Sunday, January 11, 2009

The Collapse of Bend, Continues...

Well, it's coming fast & furious now, Folks.

A seeming swarm of layoffs from all corners. Epic Aircraft & Jeld-Wen should come as no surprise. But Cascade Heatlhcare? That stuff is supposed to be immune, right?

No, seems when you do not have money, that visit to the doctor that used to be required can become "elective" pretty quick. You won't see a lot of folks out China Hat Road way clogging St Chas waiting rooms.

Nope, nothing is immune, not healthcare, not recreation, nothing. We've seen store closings of little guys (Westside Video, Bond Street Market, childs clothing seller Bonkerz), big guys (Office Depot, Linens N Things), and we'll see more in the near future of all kinds (Gottschalks, Cessna, City of Bend, The Bulletin, Les Schwab).

Retail is just the "face" of a slowing economy. There's plenty of "back office" type businesses closing; little public face, but quite a few jobs lost just the same. Even our little local Gubmint is in a constant state of layoffs.

We're at 10% unemployment, businesses are closing so fast it's hard to keep count, we've watched our local medians drop from $396,000 to $226,000. OK, this is the shit storm this blog has been yammering on about for 2 years as INEVITABLE. It's here. This is it. And NO, it is not even close to ending. The damage is not even close to being done.

So what would you do, if your own personal life looked this shaky? Do you fall back on (hopefully) saved up reserves? Do you keep piling up the money in a Federally Insured bank account, if you're lucky enough to still have a job? Do you scale back your eating out? Do you scale back the wine from $40/bottle to $15? Do you actually, God forbid, start cutting some of this stuff out entirely?

Or, do you borrow to the last of your ability and buy a new SUV? Do you expend the last of your reserves on building a fence around your back yard? Do you go for broke, and throw it all down on a new investment house with negative cash flow for as far as the eye can see?

See, to me, the answers to these questions are just ridiculous. It's pretty obvious. You STOP spending. OK, you do that whether you still have an income source or not. There are some people who do this innately. They're called Rich People. Well, they are at least financially insulated. People I know who are doing well right now have been saving their pennies. And I mean pennies. They don't make a King's Ransom. But they do save, quite a bit more than most people. They aren't really "cheap", they just have "lean" tastes.

But not our City Council. Not our local Paper. No.

No, they are advocating that we all spend as much as we can as fast as we can.

Yeah, we'll get great stuff, like a shed to house our broken down bus fleet. Or some blown up rock out in the Juniper Ridge badlands.

Costa is trying to convince us that we should run out and BUY cars with incentives that actually don't exist West of the Rockies. And by gum, with medians in the low $200's, "Some interest rates also at historic lows, could drive buyers back into Bend market".

Uh huh. Read the piece, and you'll find that "Some" interest rates applies to Bill Gates' FICO, not yours. Costa just doesn't get it.

Brucey posted in the comments that we're getting 100+ NOD's a week. That's 100 people (well, maybe not quite, but you get the idea) who will not be able to buy shit on credit for 7-10 years. You can lower the rates to ZERO (or less), and these people WILL NOT get extended one cent.

The Fed can (and has) pushed the interest rate/monetary policy string as far as it can (rates at 0%), and nothing has changed. What's funny is that this country is simply returning to "normal". We're returning to fairly "normal" credit restrictions.

But there's the rub. For about 7-8 years we extended credit to "non-normals", people who could NOT afford it. No income to afford the debt service. So how did it go on for all those years? Easy, simply "co-mingle funds", ala Summit 1031. Make "refi" money your New Income Stream. All that nasty old loan debt, is replaced by an even bigger loan, and what's great, is I Get Paid To Do It! Old $350K loan replaced by $500K refi loan and 2 years from now with a crooked appraisers help, I get another $175K, ad infinitum. Presto, Huge Income, No Work, Forever.

Well, the Minsky Moment arived on this Enormous Teetering Edifice, and the whole thing began toppling the middle of last year. And NO WHERE did it stand taller, grander, more magnificently than Bend Oregon. No where. It literally DEFINES this place. Scam piled on graft piled on deceit piled on fraud piled on schemes.

No where in the USA is the local economy more exposed to the crushing forces overwhelming our national economy than right here. I've said it before, Sit Back And Witness The Horror, Ladies And Gents. You are about to see an entire small city rip itself to pieces.

The Hollern/Moss/Costa Triad is crumbling. Hollern drank the Kool-Aid and bought Ironhorse & Yarrow. Moss financed that, and much, much more. Costa is in a 100% Dead industry, and is desperately trying to hold the buggy-whip edifice that is The Bend Bulletin together.

Again, you are about to witness a town completely implode on itself like nothing that has happened to any major town in the USA in 80 years. It's going to happen right here. This town will be the stuff of Legendary Collapses. This town will be the stuff of future editions of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds".

You're seeing it now. Our unemployment rate is at 9.9%. That's just amazing, but it will get Far Worse. It's going to get worse than you or I thought possible. The Viscious Cycle of the Great Deleveraging will take down HALF this town.

Of course, Costa will tell you with the Last Dying Breath of The Bulletin that Aspe... errrr uh, sorry, Bend is made up almost completely of multi-millionaire transplants from Saudi Arabia, Dubai or somewhere, and so employment doesn't really apply to this place.

Ummmm, OK, a little test. I work for a living. Do you work for a living? Do most of the people you know work for a living? Of course, I do know retirees around here. But not many, certainly not many in proportion to the number of people I know who Have To Work For A Living. This is a WORKING TOWN. Employment DOES matter.

And Bend has NEVER had a decent employment base. This place is built on low-wage shit jobs. And those are being lost in waves. No big deal, it's always been that way. But now we're losing the small, core base of family-wage level jobs. Fuck Gottschalks, we're losing jobs at St Chas & Les Schwab corporate.

Head over to BendBB (anon proxy ONLY!), and check out recent price changes. Used to be that you'd see only a few price cuts in the double digits. Now their practically ALL double digit percentage cuts in price. And it's worse than it appears. Some of those homes have been flipped between Realtors like the crack-whores of RE that they are. Desert Skeeze listings can be counted on to have changed hands several times.

When you look at the DOLLAR CHANGE in prices, you are looking at INCOME REDUCTIONS. These reductions USED to be INCOME GAINS, and these gains fueled Deschutes County growth for the better part of 30 years. This place slowly but surely went from one of the most undervalued to The Most Overvalued RE market in the country. The whole REFI-AS-INCOME game was played NOWHERE more intensely than it was here. And it was played far, FAR longer. In fact, a very precious few can attest to even pretend to remember the Bad Old Days of the laste 70's. This Game has been going on for 3 DECADES in Deschutes County. Not 5 years. Not 10 years. 30 YEARS.

Don't think the Great Unwinding will be over here when the rest of the USA is done, it won't. Here's the point:

There won't be a recovery here. Not in the way you think about it.

Remember last year, early, when the market started cracking here? People who dodged the bullet renting (Timmy, etc) started talking about buying at fantastically lower prices? Like "$250K"?

OK, so we all know NOW that is a suckers game. It's become clear. But that Speculative Mindset is STILL HERE. The idea that I will BUY AT THE BOTTOM in Bend.

And what? What comes after? It's unspoken, but it's there...

Yes. That little SPECULATIVE VOICE that tells you that YOU will make a great deal on a house... and then... the market will recover... AND YOU WILL GET RICH! Yeah!

OK, this very vague and almost unspoken mindset subtley infects EVERYONE HERE. Everyone reading this blog probably has some deep-seated desire to scoop up the bargain of a lifetime at what seems to be a ridiculous bargain prices.

BEWARE. OK. This is NOT going to happen.

Here's a little chart from the Jap Bubble:
You can see that once the collapse began, it was still going strong 17 YEARS later. Bend is going to have a Hockey Stick decline. It'll fall for years & years. And then it'll just flatline. Dead as a doornail, no Big Recovery, no Return to Normal, no Speculation, no Good Times.

The malls will be half empty, as will downtown. Most of the STD's ringing the Eastside will have been sold off piecemeal, and will have weed-infested half-built shitshacks sitting on them. HALF the retail will CLOSE. HALF the restaurants will close, at least. Cascade Business News is GOING TO CLOSE. The Bulletin is GOING TO CLOSE. Either Lowes or Home Depot will close. All these consumerist fueled nightmares are going down.

There isn't going to be a recovery here. It'll be like living in a depressed little version of Detroit, where the Heyday is over. Never to return. You will need your little shit job to pay for the little shit house on your little shit lot. And you will not make any money EVER on it. EVER.

I'm telling you folks, you will NOT recognize Bend in 10 years. Many, if not most won't be able to recognize it, cuz you'll have left.

OK, if you are thinking of buying RE, I ask you to think again. We're NOT EVEN CLOSE to fair value. Values are PLUMMETING. Rent-to-own ratios are STILL ridiculous. This town is going to go bankrupt. Industry & retail are being GUTTED as we speak. We're in a precarious period where it looks like a place you'll "want to be" for the long haul. But it's not going to be for long. Would you want to live in inner city Detroit at any price?

Because that's what Bend is becoming. And medians BOUGHT at $225K will seem like a HORRIBLE, TERRIBLE ERROR in judgement 7-10 years from now. Medians aren't going to $125K for no reason. They are going there, and they will STAY THERE, for abundant reasons.

No local incomes to support anything more. Burns-style entertainment. No restaurants. No fun places. Completely uncertain job prospects. No opportunity. Just straight depression. You WILL NOT want to be here.

What to do:

  • Keep renting. Do NOT buy.
  • Pile up the cash. Don't BUY ANYTHING.
  • Cling to a paycheck as long as you can. If it's already gone, YOU LEAVE town.
  • List your EXCESS RE Now. And you mark it down BELOW MARKET. It'll be 20% lower in 12 months.
  • Start looking for INCOME PROSPECTS outside of Bend. Keep your eyes open.
  • Sell your cars. Sell your other toys. Sell your crap. Keep the money.

Speculative Bend is done. Over. We're in Survival Bend now. No one makes DEALS anymore. No sexiness, no flash. What 's befallen Summit 1031 will BEFALL THIS TOWN. Utter collapse, with NO HOPE OF RECOVERY EVER.

It's time to HUNKER DOWN.
DO NOT BUY ANYTHING
CONSERVE YOUR CASH.
REMEMBER THE FOUR B'S

IT IS OVER
"I just come from Bend Orygun, where they done titty fucked me atop Volo till I couldn't take it no more! I'm certainly glad I stayed as long as I did, with no visible ill-effects!"

664 comments:

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Bewert said...

That's a big number--from Barney Frank's new H.R. 384 - TARP Reform and Accountability Act of 2009:

"SEC. 703. BORROWING AUTHORITY.

Section 14(a) of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act (12 U.S.C. 1814(a)) is amended--

(1) by striking `$30,000,000,000' and inserting `$100,000,000,000'; and

(2) by inserting prior to the last sentence, the following new sentence: `The Corporation may request in writing to borrow, and the Secretary may authorize and approve the borrowing of, additional amounts above $100,000,000,000 to the extent that the Board of Directors and the Secretary determine such borrowing to be necessary.'.

Bewert said...

Re: Anything killer deals for the home? Kitchen? Going to be cooking a lot more the next few years, need some new shit, ... Are they going to give SHIT away, like they did at Linens and Things??

###

We're thinking so. We plan to go over later this afternoon and do some bargaining. IIRC the ad said 60% off.

Anonymous said...

So are they liquidating? Or just closing and transferring the inventory back to the warehouse?

Anonymous said...

This will effect 'Bend Sci', as almost all pharm research is getting shut down to cut costs because of poor ROI.

...

The Wall Street Journal


Jan. 13, 2009

Pfizer is laying off up to 800 researchers in a tacit admission that its laboratories have failed to live up to the tens of billions of dollars it has poured into them in recent years. While the 800 job cuts will only dent Pfizer's overall work force of 83,400, they strike at the company's lifeblood: The labs charged with discovering lucrative new drugs.

tim said...

>>So are they liquidating? Or just closing and transferring the inventory back to the warehouse?

Given the way their corporate bonds are trading, I doubt there will be a warehouse to ship it back to. Or money to ship it.

Anonymous said...

CHEAT, PRAY, LOVE: USA Post 2008
by James Surowiecki

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2009/01/12/090112ta_talk_surowiecki


Along with slashed payrolls, rising foreclosures, and plummeting stock prices, 2008 brought another unwelcome development: a surge in bank robberies, which were up more than fifty per cent in New York. This wasn’t shocking: we typically expect property crimes to rise in hard economic times. There is, though, one crime against property which bucks this trend: defrauding investors. On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough. While bank robbers are getting busier, the Bernard Madoffs are starting to get caught.

Madoff is just the latest in a long line of fraudsters who took advantage of investor euphoria. Time and again, as asset markets have become frothier, fraud has flourished. During England’s South Sea Bubble, in 1720, a host of bogus joint-stock companies arose, including one that described its enterprise as “nitvender,” or the selling of nothing. The boom of the nineteen-twenties featured men like Arthur Montgomery, who ran a Ponzi scheme promising investors four-hundred-per-cent returns in sixty days, and the Match King, Ivar Kreuger, who sustained match monopolies all over the world with forged bonds and doctored books. More recently, the stock-market bubble of the late nineties gave rise to enormous frauds at companies like Enron and WorldCom.

Fraud is a boom-time crime because it feeds on the faith of investors, and during bubbles that faith is overflowing. So while robbing a bank seems to be a demand-driven crime, robbing bank shareholders is all about supply. In the classic work on investor hysteria, “Manias, Panics, and Crashes,” the economist Charles Kindleberger wrote that during bubbles “the supply of corruption increases . . . much like the supply of credit.” This is more than a simple analogy: corruption and credit are stoked by the same forces. Cheap money engenders a surfeit of trust, and vice versa. (The word “credit” comes from the Latin for “believe.”) The same overconfidence that leads investors and lenders to underestimate the risks of legitimate investments also leads them to underestimate the likelihood of fraud. In Madoff’s case, for instance, his propensity for delivering inexplicably consistent returns month after month should have been a warning sign to his investors. But in the past few years besotted investors were willing to believe lots of foolish things—like the idea that housing prices would just keep going up.

An oversupply of credulity doesn’t last, of course; when the crash comes, and people get more cynical and cautious, the frauds are exposed. As Warren Buffett put it, “You only learn who’s been swimming naked when the tide goes out.” Did the share prices of Enron and WorldCom start plunging after their fraudulent actions came to light? Actually, it was the other way around: the financial mischief was exposed only after their stock prices tanked. In Madoff’s case, the steep across-the-board decline in asset prices curbed investors’ appetite for risk, so that many started to pull their money out. That effect may very well have forced Madoff to dispense more money than he could keep bringing in, especially since recruiting new investors, which you have to do to keep a Ponzi scheme going, would have become harder after the crash.

When the Madoff scandal erupted, some people argued that investor confidence would be further shaken—that the scandal would make America’s markets look more like Russia’s, notoriously rife with scams and suspicion. That hasn’t happened. After the Madoff story broke, the market jumped almost five per cent, and it’s now well above where it was when Madoff was arrested. One reason is that a stock market that lost seven trillion dollars in value in 2008 knows how to take a fifty-billion-dollar loss in stride. And Madoff was running money largely for an élite clientele, which gained access to his services primarily through inside connections, limiting the market-wide impact of his malfeasance.
But the main reason that Madoff didn’t destroy investor confidence is that it was already gone, thanks to a year when just about every institution that the market depends on—rating agencies, accounting firms, regulators, Wall Street C.E.O.s.—had messed up. The whole web of intermediaries and knowledge brokers that modern asset markets have come to rely on has become frayed. That helps explain the current credit crunch—bank lending has dropped fifty-five per cent this year—and the dismal state of the stock market. Discovering what the crooks have been up to is disillusioning, but not as disillusioning as coming to terms with what the so-called honest people did.

In David Mamet’s movie “House of Games,” the grifter played by Joe Mantegna explains to a former mark, “It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.” So the bankers gave us their confidence, in the form of mortgages and other forms of credit, and we gave them ours. This culture of credulity did plenty of damage to the economy, but now it has given way to something even more corrosive; namely, endemic mistrust. Because if there’s one thing worse than too much confidence it’s not enough. Fraud impoverishes a few; fear impoverishes the many. As long as mistrust prevails, people will keeping pulling money out of the system—sometimes even at gunpoint.

Quimby said...

I thought I asked a damn good question about the future of the American laborer...and it's been 5 mins and no-one has answered! Hurumph...

Quimby said...

If the fat lazy American Gen-Xer is starving, will they dig ditches or do work seen as beneath them?

Me thinks YES.

Bewert said...

Re: liquidating or closing

###

They are trying to survive but have a big note due in May that has already been extended a year. Bend store, Wenatchee store are closing.

Couple of articles from the last few days:

http://www.wwd.com/business-news/gottschalks-looks-to-avoid-bankruptcy-1915079

http://www.modbee.com/local/story/559112.html


And off the Yahoo message board yesterday:

"My mother-in-law works at GOTT and they have been instructed not to do inventory and they are not replacing sold stock. Still sound like a company that will be bought out? NOT."

And earlier this morning, in answer:

"Inventory for end of fiscal year has been postponed until further notice for Gottschalks stores is true."

My guess is you aren't doing year-end inventory you are in liquidation mode. They are putting all their eggs into the investors coming on board, but seeing as how their December sales were down almost 10% this year from last, they don't seem to have a real good hand to negotiate with.

Bewert said...

Re: If the fat lazy American Gen-Xer is starving, will they dig ditches or do work seen as beneath them?

Me thinks YES.

###

Q, it's this springs weight loss plan.

MrBruce said...

Quim,

Having ran businesses for 40+ years, and hired all kinds of people, I can sadly tell you. There is a fucking REASON that immigrants still come to the USA, but as always I'll make it into a long story.

First generation all work hard, whether mex,spic,span,jew,irish,china,... they come here for a better life.

Thus as an employer, you want first gen, its NOT about the money $$$ its about the fact they work, and do as told.

Then you have second gen of any fucking race, ... they look around, lets take MEX, he goes to school raised in the USA, and see's his dad work his fucking ASS OFF. ...

Then the Mex kid is 12, and the white kids have better toyz, and better house, and mex kids dad works until he drop's dead.

Now the 2nd gen mex kid is 18 does he go to college? NOPE, cuz his family works, ... maybe white kid goes to college, cuz white kids don't work.

So the mex kids deals drugs, goes on welfare, or lives off his wife who runs a babysit biz at home,...

Then there are black kids, they dream of NFL or NBA then one day about 14 yr old they look around and note that most niggers over 18 are in prison, that their chance of going NBA or NFL are about the same as them becoming a fucking brain surgeon so they SNAP. They see the ULITIMATE fucking truth. They can flip burgs @ micky-d, or they can hustle drugs, and get unlimited pussy, and a nice car. Smart entrepreneurial black kids and 2nd gen mex kids choose the latter.

Now back to fucking whitey, ... just look at our 4th gen logging community's, OAKRIDGE-ORYGUN come to MIND or BEND.

Once the high paying logging jobs were lost post 1950's the lifestyle became 2nd gen welfare, 3rd gen welfare, today almost all ORYGUN logging community's have 14yr old girls pushing strollers, you have to guess who the mother is, ... Welfare is the life-support.


In order to go back to a depression style CCC where every able bodied man did physical work, there would have to be a fucking total collapse of ALL welfare, and that's not going to happen, you can't elminate welfare in the URBAN jungles of the USA, and not expect a civil war. Not a fucking option.

So what will happen??

More welfare, and a few jobs, but remember these days 'infrastructure' is with heavy-equipment and training the day of handing a retard a pick&shovel, is over, ...

Your question was general, and I have answered. The future of the USA will be like the past, if you want work done you hire a 1st gen immigrant.

The latter generations all find a way to hustle and run city-halls like Bend, this is why Redmond for instance is a family business, all the cops, firemen, and ... all are of the same family.

Americans 2nd gen and later have a way of finding a 'grift' or a 'racket'. It's always been this way, and always will be this way.

Anonymous said...

APU,

We used to 'calc' un-employed by # of people out of work, who should have been working,... every able bodied man, but 'women' weren't counted, they being home-workers.

Today we calc by the number of people collecting un-employment insurance, or looking for a job, most notable now, ...

1.) Those who give up looking are not counted, only those who show up week after week at the un-employment office and keep their paperwork 'current' are considered 'un-employed'.

2.) Those who work under the table are not counted ( Hello Bend ), given they are not part of the 'system'

3.) Those who are old/young are not counted, for instance a college student is not counted. An oldster drawing SS post 62 yrs of age would be assumed to be not counted.

It's sort of a joke now, hell the DEFN of a depression is 10%, even using the 'Orwellian' methods today, we're already in a depression in the tri-county area here.

#1 above is the national joke, but #2 is Bend as most people in construction worked for cash.

Given that it used to be that 5 yr olds worked, and you worked until you dropped dead at 70 yrs. Something like that will return.

Say it can't happen here? Its happened in CHINA, the IRON-RICE-BOWL ( life welfare ) is now over, that's why everyone wants a male-child, ... that's your welfare for old-age.

MrBruce said...

In China the government was able around 1990 to eliminate free health-care, welfare, ... almost all communal-ism.

Today's China is 100X more lassi-fare capitalism than the USA.

The DIFF is confuscian, the masses are well managed, disarmed, ...

The Government in CHINA can do anything, without much regard to revolution.

On the other hand, the US citizenry is armed to the teeth and angry as hell, so the GOVERNMENT just keeps sending our welfare checks, ... CORPORATE & INDIVIDUAL.

Where, When will it all end?? All western civilization ends this way, and always, read the FUCKING BOOK "Decline of the West", Oswald Sprengler, 1915, Nothing new, old Sprengler detailed all the way back to Rome how Western Mercantile civilizations always make their currency worthless.

What happens? What is always the outcome??

Once the paper-money is worthless, the farmers quit sending food to the city's, the city's implode, and the masses return to the farms to grow or harvest, ... to eat.

The US is a great experiment in RAW power, we have a GUN (NUKE) to the worlds head, and force them to accept our dollar, but ROME too controlled the 'known' world, and the racket still didn't work, because food is always local, and once the surrounds burbs don't accept the city money, then food becomes scarce, and the city's fold.

Certainly in the US with angry racism held together by the then veneer of welfare since the 1960's now going on 3rd generation, ... the people don't know anything, ... in the past most people were never more than a generation from the farm, and had a farm to go back to.

I think that this is why MAO of CHINA was brilliant, he rounded up all the opposition in CHINESE citys and forced them to go live on the farm, and grow food for the chose who remained in the citys, ... IF OREO could pull something like this off, ...

But CHINA is confuscian, while the USA is NAZI, MAO really wanted the best, but the USA would rather put a nigger in prison, than put him on a farm. So here we are today, and the outcome is more blacks in prison than human history, ... now we got a black prez to heal all the wounds, but not a fucking thing will change, ...

Like black leaders have said from day-one "OBAMA ain't black".

He was raised by a white granny in Hawaii, and he had a white mother, he never saw his father, and all he knew about 'black' is what white granny told him, ...

It all goes back to the paper money, so long as the government can keep the FOOD flowing to the city's then the USA as we know will continue, but when the money is worthless, ... Then all shit will hit the fan.

MrBruce said...

Quimby said...

I thought I asked a damn good question about the future of the American laborer...and it's been 5 mins and no-one has answered! Hurumph...

*

What do you think? More of the same?

Here's the deal, over the last 30+ years we went 'service', now nobody wants the services, so all those jobs are gone, or in Mumbai, Calcutta, or some other big Indian city. Why? Cuz their english is better than whitey's.

Labor is finished, shit we could do a reverse and send them to CHINA where people still build sky-scrapers with bamboo and buckets. But they got their own 1Billion people to keep busy.

'Labor' in the USA simple ain't needed. So people will move-on, .. most likely their will have to be major 'work-farms' to keep feed the urban folks, and the smart ones will go to the farms.

We have gone industrial, post-industrial, technology, post-technology, service, ... post-service, ... automation, ..

On the far end of the spectrum you have the KUNSTLER theory's of no oil, and we all go back to a horse AMISH lifestyle, ... again everything would be local.

The US dollar is going to become worthless this we fucking KNOW.

When it does US city's will become hell holes, and the survivors will be roaming like post civil-war carpet baggers.

Never been a better time to travel to New Zealand or Australia.

But hell OBAMA could fix it all by creating a draft and sending 10M to IRAN to die, and capture all the oil, and then we sell that oil to the world, and for a few more generations USA is #1, that could still happen.


Non-usable, expendable 'labor' this is an old problem.

US citizens are the enemy. When you occupy a land you have a choice to kill all the people ( HITLER HOLOCAUST ), or make them slaves, but many people are not good slaves, for instance nobody ever found use for the Australian aborigne, they just didn't work. In Africa, people had been en-slaving one another forever, so it was just another master in another land, it worked.

Throughout history when you have millions of un-needed people the solution has always been to send them off to war, thus we created the Crusades, and white hoards invaded Arab lands.

There is NOTHING new under the sun, but whitey will not work, ... but he can be sent to war to die.

Anonymous said...

>>Bend store, Wenatchee store are closing.

Link? Verification?

Bewert said...

Olmert says called Bush to force change in U.N. vote

REUTERS
Reuters North American News Service

Jan 13, 2009 03:29 EST

JERUSALEM, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said a telephone call he made to U.S. President George W. Bush last week forced Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to abstain in a U.N. vote on the Gaza war, leaving her "shamed".

Pouring on political bravado in a speech late on Monday, Olmert said he demanded to talk to Bush with only 10 minutes to spare before a U.N. Security Council vote on Thursday on a resolution opposed by Israel calling for an immediate ceasefire.

"When we saw that the secretary of state, for reasons we did not really understand, wanted to vote in favour of the U.N. resolution ... I looked for President Bush and they told me he was in Philadelphia making a speech," Olmert said.

"I said, 'I don't care. I have to talk to him now,'" Olmert said, describing Bush, who leaves office on Jan. 20, as "an unparalleled friend" of Israel.

"They got him off the podium, brought him to another room and I spoke to him. I told him, 'You can't vote in favour of this resolution.' He said, 'Listen, I don't know about it, I didn't see it, I'm not familiar with the phrasing.'"

Olmert said he then told Bush: "'I'm familiar with it. You can't vote in favour.'

"He gave an order to the secretary of state and she did not vote in favour of it -- a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organised and manoeuvred for. She was left pretty shamed and abstained on a resolution she arranged," Olmert said.


Fourteen of the Security Council's 15 members supported the resolution, which has failed to halt Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip and Hamas's cross-border rocket fire.

Olmert, under police investigation over alleged corruption, resigned as prime minister in September but is serving in a caretaker capacity until a new government is formed after Israel's Feb. 10 parliamentary election. (Writing by Jeffrey Heller, Editing by Alistair Lyon)

Source: Reuters North American News Service

###

Enough...

Anonymous said...

US citizens are the enemy.

When you occupy a land you have a choice to kill all the people ( HITLER HOLOCAUST ), or make them slaves, but many people are not good slaves, for instance nobody ever found use for the Australian aborigne, they just didn't work. In Africa, people had been en-slaving one another forever, so it was just another master in another land, it worked.

*

So here we are what do you do with 300M +2nd generation US population. Did anybody turn the Native-Injun's into productive workers?? Hell no, just like Aborigines, they would have committed suicide rather than being strapped to a machine and do the same fucking thing 18hr/day.

It's takes generations of breeding to create good factor workers, ... The US immigration system is what makes the US the most productive place in the world, we open the doors to people who want to work.

But sadly, the ensuing generations, learn to be ameriKKKan's rather quickly.

Quim asks "Will whitey work",

I ask, "What will the future USA even look like??"

Today the 'system', the Judges, the boss-hoggs the legal system is very afraid. I think you'll see a major effort to collect guns in the USA.

The 'teeth' of the first amendment is the second amendment. The HBM's of this nation tremble in fear of the armed citzenry.

