DeRosaWorld

Liars, Fools, dicks, Cowards, Scoundrels, Traitors and Not Worthy Of The Offices They Hold

11 dimensional chess my ass... I hope the deal includes revoking the FOX News broadcast license... without that move, there will be no progress.

Sunday Morning Music: Rosemary Butler - Rock Me On The Water

Yes... Rosemary Butler!  The 1970's most valuable background vocalist performing her favorite songs. Here she is covering Jackson Browne's Rock Me On The Water.  The venues have gotten smaller, the audience is easily distracted and the stage is cramped, but that girl can sing...

Saturday Musings: 'Bipartisanship 101 - Professor Barack Obama, Former President of The United States' Edition

Cenk Uygur was too hard on Republican guests of his MSNBC political talk show so he is being replaced by the Reverend Al Sharpton. 

So now liberals have the most hated black activist in America and a lesbian that looks like Elvis Costello representing Progressive politics on prime time TV news.

The constant and total manipulation of the American citizen continues as we rush as quickly as possible to the end of our short lived Empire. Uygar wasn’t only too rough on Republicans; he was a big, normal, tough looking dude the average white guy would want to have a beer with… even if they couldn’t pronounce his name…so off he goes.

I bring this up because it is not only Rupert Murdoch that is fucking with us…

I have tried to be quiet and respectful of the debt ceiling negotiations… this is President Obama’s last stand… either he gets a deal or the economy collapses… oh, help us Obama Wan Kenobi… You’re our only hope.

There should not be debt ceiling negotiations going on… what does the debt ceiling and the Republican Party's demand that he economy be turned over to the corporations once and for all, have to do with one another?  Nothing… that’s what.

Most of the liberal blogs are Obama deniers at this point… claiming like Saint Peter that they do not know this man… or worse… that they knew this would happen… they seem to forget that in order to stay in the liberal progressive club… you HAD to vote for Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008… no choice in the matter…

Well, President Obama doesn’t seem like much more than one of those odd, black, conservative Republicans that  the media  let’s run, and get in on the early debates, every Presidential election season.

His policies, other than his mediocre support of gay rights, have nothing to do with progressive politics.  Eleven dimensional chess is not the game here and the Republicans are not the ones being played.

If you look at the last three years… it would seem the Republican Party planted the first black President into the Democratic Party as a mole.

A strong President wouldn’t even be talking to John Boehner at this point. She would be pushing the power of the imperial Presidency even farther than George Bush, Jr. did in trying to save American citizens from the corporate attacks that are destroying… utterly destroying them.

Does Our Debt Ceiling Really Matter When We Can't Even Read Our Own Books

I can't even tell you how many times I have re-read the ending of The Great Gatsby. It is so inspiring.

Let's face it, the only reason F. Scott Fitzgerald is still mentioned in the same breath as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner is The Great Gatsby... but 'Gatsby' is a high water mark in American literature.

This may be the most disturbing news I have read in years: The Not-So-Great Gatsby... because our kids just can't understand it...

"...Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning....

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

American literature doesn't get any better than this... but the kids today will not have to read that passage... it is too difficult for them. 

This is what our kids get to read instead:

"Gatsby had believed in his dream. He had followed it and nearly made it come true.

Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.

Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby's dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn't he?"

What the fuck? 

Maybe soylent green is the answer.  What else do we do with our young?  

I guess this explains why Barack Obama is the the first black President and Michele Bachmann will be the first woman President.

Let Them Eat Cake... Americans Learn How To Spark A Revolution Using The Social Networks...

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), a leading advocate of shrinking entitlement spending and the architect of the plan to partially privatize Medicare, spent Tuesday evening sipping $350 wine with two likeminded conservative economists at the swanky Capitol Hill eatery Bistro Bis...

...Susan Feinberg, an associate business professor at Rutgers, was at Bistro Bis celebrating her birthday with her husband that night. When she saw the label on the bottle of Jayer-Gilles 2004 Echezeaux Grand Cru Ryan's table had ordered, she quickly looked it up on the wine list and saw that it sold for an eye-popping $350, the most expensive wine in the house along with one other with the same pricetag...

Read the entire story at TPM: It gets better... these folks actually confront Ryan at is table... To the barricades!

Law Enforcement On Obama’s Watch Rounded Up 393,000 Illegal Immigrants Last Year And Zero Bankers...

In case you miseed Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone article, Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

"...The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims..."

