Things We Americans Can All Now Thank Republicans For

Herewith, just that, a list, incomplete as it is, of all the things we have Republicans and their Republican Party to thank for.

--Senator Joe McCarthy and his attacks, repeated, on fellow Americans

--Richard M NIxon, who famously/infamously quit the office of our Presidency because he illegally had his own men break into a room of the Watergate Hotel to get information on his opponent(s) in the Democratic Party

--Ronald Reagan and his dismantling of the middle class what with cutting taxes on corporations and the already-wealthy and then his additional attacks on Unions across the nation

--The very illegal Iran-Contra affair of, again, Ronald Reagan which was when "Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Khomeini government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo."  (Source: Wikipedia)

--George W Bush, who also famously/infamously ignored his Presidential Daily Briefs warning us of a pending attack on the nation

--The 9/11 attack, see above, in which 2,977 very innocent Americans lost their lives

--The squandering of our national budget by, again, yes, George W Bush who took that budget surplus we had under his predecessor, Bill Clinton, and blew right threw it

--And the way "Dubya'" blew through our nation's budget surplus was by, of course, using 9/11 as an excuse to attack not just one but two nations, Iraq and Iran

--Then there's the way Dubya' flew TWELVE BILLION DOLLARS, in an airplane, to Iraq. And let it disapper. Yes. True. Really

How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq

--The intentional disenfranchising of at least hundreds of thousands, if not, in fact, millions of taxpaying citizens by using "voter ID" laws all so they, Republicans, could either get or stay in government office

--The denial of fair and true representation in our government due to gerrymandering which either puts or certainly keeps their own members in government office, instead of the rightly-elected

And now:

--Donald J Trump.

--Immigrant children in cages at our Southern border

--Immigrant families separated at our Southern border

--Immigrant children lost in our governmental penal system, away from their parents, because they were separated at our border and with no clear way to rejoin them, the children to their families

--Some of the greatest wealth inequality, today, in our entire nation's history

US income inequality jumps to highest level ever recorded

--Large tax cut after large tax cut for the already-wealthy and corporations all the while ignoring or denying the people's true needs, fairness, decency, equity and/or the nation's debt

--The worst national response to the worst international, killing pandemic in the last more than 100 years resulting in our nation's death toll from it all is the worst in the world, literally. The "world's wealthiest nation" with nearly 400,000 citizens dead from COVID-19 and still counting

--An insurrectionist, treasonous, traitorous attack from a President's supporters, on our nation's Capitol

--Pipe bombs, during that same attack on our Capitol, by this President's followers, at the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee Buildings

--Feces and urine left behind on this same treasonous attack on our nation's Capitol

--Threats from more of those same treasonous, traitorous people following a/this President to do it again, that is, attack our nation's Capitol again, this time on January 17, January 19 and/or January 20 because their leader told them he didn't lost an election which he really did decisively lose

--The legitimately most scandalous, scandal-ridden presidency and President in the nation's historycomplete with obstruction of justice, perjury and collusion with our known, sworn international enemy, Russia, to get himself elected. (That last part verified by our own FBI and intelligence agencies

So there you are, fellow Americans. An ugly, ugly and yes, keep in mind, very partial list of what Republicans have done and are responsible for in our nation and our nation's history. And keep in mind, this is still with 10 days left to go in this President Donald J "Jenius" Trump's presidency.

Let's hope it doesn't get any worse.

Additional link:

50 Reasons You Despised George W. Bush's Presidency

What Most Americans Don't Know About Our National Defense Budget--But Should

There is an excellent, even important article out presently at Alternet I wish all adult, voting-age Americans would read. It is this.

How to Blow $700 Billion and Lose Wars

A Guide to America's Exploding Defense Budget and Military Failure

Step 1: Buy the most expensive weapons in history. Step 2: Don’t use them, since they mostly don’t work

And before any military patriots or just disbelievers dismiss the article, out of hand, before reading it, they should know it's written by a Veteran and who served in Iraq, on the ground. It's not from some "Left Wing" "librul" they can or should dismiss.

A bit from the article:

This year, President Trump signed the largest defense budget in our history: $700 billion. The budget includes $13.7 billion for 90 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, which according to CNN are “in service and mission capable only 26 percent of the time.” Not a single F-35 jet has yet to see combat duty.

The budget will provide $4.5 billion for the construction of a new Ford class aircraft carrier, $450 million for three Littoral Combat Ships, $4 billion for two new guided missile destroyers, $5.5 billion for two new Virginia Class submarines, and tens of billions more for upgrades and repairs on various aircraft and naval vessels. Two of the guided missile destroyers already in service were involved in deadly collisions with cargo ships in the western Pacific last year. A Navy investigation revealed that for all of the hundreds of billions spent on defense, there was apparently not enough in the budget to provide for adequate training in standing watch and driving Navy combat ships...