The definition of war ( von Clauswitz ) is to dis-arm a people, this will and must be OREO's first mission, to ensure that the NEW USA can transpire, if the citizenry is left armed, there will be a revolution.

The US citizen will wake-up to the fact they have been robbed, enslaved, and fucked by their elite during the BIG post 1980's to current party by Ronny Regular & Friends.

The DEM's&PUG's will coalesce around the central need to dis-arm the USA public, and then you'll see socialization of food, land, power, transportation.

The path of the future USA largely hinges upon those who are willing to open their fucking mouth.

Bewert said...

Re: Gottschalks links

###

Actually the Wenatchee store closed five years ago--the link showed up with the more current ones.

Their Saturday or Sunday ad in the BULL stated that today was their last day. It's in the recycling bin but I'll go try to find it.

tim said...

>>I think you'll see a major effort to collect guns in the USA.

That'd be something. The moment you start to ask for the guns is the moment people stop handing them over.

Anonymous said...

Dunc had some interesting problems in his store yesterday, perhaps the boyz can offer advice.

It's a tough call, on the one hand if dunc wants traffic he's got to be a flea market.

On other hand, if your going to cater to Bend's beautiful tourists and run a comic&card salon, your going to have to tolerate ass-holes destroying you merchandise.

Things are changing rapidly for dunc, sounds like he needs support, perhaps some of you KUNTS that spend 24/7 on the keyboard can go act as martial house detective time to time to help him out, gratis of course.

Interesting problem, but as Bend transforms from a downtown of beauty, to a downtown of misery yesterday will become routine.

Can't just get rid of all the flea market shit, otherwise your just a high-end salon, and that is bend dead, ... On the other hand its hard for one person to run a high-end flea market.

In this economy one cannot afford employees.

Give dunc some help folks.

Pussy you got nothing better to do.

MrBruce said...

That'd be something. The moment you start to ask for the guns is the moment people stop handing them over.

*

It doesn't work that way, its why we had IRAQ, we now have 100k guys trained to go to an URBAN environment and door to door collect guns. They have been very effective in collection. It doesn't take long to find the hiding spots used.

Most guns in the USA are registered, so you even know which doors to knock on.

###

I simply don't see any other way for the crooks to survive. The OREO government is the crooks, just like Shrubbery.

Perhaps in 2012 we'll be able to elect a non-crook government, but for now its the same old Wall St boyz, trying to survive, and in doing so will make the dollar worthless which will destroy the country.

On another NOTE APU, there is an interesting theory running around that TEAM-KENNEDY actually OWNS OREO, given the fact that if CLINTON own, she was going AX Kennedy clan.

Now we have BOSTON/CHICAGO crime intertwined, and NY power on the way out, perhaps some of the BEST rackets on Wall ST can be dis-assembled and moved to Chicago.

Interesting times, and I don't see anybody asking the right questions.

What we see this week is OREO trying to be MORE BUSH THAN BUSH.

Who would have guessed, you would think that Bernanke and NOT Geithner would still be our future.

Any ways Caroline Kennedy gets the SENATE, cuz the KENNEDY clan has put the wooden-stake in the heart of CLINTON-TEAM.

Kennedy's are good IRISH, trouble is last time they tried to do good in the USA the system took out JFK & Bobby,

I would like to see more thought on this idea of KENNEDY-CLAN owning the OREO, and bringing him to power.

MrBruce said...

I have no idea why I keep posting irrelevant shit about Israel on this site. It's like my fingers just do it, and I have no control over them.

Anonymous said...

Funny that we have an 8 million dollar store closing that opened just a few months ago, and we have no news outlets confirming what the company apparently advertised this past weekend in the paper.

Anonymous said...

That'd be something. The moment you start to ask for the guns is the moment people stop handing them over.

*

As life-member of the NRA, the first month that we invaded IRAQ, a soldier wrote an editorial asking "Why are we kicking down doors and Iraq and taking peoples guns"

The NRA replied, "because those guns will be used in the future to shoot at you."

The soldiers question was based on the assumption that we had gone to IRAQ to turn it into a USA state, and thus like USA the people in IRAQ should have the right to bear arms. Not so said the NRA, they're NOT US citizens.

Again, today we have over 100k young men & women trained to confiscate gun in urban environments. These new specializations will be used on our own home turf.

FACT.

Perhaps at first only to disarm blacks and mexicans, ... but whitey will get his day.

DEFN of War "Von Clauswitz" 'To Disarm a people, is the goal of war'.

tim said...

>>I have no idea why I keep posting irrelevant shit about Israel on this site. It's like my fingers just do it, and I have no control over them.

Well stop it. You seem to want to distract us from Bend with shit we can get a million other places.

Bewert said...

Recyclings come and gone. IIRC it was a clearance ad with an ending date of Tuesday. I thought it said closing, but maybe not. They have money to operate through January, so it doesn't make sense to just close but rather to run with about three employees and clear things out.

Another story from earlier today (includes Circuit City, too):

http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/2122808/

The Yahoo message board has quite a few posts:

http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_(A_to_Z)/Stocks_G/forumview?bn=7999

Bewert said...

Actually I'm busy as hell right now. I turned down a sub job this morning to get some shipping done and try to finish up another project. And received an email from an old client asking for a price on two more interactives. It's kind of surprising how much things have picked up this winter.

Plus, just got a call from the city to come and interview for the Budget Committee on Friday. So I should spend some time going over the numbers before then.

Sounds like Dunc had a daytime drunk from Cali in trying to impress his kid. As things get tougher we're going to see more of this.

That big bust of the three armed robbers yesterday was three blocks away. That's waaay to close to home. Things are definitely changing for the worse.

Re: Israel stuff--most of it doesn't affect us directly. If we go to war with Iran because Israel wants us to, then it will affect all of us, especially economically. With Bush out, I think Obama will be less one-sided, but only time will tell. That story from Olmert was rather stunning in its blatant bragging about influencing our foreign policy over the objections of the rest of the world.

Anonymous said...

IHTBYB,
Email me I have some great stuff for a new post for you.
margebend@gmail.com

Anonymous said...

That story from Olmert was rather stunning in its blatant bragging about influencing our foreign policy over the objections of the rest of the world.

###

My take is a slap in the face to Shrub, the weakest prez in US history, he's finished and Olmert can now tell the truth that Shrub kissed his fucking feet.

The OREO given that he has put a WHO-IS-WHO MOSSAD&AIPAC cabinet around him, Olmert will not say a fucking thing.

Every fucking thing the OREO does will now be called by Olmert & Netanyahu.

This was Olmerts good-bye gift to lame-ass/duck egg sucker Shrub. Also a final slap to Condi, for being the zionist-christian slut that she is,

MrBruce said...

BP good stuff today all CSM about Israeli's dumping tons of 'DIMP' a new phosphorous high tech system from the USA that radiates all human tissue in a surrounding area.

Sort of like a neighborhood microwave oven ( inside out ), everybody in the hood gets burned ( outside in), and it ties a whole village up caring for the infirm.

The USA technology being testing by the USA in Palestine is intended to send a signal to IRAN, about what they can expect in the coming months.

MrBruce said...

Email me I have some great stuff for a new post for you.
margebend@gmail.com

###

Marge,

I need material for my JR site. Please send me what you got.

Bruce

brucepuss@gmail.com
or
bewert@gmail.com

I prefer brucepuss@gmail.com

MrBruce said...

APU or Quim,

So what do you guys think about the future of US labor??

Do you honestly think that Obama will create a CCC and everyone will be building hiking trails?

People tend to do the same stuff over&over, and Obama's cabinet is largely the younger intellectual backbone of Bushes cabinet.

I see money going to much of the same people and same shit, e.g. the bankers, and lawyers who run this country.

For a consumer economy, that consumes foreign crap, its better to pay them to stay home and watch TV, and shop by internet, its a win-win for all.

Anonymous said...

That big bust of the three armed robbers yesterday was three blocks away. That's waaay to close to home. Things are definitely changing for the worse.

*

Like the story above about USA confidence, people are pulling their money out of the system.

For those that have guns, and no money, the way you do that is robbery.

Ergo, bank robbery is expected to explode as people 'take money out of the system'.

For that matter just good old fashion robbery on one another, take you neighbors money before he spends it, everybody is taking money out of the system, even the crooks.

tim said...

I think Obama will try to maintain Bush's status quo, but it will be a losing battle.

In the future, credit cards don't work anymore. It's hard to get your head around that, but that's where you start when you want to figure out tomorrow's economy.

I don't know about labor. Where are people going to work? Don't know. Productivity has killed our labor force. Robots and automation do all the work.

Anonymous said...

Jews are not Zionist and all Zionists are not Jews. Pious Jewish people are rightfully reviled by the murderous extremist “cult” that exploits Judaism for public relations and window dressing.

What really happened on September 11th, 2001 is crucial because it is the foundation for fascist tyranny.

The “Bush administration’s” version of what happened on 9/11 is clearly a ridiculous lie, Bush consistently obstructs any meaningful investigations of it, the Solomon Brothers Building did not implode by itself, Newtonian Physics did not take a leave of absence that day, three New York City skyscrapers imploded in a perfect controlled demolition fashion, only two of which were hit by airplanes and evidence from the crime scene was deliberately destroyed.

Who had the motive, means and opportunity to commit the crime of the century and who has benefited?

There is only one “government” on this planet with access (through spying) to the protocols, logistics and moles necessary to infiltrate the most restricted airspace/air defense digital network systems on the planet FOUR TIMES IN ONE DAY with complete impunity and corrupted enough to ally itself with corrupted “neoconservative” liars.

ISRAELI MOSSAD.

They’re modus operandi demonstrates that they will do anything to protect Cheney/Bush from accountability of their war crimes in the Iraq Holocaust. The ruthless, arrogant, sloppy criminality and lies are perfectly consistent with the ruthless, sloppy attacks of 9/11.

ISRAEL BLACKMAILS AMERICA:
“PURE EVIL” Does A Deal With “THE DEVIL.
” PURE EVIL is DICK CHENEY.
THE DEVIL is THE ISRAELI MASSAD.
THE DEAL was 9/11.

NUCLEAR WAR IS IMMINENT.

Cheney perceived the perfect partner in the perfect crime of the century to be Israel’s Mossad. Cunning, ruthless, skilled, connected, covert - the “False Flag” experts (Lavon Affair, USS Liberty, etc.
As is now clear and agreed upon by all, the Bush Sr. / Cheney Administration (in which Shrub is merely a spokesperson and useful idiot) adopted the PNAC plan as its own. Cheney found within it the opportunity to capture vast resource-rich territory in a World War blamed on others, and thereby enrich himself and his friends.

9/11 proved not to be the perfect crime, and the co-conspirators actually got caught and have been covering up their crime and silencing their “enemies” ever since. Israel and Cheney were both caught red-handed on 9/11 itself.

Cheney was caught red handed when Senator Norm Mineta walked in on him in the midst of barking out the “stand down” orders, which DELIBERATELY allowed the Pentagon to be attacked. Israel’s Mossad was caught red handed when their five agents were arrested after being observed celebrating and filming the impact and subsequent collapse of the Twin Towers. They weren’t just arrested, they had with them video taped evidence of themselves celebrating on camera as the towers fell (as would a demolitions team after a successful implosion). One of them had the temerity to hold a cigarette lighter in front of the camera smiling like a kid at a rock concert.

These historic events are factual. Go look. They don’t even hide it.

The lengths to which the US, Israeli governments and Zionist owned disinformation media like “Fox News” and “CNN” have gone to bury these and other historic events are evidence of their complicity in 9/11.

Cheney was wrong to have selected Israel as any kind of partner in crime. Israel was not going to be content to share the spoils of war, Israel wants ALL the spoils of war, and now has at its disposal ALL of the tools and leverage to literally destroy the United States, and is in the midst of doing so right this very moment.

Could it be mere “coincidence” that the so called “terrorists” just happen to be located in sovereign nations that Israel has targeted for theft and conquest? Anyone who believes such rubbish is unaware of Israel’s illegal spying against Americans plus Israel’s illegal and brutal acquisition of territories.

Why the silence from the Bush Administration with respect to Israel’s destruction and acquisition of territory?

BLACKMAIL - plain and simple.

Through Abramoff, Franklin, Lieberman, Chertoff and their thousands of moles within the US Government, in concert with their vast network of installed monitoring software, data retrieval and listening devices, Israel has compromised virtually every Administration official AS WELL AS nearly every US Senator and Congressman. Israel has evidence of all of them accepting bribes, because Israel was behind the bribes and recorded evidence of all of it. Israel has evidence of sexual escapades out of wedlock, because Israel arranged for it, and documented it.

Israel has direct evidence of the Administrations role in 9/11, because Israel partnered in it. Israel controls the Mainstream US Media, and the Administration KNOWS IT. As we speak, Israel is threatening the administration with the total exposure of their role in 9/11 if they even begin to interfere with Israel’s plan to take out not just Lebanon, but also Syria AND Iran, using NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

The bombs that we are rushing to Israel at this very moment…the bunkerbusters to be delivered by the F-15s - are they nuclear?

If the US had any ACTUAL LEVERAGE or ability to slow down Israel’s mad territory grab, death machine and Mid East hegemony, the least they would be doing is holding back delivery of bombs.

As with EVERY member of the Bush Administration, Condaleeza Rice has no power whatsoever over Israel. They’re blackmailing her too.

Israel has already accomplished its goal. It has completely compromised the integrity and security of the United States Of America. It is in total control of the US Treasury, Defense Department, Congress - every institution and branch of government. The culture of corruption in Washington met its match with Israel.

The co-conspirators thought they had an equal partner in crime, but they have now come to realize that this was a very long term and elaborate sting - for the ultimate prize - control of the United States Of America and its Nuclear Arsenal.

This is where we stand today. Literally everyone in Washington knows it. All of the retired Generals and Bush Senior advisors are on highest alert. The Bush Administration is in the midst of the biggest disaster ever conceived, and unless they do EVERYTHING that Israel demands, the evidence of their crimes will be plastered across every major newspaper in the United States. The Administration knows for a fact that Israel is going to nuke Iran and Syria.

The only choice the Administration has to stop Israel from nuking these two countries is to Nuke Israel itself. Even this though will not prevent the Truth of 9/11 from being revealed.

CHECKMATE.

Nuclear war is coming either way.

“The Crazies” as Colin Powell referred to the Zionists, have won - and he personally enabled it. President Bush said to all of us:
(”I’m driven with a mission from God. ‘God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan’.” “And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq…’ And I did”).

If that disgusting excuse for a human being “talks” to God then I have a bridge for sale on the Moon.

LESS THAN ONE MONTH AFTER 9/11:
“Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” -
(Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.)

They are truly the “false flag” experts, SS Liberty, Lavon Affair, 9/11, etc., who commit acts of “terror”, blame it on those whom they want to “conquer” and steal from while deceiving America into fighting a bogus “war on terror” for them.

After they have conquered the entire Mid East Continent and America’s military is burned out, they will conquer what is left of America.

It must always be remembered that NO ISREALIS DIED IN THE IRAQ “WAR/OCCUPATION” WHILE MILLIONS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE WERE DESTROYED AND AMERICA IS NOW BANKRUPT, BOTH MORALLY AND FINANCIALLY.

There are more “dual” Israeli-American citizens in the “Bush administration” than any other administration in US history and AIPAC is the largest lobby ever seen in US history, even bigger than Exxon.

Yet, to the best of my knowledge I have never heard of a “dual” Mexican-American citizen. Could it be a “coincidence” that over 6 million innocent civilians who had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 scam were tortured, displaced and murdered in Bush’s Iraq Holocaust?

Cheney/Bush sneer and smirk about their war crimes and obscene self enrichments.

Could it be that the same racist Zionists who occupy the Israeli government occupy America’s government, communications media and spies on innocent Americans?

As the corrupted Bush regime has brazenly shown, they place themselves above ANY law that they choose and have committed the most horrible crimes, just like the fascists they are. Home grown fascists stole our Constitutional Republic and stole our money from us!

Have we not had enough lies from the sleazy Fox Fear Network ?
“Invade!” “Muslim terrorists!” “Blah, blah, blah!” “Terror, terror, terror!” “Blah, blah, blah!” “LIBERAL Terrorists!” “Blah, blah, blah!” “They’re going to kill us!” “Terror!” “Israel is our ally!” “9/11!” “Drill!” “Kill!” “Kill them over there before they come here!” “Blah, blah, blah!” “Terror!” “Terrorists”!
Pathetic.

Bush&Co thugs make Nazi war criminals look like Gandhi.
After their ill begotten “assets” have been seized, Bush&Co need to be given a fair trial for the civilized world to see.
Their capital crimes against humanity warrants capital punishment with extreme prejudice.
Nothing else will do.

After WWII, the Germans were shocked to learn what Hitler had done in their names. I suspect that in the near future Americans will be shocked to learn what Bush&Co have been doing in their names.

Please do not be deceived by any more of their “anti-Semitism” bullshit. Every time those assholes are exposed they always whine about “anti-Semitism”. Remember, to accuse anyone of being “anti-Semitic” because they criticize Zionists is like accusing anyone who criticizes Nazis of being “anti-German”.
Idiotic rubbish.

They may have bribed, blackmailed and contaminated our government and communications media but the lying, murderous, phallic worshipping descendants of the Khazar Empire are being exposed.

History is replete with the fact that all Empires are eventually destroyed and its sheeple obediently follow to the slaughter.

Obama knows he can do little against the Zionist Cabal which has total control of our Government.

He now sees that the government has been completely TAKEN OVER and we can see the silence is his SHOCK.

It is better that he play along and do what he can to help us from the INSIDE.

Every appointment he has made is an “Israel Firster” which means they are coming out in the open and are going to be more and more dangerous to us. There is little the President can do because Presidents have been puppets of the Zionist Federal Reserve for a long long time.

They controlled our money supply and by default controlled our government.

Attack the Zionist dual Citizens around OBAMA but do NOT attack and weaken OUR man we voted into office.

We voted for OBAMA and hopefully his Moslem heritage will give him the strength to oppose these spawn of satan over here like the Palestinians are doing over there.

Anonymous said...

Jews are not Zionist and all Zionists are not Jews.

###

Well I always say ...

"Israel ain't Jewish, and CIA ain't Christian"

What we do know, is that going from Twisted-Little-Shrub, to OR-BOMB-EO is that we have gone from, ...

Neo-Con to Zio-Con, that we do know.

OR-BOMB-EO's cabinet is a who's who of Zio-Con's from Biden to Emmanuel.

OR-BOMB-EO's so called 'muslim heritage' is about as deep as his African Heritage, if you consider being raised by a white-mother, and white-granny in Hawaii as being a black/muslim heritage.

USA & Israel will destroy themselves, and China is more than willing to sell both teams the weapons to accelerate the self destruction and mutually assured suicide. Long ago Chairman Mao predicted that Uncle Sam would pay for the rope he hung himself with.

Anonymous said...

I don't know about labor. Where are people going to work? Don't know. Productivity has killed our labor force. Robots and automation do all the work.

*

Exactly all us computer nerds have been seeing this for long. Doc's & Lawyer's too will be automated, SW eng's too, ...

That's why BP is seeing work, the system is still busy automating the last of the service jobs.

Anonymous said...

There are more “dual” Israeli-American citizens in the “Bush administration” than any other administration in US history and AIPAC is the largest lobby ever seen in US history, even bigger than Exxon.

*

BULLSHIT, OBAMA's AIPAC dual citizenship roll-call makes BUSH look like an anti-semitic.

If AIPAC running this country bothers you, then your going to be looking back to the Cheney years with tears.

OBAMA hates this country, and will let Israel do as these wish, so long as OBAMA achieves his goals. Win-Win for all.

The real question is how many MORE TRILLIONS and TRILLIONS can BUSH/OREO print, before the USA is kaput??? That is the essential question.

The difference between BUSH & OREO, is that BUSH had to hide his AIPAC buddy's, but OREO wears them on his arm as a badge of entitlement.

Bewert said...

Obama: Sandwiched Between Emanuel and AIPAC
by Iqbal Jassat
(Tuesday, November 18, 2008)

"These behind the scene appointments of unelected people have been setting the stage for a dramatic escalation of military conflict with Iran as soon as the new administration takes office."

Will President-elect Obama be guided by Rahm Emanuel, his White House chief of staff or by the candid views of outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on the question of Israel? This is but one of the frequent questions raised alongside the other being whether Obama is being pushed to opt for a military strike against Iran.

Since the Bush administration’s failure to produce any meaningful respite for Palestinian suffering, now in its sixth decade of occupation, some pundits within the US and outside have foolishly been predicting that an Obama administration may break out of the neocon logjam.

Expectations of change vis-à-vis Israel, fuelled by the electoral platform of a “need for change” have been dampened since Obama’s appointment of Emanuel, who apart from being a close ally of the leading Zionist lobby is also directly linked to the Jewish colonial enterprise. Emaneul served in the Israeli Defense Forces during the 1991 Gulf War and has been described as “a super-Likudnik hawk” by Alexander Cockburn.

In addition, he has been described as a fanatical Zionist – no different from neocon hardliners such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Though billed as a “golden boy” of the Democratic Party, Emanuel’s voluntary physical deployment in the service of the Israeli Defence Force has raised questions about Obama’s ability to chart a new course in the Middle East.

Also incredible is the appointment of Dennis Ross, an old guard pro-Israeli, as Middle East advisor of Obama. Ross is well known for his hawkish views and having backed the US invasion of Iraq, has been endorsing similar military options regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran. Apart from articulating his right-wing views on Fox News as a “foreign policy” analyst, Ross has been involved in the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israeli think-tank.

These behind the scene appointments of unelected people have been setting the stage for a dramatic escalation of military conflict with Iran as soon as the new administration takes office. An interesting article in the New York Times entitled “New Beltway Debate: What to do about Iran” warned that it is not just the trigger-happy Bush administration discussing the possibility of military action against Iran. It goes on to warn that Obama’s team is also “examining the so-called military option”.

Obama’s pre-victory commitment to AIPAC – America’s most powerful pro-Israeli lobby- is thus viewed as an early warning of the direction he is likely to pursue in securing Israel at the expense of the legitimate rights of the Palestinians. The announcement of key appointments suggest that though “Change” was Obama’s electoral platform no such change is imminent!

###

And as long as our media portray Palestinians as murderous terrorists who only understand force, nothing will change. Hollywood has been making movies about the greatness and goodness of Israel for 60+ years. The news media is the same way. Gaza has been an open air prison since Israel "withdrew" to the border. They control all the border crossings (the Epyptian ones are required to have the Euro overseers to open, and Israel controls their travel) and have instituted an economic embargo that while bombing electric plants, cooking gas plants, cement plants, etc.

The entire world sees the US and Israel, correctly, as brutal occupiers. Together with a couple of island nations and sometimes Canada or Australia, the US and Israel are on the short end of 150+ to 4 votes in the UN over the subject.

And Israel will abandon us like a used condom as soon as the dollar hits the toilet when China decides to sell of all the Treasury notes it's holding.

Anonymous said...

Jews are not Zionist and all Zionists are not Jews.

*

It's interesting this newbie here, me thinks he's HBM as an anonymous.

But I'll bite the bait, and reflect on this essence.

Sure if you want to get REAL condi/bush are the real Zionists, for they are zion-christians, christians that do their bidding for Israel.


Like the statement I make "CIA ain't christian, Mossad ain't Jewsih"

At the very least CIA/MOSSAD is oil, its money, its power, but it was never christian ( jeebus freaks ) or Jewish.

But christian-zionists are some of the easiest hand-puppets in the USA to play, ...

Like our own Neuman, &ASS - 1031 trust, running a large Christ-Zionist ministery out of BEND with 1031 money, but better is to get the 1031 people themselves and the 'christians' to fight the good war for Israel, the beauty is that while most of this shit, as APU says, can be found anywhere, the "Zionists are NOT jews" is very relevant to BEND-ORYGUN.

Zionists whether it be MADE-OFF or Neuman have been making a fortune, and with their bud's running the court, will never spend a day in jail.

It's all been a good show, and with OREO its going to even get better.

With BUSH everyone called him an idiot, but with the OREO you'll be called a racist.

The ZIONIST goal is complete bash them and your anti-semitic, and bash the OREO and his zio-cons, and your a racist.

Soon nobody anywhere will be able to talk.

Anonymous said...

What really happened on September 11th, 2001 is crucial because it is the foundation for fascist tyranny.


*

Then there is the above statement which is so HBM, for his only desire is to destroy this group.

See very few people in Bend can speak the truth as they see it, HBM under the control of his handlers, want nothing more than to destroy this blog.

How?? By proving that we're anti-semitic nut cases, and conspiracy theorists, every nut-case opinion possible has been included in this HBM thread, where he can then run over to his SORE/EYE and say "LOOK AT THEM, they talk anti-semitic shit"...

But the fact is before HBM came here there was never any Jewish bashing, sure a little comment on Israel/Palestine, but not full on Jew Bashing that HBM's love cuz it proves his point that this group is vile, and needs to be censored, because they think they can say anything, and that cannot be tolerate in BEND.

A couple dozen well financed Saudi's, who were trained by US engineer Usama-Bin-Laden, did 911, now it be true that BUSH got all his money from the bin-laden family during the prior decades, both bushes, little-shrub, and daddy-shrub, but the fact is Saudi sent a clear signal to US empire to get the fuck out of Saudi, and guess what it worked, we left, and invaded Iraq, and Afghanistan.

It's been long known by the CIA, that if you give you enemy 10's of billion of dollars for years ( saudi oil ), and you occupy their country ( mecca ), that eventually shit happens, and shit did happen.

Blaming Jews for 911, is a trap, that is intended by AIPAC, ADL, and a lot of other Zionists interest to prove that we are NUT-CASES, and yes we are morons, never said we weren't but we're NOT FUCKING conspiracy theorists as ZIO-CON-HBM would like to make us appear.

Anonymous said...

Citi prepared to get $100B from OREO early, ...

The Wall Street Journal


Jan. 13, 2009

Citigroup, under pressure to rapidly downsize, is preparing to unveil a major reorganization that will mark a further step toward dismantling the financial conglomerate, according to people familiar with the matter. In addition to spinning off the New York company's Smith Barney retail brokerage unit into a joint venture with Morgan Stanley, Citigroup is preparing to narrow its overall mission to two areas: wholesale banking for large corporate clients and retail banking for customers in selected markets around the world.

Anonymous said...

The announcement of key appointments suggest that though “Change” was Obama’s electoral platform no such change is imminent!

*

That's the fucking beauty of 'change', everybody got to imagine it was their change, for their vision, it was all for everybody, but nothing for nobody.

Pure ADL,JDL,AIPAC, ... Pure Walter Annenberg, and it work, of course it worked, it has always worked, and always will work.

Quimby said...

Sorry, had to duck out for a few hours. The conversation has progressed nicely with Busta-Bruce giving a fine overview of 1st,2nd,3rd,4th generation immigrants and their general work ethics. It seem spot on.

I'm wondering if manufacturing might come roaring back, sort of a new "protectionism", Made In the USA revival where we stop sending jobs and manufacturing overseas and stuff is done here.

The problem is that I don't understand the global market or the current crisis' implications well enough to know if this is even possible.

And you can't automate everything. There is big business (non-automated) in automation maintenance.

The huge irony in all this is that the free market was supposed to set us FREE. In reality, we are now slaves only to the market itself. We do what it demands or we die.

Anonymous said...

"It's interesting this newbie here, me thinks he's HBM as an anonymous.

+++

Aha, the first potential HBM siting, and what? less than a day and a half since he left? Or did he whine on outta here yesterday? I lose track in my old age...

Anyway, I think that might be an actual hbm siting, give me confirmation and earn your two Abyss pints.

tim said...

>>I'm wondering if manufacturing might come roaring back, sort of a new "protectionism", Made In the USA revival where we stop sending jobs and manufacturing overseas and stuff is done here.

We manufacture much. And we could do more. But we do it without people. So does Japan, now. It's only low wage places that use people. Then, when they get rich and automate, they do it without people.

Manufacturing won't help out labor force.

