Hitler on protecting his people against terrorists. Sound familiar?

March 15, 1939 Proclamation of the Führer to the German people:

"To the German People: Only a few months ago Germany was compelled to protect her fellow countrymen, living in well-defined settlements, against the unbearable Czechoslovakian terror regime; and during the last weeks the same thing has happened on an ever-increasing scale. This is bound to create an intolerable state of affairs within an area inhabited by citizens of so many nationalities. These national groups, to counteract the renewed attacks against their freedom and life, have now broken away from the Prague Government. Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist. Since Sunday at many places wild excesses have broken out, amongst the victims of which are again many Germans. Hourly the number of oppressed and persecuted people crying for help is increasing. From areas thickly populated by German-speaking inhabitants, which last autumn Czechoslovakia was allowed by German generosity to retain, refugees robbed of their personal belongings are streaming into the Reich. Continuation of such a state of affairs would lead to the destruction of every vestige of order in an area in which Germany is vitally interested particularly as for over 1,000 years it formed a part of the German Reich. In order definitely to remove this menace to peace and to create the conditions for a necessary new order in this living space, I have today resolved to allow German troops to march into Bohemia and Moravia. They will disarm the terror gangs and the Czechoslovakian forces supporting them, and protect the lives of all who are menaced. Thus they will lay the foundations for introducing a fundamental re-ordering of affairs which will be in accordance with the 1,000-year-old history and will satisfy the practical needs of the German and Czech peoples.

-Adolf Hitler, Berlin."

Democracy Now Host Amy Goodman Recognized With Right Livelihood Award

Democracy Now! Host Amy Goodman Recognized With Right Livelihood Award
Oct. 3rd, 2008 at 11:09 AM
AMY GOODMAN, HOST OF DEMOCRACY NOW, FIRST JOURNALIST TO WIN "ALTERNATIVE NOBEL"

New York City, NY - Award-winning journalist and host of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely recognized as the world's premier award for personal courage and social transformation. The annual prize, also known as the Alternative Nobel, will be awarded in the Swedish Parliament on December 8, 2008.

The Right Livelihood Award was established in 1980 to honor and support those "offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today". Goodman has been selected for "developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media."

Pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the country, Democracy Now! is a daily grassroots, global TV/radio/internet news hour airing on more than 750 public radio and television stations and at democracynow.org.

Goodman said, "I am deeply honored that grassroots, independent journalism and the hard work of my colleagues at Democracy Now! are being recognized in these critical times. I strongly believe that media can be a force for peace. It is the responsibility of journalists to give voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken and beaten down by the powerful. It is the best reason I know to carry our pens, cameras and microphones out into the world. The media should be a sanctuary for dissent. It is our job to go to where the silence is."

Goodman and two Democracy Now! producers were arrested last month at the Republican National Convention while reporting on street demonstrations. Charges were dropped after widespread public outcry. The video of Goodman's arrest was among the most watched YouTube video's during the convention week. It has now been viewed over 860,000 times.

Amy Goodman writes a weekly syndicated column with King Features which runs in major newspapers throughout North and South America. She is co-author with her brother, journalist David Goodman, of three New York Times bestsellers: Standing Up To the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times; Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back; and The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them.

Goodman's reporting on East Timor and Nigeria won the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award. Her other awards include the first ever Communication for Peace Award presented by the World Association of Christian Communication, the Puffin/Nation Institute Award for Creative Citizenship, The Paley Center for Media "She Made It" Award, and the Gracie Award for American Women in Radio and Television Public Broadcasting. Goodman has also received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Goodman shares the 2008 Right Livelihood Award with Krishnammal and Sankaralingam Jagannathan of India, and their organisation, Land for the Tillers' Freedom, for their work dedicated to realising in practice the Gandhian vision of social justice and sustainable human development; Asha Hagi of Somalia "for continuing to lead at great personal risk the female participation in the peace and reconciliation process in her war-ravaged country."; and Monika Hauser of Germany, gynaecologist and founder of medica mondiale, "for her tireless commitment to working with women who have experienced the most horrific sexualised violence in some of the most dangerous countries in the world, and campaigning for them to receive social recognition and compensation."

