Wednesday, December 30, 2009

George Bailey Speaks

Our annual Christmas Eve tradition is to watch the movie 'It's a Wonderful Life'.
The story is a good reminder of the impact that one person's good behaviors and selfless choices can have on the lives of others around them and beyond them.

This year I was particularly struck by the way the plot line also pointed out how today's bad banking behaviors and selfish corporate attitudes are negatively impacting so many average people's lives. As a result, the film's "Pottersville" nightmare, in all its harshness and vulgarity, now looms before us in real life.

But here, for your viewing pleasure, is Jimmy Stewart poignantly delivering the quintessential Frank Capra-esque comment on, and warning for, our times:

It's A Wonderful Life (1946) - James Stewart - George Bailey's Speech to Potter & the Loan Board

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Cui bono




Yesterday the MSM was burying the Yemen connection to the Christmas eve airline terrorist. How exactly to say to TV viewers "Yemeni alQaida terrorists claim it's retaliation for - oops we forgot to report last month about Obama bombing Yemen - after all the Tiger story was so much more important to you". No, the dumbed down American audience can't handle the truth: better just say "Arabian peninsulars" did it and not explain any background. Just like the 1979 revolution in Iran had no US causation either, they're just crazy A-rabs! Better not use the word blowback either. Wouldn't want to confuse the message of the day which is
'They're out to get you" and

..."You shall be avenged!"

So today the MSM squawks lets go bomb em [again] in Yemen in retaliation for this inexplicable unprovoked [sic] act.

Blowback from Obama's bombs almost got those passengers and crew killed. And Obama answers retaliation with even more blowback risk for a bump in the polls amid floundering legislation. Look how resolute and presidential he can be! Very Churchillian.

Meanwhile names of peaceful dissidents are kept on the no fly lists and denied visas but the frigging bomber is let in despite warnings to the US embassy from his own dad? That list discrepancy involving banning peaceful foreign speakers with inconvenient truths didn't come up in the ad nauseum MSM "coverage" either.

I think they are not as stupid as they lead us to believe. I think they purposefully let this known threat in to keep up the domestic scare tactics. Why? For obfuscating more government-authorized theft. For changing the subject domestically away from the economy stupid. For rallying the sheeple to revenge. For reversing poll numbers. For war in Yemen over control of oil routes. Yes the system "worked" exactly the way they wanted it to work!

It is only a miracle that those passengers and crew are alive today.

Expect more inexplicable multi-layer security bungles from the "system" that mysteriously always works for the war profiteers and their power mongrels in Washington.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

The Hopeful Cynic


My friends are sometimes surprised to learn that gylangirl did not vote for Obama [nor for McCain]. Instead she “protest-voted" third party. The Democratic Party’s Hope candidate was all about betraying the base, which, after all, is what the Democratic Party is famous for [see Clinton, William Jefferson: vis a vis “the end of welfare as we know it”; “don’t ask don’t tell”; NAFTA; the repeal of Glass Steagall banker abuse protection etc].

Gylangirl watched with dismay the presidential candidate's role in the Bush administration's Goldman Sachs bailouts and the president-elect's Goldman Sachs cabinet selections. Obama would betray us, gylangirl reasoned. But even she admits that when he walked out on that stage election night with his family, she felt that tiny glimmer of [soon-to-be-dashed] hope.

But that was then. It is becoming obvious to all but the most loyal party hack that Obama is only pretending to help the middle class during this recession; he is only pretending to oppose Bush’s Afghanistan and Iraq wars; and he is only pretending to rein in the US Treasury-sucking vampire banks; he is only pretending to support democratic elections in foreign countries like Afghanistan, even as he successfully engineered his very first foreign coup d’etat of another democratically elected president in Honduras.

His campaign volunteers and supporters are imploring him to stop and do the right thing. They seem on the verge of a heart-breaking psychological breakdown. Or rather, one could hope, a psychological breakthrough: to cynicism, the only reality-based political sentiment these days.

So tonight Obama will announce his second troop increase for the war in Afghanistan. Thanks to the peace-prize winning president, there will now be more US troops in Afghanistan than there were Soviet troops back in the day. That’s a lot of blowback risk. Not to mention a lot of troop losses and billions of dollars in more national debt. And did you notice that Afghanistan is where empires go to die? But I digress.

The truly left wing peace activists who incorrectly placed him upon the anti-war pedestal are now in shock that they helped elect another war escalator. However, judging by the TV punditry, the dyed-in-the-wool Democratic Party partisans are neither shocked nor ashamed: they are dutifully shifting away from their Bush era anti-war positions so as to defend their leader. Because that’s what team cheerleaders do. They’ll justify the betrayal and accept any crumbs that fall: “no no-bid contracts this time” so hurray for Our war president! The more naive ones will endlessly hope, like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin, that someday, real soon now, or certainly after his 2012 re-election, Obama will justify their misplaced trust and their 2008 vote.

But gylangirl hopes that real soon now, many Obama supporters will join gylangirl in the ranks of the cynical, never to be fooled again. Yes, there she goes again, thinking it will be different this time. Hope springs eternal.