Quimby said...

>> Manufacturing won't help out labor force.

I understand Timmy...but WTF are people gonna do? Farm? Run Machinery? Not EVERYONE can work with their minds for $$$.

Anonymous said...

The four horsemen of the economic apocalypse...card check, protectionism, higher taxes and the gree movement.

Anonymous said...

*** green movement

tim said...

>>I understand Timmy...but WTF are people gonna do? Farm? Run Machinery? Not EVERYONE can work with their minds for $$$.

You know, that's the trick. What does the worker do when there is no more work left to do? Don't need him on the farm anymore. Efficient farms. Don't need him in the factory. Efficient factories.

This is a real problem. We talk about job training, but training to do what?

Anonymous said...

Aha, the first potential HBM siting, [sic] and what? less than a day and a half since he left?

I don't post anonymously. That's for cowardly chickenshit psycho assholes.

Hasta la vista.

MrBruce said...

The huge irony in all this is that the free market was supposed to set us FREE. In reality, we are now slaves only to the market itself. We do what it demands or we die.

*

I hate to dwell on history, but shit, yes and yes, what did the pioneers have?? Maybe a good saw, or a hammer, but a good quality ax made the man, you could build a home with ax, and split fire wood to beat.

The general problem with 'china' is quality, the DEMAND by the MORON for cheap will lead to products so inferior its mind-boggling.

Allow me to digress, as a he kid we could go to Sears and buy Craftsmen, to this day, in one of my 100's of tool-boxes I still have my craftsmen from high-school and still largely loaded with auto fixit-tools, when I hit the desert in the summer for explore, this is the toolbox, why? Cuz I have pulled tranny, rear-ends, and et-al ...

So a little high-school kid was able to get a little box to carry through life, for really not much money, certainly not much more than a weeks work back then pumping gas.

Now I'll digress to Africa, where everything comes from China, a few years ago there on a long journey on a land-cruiser I had picked up the brakes went out, nobody had brake-fluid you filtered old, tools? I bought a set of open-end from a hw store in Africa, and everyone broke on the first bolt, finally went to a auto-shop in some remote village and got a tool from some mechanic, yep they had to import their tools from Germany, and there was not even a place in Nairobi to buy them, almost impossible to get quality, impossible to get a tool that would last a job, and un-heard of to get a set of tools that would last lifetime.

Also given that I have lived china, you know what they do?? Every body carries a little bottle of crazy-glue ( isocyanate ) bleeding, plug it up, got a flat on your bike or scooter crazy glue, they use it for everything, even in remote places. Why I bring this up is HALF FUCKING ASS.

The USA of old I'm talking about the USA I know, we fixed shit right, we used the right tools for the job.

I talk about a lot about being a land lord, but on my units if there is any problem, I toss the old and put in NEW, nothing is made to be fixed, ...

Now now my fucking point. I see a HUGE fucking market in the future for tools that work, good shit, hammers, axes, saws, that will last a lifetime, and people will be files to maintain those saws.

We have built a disposable society, and people in Africa&China tolerate it cuz, its all they have ever known in the modern world.

But here in the USA we saw 1800's, 1900's, where every kid knew how to make a radio post 1920, where in the 50's everyone fixed their old tv or radio. Everyone could fix an auto, and if you took care of it would last a lifetime.

What the FUCK do we have today? Nothing, even our polticians and banks and presidents are disposable, our city government is disposable, just one other dumb fucking aber-pussy after another punching time to get his PERS pension.

I see a return to quality, simplicity, and old fashion DO-IT-YOURSELF. Today the LOSERS are people who pay other people to wipe-their-ass.

HOMER says DON'T spend money!! That's fine, but today when everybody has to pay someone to watch their child, or fuck their wife, or wash their hair, ...

So the people who will survive the future will be those who demand quality tools that last a lifetime and know how to use them.

I suspect that MOST ameriKKKans will live like Mexicans, africans, or chinese, ... its all they know, half ass and toleration. Even Mexican food I have NEVER bought a tortilla machine that didn't break after a dozen tortillas, so we continue to roll them by hand with a roller, Mexicans tolerate this shit too tortilla machines made of pot-cast iron so fucking brittle that corn-flour and water will break them.

So here we stand today, we have cars we can't fix, and tools that don't last, and everyone tolerates corruption, and nothing works, I also see and you see the non-payment of our SDC, slowly it will be common to expect them not to plow, or for the sewer to back-flow, ...

The place of tomorrow where people will want to live will be the place that works, where you can buy tools that last, and that people know how stuff works. Say that place doesn't exist, but I know it does, it exists on most family farms, and they really do still exist.

Anonymous said...

hbm said...

I'll read it, but I'm done commenting on it. Good bye.

January 12, 2009 4:30 PM


and now, barely 24 hours and 25 minutes later, hbm's back:

hbm said...
Aha, the first potential HBM siting, [sic] and what? less than a day and a half since he left?

I don't post anonymously. That's for cowardly chickenshit psycho assholes.

Hasta la vista.

January 13, 2009 4:55 PM


What a dolt... he shows up here (after he claimed he was NOT gonna comment here) with a lie that he doesn't comment anonymously.

HBM, a liar who lies about not commenting here any longer; only to come back and lie some more about his commenting.

What a liar.

Anonymous said...

hbm said...
Aha, the first potential HBM siting, [sic] and what? less than a day and a half since he left?

I don't post [sic] anonymously. That's for cowardly chickenshit psycho assholes.

Hasta la vista.

January 13, 2009 4:55 PM


Of course not, you post under 'hbm' in the Sore Eye blog.

But here, you used to COMMENT under hbm, and now you do it anonymously.

You have been busted, and not by the buster, you liar.

MrBruce said...

What does the worker do when there is no more work left to do?

*

They said the same thing about buggy-whip manufacturers, what will the do?

Are you worried about the man/woman or society??

In our society, its cheaper to put them on welfare, witness any fucking US logging town in ameriKKKa post WWII, welfare towns.

Smart men always see it coming long before the buggy-whip market goes to zero, they have sold their business to some fucking idiot and moved on.

Perhaps once upon a time a man learned a trade that would last a lifetime, carpentry, metal-work, ... NO MORE, in technology the average to is throw away ALL accumulated knowledge every three years, and learn some new marketing crap shit, ... so much for using your mind.

When too many people are idle you send them off to war, western civilization has always done this going back to Spartan or Greece or before, its how you solve the problem. It's how OREO will solve the problem.

Thirty years ago we automated the machinist, today we're automating the doctor, hopefully soon we'll automate the fucking lawyer.

Remember that song when we were kids, ... in the year 2030, if man is still alive, ... with their unused arms at their sides, ...
People don't have to do shit,

The individual will always get off his/her ass and survive, and move on, those that hang to long perish, always been that way.

'We as society' can only off the IDLE mass death in WAR, that is the only out in human history, well their is also small-pox blankets an aerial spraying of Suterra products, but that doesn't reap society with 'gold' and treasure.

Individuals help themselves, those waiting for their government to help them, will find themselves on a front-line in some god forbidden country killing people because they are told.

MrBruce said...

I don't think we'll ever get rid of the HBM where else can he go?? As much as he despises free speech, no where else can he post his shit and not get deleted, hell if he walked his own talk why isn't he over at BEBB with birds-of-a-feather??

Why? Cuz BEBB would delete his fucking shit.

HBM hates himself, and hates the SORE, and hates the BULL, he hates everything, and thus he's now one of us, welcome home hbm.

MrBruce said...

Farm? Run Machinery? Not EVERYONE can work with their minds for $$$.

*

The market for your mind will not last, an english speaking mind is a dime a dozen in India, or China, ... or Africa.

Nothing special about USA minds, the 'service sector' just another fucking econ-bubble, that will pop, and once again the mind will be worth shit.

Throughout history its been food&shelter, ... when the currency is worthless there will be a food shortage, for now we have SURPLUS housing and SURPLUS labor.

SURPLUS labor is always solved by WAR.

Surplus housing, you burn it down, or turn it into welfare housing, never been a shortage of deadbeats in US history, there could be a landrush call down to LA the first 10k get a free BEND house of their choosing, all that LA has to do is buy the houses, and go to the MOST violent fucking slum in the city and hand out BEND VOUCHERS for a house. ...

MrBruce said...

I don't post [sic] anonymously. That's for cowardly chickenshit psycho assholes.

*

That there sounds like 'pussy talk' only the pussy thinks that real men use their bewert.

Anonymous said...

Excellent send-off to Bush, from our friends in Israel.

Note the problem here is the press is supposed to ignore hebrew, dumb fucking press.

But is is getting fun, the US deny's but everyone attending the UN saw what the saw and agreed with what they saw.

The real question now is will Olmert bitch slap the OREO in public??

...

Israel and Us Offer Differing Reports on Un Resolution Abstention
Israeli PM Ehud Olmert claimed he had called George Bush to override US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice
The US and Israel offered conflicting accounts today over alleged Israeli intervention to prevent the US voting for a United Nations ceasefire resolution last week, a move that apparently left the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, humiliated.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, speaking at a meeting in Ashkelon in southern Israel last night, claimed that he had been forced to call George Bush, the US president, to override Rice. According to Olmert, Rice had been planning to vote with the other members of the security council for the resolution.

But the resolution was passed with 14 votes for, and one abstention.

Olmert, in a speech in Hebrew, is reported to have said: "When we saw that the secretary of state, for reasons we did not really understand, wanted to vote in favour of the UN resolution ... I looked for President Bush and they told me he was in Philadelphia making a speech.

"I said, 'I don't care. I have to talk to him now'. They got him off the podium, brought him to another room and I spoke to him. I told him, 'You can't vote in favour of this resolution.' He said, 'Listen, I don't know about it, I didn't see it, I'm not familiar with the phrasing.'"

Olmert said: "He gave an order to the secretary of state and she did not vote in favour of it - a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organized and manoeuvred for. She was left pretty shamed and abstained on a resolution she arranged."

Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman, said today: "I've seen these press reports. They are inaccurate."

Olmert's version coincides with the one offered up by other members of the security council the day after the vote.

It is also known that Rice had been planning a press conference before the vote but abruptly canceled it to take a call from Bush.

© Guardian News & Media 2008

Anonymous said...

Obama recalls some lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The Young British Soldier,” which he learned in high school:

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”

Anonymous said...

Palestinians and American Indians: Hey Ho, Indigenous People Got to Go!

Russell Means Breaks the Silence on Obama

By BRENDA NORRELL

American Indian activist Russell Means said President-elect Obama was selected by the colonial powers as president to improve the US image globally in the aftermath of George Bush. Further, Means said Obama’s appointments show that he is a Zionist controlled by Israel. Speaking on Red Town Radio today, Means said what is happening now to Palestinians is what happened to American Indians.

“Every policy the Palestinians are now enduring was practiced on the American Indian,” Means said on the Blog Talk Radio show, hosted by Brenda Golden, Muskoke Creek. “What the American Indian Movement says is that the American Indians are the Palestinians of the United States, and the Palestinians are the American Indians of the Middle East,” Means said. Further, he points out that the Zionists who control Israel now control the United States. “The power of the US in world politics diminishes every day.”

“Now they have found a house servant by the name of Obama.” Means said Obama was selected as a “man in charge to take the heat,” because of the “bad cop” image that Bush put forth in the world. “Now, all of a sudden, it is, ‘We’re so great. We elected a black man to be president.’”

Means added that Obama is a black man who was raised by his white grandmother and has appointed Zionists to key positions and that the US is headed for a new era of menial jobs. On Indian lands, Means reminds us, the only people who get ahead are those who sell out to the colonial system. Now, there is massive and sophisticated propaganda by the Zionists and the U.S. Both countries, he said, are liars. In the US, American Indians have been shut out of history, philosophy and the arts, in a “total blackout.” The United States does not want to be reminded of the smallpox blankets, theft, colonialism and mistreatment of the American Indian, he said.

Means said most Americans do not realize that the financial collapse of this country is only beginning: “Americans cannot continue the lifestyles of consumers when there is no production. Low income jobs and menial jobs are the only ones left.” “Health care in the US reveals how the policies used in experimentations on American Indians became US policies. The US health care system is now stringent and calloused, with constant refusals of treatment. This has always been the case with the Indian Health Service. Now it is the policy of the HMOs. Family ranchers and family farmers are now in the way of progress, the same way the American Indian was once viewed. Now, family farmers and family ranchers are being gutted, because they function on massive credit. They are trying to pay back debts, which is not possible with manipulated agriculture prices. The family farmer and family rancher are now going to be extinct.”

Means points out that the federal government has also taken over and polluted the educational system; “Americans don’t even know their own history. Along with this federal control, came the passage of English-only laws in many states. However, for Indigenous Peoples it is positive to know many languages. If you speak two languages, you are speaking with two brains. That is the way it is to us. That’s how we look at life. In the mid-Twentieth Century, US schools listened to the communities and local governing boards.”

“However, now the US educational policy has taken away local control and mandated federal guidelines. So now education has become a matter of money. Meanwhile, the real history is silenced. While the United States attempts to portray itself as a peace loving nation, the fact is the United States is at war every year. The United States breaks a host of international laws every year, which has been the pattern since 1946. American Indians were aware of what the US was doing, because the US had already broken all treaties with American Indians; treaties guaranteed by the US Constitution,” he said.

About the American revolution to throw off the British, Means pointed out how “his-story” has been manipulated; “There is a great deal of propaganda about why the US broke away from England. But the fact is that George Washington, the largest landowner, along with the slave owners, broke with England so that the original treaties of England with American Indians in the west would not have to be honored. The US broke with England, to invade the west and take the land. ”

The US was created to break international laws,” Means said, adding that it is obvious today that this is the pattern of the U.S. Means said the United States was initiated as an outlaw and renegade nation and that “today, its imperial policies mean that Israel is a surrogate of the US, receiving aid from the U.S. With the combined US and international aid, Israeli receives $12 billion a year for its “military and the settlers in the West Bank.”

Means said 80 percent of the people in the West Bank are paid to stay there. “It is America who pays them to stay there. But even in Israel, where there is a free press and not everyone agrees with Israel waging war on Palestine. He said 20 to 30 percent of the people in Israel are against the war on Palestine. Like the United States, Israel has been at war every year of its existence.”

Means often refers to Israel as the 51st state, of warmongers and imperialists. “America and Israel are based on lies, resulting in the massive deaths in Iraq. Now, the US and Israel are focused on Iran because its oil reserves.” Means said Indian lands have become “open air concentration camps.” “If you chose to stay on the reservation, you are guaranteed to be poor, unless you are part of the colonial apparatus set up by the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” he said.

“On Indian lands, everyone fights to be part of the tribal governments because that is where the money is. Everyone fights to be part of the colonial system. The only way you can be part of the colonial system is to obey. Those returning home to Indian lands cannot ‘rock the boat,’ demand their treaty rights or their rights guaranteed by the US Constitution.”

Means said the American Indian Movement made people aware that the US Constitution was based upon that of the Iroquois Six Nations. “However, the US Constitution only includes one-third of the Great Law of Peace. If all of the Great Law of Peace had been adopted, this country would be much different and much wealthier.” However, it was turned into a country of consumers. He said what you get with a country of consumers is greed. “What is going on in Palestine is going on in America. The United States is taking away the homes of the people.” Now in the United States, there is “communism from the left” and “right-wing socialism.” He said the problem with socialism is that it is bereft of consensus and spirituality.

Means, now 70, said he has experienced the US when it reached its zenith in the world in the 1950s, “At that time, America was a productive country. In the years that followed, the ruling elite sold out the unions, as the labor movement was razor thin close to taking over politics in America. The most watershed event was Brown vs. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court ruling which desegregated schools. The white male started losing his power. Then, in the social revolution that followed, white males lost control of their women and their women’s vote, and lost control of the work place. While civil rights was the chosen remedy of most social movements, American Indians remained dedicated to ‘sovereign rights,’ individual sovereign rights. We are the only ones that held on to the sovereign concept, he said. The other social movements were saying, “Please Mr. White Male let me be equal to you.”

Means said things will be different now, “Our grandmother the Mother Earth is tired of the human race. She is going to eliminate it and I champion her, Mother earth.” Means said matriarchy is what Indigenous people are all about. “We know that women are the givers of life and men are the takers of life. We have to follow the woman in order to gain balance.” He said in a matriarchal society, there is a balanced society, as each celebrates their strengths together. “True individual freedom has to be done by consensus, otherwise it is mob rule.” In the US, now there are fake elections. “The people are convinced they are actually electing a president. However, it is the Electoral College that actually selects the US president.”

The charade is now coming to a close, as the ‘Patriot Act’ means that Posse Comitatus is dead and buried. Means said everyone has the responsibility to be free. “You are free to be responsible. That is the essence of freedom.” He said everyone should know their rights. Otherwise, they are guaranteed slavery.

“Einstein said, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome,’” “That’s America, that’s the Indian reservation. That’s pathetic and an injustice to human beings.” He said “human brains are doped up with all this ignorance and greed.”

Red Town Radio show host Brenda Golden, an enrolled Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, grew up in Clearview, Oklahoma. Golden attended Sequoyah Indian School in Tahlequah before joining the Air Force. Later, she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration from the University of Oklahoma. She has worked in Indian Country as an educator, tribal liaison, grant writer, board member and volunteer since the early 1990's.

Golden said she is hosting Red Town Radio, on Blog Talk Radio, to offer a platform for Indigenous issues.

Listen to more of the show, including David Hill, who called in, and pointed out that while the US cut school funds and school lunches, the US increased aid to Israel.

Anonymous said...

HBM is right. The BULL fails to remind people that the suicides in Madras last week were all members of the Warm Springs Indian tribe.

Even here in Central Orygun, our injuns only hope is exit by self inflicted gunshot.

Anonymous said...

Means added that Obama is a black man who was raised by his white grandmother and has appointed Zionists to key positions and that the US is headed for a new era of menial jobs.

*

Jeebus fuck xmas, didn't I just today say that!!

The only part I don't agree is that the menial jobs will be hard to find.

The whole new scheme of the USA today will be self pity, and learned-helplessness. Your witnessing a spine-less fearful US public that will kowtow all Zionists. Anybody that dares like 'Means' aboves will be called 'Racist', luckily for Means, you can't call an American Injun a racist.

Anonymous said...

US consigns 3,000 tonnes of "ammunition" to Israel

January 10, 2009, 11:22 AM (GMT+02:00)

The US Navy's Military Sealift Command is hiring a merchant ship to carry the arms on two separate journeys from the Greek port of Astakos to Israel in mid-to-late January, according to Reuters. A 'hazardous material" designation on the manifest mentions explosive substances and detonators, but no other details. One broker said that the size of a shipment of this kind has not been seen for years. DEBKAfile's military sources note that the Israel's air, ground, tank and sea offensive against Hamas in Gaza entered its 15th day Saturday, Jan. 10.

Anonymous said...

If it weren't for fucking Bend Zionists like Miller, Lyons, Switzer, Neuman, ... The Bend Bubble would have gone up forever.

Anonymous said...

Move over 'smart growth', HRC bitch now has 'smart power'.

So the change that OR-BOMB-EO has brought us is 'smart power', does this mean that under Shrub it was 'dumb power'??

Anonymous said...

Fuck all you Repugs who love the Zionists, and homos, lesbians and transgendered...

Anonymous said...

Gaza: Israel under fire for alleged white phosphorus use

On Tuesday, the Israeli army denied using white phosphorus munitions. A Norwegian doctor claims Israel is using Gaza as a 'test laboratory for new weapons,' including Dense Inert Metal Explosives, or DIME.

By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

January 14, 2009

PARIS; and Beirut, Lebanon - Marc Garlasco has been on the northern border of Gaza for the past five days watching what he says are white phosphorus munitions exploding over a crowded refugee camp.

Mr. Garlasco, a senior military analyst for New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), says that the way Israel is using the incendiary device is illegal. White phosphorus shells contain more than 100 felt filaments that ignite upon contact with the atmosphere, drift to earth, and burn intensely for at least 10 to 12 minutes.

The usage of white phosphorus is not illegal under international law if it's used in military operations as a smoke screen to cover troop movements or against bunkers, armored vehicles, and ammunition dumps. But its use is forbidden against people – civilians and soldiers alike – under nearly all military codes and laws.

"The use of white phosphorus is banned as a weapon that causes 'unnecessary suffering,' " says Mark Ellis, director of the International Bar Association in London. "It isn't to be used in civilian areas, or indeed against people since it creates horrible damage to the human body, and unnecessarily so."

Israel, which has been charged with using white phosphorus in Lebanon, says it is not using white phosphorus in its war against Hamas in Gaza, now in its 18th day.

"The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] acts only in accordance with what is permitted by international law and does not use white phosphorus," IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi told Israel's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday in response to a query.

But Garlasco says that phosphorus is clearly being used in the Jabaliya refugee camp, one of the most crowded areas in Gaza.

"I can see them; we are very certain, whatever the Israeli Defense Forces may say, that white phosphorus is being used. It was used by Israel in Lebanon in 2006, but not until the population fled. In Gaza, the population can't flee."

As the offensive continues, which has killed more than 900 people, a variety of European doctors in Gaza, human rights groups, news organizations like Al Jazeera, and observers on the border are reporting instances and sightings of weapons use that is causing deaths, and wounds they say they have not encountered before. Most are calling for access to Gaza to determine what is true amid a rage of reports and rumors.

While the phosphorus explosives are widely condemned for raining down indiscriminate harm, questions have also arisen about the possible use of another weapon called Dense Inert Metal Explosives, or DIME, that was created by the US Air Force. DIME is designed to be used in crowded urban areas since the weapons are highly lethal but have an extremely limited range of explosive force that can reduce collateral damage.

Anonymous said...

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2006/10/11/italian-tv-exposes-experimental-idf-use-of-us-weapon-which-severs-and-burns-limbs-below-genitals/

Experimental IDF Use of U.S. Weapon Which Severs and Burns Limbs Below Genitals

Oct 11th, 2006 by Richard Silverstein


WARNING: I wish to warn anyone who reads this that I feature here a photo of the Palestinian injuries caused by DIME. This and others featured at the RaiNews site are some of the most horrific wound images I’ve seen. They are not for the faint of heart. Turn away now if this will cause you great distress.

Rai24News has tonight broadcast its expose (video here–wmv file, use Windows Media Player) of the new DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive) weapon which Israel used to devastating lethal effect in Gaza during July and August. The tungsten and carbon in the bomb explode with such force that they create micro-shrapnel which in effect severs the limbs of victims just below the genitals. It essentially fries the skin and organs with which it comes into contact and amputates limbs with the effect of a circular saw. You can find photographic testimony of the damage at the Rai site. Doctors in Gaza never saw wounds like this before and knew quite quickly that they were dealing with a weapon they’d never seen. At least 62 victims have been treated for one or more severed limbs from this munition.
palestinian wounds caused by DIME weaponPalestinian wounds suspected of being caused by DIME (credit: Rai24News)

The RaiNews production crew, the same one which exposed U.S. use of phosphorus shells against insurgents in Fallujah, did meticulous research interviewing Palestinian medical personnel, an Israeli weapons expert and former IDF general, and Italian lab specialists. They reach the conclusion that in all likelihood the weapon in question is DIME.

The report does not weigh in specifically on the question of whether or not the Israelis developed this weapon themselves or secured it from the Air Force, which originally developed it. My money is on the weapon having been transferred to Israel by the U.S. But I’m dying to have a journalist actually ask a Pentagon PR flack to comment on this. I’d love to get even a “no comment” on the record.

When questioned by the news crew, the IDF maintained its boilerplate denial: “Israel uses no weapons that are not legal under international law.” Which of course begs the question since DIME is brand new and international law has not had an opportunity to make a judgment on its legality.

Though the report does not specially answer this question, I am assuming that the IDF refused to talk to the Italians officially since the only source quoted is Maj.-Gen (res.) Yitzhak Ben-Israel, former director of the IDF’s weapons lab. His interview is fascinating in an utterly ghoulish sort of way. He speaks of the weapon as being perfectly suited for urban environments (like Gaza) because according to him, you can kill an intended victim while leaving an innocent bystander standing nearby unharmed.

He even likens DIME to scenes from American police dramas in which a policeman faces an armed hostage-taker. The policeman shoots the gunman “right between the eyes, not 10 cm to the left or 10 cm to the right” and leaves the hostage untouched. In other words, DIME is the Dirty Harry of the U.S. military and the IDF. This all sounds quite “wonderful” (again in a ghoulish sort of way) until one considers that DIME’s kill zone is 12-25 feet. In crowded spots like Gaza (with the highest population density of any place on earth), this could mean killing many more than just a single intended victim or two.

Haaretz columnists have noted the IDF’s fascination with technological gizmos which are supposed to give Israel an advantage over its adversaries. A reliance on such “superiority” was part of what lulled its army into complacency on the eve of the Lebanon war. In its fascination with new weaponry, clearly the IDF loses sight of the impact of such weapons not only on its victims, but also on Palestinian and world opinion as a whole. Does the IDF not think that it will pay a high price for use of such ghastly implements of death?

What I have not read in any account of this weapon is its new and savage way of assaulting the human body. To compensate for its smaller kill zone, the weapon’s lethality within that zone has been amplified by the new carbon/tungsten micro-shrapnel. It is more precise (perhaps), but kills “better” or more intensively. It seems to leave only tell-tale pock marks and barely perceptible entrance wounds while wreaking havoc with the body’s internal organs. What kind of insane weapon is this?

Though articles have been written about DIME in the U.S. and British media, to my knowledge no one in this country has written about this story (yet). This post is a cri de coeur for some enterprising journalist to take this subject on. I think using Palestinian guinea pigs to test the lethality and effectiveness of experimental U.S. weapons is a heinous crime whether or not it violates existing international law. If I wasn’t so cynical I’d call for Congress to investigate this story. The fact that it is bought and paid for by Aipac would throttle such a proposal in the cradle.

Another eerie factoid about DIME is that it is remotely, rather than self-propelled, which means that you barely hear it before it strikes. It emits a small buzzing sound as it flies through the air.

Anonymous said...