He finishes the article perfectly, to me. It's something I've been saying for some time.

Fifteen years in Iraq. Seventeen years in Afghanistan. There is no end in sight.

From 2011 to today, 2018, we more than doubled our national defense budget from 354 billion dollars to 700 billion.

We have no new enemies. No new group has attacked us or is attacking. Or is going to.

We are weakening, actually weakening our nation with all this absurd, obscenely expensive and very wasteful spending.

Understand this:

Our defense budget is very huge, very bloated and very wasteful and is actually making the nation weaker.  Not stronger.

What are we going to do about this, America?

Links:

The Secret Side of Military Spending & The Wastes of War

We Are Spending a Trillion on War 

and We Need to Own Up to It

The 10 Most Blatantly Wasteful Defense Items

Note this next article is from the American Conservative magazine:

Expanding the Military Budget Is 

Wasteful and Unnecessary'

Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion 

in bureaucratic waste

The F-35: A Weapon That Costs More 

Than Australia

America: The World's Warmonger

Proof positive. This, from the New York Times yesterday.

U.S. Sold $40 Billion in Weapons 

in 2015, Topping Global Market

Most Dangerous Nation In The World?

There is a terrific article out today over on TomDispatch. It's all about America--what we've been doing for some time, across the globe, what we're capable of and what we may yet do.

The Most Dangerous Country on Earth

It ain't Russia, kids.

The article poses the possibility of whether we, the United States, are, very likely and literally, the most dangerous nation in the world.

Honestly, no hyperbole, I think it's unquestionable.

Given our "yooge" army, our military and all our weapons and what we spend on what we call "defense" alone, that can be argued. Then, when you add in how many nations in the world we have military bases in? Over 700? All interfering in other nations' internal affairs?

Oh, yeah.

We think ourselves the most peaceful, peace-loving people in the world, sure. Standing up for peace and justice and fairness and right and equality. Sure we do.

But the truth? What we actually do? What we've done? What we're doing?

Read the article.

As it states, we just had the head of our own "..leading domestic investigative outfit...", the FBI, interfere in our own national election for our president.

Karma is most surely a bitch, isn't it?

And then, consider these facts. First, we spend more, as a nation, on what we call defense, than any other nation and in huge numbers.

Secondly, we supply more arms to the world than any other.



After repeatedly interfering in other nation's elections, at times assassinating one here or there and just "taking others out", our own investigative unit guides our own election.

The irony is virtually dripping.

You can go way back, at least decades, into what America has done in other nation's affairs or you can go to far more recent history with the Republican Party's and George W. Bush's very chosen war in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein. And then there's all over the Middle East, of course, and Southern and Central America.

So, yeah, America, get over yourself. Look around. You are the biggest threat to world peace in the world.

And you have been for some time.

And you have no intention of stopping.

About That Election, America

The last time you did this?

Quote of the Day -- On the US Out of the Middle East

From this article in POLITICO

Why the Arabs don't want us in Syria

"Let’s face it; what we call the “war on terror” is really just another oil war. 

We’ve squandered $6 trillion on three wars abroad and on constructing a national security warfare state at home since oilman Dick Cheney declared the “Long War” in 2001. The only winners have been the military contractors and oil companies that have pocketed historic profits, the intelligence agencies that have grown exponentially in power and influence to the detriment of our freedoms and the jihadists who invariably used our interventions as their most effective recruiting tool. We have compromised our values, butchered our own youth, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, subverted our idealism and squandered our national treasures in fruitless and costly adventures abroad. In the process, we have helped our worst enemies and turned America, once the world’s beacon of freedom, into a national security surveillance state and an international moral pariah.

America’s founding fathers warned Americans against standing armies, foreign entanglements and, in John Quincy Adams’ words, “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Those wise men understood that imperialism abroad is incompatible with democracy and civil rights at home. The Atlantic Charter echoed their seminal American ideal that each nation should have the right to self-determination. Over the past seven decades, the Dulles brothers, the Cheney gang, the neocons and their ilk have hijacked that fundamental principle of American idealism and deployed our military and intelligence apparatus to serve the mercantile interests of large corporations and particularly, the petroleum companies and military contractors that have literally made a killing from these conflicts.

It’s time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by ending the ruinous addiction to oil that has warped U.S. foreign policy for half a century."

~ Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

9/11

Thank you, George W. Bush.

The Bush White House Was Deaf to 9/11 Warnings

Bush administration ignored CIA terror warnings

Bush Received More Warnings About 9/11 Than We Realized

Unheeded Warnings: George W. Bush and 9/11

Imagine

Imagine if any one of these things happened in our US history.

