Friday Rant: From Drilling Off Our Coast To The Path Led By Waterboarding

Eugene Robinson
Matt Latimer
Paul Krugman

"Yet any action to help the unemployed is vetoed by the fear-mongers... So we’re paying a heavy price for Washington’s obsession with phantom menaces. By looking for trouble in all the wrong places, our political class is preventing us from dealing with the real crisis: the millions of American men and women who can’t find work." - Paul Krugman

We have strong economic indicators that our economy is improving. Wall Street firms are making a killing. GM is posting a $10 billion quarter, as is Exxon and Chevron. Out of all of these companies, only GM hired any new people, the rest did their best to cut and trim their sails, helping to leave more than 4 million people out of work, one million whom have been out of work for over a year...

So, why does the GOP have this bug up their butts about deficit spending? We must drastically cut the budget or else bad juju will happen, though we can't tell you what it is; it will affect your dear grandchildren... Could it be just another scare tactic, to try and turn voters against a Democrat? ... while we were sleeping, our House Republicans passed a bill making it easier to get an oil lease in the Gulf of Mexico, because the current hold-up was making sure that they came up with a better way to contain an oil spill before allowing them to drill in deep water.

While I'm talking about oil, there is such a misconception about drilling, baby, drilling for oil off of our coasts, that the oil produced there gets to be used as a cheaper source for gasoline in America. All of the oil produced is put up for sale on the world market, and the highest bidder wins. Our oil can go to Russia or China, whomever outbids us. People also speculate on what that price will be when it's sold, and the amount they have gambled on gets put into the price of oil sold, like it or not, and that can affect the price quite a lot. If we were to end this commodity speculation, the price of food, gas, and medicine would all come down significantly, easing the current global inflation. That won't happen as long as people's greed is greater than the pain and starving this causes... No amount of taking oil off of our coasts will help our economy, unless we nationalize the oil companies. Then, we could get rid of all taxes and have enough left over to finance another couple of wars...

It took our special forces 40 minutes to go in and take out Osama bin Laden. Why not spend another half hour or so on Moammar Qaddafi? Get it over with as painless as possible, get out of that country before spending millions of dollars on munitions for the rebels... Nobody would be whining as much as the Pakistanis are over bin Laden. Notice how little outcry there is outside of Pakistan... I want to know where bin Laden's wives came from, did he have more than was allowed? I know that he had delusions of being a reincarnate of the Prophet, so how much of that was play-acting and how much of that was an attempt to impress the rubes? Remember that Iran is hosting part of bin Laden's family, a wife and some kids. I wonder if they are still there, or did they travel back to Abbottabad with Ahmadinejad's blessings? It's bad enough that one wife hadn't left the compound in over 5 years...

We are trying to punish Pakistan by cutting off American aid we had promised. The Israelis became inspired by that, and have cut off $105 million in tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority, because they don't approve of the Fatah - Hamas reconciliation. This is a preview of things to come as long as Netanyhu and other right wing wackos are in charge of the Israeli government. At this rate, it will take the US to come in and invade Israel before a positive change can be made there. The attitude of these kind of Israelis towards the Palestinians is the Palestinians have been raised in a culture of hatred and they aren't even human anymore...

The real change since 2001 hasn't been in Asia or the Middle East, but rather in America. As Tom Engelhard put it in the Asian Times: "The point has been repeatedly made about Osama bin Laden that by the time of his death on Monday he was already a footnote to history in a Middle East convulsed by the Arab Spring. What's not being said is this: The world Bin Laden really changed forever wasn't in the Greater Middle East, it was in the United States. And that change was for the worse in almost every way." We have become a lot more paranoid, and have open discussion about the merits of torture, making family meals more interesting. We have lost some of our personal freedoms so our intelligence forces can listen in on our conversations, on the phone or on our computers and cellphones. We no longer welcome immigrants and the right wing wackos are now considered to be politically mainstream. Life just isn't as much fun anymore, and other folks want us to start accepting the moral consequences every time we invade another country...

Praise is being given on the waterboarding techniques that led to the information of finding Osama bin Laden, all praise George W Bush!!!

Except, it didn't work that way. Waterboarding and the use of torture was outlawed and not used after 2003. The info we got from Khalid Sheik Mohammed came in 2004, over a year after we stopped waterboarding him 186 times. The path of information came through Guantanamo, but torture didn't have anything to do with it, ya sadistic and sick bastards...