AARP Betrayal the TREASON of this century: I posted late last evening and did not do the best job of explaining what AARP may be doing surreptitiously to get cuts in Medicare and Social Security for their OWN greedy vile purposes so here is the link to the Huff Post story: See Here or go to:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/17/social-security-advocates-aarp_n_1355477.html#postComment

Let them KNOW you are on to them and let your Congresspersons know you are AGAINST Social Security and Medicare CUTS.

They do NOT need to be cut IF the 1% pay their fair share in their taxes they would not even feel. They are GREED personified. Social Security is solvent until 2037 and need NEVER be insolvent if our tax structure was equitable.

When I go into doctor's offices now I cannot BELIEVE all the seniors I see and incredulously to me am considered nearly one of them now. ALL those people or
most of them are being kept alive because they have Medicare. The conservative swine want to get rid of Medicare and replace it with vouchers you would have to buy from private insurance costing us exorbitant unfordable rates. As it is one must supplement Medicare anyway as it does not pay for everything as, of course it should! DO NOT LET THEM CUT MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY. Conservatives with their opposition to the president's Affordable Health Care Act spew utter LIES saying it would "kill granny" with death panels. If you really want to kill granny see how fast she dies with no Medicare.

Remember the 2000 campaign of the great Al Gore and his LOCK BOX for Social Security? Well, monies for Social Security and Medicare SHOULD be in there. Lock it in and throw away the key!!

AARP and Medicare Betrayal: Just posted on Facebook AARP: See link here for the story of AARP's POSSIBLE BETRAYAL: LISTEN UP AARP.. and those looking at this wall KNOW what AARP is trying to do. The AARP CEO's probably are a part of the 1% and they are betraying the very membership they are SUPPOSED to be about -- Seniors. They are behind the scenes advocating for cuts to Medicare and Social Security so the Congress won't take it out of the hide of the 1% wealthiest by taxing them like they SHOULD be taxed and save Social Security and Medicare. These are LIFEBLOOD safety nets. MILLIONS are alive today because of them. AARP, listen up and listen good ...when the 99% rise up we get what we want..we did in the Komens sickening plot to take down Planned Parenthood and we are getting somewhere with the 99% movement AND now we will take on AARP.

I will give up my AARP membership faster than I swat a mosquito if they aid in cutting Medicare and Social Security. They are greedy betrayers of those they are supposed to serve. TELL THEM DO NOT CUT MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY. There is NO NEED to. Seniors, GET READY TO SCREAM LOUD AND CLEAR. WE will CUT AARP membership in an INSTANT and get ready to join that which takes the place of this rotten to the core organization who is BETRAYING YOU!

Tell AARP you are mad as hell and you won't take it. Hit them in THEIR pocketbook before they try to take away your life.

A Letter to Bill O'Reilly--A response to something he blathered: Since when is the EXTREMIST right who watch Fox News AND you, Mr. O'Reilly, such democratic rational humanitarians?

No matter how you minimize MSNBC's impact and you spin whatever numbers you like it does not matter since no one questions you and those who do turn you off because they know they get nothing but lies and the spin of them.

MSNBC and Current too are the most excellent network commentary on the planet and whose broadcasters are unbelievably BRILLIANT.

Here is my day: Dylan Ratigan, Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, the GREAT Rachel Maddow, and the WONDERFUL Larry O'Donnell are a must. I tape them all and watch two on Current TV -- Cenk Uygar The Young Turks and OF COURSE Keith Olbermann. On the weekend I watch UP with Chris Hayes -- a genius and after him Melissa Harris Perry -- brilliant and beautiful. Her verbiage is as wonderful as she is gorgeous!

For comedy its John Stewart. If I had 1/2 of the intellect of all of those commentators I would be a genius! I have one feeling when I watch them -- ENVY. I WISH I could be as intellectually astute as they. Even their fill-ins like Ezra Kline is cerebral dynamite.

You, Bill O'Reilly and your fellow right wing extremist commentators are nothing in comparison to them. What MSNBC and Current commentators have in their proverbial little finger you do not have, yes, you guessed, in your entire body. You only WISH you did. What the heck you take the money from Fox and live like a king; the same as those for whom you advocate.

At LEAST those on MSNBC are on the side of the 99% and guess what? The election is going to be decided right there. I cannot WAIT for November. Despite Fox's financial gargantuan status, despite your mouth dripping with your millions, despite the king of Citizen's United Mitt Romney and despite those racists who hate Obama NOT because of what he is about but because of an ethic status he had no hand in creating, HE will be reelected and you know it since the Republican field is an embarrassing Ringling Brothers circus. You and your alleged minions -- those lovely rational people whose spokesman you allegedly are -- will either get on board our train or be left in the dust! Your majority is slipping fast and you know it which is why, sir, you are the vitriolic blatherer you are!