For more information about the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, please visit http://www.rightlivelihood.org.

We are an opinionated country. We would be much better served by becoming informed.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=212416&ac=Insight

We have met the enemy and he looks familiar...

There's plenty of blame to go around for the crisis in the economy -- and we're guilty, too.

By TERRY DAVIES September 28, 2008

When President Bush introduced the Wall Street subsidy last Friday, he said that it was not the time for assigning blame. The public has had a week to ponder the implications of the starting price of $700 billion and other uses for the money. We can either bail out Goldman Sachs or we can: repair every single bridge and road in our neglected infrastructure: fund Social Security; fund Medicare; improve public education; insure everyone's retirement and make alternative energy a reality. The next day we could provide healthcare for every single American and get a new knee for Tom Brady.
Something has to be done to address the financial crisis. We have been pressured to accept the Paulson plan immediately as if it were the only possible option when a better approach has already been used. In 1992, the banking system in Sweden collapsed under a pile of bad loans caused by a real estate bubble. The government stepped in, but not right away and they did not use the Paulson approach of buying the bad loans from the banks at inflated prices. Instead, the banks were forced to write down all of their losses before they got a dime of public money. When they received funds, it was in exchange for equity in the banks -- so the public could participate in the return, not just shoulder the risk. They used capitalism. Like we did with AIG and Fannie Mae.
The largest bank, SEB, decided to fix its own balance sheet and turned a profit in 1993. Sweden is not a paragon of capitalism, but their banking bailout wound up costing very little. As a 26-year veteran of investing and trading, including 20 years with a large firm in New York City, I am a big believer in the free market and have a major issue with the government operating the financial sector. But I am also a big fan of what works. I trust reality over opinion. I also trust incentive-based compensation over a free handout. Why does Warren Buffett's lousy $5 billion get him a big piece of Goldman when our $700 billion gets us toxic waste?
We could start by blaming the government for this, since they are paid to watch out for us. Which they might have done, except for the deregulation binge that started under Reagan, continued through Bush I and Clinton and is carried on today by Bush II. This rush to deregulate gutted the SEC, abolished the Glass-Steagal Act and led to this mess. (Google away -- it is all there.) So it is their fault -- those Republican/Democratic administrations. Except that we Americans believe in less regulation, small government and free markets, don't we? The bad guys must be all those Wall Street types. We trust them with the keys and they drive the global economy into a ditch. Except, as noted above, we like our markets free and Wall Street exists to maximize profit. So it has to be sub-prime mortgages at the bottom of all this. But mortgages, sub-prime or otherwise, work out just fine as long as the borrower pays back the loan. Which would put the blame back on ... hang on, I don't like the way this is headed. Let's start over. How did we get here?
• Step one -- the housing bubble. In 1938, Fannie Mae was started to create a secondary market for mortgages so lower-income Americans could buy a house. In 1968, Fannie Mae was privatized, issued stock, and became a private corporation gambling public funds. Over the next 40 years, what was meant to be a small, special-purpose agency grew to control 50 percent of the U.S. mortgage market and issue roughly $2 trillion in debt. All that money was loaned to homebuyers, artificially pushing home prices higher. It became gospel that houses only went up in value, they didn't depreciate like other assets, so stretching to buy as much house as was possible was darned smart.
With the proceeds, Fannie Mae made a fortune -- and was regulated poorly if at all. One investigation found that Fannie Mae was taking on enormous risk by not adequately hedging for rising interest rates. In 2003,...
a plan to increase oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was proposed by the anti-regulator George W. Bush. (Didn't see that one coming, did you?) Home builders and Democrats killed it, saying it would reduce loans to the poor.
• Step two -- Wall Street gets involved. Investment banks (IBs) make serious money buying and packaging mortgages, then slicing them up and selling the parts to institutions that need lots of fixed income (aka bonds) like insurance companies and banks. The IBs pushed mortgage banks to make more loans so they could make more money. This answers the fundamental question of why lenders made all these high-risk loans -- because it wasn't their money.
The slicing-up part gets interesting. The mortgages were sorted according to quality, then cut into tranches which were numbered according to when they got paid. The first tranche received the initial payments, down to the last tranche, which had the risk of being last in line but also had the potential for gain if there were extra funds at the end. The problem was, nobody wanted to buy the high-risk stuff. Time for magic!
The IBs gathered the toxic tranches, bundled them, sliced them into tranches and created more bonds -- called CDOs -- the majority of which received AAA ratings. Highly risky debt magically became AAA-rated bonds. The ratings companies deserve all kinds of blame. Their loan evaluations were based on data provided by the issuer from a time period when house values soared. Since that historical default rate was low, they assumed it would stay that way. Forever. The large brokers and banks sold CDOs to their clients and called them as good as cash.
Before all this mess started, we had a deal in America: Work hard, save your money and you could afford to own your own home. It changed over time. Anyone could get a loan; everyone was buying houses and housing prices went sky high. Based on those escalating prices, people could afford even bigger loans. The deal mutated to: Every American deserves to own a house, preferably 2,500 square feet with big-screen HD TVs in every room.
Spending was the new creed. After watching the restaurant where I courted my wife disappear in a dust cloud one September morning, I was told to shop. Spending would solve everything. For the last 20 years, U.S. economic growth came from debt-funded consumption. From 2002-2006, household borrowing grew 11 percent a year. We borrowed against our homes as well. Lenders say people spending 30 percent or more their income on housing are in trouble. That now applies to 38 percent of every American with a mortgage.
Will this rescue plan work? It will buy time for balance sheets to be repaired. But it has an essential flaw. It tries to maintain the status quo. Hank Paulson designed the plan to get the economy to "fund expansion." We cannot afford what we have. The plan should really be to shrink the economy back to a sane level. Shrink the massive debt down to a level where earned income can support it. In 1978, American households had total debt that amounted to 79 percent of total employee compensation. Today, this figure has more than doubled to 174 percent.
We have met the enemy and he is us -- our need for stuff, our reliance on experts, our unwillingness to sacrifice anything. We are an opinionated country. We would be much better served by becoming informed.



