The article Battlefield America: U.S. Citizens Face Indefinite Military Detention in Defense Bill Before Senate expands on the warnings I have posted earlier. See also Block expansion of presidential power to make war and imprison.

Below are excerpts of the transcript from the video interview shown in the article.

The Senate is set to vote this week on a Pentagon spending bill that could usher in a radical expansion of indefinite detention under the U.S. government. A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act would authorize the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect — anywhere in the world — without charge or trial.
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And one other point, another very controversial provision in the bill and what the administration has particularly objected to, is the mandatory military custody provision which would say anyone suspected of terrorism in any way connected to Al Qaeda would have to be put into military custody. So, the government wouldn’t even have the option. So, all these FBI investigations that are thwarting terrorist attacks and local police investigations, immediately that would have to be turned over to the U.S. military, and that would become a military action here in the United States, on U.S. soil.

What is the ulterior motive of shifting terrorist investigations from the successful civilian police force to the less successful military? Remember, it was the Bush administration that scoffed at the Clinton administration’s successful foiling of terror plots by treating these plots as criminal activity. It was the Bush administration that failed to stop the 9/11 attacks because they believed more in military intervention than police intervention.

I can understand why the top 1% would want their power enhanced and would want laws passed so they could make more money. What I cannot understand is why they would want their minions in Congress to destroy this country. After all, they have to live here, too. Maybe they think that a member of the top 1% would never fall out of favor so much that one of their own would ever be subject to these provisions of indefinite detention without trial. What fools they be.

As Sharon points out, just think how easy it would have been for the Republicans to get rid of Bill Clinton. They would have just had to disappear him rather than try to impeach and convict him.

Here is Jon Stewart of the Daily Show discussing how Faux Noise covered the President’s Thanksgiving Day message.

If the video fails to run, click on this link.

This video shows why we will all miss Barney Frank in Congress. With any luck, he will just be making more television appearances than he did when he was in office.

Apparently, there is no amount of sarcasm that will ever stop a determined interviewer from asking the next stupid question.

This video is a discussion about science, society, and the universe with Stephen Colbert, who is out of character, at the Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey on January 29, 2010.

The interview is both funny and enlightening. It is worth the 90 minutes you’ll spend watching it.

I received the following email:

To see why it might be important to sign this petitioin, read the previous post Is Obama Fulfilling the Neocon Dream of Mass Regime Change in Muslim World? and view the referenced video.

The upshot of that previous post is that the decision to go to war has probably already been made and it is probably unstoppable, but that is no reason for not trying.

The Democracy Now article Glenn Greenwald: Is Obama Fulfilling the Neocon Dream of Mass Regime Change in Muslim World? introduces the video with the following:

Political blogger Glenn Greenwald recently wrote about retired General Wesley Clark’s recollection of an officer telling him in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks that the then U.S. Secretary of Defense had issued a memo outlining a plan for regime change within five years in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. We play an excerpt of Clark’s comments and ask Greenwald to respond.

So, if you are wondering why President Obama’s foreign policy is so bellicose, I have no explanation. The video in the above article at least shows you what the policy seems to be. Who actually is in control in this administration and how did they come to have such control? Did we know we were voting for these people to have control, whoever they are?

I post this video as a public service. I had no idea of the information presented here.

I’ll give credit to RS who posted this on a Facebook page. I’ve already probably said too much that is incriminating.

The article HERE’S WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE ECONOMY… (And How To Fix It), contains the written explanation, a few items of which are the following:

• This budget plan can theoretically include an increase in short-term spending designed to minimize the country’s pain, as long as it also includes a decrease in long-term spending (again, right now, the world is willing to lend us as much money as we want)
• The 10-year government budget designed to get us out of our current predicament, therefore, should probably include a massive, multi-year infrastructure spending program.

The article also contains the following video explaining the problem and solution.

The major piece of this plan that is missing is to fix the tax system to reverse the concentration of wealth that has been promoted for the last 30 years. The old tax structure and rules kept us out of depression for 70 years. Without returning to the old structure (much more than just fixing the taxes), even if we manage to get out of the current predicament, it won’t last as long as the previous recovery.

The Truthdig article How China Has Benefited From America’s Hostility to Iran quotes from the Barry Lando article China and Iran. Lessons from a Lab Rat.

True to form, the Americans have been pushing trade sanctions in various degrees of severity ever since American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran back in 1979.

The Chinese argue the current stiff sanctions won’t convince the Iranians to stop their nuclear program. However, those sanctions have certainly helped the Chinese gain a remarkable foothold in Iran.
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And as all this has been going on, the Chinese have been prospering.  Chinese/Iranian trade has mushroomed from $3.3 billion in 2001 to $30 billion in 2010, and is expected to hit $50 billion by 2015.  The prize, though is the gas and petroleum.

Is this rise in trade between Iran and China what causes Obama to assure us that the sanctions are working?

A while ago, someone came up with the good advice, “The President ought not say things that he knows are untrue.”

The Truth Dig story Big CIA Bust Reported in Iran, starts with:

This information, we should note, comes from Iran’s state-sponsored news agency, but officials in Tehran said Wednesday they had arrested as many as 12 CIA agents who had been working undercover to gather intelligence about the Iranian nuclear program and what the government planned to do with it.

If Truth Dig were aware of the Seymour hersh story discussed in my previous post Propaganda Driven Hysteria Over Iranian Nuke Program, they might not be so dismissive of the report by the Iranian news agency.

I wonder if this result of the  unmasking of the CIA spy ring was an “aw sh*t” moment for Seymour Hersh.  How do you measure the trade-off of debunking our own propaganda that might lead us to an unnecessary war with the possible disclosure that might have led to the arrest of our spies?