War Is Hell

McInsane Hearts Bin Laden (when expedient)

TaTa Jaguar and Land Rover: Was Ford Your Demise?

I referenced Tata Motors and their new Air Car they intend to introduce in a few years to the USA. Tata is an Indian Company and besides the fact that most Americans think of India as poor, they are planning to purchase these luxury car giants for what I consider something a bit more than “poor”.

Jaguar and Land Rover deal expected soon.

In continuing coverage from previous briefings, the New York Times (3/25, C3, Timmons) reports Ford Motor Company and Tata Motors “are expected to announce on Wednesday that Tata is buying the luxury brands Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford for about $2 billion.” With the sale, “the British-based Jaguar and Land Rover will switch from a parent company in the throes of painful contraction to one with ambitious international expansion plans. Ford lost $15 billion over the last two years and is pushing employees to take buyouts.” The Times notes that “Tata and other Indian carmakers are trying to transform India into a low-cost automobile manufacturing center,” and “[h]ow the British luxury brands will fit into Tata Motors remains to be seen.” The automaker “is best known for its pocketbook-friendly family cars, like the Indica and the Indigo, though domestic sales of both have dropped recently.” In 2008, Tata “introduced its long-awaited Nano — a four-door passenger car that will sell for about $2,500.” Talks “between Tata and Ford have dragged on longer than expected.” Even though Ford had announced “that Tata was its preferred bidder,” demands from its workers’ union “and pension plan shortfalls have complicated the transaction.

 

It is evident that foreign automakers are taking over what was once our stronghold in the world. For whatever problems these Big Three brought on themselves, I am confident that NAFTA and other trade agreements are what is killing what was once our largest industry.

 

So what will happen to these luxury cars after being taken over by the Indians? Will they get cheaper or more luxurious?

Leaving Iran the Gift of Iraq

Leaving Iran the Gift of Iraq

by Jon Faulkner at Smirking Chimp 

It’s astonishing that so many Americans failed to see George Bush as the disreputable fraud he is. A stacked Supreme Court foisted him off on Americans and the nation has paid dearly ever since. After eight years of incalculable damage the shiftless, irresponsible Bush, will ride off into the sunset to retire to Crawford. He’ll leave a ruined economy and an endless war behind. Iran will embrace Iraq in its effort against the Great Satin while Putin sails into the Gulf offering his services as a peace negotiator and major trading partner. Putin will get a very real chance to supplant the U.S. and claim Russia the world’s only superpower. Such is the incalculable damage Junior has visited on the U.S. “Boy, I bet this is the kind of stuff that would keep a president up at night,” said the president. You don’t worry? Loose sleep? “Nope, everything’s fine here!”Thus spoketh George.

When the U.S. backed Iraq in its war with Iran it was to maintain the balance of power in the Middle East. When Iraq invaded Kuwait the first Bush chased Saddam back to Baghdad but stopped short of forcing him from power. The balance was maintained. Enter the moron. After destabilizing Iraq enough to augment a civil war and fracture the nation into regional sections, the U.S. now wants to withdraw. When it does, and there’s not much choice in the matter, the vacuum left behind will be filled by Iran. Iran will welcome Iraq’s Shia majority as brothers who have been lost to one another. If Iraqi’s are ever going to restore their fractured nation it will almost certainly be Iran that leads them there. The majority, Shia Islamic fundamentalists, with Iranian backing, will steadily rebuild and bring together a shattered nation. To keep Iran at bay, and to try and postpone the inevitable, Bush would like to bomb Iran and destroy their military. But Bush is finished with his disastrous forays into places and events he has no understanding of. He, and the U.S. are net losers of this war.

Russia’s president Vladimir Putin will sail into the Gulf as a broker for peace thereby contrasting nicely with the self proclaimed “War President.” Putin will get a very real chance of supplanting the U.S. as the world’s only superpower as he negotiates new trade agreements with Iran and its close friend, Iraq. Russia’s oil wealth, combined with the net production of Iranian and Iraqi oil, will represent a huge portion of the world’s oil reserves. Approaching $4 a gallon today, the price will rise until American economic security is severely diminished.

Republicans, when they deregulated business to clear the way for faster and easier profit, predetermined the nations decent into financial hardship. Bush with his enormous tax cuts and war on borrowed money has kicked loose the already shaky underpinning of the U.S. economy. Putin will bargain with advanced weaponry and consolidate Russian, Iranian and Iraqi oil to bring a new dynamic to the world’s oil market and, as is always the case, there will be winners and losers when the dust settles. The U.S, unfortunately, is hardly in a winning position.