Hi,

And this today from a radio friend in Canada:


Hi humble,

Actually I was thinking about something along these lines yesterday. What if McCain/Palin were the Democrats in this election with exactly the same lives/backgrounds?

First the mass media would dig up every little bit of dirt on them and then endlessly and mercilessly crucify them. The fact that this duo are Republicans should not exempt them from proper scutiny. But they are exempted, just as the Bush regime has been despite 8 years of all manner of crime, incompetence, and outright treason.

Over many decades the conservative vested interests have invested hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in so-called "think tanks" and other forms of propaganda mills to brainwash themselves, spread misinformation and outright lies, twist facts, and assassinate characters to skew the media and dumb down the public.

That a couple of twits like McCain/Palin are running for the highest office in the land when neither is fit for any kind of public office, is proof of how successful this stretegy has been.

I have noticed however that the supermarket tabloids have been slamming Palin from day one....

+++++++++++++



exerpt from: http://www.hermes-press.com/driving_insane.htm (a truly scary site)

scroll down to PROPAGANDA

Most Americans are unaware that public agencies like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) have been totally co-opted by forces of oppression--as their propaganda con games reveal.

CPB gives no hint that Americans are seeing through the deadly attempts to destroy their minds. Fortunately, many American military personnel are also waking up.


CPB and other propaganda rackets are so ham-fisted in their indoctrination efforts that more and more people are seeing through their subterfuge. For example, it was easily apparent to television viewers that CPB's featuring Richard Perle, a despicable, Neanderthal conservative in one segment of its program, proved that it has no journalistic integrity whatsoever. Allowing Perle to preach his lies with a straight face--with no genuine countervailing opinions being offered (you certainly can't suppose that Richard Holbrooke is anything but sympathetic to the cabal)--gives the lie to the entire series.
+++

liberals will be forced to shoot wolves from airplanes, deny evolution, and act out drills preparing them for the Rapture

From the MANITOBA HERALD, Canada


A flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada
has intensified in the past weeks, sparking calls for increased patrols
to stop the illegal immigration.

