3 cheers for this veteran. A vet who calls out Bush and Cheney and names them for the cowardly liars that they are. Two dudes who never served. Cheney getting 5 Vietnam War deferments and Bush, well, for “serving” in the National Guard, and the cover-up that was all about.

“Tomas Young, who was shot and paralyzed during an insurgent attack in Sadr City in 2004, five days into his first deployment, penned the letter from his Kansas City, Mo., home, where he’s under hospice care.”

Tomas had this to say, among other things…

“”I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.”

Way to go Tomas. I am sorry for what you have lost. But proud of you for the courage you demonstrate.

Here are a few excerpts;

“In 2011, Newsweek asked 1,000 Americans to take the standard U.S. Citizenship test, and 38 percent of them failed.”

“Widespread ignorance of objective reality poses a genuine threat to democracy. The people of the United States have ignorance in abundance.”

“In a 2011 study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science (PDF), Harvard economist Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke, took a look at Americans’ perceptions of how wealth is stratified in this country and what an “ideal” distribution of wealth might look like.

They found that “respondents vastly underestimated the actual level of wealth inequality in the United States, believing that the wealthiest quintile held about 59% of the wealth when the actual number is closer to 84%.”

Looks like the status quo continues. Americans are still lazy and stupid.

He helped lie us into the war back then, and couldn’t help but lie again trying to cover his ass. For instance, Frum said to make us feel sympathetic,”( from Glenn Greenwald’s column today);

“My youngest daughter was born in December 2001: a war baby.” To justify this characterization, he says that “when my wife nursed little Beatrice in the middle of the night, she’d hear F-16s patrolling the Washington skies,” and that “a few weeks before, a sniper had terrorized the Washington suburbs. Anthrax attacks had killed five people and infected 17 others. What would come next?” (In actuality, the anthrax attacks came from a US Army lab; the Washington sniper attacks were in 2002, not 2001, and were perpetrated by two Americans; and hearing some F-16s patrolling the sky is hardly the stuff of extreme war trauma, particularly when compared to what people in actual war zones regularly experience). Frum is right that the fear levels were extremely high in this time period, but that was due to a deliberate campaign orchestrated by the administration in which he served.”

They just can’t help themselves can they? What question I want to ask is one to all of those families who had a son or daughter who died in Iraq, “How does it feel to have lost a child  for a lie? For oil?” Why are you supporting these rascals? And what are you going to do about it.

To read Glenn Greenwald’s column about it, go here.

For just a taste, here is a little of what Glenn had to say…

“When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, his pledges of openness and transparency were not ancillary to his campaign but central to it. He repeatedly denounced the Bush administration as “one of the most secretive administrations in our nation’s history”, saying that “it is no coincidence” that such a secrecy-obsessed presidency “has favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to the sunlight.” He vowed: “as president, I’m going to change that.” In a widely heralded 2007 speech on transparency, he actually claimed that this value shaped his life purpose:

“The American people want to trust in our government again – we just need a government that will trust in us. And making government accountable to the people isn’t just a cause of this campaign – it’s been a cause of my life for two decades.”

His campaign specifically vowed to protect whistleblowers, hailing them as “the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government” and saying that “such acts of courage and patriotism. . . should be encouraged rather than stifled.”

And….

“Just this week, the Associated Press conducted a study proving that last year, the Obama administration has rejected more FOIA requests on national security grounds than in any year since Obama became president, and quoted Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney for its national security project, as follows:

“We’ve seen a meteoric rise in the number of claims to protect secret law, the government’s interpretations of laws or its understanding of its own authority. In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration.”

Re-read that last sentence in italics. Most of those policies have been covered here at length, and I won’t repeat them here. But what is remarkable is that this secrecy has become so oppressive and extreme that even the most faithful Democratic operatives are now angrily exploding with public denunciations.”

The liars just keep on lying.

After the planes hit the twin towers on 9/11, VP Cheney pretended that Pres. Bush authorized a shoot-down order. Cheney now admits that he never did.

Read this article by Maureen Dowd in the NY Times.

She says, among other things,

In a documentary soon to appear on Showtime, “The World According to Dick Cheney,” [Cheney said] “I got on the telephone with the president, who was in Florida, and told him not to be at one location where we could both be taken out.” Mr. Cheney kept W. flying aimlessly in the air on 9/11 while he and Lynn left on a helicopter for a secure undisclosed location, leaving Washington in a bleak, scared silence, with no one reassuring the nation in those first terrifying hours.

“I gave the instructions that we’d authorize our pilots to take it out,” he says, referring to the jet headed to Washington that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. He adds: “After I’d given the order, it was pretty quiet. Everybody had heard it, and it was obviously a significant moment.”