“IMPLEMENTING SMART POWER:
SETTING AN AGENDA FOR NATIONAL
SECURITY REFORM”


A Statement by
Richard L. Armitage
President, Armitage International
Dr. Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
Distinguished Service Professor
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
April 24, 2008
Dirksen Senate Office Building, SD-419
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Mr. Chairman,
We would like to thank you and your distinguished colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee for the invitation to speak today on the subject of, “Implementing Smart Power:
Setting an Agenda for National Security Reform.”
As you know, we are co-chairs of CSIS’s Commission on Smart Power, a bipartisan Commission
that included one of your fellow Committee members, Senator Chuck Hagel, as well as Senator
Jack Reed and two distinguished members of the House of Representatives. CSIS’s President
and CEO John Hamre asked the two of us to form this Commission in late 2006, and the
Commission released its findings on November 7, 2007. It is our privilege to sit before you
today to provide our thoughts on implementing a Smart Power agenda in the months and years
ahead.
Smart Power: The Big Idea
Mr. Chairman, as you know, your committee held a hearing on Smart Power in March of this
year, receiving testimony from Admiral Leighton Smith and General Tony Zinni, who is also a
member of our Commission. Admiral Smith and General Zinni spoke on behalf of 52 retired
generals and admirals who are backing the idea of Smart Power, organized by the Center for
U.S. Global Engagement. The pair did an excellent job of explaining Smart Power, so we do not
want to spend too much time here on what you already know. But please allow us to briefly
explain how we came to this idea.
The two of us—one Democrat and one Republican—have devoted our lives to promoting
America’s preeminence as a force for good in the world. What we have seen recently, however,
is that too many people around the globe are questioning America’s values, commitment, and
competence.
Two decades ago, the conventional wisdom was that the United States was in decline, suffering
from “imperial overstretch.” A decade later, with the end of the Cold War, the new conventional
wisdom was that the world was a unipolar American hegemony. Today, we need a renewed
understanding of the strength and limits of American power.
The rest of the world knows that the United States is the big kid on the block, and that this will
likely remain the case for years to come. But our staying power has a great deal to do with
whether we are perceived as a bully or a friend. Humility increases America’s greatness, it does
not weaken it.
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Smart Power has been portrayed by some in the media as simply presenting a “kinder, gentler”
face of America to the world. The thought seems to be that all that is required is a new
administration or shift of style rather than substance. Smart Power is much more than this. It is
an approach that seeks to match our strategies and structures at home to the challenges that face
us abroad.
Our military is the best fighting force bar none, but many of the challenges we face today do not
have military solutions. We need stronger civilian instruments to fight al Qaeda’s ideas, slow
climate change, foster good governance and prevent deadly viruses from reaching our shores.
The uncomfortable truth is that an extra dollar spent on hard power today will not necessarily
bring an extra dollar’s worth of security.
Smart Power is based on three main principles:
• First, America’s standing in the world matters to our security and prosperity.
• Second, today’s challenges can only be addressed with capable and willing allies and
partners.
• Third, civilian tools can increase the legitimacy, effectiveness, and sustainability of U.S.
Government policies.
This is why we have called for an integrated grand strategy that combines hard military power
with soft “attractive power” to create Smart Power of the sort that won the Cold War. Power is
the ability to influence the behavior of others to get a desired outcome. Machiavelli said it was
safer to be feared than loved. Today, in the global information age, it is better to be both.
Smart Power is a framework for guiding the development of an integrated strategy, resource base
and tool kit to achieve U.S. objectives, drawing on both hard and soft power. It underscores the
necessity of a strong military, but also invests heavily in alliances, partnerships, and institutions
at all levels to expand American influence and establish the legitimacy of American action.
The United States can become a smarter power by investing in the global good—providing
services and polices that people and governments want but cannot attain in the absence of
American leadership. This means support for international institutions, aligning our country with
international development, promoting public health, increasing interactions of our civil society
with others, maintaining an open international economy, and dealing seriously with climate
change and energy insecurity.
Elements of a Smart Power approach exist today, but they lack a cohesive rationale and
institutional grounding. U.S. foreign policy over-relies on hard power because it is the most
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direct and visible source of U.S. strength. The U.S. military is the best-trained and resourced
arm of the federal government. As a result, it has had to step in to fill voids, even with work
better suited to civilian agencies. The military has also been a vital source of soft power.
Witness the massive humanitarian operations it launched in response to the Asian tsunami and
Pakistani earthquake.
The U.S. Government is still struggling to develop its soft power instruments outside of the
military. Civilian institutions are not staffed or resourced properly, especially for extraordinary
missions. Civilian tools are neglected in part because of the difficulty of demonstrating their
short-term impact on critical challenges. Stovepiped institutional cultures inhibit joint action.
U.S. foreign policy decision-making is too fractured and compartmentalized. Many official
instruments of soft power—public diplomacy, broadcasting, exchange programs, development
assistance, disaster relief, diplomacy, even military-to-military contacts—are scattered
throughout the government, with no overarching strategy or budget that tries to integrate them
with military power into a unified national security strategy.
There is little capacity for making tradeoffs at a strategic level. The United States spends about
500 times more on the military than we do on broadcasting and exchanges. How would we
know if this is the right proportion, and how would we go about making tradeoffs?
Furthermore, how should the government relate to the nonofficial generators of soft power that
emanate from our civil society? This includes everything from Hollywood to the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a private sector actor that now has the throw-weight of a
government. These are some of the challenges our Commission identified and sought to address.
Distinguished Members of the Committee, we developed Smart Power in large part as a reaction
to the global war on terror, a concept that we consider to be wrongheaded as an organizing
premise of U.S. foreign policy. America is too great of a nation to allow our central narrative
and purpose to be held captive to so narrow an idea as defeating al Qaeda. We were twice
victimized by September 11—first by the attackers, and then by our own hands when we lost our
national confidence and optimism and began to see the world only through the lens of terrorism.
The threat from terrorists with global reach and ambition is real and is likely to be with us for
some time. When addressing the threat posed by al Qaeda and affiliated groups, we need to use
hard power against the hard-core terrorists, but we cannot hope to win unless we build respect
and credibility with the moderate center of Muslim societies. If the misuse of hard power creates
more new terrorists than we can kill or deter, we will lose.
Similarly, when our words do not match our actions, we demean our character and moral
standing and diminish our influence. We cannot lecture others about democracy while we back
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dictators. We cannot denounce torture and waterboarding in other countries and condone it at
home. We cannot allow Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib to become symbols of American
power.
The Cold War ended under a barrage of hammers on the Berlin Wall rather than a barrage of
artillery across the Fulda Gap because we successfully balanced principle with pragmatism. The
United States had a strategy aligned with the challenges at hand and an approach that relied on
all means of national power.
This is an important lesson for the challenges we face today. Americans in their hearts may be
reluctant internationalists, but they also realize that we cannot cut ourselves off from the rest of
the world today. We are no longer protected by our two great oceans in the way we once were.
Foreigners will continue to look to America. The decline in American influence overseas is not
likely to endure. Most want the United States to be the indispensable nation, but they look to us
to put forward better ideas rather than just walk away from the table, content to play our own
game.
The United States needs to rediscover how to be a smart power. Smart Power is not a panacea
for solving the nation’s problems, and it is not about getting the world to like us. It is essentially
about renewing a type of leadership that matches vision with execution and accountability, and
looks broadly at U.S. goals, strategies and influence in a changing world.
An Emerging Consensus
We believe there is a strong and growing measure of bipartisan agreement on the need for
America to become a smarter power. A number of leading Americans and allies have spoken out
in recent months that the United States ought to invest more heavily in modernizing our civilian
tools of national power and increase the emphasis of these tools in our global strategy. The
following five examples stand out:
• Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a major speech at Kansas State last November
making the case for strengthening America’s capacity to use soft power and better
integrate it with hard power. Secretary Gates lamented how civilian tools that helped win
the Cold War were gutted during the 1990’s through Foreign Service hiring freezes, deep
staff cuts at USAID, and the abolishment of the U.S. Information Agency.
• Former and current American political leaders on both sides of the aisle have endorsed
the arguments behind Smart Power. This list includes notable Democrats such as Sam
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Nunn, Madeleine Albright, John Edwards, and Harry Reid, and notable Republicans such
as William Cohen, Frank Carlucci, Christine Todd Whitman and Newt Gingrich.
• Each of the three remaining presidential candidates have made public statements
supporting strengthening some aspect of America’s civilian international affairs agencies.
Each has also advocated a new approach to U.S. foreign policy in which we lead by
attraction rather than primarily by virtue of hard power.
• Military leaders have been some of the most active in calling for a Smart Power approach
to U.S. foreign policy. In addition to General Zinni and Admiral Smith’s testimony
before this Committee on behalf of 52 retired generals and admirals, former CENTCOM
Commander General John Abizaid and SOUTHCOM Commander James Stravridis have
both endorsed elements of the Commission’s findings. Combatant Commanders have
their war plans, but they also recognize that much of how they engage today requires soft
power as they try to shape their environments in favor of peace and stability.
• German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told an American audience last week
that Smart Power is George Marshall’s vision in a nutshell, and precisely what we need
today to repair the trans-Atlantic relationship and better serve the world’s interests.
There are many others who have spoken out in favor of Smart Power who are not included in this
brief listing. It is clear to us that there is something attractive about the pragmatic, common-
sense approach of our Commission’s findings that appeals to Republicans and Democrats alike.
We recognize that there are also others who may oppose our vision, whether because they stand
committed to the grand strategy of the past seven years, doubt that civilian institutions and our
allies abroad can keep us safe, or simply expect the next president to demand less of our foreign
policy instruments. There are also some, including distinguished members of this Committee,
who have voiced frustrations at the slow pace of translating the ideas behind Smart Power into
concrete action.
We share the sense of urgency in moving from rhetoric to action, and realize that if America is to
become a smarter power, this agenda will have to be taken on jointly by the next administration
and Congress alike.
From Rhetoric to Action
It is our view that the emerging consensus on the idea of Smart Power must move in the coming
months toward greater agreement on a specific Agenda for Change. Numerous commissions,
task forces, and experts continue to provide their blueprints for how to build and modernize
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America’s civilian tools and make the United States a smarter power abroad. This activity is a
welcome sign of a rising tide, but there is also a danger that divergent visions on how to
implement Smart Power could unhinge momentum that has accumulated in support of the basic
concept and rationale.
We will outline a few of the strategic priorities our Commission identified, including those
recommendations that concerned specific instruments and institutions of the U.S. Government.
Neither our Commission nor the two of us, however, hold the golden key. It may well be that
recommendations emerging from likeminded initiatives such as those you will hear on the next
panel may prove to have more lasting impact. The critical task is moving toward a set of feasible
action items that can be taken up by the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic
in the months ahead.
First, the next president should create a deputy national security adviser who is “double-
hatted” as a deputy at the Office of Management and Budget.
• The various tools available to the U.S. government are spread among multiple agencies
and bureaus. There is no level of government, short of the President, where these
programs and resources come together.
• The national security adviser is swept up in the urgent challenges of unfolding crises and
lacks the ability to focus on long-term strategy development or manage interagency trade-
offs.
• This “smart power” deputy should be charged with developing and managing a strategic
framework for planning policies and allocating resources, working closely with relevant
Congressional committees.
• The smart power deputy should lead a process parallel to the Quadrennial Defense
Review for the civilian tools of national power that conducts a systematic and
comprehensive assessment of goals, strategies, and plans.
Second, the next administration should request and Congress should resource a personnel
“float” for civilian agencies that allows for increased training and professional development.
• The Defense Department is able to sustain a far superior process for leadership education
because it routinely budgets for 10 percent more military officers than there are jobs for
them in operational assignments.
• This ‘float’ permits the military to send its officers to leadership development programs,
to work as detailees in other agencies to broaden their professional experiences and
judgment, and to meet unforeseen contingencies. Civilian agencies have not budgeted a
comparable personnel float.
• The next president should increase the number of Foreign Service Personnel serving in
the Department of State by more than 1,000 and consider further expansions in other
relevant civilian agencies.
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Third, the next administration should strengthen civilian agency coordination and
expeditionary presence on a regional basis.
• Civilian government agencies do not have a regional command structure comparable to
the Department of Defense. As a result, this prevents the development of regional
strategies that integrate interagency operations on a regional basis.
• The next president should empower the senior State Department ambassadors known as
“political advisors” or POLADs assigned to advise regional military commanders a dual
authority to head a regional interagency consultation council comprising representatives
from all other federal agencies that have field operations in those regions.
• Congress and OMB should work to provide the State Department resources to support
these regional coordination councils.
• The next administration should request and Congress should fund increases in the number
of civilian personnel able to participate in regional expeditionary missions, such as
through the pending Civilian Stabilization Initiative.
Fourth, the next administration should strengthen America’s commitment to a new
multilateralism.
• America needs the United Nations, but we need a better one than we have at present. The
United Nations could play an active role in promoting American interests in
peacekeeping and peacebuilding, counterterrorism, global health, and energy and climate.
• The U.S. alliance system negotiated during the last half century consists of nearly 100
formal treaty arrangements and security commitments. Rather than view these
agreements as hindrances to American action, the next president ought to view this
alliance network as a force multiplier.
• For decades, America has been the global champion of legal norms and standards. The
United States directly benefits from a strengthened international legal order. At those
times, though, when treaties are objectionable, the United States can justify stepping back
but not walking away.
• The main institutional architecture absent today is an effective forum for coordinating
global strategic thinking on a set of specific practical challenges. The G-8 could spin off
a series of yearly meetings on energy and climate, nonproliferation, global health,
education, and the world economy.
Fifth, the next administration should elevate and unify its approach to global development by
creating a cabinet-level voice.
• The next president should task the smart power deputy to work with the cabinet
secretaries to develop a coherent management structure and institutional plan within the
first three months of office for creating a cabinet-level voice for development.
• The Commission on Smart Power heard a range of arguments for how to organize this
aspect of our civilian capacity. Disagreement centers around the degree of integration
that will best serve American interests and the priority placed on effective development.
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Some have called for a Department of Global Development while others have promoted
the creation of a “super-State” Department of Foreign Affairs. Ultimately, we concluded
that a cabinet-level voice for global development was important for putting forward a
more positive face of the United States to the world.
• This new cabinet official should take the lead on launching new, high-profile global
public health initiatives, building on successful Bush Administration and private sector
efforts. These could include developing a global health network and bringing safe
drinking water and sanitation to every person in the world.
Sixth, the next administration and Congress should encourage greater autonomy, coherence
and effectiveness for U.S. public diplomacy and strategic communication efforts.
• Reviving USIA may not be the most practical option at present. The next administration
should strengthen our resource commitment to public diplomacy and consider what
institutional remedies in addition to capable leadership could help make U.S. public
diplomacy efforts most effective.
• One possibility the next administration should consider is the establishment of an
autonomous organization charged with public diplomacy and reporting directly to the
secretary of state. This quasi-independent entity would be responsible for the full range
of government public diplomacy initiatives, including those formerly conducted by
USIA.
• Congress should create and fund a new institution outside of government that could help
tap into expertise in the private and nonprofit sectors to improve U.S. strategic
communication from an outside-in approach. As the Defense Science Board has
suggested, this center could conduct independent polling, research and analysis on U.S.
Government priorities; promote a dialogue of ideas through mutual exchanges; and shape
communications campaigns to help shape foreign attitudes. The center should have an
independent board that could serve as a “heat shield” from near-term political pressures.
• Effective public diplomacy must include exchanges of ideas, peoples and information
through person-to-person educational and cultural exchanges, often referred to as citizen
diplomacy. The next administration should expand successful exchange and education
programs, including doubling the size of the Fulbright program.
Seventh, the next administration should shape an economy flexible and competitive enough to
deliver economic benefits while minimizing the human cost of adjusting to economic
dislocation.
• International trade has been a critical ingredient to U.S. economic growth and prosperity.
The next administration should seek to create a free trade core within the WTO,
negotiating a plurilateral agreement among those WTO members willing to move directly
to free trade on a global basis. While consensus within the full WTO remains the goal,
and could potentially be reached in some areas within the coming months, in many cases
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it is not realistic. The next administration should seek to lock in a minimum measure of
global trade liberalization.
• There is no doubt the benefits of trade are not evenly distributed—within a nation or
across nations. The next president should exercise U.S. influence in international
financial institutions to direct the efforts of these organizations toward aiding poorer
countries that face the inevitable adjustment issues that come with the opening of
markets. We should also reexamine our own trade policies toward these nations. The
next administration should fundamentally reform trade adjustment assistance to facilitate
the reentry of American workers who lose their jobs.
• Global competition today is less for markets and more for capital, talent and ideas. Half
of all patents issued in 2006 were of foreign origin. The United States must do more to
prepare itself for increasing economic competition.
Eighth, the next administration and Congress must make addressing climate change and
energy insecurity more than just a political catch phrase by creating incentives for U.S.
innovation.
• A world operating on different sets of rules and costs associated with carbon dioxide
emissions could have disruptive implications for trade, energy security, competitiveness,
and economic growth. The next administration should create a level playing field to
underpin the carbon-constrained economy. It should work with Congress to place an
economic value of greenhouse gas emissions via a mechanism that sends clear, long-term
price signals for industry.
• As world energy demand continues to rise, the next administration must reduce demand
through improved efficiency, diversify energy suppliers and fuel choices, and manage
geopolitics in resource-rich areas that currently account for the majority of our imports.
The next administration should take the lead within international institutions to establish
a common principles charter for energy security and sustainability. The charter should
outline sound energy policies and practices, including protection of sea lanes and critical
infrastructure; investment-friendly regulatory and legal frameworks that respect
sovereign rights of resource holders; and promote regular dialogues between producers
and consumers to improve information sharing.
• The next administration and Congress should establish and fund a joint technology
development center. International collaboration helps reduce costs and accelerate the
pace of innovation. The U.S. Department of Energy in partnership with major global
energy companies should establish 10-year endowment for funding energy and
technology related research. This could be administered by an international consortium
of the National Science Foundation and equivalents and disburse grants through a peer
review process to researchers to provide venture capital to develop and deploy next
generation energy technologies, such as biofuels.
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Ninth, American leaders ought to eliminate the symbols that have come to represent the image
of an intolerant, abusive, unjust America, and use our diplomatic power for positive ends.
• Closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center is an obvious starting point and should
lead to a broader rejection of torture and prisoner abuse. Guantanamo’s very existence
undermines America’s ability to carry forth a message of principled optimism and hope.
Although closing Guantanamo presents practical, legal and political obstacles, these
constraints are surmountable if it is a priority for American leadership. Planning for its
closure should begin before the next president takes office.
• The next administration should continue to expend political capital to end the corrosive
effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The United States must resume its traditional
role as an effective broker for peace in the Middle East. We cannot want peace more
than the parties themselves, but we cannot be indifferent to the widespread suffering this
conflict perpetuates and passionate feelings it arouses on all sides.
• Effective American mediation confers global legitimacy and is a vital source of smart
power.
Tenth, the next Administration should not fall into a new Cold War struggle to compete with
and contain Chinese soft power.
• China’s soft power is likely to continue to grow, but this does not necessarily mean that
Washington and Beijing are on a collision course, fighting for global influence.
• The next president should seek to identify areas of mutual interest between the United
States and China on which the two powers can work together on a smart power agenda.
• Energy security and environmental stewardship top that list, along with other
transnational issues such as public health and non-proliferation. Global leadership does
not have to be a zero-sum game.
Mr. Chairman, we would both be happy to go into more detail on our Commission’s
recommendations or discuss our personal views on these matters during our oral testimony.
Thank you again for the opportunity to sit before you today.

Anonymous said...

One celebrated Palestinian was exposed as having manufactured his life history as a dispossessed Palestinian Israeli when he had actually been born and raised in Egypt. He had visited a relation in Israel.

Semantic Creep

An important constituent of Palestinian Authority politics is the implanting of the most beneficial terminology into western media , and thus into western minds.

The use of "Palestine" has been so insidiously introduced that it can be found in Christian books about the life of Jesus. The word had not even been coined in his time! Judea was renamed Palestine by the Romans in 70 AD / CE after they had crushed the Jews. Jesus lived in Judea, Galilee and Samaria.

Within one year the name of the Temple Mount has been replaced by "a holy hilltop site" and "the Al Aksa Mosque complex" (Teletext news, British Television March 2002) see The Temple

The term "Occupied Territories" is very emotive, and is accepted without question by everybody, including the Israelis. But who is actually occupying who's territory? The West Bank was part of the territory allocated to Israel by the United nations but seized by Jordan in the May 16th war of 1948; an acquisition which was never ratified. Israel recaptured it in 1967. Surely the Palestinians are occupying Israeli territory! (see Land )

The Palestinian "Refugee Camps" are actually towns of stone buildings with all facilities including satellite dishes. The name, however, conjures up images of displaced persons living in squalor and poverty. (See pictures of Jenin, in Media Bias)

British television news coverage of the violence in Israel spoke of "plastic coated steel bullets" being used against demonstrators. When we use them they are called "rubber bullets". The facts may have been accurately reported but the bias is clear.

Anonymous said...

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" has been a long standing favorite of the Palestinians and their supporters. It has been translated into Arabic and published several times, as well as being turned into a series for Television. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" purports to the record of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders in which they reveal their plan for world domination. You will find those on the Internet who believe this to be the case. (Nazi and Arab, anti-Israel sites). The Protocols was in fact written at the end of the nineteenth century, by the Tsarist secret police. The origin of the Protocols was exposed in 1921 but, like all conspiracy theories, it endures remarkably well.

A Final thought, concerning the deaths due to terrorism and counter-terrorism.
The western media often quotes the death toll of Israelis and Palestinians and derives a kind of moral equivalence. This gives a spurious moral advantage to the Palestinians as victims, suffering the worse casualties.

Do not forget that the Palestinian dead includes the suicide bombers, the gunmen who instigate shoot-outs with the I.D.F

Also included are the Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel who are lynched by their Palestinian neighbours.

(Apparently, even road accident victims are included in the PA figures)

Christian Arab George Khouri, mistaken for a Jew and shot by Fatah in Jerusalem on 19th March 2004, was declared a martyr by Yasser Arafat.

It is calculated that Palestinians are directly responsible for the deaths of one in eight of the Palestinians killed.

Anonymous said...

The use of Palestinian Children

The stories which the Palestinians feed western journalists make much of supposed harm done to children by the IDF. This strikes an emotional chord with western families and always produces reactions against Israel. However, the Palestinians are guilty of cynically exploiting children and young people by inciting them to confront the IDF security forces and having cameramen on hand to record whatever harm comes to them. Also we are fed with harrowing images of distraught mothers of dead or wounded children. See Indoctrination to see how the Palestinian children are exploited and sacrificed to further the aims of Arafat and the Palestine Authority.

Watch the video, "The Anatomy of Child Self-Sacrifice", produced by Jerusalem Vistas to understand how the process works. Get a copy to show to your church or fellowship or school/college.

One of many cases was the 11 year old lad from Nablus who was promised a large sum to carry a backpack through an IDF roadblock in March 2004. When a military policeman picked up the backpack he discovered it was a 10Kg bomb stuffed with bolts. When the boy's dispatchers saw that he was being detained they dialled the mobile 'phone which was supposed to detonate the bomb, but it failed to explode. Had the bomb properly detonated, the lad would have become a martyr. Palestinian children are frequently used to test Israeli security systems. If they are mistaken for terrorist infiltrators and shot in error, they become martyrs and propaganda tools for use against Israel.

See also the report on the death of Mohammed Al Dura, which was blamed on the IDF and used to fan the Intifada which had just started in September 2000.

Anonymous said...

Palestinian Funerals

Funerals make good news footage and stoke up the fires of hatred. Unfortunately we in the west did not get to see the film of the Palestinian funeral during which the pallbearers stumbled and dropped the corpse, which then got up and ran away.

The medieval "Blood Libel" is still alive and well.

Anonymous said...

http://kohd.com/news/local/79909

Anonymous said...

"... the Palestinian funeral during which the pallbearers stumbled and dropped the corpse, which then got up and ran away.

***



I wish hbm would get up and run away.

I liked hbm better when he had his hissy fit and left in a huff.

Anonymous said...

There goes that HBM, printing & quoting the "Elders of Zion", ... Only the real HBM, would even bother with this tired canard.

Not since noting that his hooked nose, and sloped forehead has he gone out of his way to prove his non-jewishness.

Anonymous said...

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2006/10/11/italian-tv-exposes-experimental-idf-use-of-us-weapon-which-severs-and-burns-limbs-below-genitals/

If you look carefully at the photo's in the above post, you'll notice that there is nothing wrong with this person. Point of fact the IDF actually improved their over all athletic ability.

Anonymous said...

Nearly Half of Cessna Workers in Bend Will Lose Job


1/13/2009 - Bend
by Matt McDonald

A single mom, Jeanine Thornton wakes between four and five every afternoon, in time to see her nine-year-old daughter and thirteen-year-old son before working the night shift at Cessna in Bend. A job she says helped them move from public housing to this home in northeast Bend. Now, there is an almost a fifty percent chance she'll lose that job at the end of the month.

"You know, it's time to dust off the resume. It's time to try and find something interviewee to wear. It's time to...how do we pay the bills? How do we pay the bills?" said Thornton.

On Monday she was notifed Cessna will cut as much as 47% of its Bend workforce. Production, at four planes a week when she started last April, will fall to just one per week. Across the board, slowing economy is creating rising anxiety...Will i have a job?

"When I walked in to work today, this is what I received. It's my final check," said Vicki Stock, while visiting the employment office in Bend.

Until Tuesday morning, Vicki Stock worked in the call center at TRG-Isky in Bend which cut about twenty jobs.

"It's better to know right now and not have to sit and wait, when is it going to come, when it going to come," said Stock.

For Jeanine Thornton the answer will come at the end of the month. If her job is cut, she'll have sixty days notice. Tough news for a family that did Christmas on fifty dollars.

"We also live on a level...I think, they here a lot of no's. No you can't go here, no you can't go on this ski trip, no you can't, because we can't afford it," said Thornton.
For a list of resources for the unemployed visit:
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/emergency/tough_times.php

Anonymous said...

"... the Palestinian funeral during which the pallbearers stumbled and dropped the corpse, which then got up and ran away."

===

Miracles happen all the time, even when you are a filthy Palestinian Arab dog who attacks God's chosen people.

Die you pig, die!

Anonymous said...

I wish hbm would get up and run away.

*

Inside of every sloped headed, hooked nose, ugly fucking person is an angry zionist trying to get out.

We let HBM be himself here, are we not all KUNT's why can't we all get along and support diversification?

I would rather than a Likud Zionist who drinks Palestinian blood on this site, than shit-eating christian who professes love of humanity.

HBM is the real deal, he is gods chosen people. He can't be himself over at the SORE, but here he can be himself, and reflect his god, in his gods image.

MrBruce said...

PUSSY read this carefully, scary fucking ORWELLIAN SHIT THIS OR_BOMB_EO SHIT IS, SCARY.


• Congress should create and fund a new institution outside of government that could help
tap into expertise in the private and nonprofit sectors to improve U.S. strategic
communication from an outside-in approach. As the Defense Science Board has
suggested, this center could conduct independent polling, research and analysis on U.S.
Government priorities; promote a dialogue of ideas through mutual exchanges; and shape
communications campaigns to help shape foreign attitudes. The center should have an
independent board that could serve as a “heat shield” from near-term political pressures.

Anonymous said...

"I would rather than a Likud Zionist who drinks Palestinian blood on this site, than shit-eating christian who professes love of humanity."

+

Fuck you, you disgusting filth of a slime dog Repug!

I spit on your face, and throw my shoe at you!

MrBruce said...

Congress should create and fund a new institution inside of ISRAEL that could help
tap into expertise in the private and nonprofit sectors to improve U.S. strategic
communication from an outside-in approach. The most logical source of this PR&MARKETING team would be Bend, OR a town with 1,000's of un-employed 'image makers', most with pro-zion leanings.

As the Defense Science Board has
suggested, this center could conduct independent polling, research and analysis on U.S.
Government priorities; promote a dialogue of ideas through mutual exchanges; and shape
communications campaigns to help shape anti-Israel attitudes.

The center should have an
independent board that could serve as a “heat shield” from near-term political pressures. The public must not known that the Israeli tails wags the US dog.

Anonymous said...

>>>>Anonymous said...

“IMPLEMENTING SMART POWER:
SETTING AN AGENDA FOR NATIONAL
SECURITY REFORM”<<<

Jebus Fucking Christ

How long to we have to wade throught this shit to find something relevent to Bend.

BP, My info is not for JR, only for RE fodder.

Anonymous said...

"I would rather have a 'HBM' Likud Zionist who drinks Palestinian blood on this site, than shit-eating 'Moss/Flanders' christian who professes love of humanity."

tim said...

Oh for crying out loud you boring asses.

Should I just come back next week and see if you guys have figured out the middle east?

Anonymous said...

Come on Homer!! Email me.

MrBruce said...

“IMPLEMENTING SMART POWER:
SETTING AN AGENDA FOR NATIONAL
SECURITY REFORM”

*

Just ignore it marge, you don't need to know what Hillary Clinton has in plan for you, I think you probably already know, without reading her working doc.

Anonymous said...

"Should I just come back next week and see if you guys have figured out the middle east?"

Perhaps you should ask hbm to come back?

If you ask nicely, he may cut short his exile...

MrBruce said...

Homer ain't going to do shit, unless it fits his 'agenda' on sunday, ... Who the fuck knows what his agenda is, these days its survival for himself.

If you want action then send it to US, and we'll get it out.

brucepuss@gmail.com

I'll send what you got to everyone.

MrBruce said...

Marge,

Also we have a new 'mirror' for this site where all content is public and duplicate and google enabled.

That site is ..

Bendmorons.blogspot.com

So if you send shit, we'll put it on that site.

Anonymous said...

>How long to we have to wade throught this shit to find something relevent to Bend

It's quite easy actually.. you just use the text search at the bottom of the window and look for "marge"

Anonymous said...

