HOPE FOR THE NEW WORLD ORDER!

Let me quickly clarify the meaning of “new world order”, which can mean several things depending on your level of sanity.  I’m talking about the new economic order of the world that settled into place when the western world’s financial and real estate industries collapsed.  You may have been hearing about countries like China, India and Brazil a lot more than usual lately and that’s because they have seats at a lot more tables now.  This is a result of what’s being called “The Great Recession” and let’s just simplify things by saying that these countries have a lot more chips in front of them at the global poker table than the west does these days.  Metaphors aside, China is still buying up dollars and most economists are praying that they continue to do so as the US gets back on it’s feet.

Now that we understand this new world order a little bit better, let me get to the hope part.  China is clearly a major rising power whose economy is soon to surpass all others in size and this is somewhat disconcerting because China has a very authoritarian government with nearly as many people in prison as the United States (I’ll save that one for another time).  The bright spot I’m talking about came from India.  Recent Indian elections were by far the largest exercise of democracy in human history with a total of 420 million votes and some amazing results.  A very diverse nation, most Indians are uneducated and isolated while some are connected and learned, but all turned out to be intelligent and yearning to fulfill their destiny. In general, the results showed a people that refused to support any political party that utilized hate, fear,  race, religion, or caste to gain that support.  So, we may be watching China closely, waiting and hoping for change, but we should be supporting India now as democratic brethren and continue forging a lasting relationship and partnership with this country.  A relationship that has already begun through the immigrant Indian population here in the US.

The below posts have been transferred from our previous site on June 2nd, 2009

DID WE ANSWER A JIHAD WITH A JIHAD?

Donald Rumsfeld’s cover sheets used on intelligence reports for Bush during the invasion and occupation of Iraq showed combat photos of American troops accompanied by militant Christian scripture.  We all know we wouldn’t be discussing this if these cover sheets hadn’t been thought up, printed and handed to the leader of our nation as part of an official Department of Defense intelligence report, but they were, so let’s find out if this is substantive or just some Liberal whine campaign.

We all know that Bush is a religious man; he was the first national leader in a long time to claim that God or at least the son of God, wanted him to be President.  We also know that he had a media slip several days after the 9/11 attacks and described our reaction to the attacks as a crusade, but is that all?  Is there nothing more?

We could add this to the mystifyingly growing list of reasons why we invaded the country and claim that W was beyond getting back at the man that tried to assassinate his daddy and if he had a second choice of reasons to preemptively invade the country besides WMDs, which he obviously got, then it might not be just to get control of the oil or even strategically disrupt the middle east and turn Sunni and against Shiite (the most bloodthirsty of explanations for our war in Iraq and the most popular in Israel), but maybe Bush actually relied on the first honest thing he clung to in his golden-spoon bailout of a life when a heart attack scared the living shit out of him. Maybe the one guiding light that he has always claimed has GUIDED him … was the final straw for our decider.

Is it such a stretch of the imagination to believe that George W. Bush digested the intelligence briefings as best he could and did all the strategery he could musterfy before he fell back on his religious understanding of the situation to check his final decision. He is after all a compassionate conservative, which could also be translated as a Christian conservative who always follows his guiding light, his savior, the one thing that brought him success, happiness and most important of all, the presidency of the United States.

The clearest message here can be gleaned once you realize that Donald Rumsfeld is a superior bureaucrat who knew his boss well.  It seems he was just following the principles of good journalism. You gotta have a good hook to get your audience’s attention and a Christian Jihad was the hook he baited for W.

MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE TEA PARTY HIGHLIGHTS MEDIA BIAS

May 4th, 2009 – Geneane Giraffalo calls the tea party goers a bunch of tea bagging rednecks and racists, but she vigorously defended her compatriots rights to display dissent during the Bush years.  She claims the tea party goers were all simply being racist against a black president and that these people don’t understand their history; they know nothing about the real Boston tea party. I can’t say I agree with her on this. We all know that a good portion of these attendees simply hate the idea of a black president being forced on them by some upstart young “majority”. It’s funny how democracy suddenly sucks when things don’t go your way for four or eight years, but that’s just a part of the American experience. However, I cannot, Geneane, comfortably say that the majority out there on tax day can be so simply pigeonholed. This is all becoming wasted speculation, though. Even as liberals laugh at Fox news headlines about the growing tea party movement it doesn’t change that fact that it is actually growing. It remains to be seen what kind of turn out the fourth of July tea parties will have and how it will compare to April 15th, but the entire issue will continue to highlight the reality of the American media spectrum. Please visit my political spectrum page for more information.

