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Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

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If you live long enough you will see just about all that there is to see, except maybe the Chicago Cubs win the World Series. I was reading news stories and that's how I felt when I ran across this one:

"June 12 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. lawmakers are set to approve a $106 billion war-spending bill after President Barack Obama said he would use 'every legal and administrative remedy available' to block the release of photos of troops abusing detainees.

Negotiators from the House and Senate yesterday agreed on the compromise legislation after Obama intervened in a dispute over a Republican-backed proposal to add provisions to the bill to bar release of the photos. He wrote a letter, read aloud to negotiators considering the war bill, promising to make every effort to thwart an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit seeking to force the release of the pictures."

Only the names have been changed to defend to guilty; we keep running around the mulberry bush and nothing changes. Our new President wants more money for wars of conquest while promising to defend the Pentagon from the American people by hiding evidence of war crimes from them. All is still the same, yet this one calls himself a Democrat.

The Republicans and Joe Lieberman, whatever he is, have proposed making the photos exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Not since Orwell penned, "some animals are more equal than others" has there been such a display of blatant hypocrisy. Those pictures belong to us! We paid for them! They are ours! Trying to pass an amendment exempting them from the law is just another example of a government in a vacuum.

The Constitution, right and wrong, fair play and justice have become nothing more than sock puppet theatre. The Employee Free Choice Act is dead, killed not by Republicans but by Democrats. Arkansas Democratic Senator Blanch Lincoln announced that she had changed her position and now sided with the US Chamber of Commerce. Likewise Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska and without a full complement of Democrats on board the bill is dead. Without help from the White House the bill is dead, and so while the White House will intervene on your behalf to fight the ACLU it will not intervene to support American workers, and so the bill is dead.

Several weeks ago Nancy Pelosi found herself in hot water by saying the CIA lied to her in briefings regarding enhanced interrogation (torture). The Speaker of the United States House of Representatives then began back peddling and making excuses. Did they lie to you or not? Pelosi has since dropped from the radar, aware I'm sure that those who say bad things about the CIA suddenly become accident-prone, and just as suddenly files and information begin to leak out. "Oh, I get it," I hear you saying, "he's a conspiracy theorist!"

No, I'm a realist. The concept of no man is above the law in the United States is as dead as religious freedom in Nazi Germany. The executive branch is above the law, and the intelligence branch is above the law per our new President, the Democrat. Without legal constraints upon them what is left of democracy but to don the purple and put on circuses for the people?

In 1948 Harry S. Truman advocated and brought forth legislation for single payer health care for the American people. In 2009 Democratic Senator Max Bauchus had single payer advocates removed by force from the Senate Chamber.

In 1964 President Johnson proposed a war on poverty; in 2009 poverty is the winner.

In 1961 President Kennedy proposed putting men on the moon, the greatest industrial and technological challenge of all time. In 2009 the President wants more money to keep men in other countries, without goals, without conditions and without end. Now 240,000 contractors labor in Iraq and Afghanistan to supply a 30-million-dollar dining hall that's never been used and a US Forces headquarters building that is so full of structural cracks, leaking pipes and sinking pavement that it is questionable if it can ever be used.

All told, 32 billion dollars have been paid to Kellogg Brown & Root alone since 2001, and how many employees would you suspect oversee those billions of dollars and thousands of contracts in both Iraq and Afghanistan? Thirteen. The government has no central record of who the contractors are or what they do nor how much they are to be paid. Try that line on the IRS sometime, "I don't know, I didn't keep a record of that."

In 1941 the Democratically controlled Senate created the Truman Committee to investigate fraud and abuse under a Democratic President. The Truman Committee was estimated to have saved $11 billion dollars during the course of the war. The Democrats have controlled the House and Senate for more than two years now; where is our Truman Committee?

In response to the stock market crash in 1929, the Hoover administration proposed low interest loans to banks and industries. Through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation it lent out almost 2 billion dollars. But in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt was elected President, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporations budget was cut to 350 million dollars in 1934. Instead the money was used to aid the people, not the banks and corporations.

In 100 days Roosevelt's new administration passed fifteen individual pieces of legislation. Congress authorized the creation of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Farm Credit Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the National Recovery Administration, the Public Works Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Also the Emergency Banking Bill, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the Farm Credit Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Truth-in-Securities Act.

"Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish." (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

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I who am I? Born at the pinnacle of American prosperity to parents raised during the last great depression. I was the youngest child of the youngest children born almost between the generations and that in fact clouds and obscures who it is that (more...)
 

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