For your Reading Pleasure: Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has written a very engaging article. I suspect PERHAPS someone at BOA has read it. I put the link for your review: It's called: Bank of America Too Crooked to Fail

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bank-of-america-too-crooked-to-fail-20120314

Lovely story about the most damaging, corrupt, sickening, disgusting corporate behavior in the history of planet earth. Not only according to this article, in my opinion, are they a traitor to their own clients like a doctor subverting his own patient giving him a false well diagnosis when the patient has cancer BUT they are a traitor to the nation that gave them life. Throw in this bag ALL the politicians in Washington Republican and Democrat alike who have given them the green light as long as I am sure they STUFFED their coffers. Cute of BOA to put toxic instruments
in a small corner, blow them up, if they fail make oodles of cash from the FDIC insurance which WE the taxpayers give them or secure low interest loans at the bargain basement window no one else has access to and leave their clients in the street. SHAME on them. Didn't their mothers teach them ethics?

BOA should CLEAN UP THEIR ACT before they make Occupy Wall Street angrier than it already is. They and all their compatriots like Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and other Wall Street banksters nearly took the global economy down while they ate ALL the money we and their clients had to offer them when they fail. One would THINK it would make them nauseated to be SO stuffed. Well I can tell you it makes ME nauseated since its my and all taxpayers' money! For an interesting paragraph in the article that particularly grabbed me look below:

Anyone who wants to know what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about need only look at the way Bank of America does business. It comes down to this: These guys are some of the very biggest #$%^ on Earth. They lie, cheat and steal as reflexively as addicts, they laugh at people who are suffering and don't have money, they pay themselves huge salaries with money stolen from old people and taxpayers – and on top of it all, they completely suck at banking. And yet the state won't let them go out of business, no matter how much they deserve it, and it won't slap them in jail, no matter what crimes they commit. That makes them not bankers or capitalists, but a class of person that was never supposed to exist in America: royalty.

Self-appointed royalty, it's true – but just as dumb and inbred as the real thing, and every bit as expensive to support. Like all royals, they reached their position in society by being relentlessly dedicated to the cause of Bigness, Unaccountability and the Worthlessness of Others. And just like royals, they spend most of their lives getting deeper in debt, and laughing every year when our taxes go to covering their whist markers. Two and a half centuries after we kicked out the British, it's really come to this?

I continue to believe what MLK said: The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. I surely HOPE he was right.

The prospect of an even more right wing Republican choice-Please read. A stream of consciousness: Santorum the rightwingnut extremist won both Mississippi AND Alabama in the Republican primaries. You heard the audience at the Republican debates. They would rather a person with no health insurance who is ill die on the street than provide help. We are the ONLY first world nation that has a significant part of the population who believes that and where now before the president's health care legislation kicks in, 25,000,000 have no health insurance. Religion, our Founders specifically did NOT want to mix with the state, WILL. That is what you will get IF that rancid Republican Party nominates an even more-extremist-than-Romney candidate. I cannot imagine that but it’s true. The only thing more right wing would be The John Birch Society (they are in the mix of Republicans too), the KKK, or the American Nazi White Nationalist parties and do not kid yourself some are probably in the Republican Party today as well. The old establishment Republican party is nearly dead or on life support.

So what does that mean for us? There is NO question for us. If you thought you might not vote THINK AGAIN. Elections matter. I do not care what your criticism of Democrats has been. It is a FAR FAR better more humane party than the horrific opposition. On paper it SEEMS President Obama would have an easier time with a Santorum-like candidate and Romney still cannot be counted out BUT and it's a HUGE BUT we CANNOT, MUST NOT, take ANYTHING for granted. We must get out the vote as if our very lives depend upon it because they do. Your children's life and their children’s lives depend upon our president winning this reelection. It is a deadly serious serious matter. Not only is Republican White Land racist beyond belief they are war like beyond belief and the environment will cease to exist as well so our planet will die a slow death and so will we. They will ensure America continue on a war-like footing, partner with big corporate money (like the Nazi state did) and create a real oligarchy and a war with Iran which COULD -- I say COULD -- mean WWIII and a draft of your kids. I do not think I am being a fear monger.

The Republican Party is the most dangerous party since the Civil War. They are NOTHING I repeat NOTHING like the party of Lincoln. They are the party of the Dixicrats of old which did everything they could to deny black people equal rights. If the hard work of Dr. King and others who followed were not part of our country's history there would STILL be segregation in the south and elsewhere.