Honestly TIM, if you have something 'BEND' to talk about then make it happen, by default, what happens happens.

Anonymous said...

>Also we have a new 'mirror' for this site where all content is public and duplicate and google enabled.

and completely ignored.

MrBruce said...

It's quite easy actually.. you just use the text search at the bottom of the window and look for "marge"

*

Please don't tell our secrets, or otherwise everybody here will be calling themselves 'marge'.

Anonymous said...

Honestly TIM, if you have something 'BEND' to talk about then make it happen, by default, what happens happens.


*


Fuck all you Repugs!!

MrBruce said...

and completely ignored.

*

The point is not that it be 'popular' the point that anybody who does a google-search is pointed back to BB2, rather than have BB2 hidden.

Anonymous said...

Oh great, now we will have a room of 20 people writing insults to each, with one third using the name 'marge', another third using 'bruce', and the final third using 'hbm'.

MrBruce said...

brucepuss@gmail.com

If you have something Marge, then send it, and I'll fwd to homer, ... shit you should have his email address by now yourself.

Anonymous said...

20 are you out of your fucking try 3 people top, for ever at all time, if you think '20' hang here your fucking idiot, I now that I'm responsible for 90% of the posts today, so don't tell me about 20, two maybe, three hell no, 5 never, but 20, ... you don't understand the net.

Anonymous said...

Dude, you must be in sad shape... taking to yourself all day long...

Anonymous said...

room of 20 people writing insults to each

*

That's calling the kettle black, are you new here?

Never ever has this happened before, well it is tuesday, on a normal cycle by tuesday we pick on each other, sunday new post we discuss bend, monday things go to shit on deschutes fuel, by tues, ... all hell, ... and then by friday, our lives go limbo while we wait for god (homer) to post on sunday like cargo cultists.

MrBruce said...

Dude, you must be in sad shape... taking to yourself all day long...


###

Well thanks a lot.

We're not all vile & bile here, that be HBM, most of us ( me, myself, and eye-sore ), ... we're Bend.

MrBruce said...

Well I hope your happy, now we have ten posts in a row, that could have been written by a Bend moron.

Tim wants interesting material, but where is it?

Marge wants homer to email her, but HOMER is too paranoid, something about wanting to survive.

Anonymous said...

Tim wants interesting material, but where is it?

*


Well, shit all over me!!!

Timmy wants some good shit, but gives us what?

Nothing!

He left and will return tomorrow.

Well, don't let the door hit your skinny little ass on the way out.

And marge, well at least Homer gave us a nice picture of her to look at this week. And you thought she was just joking with you when she had lots of guns and ammo, and even a couple of bazookas to boot! Wow!! Just one question, marge: Are those real?

Anonymous said...

I will send it along in the AM it's on my computer at work now. Thanks for all those rants on Bend for the last 20.
Have you seen the new cublicle's for the Sothebys brokers. Wait til Wed.

Anonymous said...

Dude, you must be in sad shape... taking to yourself all day long...

*

The salted pork is also very good with aye pint of ale.

Anonymous said...

Fuck all you Repugs!!

*

Fuck all ye progressives.

Anonymous said...

>>>>And marge, well at least Homer gave us a nice picture of her to look at this week. And you thought she was just joking with you when she had lots of guns and ammo, and even a couple of bazookas to boot! Wow!! Just one question, marge: Are those real?><<<

Oh, Honey, that is what I'd call packin. More than what my skinney bones could carry though. Right Dunc?
Timmy, I love readin the Bend stuff, not the world war shit. Til the war comes close to hear, I've had enough of that mantic stuff.
Til tomorrow, nigh.

Quimby said...

>> I think, they here a lot of no's.

Timmy, if you look, there's editor's gold in the KOHD piece.

tim said...

>>Timmy wants some good shit, but gives us what?

I brought the Cessna dropping half story. At least it's local.

tim said...

Gottschalks files Chapter 11.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Gottschalks-files-Chapter-11-bankruptcy/story.aspx?guid={4E255D16-702C-463E-81FA-B7B24D8B6804}

tim said...

>>Timmy, if you look, there's editor's gold in the KOHD piece.

i here you

Anonymous said...

Remember Lee Iacocca,

the man who rescued Chrysler Corporation from its death throes?

[ yeh, right and billions of corp-welfare bailout ]

He's now 82 years old and has a new book, 'Where Have All The Leaders Gone?'.

[ they're picking their ass in boca with lee ]

Lee Iacocca Says:
'Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder! We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'Stay the course.'
Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America , not the damned, 'Titanic'. I'll give you a sound bite: 'Throw all the bums out!'
You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore.
The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq , the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving 'pom-poms' instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of the ' America ' my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?
I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have. The Biggest 'C' is Crisis! (Iacocca elaborates on nine C's of leadership, with crisis being the first.)
Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It's easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else's kids off to war when you've never seen a battlefield yourself. It's another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.
On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. A hell of a mess, so here's where we stand.
We're immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving.
We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the country.
We're losing the manufacturing edge to Asia , while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs.
Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble.
Our borders are like sieves.
The middle class is being squeezed every which way.
These are times that cry out for leadership.
But when you look around, you've got to ask: 'Where have all the leaders gone?' Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, omnipotence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point.
Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo?
We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.
Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm.
Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you're going to do the next time.
Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when 'The Big Three' referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen, and more important, what are we going to do about it?
Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debit, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.
I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bonehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?
Had Enough? Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope - I believe in America . In my lifetime, I've had the privilege of living through some of America 's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises: The 'Great Depression,' 'World War II,' the 'Korean War,' the 'Kennedy Assassination,' the 'Vietnam War,' the 1970's oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11.
If I've learned one thing, it's this: 'You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it's building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That's the challenge I'm raising in this book. It's a "Call to Action" for people who, like me, believe in America '. It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close. So let's shake off the crap and go to work. Let's tell 'em all we've had 'enough.'
Make your own contribution by sending this to everyone you know and care about. It's our country, folks, and it's our future. Our future is at stake!!

Anonymous said...

On Boca-Raton before I forget, but last night a good friend of Denton, said Jodi had gone to Boca, and going open a new "DEEP" in Coral Gables & Boca, ... pretty damn good bet cuz the worst is over down there, and he can tap into the all made-off's on retirement in FL,

Anonymous said...

This is what I'm talking about DENTON is pure geni-ass, rather than becoming dirt poor, he did something, he got the fuck out of Bend, and is already starting over, in a place that will boom.

Low prices and tons of retiree's, Denton must know something about old people and raw fish, go figure, ...

Personally, sushi has to have he best profit margin in the universe, and bacon-wrapped-tempura, there's product with a 10k year shelf life.

Anonymous said...

For a list of resources for the Bend 'Learned Helpless' aka unemployed visit:

http://extension.oregonstate.edu/emergency/tough_times.php

Anonymous said...

Lee's sad demise on ameriKKKa,

Ok, here's my take on the above, when LEE wanted his chrysler bailout a zillion yrs ago, everybody bitched, but hell it was chrysler, and that was good for ameriKKKa, but dees days they're all crooks, bailouts then and now are designed to keep incompetent on life-support.

Jump towards today, the ENTIRE retirement ponzi scheme where a guy like Io-coo-coo could walk with a cool billion, and 'invest' and live a life of luxury in BOCA, ... forever, and guess what its all gone to hell, these rich old crooks of a generation and a more ago, .. things aren't working out, the ameriKKKan dream is FUCKED.

Solution, fix it all so that we have a managed economy, and that old people like io-coo-coo never have to worry, make the government honest, and setup wall-st so everyone gets 10%/yr apr on their investment, just the way it was always supposed to be forever and always had been.

Well guess what, the real rip-off's started in io-coo-coo's time, and what happened is everyone imitated him, and it was a HUGE ponzi, and io=coo-coo got out first, ...

Now today all the old retirees are afraid the US is going to shit.

How come IO-COO-COO wasn't worried when he was doing the robbing? Did he really think that it wouldn't be human see, human do??

So today our economy is based on 'retirement' investing, and our baby-boomers have darn near lost all, ... Is this really a fucking surprise? Especially given that the rip-off start in the early 1980's.

MrBruce said...

The fact being over-looked by your 'peeve'.

Is to date nobody knows anything.

Bloomberg has a lawsuit open, and Fox just opened a lawsuit a few days ago.

Both demanding specifics on the terms of the 'bailout' and who is getting the money.

To date nobody knows anything.

Let's also not forget that the $700B is a drop in the bucket compared to the $8Trillion the FED has shoved out the back door since fall. That is why everyone is all over themselves to be a 'bank holding company'.

The debate here seems to be what do we call the $700B beast?? The problem is nothing is known specifically, and any thing said is worthless until the government is forced under the freedom of information act to tell us where the money went, to whom, and under what conditions.

MrBruce said...

Real Bruce,

When your not rubbing your pussy, take time to read the Armitage/Clinton 'Smart Power' plan to be Obama's working document for INTL USA presence in the future.

I don't expect anyone else here to read it or care.

Bewert said...

Latest from Roubini:

Navigating the First Global Economic Recession

With the industrial world already in outright recession and the emerging world navigating towards a hard landing (growth well below potential) we expect global growth to be flat (around -0.5%) in 2009. This will be the worst global recession in decades as the fallout of the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression took a toll first on the U.S. and then – via a variety of channels of recoupling – on the rest of the global economy.

We forecast that the United States economy is only half way through a recession that started in December 2007 and will be the longest and most severe in the post war period. U.S. GDP will continue to contract throughout all of 2009 for a cumulative output loss of 5%.

One last look at 2008 will reveal a very weak fourth quarter with GDP growth contracting about -6%, in the wake of a sharp fall in personal consumption and private domestic investment. We see the real GDP growth contraction playing out through the year as follows: Q1 2009 -5%; Q2 2009 -4%; Q3 2009. -2.5%; Q4 2009 -1%, adding up to a yearly real GDP growth of -3.4% for the U.S. in 2009; our forecast is much worse than the current consensus forecast seeing a growth recovery in the second half of 2009; we also predict significantly weak growth recovery – well below potential - in 2010. Canada entered recession at the end of 2008, and the outlook for 2009 is likely to be worse, with the economy contracting by an estimated 1.5-2% for the year.
...[remarks on rest of world...
Given its reliance on exports and capital flows to fuel growth Asia faces a gloomy 2009 amidst a G-7 recession. We expect Asia ex-Japan’s growth to slow down sharply to 3.8% in 2009. Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan will remain in recession through H1 2009, which might extend into Q3 2009 while the ASEAN economies will slow significantly from the 2004-07 growth trends. We believe China will experience a hard landing in 2009, with growth unlikely to exceed 5%, a sharp slowdown from the 10% average of the last 5 years. The reversal of capital flows and high credit cost will pull down India’s growth significantly to around 5% in 2009 from an estimated 6% in 2008.
...
Commodity prices, which already fell sharply in the second half of 2008, will face further price pressure in 2009. We estimate an average WTI oil price of $30-40 a barrel in 2009, as the fall in demand continues to outstrip supply cuts and production delays.

Anonymous said...

Gottschalks took a Chapter 11 shit today.

Who knew?

Who coulda guessed?

I bet it does not apply to the Bend store since we are special.

Anonymous said...

How long to we have to wade throught this shit to find something relevent to Bend.

The bend crackers are, once again, in fine form.

Can't you stupid mother fuckers meet at the safeway parking lot on the westside and settle this honorably?

Fling used condoms at each other from 15 feet. First one to take it in the mouth loses and must concede to all the theories, conspiracies and political gestalt of the other.

Anonymous said...

Finally somebody has the real fucking story, if we kill everyone in Palestine, then Bin-Laden will get angry and show himself. The puzzle is now clear. Everyone knows that a 1,000 Palestinians is worth one Jewish Life. Bin-Laden is pissed at USA/Israel genocide on Palestine!! Fuck who would have guessed. Imagine how pissed Bin-Laden will be with OBAMA kills all of the Palestinians??? Pissed enough to show his location? The US gets Bin-Laden the magic-negro made king forever, ... Shit just keeps getting better, ...

Bergen: Tape shows Gaza conflict 'big deal' to bin Laden

CNN International - 2 hours ago
(CNN) -- Osama bin Laden's release of an audio message denouncing Israel's military offensive in Gaza signals the al Qaeda leader's priorities, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen says.

Bewert said...

RE: take time to read the Armitage/Clinton 'Smart Power' plan

###

Downloaded the original. I actually agree with some of it, being a fucking pussy progressive:

"Distinguished Members of the Committee, we developed Smart Power in large part as a reaction to the global war on terror, a concept that we consider to be wrongheaded as an organizing premise of U.S. foreign policy. America is too great of a nation to allow our central narrative and purpose to be held captive to so narrow an idea as defeating al Qaeda. We were twice victimized by September 11—first by the attackers, and then by our own hands when we lost our national confidence and optimism and began to see the world only through the lens of terrorism.

The threat from terrorists with global reach and ambition is real and is likely to be with us for some time. When addressing the threat posed by al Qaeda and affiliated groups, we need to use hard power against the hard-core terrorists, but we cannot hope to win unless we build respect and credibility with the moderate center of Muslim societies. If the misuse of hard power creates more new terrorists than we can kill or deter, we will lose.

Similarly, when our words do not match our actions, we demean our character and moral standing and diminish our influence. We cannot lecture others about democracy while we back dictators. We cannot denounce torture and waterboarding in other countries and condone it at home. We cannot allow Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib to become symbols of American power."



It's a far cry from PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses" and its militaristic view of the world:

"This report proceeds from the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by aintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces. Today, the United States has an unprecedented strategic opportunity. It faces no immediate great-power challenge; it is blessed with wealthy, powerful and democratic allies in every part of the world; it is in the midst of the longest economic expansion in its history; and its political and economic principles are almost universally embraced.

At no time in history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals.

The challenge for the coming century is to preserve and enhance this “American peace.” Yet unless the United States maintains sufficient military strength, this opportunity will be lost. And in fact, over the past decade, the failure to establish a security strategy responsive to new realities and to provide adequate resources for the full range of missions needed to exercise U.S. global leadership has placed the American peace at growing risk. This report attempts to define those requirements. In particular, we need to:

ESTABLISH FOUR CORE MISSIONS for U.S. military forces:
• defend the American homeland;
• fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;
• perform the “constabulary” duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions;
• transform U.S. forces to exploit the “revolution in military affairs;”

To carry out these core missions, we need to provide sufficient force and budgetary allocations.

In particular, the United States must:

MAINTAIN NUCLEAR STRATEGIC SUPERIORITY, basing the U.S. nuclear deterrent upon a global, nuclear net assessment that weighs the full range of current and emerging threats, not merely the U.S.-Russia balance.

RESTORE THE PERSONNEL STRENGTH of today’s force to roughly the levels anticipated in the [first] “Base Force” outlined by the Bush Administration, an increase in active-duty strength from 1.4 million to 1.6 million.

REPOSITION U.S. FORCES to respond to 21st century strategic realities by shifting permanently-based forces to Southeast Europe and Southeast Asia, and by changing naval deployment patterns to reflect growing U.S. strategic concerns in East Asia.

MODERNIZE CURRENT U.S. FORCES SELECTIVELY, proceeding with the F-22 program while increasing purchases of lift, electronic support and other aircraft; expanding submarine and surface combatant fleets; purchasing Comanche helicopters and medium-weight ground vehicles for the Army, and the V-22 Osprey “tilt-rotor” aircraft for the Marine Corps.

CANCEL “ROADBLOCK” PROGRAMS such as the Joint Strike Fighter, CVX aircraft carrier,and Crusader howitzer system that would absorb exorbitant amounts of Pentagon funding while providing limited improvements to current capabilities. Savings from these canceled programs should be used to spur the process of military transformation.

DEVELOP AND DEPLOY GLOBAL MISSILE DEFENSES to defend the American homeland and American allies, and to provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection around the world.

CONTROL THE NEW “INTERNATIONAL COMMONS” OF SPACE AND “CYBERSPACE,” and pave the way for the creation of a new military service – U.S. Space Forces – with the mission of space control.

EXPLOIT THE “REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS” to insure the long-term superiority of U.S. conventional forces. Establish a two-stage transformation process which
• maximizes the value of current weapons systems through the application of advanced technologies, and,
• produces more profound improvements in military capabilities, encourages competition between single services and joint-service experimentation efforts.

INCREASE DEFENSE SPENDING gradually to a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually...

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.

Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions."

That was a defense contractors wet dream.

Anonymous said...

Yes, PUSSY a defense contractor wrote this 'smart power' for CLINTON/OBAMA, no fucking doubt, who would have guessed?

My favorite is the part about having an external information source, that is NOT under 'seasonal' US political control domestically that influences USA opinion at home on world affairs.

Sounds to me like a brand new Exec-Order 51, aka National Security Act, an external source of information that controls the world that isn't even under DOMESTIC control, that in spite of elected pendulums this INTL MEDIA SOURCE takes on a life of its own, never swinging left or right, but just staying 'fucking smart'.

Sounds to me that the NEW-WORLD-ORDER is trying to put together a UN-PRESS AGENCY that will forever control everyones mind for one fucking common agenda.

Yes, 'SMART POWER'.

Let's see how many fucking idiots world-wide sign up to this shit.

I think its about Al-Jazeera, and the CIA wants its OWN media in the mid-east that is the BIGGEST in the world that is louder, and will dominate ALL news about INTL events, and all else will be discounted.

Maybe this is why more media personal have been executed by US soldiers than all other wars in history.

Anonymous said...

Shit the world is going to CUM to an end.

The Wall Street Journal


Jan. 14, 2009

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that he is taking a medical leave of absence until June, saying his health issues are "more complex than I originally thought." Mr. Jobs said that Tim Cook will handle day-to-day operations.

Anonymous said...

Great fucking day to be an ameriKKKan.

If Israel/US plays this right everyone in Palestine will be dead by the time OR-BOME-EO takes office.

The US is praying like hell that this genocide provokes bin-laden or Iran to do something bend-stupid, and thus justify WW-III before the OREO is sworn, and that way he's not a war-monger, but then can just beg for the DRAFT. Which has been the fucking plan all along.

'More than 1,000 killed in Gaza'
Palestinians carry a wounded man in a stretcher in Gaza City -

14/1/2009
Palestinian hospitals have been overwhelmed by the number of injured

Palestinian deaths in the Gaza Strip have passed 1,000, medical sources in Gaza say, as Egypt continues efforts to broker a ceasefire.

Nearly a third of the dead are reported to be children and nearly 5,000 people have been injured.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he wanted to find a durable and sustainable ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian fighters.

But clashes reportedly intensified as Mr Ban began a Middle East tour.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said 1,013 people have died in the conflict which started 19 days ago.

More than 300 of the dead are said to be children, 76 are women and more than 4,500 people have been injured, of whom 1,600 are children and 678 are women.

Thirteen Israelis have been killed, including three civilians and one soldier from rockets fired from Gaza and nine soldiers killed in fighting in Gaza.

Graph of Palestinian deaths

It is impossible to independently confirm casualty figures as Israel has refused to allow international journalists to enter Gaza.

Diplomatic push

Egypt has been leading efforts to broker a ceasefire, that could include a new force of peacekeepers to prevent smuggling on its border with Gaza.

Ban Ki-moon, speaking after talks in Cairo with President Hosni Mubarak, said he hoped the Egyptian initiative would show results as soon as possible.

The UN secretary general next goes on to Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and Syria.


GAZA CRISIS BACKGROUND

In depth: Gaza conflict
Q&A: Gaza conflict
Who are Hamas?
Middle East conflict: History in maps

Also on Wednesday, Hamas officials were in Cairo speaking to Egyptian negotiators.

After the talks, a senior Hamas political leader told the BBC's Rushdie Aboualaf in Gaza that the Egyptian initiative had been positively received but that more time was needed to discuss it.

Hamas, which controls Gaza, has said any ceasefire agreement would have to entail a halt to Israeli attacks, a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces and the opening of border crossings to end the blockade of Gaza.

BBC Arab affairs analyst Magdi Abdelhadi says the gap between Israel and Hamas appears to be as wide as ever.

Israel will not agree to a deal that does not guarantee an end to Hamas's smuggling of weapons across the Egyptian border and the cessation of rocket attacks into southern Israel.

For its part, Hamas refuses to accept an agreement that could in effect spell the beginning of the end for its military wing.

Egypt and other key Arab states can put pressure on Hamas but the US remains unwilling to press Israel to make any concessions, our correspondent says.

A senior Israeli defence official, Amos Gilad, is to travel to Cairo on Thursday for talks with Egyptian negotiators, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said.

'Seeds of extremism'

Israel launched its campaign against Gaza on 27 December, saying it wanted to end Palestinian rocket fire into Israel.

The Israeli foreign ministry has said there is no guarantee Hamas would respect any ceasefire agreement.

Syrian president on Gaza conflict

Both Hamas and Israel rejected last week's UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire.

The Israeli offensive has provoked widespread international condemnation at the cost in civilian casualties.

Bolivian President Evo Morales said he was cutting relations with Israel over what he called the "genocide" in Gaza.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria warned that Israel's campaign would fuel extremism and terrorism in the Arab and Muslim world.

"The effect of war is more dangerous than war. It is sowing seeds of extremism around the region," Mr Assad said in an exclusive BBC interview.

Israeli divisions?

On Wednesday, residents spoke of heavy machine-gun fire as Israeli troops fought Hamas gunmen near Gaza City.
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Israeli strikes on Gaza continue

Israel continued to bombard the Gaza Strip after launching 60 air strikes overnight, which officials said targeted weapons-smuggling tunnels under the border to Egypt and a cemetery in Gaza City which was claimed to be a rocket-launching site.

Meanwhile, three rockets were fired from southern Lebanon towards the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, landing on open ground.


Destroyed building in Gaza City

Aid diary: Water shortage
Bowen diary: Syrian warning
Gazan families: Pulling together
In pictures: Inching into Gaza

No casualties or damage were reported.

Analysts say Israel may be holding back from all-out urban warfare in Gaza City, something that would cause heavy casualties on both sides and be politically risky less than a month before Israel holds elections.

Israeli media has reported divisions within the government, with Defence Minister Ehud Barak said to favour a week-long ceasefire..

But Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he wants to press on with the military campaign for however long it takes, reports say.

In another development, a newly-released audiotape said to feature the voice of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has called for a holy war to stop the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

The authenticity of the tape, posted on a number of Islamic militant websites, could not be independently verified.

Humanitarian concerns have increased amid the fighting, although some aid is getting through to Gaza during daily three-hour lulls Israel has allowed to let in supplies.

Anonymous said...

In another development, a newly-released audiotape said to feature the voice of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has called for a holy war to stop the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

*

Now that US/ISRAEL has linked al-Qaeda ( Bush/Raygun Afghan 'Base' in Persian ) with Gaza, its everyones patriotic 911 wet-dream to exterminate all life in Gaza.

Simply put when Israel pulled out a few years ago Gaza became a prison, but that's too expensive to operate, and thus today we're witnessing the USA final solution, given that its the USA that pays for the prison walls and feeding of the prisoners.

Anonymous said...

More Israel...

More Gaza...

More ex-Jordanians...

Less Bendisms...

Less Bruce Pussy...

Less hbm....

Anonymous said...

BIGGEST BEND STORY OF THE YEAR - THE SUICIDES LIVE IN BEND


Board: 'Bunny Suicides' stays in school library

05:00 AM PST on Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Associated Press

BROWNSVILLE, Ore. (AP) -- A book of cartoons will remain, unrestricted, in the Central Linn High School library.

School board members voted 5-1 Monday to keep "The Book of Bunny Suicides" by British humorist Andy Riley. Background: Bunny suicides

The school board has voted multiple times on the issue since October, when parent Taffey Anderson complained about the book. After her 13-year-old son brought the book home, she threatened to burn it.

The 2003 book is a collection of cartoons showing bunnies committing suicide in various ways.

"We can't censor," said board member Pat McConnel. "I'm here as a board member. I can't vote my personal feelings all the time."

Graphic courtesy: Waterstones.com

"The Bumper Book of Bunny Suicides" by Andy Riley

Publicity about her complaint drew widespread attention, including a letter from the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, It warned that removing the book could violate the First Amendment and suggested parents be allowed to ask that their children not be allowed to check out particular items.

Superintendent Ed Curtis said the district already allows parents to "opt out" of a particular book, whether in the library or in the classroom.

In a similar case in Prineville, the school board voted 4-1 Monday to keep "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" out of classrooms, though in the library, while the school district revamps its policies.

The book was a best-seller and a National Book Award winner. It was written by Sherman Alexie and is about a boy growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation who decides to attend an all-white school. The protagonist in Alexie's book discusses masturbation.

A committee made up of teachers, the public, an administrator and a librarian reviewed the book and voted 4-1 to recommend the school board reinstate the book without restrictions.

The freshman whose father touched off the debate said the book was not appropriate.

"Personally, I think we're having two things taught to us," Jozee Moss told The Bulletin newspaper of Bend. "We have the principal telling us, I don't want you cussing in this way or you'll get a referral. And yet this book talks about all these things in crude ways."

Anonymous said...

Kunts,

OH NO the fucking FUN has just started, the OREO the big black boy, mr Magic-Negro takes power of the most violent evil nation in world fucking history in just six days.

Then we cunt to hear from our LIB's all about how cargo comes to BEND, the BPussy, HPussy, & DuncPussy will have to defend their OREO 24/7, and then we all get to be PUG's cuz then it will be our call of fucking duty as loyal INDY's to fucking rub shit in the lib noses.

The fun has only begun.

tim said...

ICBINB,

Sorry. We ruined this thread. Can you make another one for us?

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

IHTBYB,
Email me I have some great stuff for a new post for you.


margie dear, send it to bendbubble2@gmail.com

Anonymous said...

tim said... "Sorry. We ruined this thread. Can you make another one for us?"

*

Huh? What a fucking pussy!!

Now we have four pussys, the newest being TimPussy.

the BPussy, HPussy, & DuncPussy (and TimPussy) will have to defend their OREO 24/7, and then we all get to be PUG's cuz then it will be our call of fucking duty as loyal INDY's to fucking rub shit in the lib noses.

*

Too true. Too true. As a true blue INDY, I plan to bash any and all Demos and Repugs who continue to devalue the $$ by giving bailout money right, left and center!

And OR-BOMB-EO will take the bulk of the wrath.

The fun has only begun.

Thats right, baby. The FUN has only BEGUN!

Remember that, TimPussy! This is the best week ever, with the greatest, hottest BABE picture ever!

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

cowardly chickenshit psycho assholes...

I'm just glad he's back.

Anonymous said...

I'm just glad he's back.

Back? I haven't seen hbm around here.

Oh, you mean this guy?

HBM said...
Kunts,

OH NO the fucking FUN has just started, ...


He sounds more like buster writing under the "HBM" (all caps?!!) than our very own, cry baby, self exiled "hbm", aka HBrucePussy, aka Mr. WimpyMiller.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

cowardly chickenshit psycho assholes...

And he sounds nothing like He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Busted! Not at all!

I'm just glad we all have a backup plan, in case Buster commits sideways.

I can't survive more than 48hrs without being told what a fucking psycho/paranoid/lying/dumbass/smelly-cunt/asshole I truly am.

Anonymous said...

"I can't survive more than 48hrs without being told what a fucking psycho/paranoid/lying/dumbass/smelly-cunt/asshole I truly am."

*

Hey, somebody's gotta do it. And Buster does it so well... maybe he was beaten as a child by his father. Isn't that his caring attitude showing through whenever he confronts BP's many foibles?

A good objective critique never hurt nobody, especially one with colorful language.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Just got your Tuscany Buttplugs pics Quimby... sorry. Busy Christmas? :-)

I don't know why they're STILL building there... that thing is going broke soon.

LavaBear said...

tim said... "Sorry. We ruined this thread. Can you make another one for us?"

*

Huh? What a fucking pussy!!

Now we have four pussys, the newest being TimPussy.