--If Jack Kennedy hadn't been assassinated

--If LBJ didn't lie us into Vietnam and that war

--If Bobby Kennedy hadn't been assassinated

--If Richard Nixon hadn't been elected to the presidency

--If George W. Bush weren't successful in stealing the 2000 election

--If George w. Bush didn't lie us into the Iraq War

The ramifications of each would be huge.

Now, imagine if all the above occurred.

What a world.


Links:

JFK . American Experience 

LBJ . American Experience

Nixon . American Experience

George H. W. Bush . American Experience

Eric Greitens Has Started Getting Into Trump Territory

Eric Greitens, Republican, far Right Wing candidate for Missouri's next Governor (shudder) is starting to send out messages that he's very like Donald Trump. That is, not just wrong but misguided and downright scary. His latest TV ad got me both scared and even angry.

President Obama, the "worst President of (his) lifetime."

Forget that President Obama helped bring us back from the worst economic downturn in 8 years since the last Great Depression.

Forget that President Obama saw to the saving of General Motors which has since come roaring back, saving literally millions of jobs. 

Forget that the stock market has gone to new highs during his Presidency. Forget that employment has gone WAY up during this same Presidency.

Forget that the deficit has shrunk, actually, factually shrunk during our current President's administrations.

Deficit shrinks by $1 trillion in Obama era

Forget and ignore that 20 million more Americans have health care insurance than used.

More Americans Than Ever Have 

Health Insurance Coverage

And then ignore or forget that, because of "Obamacare", America is spending far less on health care.

Health spending post-Obamacare seen 

$2.5 trillion lower 

And a lot more. 

Yeah, forget all that. 

Just call President Obama the worst President in your lifetime, completely forgetting the laws broken by Ronald Reagan and the nationally and internationally illegal war George W. Bush got us into in Iraq, by his choice and lies. 

Iran-Contra and Arms-for-Hostages Scandals: 

Ronald Reagan

Then, also forget that the same George W. Bush totally and completely ignored his Daily Presidential Brief, warning him Osama bin Laden was planning and preparing an attack on our nation, resulting in over 3000 lives lost that fateful day, 9/11. 

Forget, too--if you ever even knew it--that George W. Bush flew planeloads, literally planeloads of our own money, US cash, straight from the Federal Reserve into Iraq after he "liberated it", only to have it squandered because, yeah, that really happened.

How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. 

And watched it vanish

NY Fed's $40 Billion Iraqi Money Trail

So, yeah, if you forget and ignore all that and a lot more, I guess you could come to the rather bizarre, slanted and misguided conclusion that President Obama is the worst President of your lifetime.

It isn't President Obama and his work and his successes, his personal ones and his successes for our nation, that I find offensive.

It's Eric Greitens and his ads and lies and all like him and any who believe this scary nonsense.

Be afraid, people. Be very afraid when people like Donald Trump and Eric Greitens and heck, for that matter, Catherine Hanaway and others like them are all out there, successfully getting money from the wealthy and corporations, just so they can peddle their extremist, Right Wing fear and even, yes, lies.

Better yet. Get out there and vote.

Links:

THE List of 371 Obama Accomplishments so far, With Citations

On Dubya' and Obama

Bill Maher, with no expletives, on Former President George W. Bush compared to President Barack Obama.  Republican war hawk vs. Democratic negotiator.



It's difficult to believe we have to talk them out of these things and people.

Memorial Day

Bring them home.

We Americans Don't Seem to Learn From History

This week, I watched the first screening of PBS' Murder of a President  on American Experience, telling the story of US President James Garfield, his life, his deeply tragic assassination and death 200 days later.

It was fascinating to the point of riveting. Such great and deep history. Sad it isn't taught in our schools. Seems he was a brilliant man who fought for the people and even for the slaves of the nation, a very welcome rarety.

Too bad we don't still, to this day, have such Republicans.

Anyway, it pointed out to me, once more, how we Americans don't learn from history and I'll tell you why.

We all know our President Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed, also tragically and needlessly, in 1865, at the hands of a mad man.

At the time, Presidents didn't have security guards and protection. So the assassin came in, had access to the President and shot and killed him easily, if horribly enough.

You would think we would, as a nation, learn something from that, right? Like that we need to protect our presidents?

Nah.

We're Americans. Learn something?  Heck, no. Not from the past, not from recent history, nothing.

16 years later---sixteen whole, long years---then-President James Garfield, still unprotected, was headed to a train station, rather famously as it was in the newspaper, for pity's sake, so a crazy man came up and shot him, repeatedly. It didn't kill him instantly but soon enough, it was done.

No body guards. No protection. Nothing.

So a couple centuries later, do you think we'd learn anything from, say another countries military foray into another country?