So what does that mean for the other half -- us? We MUST take this election dead seriously. We MUST MUST get out the Democratic and Independent leaning Democratic (which is a huge number) out to vote. That is how our president wins. Some sickening voter ID back-to-Jim-Crow legislation that REPUBLICAN state legislators put in has been stopped by the courts hopefully into November BUT we do not know for how long and how many will not be stopped. The Justice Department is working on it. STILL WE CAN DO SOMETHING about this DISGUSTING voter ID legislation which is geared for nothing but to stop minorities, the elderly and the disabled (eligible to vote) not to vote. We can ensure Democrats and others who care about the trajectory of this nation MAKE SURE THOSE WHO NEED AN ID GET ONE and head this criminal Republican Party off at the pass. BEAT them at their own game and CRUSH them in November. I do not care if you have to walk, email, snail mail, telephone or smoke signal the vote for the president MUST prevail. Gain your enthusiasm. Erase the 2010 horrific Republican obstructionist election and re-elect the president, give him a Democratic House and keep the Senate in Democratic hands. IF YOU CAN support monetarily the re-election of the president campaign OR give to the national Democratic Party link: http://www.democrats.org/splash/sotu-nation-is-great

Think of it this way. IF the rancid racists make it in November, I will be going to the North Pole or worse. PLEASE tell EVERYONE you know to work for the president and Democrats in November and most importantly get people who would vote for the president the proper ID one needs to vote (each state is different.) NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER GIVE IN. Your life depends upon it and so does mine!

Eternal War and other things: Since I purchased Tom Engelhardt's book "The Amercan Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" I have been receiving TomDisptach which is a well written blog of many different authors who write things about our nation's eternal wars, energy gluttonous activity, greed, the ultimate end of oil and many other realities of which one who has a vested interest in this nation should be aware.

It is an excellent web site if you are interested in these vital issues for you, your children if you have them and your children's children. The post of his web site is TomDispatch.com. The articles which were sent to me are below. Do NOT be a member of the mindless know nothings many in our culture who remain ignorant of national policy are. They are condemning this nation and your children to eternal war and to a possible early death as we drink the world's oil like a chocolate soda thinking there is an endless supply. There isn't.

Wikipedia gives a brief biographical sketch of Tom Englehardt:

Tom Engelhardt is the creator of the Nation Institute's tomdispatch.com, an online blog. He is also the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of the 1998 book, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation.

Tom Engelhardt graduated from Yale University and obtained a Master's Degree in Asian Studies from Harvard University where he was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. He has written numerous articles and several books including The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books).

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Why High Gas Prices Are Here to Stay
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: TD has an offer today that shouldn’t be missed. The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, the new book of one of this site’s most popular regular contributors, Michael Klare, has just been published. Once again, on issues that couldn’t be more crucial to us (and to the planet), he is -- as has been true ever since he pioneered the concept of “resource wars” in the 1990s -- ahead of the curve.

Think about this for a second and if it doesn’t stagger you, I don’t know what to say: the U.S. military consumes as much oil every day as the entire nation of Sweden.

Or take a guess on this question of the week: How much did it cost Mobil and its partners to build the world’s largest oil-drilling platform, a 1.2 million-ton monster that sits in 300 feet of water in “Iceberg Alley” in the Canadian North Atlantic and is armored with 16 protective “teeth” designed to absorb the impact of those approaching bergs? The answer: $5 billion for the Hibernia platform, which is now producing 135,000 barrels of deep sea oil per day.

If you wanted, you could spend your time turning Michael Klare’s new book, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, into an energy and resources version of Believe It Or Not that would stagger your friends. Klare has a way of landing us on a strange new planet called Earth, one stripped to its disappearing resources and filled with insatiable greed. It’s always a bracing experience, even when, as he assures us in his new book, the rush to the planet’s Iceberg Alleys to provide energy for the U.S. military and the rest of us fuel guzzlers may be the last "race" of its kind we are likely to undertake. Tom

A Tough-Oil World
Why Twenty-First Century Oil Will Break the Bank -- and the Planet
By Michael T. Klare

Oil prices are now higher than they have ever been -- except for a few frenzied moments before the global economic meltdown of 2008. Many immediate factors are contributing to this surge, including Iran’s threats to block oil shipping in the Persian Gulf, fears of a new Middle Eastern war, and turmoil in energy-rich Nigeria. Some of these pressures could ease in the months ahead, providing temporary relief at the gas pump. But the principal cause of higher prices -- a fundamental shift in the structure of the oil industry -- cannot be reversed, and so oil prices are destined to remain high for a long time to come.

