Put Away That Knife…

Olympic Runners Feeling Stupid For Cutting Off Legs Before Finding Out About Prosthetic Ban

 

NEW YORK—An International Association of Athletics Federations ruling Monday disallowing double-leg amputee Oscar Pistorius, who uses special Cheetah-brand racing prosthetics, from participating in the 2008 Beijing Olympics has left over 70 U.S. Olympic track and field hopefuls feeling “pretty stupid” for their recent decisions to cut off their own legs in an attempt to gain a similar advantage. “I really wish they would have told me before I amputated my legs that I wouldn’t be allowed to run with those performance-enhancing prosthetic limbs,” 110-m. hurdles competitor David Payne said from his recovery room at the Johns Hopkins intensive care unit. “If I was going to be hobbled by being forced to use my healthy, normal legs to run, I should have been informed. Damn it.” Though the IAAF has remained steadfast in its decision, over 1,200 Olympic hopefuls from all representative countries have also cut off their own legs as a display of solidarity with their fellow competitors.

I Pledge Allegiance To The Corporate Flag Of America…

I found this post at Opednews and found it enlightening since the author makes the claim to be a fundamentalist Christian. I believe that most “Christians” have no idea what Christ was actually like… what He would have endorsed in us… what He would have thought and said about the current situation this “Christian” nation has herself in.

I do know that those who speak the loudest and making the most ardent claims, proving their “Christianness” with the least amount of humility are the farthest from emulating Christ. Yet you hear them (people like Bush, Coulter, Hannity, etc) claim they are Christian and others aren’t, while also being some of the most cruel, viscious supporters of evil intent. The hypocrisy is glaringly LOUD.

So, when I read something like this, it warms my heart to know that there are a few Christians that see how far UN-Christlike we are as a country:

A New Pledge And Allegiance Are Needed

by Curt Day 

Currently the courts are determining whether our current Pledge Of Allegiance should be revised. The heart of the matter is whether or not the phrase “one nation under God” should be included. Those favoring traditional values want to keep what has become a controversial phrase while others either approve of removing the phrase or are apathetic.

But what is being missed is whether the current pledge, with our without the reference to God, is obsolete. In examining whether or not our pledge of allegiance is outdated, we need to decide if the Pledge Of Allegiance reflects where we are as a nation and where we want to be as people.

Where are we as a nation? I would summarize our current state with the flag I march with at protests. This flag resembles the “Stars and Stripes” except that it replaces the stars with corporate logos. It is called the Corporate Flag and I carry it because it is the flag of my government. From our defense budget and the war to our government’s response to the flooding of New Orleans to our government’s solution to health care for seniors, our government’s first concern has been the needs and requests of corporations. In essence, our government hopes that its benevolence to the corporate world trickles down to the general population to a sufficient degree so that the people remain complacent and disengaged.

In the meantime, the oil corporations hope to join the members of the military industrial complex as being the primary beneficiaries of the War on Iraq. Their success depends on the US forcing the benchmark requiring Iraq to open its oil reserves to control by foreign corporations. It was corporations that immediately followed Katrina in hoping to financially benefit from the tragedy in New Orleans. And the pharmaceutical companies are benefitting from the Medicare law that prohibits the government from negotiating for lower prices from these same companies.

And when our government is not searching for new ways to enrich the corporate world, it goes the extra mile to cover the backsides of the same corporations. This protection can be seen in the Bush Administration’s attempts to protect telecommunication companies that cooperate with the NSA in domestic surveillance from legal action. This protection could be seen in Paul Bremer’s CPA’s ordinance that made U.S. mercenaries exempt from legal action in Iraq regardless of their actions. This protection can be seen in our government’s impotency at making either the oil industry accountable for the prices it charges as it continues to make record profits or the health insurance companies responsible for denying or delaying services that people need.

Our current state of the union where corporations are counted as persons that are more equal than people could be summed up with the new pledge of allegiance below:

I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the corporate states of America.
And to the conglomeration,
for which it stands,
one nation, under many CEOs,
always divisible,
with liberty and privileges for some.

The question now becomes whether or not our current Pledge Of Allegiance commits us to what we want to be. In other words, how important is it to be loyal to a country that favors the rich with its domestic policies and violently breaks international law with its foreign policies?

In the past, repeating the Pledge Of Allegiance was considered an honorable action because it showed a commitment to a cause greater than oneself—that is the freedom of our neighbors and fellow citizens. But when loyalty to our country enables the oppression and abuse of others, particularly the poor, is reciting the Pledge Of Allegiance still honorable? For example, is it principled to salute the same flag that flies over a war based on false premises that not only kills up to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis but enables our government to write the laws of another country?

In my fundamentalist church, our minister, having warned us that operatives from both political parties are skilled at manipulation, told us that we are Christians first and Americans second. But how should those who are not Christian consider themselves? Should they count themselves as Americans first by default?

The Declaration of Independence answers this question. It clearly states that all men, now taken as all people, are created equal. If we take this declaration seriously, we should conclude that we are people before we are Americans. And thus our first allegiance should be to justice for people regardless of their nationality or ethnicity. So when our government’s policies do violence to such justice, regardless of the citizenship of the victims, a commitment to justice should trump our desire to appear patriotic. Thus a principled commitment to a cause greater to ourselves is not seen in reciting the current Pledge Of Allegiance to the American flag, but a pledge of allegiance to a cause that is greater than our country.