The possibility of a McCain/Palin election is prompting the exodus
among left-leaning citizens who fear they'll soon be required to hunt,
pray, and agree with Bill O'Reilly.

Canadian border farmers say it's not uncommon to see dozens of
sociology professors, animal rights activists and Unitarians crossing
their fields at night.

I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood
producer huddled in the barn,' said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield,
whose acreage borders North Dakota.

The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. 'He asked me if I could
spare a latte and some free-range chicken.

When I said I didn't have any, he left. Didn't even get a chance to
show him my screenplay, eh?'

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher
fences, but the liberals scaled them. So he tried installing speakers
that blare Rush Limbaugh across the fields. 'Not real effective,' he
said. 'The liberals still got through, and Rush annoyed the cows so
much they wouldn't give milk.'

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals
near the Canadian border; pack them into Volvo station wagons; drive
them across the border and leave them to fend for themselves.

'A lot of these people are not prepared for rugged conditions,' an
Ontario border patrolman said. 'I found one carload without a drop of
drinking water. 'They did have a nice little Napa Valley cabernet,
though.'

When liberals are caught, they're sent back across the border, often
wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors
have been circulating about the McCain administration establishing
re-education camps in which liberals will be forced to shoot wolves
from airplanes, deny evolution, and act out drills preparing them for
the Rapture.

In recent days, liberals have turned to sometimes-ingenious ways of
crossing the border. Some have taken to posing as senior citizens on
bus trips to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a
half-dozen young vegans disguised in powdered wigs, Canadian
immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed
senior-citizen passengers on Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney hits to
prove they were alive in the '50s.

'If they can't identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk
Show, we get suspicious about their age,' an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are
creating an organic-broccoli shortage and renting all the good Susan
Sarandon movies.

'I feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just
can't support them,' an Ottawa resident said. 'How many
art-history and English majors does one country need?

++++++++++++++

Pundits are so bothered by Palin’s lack of ability, they are no longer reminding us that McCain means four more years of Bush.

Sarah Palin has one purpose on the ticket and that is to win the election.

The people who selected her are not stupid. It was not a shot in the dark.

Trillions of dollars are up for grabs and the election will decide if these trillions will continue to be guzzled by our corporate war machine or if at least a fraction of America's resources will finally be put into education, health care and infrastructure --- in this country.

You can believe that with trillions of dollars at stake, the republican machinery employed the most sophisticated psychological marketing science available --- and Sarah Palin turned up on the top of the heap.

Commentators cry that Sarah Palin has no ability.

An election is not about ability but about winning.

Pundits are so bothered by Palin’s lack of ability, they are no longer reminding us that McCain means four more years of Bush.

Sarah Palin’s lack of ability is her only asset, because millions of uneducated women --- and men --- living in low income housing and without health insurance --- identify with her, and she will deliver their vote. McCain already had the educated rich. You might well wonder if what Bush has left us of America could survive this latest combination of greed and ignorance.

Sarah Palin has one purpose on the ticket and that is to win the election.

The humble Farmer

Palin’s Alternate Universe

By BOB HERBERT

Published: October 3, 2008

Sarah Palin is the perfect exclamation point to the Bush years.