In energy terms, we are now entering a world whose grim nature has yet to be fully grasped. This pivotal shift has been brought about by the disappearance of relatively accessible and inexpensive petroleum -- “easy oil,” in the parlance of industry analysts; in other words, the kind of oil that powered a staggering expansion of global wealth over the past 65 years and the creation of endless car-oriented suburban communities. This oil is now nearly gone.


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"Game Change," the HBO docudrama about the 2008 McCain/Palin presidential campaign, was excellent. The acting, in my opinion, was flawless. Since I am a political junkie and followed the McCain and Obama campaigns closely nothing that was illuminated came as a surprise to me BUT to see it played out gave a dimension that I never could have gotten unless I was closely working within the campaign, in this case, on the Republican side (a highly unlikely prospect.)

The production brought life to all the pages and pages of newspaper and other descriptions of the McCain campaign's minutiae I have read. At times I forgot that Julianne Moore was acting the part of Palin, the intellectually incompetent, inexperienced, grossly unqualified vice-presidential pick one heart-beat-away from an older medically compromised McCain. Moore brought much realism to the part. The same can be said for Ed Harris as John McCain and Woody Harrelson as Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager. All actors were brilliant.

For me, an ardent Democrat, it simply illuminates why I am one and how grateful I am that Obama won the 2008 campaign. It also illuminates why elections matter. What pabulum is fed to the media who feeds it to us is NOT, in truth, necessarily what happens behind the political scenes and the lack of veracity about it makes it all the more important to choose wisely those who would determine your life and death fate. Yes, elections matter but a sharp intellect of those who seek the high echelons of power through those elections, perhaps, matters even more!

Fukushima in Retrospect: The year anniversary of the devastating tsunami in Japan has arrived and it is no cause for celebration. Looking at my posts when the tsunami disaster and the Fukushima nuclear power explosions were occurring, I most humbly say, I was spot on correct. I STILL believe the information, horrific and apocalyptic, is mostly not being conveyed to an ignorant world. The amount of radiation leakage and its effects I believe are hidden and are STILL a significant reality.

It will take years to know the increase in cancer rate deaths of tech workers and cleanup personnel. Some believe it could be significant. Much of Japan's food supply and plant life is contaminated. It is a waiting game to see its conclusive effects over time. The larger question is how will it affect all of us? The power of government and the news media reveal little about it now. There is food contamination found even in Washington State and in California. Foods shipped east and winds which transport contamination particles from deadly Cesium and other lethal elements make it a factor. How much of a danger it poses to us in the long run no one yet knows. My personal opinion is it poses a consequential threat but because cancer takes so long to develop we may never know its direct correlation. My hunch will always say it is a direct one.

Since the American memory and attention span is measured in minutes, the story goes mostly unnoticed and under-reported. Even tsunami debris is from Japan washing up on our shores and more will. Heads here, as usual, are in the sand as attention MUST be but never is paid for more than a 48 hour news cycle -- and that's being generous. The fate of the nuclear power industry is at stake. Money in this country and the politics that are appended to it are all too often in our Citizens United culture the reason information is squashed.

I post a link to the MSNBC article here. I suggest reading it and demand that the nuclear power plants we do have are inspected, brought up to date and the ones we are thinking of building never are. The cumulative effects of radiation are known. The hour of nuclear madness has arrived and did so with the first explosion of a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima/Nagasaki in August, 1945. No amount of radiation is safe as the great Helen Caldicott stated. I quote from an article about her below and which in its entirety can be found here.

Helen Caldicott, the Australia-born American physician and anti-nuclear activist of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was a practitioner of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston, U.S. A leading critic of nuclear technology and armament industries, she tried to raise the world's conscience through her almost solitary protest writings and TV and radio appearances against the dangers of nuclear technology for the environment. In the light of Fukushima (2011), Chernobyl (1986) and Three Mile Island (1979) nuclear accidents (all of which happened after 1978) and the great concern they generated in the world during the last four decades, Caldicott’s 1978 book Nuclear Madness assumes prophetic significance.

Enlightened Faith: On March 2, 2012 the Metro West Daily News printed an article entitled “Islamic Center in Wayland hosted talk on Founding Fathers.” It discussed the lecture given by Rev. Gary Kowalski, a graduate of Harvard College, the Harvard Divinity School and minister at the First Parish Church in Sudbury. I attended that discussion.