You’ve Been Served

Sat Jan-12-08 09:53 PM
Original message by Nance Greggs  at The Democratic Underground

An Open Letter to: All Politicians, All Corporations, All Media

Our government has become non-responsive to the needs and wants of American citizens, and has followed its own agenda to benefit wealthy individuals and even wealthier corporations. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

The corporations that are handing out pink slips to middle-class workers are the same corporations that are handing out multi-million dollar bonuses to their CEOs. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

The news media no longer even pretends to serve the public interest, but serves only its corporate masters in delivering ‘the news’ as it wants it to be perceived, and not as it actually is. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

Under BushCo, our country has gone from surplus to debt, from world-revered to world-reviled, from a nation that represents freedom to a nation that represents war, torture, and death. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

Our beloved Constitution has been ignored in order to suit an administration determined to put its own insane goals above the sanctity of our democracy. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

Our government has plunged the country into unfathomable debt in order to pursue an illegal and immoral war, whose only ‘success’ has been filling the coffers of the war-profiteers, their family members, their cronies and themselves. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

While the middle-class lose their jobs, their homes, their savings and their health coverage, our government has not ended but encouraged the conditions that have led to this disaster. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

As the accountability of our elected government officials has become a thing of the past, so their blatant corruption has become accepted as the current status quo. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

Billions of taxpayers’ dollars have ‘gone missing’ under the current administration, while billions more have been funneled into the pockets of Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Oil and Big Business via no-bid contracts, ‘sweetheart deals’, tax-cuts, and corporate welfare. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

Investigative journalists of integrity, willing to tell the truth at any cost, have been replaced by talking hair-dos, infotainment specialists, and out-and-out lying propagandists. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

As our troops return home as severely wounded veterans without access to financial, psychiatric or medical assistance, our government ignores their plight, and that of their families. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

While the rest of the global community tackles the problems of pollution and climate-change, our nation sticks its head in the sand and dismisses the impact of the consequences. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

As the children of the world surpass our own children in education, skills, and training, our government persists in funding bridges-to-nowhere while ignoring the obvious outcome of under-funding the needs of the next generation of Americans. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

Our elected representatives no longer represent the will of their constituents, nor do they carry out the Constitutional duties they swore to execute, but instead put their personal ‘re-electability’ above all other concerns. We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

As Americans, we have watched our jobs sent to cheaper labor markets in order to increase the ‘bottom line’, we have watched our tax dollars squandered on nonsense, we have watched our neighbors lose their lives in the aftermath of natural disaster because they were too unimportant (poor) to deserve assistance, we have watched a once-great democracy diminished due to the whims of a petulant sociopath too self-absorbed to care about the country he was allegedly elected to govern.

We have watched as our voting process has been reduced to an electronically-hackable joke, while our once-respected media spews talking points instead of focusing on facts that should be publicly exposed and discussed, while our rights and freedoms become not what we are guaranteed under our Constitution but what a group of arrogant, always-proven-wrong PNACers consider to be their idea of how the country should be governed – for the financial benefit of the few and to the detriment of the many.

We see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

The revolution will not be televised. It will not be violent, it will not be sudden. It will move slowly, but inevitably towards what is right, what is just, what is fair. It will not be partisan, but will include Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Greens – and every other political persuasion one can think of. It will include all pissed-off Americans - and in case you haven’t noticed, that’s one big fuckin’ group, and it’s getting bigger by the day.

But it will happen – because we’re mad as hell, and we won’t take it any more. Because We the People have had enough. Because there are more Average Joes than there are politicians, media tycoons, lobbyists, bankers, and corporate CEOs combined.

Because we see what is wrong, and we mean to have it made right.

Consider yourselves on notice. The revolution will happen; that’s a given. And if you’d taken your heads out of your asses once in a while, you would have noticed the fact that it’s already begun, it is unstoppable, and it will place this nation back into the hands of its rightful owners - the citizens of these United States of America.

Bush Visits Daddy In The Middle East

And collects more allowance so he can run his little plaything (America) in to the ground. Let Palast explain:

George of Arabia:
Better Kiss Your Abe ‘Goodbye’

by Greg Palast
Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Bend over, pull out your wallet and kiss your Abe ‘goodbye.’ The Lincolns have got to go - and so do the Hamiltons and Jacksons.

Those bills in your billfold aren’t yours anymore. The landlords of our currency - Citibank, the national treasury of China and the House of Saud - are foreclosing and evicting all Americans from the US economy.

It’s mornings like this, when I wake up hung-over to photos of the King of Saudi Arabia festooning our President with gold necklaces, that I reluctantly remember that I am an economist; and one with some responsibility to explain what the hell Bush is doing kissing Abdullah’s camel.

Let’s begin by stating why Bush is not in Saudi Arabia. Bush ain’t there to promote ‘Democracy’ nor peace in Palestine, nor even war in Iran. And, despite what some pinhead from CNN stated, he sure as hell didn’t go to Riyadh to tell the Saudis to cut the price of oil.

What’s really behind Bush’s hajj to Riyadh is that America is in hock up to our knickers. The sub-prime mortgage market implosion, hitting a dozen banks with over $100 billion in losses, is just the tip of the debt-berg.

Since taking office, Bush has doubled the federal debt to more than $5 trillion. And, according to US Treasury figures, on net, foreign investors have purchased close to 100% of that debt. That’s $3 trillion borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Japanese and others.

Now, Bush, our Debt Junkie-in-Chief, needs another fix. The US Treasury, Citibank, Merrill-Lynch and other financial desperados need another hand-out from Abdullah’s stash. Abdullah, in turn, gets this financial juice by pumping it out of our pockets at nearly $100 a barrel for his crude.

Bush needs the Saudis to charge us big bucks for oil. The Saudis can’t lend the US Treasury and Citibank hundreds of billions of US dollars unless they first get these US dollars from the US. The high price of oil is, in effect, a tax levied by Bush but collected by the oil industry and the Gulf kingdoms to fund our multi-trillion dollar governmental and private debt-load.