Probably better add me onto that list because this thread got all fucked up somewhere between there and here.

LavaBear said...

Cracker Ass is heading for it's 52 week low. Getting back to it's 2001 price.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Cracker Ass is heading for it's 52 week low. Getting back to it's 2001 price.

Wall St doesn't like hearing about BULLSHIT software addition glitches. They KNOW they are dealing with THIEVES at that point.

That country bumpkin bullshit only works in BEND.

Quimby said...

>> Just got your Tuscany Buttplugs pics Quimby

No worries.

MrBruce said...

What about that fucking Marge, says she has shit, but only wants HOMER to email her?? The real marge wouldn't have a full bio, like the current marge, hell the real marge killed her 'benddenial' only a few months ago, the new marge has more fucking personal info than the BP, and yet the new fake Marge wants homer to personal email.

Bruce requested 'marge' to email 48 hrs ago, and not a fucking thing, be careful fucking homer, there are some KUNTS trying to ream you in Bend. Be very careful Homer, for some reason somebody in this town, like never before has a hard-on for YOU.

LavaBear said...

>>>Wall St doesn't like hearing about BULLSHIT software addition glitches.

1988: ok, software glitches happen.
2009: You either way fucking stoopid or you stealin'. Time to start watching for Hertz rent a cars and pizza delivery in their parking lot.

MrBruce said...

Why is ONLY the fucking PUG's, those OUT defending AIPAC HO Geithner???, WHY are ONLY THEY defending Geithner??

This is stinking to hell, OREO begs bush to release $350B, yet TEAM-BUSH protects Geithner from the fucking gauntlet.

This is fucking stinking to shit.

OREO is MORE BUSH THAN BUSH.

After Tax Errors Raised, GOP Leaders Defend Treasury Nominee
But Some Call Geithner's Actions Serious Missteps

Was he cheating on his taxes or just sloppy with his finances?

[or just a fucking idiot, this is supposed to be a Jews-Jew, supposed to be the smartest fucking economist in the world, supposed to be Bernankes hand picked golden boy, now we're told he's too FUCKING STUPID TO FILL OUT a 1040?? ]

Lawmakers vetting the nomination of Timothy F. Geithner to serve as Treasury secretary say they may never be sure. But leading Republicans nonetheless joined Democrats in leaping to his defense yesterday, calling Geithner's tax gaffes small potatoes compared with his qualifications for saving the global economy.

MrBruce said...

Cracker Ass, did you fucking run a State of Orygun search on Bitch Moss? Running the biggest fucking Christian Home School network in State.

Some say why the fucking hard-on for team christian-zion?? Why ?

Team Bend-1031, is a who is who in Christian FUCKIN Zionism, like Made-Off big Runs on BEND-1031 were sent to ISRAEL for god's chose people, dumb fucking KUNT of BEND-ORYGUN think this issue is 8k miles away but not fucking so, BEND is epicenter, no fucking accident BEND is #1 over-valuation, and NO fucking accident BEND is #1 for zionist contributions to Palestinian Genocide.

MrBruce said...

Zion-Ministry & 1031 like Peaches & Cream, ... and Team-Moss yeh, ... like God's chose people didn't just run the Bend bubble to make money for personal, they be doing the Lords work.

MrBruce said...

Lawmakers vetting the nomination of Timothy F. Geithner to serve as Treasury secretary say they may never be sure. But leading Republicans nonetheless joined Democrats in leaping to his defense yesterday, calling Geithner's tax gaffes small potatoes compared with his qualifications for saving the global economy.


*


Pleeeeeeeze somebody BITCH slap meee, line 39, form 1040, enter income for year xx year, .... whoops I got $200k from the UN, but I forgot to mention that, but shit, now that I'm running for PUBIC office, not the fucking FED which is a secret PRIVATE CORP, but NOW that I'm running for PUBIC office, folks can look at my tax returns and see that I fucked the government for years to save a fucking nickel.

The DEM's & PUG's say no problem, cuz this guy is the geni-ass that is going t save ameriKKKa.

Pleeeeeeeeeeze is there any fuckin KUNT in this NATION that has a brain left? Pllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeze??

Since when are the PUGS & DEMS all over themselves to protect at fucking retarded crook??

MrBruce said...

"These are huge times. These are not the times to think in small political terms,'' Graham said, praising Geithner's involvement with the Bush administration in crafting the U.S. response to the global financial crisis. "We need a new secretary of Treasury that understands where this country is at financially and has a game plan to move forward. I think he is the right guy."


*

Yes, bitches SHUT the fuck up, this is the brains behind PAULSON, you want 4 more years of BUSH or not??

Then shut the fuck UP, and vote for Geithner, cuz he is MORE BUSH than BUSH, and will make the OREO government look like RAYGUN..

Imagine that??

MrBruce said...

OK, I warned YOU FUCKING PROGRESSIVE KUNTS ( PROGRESSIVE REMEMBER?? LIBERAL W/ a condom ), ..

Where's The Outrage?
January 15, 2009 12:16 AM EST
views: 22 | comments: 1

During the election we heard time and again how Joe the Plumber should not ask questions of Obama because he owed about $1200 in back taxes. Fast forward and now we have Obama's choice of Timothy Geithner for Treasury Secretary who we have learned he owed $32,000 in back taxes prior to being tapped for Treasury Secretary after which he paid them off. And what do we hear about his failure to pay taxes "not a big deal" "just a hickup". And this is the person who's going to run the IRS? How do you not know that you have to pay taxes?

So now we have Geithner who has ripped off the govy for fucking years, and we're told to ignore, but holy shit, after giving joe-the-plumber an enema, we're told to ignore the shit all over Geitners fucking lips.

It's too fucking rich, just a few years ago, even knowing a mex nanny would have excluded you, but Geihtner was running a ho-house of non-green card nanny's, and YOY, year after year, filing fraud 1040's, where is the fucking cred??

Not to pick on PALIN, but remember the shit about vetting your fucking dumb&numb????????

MrBruce said...

Republicans are reacting in the traditional way. "The man who wants to be the top tax collector in America," Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.) told reporters, "not having paid $35,000 in taxes, apparently maybe even involving an illegal alien, is a serious matter."

*

Hell yes, this is WHY fucking MADE-OFF isn't IN fucking jail.

Because we're now in an era where whose COCK you sucked yesterday is more important than the crime.

The FUCKING FACT is tax fraud is tax fraud, and if you file a fraudulent 1040, your fucking OUT.

JEW or NOT.

MrBruce said...

You god damn mother fuckers of BEND, with 1031 sponsoring of Israel who voted for OREO, you wanted change, I'll give you change, from now on your diet is fried Palestinian. Choke on Them.

***

Predictably, the United States Senate and House of Representatives voted to support Israel’s carnage in Gaza thereby handing the new President yet one more war to contend with, one unhappily more dangerous to America than those in Iraq or Afghanistan. That may seem to be, on its face, a strange thing to say unless one understands that we are in Iraq fighting for Israel and, with this vote, our Congress has indebted itself to the Israeli forces that govern the United States (as Ariel Sharon said long ago), forces that will use endangerment of Israel as leverage to attack Iran and Syria, countries already in their military sites since 1992.

Our Senate’s indebtedness is unanimous; while 20 in the House abstained and five voted against the resolution, all the rest voted to support. The reasons offered: Israel has a right to defend itself even though we do not know where Israel is: that is, Israel has yet to define its borders and remove itself from occupied territories; and the rockets fired over the last 8 years must stop, even though Israel, with one shell in Gaza, killed 43 at the UN school, twice the number killed by rockets in 8 years. But logic, international law and international opinion, and fundamental moral law cannot sway our Congress; money can and does. Obama may have a Senate majority and a Democratically controlled House of Representatives, but he cannot respond to the desires of the American people for change – no more wars – nor to the United community of nations that have voted with their feet against the actions of the Israeli government in open and defiant dissent against their governments in London, Ireland, Scotland, Europe and through out the Arab world including Jordan and Egypt. Our Representatives represent Israeli wishes and policies not those of the American people; the people voted overwhelmingly for change not the continued support of Israel represented by these votes or the appointments made by Obama as advisors.

Ironically our “only democratic ally” in the mid-east, as constantly reiterated by our main stream media and talking heads, has locked the media out of Gaza in order to isolate truth to its Public Relations campaign begun the day it invaded Gaza three weeks ago. Consequently, Americans receive their news from those that decided to break international law and their own responsibilities as an occupying force under the Geneva conventions. No truth, no morality, only raw force serves this Zionist nation beholden only to itself and those it owns, including our Congress. Yet the news gets out. The people of Gaza transmit the truth by phone cameras and a handful of Al Jazeera journalists that report from the killing fields. These pictures inundate the Internet and even a European press on occasion.

Contrast the reality of the coverage with that provided to Americans. In Sderot, the little town used by Israel to portray its misery, devastation, and ultimate demise at the hands of the “terrorists,” the citizens have taken to the hillside overlooking Gaza -- binoculars, sunglasses and beach chairs in tow -- to watch the rain of Israeli terror by air, sea and land on an imprisoned people. (Shashank Bengali, “Israelis, sipping Pepsi, watch bombardment of Gaza town,” 1/5/2009, McClatchy). Are they in danger? Perhaps, although they do have bomb shelters and warning sirens, something that the people of Gaza do not have. And as I have noted elsewhere (in Counterpunch, 1/5/2009), they have been bombarded on average with 2 rockets per day for 8 years. Twenty three have died over these 8 years, an unsupportable number killed by meaningless use of force. Nonetheless, this has become the rationale for Israel’s current killing that now approaches 1000 half of whom are children. Disproportionate? Not to our Representatives.

Now consider what we are not shown, an image that the western media finds “pornographic,” “irresponsible journalism,” “too graphic,” “too emotional” for public consumption; yet the rest of the world sees these images, hundreds and hundreds of them. This alone should give our representatives pause to reflect on how their subservience to the barbaric behavior of Zionist Israel plays out in the world that is not controlled by American corporations or complicit congressmen. You can go here . There you will see the head of a little girl looking forlornly though vacant eyes, mouth still open, completely buried from the neck down in rubble from her crushed home; indeed, too graphic, too emotional to contemplate, just another unnamed casualty of war where death happens … unfortunately, and “we’re sorry.” This appeared in multimedia, a Norwegian site, where you can also hear Sven Egil Omdel, the Director, explain why he decided to publish the photo even though it is against policy: “It is (the publication) a conscious provocation and we have two reasons for it: Israel keep (sic) all western journalists away from the war in Gaza. … The most important reason for us to show this face, is that the Arab world sees pictures like these from Gaza every day. Not a single still, but hours and hours of TV images of hospital floors full of small, dead bodies. Four year olds, two year olds, seven year olds, newly borns – These pictures represent the war in Gaza for millions of muslims – and we wonder why the hatred against Israel and the west grows? (translation)” This now is Obama’s war whether he wants it or not including the 3000 tons of ordnance being shipped now to Israel by the United States to supplement what they are currently using in Gaza.

Americans must understand the timing of this “war” that is not a war but a slaughter of caged people that have no where to hide, no where to go and even then, when following IDF orders, find themselves in a building targeted for destruction, their destruction. Deceit governs; racism motivates; hatred compels and greed for others’ land is the bed rock of action.

Why now? For two years, during the election campaign for the US Presidency, Israel imposed a siege on Gaza, a calculated act of slow, insidious decimation of the people planned in 2004 (www.infoimagination.org) to ultimately compel the Palestinian people to submit to Israeli dominance, without a state, without an army, without freedom of ingress and egress, unclassified and wholly dependent on Israel. Included in that strategy was the need to complete “Securing the Realm,” the document drawn up by our faithful Neo-Con “servants” that drove the policies of Bush’s administration and called for regime change in Syria and Iran in addition to Iraq. During the political campaign, while press coverage crowded out virtually all other news, the Zionist forces destroyed the infrastructure of Gaza, began the locking down of gates and the slow but methodical destruction of Gaza’s economy. Simultaneously they sought, but failed to get in time, Bush’s approval of attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites. Now, as the days of the Bush reign of terror ends, they are desperate to force Obama into a continuation of absolute and unquestioned support of Israeli policies in the mid-east. With the Congress in hand, with the vote made public in America and its continued commitment made known to the world, they believe that hey have locked Obama in a prison not unlike that surrounding Gaza.

What now? Reflection on the past few years, since 2005 to present, especially in the United States, makes possible this observation: the people of the United States and the people of Israel no longer see eye to eye on matters of mutual concern and, indeed, have already expressed that reality in fact. What do I mean? Beginning with the Downing Street memo and the disclosures of Richard Clark and Ambassador Wilson, the ability of the main stream press to hide the truth from the American people could no longer hold. As 2005 evolved, more and more disclosures unraveled the lies protected by the “fair and balanced reporting” of the corporate owned and controlled media. Fair and balanced was neither fair to truth nor balanced. To put two items on a scale, one for, one against, does not present truth or a balanced report. It simply shows two different perspectives, one for and one against. But as facts and documents became available to the American people, items available over the prior years on various Internet publications, the American people reacted by throwing out Bush supporters in the 2006 and 2008 elections and Bush support eroded into the mid-twenties.

They wanted “change” promised from the start by Senator Obama and mimicked eventually by most of the other contenders to the throne. Change meant getting out of Iraq immediately and return to a government that had a concern for America, including less absolute and blind support for Israel. The vast majority of the American people do not accept the disproportionate and cruel invasion of Gaza by Israel. As more and more pictures and videos become available on the Internet, especially the recurring images of savagery on You Tube, the American people are traumatized by the horror, especially the uncountable number of deaths of children. Our representative government does not represent the American electorate; it represents only scared politicians who depend on AIPAC money, men and women who fear for their political seats regardless of what their constituents believe and want.

By contrast Israeli citizens are faced with an election that has all three contenders fighting to convince the electorate that he/she is the one that will inflict more force to subjugate the Palestinians to Israeli will. The focus of this campaign resonates around the war monger Benjamin Netanyahu; both Livni and Barak must demonstrate that they are better leaders to take Israel against the Palestinians, the Syrians and the Iranians. Israel’s future is one of continued war which means in turn continued American billions to sustain their ambitions against their perceived enemies. They do not talk of “talk” with neighbors, only unending war against those that oppose the Jews. One does not speak of Israel as a state or government when “victimhood” is needed to induce unyielding support for the Israeli governments need to acquire more land and control the regimes of its neighbors, one must turn to the bias against Jews that is world wide and endemic. Sympathy cannot be rung from criticism of a government’s policies.

Horribly, the invasion of Gaza can be viewed quite accurately as a campaign war where Livni and Barak have made evident to the electorate that they will use force to ensure Israel’s right to dominate the area regardless of international pressure and opinion, international law or international justice. They know they can do this because they have control of the American Congress and administration including the veto power of the United States in the Security Council. World opinion means nothing. The Israeli electorate, with modest exception, does not want change.

Ultimately, it’s AIPAC’s will against the American citizens’ expressed desires as they voted for this man of change. Who will win? Will the blatant exposure of Israeli violence and mercilessness, in pictures and videos, turn the tide? Can Israeli hacking of Internet sites like that done to The Palestine Chronicle and the attempted erasure of sites that contain the pictures and videos described above stop the flow of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza and quell the building animosity that has arisen world-wide against the cruelty employed by Israel in its savage destruction of Gaza?

Will Obama turn to diplomacy, as he preached when a candidate and, thus doing, fulfill the truth enunciated by Phillip, “Become more human, and humans will love you”? Will he turn to negotiations with those engaged in these brutalities, to stem the violence? Will he recognize the impossible absence of the democratically elected Hamas government from deliberations with Israel over Gaza? How absurd. Will he reconsider the bribery that Bush employed to keep Egypt and Jordan in collusion with Israel despite the agony the people of Egypt and Jordan experience as they watch their people die in Gaza? Will he seek justice by returning to the resolutions of the UN that demand Israel return to the borders of 1948 or 1967, to leave the occupied lands of Palestine including East Jerusalem, to recognize the right of return of the refugees, to realize that Palestinians have a right to their state just as Israel has a right to its, something recognized by Hamas though never recognized as true by our main stream press. (Guardian, 1/12/2006 and Ynet, 1/30/2006). Will Obama seek peace that America might be free of its entanglement with a rogue state that blindly leads America into the darkness of unending conflict and death? Will he demand of Israel that its support from America depends of its recognition that it can only survive if it lives in harmony with its neighbors not out of fear but out of brotherhood? Will he suggest that the Israelis consider a diametrically opposite road to peace, one that understands “People will love you if you become more human”?

MrBruce said...

Americans must understand the timing of this “war” that is not a war but a slaughter of caged people that have no where to hide, no where to go and even then, when following IDF orders, find themselves in a building targeted for destruction, their destruction. Deceit governs; racism motivates; hatred compels and greed for others’ land is the bed rock of action.

*

All PAID for 100% by TEAM MOSS/NEUMAN-1031 team Zion-Ministries of Bend ORYGUN.

MrBruce said...

They wanted “change” promised from the start by Senator Obama and mimicked eventually by most of the other contenders to the throne. Change meant getting out of Iraq immediately and return to a government that had a concern for America, including less absolute and blind support for Israel. The vast majority of the American people do not accept the disproportionate and cruel invasion of Gaza by Israel. As more and more pictures and videos become available on the Internet, especially the recurring images of savagery on You Tube, the American people are traumatized by the horror, especially the uncountable number of deaths of children. Our representative government does not represent the American electorate; it represents only scared politicians who depend on AIPAC money, men and women who fear for their political seats regardless of what their constituents believe and want.

*

TELFER BITCH where does she get her prize??

AIPAC. Small fucking world??

Welcome to BEND-ORYGUN.

MrBruce said...

What is most fascinating about the entire Bend-1031 fiasco, is virtually all the money secreted was passed to Israel to purchase DIME ( chemical weapons ) to destroy all life in Palestine.

***

Pastor John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, received a rousing reception during his address at the opening dinner plenary of the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference.

Hagee warned the crowd that "Iran poses a nuclear threat to the State of Israel that promises nothing less than a nuclear Holocaust." Hagee claimed that the situation is like 1938, only "Iran is Germany and [President Mahmoud] Ahmedinejad is the new Hitler."

Hagee added: "We must stop Iran's nuclear threat and stop it now and stand boldly [with] Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East."

A few weeks earlier, Hagee met with Senator John McCain, a leading contender for the Republican Party's 2008 presidential nomination. Hagee has been leading the charge of conservative Christian evangelicals urging President Bush to deal more robustly with Iran.

"Hagee's appearance at AIPAC indicates the growing organizational strength of the Christian Zionist lobby for apocalyptic war and the rise of corresponding Jewish factions both within AIPAC and within Israeli politics that are pushing for dramatically expanded war in the Mideast," Bruce Wilson, the co-founder of Talk To Action, told me in an e-mail interview.

John Hagee, the pastor of the 18,000-member San Antonio, Texas-based Cornerstone Church and the head of a multi-million dollar evangelical enterprise, "seems to believe such a conflict is both inevitable and necessary," The Jewish Week noted in early March.

Hagee, who founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a Christian Zionist lobbying group last year, is the author of a number of Christian-themed novels, as well as the recent "Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World," which maintains that biblical prophecy is currently playing itself out in the Middle East.

"The end of the world as we know it is rapidly approaching," Hagee wrote in "Jerusalem Countdown." "Just before us is a nuclear countdown with Iran followed by Ezekiel's war (as described in Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39), and then the final battle -- the battle of Armageddon."

In a recent series of articles focused on Hagee, Talk to Action's Bruce Wilson described him as someone that "has built a career on aggressive support for hard right to fringe right Israeli politics and is now making inroads towards convincing the mainstream American Jewish community that he and CUFI are the best tactical allies Jews and Israel can expect to find."

"Pastor John Hagee's warmly received AIPAC speech illustrates the extent to which political leaders who espouse ideology that in the 1960's was considered to be scandalously close the extreme end of the political spectrum can now expect to broadcast their views from a national stage," Wilson told me.

Recruiting Evangelical Allies for a Showdown Against Iran

Joel Rosenberg is another conservative Christian evangelical advocating some type of Bush Administration action against Iran. In late February, Rosenberg, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, reported on his website that a number of conservative Christian evangelical leaders were beginning to show an interest in Iran, particularly as the situation in the Middle East relates to passages in the Bible.

Rosenberg's latest novel, "The Ezekiel Option," is "about the threat of a Russian-Iranian alliance to destroy Israel based on the Biblical prophecies found in the Book of Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39." These prophecies "describe what Bible scholars call the war of Gog and Magog. Russia and Iran form a military alliance with Lebanon, Syria and a group of other Middle East countries to destroy Israel in what Ezekiel described as the last days."

In January, during a trip to the Middle East, Rosenberg said that he "brief[ed] several hundred Arab and Iranian pastors and evangelical leaders on the latest geopolitical developments in the region," and that he taught "on Ezekiel 38 and 39 ... prophecies that most Christian leaders in the region are unfamiliar with."

Back home, Rosenberg has discovered a growing interest in developments in Iran amongst evangelical Christian leaders. While flying to New Mexico he "happened to sit next to" Focus on the Family founder Dr. Jamews Dobson, one of the most politically powerful conservative evangelical leaders in the U.S. Dobson, who "had been in Washington for meetings with high level administration officials to discuss Iran, Iraq and the latest developments in the Middle East," told Rosenberg that he was becoming more "concerned about the Iranian nuclear threat, and has been studying Ezekiel's prophecies."

Rosenberg also reported that Kay Arthur, a "world renowned Bible teacher," had also developed an interest in "the military alliance ... between Russia and Iran and how this might relate to Ezekiel's prophecies." Arthur recently invited Rosenberg to her headquarters in Chattanooga, Tennessee, "to teach on the Biblical description of the `War of Gog and Magog' and to record a series of radio and TV programs to explain these prophecies in light of current events."

He also "spent several days with a team of Iranian Christian pastors" that "have a satellite television ministry which is seen by between 4 and 7 million Iranian Shiites every day." Rosenberg discussed "Bible prophecies about Iran with them and help[ed] them develop a plan to communicate `God's love and plan for Iran' through their live satellite broadcasts, as well as figure out how to answer the many phone calls and emails they are sure to get from inside Iran once such programs are broadcast into the country."

According to Rosenberg, the Iranian Christian pastors "see a showdown with Iran coming, and they feel passionately about reaching their fellow Iranians with the good news of Christ's love."

"Will there be a war in the region this year or next?" While acknowledging that "it's too it's too early to say," Rosenberg claimed that 2007 is "the Year of Decision." President Bush and Congressional leaders "will need to decide soon just how they're going to handle the Iranian nuclear threat," [and] Church leaders also need to decide just how they are going to handle the Iranian threat, as well ... after all, time is short, and the stakes are high."

Last July, at Christian United For Israel's coming out party in Washington, D.C., John Hagee stated that "The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West ... a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation ... and [the] Second Coming of Christ."

During a September 18, 2006 interview with WHYY's Terry Gross, Hagee talked about the Russian/Iranian alliance that for the past ten years has been "plot[ing] and plan[ning] Israel's destruction." Hagee charged that "Iran's nuclear weapons have been produced with Russian scientists. The Islamic Arabs are using the Roadmap to Peace to get all of the land of Israel they can get. And when Israel finally says, `Enough!' you're going to see the beginning of the implementation of Ezekiel's war in 38:39. The critical point is the church is raptured before this war begins. I am telling you that makes this message one of the most thrilling prophetic messages you've ever heard in your life. You could get raptured out of this building before I get through finished preaching. We are that close to the coming of the Son of Man."

In a statement Jane Hunter and Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, co-founders of the website JewsOnFirst.org, said that "Hagee's call in his speech for victory for Israel and America (which appears to refer to Iran) is not necessarily the call for military victory which his audience might have heard (a chilling prospect nonetheless). Hagee's "victory" is coded language for Armgadeddon, which Christian Zionists see as the end-times battles set in Israel, when Christians are raptured to heaven and Jews lose -- unless they're happy to convert."

If President Bush unleashes a pre-emptive military strike against Iran, there is little doubt that Pastor Hagee and Joel Rosenberg will be standing behind him.

MrBruce said...

Some say ORYGUN is NOT AIPAC, but pray-tell THE MORMRON lost big-time dar boy Smith frozen food is out. This is why OUR BEND BOY HB-MILLER ( aka SORE-JEW aka Switzer little-HO ) bashed SMITH 24/7.

Now we got Merkley, bought and paid for by AIPAC, and well the other Senator Ron Wyden is a AIPAC WHORE going back to birth. So today its complete, ORYGUN only exists to generate cash for ISRAEL to exterminate life.

*

Questions Rise on Unreported Rep. Merkley Trip Digg Questions Rise on Unreported Rep. Merkley Trip Technorati Questions Rise on Unreported Rep. Merkley Trip
by In the news Tuesday, October 17. 2006
Below- is a Majority 2006 Press Release about House Minority Leader Jeff Merkley Trip:

Rep. Jeff Merkley Failed to Report Expenses-Paid Trip to Israel

SALEM – Majority 2006 today called on Rep. Jeff Merkley (D-Portland) to report an expenses-paid trip that he took to Israel in 2002. Rep. Merkley's trip was organized and partially-funded by Project Interchange, a Washington D.C. group providing "educational seminars" in Israel for "America's policy and opinion makers."

Other legislators have amended their ethics reports to include similar trips to Israel, which were funded by non-profit Jewish advocacy groups. In his 2003 Statement of Economic Interest, Rep. Merkley does not report his participation in the seminar.

MrBruce said...

A magic-black jewish negro, who would have guessed??

Obama pushes ahead with plan to rejuvenate black-Jewish alliance

By Ron Kampeas · January 13, 2009


Then-candidate Barack Obama brought thousands of pro-Israel activists to their feet in June when he invoked the memories of two Jewish and one African American civil-rights volunteers who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964. (AIPAC)

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Then-candidate Barack Obama brought thousands of pro-Israel activists to their feet in June when he invoked the memories of two Jewish and one African American civil-rights volunteers who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964. (AIPAC)

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Barack Obama's pledge to use his presidency to revive the black-Jewish alliance starts on Day (minus) One -- the day before he becomes president.

The president-elect's inaugural committee has asked Jewish groups to make black-Jewish dialogue and joint outreach to the poor a focus of Martin Luther King Day commemorations Jan. 19. Renewing the classic civil rights alliance is part of the inauguration's "big picture," a senior inauguration official told JTA.

The emphasis comes after a bruising campaign in which Jewish voters were targeted by anonymous campaigns attempting to depict Obama as a secret Muslim, as well as conservatives who questioned the candidate's pro-Israel bona fides. It also comes after decades of mistrust fueled by disagreements over affirmative action, Israel's relationship with South Africa and outright expressions of hostility from prominent black figures such as the Rev. Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan.

Obama, who has strong ties with influential members of the Chicago Jewish community, made it clear during the campaign that the alliance which helped bring about civil-rights change in the 1960s was a central focus of his Jewish outreach.

Invoking this alliance was a linchpin of his speech in May to thousands of members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where references to domestic policy often fall flat. Not so with Obama: The Washington convention center filled with cheers when he invoked the memories of the three civil-rights volunteers -- two Jews and an African American -- who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964.

"In the great social movements in our country's history, Jewish and African Americans have stood shoulder to shoulder," Obama said. "They took buses down south together. They marched together. They bled together. And Jewish Americans like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were willing to die alongside a black man -- James Chaney -- on behalf of freedom and equality."

A few months earlier, during a speech at last year’s commemoration of the King holiday at the slain civil-rights leader’s church in Atlanta, Obama criticized anti-immigrant and anti-gay sentiment in some corners of the black community. He also lamented that the “scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community.”

Throughout his campaign, Obama made his desire to bridge the divide a focus of his talks with Jewish leaders, said Deborah Lauter, the Anti-Defamation League's national civil-rights director.

"When Abe met with Obama, Obama conveyed to him he would like to see the historic black-Jewish roots renewed," Lauter said, referring to Abraham Foxman, ADL's national director.