Rev. Kowalski gave an extraordinarily informative and riveting lecture on the connection between our Founding Fathers, their acceptance (or rejection) of faith and its place within the founding constitutional document of the American republic. He understood the historical etiology of the Founders’ experience and its relation to the constitutionally-constructed mandate of the church/state separation clause. He did not say that the Founders had no religion but he DID say that the Founders’ religion was a personal one wrapped in the cocoon of self separate from the political sphere except that the state could not interfere with any man’s freedom to believe (or not) as he chooses. That foundational edict is significantly different from government requiring specific religious mandates to which every person must subscribe.

The Founders, as he said and I know, were men of the Enlightenment who, while not eschewing the belief in a supreme Creator, wrapped that religious belief in their own sphere which was NOT a part of the larger governing body politic. Some Founders had religious doubts, some were not Christian, some were Deists, some loved science and were uncannily prescient about it. Most knew the lethal difficulty religious belief presented to a nation that fused it with the state. They saw and understood the wars it engendered in the European experience the embers of which branded fear and scars upon their consciousness. There would be in our nation’s founding document NO religious litmus test for citizenship or for the acquiescence of power.

Our Founders, I believe, would wax aghast at the religious nearly Puritanical irrational frenzy creating a new Scarlet Letter for those, in present time, who do not subscribe to one particular faith. The Republican Party has now become, to the detriment of this nation which usually rejects extremism, a party constructed mainly of right wing extremists where religious subscription, particularly Christian, is mandatory doctrine for entrance into this political club. Our Founders did not mean this to be so. Many would be dismayed at how anti-science, anti intellectual and supremely ruinous the country has become because of issues of faith. They would, though, not be surprised at the toxicity religious belief can engender and knew the discord it could sow.

Religion, uncompromising and extreme, is destroying the very fabric of church/state separation from which this nation was stitched. Rev. Kowalski's book is a scholarly examination of the nature of what our Founders believed and what they envisioned for a new nation. Our Founders did not want to pound religious doctrinal faith into the republic’s sinew but to extricate religious doctrine from the marrow of its governing bones. Rev. Kowolski’s book Revolutionary Spirits: The Enlightened Faith of America's Founding Fathers is an excellent read.

Why Primary Voting Matters:

Ohio primary results: This is why it mattered if Democrats voted in the primary. Can you imagine? The president in the all important Ohio running with NO opposition in a primary garnered more votes than any Republican. May this continue!! Keep urging your fellow Democrats and anyone else in other states to get out to vote in the primary despite the president being unopposed. ;-)


Barack Obama 547,588 votes

Mitt Romney 456,513 37.9%
Rick Santorum 446,225 37.1%
Newt Gingrich 175,554 14.6%
Ron Paul 111,238 9.2%

Robotic Romney -- Liar-In-Chief: Well I predicted a slight error. I thought Santorum at the end would squeak out an Ohio win BUT I was not wrong by much. Santorum may as well have won as Romney wins Ohio by 1% point. This was a state he was predicted to take significantly. He has HUGE problems now that it was a squeaker win for him. Okay, good let's see him work for it.

My God, America, what Obama has in his small pinkie finger the robo candidate Romney does not have in his entire body. He is a DISGUSTING candidate, -- utterly AWFUL, robotic and the worst of the liars on the Republican slate bar none and THAT is going some. He lies despite having TAPE -- TAPE I say -- showing otherwise for the health care mandate, he was ALL for it and for it federally as well. The tapes are there, the evidence is there. He would be a candidate for LIAR-IN-CHIEF! UGH. A worse Republican field I have never in my decades of life seen. Simply horrible! It COULD -- I say could -- be a brokered convention. I don't think so but it's possible.

As Obama/Biden email sent to me (and probably to you too but it's worth repeating:

We now know for certain that, no matter who the Republican nominee is, we're not only up against the same economic policies that helped create the worst economic crisis in our lifetime.

We're also up against a set of rigid social policies that would take us back almost a century.

What we've seen over the past few days is nothing short of terrifying. We're facing an all-out-attack on women's health care, and now is the time to pitch in and fight it!

The leading Republican candidates for president embraced a bill that would allow any employer to deny any employee coverage for contraception -- or any other medical service they personally object to.

And when one young woman spoke up about that bill's very real health risks, she was crudely and viciously attacked by their allies. Not a single one of the leading Republican candidates stood up for her.

There are 450 other state bills where this one came from.

This issue isn't going anywhere.

So if you want to make sure our next president isn't someone who wants to take us back to the Dark Ages and actually thinks a woman's access to health care is debatable, then it's time to take action and help build the campaign that's fighting back.

Obama 2012, Democratic House, and Democratic hold the Senate!