Now comes Ms. Palin, a smiling, bubbly vice-presidential candidate who travels in an alternate language universe. For Ms. Palin, such things as context, syntax and the proximity of answers to questions have no meaning.
In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.”
What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. As the historian Robert Dallek has pointed out, Reagan “saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism, which would ‘invade every area of freedom in this country.’ ”
Does Ms. Palin agree with that Looney Tunes notion? Or was this just another case of the aw-shucks, darn-right, I’m-just-a-hockey-mom governor of Alaska mouthing something completely devoid of meaning?
Here’s Ms. Palin during the debate: “Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again ... Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?”
If Governor Palin didn’t like a question, or didn’t know the answer, she responded as though some other question had been asked. She made no bones about this, saying early in the debate: “I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear.”
The problem with Ms. Palin’s candidacy is that John McCain might actually win this election, and then if something terrible happened, the country could be left with little more than an exclamation point as president.
After Ms. Palin had woven one of her particularly impenetrable linguistic webs, Joe Biden turned to the debate’s moderator, Gwen Ifill, and said: “Gwen, I don’t know where to start.”
Of course he didn’t know where to start because Ms. Palin’s words don’t mean anything. She’s all punctuation.
This is such a serious moment in American history that it’s hard to believe that someone with Ms. Palin’s limited skills could possibly be playing a leadership role. On the day before the debate, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, made an urgent appeal for more troops, saying the additional “boots on the ground,” as well as more helicopters and other vital equipment, were “needed as quickly as possible.”
The morning after the debate, the Labor Department announced that the employment situation in the U.S. had deteriorated even more than experts had expected. The nation lost nearly 160,000 jobs in September, more than double the monthly losses in July and August.
Conditions are probably worse than even those numbers indicate because the government’s statistics do not yet reflect the response of employers to the credit crisis that has taken such a hold in the last few weeks.
Where is the evidence that Governor Palin even understands these complex and enormously challenging problems? During the debate she twice referred to General McKiernan as “McClellan.” Neither Ms. Ifill nor Senator Biden corrected her.
But after Senator Biden suggested that John McCain’s answer to the nation’s energy problems was to “drill, drill, drill,” Ms. Palin promptly pointed out, as if scoring a point, that “the chant is ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ ”
How’s that for perspective? The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.”
John McCain has spent most of his adult life speaking of his love for his country. Maybe he sees something in Sarah Palin that most Americans do not. Maybe he is aware of qualities that lead him to believe she’d be as steady as Franklin Roosevelt in guiding the U.S. through a prolonged economic downturn. Maybe she’d be as wise and prudent in a national emergency as John Kennedy was during the Cuban missile crisis.
Maybe Senator McCain has reason to believe that it would not be the most colossal of errors to put Ms. Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency.
He’s got just four weeks to share that insight with the rest of us.

+++

Sarah Palin has one purpose on the ticket and that is to win the election.

The people who selected her are not stupid. It was not a shot in the dark.

Trillions of dollars are up for grabs and the election will decide if these trillions will continue to be guzzled by our corporate war machine or if at least a fraction of America's resources will finally be put into education, health care and infrastructure --- in this country.

You can believe that with trillions of dollars at stake, the republican machinery employed the most sophisticated psychological marketing science available --- and Sarah Palin turned up on the top of the heap.

Commentators cry that Sarah Palin has no ability.

An election is not about ability but about winning.

Pundits are so bothered by Palin’s lack of ability, they are no longer reminding us that McCain means four more years of Bush.

Sarah Palin’s lack of ability is her only asset, because millions of uneducated women --- and men --- living in low income housing and without health insurance --- identify with her, and she will deliver their vote. McCain already had the educated rich. You might well wonder if what Bush has left us of America could survive this latest combination of greed and ignorance.

Sarah Palin has one purpose on the ticket and that is to win the election.

The humble Farmer

+++



I might add here that of course the republicans want unemployment: uneducated unemployed young men can always join the army.

The humble Farmer

Nixon, Bush, Palin, and people's houses went up in smoke

There is one capable, sober guy in the Bush administration: Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He recently said that U.S. forces in Iraq had to learn counterinsurgency on the job. “But that came at a frightful human, financial and political cost,” he noted.

Gates warned that “warfare is inevitably tragic, inefficient.” He urged skepticism of any notion that “adversaries can be cowed, shocked or awed into submission, instead of being tracked down, hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.”

In short, he lambasted the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush war effort for its gambler’s irresponsibility. The financial equivalent of reckless “Shock and Awe” has been “Sub and Prime.”

And people’s houses across America really did go up in smoke.