This is the dilemma faced by would be, U.S. presidents. A new consortium of oil wealth will suddenly begin dictating who gets how much and at what cost when the U.S. pulls out of Iraq and Iran fills the vacuum the U.S. left behind. Bombing Iran is out of the question. The first thing Iran would do is sink a few tankers in the straits so marine traffic could neither come or go. World depression anyone?

Bush will get someone to write his memoirs. The book will be a best seller. George will explain how he tried to save the world but was foiled by liberal, bleeding hearts. The next insult will be the Bush Library. “Everyone else got one so I want one too.” After it’s built Bush can pretend to scholarship. The vast ignorance that Americans have of the U.S. Constitution and their Bill of Rights is the rot that threatens their nation and way of life. It guaranteed that someone of Bush’s abbreviated intellect and low character would eventually rise to the nation’s highest office.

The most important thing that Bush has done is illustrating the fragility of democracy - how easily it can come undone. Any reasonable person may ask why there was no one to stop Bush from making his catastrophic decisions. Congress went along with the Bush program and Congress was the only elected body with the power to oppose him. A few Congressional members tried to introduce sanity but were shouted down, and by inference, threatened with treason. Dick Cheney, gone to fat and resembling nothing so much as a slug, is other living proof of how easily the corporate entity can usurp government and threaten democracy.

Snake oil salesmen, modern versions of carpetbaggers, hucksters and scam artists of all stripes, found themselves in like company in Bush’s White House. Oil companies became champions of the environment, and global warming was dismissed as liberal hysteria. Corporate scandal and greed, of formerly unknown proportion, fed at the public trough while Bush excused corporate tax obligations. No bid contracts were awarded to corporations that drooled at the prospect of war. It made no difference that some of those corporations, such as Cheney’s Kellogg, Brown & Root, operated behind shell companies with foreign addresses and charged American taxpayers $45 for a can of soda. Hey! It’s only bidness. Profit is the motivation that allows business to believe there’s something worthy in jacking up the price of a cancer drug because someone who is very sick must have it, or die. The perfect customer.

Americans bought into this insanity not once, but twice, and in November are very likely to sustain the national train wreck with John McCain. If there’s one thing that republicans have learned it’s that millions of Americans ain’t too bright. They’ll buy anything if it’s wrapped up colorfully enough, and tied with a pretty bow. Here’s a quote from a typical Bush supporter.
“More people voted for George Bush than voted for any president in U.S. history. More people in America believe that he’s doing the right thing. And the fact that he won the majority of the vote suggests that the majority of America believes that we, as a nation, are on the right path.”

Right wingers, in league with the bidness community, have kicked the legs out from under the nation’s economy. Grover Norquist, that quintessential, right wing moron, saw his vision come to fruition - that government be shrunk “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Grover, like many right wingers, lets fantasy get in the way of fact. Foreign lenders, tired of hearing right wing ideology from republican troglodytes, wonder how Americans can be so stupid. Don’t they see their nation is being sold out from under them? Americans borrow money like there’s no tomorrow while a contrived war and the suspension of corporate taxes suck the life from the American economy. How, lenders ask, will the U.S. pay for its wars and tax giveaways? How will it repay us? Here’s another quote from a Bush voter. “Mr. Bush is right when he claims that his re-election vindicates his policies. That’s exactly what elections are about. The people of the USA have chosen to continue his policies. Whatever the rest of the world thinks is immaterial.”

As the nation prepares to elect a new president, democratic delegates are debating among themselves whether or not they should bend to the will of American voters and nominate Barrack Obama. They say, according to news sources, that their interests lie in nominating the candidate most likely to win. The same news sources say that Limbaugh’s Ditto Heads, and many other republicans, are crossing party lines to vote for Hillary in the primaries. Republicans understand that Hillary will be much easier to defeat than Obama in the general election so their artificially inflating Hillary’s support in an attempt to get her nominated. The DNC and other national power brokers will, as usual, shoot themselves in the foot and bend every effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Hillary has many new friends. One of her newest is Rupert Murdoch, owner of a media empire that includes Fox News and promotes right wing ideology, or, more accurately, the obsessive compulsive need to suck the life from anything that may be remotely construed as having the potential for profit. This is a form of mental illness, and should be recognized as such. Murdock wants to see Hillary win the nomination too.