Surprise, surprise!

They are all liars. Every single one of them. Don’t believe a word any politician says, ever. Follow-up. uestion authority. Get the facts from multiple sources.

Income Inequality

Keep in mind while you watch it…. 1. US productivity has increased over 80% since 1979, but 2. median household income has not. It should be $92,000 not around $50,000.

To be more exact, productivity in the economy grew 80.4% between 1973 and 2011, but the real hourly median compensation of a worker only grew 10.7% (with almost all of the hourly compensation occurring in the late 1990′s). Contrast that to the period of 1948 to 1973, where the increases in productivity grew in tandem with worker compensation.

Take a look at these charts here. Wonder why you, the average citizen is doing so badly, but the 1% is doing great? These charts explain why.

Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high. Companiesare making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. (And some people are still saying that companies are suffering from “too much regulation” and “too many taxes.” Maybe little companies are, but big ones certainly aren’t).

Here are Yves comments;

This segment on BBC may not go viral, but it seems to be getting traction, based on the e-mails (hat tip readers Paul S and Marcus) and alerts in the comments section.

This is not an entertaining Rick Santelli-style rant, it’s a cool assessment of how the Euromarket crisis is likely to end, which he thinks is very badly. The flummoxed reaction of the BBC host suggests that the trader, Alessio Rastani, was a booking mistake.

But consider his second message: that Goldman and people rule the world and like him don’t care about what happens to the real economy. A depression is just a great investment opportunity if you see it coming and position yourself accordingly. Rastani is the bland, reasonable face of predatory capitalism.

Well, the great budget ceiling deception is over. Congress passed an increase to the debt ceiling, and Obama signed it. But, it was all a deception and a bunch of lies. Why? They could easily balance the budget and even run a surplus in one fell swoop. Using the NY Times Budget Puzzle, here is what I came up with to balance the budget (the puzzle itself has some flaws and forces you to use their choices, but its a start)….

Goal

Eliminate Projected shortfall of $418 billion in 2015 and $1,345 billion in 2030

My choices:

Cut foreign aid in half

Eliminate earmarks

Eliminate farm subsidies

Cut pay of civilian federal workers by 5 percent

Reduce the federal workforce by 10 percent

Reduce nuclear arsenal and space spending

Reduce military to pre-Iraq War size and further reduce troops in Asia and Europe

Reduce Navy and Air Force fleets

Cancel or delay some weapons programs

Reduce the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000 by 2013

Enact medical malpractice reform

Reduce the tax break for employer-provided health insurance

Return the estate tax to Clinton-era levels

Return investment tax rates to Clinton-era levels

Allow expiration for Bush tax cuts on income above $250,000 a year

Payroll tax: Subject some incomes above $106,000 to tax

Reduce mortgage deduction and others for high-income households

Millionaire’s tax on income above $1 million

Eliminate loopholes, but keep taxes slightly higher

Bank Tax

Did I reach my goal? YES! And even ran a surplus for 2015 and 2030!

None of my choices cut medicare, social security, raise the retirement age eligibility, medicare eligibility, transfers to the states, restrict access to disability, restrict access and pay of military retirees, or active duty personnel. They do fall heavily on corporations and the rich. Most of them are only returning to Clinton era levels.

See? This could easily be done. But our government is owned by the rich and big business.

Stop listening to government lies. Call your Congress Critter.

Want to know the truth? You hear all of these theories, about being overtaxed, or undertaxed, what works and what doesn’t. Whats the truth? I find its best to just take a look at the results. Data that hasn’t been massaged by some politician or corporate media outlet.

Take health care for instance. The argument is we have the best health care in the world here in the old US of A. But folks, the actual health data DOES NOT support that. Oh sure, we spend the most. But in terms of actually being healthy, of living longer, we are WAY down at the bottom of the list.

Which brings us to taxes. Do we really pay too much? Yes we do, for what we get. But take a look at what other developed countries get for their money. Yes, they pay a lot more in taxes than we do. But they have 100% health care, guaranteed schools, a higher quality of life.

For instance, look at this article recently published in the Globe and Mail. Germany pays about 34% of its GDP in taxes. The US only pays 24.8%. We should be a lot better off, right? I mean the rich people say so. The m ore money they have , the more investments they can make and create jobs for the middle and lower classes.

WRONG! It is a LIE!

From the blog post by Juan Cole where I found this article;

“There is obviously no direct connection between low tax rates and a high rate of economic growth in various countries in 2011. Germany is doing well (maybe 3%), the US is doing poorly. Germany’s unemployment is 7%, lower than the US. The argument that raising taxes on the wealthy would hurt growth or employment holds no water.”

Check out both the blog post and the article. And then you decide.