Rush Away from Rush: Here are companies with a conscience. They have suspended their advertising with Clear Channel's Rush Limbaugh. They are:

Quicken Loans, Pro Flowers, Carbonite, Citrix, Go To Meeting, Legal Zoom, Sleep Number and Sleep Train.

If you need anything that these companies have to offer DO buy from them. There may be others which boycott the gas bag and if so add them to this list. To the contrary, companies which do not care and decide to stick with this immoral piece of trash then pull your patronage from them.

We hit where it hurts. MONEY is Limbaugh's Kryptonite. Hit him and hit him hard. Show no mercy as he would show none to you. It is a miracle he even made his limp apology to Ms. Fluke. To quote a Yiddish word: Ms. Fluke is a MENCH i.e. a good person; Limbaugh is NOT!

To my Jewish Compatriots--Escape from Hasidism: Here is a link to an article from Salon.com below. It is about a formerly Hasidic ultra orthodox woman who escaped the tyranny of the Satmar Hasidic sect. She wrote a book entitled: Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots.

It is an excellent article. Perhaps when I have time I will read the book. As I have said frequently I do not criticize religion. Believe what you want. I DO, though, criticize ALL religion that is fundamentalist and extreme whose rules are made by men, for men and are about men even if those rules mean the subjugation, submission and brutality of women which even some women within the sect tolerate simply to get along.

It is shameful no matter what it is Hasidic Judaism, wingnut Protestant Fundamentalism or Islamic Fundamentalist. It is all bad and in many cases means the mental crushing of women if not in body then certainly in spirit.

Impeach Chief Federal Judge Richard Cebull: Richard Cebull is Chief Justice of the United States District Court for the 9th District of Montana. Last week he sent an email to several of his friends that was so racially disgusting and so inappropriately injudicious for a sitting Chief Justice to even think of sending it boggles the mind. It went viral on the Internet as one might expect. I refuse to print the contents of the email in my opinion piece because it is so offensive to me. If one wants to see what he said simply search for his name and the racially disparaging email he sent to his buddies about our president and the president’s mother. You will, of course, easily find it.

I first heard it on the constant stream of news I have on during the day. I was so infuriated that I called the Montana 9th District Court where he sits. I was unable to get through as I am sure others felt as passionate as I. However, I got through to another justice and left my opinion with his secretary to convey to Chief Justice Cebull.

The email Justice Cebull sent was so loathsome it calls into question his ability to serve on the court with temperate equanimity and fairness. He has written an apology to the president but, in my opinion, his apology is not enough. It rings hollow. Chief Justice Cebull of the United States District Court of the 9th District of Montana should resign or face impeachment, conviction and removal from this federal court. What he did was unbecoming of a Chief Justice of the US Federal District Court, unforgivable and worse dangerous because it feeds into the racist disgusting politics of the Republican Party and its Tea Party appendage. Our president must be saddened to hear the vitriol and racist comments, as he yet again receives another. He has received more racially tinged caustic and threatening remarks than any other sitting president in the nation's history.

This judge contributed to this verbal violence against our president as if he committed an act of violence against the president himself. No forgiveness is possible and no apology is sufficient. The Chief Justice should be impeached and made an example of what will happen IF you do not watch what threatening racist comments you say to a sitting president especially if you hold high office. Attack the president politically fine, for policy issues sure, BUT NOT because of his race. It is dangerous , demeaning, insulting and unconscionable. I hold these Republican men of power accountable for the compromise their words pose to national security. The words are an act of terrorism, unforgivable, and unbecoming a United States District Court chief justice or any justice. Chief Justice Cebull should be punished by the loss of his prestigious position because of them!

Dialing for Dollars: A phone scam perpetrated on our troops by BBG Communications is SICKENING. BOYCOTT BBG Communications. DO NOT USE THEM. Use anything but them. They tell NBC Today show that they are not responsible for the humongous fees for 2 minutes of calling time they charge our troops to call home and tell them that a German company is responsible. Another corrupt corporation passing the buck yet again. Just what we who think corporations are often SICKENING making big bucks off war. This is yet another example. Maybe they will think twice about their unconscionable practices when we ALL boycott them. USE anything else but BBG Communications.

These companies are IMMORAL UNETHICAL snakes who would steal their mother's eyeballs for a buck. BE VIGILANT. Do NOT let them do this to our troops and hit them where they feel it the most in their bank accounts!