A Different View On Venezuelan and U.S. Relations... And Revolutions

Audio of a speech by President John Kennedy, 50 years ago today, commemorating Venezuelan Independence Day and linking it to our own Independence Day celebrations.

Quite a different view of Venezuela than our current leaders.

JFK's views on Latin American revolutions are interesting.

The Textbooks Need To Be Rewritten

"...Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.

In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide..."

So... what is A. E. Hotchner's next move? What is ours?

What is the United States of America?

We need to analyze this as we move forward, if we are to move forward.

We kill our Presidents, we elect actors to the throne, we elect oil barons and their sons. We denigrate the good and worship the liars, the greedy, the evil.

We fall for it all; all the lies and misdirection. We fall for the promise of becoming rich in America without working for it... all we have to do is screw our neighbor.

One of our greatest writers, a titan of 20th century American culture taken down by the illegal, paranoid, closeted homosexual fantasies of America's greatest cocksocker.

Sunday Morning Music: Mary J. Blige - Piece of My Heart

Damn. This woman was born to rock.

Saturday Musings: 'Faye Dunaway Is Restless' Edition

Faye Dunaway awoke this morning weighed down in a sudden attack of ennui. Glenn Beck was off the air, nothing to watch before seeking refuge in Turner Classic Movies with the hope of maybe seeing William Holden, young in Picnic or Sunset Boulevard. 

All the televisions have been smashed in the street. The monkey is dead and Williams Holden floats, dead in a pool of black and white... Diana Christensen roams the corridors of the mansion...

The American corporate media took a few hits this week. As an industry it has been on a death spiral rivaled only by the 9/11 hijackers. I am not sure who caused more damage, but our media’s terror attack on our nation is not over, so they still have time to catch up.

One of the elite super-pundits, a man whose stance bridges both broadcast and print, the upper echelons of American journalism… called the President of The United States a ‘dick’ on television. Now if he had a picture of the President’s dick, that would be an outstanding scoop, but alas… We are left with Greta Van Susteren to fill our large, 16x9 aspect ratio television screens and therefore our living rooms with the strange rantings of the intelligentsia.

Remember, she is the one who guided us through the endless hours of the OJ Simpson TV season season.

Politicians from both political Parties are arguing over who can take away your pensions, social security, health care, Medicare and Medicaid and public education more efficiently. It is down to a compromise of numbers and sound bites that will make one Party look tough or the other Party look somewhat compassionate… COMpassionate, not to be confused with passionate.

And there is the President, a man who refuses to use the power of his office. He keeps it in his desk drawer and refuses to bring it out… why? What could his reasoning be at this point in, not only his Administration, but in history?

If ever there was a time for a President to act audaciously and courageously for the cause of protecting the American people it is now. Hell, it was two years ago.

The Democrats have no power, even when they are in power. The Republicans and the Media set the agenda, frame and edit the argument. The Democrats can only try to defend their position and it always seems to come from a position of weakness.

There is  no passion in the Democratic Party’s message.  That is because the Democrats do no act on their passion… they may have it, but we don’t see it.

And the people, suddenly for the first time in a generation, have to take to the streets after it is too late.

In New Jersey, in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan… to try to get back what Republicans… yes Republicans they voted for… have taken from them… their Americanism... their American nationality.

These are the people who have to turn their televisions off… open their windows and shout. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”  And throw the televisions out. Turn FOX News and MSNBC and CNN off. Get local. Find the websites and blogs and political groups in your neighborhood or town and visit them.  Get involved in your future, the future of your kids and grand kids and this country. Because if you don’t it is obvious that someone else will.

Help Faye Dunaway put Diana Christensen to sleep.

Three Chords And The Truth...

First-World Problems Rap

Innocent Until Proven Guilty?

BREAKING:

It seems the A-list liberal progressive blogs that wanted Dominique Strauss-Kahn's head (both of them) on a platter are having trouble dealing journalistically with the facts of the case.

The rush to judgement was awesome. So much for a Socialist French President... the bastard... but wait... could the 24/7 news machine have jumped the gun?

Now what?

Digby and Jane Hamsher are choosing to ignore the story this morning... Josh Marshall and Arianna Huffington have it 'below the fold' on their websites.

Interesting lessons in journalism developing before our eyes with the new media and social networks exploding around us and instana-pundits in our living rooms. Fact-checking is a thing of the past.

Never apologize... it's a sign of weakness.

The story is not over... there are many questions to be answered and much to be answered for.

This is much more fun that Beck's last show.