April 20, 2009 – We’ll do our best here to give each side’s best pitch and then break these arguments down and put the relevant pieces side by side for comparison.

Starting with the Democratic side first as the defending Republican side should get the last word. Basically, the democrats are still in a state of ecstasy from the victory and see anything the GOP does as ridiculous and only playing perfectly into their hands. After Rush showed an undisputable dominance over the national conservative dialogue, the Dems jumped on it, which was the right play and it was played well. The GOP hardcore ignored the liberal media once again, but those Americans that live on the fence saw the Republicans as a leaderless group of whiners.

The liberals are trying their best to do the same thing with the tea parties, but they have tried to put up Fox news and the conservative media as the ringleaders in a conservative media circus (it was a snowball kind of thing that started from a conservative commentator, actually). In reality, this is a libertarian event that Republicans have either co-opted or patriotically joined ranks with, depending on your perspective. The first impression from liberals seems to be that these tea party goers are complaining about taxes when most of them just got their taxes lowered and a rich minority of them are going to have their Bush tax cuts expire over a year from now, but most of them weren’t waving their signs about on the 15th of April for this reason. The more level headed conservatives and those that speak for them in the media stated that they came out to protest how their tax money is being spent right now and make no mistake it is being spent like mad. Liberals seem to be satisfied with the fact that Bush started throwing money around before Obama when the economic collapse started and so how can Republicans complain about it, but to be fair most republicans have admitted being as angry about Bush’s spending as they are about Obama’s. This still leaves the basic question over whether this spending spree is necessary or will it make things worse. We all agree that time will tell, but we can go a little further here.

This brings up the overall philosophy issue at hand which seems to be crystallizing the perennial divide between America’s two parties right now. Prolife vs. Prochoice is on the back burner, although it’s starting to boil like everything else and the war on terror or whatever people want to call it these days has filtered down to success or failure in Afghanistan and the survival of Pakistan, but the global economic recession has everyone’s attention around the whole world and it brings up the same overarching issue. Example, the US and UK have gone for spending their way out of this mess, while the EU dominated by Germany has decided to wait and see how effective the money spent by the US and UK is before throwing down any of their own money; We have one part of the world trying to spend like crazy and the other part afraid this is a bad idea.  Germans have a shrinking population and they don’t want to leave a bunch of debt to less children.  India, Brazil and China have taken the EU’s (i.e. Germany’s) view even though China continues to buy foreign currency.  So, we could say that if the main issue behind the tea parties is government spending, then that issue can be linked to the overall issue that the world is struggling with regarding spending our way out of the Great Recession.  Unfortunately for some, this lends legitimacy to what will be considered a movement in America now.  And what so wrong with that? Celebrating things from the perspective of our fore fathers isn’t all that bad, maybe we could rekindle our potentially vigorous hemp market back to what the forefathers made it. One thing is for sure, the more independent minded Americans that join the Tea Party the better.   (more to come.)

April 15th, 2009 – April 15th is a stressful day for most, but rarely does something good come from it. This year’s government collection day, however, has brought about an enlightening exposure of the true political fancies of America’s media establishment. To simplify, Fox news all but created the movement by coopting a libertarian tradition of protesting taxes and big government exemplified in what Ron Paul and others have called a tea party. Then we have CNN that took its usual left of center position by acknowledging the planned 500 to 700 city protest, but gave it minimal time while not taking the anti-Fox news angle too far; that was the chosen task of MSNBC which had as much fun as possible with the Maddow and Obermann tag team pushing the tea bag metaphor as far as they could while leveling their usual direct cannon fire at Fox news.
So there we have it; the cable news spectrum goes from extreme right Fox through left of center CNN and on to equally extreme left MSNBC. The various newspapers that are large enough to survive the current storm with loyal readers and strong internet support haven’t spent much time on the story until now, but it remains to be seen how the story will be treated by everyone during the media cycle’s clean up phase. Blog will be updated after checking media reactions.

Media reactions fuzzy on this as news cycle swept up by bigger events, please see my other posts.