In 2000, Republican thugs interrupted the vote counting in Florida. They shouted, pounded on the door of the precinct house, and finally managed to intimidate the vote counters disrupting the democratic process of electing a president. Instead of being arrested and frog marched to the nearest jail, they were cheered by millions of Americans who apparently saw nothing wrong with their behavior. Another example of the ease with which democracy can be compromised. Of course, it requires the rest of the nation to look away and pretend there’s nothing wrong. Many Americans, happily suffering Junior, have watched as their Constitutionally guaranteed rights have been whittled away. They’ve watched as the U.S. has embraced torture as an interrogation tool. They’ve watched like dumb, blind animals, as their nation changed from a beacon of hope to an inspiration of fear and hate among the world community. “While you may disagree with some of his tactics, he is a man of conviction that does not shape his beliefs around public opinion. Bush represents a great number of Americans in his fundamental beliefs. Is there anyone in the world who has demonstrated more support for human rights and freedom?” - Bush voter

Christians, corporations and rich folk, many in the south, the corn-belt, and much of the west will turn out for McCain. It will be a close contest and if previous elections are any indication, with their highly suspect vote counts, the prize will go to McCain. It’s going to be very difficult for republicans to give up power and let liberal democrats, once again, destroy the nation with their damned socialized health care, their whining about the children who need quality daycare. The damned liberals are already crying over the poor high school kids who can’t go to college ‘cause their broke. And of course they’ll moan and groan over the damned war, as if a few towel heads ever made any difference in the general scheme of things. “Is this our fault?” Republicans ask. Maybe all those downtrodden no accounts should have been born like George Bush, who never had to do a thing in his miserable, unproductive and failed life, but still got elected president. If Junior could, then anyone can!

B’Man: I find it virtually impossible to believe that our leadership was so stupid or misled by “faulty intelligence” to have conducted this stupendous blunder in Iraq. I cannot simply consider all the facts and actions to be coincidental. Can anyone, with a straight face and honor, believe that we have such nincompoops running things (I don’t mean that rhetorically, either)?

How can it be that they can win elections, rape America, steal our liberties, and force most of us into poverty by stupidity?

It MUST be intentional. If so, rednecks, then, DAMMIT, wake up and help me take America back. If you love it like I do, wake the hell up!

How Osama Bin Laden Won

One of the sad things about this entire “War on Terror” is that the Bush Fools have played along with everything that Osama Bin Laden baited them into. We keep hearing from the very loud MSM that “they hate us for our freedom”, etc, but Bin Laden, himself, was very clear about what Al Qaeda was doing.

This ran on CNN and CNN.comon Monday, Nov 1, 2004 and quotes this man as he explains EXACTLY the intent of Al Qaeda. Like a shark attracted to chum, the US fell for it and this means that we have fallen to the tactics of a cave-dwelling maniac, by doing EXACTLY what he wanted us to do.

Could our leader, George W Bush have been any more gullible and stupid to have done EXACTLY what Bin Laden wanted? Or could he be complicit? Bin Laden is not dead for a reason, and the reason is NOT that he couldn’t be found and killed (imo).

A blast from the past to show rednecks how stupid our “Redneck-in-Chief” truly is:

(CNN) — The Arabic-language network Al-Jazeera released a full transcript Monday of the most recent videotape from Osama bin Laden in which the head of al Qaeda said his group’s goal is to force America into bankruptcy.

Al-Jazeera aired portions of the videotape Friday but released the full transcript of the entire tape on its Web site Monday.

“We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah,” bin Laden said in the transcript.

He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, “using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers.”

“We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat,” bin Laden said.

He also said al Qaeda has found it “easy for us to provoke and bait this administration.”

“All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations,” bin Laden said.

Amazing how such a small group of radical religious group could bring this great country to its knees. But, I contend that it could not have been done without the full participation of the neocon driven, Bushilicious Fool Team. We MUST rid ourselves of these idiots and I wish BEFORE the election in November.

The “Have’s” and the “Have Not’s”

B’Man: If there were ever a sound reason to go to a single payer, not-for-profit healthcare, this is it.

Published on Sunday, March 23, 2008 by The New York Times

Gap in Life Expectancy Widens for the Nation

By Robert Pear

WASHINGTON - New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades.

Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, the researchers said, but affluent people have experienced greater gains, and this, in turn, has caused a widening gap. One of the researchers, Gopal K. Singh, a demographer at the Department of Health and Human Services, said “the growing inequalities in life expectancy” mirrored trends in infant mortality and in death from heart disease and certain cancers.

The gaps have been increasing despite efforts by the federal government to reduce them. One of the top goals of “Healthy People 2010,” an official statement of national health objectives issued in 2000, is to “eliminate health disparities among different segments of the population,” including higher- and lower-income groups and people of different racial and ethnic background.

Dr. Singh said last week that federal officials had found “widening socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy” at birth and at every age level.