Do you think we'd pay any attention to the world and international, military history of, say, France, that had attacked and fought the people of Vietnam?

Oh, hell, no.

Go ahead. Attack. Go in. Think you're going to win. Think you're going to win the people over. With bombs.

We all know how that went.

Couple decades later?

Not just one nation but two.

Iraq?  Afghanistan?

Oh, heck, yes, let's attack.

Forget that the British and Soviets both attacked and fought and were repelled and in effect beaten in these places and by these people.

Ignore it.  Go ahead and attack.

We're Americans.

We don't need to learn from history.

Who We Are, America

Who we are, what we've become, what we're actually doing, in spite of what we think of ourselves.

---Our health care has become unobtainable for millions of us.  And we know it.

US Healthcare: Most Expensive and 

Worst Performing

---Same with college education (actually, according to this ranking, we're 3rd most expensive in the world but climbing).

10 Most Expensive Countries for College 

in the World in 2015

---We spend more on what we call defense than any other nation, bar none and far and away, yet we no doubt think of ourselves as a peaceful people and nation.

World's Top Military Spenders: U.S. Spends More than Next Top 14 Countries Combined.

---same with weapons---we are the world's number one arms seller.

World's Largest Weapons Exporters

So congratulations, America and Americans. I don't think you really know exactly who you actually are and/or what you're doing in the world and even to your own nation.

Don't Wanna' Study War No More

This is so true and America, the world's biggest arms seller, is the biggest, worst culprit.

Peace loving people, my ass.

2016: Imagine

The way to justice and peace. End endless, perpetual war.

The United States---the Actual Big Problem in the World?

I've said it here before. I'll say it again.

The United States is the world's warmonger.

We spend more on war and what we call "defense" than any other nation in the world, far and away. Here's 2009 alone.

We're in more nations, with more bases and more weapons and more bombs and tanks and planes and ships and more of everything else's than any other nation, bar none.



Look at the last big wars of the past 5 decades. What were they and who was in them? Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan is where they were and we started them. We keep saying we're saving someone from something so we go over and blow 'em up real good.

Then there's weapons manufacturers as a nation. Guess who's making more weapons, by country, than any other nation and putting those out in the world. I think you see where this is going.

(H)ere is the list of the world’s top 10 arms exporters, along with their respective shares of global exports between 2010 and 2014, from SIPRI:

1. United States: 31%
2. Russia: 27%
3. China: 5%
4. Germany: 5%
5. France: 5%
6. U.K.: 4%
7. Spain: 3%
8. Italy: 3%
9. Ukraine: 3%
10. Israel: 2%

See the entire study from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

And those two are external. Now let's consider ourselves internally.

I think we know which nation on the planet has more weapons, for civilians, than any other, don't we? Sure we do. It's the good old, USA, once again, bar none.

We, as a nation, as a people, need to both stop thinking of ourselves as a "peace-loving people" and nation, we need to stop kidding ourselves and we need, badly, to do something about it. More people are being killed on this planet, both inside and outside the US.

We need to cut down on the weapons. There are a lot better ways to "do business" on this planet than by creating and selling and profiting from weapons.

We need to get started.

We need to give peace a chance.

The world--our own and the rest of it--will be a lot better place for our having done it.

Link: Ceasefire in Yemen Faces Collapse as U.S. Continues Weapons Sales to Saudi Arabia, Fueling Civil War

Veterans Day, 2015

Remembering World War II, by the numbers. An informative, fascinating, possibly even important video on the people killed in World War II.



Never forget.

Prophetic. Prescient

On this day, September 25

1990 - Saddam Hussein warns that US will repeat Vietnam experience.

It's Not Too Late!

An hour to go, I'm going to sneak this in yet. It's too important to not.

Happy International Day of Peace!

The International Day of Peace, sometimes unofficially known as World Peace Day, is observed annually on 21 September. It is dedicated to world peace, and specifically the absence of war and violence, such as might be occasioned by a temporary ceasefire in a combat zone for humanitarian aid access. The day was first celebrated in 1982, and is kept by many nations, political groups, military groups, and peoples. In 2013, for the first time, the Day was dedicated by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to peace education, the key preventive means to reduce war sustainably.

To inaugurate the day, the United Nations Peace Bell is rung at UN Headquarters (in New York City). The bell is cast from coins donated by children from all continents except Africa, and was a gift from the United Nations Association of Japan, as "a reminder of the human cost of war"; the inscription on its side reads, "Long live absolute world peace".

Imagine.

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace...

In Memoriam, 9/11

To the estimated 4,347 American soldiers who died in the war we were all lied into (see Casualties in Iraq),

Links:  The Bush White House Was Deaf to 9/11 Warnings

Bush Received More Warnings About 9/11 Than We Realized

Bush Warned of Hijackings Before 9-11