Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 1444 Editor's Choice: 20
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gc_wall
[Read the article: Warrantless surveillance and the new Coretta Scott King disclosures]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Torture damages the perpetrator and the victim. It does not recognize innocence. It denies the existence of human dignity. It is a crime no matter who approves of it. It is the action of the criminally insane.
So far as we know, they don't even ask any questions during these torture sessions. But we do know that they've raped children in front of their parents on the pretext of getting them to 'talk'.
The Clinton administration is known to have prevented no fewer than eight 9/11-level attacks and to have dissolved dozens of terrorist cells - without committing felonies and without demanding the 'legalization' of a federal Gestapo.
After all these years, the Bush administration still stonewalls getting high-value terrorist targets secured, like chemical plants and ports of entry, but is throwing millions in 'homeland security' at red states to protect half a dozen old cows here and there. This should suggest that the Bush administration isn't the least serious about 'terrorism' at all, but is merely exploiting it as a political football and as a means of establishing a police state to keep the peasantry - that's you - in their place.
No other conclusion is possible.
Conason isn't exactly correct when he says "It Can Happen Here" (See the advertisement on the right). It has happened here.
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Scorpio69er
[Read the article: Bush's New Deal on housing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Good job, scorp, good job. Glad you're still with us.
A return to traditional lending standards neccessarily means a return to traditional pricing.
This can only mean that housing prices must fall, which can only mean that tens of billions on the books of housing lenders will have to be written off on home valuations, in addition to more tens of billions that will have to be written off the homes can't be sold, which means tens of billions more that can't be made in payments, which means tens of billions more that will have to be written off on the investment derivatives based on these so-called assets.
In the meantime, the building industry takes a hit, along with all the other home industries associated with it. And it's been the housing industry which has been the major driver of economic growth for the last few years since the dot-com bust, as we recognized on the Krugman forum a couple of Aprils ago. The death spiral is on.
The response to this, naturally, is to provide the necessary welfare for the wealthy. Banks are indirectly borrowing big money from the treasury, but the cash flow still isn't there to repay those debts either, which will have to be 'restructured', meaning forgiven, meaning taxpayers foot the bill, which was already enormous. Bank borrowing ratchets the debt up the chain, ensuring that the hundreds of billions of bad debt gets transferred to Uncle Sam. The scam is still on. It has merely taken a different form. The predators who got us in this mess now have free access to the US treasury.
Paying for it all will require selling off national productive assets, while trying to maintain middle-class prosperity with what's left. Not gonna happen. The death spiral is on.
A couple of years hence we'll be able to say that "No rich people were harmed in the making of this depression." I'm not comforted by that already.
Weird ugly.
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And to think
[Read the article: This Modern World]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That Republicans have conned millions of people into believing that they have "morals".
I mean, how gullible can you get?
Pubs (in unison): "Suckers!"
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Girly-boy pubs.
[Read the article: National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Indeed, as this Mark Hemingway "sissy mary" outburst illustrates, the opposite is almost always true. The gap between the Mythological Right-Wing Male Leader and the reality of their actual leaders is virtually infinite.
They're evidently overcompensating for something, possibly that utter lack of masculinity, and perhaps embarrassingly small genitalia. Maybe both.
Makes you wonder just how many of these guys should be on the child abuser lists. We do know that the Republicans are the Party of Perversion:
Stop Republican Pedophilia!
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Stop Republican Pedophilia!
[Read the article: National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's a national problem. Maybe even a problem for the girly-boys at National Review:
Republican Hypocrisy Revealed
http://www.armchairsubversive.org/
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Kitt
[Read the article: National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]None of those guys in the pictures have the ridiculously big bulge that Bush has.
None of the rest of them needed a diaper either. Draw your own conclusions.
Bush must have had a guacamole salad for lunch, judging from the contents of his flight helmet.
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National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway
[Read the article: National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I could carve a better man out of a banana.
Which would, of course, ruin the banana.
It may help to think of Republicans as a type of soft fruit.
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blunderdog
[Read the article: National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maybe it's not a good idea to be projecting our power all over the globe if we're going to end up losing all these wars all the time.
You misunderstand. The purpose of these wars is not to 'win' them, and certainly not to 'win them for Democracy', and not necessarily even to plunder the victim or to enable additional plundering of adjacent victims.
It's war profiteering. All the insiders from Halliburton and the Carlyle Group know this to be true. It's what they do.
Defense contractors don't have a lot of lobbyists. They just put their own guys in the government, so a lot of lobbyists aren't needed. It's a great cost-saving strategy to have the government pay the salaries of your employees.