Lauter said Obama's commitment might help spur an alliance that has faltered in recent years. Charged with reviewing what ADL chapters had planned for Martin Luther King Day, she noticed that plans for events bringing blacks and Jews together had decreased.

"There are some pockets of activity, but they're not what they used to be," Lauter said. "The ones that exist work well, but it hasn't been a priority."

In recent weeks, however, Lauter said she noticed an enthusiasm for re-establishing the alliance. Obama's 78 percent support among Jewish voters -- higher than expected -- was pivotal.

"The numbers were so strong in terms of the Jewish vote for Obama," she said. "There's a spirit of renewal, looking for opportunities to renew old ties and look forward generally."

Rumors of the demise of the alliance are overstated, said Rabbi Marc Schneier, who co-founded the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. The tensions stoked by the radical inclinations of an older generation had been replaced by the outreach favored by younger blacks, including Obama.

"Crown Heights was the lowest point," he said, referring to the lethal 1991 riots in Brooklyn, "but since those difficult and trying days there has been a cadre of African-American and Jewish leaders dedicated to repairing and restoring the relationship." The foundation is now chaired by hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons.

Schneier says he likes to tease Eleanor Tatum, the publisher of the Amsterdam News, an African-American weekly, that he sees more ads in Jewish papers for Martin Luther King Day activities than he does in hers.

Rabbi David Saperstein, who as the director of the Reform movement's Religious Action Center is a leader of national Jewish outreach to other civil rights and minority groups, says the relationship is thriving -- in the leadership.

"The reality is day in, day out, blacks and Jews are working together for education, to help the poor," he said. In the U.S. Congress, "the black caucus is overwhelmingly pro-Israel, the Jewish caucus has been overwhelmingly been supportive not just on civil rights, but on aid for sub-Saharan Africa."

It needs to trickle down, Saperstein says.

"There's too little social interaction," said the rabbi, who delivered the invocation the night Obama accepted the presidential nomination in August. "We can develop more opportunities for youth groups to work together on common projects. It is the building of levels of trust and personal connection that helps us through tough times."

Using Internet outreach, ADL is asking its activists and others to take the Martin Luther King Day "service pledge."

"By signing this pledge, I recognize that respect for individual dignity, achieving equality and opposing anti-Semitism, racism, ethnic bigotry, homophobia, or any other form of hatred is a non-negotiable responsibility of all people," it concludes.

An array of national and local Jewish groups have signed up with the inaugural committee’s black-Jewish outreach.

In Washington, Jews attending inaugural festivities also will be asked to join the Washington Hebrew Congregation's "work day" on Jan. 19, helping the homeless.

"If you're a Jewish person coming to Washington for the inauguration, you'll see that -- but you'll also see homeless shelters and soup kitchens," said the senior inauguration official, who spoke on the transition team's strict condition of anonymity.

Other programs are more lighthearted.

The Greater Washington Jewish Community Relations Council is marking the King day evening with the Black-Jewish Dialogues, which is described as "a hilarious two-actor, multimedia romp of sketches, theater and video that reveals the absurdity of prejudice and hate within the context of the American Black-Jew experience."

Schneier insisted such activities were not out of the ordinary -- "we're close to the heyday of the black-Jewish relations" -- but he said it was thrilling in recent weeks to see the alliance at its most rarefied level.

"When I saw Rahm Emanuel appointed White House chief of staff," he said, "I saw the black-Jewish alliance at work again trying to restore this country."

MrBruce said...

That's some heavy shit, a black-jew when you think about it, the worlds most prolific religion is muslim, and most are black, and Israel wants to exterminate them, but all the while they control the most powerful ( military ) on earth, and have elected a black-jew to paint a happy face on the agenda.

Black leaders from day-one 'said' Oreo ain't black.

But that didn't stop AIPAC from running the 2009 coronation.

I have a stinking suspicion that the name Obama will go down as the biggest traitor in black history
But then he's an OREO!

MrBruce said...

GOD-DAMN we're going to miss the twisted little demented Shrub, ...


The global village idiot

By Tony Parsons 15/01/2009

5 days to President Obama: Bush's legacy

Was George W Bush really as dumb as he looked?

Widely derided as the very worst President in American history, will the passing of time make us look more kindly on those blank, bewildered features?

Have we - in Dubya's own immortal phrase - misunder estimated him?

History has a way of radically altering the image of American Presidents. Lyndon Johnson, reviled in his day for the escalation of the Vietnam War, is now best remembered for pushing through Civil Rights legislation.

Ronald Reagan, despised as a simple version of Doctor Strangelove during his administration, is now grudgingly admired for his stance against Communism.

Even Nixon - scourge of the hippies, carpetbomber of South-East Asia, the dark hand behind Watergate - is viewed more sympathetically and seen as a deeply flawed, even tragic figure, rather than the murderous crook the world took him for at the time.

Will we start missing George Bush once he has gone? They will miss him in Africa, where a year ago thousands of adoring fans lined the streets to cheer him.

It is a difficult fact for Bush-haters to swallow, but during the eight years of the Dubya regime, America spent Û18billion (£12.4billion) on AIDS prevention, Û1.2billion (£850million) to prevent malaria and gave Û3.5billion (£2.4billion) to African nations that govern well, provide social services and encourage economic growth.

Of course this is small change compared to the Û850billion (£583billion) he has spent on his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a figure currently rising by Û13.6billion (£9.3billion) every month. Add in extra costs, such as payouts to the families of dead soldiers, and estimates put the total bill at three times that.

But all across Africa, even in Muslim countries, George is worshipped. In Darfur, many couples name their baby boys George Bush.

"The Bush regime has been divisive - created bitterness - but not here in Africa," Bob Geldof has written. "Here, his administration has saved millions of lives."

With projects like his President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the Bush administration has ensured that, for millions of Africans, from the townships of South Africa to the backstreets of Rwanda, HIV is no longer a death sentence.

If anything rescues George Bush from the dustbin of history, it will be his work in Africa.

And yet Africa is not the world.

George Bush's lifeline for millions in the Third World proves that blanket, unequivocal condemnation of his Presidency is as simple-minded as that little, pea-brained smile that played across his features when he wasn't sure what was going on. Which was most of the time.

But there is also no denying his Presidency has made millions more despise the US. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Africa will emerge from the darkness into the light and history will record that George Bush did far more practical good than Bill Clinton or Bono ever did.

But what about the misery he created in the rest of the world?

When he ducked those shoes in Iraq, his wife loyally said that George was "a natural athlete". But to most of us he always looked like a natural simpleton, a rich man's son who got to the Oval Office on his daddy's shirttails, the global village idiot.

In truth, anti-Americanism is always thriving in large parts of the planet because for most of the 20th Century, the USA was the richest, most powerful nation the world has ever seen. But George Bush gave the world good reasons to hate America. He has been a far more effective recruiting agent for Islamic terrorism than Osama bin Laden.

With his clumsy, murderous war in Iraq, Bush made anti-Americanism a global sport. Even those of us who love America have despaired of the country under George Bush's watch.

The best things about America - its generosity, its sense of limitless possibility, the profound belief in freedom that sent Americans to fight and die in Europe in two world wars - has been replaced by a seething paranoia and murderous belligerence.

When the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, almost all of the world was on America's side. It is to George Bush's eternal shame that he squandered that goodwill. Incredibly, on a day when we watched 3,000 people murdered on live TV, George Bush somehow contrived to make the USA look like an aggressor.

Bush seemed too stupid to be President. Saddam Hussein has nothing to do with 9/11, and yet Bush and his neocon cronies wanted to make an example of someone with a beard.

Iraq, for all its murder and torture, was a largely secular state. Saddam wanted to be the god Iraqis worshipped. But Bush - and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney - turned Iraq into a seething hotbed of militant Islamic terrorism. And for that, history will never forgive him.

Perhaps the great mystery of George Bush is this: he was not only stupid, but empty.

The very worst forces of America - warmongers, religious nutters, and raving nationalists - swarmed around him and painted their fantasies on his blank canvas.

Lawrence Wilkinson, a top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell - a good man who was shamefully duped into believing the great lie that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction - said: "Dick Cheney knew that he was going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush. Personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum."

In many ways, Bush was a luckless President. 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the global economic meltdown all happened on his watch. That's an awful lot of world shattering events to have sitting in your in-tray, but with a gritty, shrewd response, Bush could have seized greatness.

However, the Texan twit was never made for greatness.

9/11 produced unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The citizens of New Orleans were left to rot in the rising waters of Katrina. And the casino capitalism of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco flourished under his regime, while the response of Dubya's Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, seemed slow and inadequate until he followed the lead of Gordon Brown. George Bush never missed an opportunity to do the wrong thing.

He had his followers, the "USA! USA!" chanters who acted as though the war on terror was a basketball match there to be won if they just shouted loud enough.

But even these chubby patriots have shuffled off now, worried about losing their homes, their jobs and their shirts, and his approval rating has slumped to an almost nonexistent 27 per cent.

Which makes George Bush, at the end of his two terms as President of the United States, only slightly more popular in Biloxi than he is in Baghdad.

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They will miss George Bush in dozens of African countries, but the rest of the world will be glad to see him ride off into the sunset.

During the 20th Century America was the richest, most powerful nation in the world. George Bush reminded us that the 20th Century is over. Here was a 10th-rate President for a nation in decline, which still acted like the biggest bully in the playground.

"Goodbye from the world's greatest polluter!" was how Bush wittily bid farewell at his final G-8 summit - a wonderful example of the man in all his belligerent stupidity.

Under Bush, America lost its moral authority and it will take a lot to get it back.

The world will not forgive the images of sadistic redneck trash posing for their photos in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib.

Nor will the world forget how America's love of "freedom" saw nothing hypocritical about locating Guantanamo Bay far from American soil and far from American laws.

And these were supposed to be the good guys.

Graham Greene's classic novel The Quiet American features an ugly American abroad who firmly believes he is doing good, for his own country and for the world, even as everything he touches turns to ashes.

George Bush was just like that, but on a global, epic scale. For here was the ugliest American of all, who could have united the world after 9/11, but who instead tore it apart.

Warmongers, raving nationalists and religious nutters painted their fantasies on his blank canvas

Here was a tenth rate President for a nation in decline still acting like the biggest bully in the playground

features@mirror.co.uk

Dubya's highs & lows

January 2001

Sworn in after beating Al Gore in Florida, where brother Jeb is governor, amid claims votes for his rival were not counted.

Sept 11 2001

Told of attacks during visit to a school.

Oct 7, 2001

Us and UK attack Taliban in Afghanistan.

Jan 2002

First prisoners arrive at Guantanamo Bay. Names Iran, Iraq, and North Korea the "axis of evil".

March 2003

Us missiles hit Baghdad as invasion starts. On May 1, he proclaims: "Mission accomplished."

April 2004

News of abuse by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq emerges.

Sept 2005

Accepts blame for slow rescue after Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans.

July 2006

Greets PM with words "Yo Blair!" at G8 summit.

March 2008

Death toll of US troops in Iraq is 4,000. In September he presides over financial meltdown.

Jan 2009

Has the lowest approval rating ever recorded.

MrBruce said...

God bless HRC, the BendBitch.

Why the Obama/Clinton path to Mideast peace will fail

Michael Lerner

Thursday, January 15, 2009

There is little chance peace can be brought to the Middle East unless it is imposed on both Israel and Palestine by the international community.

Calling for an international peace conference and an immediate cease-fire ought to be the first foreign policy priority for the Obama administration.
Instead, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Rodham Clinton's remarks to the Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday committed the Obama administration to a path that is certain to fail as it has throughout the past several decades.

She stressed three elements of her position:

-- The United States remains committed in its support of Israel, which guarantees that it cannot play the role of "honest, neutral broker of peace."

-- The United States restates that it will not negotiate with Hamas until it recognizes Israel (which Hamas has already said it would not do, though it has been willing to negotiate a cease-fire agreement with Israel and announced that it is prepared to negotiate a new agreement that could last for 20 or 30 years).

-- The Obama administration will work to bring the two parties together for peace negotiations.

This position is at odds with the views that Obama articulated when he was seeking the Democratic nomination. At that point, he made clear that we should negotiate with Iran and Syria, which both pose more serious threats to American interests than Hamas.

The difference, of course, is the Israel lobby to which Obama and Clinton have repeatedly paid obeisance. That lobby, representing the most hard-line elements in the Jewish world but also tens of millions of Christian Zionists who support the militarist perspective in dealing with Arabs and Palestinians, has insisted as a matter of faith that American politicians promise not to deal with Hamas. In the 1980s and 1990s, the lobby insisted that the United States not negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The Obama administration's game plan, according to several Israeli analysts, is this: Call for a cease-fire that will freeze in place Israel's commanding military position in the West Bank and Gaza after allowing Israel some more time to finish its task of wiping out Hamas operatives in Gaza, then hope that the military success of the Israelis will strengthen Ehud Barak (head of the Israeli Labor Party) and Tzipi Livni (head of Olmert's Kadima party) in Israel's February elections; anticipate that these two will form a government to negotiate a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority, whose power will be strengthened as Palestinians witness the defeat of the military option proposed by Hamas.

Unfortunately, the Palestinian state likely to be produced by these negotiations will be neither economically nor politically viable. Barak and Livni will not have the power to make serious concessions to the Palestinians, so the government they likely will form (with Secretary of State Clinton and the Obama administration's participation) will be one that allows the Israeli army to crisscross the Palestinian state in order to safeguard the 400,000 Israelis who will continue to live in settlements. The state thus created will resemble a patchwork of little city-state cantons that will not look or feel to the Palestinians like a real state.

While the weak Palestinian Authority may accept an arrangement of this sort, the vast majority of Palestinians will eventually wake up to understanding that this U.S. -negotiated deal is little more than an agreement by Palestinians to police themselves while Israel retains its settlements and its military dominance of Gaza and the West Bank.

Eventually, the Islamic fundamentalist movement will reappear and gain new strength, and resume the struggle, while Israelis and Americans cry foul because they gave the Palestinians a state.

The only viable alternative is for Obama to call for an international conference of the European Unon, Israel and the Arab States, the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and, yes, Iran and India as well, and allow that international conference to impose a solution that provides security and justice to both sides. Only an imposed settlement has the slightest chance of being just to Palestinians - the precondition for a lasting peace, and a secure Israel.

Hard as it might be to push the Obama administration in this direction, it will be less difficult than getting Secretary of State Clinton to use American power to directly force Israel to be responsive to the minimum needs for peace and justice for the Palestinian people.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine: a bimonthly Jewish and Interfaith Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. He is chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives ( www.spiritualprogressives.org), author of 11 books and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco.

tim said...

Bunch of stuff in the Bulletin today.

Tetherow defaults and problems. COCC sucking. Downtowners trying to decide if they want to pay Chuck Arnold's salary. Gottschalks in Bend doing fine for now.

Anonymous said...

tim said...
Bunch of stuff in the Bulletin today.


+

Huh?

Is that the Jerusalem Post-Bulletin?

Or the Zionist Bulletin-Review?

Not familiar with that, please provide a link...

Anonymous said...

HB Miller Bitch Wife has big plans to sell COCC land for PROFIT $$$. Folks the State Land Grant gave the LAND for FUCKING EDUCATION. NOT AIPAC LOTTERY.

****

COCC plans mixed-use development
Land-rich and money-poor college sees empty property as a way to raise funds
By Sheila G. Miller / The Bulletin
Published: January 15. 2009 4:00AM PST

What: A public meeting to discuss COCC’s plan to create a special planning district for mixed-use development on college-owned land.
When: 5 to 6:30 p.m., Wednesday
Where: COCC’s Barber Library, second floor
For more information, contact Director of College Relations Ron Paradis at 541-383-7599 or at rparadis@cocc.edu
Comment on this article:

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A 40-acre combination of retail, residential and other revenue-creating development could be on the horizon as Central Oregon Community College considers creating a special district to build on much of its unused property.

The college will apply to the city of Bend for a special planning district, much like The Old Mill District or NorthWest Crossing, that would allow a variety of development to take place on the land near Mount Washington Drive and Shevlin Park Road.

The college wants to make money off of the property, particularly at a time when state funding seems likely to dwindle, and also hopes to create business-education partnerships with retail or other commercial groups. Development on the property could include shopping, restaurants and housing, as well as parks or trails.

Ron Foerster, the college board chairman, believes the special district is a good idea.

“What the college is trying to do is find ways of improving the financial efficacy of providing education to people,” Foerster said. “By that I mean providing more and better courses and facilities for education at a lower cost, if possible.”

But, Foerster said, that will require using the funds it has.

“(The college is) kind of land-rich and money-poor,” he said. “So we’re looking and exploring for ways of using our asset more effectively.”

The district would define how the land can be used. Currently, the land is zoned for single-family residences, and if the district is approved, the area could be used in a variety of other ways.

Developing the district would keep the college from having to ask the city for an exception to the current residential zoning every time it wants to build something new.

The special district would encompass the entire campus, as well as about 40 acres along Shevlin Park Road that are currently unused. That 40 acres, which would be called the Campus Village area, could include housing, retail shops, parks, education buildings and other development. Another 30 acres the college owns would remain untouched for the time being.

Colin Stephens, the city’s planning division manager, said he had been in discussions with college administrators during the past few months about the plan.

The district, Stephens said, would create a list of development standards within the campus area. For example, the district might include retail and residential areas in addition to education buildings.

Within the new district, there would be two zones: The core campus area would be purely for educational purposes, while the Campus Village area would have more development opportunities.

Stephens said he expects the zoning change to take between three and four months to complete.

The area the college wants to develop in the district is already slated to house the college’s culinary institute.

“Our long-range plan doesn’t require us to use that for providing education directly,” Foerster said. “So we have been looking at getting it rezoned so it can be used by commercial enterprises or private people.”

COCC President Jim Middleton said the college has been working on the development for three years.

“We have talked about doing the development on the south edge of the campus to generate income and to energize a business-educational linkage,” he said.

Middleton said in early 2008, the college selected Bill Smith, whose company designed The Old Mill District, to be the master developer for the Campus Village area, but Vice President for Administration Matt McCoy said the developer and college are still negotiating the terms of the deal.

The idea is to allow residential, retail, educational, business and recreational buildings in Campus Village; some of those still would not be allowed in the core campus area. Middleton stressed the college doesn’t plan to sell the land; rather, he wants to create long-term leases.

“We want to be as sensitive as we can that anything we build there is designed in a manner that we could not renew the lease and immediately shift those to classrooms for the college,” he said. “We’ve been saying ever since I’ve been here that we need to look at generating alternative revenue streams. Purely depending on the state, tuition and local property taxes will not keep pace with the college’s needs.”

Foerster said there was a renewed urgency, with the state’s budget downturn.

“I think we’re at the point where we want to rezone and get serious,” he said. “We’re looking at uncertain financial times, and we’re seeing the continuing creep in the cost of education, and by putting some of our real estate to use we’ll generate revenue and hopefully keep the cost of education down.”

There’s no set timeline, Middleton said, but he hopes the city will approve the special district by summer.

“Then any project that we would propose would then be proposed in line with those rules,” he said.

On Wednesday, the college will hold a public meeting about the proposal, and then administrators are expected to send the proposal to the city, which will do an internal review of the plan. Staff will then make a recommendation to the Bend Planning Commission about the district and hold public hearings before sending on a recommendation to the City Council. The council will also hold a public hearing and make a decision about the district.

Sheila G. Miller
can be reached at 541-617-7831 or at smiller@bendbulletin.com.

Anonymous said...

“(The college is) kind of land-rich and money-poor,” he said. “So we’re looking and exploring for ways of using our asset more effectively.”

###

Prostitute the 'children' this is what third worlds country's do.

"The (college) is kind of child-rich, and money-poor. He said. "So we're looking at auctioning the children off to pedophiles by the hour so we can subsidize our salary".

The Zionist-Bulletin fully endorses anything that guarantees public payroll is met. "God's chosen people have to eat also", say's Costa.

Bewert said...

CACB 4.57

MrBruce said...

JEWISH ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE RISE OF THE LEFTIST ASCENDANCY IN ISRAEL

by Steven Plaut

One of the greatest ironies of Jewish history is that the secular Zionism of the nineteenth century was formulated precisely for the purpose of offering an alternative to the assimilationism and Jewish "self-hatred" of the Diaspora. Zionism arose as a response to both assimilationism and anti-Semitism. Who then could have dreamed that the fulfillment and realization of Zionism would be accompanied by the emergence of the most malignant manifestations of Israeli self-hatred and Jewish anti-Semitism, this in the state of Israel and the land of Zion. The very same Zionism that was designed to offer an alternative to Jewish assimilationism saw in fact the emergence of a uniquely bizarre movement of assimilationism right inside the Jewish state itself, in the form of "Post-Jewish Israelism" and "Post-Zionist" Jewish anti-Semitism.


ROOTS OF ISRAELI ANTI-SEMITISM

Until very recently in Jewish history, it was widely presumed that secular Zionism and the establishment of Israel had achieved an irreversible victory over the movements of Jewish assimilationism and self-hatred, at least among Jews living inside the Jewish state, but also to a large extent among Diaspora Jews as well. Secular Zionism represented a blending of modernity with Jewishness that involved neither the assimilationism of the radical anti-Orthodox "reformers" among Jews in the Diaspora nor traditional Orthrodox rejectionism of modernity. It had achieved this via the engineering of "Israeliness," which was a new phase of identity for Jews who lived inside their own Jewish state. "Israeliness" was ever-so-modern, with high-tech industries cropping up everywhere like mushrooms, with European standards of living and lifestyles, with prestigious universities and scientific institutions, not to mention a military of legendary prowess. And all this was taking place inside a state whose raison d'etre was its Jewishness, its serving as a national home for Jews.

Certainly Israeliness had its problems, not least of which was a dubious, if not outright hostile, attitude towards Jewish tradition. Israel's intellectual, journalistic, academic and artistic elites long displayed a deep animosity towards matters of religion and towards religious people, an antipathy shared by parts of the broader secularist population. This hostility was fanned in part by resentment at the powers of the politicized religious Establishment. Anti-Orthodox bigotry has long been the primary form of bigotry in the country. It escalated after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a religious law student, and it found perhaps its greatest expression in the surprising electoral achievements of the Shinui Party, reconstituted as an anti-Orthodox Party under the leadership of Joseph "Tommy" Lapid..

Beyond knee-jerk hostility to Jewish religion and tradition, "Israeliness" also had other dubious roots. There was always a strong "Canaanite" trend present in Israeli society, especially among its intellectual elite, which insisted that Israelis represented a new "post-Jewish" nationality, and so were essentially an altogether non-Jewish ethnic group. (The "Canaanites" were a movement of Israelis in the 1950s and thereafter who attempted to detach Israeliness from Jewishness and create a new "non-denominational" Hebrew-speaking "nationality" of "Israelis", one that could encompass the Arabs as well.) As such, these new "Canaanized Israelis" believed they had little in common with Diaspora Jews and even less with Diaspora history. Many a "Canaanized" Israeli Jew insisted that he had far more in common with the Druse and Bedouins of the country than he did with any Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. Another of the many forms of backlash against Diaspora Jewishness was a ferocious hostility to Yiddish.

In the first decades of its existence, the celebration of "Israeliness" in Israel took many forms, including those that downplayed the role of Jewishness in the state. The Israeli school curriculum at secular schools, where the majority of Israeli children attend, was largely stripped of Jewish content. Jewish history in the typical Israel school ended at Masada or with Bar-Kochba and then mysteriously rematerialized at the first Zionist Congress in Basel. Jewish religion, other than the Bible, was eliminated almost altogether from the curriculum, except in the religious schools. The result is that today many an Israeli teenager cannot complete the sentence that begins with the words "Shma Yisrael", and few can correctly explain what the Amida is.

The celebration of Israeliness was also widely believed to offer the ultimate path towards resolution of Arab-Jewish differences. After all, there was no reason why Arabs could not follow the example of the more "Canaanite" Jews and embrace with enthusiasm the new "Israeliness", an "Israeliness" that would transcend religion and pre-Israeli ethnicity or denomination.


HOW THE SECULAR LEFT FUELS THE GROWTH OF ISRAELI HOSTILITY TOWARDS ISRAEL

National challenges and deluded "Canaanitism" aside, until recently few would have questioned the basic conclusion that secular Zionism was an unqualified Jewish national success. The leadership in the state of Israel may have been filled with certain self-delusions, but ordinary Israelis were not assimilating into any alien gentile ethnicity or nationality as were so many Diaspora Jews. Israelis would always remain Jews, even if only deluded Jews knowing little about Judaism. Hebrew was their everyday language of communications. Jewish holidays were the bank holidays. Jewish symbols were the symbols of state. Moreover the secular Zionist merging of Judaism with modernity appeared to be stable for the very long run. It was not threatened by modernity even in its most extreme forms.

The axioms concerning the ability of secular Zionism to overcome the traditional threats to Jews of anti-Semitism, assimilationism and self-hatred came crashing back down to earth in the 1990s. There emerged inside Israel a movement of mass Jewish anti-Semitism, which effectively exerted its hegemony, first over the radical Left and the chattering classes of Israeli academia and journalism, and ultimately over the entire country in the form of the Leftist Ascendancy. Under this Leftist Ascendancy, the Left has continued to exercise control over much of national policy making, even when it is in opposition, indeed even when coalitions headed by the Likud have held power.

The rapid growth of Jewish anti-Semitism inside Israel during the "Oslo era" raises serious questions about just how successful secular Zionism really was. The Oslo era was accompanied by a massive assault on Israel's pride and confidence by its own leaders. Israeli intellectuals lectured the country about its original sinfulness. Israeli campuses were flooded with "New Historians" and "Post-Zionists", pseudo-academics rewriting history texts and school curriculum to promote the Arab "narrative" and the Arab version of history, the moral equivalents of Holocaust Deniers in other countries. Israeli politicians in the 1990s leapt forward, ready to strip the country of all of its Jewish national emblems, from the star on the flag to the words of the national anthem. And after 1300 years of discrimination against Jews by Arabs, Israeli politicians were implementing "reverse discrimination" programs, under which Arabs received preferences and Jews suffered quotas.

One after the other, Israeli politicians during the early and mid-1990s mouthed the post-modernist gibberish of the anti-Israel choruses from overseas, about how Israelis needed to stop ruling over another "people", had to learn to understand the "other", had to commemorate the "tragedies" the Jews had imposed upon the innocent Arabs and so make restitution. If no Palestinian people had ever existed in history, Israeli politicians were determined to invent one for peace.

World anti-Semitism exploded as a direct consequence of Israel's own politicians granting lip service and credibility to the anti-Jewish canards that had always been the propaganda underpinnings for hatred of Israel, including Israeli official acquiescence in accepting the rhetoric of the anti-Semites. Here were Israeli leaders agreeing that Israel was indeed a colonial "conqueror" and "outsider", an "oppressor" of Palestinians and the cause of Palestinian "suffering". Here were Israel's own leaders confirming that Palestinian barbarism and atrocities were ultimately the fault of Israeli "occupation" and Jewish insensitivity.

While Jewish assimilationism in the Diaspora has often been termed "self-hatred", the expression is misleading. Diaspora assimilationists are generally people who are simply indifferent to their Jewishness and want nothing to do with Judaism. They generally do not actively wish Jews harm (although there are some exceptions). Going further back in history, Jewish assimilationists were in general simply socially-mobile people, willing to jettison their Jewishness in exchange for opening of career doors and access to positions of status closed to Jews. By and large, these were not people who hated other Jews, although of course there were always some exceptions among these as well.

The Oslo era in Israel however saw the emergence, perhaps for the first time in history, of virulent and literal anti-Jewish bigotry among the intellectual, media and political Jewish elites of Israel. Israeli universities became petri dishes for Jewish anti-Zionists and anti-Semites, "Post-Jewish" leftist extremists openly collaborating with the enemies of their own country in time of war, people openly advocating the elimination of their own country and its merger into some sort of Palestinian state. Israeli campuses became in large part the occupied territories of the Leftist Ascendancy. There are today Israeli professors and lecturers who openly serve as Court Jews for the worst anti-Semites on the planet, including Islamist fundamentalists, neonazis and Holocaust Deniers. Israeli leftist faculty members tour the world, denouncing Israel before audiences of anti-Semites as a nazi, fascist, terrorist, criminal, apartheid country, engaged in systematic human rights atrocities.