Destroyer of Worlds: In response to the headline "Senators Offer License To Strike Iran Nuclear Program" story here: I Quote from Robert Oppenheimer physicist and director of the Manhattan Project which developed the first nuclear bomb for the US and used it on Hiroshima/Nagasaki in 1945. He said:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita... "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Republican Wolves in Sheep's Clothing: The Republican PRIMARIES continue even after Romney's win yesterday. The Republicans will still be at each other's throats. It is indeed a long way between now and November. The president delivered a speech yesterday that was reminiscent of the power that he showed in 2008 and why many of us were smitten by his charismatic aura. I am STILL smitten when I hear him speak like that. I wish in 2010 he sold most especially his health care act to a nation that was staggered by the Bush bail outs of too-big-to-fail banks and to our devastating detriment colored the map red everywhere, took their racist anger out on President Obama, stepped on their own toes and voted in the most obstructive Congress and state governments since the Civil War.

I am writing this while Romney is in the limelight. It cannot be overstated how unappealing he is. We MUST NOT and CANNOT take anything for granted. I do not care what anyone's reservations may be about the president. One must keep in mind that Republicans are banking (pardon the pun) on the fact that the ones who vote for them will not think through what they do. They will not remember it was the Republican politics over decades of do nothing government which wants one to sink or swim and live or die on their own in an anything goes Wall Street of unregulated economic fraud gone wild that nearly killed this nation and the world.

If they had had their way in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt would not have been elected and Republican Hoover politics would have prevailed. That would mean that you, your parents, your children and their children never would have had Social Security, Medicare nor other safety net programs that grew out of it. THINK and tell your friends who have a thought to vote Republican, what kind of life the elderly, the sick, the poor and the disabled without Social Security, Medicare, etc. would have now. Most would be dead well before their time and it could happen to you.

Those programs arose because there was a desperate need of a population that was crushed by a Depression so deep no capitalist, no banker, no megga rich could extricate this country from that black hole. FAST FORWARD to present time. Things are not that different. Barack Obama does not want human beings to live or die on their own because of forces that are beyond any one person’s control. THIS is what we risk by those who think voting Republican is a good idea. Those programs protect EVERYONE because NO ONE is immune from economic whims and the difficulties of life.

NO, Republicans are wolves in sheep's clothing RUDELY calling our president a snob because he wants others to have an educated chance at life. A Republican insulted a beloved assassinated president Kennedy, an ardent Catholic, who, as our Founders did, wanted religion OUT of the state. It is why they inserted the separation clause. Religion woven into the state kills and most especially this country's brand of southern Baptist fundamentalist insanity not only kills but does so especially by killing people of color submerged once again to a white tyranny so vile and so evil their efforts could be met with oppositional violence yet again.

All Republicans who are vying for the presidency want to dismember those programs that keep people alive. They will NOT tell you that but that is what they are about. And it is NO accident that the supporters behind them at the podium are almost entirely white. They want this black man out of the presidency no matter how they decimate American society to do it. It is why the opposition to him was so virulent. It was hijacked by an entire party which was appealing to that mantra over decades.

Romney, if elected, will change permanently the nature of the Supreme Court as well, the nature of Social Security and Medicare and will yet again make it possible for insurance companies to NOT cover you if you have a preexisting condition. This is deadly for all of us. Their foreign policy, too, will be even MORE bellicose based on lies than it had been under Bush. Our president is trying to carefully manage policies he inherited geared to the most explosive neighborhood on the map -- the Middle East.

Our president in his DNA wants to insert institutional change so that what happened to us in 2008 does not have short memory and wants also NO repeat of September 11. We MUST remember who the culprits were that brought us those devastating events -- the oligarchy of too-big-to-fail banks, the real estate market fraud and the rating agencies who threw our nation into the Greatest Recession which almost led to a second Great Depression and a Bush floundering administration that before September 11 IGNORED the warnings on a President Bush's desk telling him of an imminent bin Laden attack. Bush went fishing!

Go out and organize but most of all VOTE. Vote for our president and vote Democratic because we ARE our brother's keeper. Be a part of the Obama miracle again. The cause is the same except because of him our country is coming back and bin Laden is dead! Nothing less than your life and those lives you hold dear are in the balance.

NEVER give up, do NOT be duped, vote for the reelection of the president and spread the word to all you know and tell them what is at stake.

Oil Speculation--Treason by Any Other Name: Headline in McClatchy News: "Federal judge weighs whether to let regulators rein in oil speculators." The story is here.

I have been thinking about this since pumping my gasoline has become pecuniary torture. I'd rather be water boarded. The price at the pump is obviously staggering. The answer to the judge's contemplation as to whether oil speculation should be regulated is a resounding YES. It should be heavily regulated if not OUTLAWED entirely.

