I got banned from the WSJ comments “community” for commenting on this– Charles Koch’s whine about freedom, and how everybody’s picking on him.
Ironic, don’t ya think?
I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but in case you missed it: The Kochs are Birchers. (Their father was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, and made his fortune selling oil to the Nazis.) They are the farthest thing from patriots as you can get.
Robert Parry on Ukraine’s new IMF regime:
It’s a safe bet that most of the Ukrainians who flooded Maidan Square in Kiev in February did not do so because they wanted the International Monetary Fund to make their lives even more miserable by slashing subsidies for heat, gutting pensions and devaluing the currency to make everyday goods more expensive.
But thanks to the U.S.-backed coup that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych and replaced him with a regime including far-right parties, super-rich ”oligarchs” and technocrats with little sympathy for the suffering of average people, that’s exactly what happened. Although lacking legitimacy that would come from national elections, the coup regime pushed through the demands of the Washington-based IMF.
The process began just 10 days after the violent Feb. 22 coup that forced Yanukovych to flee for his life. IMF officials landed in Kiev on March 4 to hammer out a deal that acting Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, himself a chilly bank technocrat, has acknowledged is “very unpopular, very difficult, very tough.”
What is also striking about the IMF plan is that it puts virtually all the pain on average Ukrainians. There is nothing in the economic “reform” package that extracts some of the ill-gotten gains from Ukraine’s ten or so “oligarchs,” the multimillionaires and even billionaires who largely plundered Ukraine’s wealth after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
There is no plan for demanding that these “oligarchs” kick in some percentage of their net worth to help their own country. Instead, hard-pressed citizens of the United States and Europe are expected to carry the financial load.
Declaring that the seven million figure was obviously phony, Beck flew into a rage against Obama and the “rat bastards” in the media who refuse to hold him accountable for his pathological lying.
“This guy,” Beck said of Obama, “you put him in a military uniform, I’m not kidding you, you put him on a balcony in a military uniform, this guy is a full-fledged dictator.”
“He’s a sociopath!,” Beck proclaimed, later in the broadcast. “He’s sociopathic!.”
Then, after an hour of ranting about Obama and the press and the Republicans, Beck finally snapped and declared that he is “not going to pay attention to these people any more, I am not going to waste my life,” screaming that “I have a right to pursue my happiness, I have a right to do what I was born to do!”
“My state of mind is great,” he concluded, “’cause I’ve had enough”:
Upon returning from the commercial break, Beck resumed railing against all of these same people while simultaneously asserting that he was done paying attention to them.
H/t Price Benowitz LLP.
Do you believe this song is now 30 years old? I always loved Cyndi, and I loved her even more after I read her autobiography:
Nancy Sinatra:
Dionne Warwick:
If there is even one more act of Muslim terrorism, it is then time for Americans to start slaughtering Muslims in the streets, all of them.
— Patrick Dollard (@PatDollard) April 2, 2014
http://youtu.be/pfxB5ut-KTs
Just sounds like they want more diagnostic codes for the insurance companies:
Is nonconformity and freethinking a mental illness? According to the newest edition of the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), it certainly is. The manual identifies a new mental illness called “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD. Defined as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, argumentativeness, and being easily annoyed.
The DSM-IV is the manual used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental illnesses and, with each new edition, there are scores of new mental illnesses. Are we becoming sicker? Is it getting harder to be mentally healthy? Authors of the DSM-IV say that it’s because they’re better able to identify these illnesses today. Critics charge that it’s because they have too much time on their hands.
New mental illnesses identified by the DSM-IV include arrogance, narcissism, above-average creativity, cynicism, and antisocial behavior. In the past, these were called “personality traits,” but now they’re diseases. And there are treatments available.
The LGBT activists were the only progressives who pushed Obama hard, right from the beginning. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that they’re the only group who got what they wanted, but I don’t think so:
In a meeting with the heads of the five service branches in 2010, President Obama offered the leaders a choice: Support my efforts to end the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, or resign.
In a video obtained by BuzzFeed via a Freedom of Information Act request, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Robert Papp revealed that Obama was unwilling to compromise with service leaders over DADT during a meeting in 2010. “We were called into the Oval Office and President Obama looked all five service chiefs in the eye and said, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I cannot divulge everything he said to us, that’s private communications within the Oval Office, but if we didn’t agree with it — if any of us didn’t agree with it — we all had the opportunity to resign our commissions and go do other things,” he said.
Papp talked about the meeting during a Q&A session with U.S. Coast Guard Academy cadets following a leadership address to the corps on Jan 8. The admiral was asked how officers should respond to policies that they disagreed with but were required to enforce. “If I disagree morally with, it’s my obligation to voice that, regardless of the risk it might give my career,” he said. “I’ve been in those situations. I’ve been fortunate to have good leaders that have appreciated that.” Using himself as an example, Papp said it was OK for leaders to “not be thrilled” with a certain regulation, but if they didn’t “see anything terribly wrong with it,” it was their job as officers to support and enforce it.