Obama carrying out Osama’s plan to bankrupt the U.S.

Alan Grayson reminds us that Osama Bin Laden had an overall plan to ruin the United States. All he needed were a couple of presidents to help him carry out the plan. George W. Bush was more than willing. Then along came Barrack Obama, who surprised his followers and decided to do his part to bankrupt the United States. Grayson explains:

Today, the war in Afghanistan becomes America's longest war. Longer than the war in Vietnam. Longer than the Korean War. . . . Bin Laden's strategy was -- and is -- painfully simple: to repeat his victory in Afghanistan against Russia, by driving us into bankruptcy. As he put it, he wanted to use his "experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat." In other words, he just wants to go two-for-two. And, as Bin Laden noted, it is equally simple to get us into that trap.
If you are dismayed that President Obama (and Congress) are eagerly following Bin Laden's plan to bankrupt the United States, consider signing Grayson's petition to support "The War is Making You Poor Act."
This bill would eliminate the separate funding for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and eliminate federal income taxes for everyone's first $35,000 of income (or $70,000 for couples) each year. And it would help pay down our national debt.

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Evolution imprisoned in biology classrooms

David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist who teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Biology Binghamton University. He has long been a champion of multi-level selection theory, and he boldly applied his research and findings to human conduct, boldly going where many biologists hesitate to go, based upon a well-documented history of derision aimed at scientists who dare to study human beings as though they were animals subject to natural selection. This, despite the fact that humans clearly are animals that are subject to the forces of natural selection. Today, I spotted an excellent video of an October 30, 2009 talk that David Sloan Wilson gave following the publication of his book, "Evolution for Everyone." The video lasts almost one hour. I previously posted extensively on his book here. I've posted on other aspects of his work here and here . Wilson opens his clear, insightful, sometimes blunt and oftentimes humorous talk by announcing that higher education has an "evolution problem." The problem is that many in academia resist applying modern scientific biological findings to their own disciplines, even though these biological findings would be highly relevant. Wilson thus refers to the Ivory Tower as the "Ivory Archipelago." Darwin anticipated the broad scope of his theory, but many teachers in the humanities refuse to have anything to do with well-substantiated principles of biology, even modern findings would be highly informative to their fields of study. [More . . . ]

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What’s going on with Barack Obama?

I much preferred Barack Obama to be President over John McCain. Obama now has a track record, and I find it highly disappointing. Frank Rich is also disappointed:

It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him. Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.
I think Frank Rich is being naive, however. I think that many of us who put so much effort into seeing Obama elected are naive. It's not that Obama is still feeling his way. It's not that he's trying to figure out what should be done about health care insurers, Wall Street or BP. When I see Obama these days, I see a President whose failures to speak up and rail at injustice are conspicuous by their absence, over and over. Truly, how long does it take to get angry about the way our military has treated highly competent gay soldiers? Where is any meaningful cost control component to health care reform (supposedly the main reason for health care reform)? Why isn't he forcefully arguing against too-big-to-fail banks and promoting the reenactment of Glass-Steagall? Why isn't he livid when Congress carves payday lenders out of the financial reform bills? When the financial sector floods Congress with 2,000 lobbyists, or when "78 former government employees registered as Comcast lobbyists in the final quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010" to push through it's proposed merger with MSNBC, why isn't President Obama visibly and audibly outraged? When I watch Barack Obama, I am watching a President who is not willing to stand up for the rights and needs of regular folks when those rights and needs conflict with the greed of huge well-monied corporations. He has shown us that he'd rather not take the bully pulpit and deliver a sustained message of condemnation, even when the need for such a tirade is palpable. Obama's absence of outrage demonstrates either that he has succumbed to the power of money to get himself re-elected (or to get his fellow-democrats re-elected), or he's being physically threatened. There's no other way to explain the sharp conflict between Obama's pre-election speeches and his post-election malaise. To the extent that there is yet any "Hope" to turn this Presidency around, Obama needs to make it his mission to tell the American People in every way possible, using every rhetorical skill he has, that our Democracy is utterly corrupted, and there is no use trying to govern this country until we take private money out of politics. Until then, we cannot have any honest debate on any issue and all "fixes" of any problem will be illusory.

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Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Anonymity is driving the uncivil ways of the Internet, I believe. I'm proud to say that most of the people who publish at this site (both those who post and those who comment) do so in their real life names. I am convinced that this choice to disclose who we are facilitates conversation. It recently occurred to me that a good illustration of the corrupting power of anonymity comes from "The Wizard of Oz." Remember the rudeness of the Wizard while he was anonymous? "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" Progress was possible only when the curtain was pulled back and the parties could work together face-to-face. Tom Tomorrow provides yet more insight into the corrosive power of Internet anonymity.

Continue ReadingPay no attention to that man behind the curtain.