Any product which is the life blood of a nation and even the world should NOT be played with like a child's toy for personal riches. Oil (until we dump it as a source for energy) is necessary for life. It is, in truth, more important than any other object of speculation. Oil gives one the ability to conduct one's life, to move, to have health care, and to have goods transported. Everything on planet earth that man depends on depends on for its transmission oil. The heat that heats our homes depends upon oil as does our food, clothing and shelter. The necessities of life depend upon oil.

Speculators -- like the Koch Brothers -- on the oil market drive up prices and play with it to the detriment of everyone else except the corporate speculators of this life blood. They become millionaires and billionaires. Economies rise and fall on the price of oil. People live or die because of the price of oil. The fact that Republicans in particular think that they can defeat this president by making it a torturous experience for Americans to fill up their tank is unconscionable. That this judge, nominated by this president, has to think twice about implementing what is already in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 passed by Congress is unimaginable.

Anything that has influence over whether a culture or a nation lives or dies should NOT be the subject of Wall Street speculation. Treason by any other name is still treason!

A Different Spin of the Record "Bomb Iran": Wikileaks emails indicate Stratfor, a global intelligence company, allegedly discovered Israel already destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities described here puts a different spin on bombing Iran doesn't it? Why would it not surprise me that Israel already acted and did so covertly so much so that it did not cross the radar screen of most? It is amazing if true. I'll give kudos to the Jewish state. I LOVE it when Jews thumb their nose at the world and say Jews will take care of Jewish problems. In the final analysis they know from a 20th century perspective which presented the ultimate existential challenge and near elimination of them that showed they can depend on no one but themselves for protection.

Israelis are smart and utterly capable. Yes, I am a pro Israel lefty because I believe the proof before my eyes of cultures that are progressive. As a Jewish woman raised in a Jewish household I never felt women's power compromised. It simply was that my mother ruled the roost -- GOOD. In Israel they make better use of the entirety of their population and women make up at least 1/2 of it.

The Islamic world had better measure up and fast because no matter how much they scream "death to America and death to Israel" they will not prevail. I know where I as a woman would choose to live. My love for Israel is second only to my love for my own country, the US, because my eyes see what they see and what I see in Israel OR the US for a woman and for other minority groups is significantly more advanced, more progressive, less religiously ideological and, in my mind, that means I am able to make a qualitative assessment and that is that those cultures are a better place in which to live!

Life’s Lottery—The Good Fortune and Opinion of the Oscars: The Day after the night of Oscars many wax critical of the yearly extravaganza. We cannot believe we stayed up for it and need a pot of coffee to overcome our sleep deprivation from it. Much that follows are the superficial criticisms – laughter at the flops, scorn at or admiration of someone’s body/dress, anger at the unnecessary waste of time, and disappointment with some who won it. Later, we walk out our door and forget most of it until it appears on our TV screen once again next year.

In what room, though, in our cerebral hemisphere does criticism of The Oscars sit? Maybe it sits in the hall of envy. Who would not envy the talent and plethora of good fortune that many in the Oscar audience enjoy? Most are multi millionaires who win life’s lottery of a nomination and an even more selected few win the film's highest award itself. It translates into their ode to immortality and phenomenal fortune. Life is, indeed, easier if one is as gifted and wealthy as they. The money made from those gifts makes the vicissitudes of life most of us encounter significantly easier to bear. When Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep’s fashion mogul character in the Devil Wears Prada) is asked by her lowly secretary: “What if I don’t want this? “Oh,” Miranda says, don’t be silly – EVERYONE wants this. Everyone wants to be us.” There is some truth to that.

In our era when so many are homeless, jobless and struggling those selected few in the Oscar audience can make one covetous of their good fortune. Some say it is a bell curve. Those on one side of that curve have little; there is a big middle of average where most of us sit, but the cream of the crop lives on a small part of that curve whose luck resides within the DNA of their talent and at the mercy of fate. Some draw life's short straw or have life or the politics of it hand them an Occupy Wall Street 99% rock and that can make one sad and jealous.

Congratulations to those who won. I thought most deserved it. I wish there were a double best actress award to present an Oscar to Viola Davis too for her poignant role in “The Help,” a film about the plight of domestic workers in the Jim Crow era of the south. The best picture film, The Artist, may be good even great but I wanted “The Help” to win. There are some in black studies who criticize that film. I do not. At least that rancid part of our nation's history commanded attention that time might dictate memory forgets. Like the Holocaust and the Jews of Europe, the American Holocaust against the black man, must never be forgotten. Anything we can do not to forget it is a good thing!

In the end though, I admit it. Yes, Miranda, I would like to be you!