president. Stepford Wives become robotically subservient only to their husbands; they pose no threat to the rest of us. But Stepford Republicans become subservient to right-wing forces of corporatism, war and prejudice. Once converted into mindless ideologues, Stepford Republicans are a threat to us all. The prototype of a Stepford Republican is PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN. After his apparent abduction and alteration, he became an instrument of corporate power in the White House: union-busting, down...

HATERS & BAITERS I will never understand people who label others they don't agree with as "haters." Case in point, DEMOCRAT HATERS. Now I am not a Democrat or a Republican. I consider myself liberal in some areas and conservative in others. I never vote a party line. I do a lot of reading and thinking before I make decisions. Yes, I am disgusted with President Bush and his cronies. They're an embarrassment to their party and the country. But a hater? Hating someone takes a lot of energy. Terrorists hate blindly. I'm not a terrorist. There's just a few things I hate: Lying, Exploiting the vulnerable, Evil and asparagus. Our country was founded on disagreement and discussion. Anyone who's read some of the recent books about the antics of our Founding Fathers knows it wasn't one big happy powdered-wig-fest. There were some pretty extreme ideas and everything was on the table. That's still the only way America will grow and flourish. ...