Eight Stages of Genocide

I have the privilege of being a student in two of Dr.Gregory Stanton’s courses: Human Rights Violations (The Genocide Course) and American Civil Rights Movements. He is an inspiration to me and many of my peers. He has motivated the UMW community to educate itself on human rights violations and take actions to prevent them. Please watch his discussion, in the video below, on the eight stages of genocide. I promise that it will open your mind to an effective manner of evaluating probably one of the most vicious crimes in human history.

Unemployment on the Rise….. and The Foreclosures Keep Coming..

Jobless rate jumps to 5-year high of 6.1 percent

Pundit Hypocrisy….

This is hilarious. Please take in this hypocrisy. Unfortunately, you will have to click the following link to watch the video.

Click Here for The Video

Obama and Community Organizing

Senator Obama explains the relevance of community organizing and how it has prepared him for the presidency. Interesting enough, Obama also raises the point that the GOP is focusing on short term career choices that Obama made directly out of college. The GOP is not talking about his role as a civil rights lawyer, state senator, or member of the U.S. Senate.

See it for yourself….:

McCain’s Qualifications in Question…

Click Here to Read the Editorial

POW the Verb, the Noun, the Excuse…

“John McCain has been exploiting his prisoner of war experience every chance he gets. He has used this story to justify everything from not knowing how many homes he has to his healthcare plan to his marital infidelities to his taste in music. The McCain campaign is even using his POW story in paid ads. Being a POW does not qualify someone for the Presidency” – Dr.Philip Butler (Fellow POW)

Alaska’s Windfall Oil Profits….

Why is the GOP so focused on the drilling for oil, when it is a known short run fix. Well, the fact of the matter is McCain himself has stated that he isn’t fluent in Economics. To add, Palin may have some other incentives to push for oil drilling. Check this out:

I typically do not post full articles, but I really appreciated the clarity of the information in the following article by Robert Scheer, the editor of Truthdig.com and contributing editor to The Nation.

Welcome to the People’s Republic of Alaska, where every resident this year will get a $3,200 payout, thanks in no small measure to the efforts of Sarah Palin, the state’s Republican governor. That’s $22,400 for a family of seven, like Palin’s. Since 1982, the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests oil revenues from state lands, has paid out a dividend on invested oil loot to everyone who has been in the state for a year. But Palin upped the ante by joining with Democrats and some recalcitrant Republican state legislators to share in oil company windfall profits, further fattening state tax revenue and permitting an additional payout in tax funds to residents.

No wonder she is popular with voters in a state whose residents pay no income or sales taxes but are blessed with state coffers rolling in cash at a time when all other states are suffering. Indeed, when the oil companies pay more taxes to the state of Alaska, they get to write that off against their federal tax obligation, leaving the rest of us to make up the shortfall.
The state of Alaska owns most of the oil-producing land and was getting upward of 85 percent of its budget from the oil companies that lease the fields, even before Palin helped increase the state’s cut. While other states fire schoolteachers because of the economic downturn, Alaska has, as Palin indicated in accepting John McCain’s offer to join him on the GOP ticket, more money than it knows what to do with. In a display of plucky arrogance at her coming-out press conference, Palin boasted deceptively that if Alaskans wanted that infamous bridge to nowhere, “we’d build it ourselves.”

She originally had supported having US taxpayers finance that boondoggle, before McCain and others in Congress blasted it.

Not that I blame Palin for wrangling for her state a bigger cut of oil company windfall profits; it’s just not an option that will work wonders for states without oil. Of course we can remedy that by having a federal windfall profits tax of the sort that Barack Obama dared propose, and which McCain and his fellow congressional Republicans have managed to quash. Their argument, rejected quite pointedly by Palin for Alaska, is that it would discourage oil companies from investing in boosting oil field yields.

McCain derided Obama’s call for the windfall profits tax, saying it would “increase our dependence on foreign oil and hinder exactly the same kind of domestic exploration and production we need.” I am far more interested in how McCain handles the contradiction between his and Palin’s position on windfall oil profits than whether he properly vetted her on her family-values commitment to the abstinence-only teenage sex education program.

Why is it a good thing for the folks up in Alaska to get a cut of exorbitant oil company profits, but not the rest of us, if we are all part of one nation? Didn’t taxpayers from across the US buy the place from the Russians? Isn’t it our federally collected tax dollars that have been subsidizing Alaska more lavishly than any other state, both before and after the bonanza of oil?

Just witness the success of Palin, who, as mayor of the hamlet of Wasilla, hired a big-time lobbying firm intimately connected with the state’s now-indicted Republican Sen. Ted Stevens and thus obtained $27 million in federal earmarks during her tenure. As the Washington Post calculated in a devastating report on Mayor Palin’s assault on the federal treasury, her home town of Wasilla (with about 6,000 inhabitants in 2002 when she was mayor) received $6.1 million, or $1,000 per resident in earmarks–almost as much as Boise, Idaho, got this year with a population that is thirty times larger.

It obviously helped to have Alaska’s now-indicted senator as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. And despite McCain’s claims that Palin distinguished herself by breaking with Alaska’s discredited Republican establishment in February, the governor sent Stevens a request for $200 million to support various state projects. With representatives like that, it’s no wonder that Alaska, despite its oil boom, is still at the top of states subsidized by federal dollars, receiving $1.84 back from Washington for every $1 that Alaskans pay in federal taxes. (California receives 78 cents for every $1.)

Unfortunately, looking to Palin for advice on helping the rest of us during the oil crunch, as McCain has promised, is a bit like asking a Saudi oil minister or Russia’s Vladimir Putin to provide a model for our nation’s economic woes. They hardly feel our pain at the pump.

- Robert Scheer

Joe Klein Reveals GOP Bullying….

Joe Klein of Time Magazine ended his most recent article with this:

There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is “a task from God.” The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.

Big League GOP Members Dismiss Palin

Former McCain strategist Mike Murphy: “It’s not going to work!”
Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan: “It’s over… They went for this, excuse me, political bull**** about narratives. Every time Republicans do that… they blow it.”
Murphy: “You know what’s really the worst thing about it? The greatest of McCain is no cynicism, and it is cynical.”

McCain’s Political Pawn

Although I believe that Palin’s future role as a grandmother has no place in politics, I do believe that the information that is being covered about her leads one to believe that her selection was in fact a last resort political move. She was not selected based on her experience or knowledge. Rather, she was selected at the very last minute in hopes of stirring the pot, darkening the spotlight on the DNC, and motivating disgruntle voters. Here is some more information that shows that McCain’s campaign did not properly research into this woman.

Some info for NYT:

“it was learned that Ms. Palin now has a private lawyer in a legislative ethics investigation in Alaska into whether she abused her power in dismissing the state’s public safety commissioner; that she was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party, which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede; and that Mr. Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge.

Aides to Mr. McCain said they had a team on the ground in Alaska now to look more thoroughly into Ms. Palin’s background. A Republican with ties to the campaign said the team assigned to vet Ms. Palin in Alaska had not arrived there until Thursday, a day before Mr. McCain stunned the political world with his vice-presidential choice. ” – NYT

I ask you, does it make sense to vote for an individual who will select someone, that could potentially lead this country, without any concern for the American people?? Do you not feel that Palin is being used as a pawn in a game where McCain is looking for any chance of victory…???

It isn’t the content of the NYT article that bothers me. I am bothered by John McCain’s inability to properly select a running mate. That very same selection puts us all at risk of being under the rule of another inexperienced conservative.