Op-Ed Columnist

Nixon, Bush, Palin

By ROGER COHEN
Published: October 1, 2008
In 1970, in the midst of the longest bear market since World War II, President Richard Nixon declared: “Frankly, if I had any money, I’d be buying stocks right now.”
Now, I’ve been asking myself, just for the heck of it, what would happen if President Bush tried his own jawboning of the market and said: “Frankly, if I had any money, I’d be buying stocks right now.”
My conclusion is: Mr. President, please, please do not say that! I reckon the market could tank in ways that would make this week’s one-day 777 point plunge look paltry.
I’m not about to write a paean to Nixon. I watched him quit in a bar in Bolinas, Calif.; I can still hear the cheer. But even his tortured, sleazy nature betrayed some essential seriousness about the fate of the United States. By contrast, the Bush crowd has gambled the future of this country with abandon.
(And Nixon did resign as impeachment loomed. Whatever happened to the notion that someone — a cabinet member, a Wall Street C.E.O., the inventor of credit-default swaps — might actually fall on his or her sword? Shame has become a quaint chivalric notion, like honor, a thing of another American time.)
A closer look at the Bush gamble is merited because the first person to reprice risk on the basis it no longer existed was the president. Now, that’s leading by example.
The gamble involved going to war in Iraq at an estimated cost to date of about $700 billion (does that figure sound familiar?), while opting not to raise taxes but to lower them. It involved going into that war, and another in Afghanistan, while asking not for shared sacrifice but a great collective maxing-out in the service of: shopping.
At the same time, Bush, who often seemed to need directions to the Treasury, opted to allow an opaque derivatives market to grow into the trillions without supervision, regulation or information. The market knew best. Turns out that what the market knew best was how to turn capitalism into a pyramid scheme for trading worthless paper.
The cost is now clear. But we should be grateful for small mercies. Remember Bush wanted to throw Social Security into the casino, too, by privatizing it!
Market capitalism is a sophisticated thing that calls for transparency, ethics and rules. Bush and his crowd gambled that some “new paradigm” meant these things were passé.
They’re not. We have to be careful now. Already the contagion of bank failures has spread to Europe. People are asking of the United States: what became of this country?
The Chinese have been ready to treat U.S. Treasuries as a rock-hard store of value and loan us the dollars they accumulate at a very low interest rate. But what if they start to doubt the U.S. government will repay its debt?
“We are getting closer to a tipping-point,” said Benn Steil, an economist. “People are asking: can we really trust the dollar as a store of value?”
The Bretton Woods system of monetary management collapsed in 1971, under Nixon. Since then the dollar’s been the primary reserve currency. Now, we’re reaching another point where a rethink of the foundations for a global economy is needed.
Global trade and capital flows are essential to prosperity. But it’s illogical to have a global system with no global reserve as insurance. Perhaps the trillions of Gulf and Chinese surpluses could be used to finance that. Or perhaps it’s time for a return to the gold standard.
I know one thing: this is no time for further gambling. John McCain rolled the dice on Sarah Palin. I’m grateful to Bob Rice of Tangent Capital for pointing out that the actuarial risk, based on mortality tables, of Palin becoming president if the Republican ticket wins the election is about 1 in 6 or 7.
That’s the same odds as your birthday falling on a Wednesday, or being delayed on two consecutive flights into Newark airport. Is America ready for that?
The lesson of the last eight years is this: when power is a passport to gamble, people can end up seriously broke or seriously dead.
There is one capable, sober guy in the Bush administration: Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He recently said that U.S. forces in Iraq had to learn counterinsurgency on the job. “But that came at a frightful human, financial and political cost,” he noted.

Gates warned that “warfare is inevitably tragic, inefficient.” He urged skepticism of any notion that “adversaries can be cowed, shocked or awed into submission, instead of being tracked down, hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.”

In short, he lambasted the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush war effort for its gambler’s irresponsibility. The financial equivalent of reckless “Shock and Awe” has been “Sub and Prime.”

And people’s houses across America really did go up in smoke.
And fear stalked the land.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

You are invited to stop by for supper anytime.
Robert Karl Skoglund
785 River Road
St. George, ME 04860
207-226-7442
humble@humblefarmer.com

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