He and another researcher, Mohammad Siahpush, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, developed an index to measure social and economic conditions in every county, using census data on education, income, poverty, housing and other factors. Counties were then classified into 10 groups of equal population size.

In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, he said.

After 20 years, the lowest socioeconomic group lagged further behind the most affluent, Dr. Singh said, noting that “life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000.”

“If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).

B’Man: If you are poor and a black man, you can figure that that little old Right Wing crazy Bushie lady is going to live 14 years longer than you. Equality, you ask?

The Democratic candidates for president, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, have championed legislation to reduce such disparities, as have some Republicans, like Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi.

Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said: “We have heard a lot about growing income inequality. There has been much less attention paid to growing inequality in life expectancy, which is really quite dramatic.”

Life expectancy is the average number of years of life remaining for people who have attained a given age.

While researchers do not agree on an explanation for the widening gap, they have suggested many reasons, including these:

¶Doctors can detect and treat many forms of cancer and heart disease because of advances in medical science and technology. People who are affluent and better educated are more likely to take advantage of these discoveries.

¶Smoking has declined more rapidly among people with greater education and income.

¶Lower-income people are more likely to live in unsafe neighborhoods, to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior and to eat unhealthy food.

¶Lower-income people are less likely to have health insurance, so they are less likely to receive checkups, screenings, diagnostic tests, prescription drugs and other types of care.

B’Man: Highlighted for effect. I believe that the lack of healthcare is the biggest factor, but there is one factor that is not mentioned: lower class workers tend to work far more hours and get little time to visit a doctor, with no sick leave or compsensation for when they miss, they cannot “afford” to get healed. 

Even among people who have insurance, many studies have documented racial disparities.

In a recent report, the Department of Veterans Affairs found that black patients “tend to receive less aggressive medical care than whites” at its hospitals and clinics, in part because doctors provide them with less information and see them as “less appropriate candidates” for some types of surgery.

Some health economists contend that the disparities between rich and poor inevitably widen as doctors make gains in treating the major causes of death.

Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, rejected that idea. Professor Krieger investigated changes in the rate of premature mortality (dying before the age of 65) and infant death from 1960 to 2002. She found that inequities shrank from 1966 to 1980, but then widened.

“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”

The creation of Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, the “war on poverty” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all probably contributed to the earlier narrowing of health disparities, Professor Krieger said.

Robert E. Moffit, director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said one reason for the growing disparities might be “a very significant gap in health literacy” - what people know about diet, exercise and healthy lifestyles. Middle-class and upper-income people have greater access to the huge amounts of health information on the Internet, Mr. Moffit said.

Thomas P. Miller, a health economist at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed.

“People with more education tend to have a longer time horizon,” Mr. Miller said. “They are more likely to look at the long-term consequences of their health behavior. They are more assertive in seeking out treatments and more likely to adhere to treatment advice from physicians.”

A recent study by Ellen R. Meara, a health economist at Harvard Medical School, found that in the 1980s and 1990s, “virtually all gains in life expectancy occurred among highly educated groups.”

Trends in smoking explain a large part of the widening gap, she said in an article this month in the journal Health Affairs.

Under federal law, officials must publish an annual report tracking health disparities. In the fifth annual report, issued this month, the Bush administration said, “Over all, disparities in quality and access for minority groups and poor populations have not been reduced” since the first report, in 2003.

The rate of new AIDS cases is still 10 times as high among blacks as among whites, it said, and the proportion of black children hospitalized for asthma is almost four times the rate for white children.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last month that heart attack survivors with higher levels of education and income were much more likely to receive cardiac rehabilitation care, which lowers the risk of future heart problems. Likewise, it said, the odds of receiving tests for colon cancer increase with a person’s education and income.

© 2008 The New York Times

Barack Obama Speaking About Medical Marijuana

The Mail-Tribune (Medford, OR), March 23, 2008:

“Q: A couple of other issues of interest to Oregonians involve initiatives passed by the voters that have come into conflict with the federal government: physician-assisted suicide and medical marijuana. Do you support those two concepts?

“A: I am in favor of palliative medicine in circumstances where someone is terminally ill. … I’m mindful of the legitimate interests of states to prevent a slide from palliative treatments into euthanasia. On the other hand, I think that the people of Oregon did a service for the country in recognizing that as the population gets older we’ve got to think about issues of end-of-life care. …

“As for medical marijuana … I’m not familiar with all the details of the initiative that was passed, but I think the basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors, I think that’s entirely appropriate. …

“I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue.”

What, the Anti-Bush? ummhmm… we’ll see.