Increasing numbers of self-hating Israeli academics openly call for Israeli national existence to be ended and for Israel to be replaced with a single state with an Arab majority and PLO hegemony. Israeli left-wing professors turn out mountains of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish political propaganda, often passing it off as "scholarly research." It is an open secret that on campus, leftist extremists with laughable and ludicrous publication records get hired, tenured and promoted, as acts of solidarity by other leftist faculty already inside the system. Israeli university governance is notoriously corrupt and politicized. Some of these tenured leftists then tour the world urging anti-Semites to boycott all of Israel, including the very same academic institutions in which they are employed and from which they draw salaries.

The campus was not the only headquarters for Jewish self-hatred. In the 1990s the Israeli public school system was also conscripted into proliferating anti-Israel pro-Arab ideology. Israeli politicians from the Left and some leftist "academics" seriously proposed that Israel create a National "Naqba Day", in which it atone for the very fact of its creation and the "catastrophe" that this creation caused to Palestinian Arabs. "Naqba Day" events are increasing common on Israeli campuses and occasionally in Israeli public schools. Israel is the only country on the planet in which schools and colleges regularly hold symposia devoted to expressions of mourning and remorse that the country in which they live exists at all, and in which they barely hide their desire to see their country annihilated.

The Israeli media has long operated under the nearly complete hegemony of the Far Left, a unique form of quasi-totalitarianism operating within the overall framework of a country with democratic institutions. The Israeli media have by and large taken their cues from the Academic Left, and campus Newspeak, including "postmodernist" gibberish, is now a regular part of the daily journalistic dose. Israel's daily newspapers have served as regular bludgeons against the country, promoting Arab propaganda as editorial and Op-Ed opinion and often even as news, blaming Israeli obstinacy and mistreatment of Arabs for all of the problems of the world.

Haaretz long ago ceased to be a newspaper or an organ of political pluralism, and operates as an instrument of Far-Leftist political indoctrination. Yediot Ahronot is only slight less biased. Maariv is the only Hebrew newspaper that maintains any semblance of pluralism, and even it is often much more often a platform for the Left than for the Non-Left. The three Israeli television stations compete against one another over which is the furthest to the Left and which can employ the largest number ofleftist political commentators. The main form of political pluralism in radio broadcasting ended when the Sharon government shut down Arutz 7.

The main manifestations of the Leftist Ascendancy have been the universities and the media, but other institutions, such as the Supreme Court, the intelligence services, and much of the officer class in the military, have also come under its sway. A large part of the secret of the success of the Ascendancy is the enormous funding it openly receives from institutions and people outside the country, those for whom Israel's best interests are decidedly NOT part of their agenda. Picayune "organizations", some of them communist front, are flooded with funding and fill the press and billboards with large political ads.

And Jewish anti-Semitism is more and more openly the driving force behind the fundamentalist theology of the Leftist Ascendancy. This obsession with self-flagellation among the Ascendant Leftists has produced a situation whereby each and every atrocity committed by Arabs, without exception, is greeted with calls from the Israeli chattering classes for MORE concessions and appeasements. Some, including the tenured extremists at the universities, go so far as to justify and celebrate Arab acts of terror as necessary to force Israelis to come to their senses and make peace.

For the past 12 years the Israeli elites have lived in a make-pretend world in which Jews are to blame for everything and Arabs are merely expressing "frustrations" at being "mistreated" for so many years by Jews. The fact that no Arabs ever launched any intifada in Arab countries, wherein their treatment by Arab regimes has always infinitely worse than by Israel (even if all Arab accusations against Israel are accepted at face value), never seems to matter to any of them.

The psychological war by Israel's elites against national pride, dignity and self-respect, indeed against national existence, has long been accompanied by a set of diplomatic policies expressing little more than self-loathing. Every atrocity by the Palestinians is greeted with new offers of concessions and goodwill gestures from Israel, which has been pursuing a policy holding that no act of Arab violence should go unrewarded. Ehud Barak surrendered to Hizbollah terror and withdrew Israeli troops from Lebanon, and, in so doing placed all of northern Israel, including the Haifa Bay and its refineries, within range of Hizbollah rockets. Israel rewarded decades of Syria's aggression, Holocaust Denial, harboring of German war criminals, and terrorism through its Hizbollah surrogates by offering to grant Syria not only the Golan Heights but also parts of pre-1967 Israel, with access to the waters of the Sea of Galilee.

The national policy of self-abasement was accepted with equanimity by much of the Israeli public, hoping against hope that the Osloid politicians promising light at the end of the appeasement tunnel would prove correct. The very same nation that had defeated the Arab hordes in 1948-9, in the Suez Campaign, in the Six Day War and in the Yom Kippur War, now morphed into whining defeatists. The one avenue for making peace that was declared by the elite as unthinkable was "Peace through Military Victory" over the country's tormentors. And all the while Israel's own government was subsidizing the venomous anti-Zionist extremists at the Israeli universities and elsewhere.

For thirty years or so after Israel's creation, few would have challenged the idea that secular Zionism had achieved an unqualified success in its begetting the new "Israeli". Israeli Jews were at last "normal" citizens of their own country, patriotic to the point of being insufferable, proud to the point of hubris, confident in themselves and in their military, sure of their moral justifiability. And then, just a few years later, these same Israelis were reduced to begging Yassir Arafat to allow his terrorist squad leaders to meet with Israeli army officers in order to maintain the facade of a "peace process" still operating. Israeli politicians were abandoning any pretense of conditioning further concessions to the Arabs on their abstaining from violence. Israeli leaders and intellectuals were endorsing the principle of Israel paying reparations and tribute to the very same Arabs who had attacked them and lost.

The 1990s were the era in which it became evident that a great many Israelis and most of the Israeli elite had lost their will to survive as a nation. After centuries in which Diaspora Jews maintained the most militant sorts of pride and self-assurance even while being mistreated, despised and humiliated, here were the Israelis of Oslo, possessing one of the great armies of the world, abandoning all pride and explicitly promoting self-humiliation. The same Israeli military that had rescued the Jewish hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, was suddenly incapable of rescuing a wounded IDF soldier bleeding to death in Joseph's Tomb in Nablus or protecting children under fire in Jerusalem neighborhoods. McClellenism had replaced audacity as the calling card of the Israeli Defense Forces. Here was an Israel unwilling to use force to prevent Palestinians from firing rifles, mortars and rockets into civilian homes, and instead was asking to hold talks with those doing the shooting, to work out differences and reach understandings.

An Israel less than two generations after the Holocaust was suddenly willing to hold "peace talks" with people who deny there ever was a Holocaust and who insist that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make Passover matzos. The same Jews who fought against enormous odds and won in 1948 were acquiescing in a "peace process" that involved unilateral peace gestures from Israel in exchange for the Arabs continuing to make war against the Jews.


JEWISH SELF-HATRED AND THE OSLO DEBACLE

The most fundamental question for this new Post-Oslo era requiring clear answers is how Israel could have allowed itself to pursue the Oslo peace process in the first place. The answers are very likely to point to the central role of Jewish anti-Semitism and self-hatred.

The great mystery about the Oslo "peace process" is not why it failed, which by now should be fairly obvious to anyone besides fundamentalist theocratic leftists, but why anyone in Israel could have been persuaded in the first place that it might succeed. Secular Zionism was supposed to "normalize" the Jewish people. I do not believe that the Oslo Debacle can be explained without noting the role of Jewish anti-Semitism in its implementation.

In the 1990s, we observed the leaders of Israel from the Israel Labor Party, together with the more radical elements within the Israeli Left, insisting that peaceful relations with the Arabs could only be achieved through a long process of Jewish self-deprecation, self-denial and self-humiliation. Israel's political elite claimed that peace could be achieved through Israel agreeing to turn over its heartland to terrorists, that security could be achieved by the abandonment of security and by Israel distancing itself from its own Jewish roots. They insisted throughout the 1990s that if only Israel would jettison its traditional defense policies and instead trust to the goodwill that would be generated by making concessions to the Palestinians, Jordanians, and the Syrians, then peace would break out. They convinced themselves that military force was obsolete and played no further role, this in the most barbarous region of the planet. They convinced themselves that peace could only be achieved through appeasement of evil and accommodation of anti-Semitism.

In the early 1990s, Yassir Arafat and the PLO leadership were far off in Tunisia, whither they had been banished as a result of the devastatingly victorious, if highly controversial, Israeli military campaign in Lebanon in 1982. The world - or at least the United States - had made its peace with the Israeli position that the PLO was not an acceptable partner in any Arab-Israeli peace talks and that the most that Palestinian Arabs could hope for would be a limited autonomy in parts of the "occupied territories", with no role for the PLO. The intifada violence that had begun in the late 1980s was essentially finished, with less and less incidents by the month and with terrorists so desperate for materiel they were concocting their own zip guns out of household materials, where Palestinian explosives were far more likely to kill the preparer than anyone else. True, Israeli troops were harassed by Palestinians throwing rocks, but this was a harassment that could have been ended at any time through a firmer response, albeit one with some fleeting public relations costs. The rock throwing generally threatened neither the soldiers nor the existence of the state of Israel.

But into this picture of near-pastoral tranquility came the Oslo "peace process" and snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. It was based upon the proposition that economic interests and consumerism had replaced military power as the determinants of international relations in the post-modern world. It sought to reduce tensions with the Palestinian Arabs, who had just been defeated in their intifada, by importing the PLO's leadership into the "occupied territories" and then allowing it to arm itself and build up an army in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The Israeli government provided many thousands of rifles to Palestinian terrorists sworn to destroying the country and enormous bankrolls.

Seven years after the "peace process" had begun, Prime Minister Ehud Barak was negotiating handing over to the PLO the Old City of Jerusalem, including control over the Western Wall, in addition to slabs of pre-1967 Israeli territory in the Negev -- all this while the PLO murdered Jews every day. The PLO's response to this obsequiousness was to launch a war against Israel in the form of the "Al-Aqsa Intifada".

Today, as a direct result of the imposition of Oslo by the Leftist Ascendancy in Israel, the army of tens of thousands of PLO soldiers possesses anti-aircraft missiles that threaten Israeli civilian and military air traffic. About 1400 Israelis have been murdered as a direct result of the implementation of the policies of the Left, with tens of thousands of other lives broken and embittered. An entire generation of Israeli Jewish children has been traumatized. The PLO terrorists now possess anti-tank weapons, al-Kassam rockets and katyusha missiles. They have shelled civilian areas inside pre-1967 Israel. The Gaza Strip is today a large mortar and explosives factory. The goodwill measures of Israel have produced a campaign of Nazi-like hatred led by the PLO, of which the world has seen no parallel since the 1940s, down to and including virulent Holocaust Denial accompanied by Holocaust justification (never mind the contradiction).

Every single prediction by the pro-Oslo camp has proved itself incorrect and every single warning by the opponents of Oslo has proved correct. The PLO was never interested in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict through compromise. That was a delusion of Israel's politicians. "Land for peace" was always a formula for peace that the Israeli elite insisted the Arabs accepted, but never something to which the Arabs themselves agreed. The PLO's ambition in establishing itself in the West Bank and Gaza was simply to use those areas as staging grounds for attacks against Israel, precisely as the demonized opponents of Oslo had predicted. These terror attacks are in the hope of ultimately drawing the Arab countries into a new full-scale Arab-Israeli war, possibly one involving weapons of mass destruction.

The fact that leftist politics in Israel is more theology than ideology should be evident to all, and is in the response by the Left to the countless proofs that its thinking before 1992 was completely incorrect. In the early 1990s opponents to Oslo were demonized and declared deluded fanatics, people who simply hated peace. History has proven these "fanatics" not only correct but downright optimists.

Today the Israeli Left responds to each and every atrocity by demanding that Israel continue to seek to appease its way to a peace accord. The Left is insisting that new formulas and new concessions be offered, so that - at long last - a "permanent deal" can be signed with Arafat and his stormtroopers. The strength of the Leftist Ascendancy is evident in the fact that even leader after leader from the Likud has agreed to operate within the framework of leftist axioms and "thinking," down to and including repeated unilateral ceasefires, offers of unilateral "withdrawals," and endless "goodwill gestures." The power of leftist theology is so strong that even Likud governments seek to implement its policies of "peace through appeasement", where the preferred strategy for dealing with terror is concessions and niceness, rather than harshness and utilization of armed force.

The Leftist Ascendancy indubitably lies behind the cognitive dissonance that characterizes Israelis at the beginning of the twenty-first century, best exhibited in the fact that the vast majority of those who support continuation of the "peace process" also insist they believe that Arafat will follow any deal signed with more terror and more attacks on Israel and that the PLO will violate any future deals it signs.

Future historians will find it a daunting challenge to explain how it could have been that the Jews, often stereotyped as the smartest humans on the planet and with more Nobel Prize winners than any other group, could have allowed themselves to be snookered into the Oslo accords. How could seemingly intelligent people place their faith in such absurdities? No "normal" people would voluntarily entrust its national security to a group of Islamofascist terrorists and endanger its very existence because of a belief that internet services and consumerism had made defense and territory superfluous. No "nation" on earth would tolerate such a thing. Why did Israelis? The only possible explanation is that the Israelis who pursued Oslo were not really a nation. They had never really developed a national consciousness, but had been merely play-acting all along.

In fact, the entire Oslo episode of Jewish history is an indicator not only of the silliness and shallowness of Israeli politicians, but of something far deeper and far more ominous. Very simply stated, the Oslo "peace process" was the byproduct of Israeli self-hatred and Jewish assimilationism inside Zion. And Oslo may very well also indicate that secular Zionism has failed.

The failure of secular Zionism is one and the same with the crisis of "Israeliness". Oslo has shown how shallow and empty is the whole enterprise known as secular "Israeliness". In its bid to replace traditional Jewish identity with civic Israeliness, with Hebrew-speaking consumerism and post-Jewish civil patriotism, secular Zionism has in fact created a bizarre new entity riddled with confusion regarding its own identity, increasingly dominated by defeatists and "post-Zionists" exhibiting virulent self-hatred and self-abasement, willing to blame itself for all of the problems created by Arab aggression and fascism, and all too willing to sacrifice its national interests upon pagan alters of political correctness.

In the nineteenth century, much of the original opposition to Zionism by the religious leaders of Europe was based on their allegation that secular Zionism was thinly-disguised assimilationism dressed up in nationalist symbolism. How ironic it will be if history books record that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first proved them essentially correct.

Much of the problem can be traced to the bankrupt notion that some sort of Israeliness can exist separate from Jewishness. This is the strange form of "assimilationism" that has resulted from the attempt to create a "Post-Jewish" Israel. No Israeliness well-anchored in Jewishness could have sanctioned a set of policies based on the proposition that violent anti-Semitism was somehow the fault of the Jews and the result of mistreatment of others by Jews. An Israeliness well-grounded in Jewish consciousness would never have given rise to a struggle for acceptance based upon the presumption that people hate Jews because of Jewish sins, selfishness, shortcomings, and misdeeds. Only people detached from and ignorant of Jewish history could have believed that violent anti-Semites can be bought off with promises of high-tech investments and five-star tourist hotels.

Now, in the emerging post-Oslo era, the charade has come to an end. The Leftist Ascendancy and Secular Zionist "Israeliness" have undercut the will to survive and very legitimacy of the State of Israel. They are what gave birth to the pathology of self-deception and self-loathing that produced the Oslo phenomenon.

MrBruce said...

Imagine Cracker mAss & Co going below $5, who would have guessed??

MrBruce said...

Umpqua & CAcb getting bitch slapped today, must be all that fucking BEND land going back to the bank.

Never been a better time to quit paying payments on under-water loans due to be called.

Hello Texas Ratio soon to be at the critical 100 mark.

The end is near.

Could you all imagine 'Bend' losing its "LIQUIDITY"???

Remember just a week ago CACB told MERENDA "NO MORE CHOCOLATE".

The fudge packing of AIPAC elitists running Bend is over, now theft now will have to fall back to the old fashion way.

AIPAC elitists selling worthless-free land to the City, and AIPAC elitists buying 'cheap' but valuable land from COCC.

Anonymous said...

How to tell fake bruce from real bruce quickly:

Mouse over the blue name bruce. Look at the bottom of your browser in your status bar. If the link ends in 84, its fake bruce and can be ignored. If it ends in 41, its real bruce and at least warrants a read.

The bruce impostering is becoming ridiculous and fucking boorish.

Anonymous said...

SocGen predicts US depression and Chinese trade war. Hate to pile on.

http://www.financialweek.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090115/REG/901159992/1036

Anonymous said...

"Mouse over the blue name bruce. Look at the bottom of your browser in your status bar. If the link ends in 84, its fake bruce and can be ignored. If it ends in 41, its real bruce and at least warrants a read."

+

And why are the real bruce comments worth reading and not the fake bruce comments?

I judge all comments based upon the character of their content, not on the color of their name.

I think everybody should comment as bruce, then everybody would be equal.

hbm said...

"The bruce impostering is becoming ridiculous and fucking boorish."

*

I respectfully disagree.

The many bruce comments (both real and imagined) are quite provocative and interesting. This has been a great week for me to remove myself from the dialogue and just read the many great comments.

Anonymous said...

>And why are the real bruce comments worth reading and not the fake bruce comments?

Have you fucking read them? I actually searched for a Fireworks plugin that would ignore all comments from a particular user. Unfortunately, none exist.

Anonymous said...

This blog has gone to shit this week.

This is why most blogs eventually adopt comment moderation.

Kind of like why for FREE MARKETS to work, you must have some regulation.

Some rules of the game.

Otherwise a small number of people (one person) destroys the whole thing.

I agree with the person who said:

"I actually searched for a Fireworks plugin that would ignore all comments from a particular user"

Keep searching!

Certainly we can't depend on Homer to delete all the bullshit.

*

Keep the focus on the economy.

Keep the focus on Central Oregon.

*

If you don't have anything to say about these two topics, then say NOTHING at all.

tim said...

Is this a fake buster coming here making the site boring so no one reads it anymore?

I'm really skeptical that real buster would drive people away like this.

Bewert said...

Wonder if Dunc wants to pay Chuck Arnold to close off his street:

Downtown Bend Business Association wants a new fee structure

Downtown Bend businesses that are not members of the Downtown Bend Business Association could see a spike in their Economic Improvement District fees this spring, while those that are members would see their fees drop under a new plan proposed at a regular monthly meeting Wednesday.

If supported by at least two-thirds of downtown property owners and passed by the Bend City Council in March, the new three-year EID levy would require all downtown businesses to pay for membership in the association, said Chuck Arnold, executive director.

EID fees pay for all those things that a visitor to downtown Bend might take for granted, including flower baskets, holiday lights and snow removal. Events organized by the association, such as Art Hop, Oktoberfest and sidewalk sales, also would be in jeopardy if the extension of the EID is not passed, Arnold said. So would the executive director’s salary.

The EID was created in 2007 by a vote of the property owners who elected to assess themselves 11 cents per square foot of commercial space to improve downtown. Those costs can be passed onto to business owners through their rent. If renewed, the new levy would be 15 cents per square foot, Arnold said.

Downtown Bend Business Association members, comprised of about 60 percent of the estimated 200 downtown businesses, pay the association dues that benefit the entire downtown, he said.

“There is no question that these are challenging times, but the majority of business owners will see a reduction in their fees because we will spread this around,” he said.

EID costs would increase 4 cents per square foot for nonmembers. For a 1,200-square-foot commercial space, for example, association dues would rise 36 percent, from $132 per year to $180 per year.

A dues-paying member with a 1,200-square-foot property, who would pay the same $132 in EID fees plus about $400 in dues under the current arrangement, would pay the same $180 per year under the new EID, a 66 percent decrease, according to Arnold.

For it or against it

Support from downtown business and property owners at the meeting appeared solidly in Arnold’s favor.

“Bend’s downtown looks great,” said Bill Pon, a property owner and commercial broker for Lowe’s Commercial Properties. “Beautification is a vital part of downtown and it is important to keep it in place as we move forward.”

Past efforts to beautify downtown without a special district designed to do so have failed, said Karen Letourneau, owner of Bend Bungalow, a home and gift store on Wall Street.

“We’ve tried the volunteer approach and it doesn’t work,” Letourneau said. “That is why we have to do this. It’s a great proposal.”

A pair of nonmembers who were not at the meeting said they were opposed to any fee hikes, especially during tough economic times.

“I think it’s a bad move,” said Rob Butler, owner of Bend Mapping & Blueprint on Bond Street. Butler has owned the business, which has been in Bend since the 1970s, since 2005, he said.

Last year, Butler paid $316 in EID fees, which he said would go up at the same time revenues are down if the measure passed.

“If it did what it was supposed to do, it would be fine, but it does not,” he said.

Downtown events and beautification efforts have not helped his business, Butler said. In fact, downtown events often lead to less business, he said.

“I think the association has good points and good value if its intent is to help promote business, rather than just creating a look for downtown. But we’re going to beautify a bunch of empty buildings the way this (recession) is going,” he said.

Wendy Sexton, owner of Trivia Antiques on the corner of Bond Street and Minnesota Avenue since 1984, said she cannot afford any more fees.

“Whatever happens, I get the cost passed on to me,” she said. “I can’t afford the rent as it is.”

###

Isn't this taxation without representation? Called a fee, of course.

Bewert said...

Speaking of the BULL, I thought it was pretty funny they put El Gordo's pic up with that article on SCHIP being tripled, since he isn't actually in the Senate anymore...

Costa is so blatant it's pretty funny. Great oped from Krauthammer in today's BULL, too, basically saying exterminate all Gazans or Israel won't be safe. The BULL is farther right than the OC Register, which I thought was impossible.

Bewert said...

Re: I'm really skeptical that real buster would drive people away like this.

###

Been wondering the same thing at times...

Anonymous said...

>>>I'm really skeptical that real buster would drive people away like this.

At least real Buster cares about Bend and can relate thoughts back to it sooner or later. The fake Bruce is just an idiot.

Anonymous said...

Probably a Realtor or builder trying to shoo people from the truth (with the inflammatory Gaza distraction).

Pretty common nowadays on lots of blogs. And yes, some people have to moderate or lose all readers as the troll dominates.

LavaBear said...

At least Pork Chop was humorous with his made up shit. Fake Bruce isn't worth engaging in conversation.

Cracker ass just might skip the 4 handle all together and head right on to the 3's.

Bewert said...

Some real news about the City:

John Russell is no longer a city employee. He's contracting with the City, and Jerry Mitchell seems to be in charge of the Econ Dev/Urban Renewal department. That's a major surprise.

Bewert said...

That Financial Week article somebody posted the link to above is well worth a read:

More good news: Depression, stock rout ahead, says SocGen

Strategist Edwards sees 40% plunge in S&P, looming trade war with China; market to 'slide sharply

January 15, 2009 9:08 AM ET

Societe Generale said on Thursday that the United States’ economy looks likely to enter a depression and China’s could implode.

In a highly bearish note, veteran cross-asset strategist Albert Edwards said investors should now cut equity exposure after a turn-of-the-year rally and prepare for a rout.

He predicted that the S&P 500 index of U.S. stocks could be set for a fall of around 40% from recent levels.

Mr. Edwards also raised the danger of a global trade war with China.

“While economic data in developed economies increasingly reflects depression rather than a deep recession, the real surprise in 2009 may lie elsewhere,” Mr. Edwards wrote.

“It is becoming clear that the Chinese economy is imploding and this raises the possibility of regime change. To prevent this, the authorities would likely devalue the yuan. A subsequent trade war could see a re-run of the Great Depression.”

Mr. Edwards has long been one of the most bearish analysts in London, first with Dresdner Kleinwort and then with SocGen.

But he called in October for clients to increase their exposure to equities, which he said were due a rebound.

“We believe that the market is (now) set to quickly slide sharply toward our 500 target for the S&P,” he said.

The S&P 500 is currently at 842, up about 14 % since hitting a low in November.

Bewert said...

CACB 4.36

Volume almost triple the average. Patti must be in full war room mode by now.

Bewert said...

CACB's low today: 4.08

Ugly.

Bewert said...

Looking at the individual trades in the last hour, it looks like CACB is buying it's own shares on 100 share upticks to bring the price back up by the end of the day. The CACB meteorite may yet enter the atmosphere and burn up.

Duncan McGeary said...

The hassle is getting to be too much.

I just don't want to scroll down all those useless messages anymore.

Time to find more useful sites, I guess.

I say this not in anger but sadness.

hbm said...

I say this not in anger but sadness.

Yes. Sadness.

Perhaps me & Dunc and bruce should start our own Bend Blog, not just on the RE implosion, but all things Bend. With moderation to kill the trolls.

Anonymous said...

I know. Sadly, this site once was more useful then BEBB. It's not anymore. Over there they delete, over here they obfuscate. BEBB2 is useless as there is no traffic, and Porkchop is the only one that posts there.

Sad.

Bewert said...

Re: I just don't want to scroll down all those useless messages anymore.

###

Dunc, do what I do--hit the END key and them PG UP until you run into the nonsense. You skip most of it pretty quick. A lot faster than scrolling down.

I tend to post in clusters, as should be obvious by now. When I need a break or have a little extra time.

tim said...

>>Dunc, do what I do--hit the END key and them PG UP until you run into the nonsense. You skip most of it pretty quick. A lot faster than scrolling down.

Then you lose comments that are wedged between Gaza crap.

The messages might as well have been deleted.

If we give up, though, the Realtor troll wins.

LavaBear said...

>If we give up, though, the Realtor troll wins.

I was hoping he would jump back onto the "nofollow" bandwagon because that was soooo much more interesting than the gaza crap.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps me & Dunc and bruce should start our own Bend Blog, not just on the RE implosion, but all things Bend. With moderation to kill the trolls.

I didn't post that, but I agree with it. In a misguided interpretation of "free speech" Homer has allowed his blog to become infested with morons who evidently spend the evening getting shitfaced at the brewpub and then spend the night posting incoherent rants here.

Aaron Switzer tries his best to keep trolls out of the Wandering Eye blog, which naturally infuriates the trolls. Too fucking bad. Such people have nothing worthwhile to contribute and only use the blog to vent their hate and hostility.

tim said...

Seems like Dunc's blog is fine the way it is.

Anonymous said...

Aaron Switzer tries his best to keep trolls out of the Wandering Eye blog, which naturally infuriates the trolls. Too fucking bad. Such people have nothing worthwhile to contribute and only use the blog to vent their hate and hostility.

*

Aaron doesn't have any thing to do with keep the eye clean on non-hbm correct material, hbm is the person who does all the deleting.

One persons spam is another persons ham

We already have a group community that is 'moderated' by hbm, its called the sore-eye, those that want it know where to go, or do you need a link?

Anonymous said...

http://www.tsweekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=106&Itemid=153

*

So there you go, get homer to book-mark the above, and anybody that wants to be deleted and moderated by HBM 24/7 can be happy. Shit we already have the BEBB board moderated by rdc/bendbb, there are so many paradises already.

Why the fuck does free speech and non-moderation ( CONTROL ) fucking drive HBM into a fucking AIPAC conniption?

Because Swizter, Miller, ... et-al are AIPAC whores and they want everyone to be moderated but themselves.

Want to see where HBM moderation will lead?? Just visit the top link and read the 'controlled' HBM topical drivel that his world permits.

Anonymous said...

When HBM worked as a journalist 10+ years ago at the BULL he was the worst fucking writer in history.

He was always Bob Woodwards little boy, even being older as he is.

Then he retired from the BULL and now works for peanuts where he bores people out of their fucking mind.

Anybody that needs their dose of HBM knows where to go, the real question is WHY the fuck does HBM come here? I can tell you why.

Material. HBM has a fucking loser idiot, that never made a nickel in his life, and today he's an old fucking loser, and in his misery wants everyone to be fucking miserable just like him.

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