Dana Milbank Declares a “Palin-Free” Month… That’s a GOOD Idea

Read this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/20/AR2011012004349.html

Note this:

Palin clearly isn’t going away. “I am not going to sit down. I’m not going to shut up”, she told Hannity on Monday. But if we treat her a little less like a major political figure and a little more like Ann Coulter… a calculating individual who says shocking things to attract media attention… it won’t matter. Sure, we might lose some Web traffic or TV ratings, but we might also gain something. Remember the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza, by giving up sex, suddenly frees up brain power to learn Portuguese and Euclidean geometry, to teach Derek Jeter the physics of batting, to become a “Jeopardy” whiz, and to solve a Rubik’s cube? If we stop obsessing over Palin, we might suddenly become experts in the federal budget or Medicare reimbursement rates.

And so I pledge to you… Sarah Palin’s name will not cross my lips… or my keyboard… for the entire month of February. Who’s with me?

I thought deeply after reading this… yes… Sarah Palin is a symptom, by herself, she’s not substantial in the least… she’s only a manifestation… she’s not an Urgrund ontological cause. Rather, the Republican Party, as a whole, has become a polarising and polarised political faction. It’s not the GOP of Eisenhower, Nixon, and TR… it’s the product of the senescent dribbling of the Reagan era… deregulation was going to “lift all boats”… well, the share of the national wealth of the richest 1 percent of the population rose from 9 percent in 1980 to 24 percent today. It should sober us that this doesn’t satisfy them. They want to take MORE from us. The main cause of the Great Recession was the Bush tax cuts. Full stop. Yet, the GOP demanded that we keep them in toto… and they held the unemployed up at ransom to do it. They didn’t hesitate to put a dagger to the throat of the weakest Americans. That is why I have decided that I shall NEVER vote for the Republican Party again… ever. I cannot vote for a political faction that deliberately poises its boot over the faces of the helpless in order to advance the cause of further lining the pockets of the overclass.

In short, the Republican Party is evil, objectively speaking. After all… look at Newt Gingrich. A political party that honours a man who delivered divorce papers to his wife when she was deathly ill in bed with cancer is degenerate and beyond the pale. This is not the Republican Party of William F Buckley. That’s gone for good. Sarah? I think that Mr Milbank is right… in some respects. Yet, I think that his proposal has merit, and I’m going to join in. We should keep our eyes on Palin, though… she has devoted nutter fans, who are as ignorant and close-minded as she is. We’ve got to get out and vote in 2012… the GOP gains in the midterms were mainly due to liberal and moderate voters staying home. We won’t have a second chance…

Barbara-Marie Drezhlo

Thursday 27 January 2011

Albany NY

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Back Off, Mr Whiteford…

I have had some trouble lately emanating from John Whiteford. It started when I received an unsolicited e-mail from him. I didn’t give my address to him… nor had I left any comments on his site to leave any cybernetic “trail”. No doubt, one of the moderators on the Orthodox Forum gave it to him… some years ago, I was a member, but dropped it, as so many do. By the way, I believe that Bill Samsonoff and Michael Regan are innocent. I would warn anyone of ever logging on to this site with your main e-mail account. I can’t just dump the address that Harry Coin got his hands on… it’s the one that I use for employment purposes.

To make a long story short… he’s very tiresome. Mr Whiteford tried browbeating me to agree to his rightwing fantasies, so I spammed him. Well, that’s the end of it, I thought. I won’t bother him, and he can’t bother me. He continued to send harassing e-mails. Each time, I didn’t reply, I simply spammed him. Mr Whiteford believes that he has the right to publicise my personal life on the web. Most certainly, I gave him no permission to do so, nor has Mr Whiteford had access to my personal records (under the PHI provisions of HIPAA Title II, that requires my direct authorisation, which I haven’t given him).

Therefore, I checked out my legal rights… Mr Whiteford, if you send me another e-mail, it’s grounds for legal action. I shall exercise such without hesitation, sir… I wish you to leave me alone, and I shall leave you alone. I did not initiate contact, sir, and I am publicly and officially informing you that I wish no further contact of any kind from you. Again, I warn you, I shall exercise my legal rights in this matter.

The fact that Mr Whiteford is a priest daunts me not in the least. There are standards, and he has transgressed them. Even though Mr Whiteford uses ad hominem tactics, I shall not. Leave me alone, sir, or face the consequences. Truly… we shouldn’t be silent in the face of clerical malfeasance. The only way to end such is to SPEAK OUT. God shall NOT punish you if you oppose a crank priest.

If this doesn’t convince you that our Church has deteriorated since the days of Antony Bartoshevich, Leonty Turkevich, Anastassy Gribanovsky, and Kyprian Borisevich, nothing will, I fear. Shenanigans such as this point up the need for the union of Russian Orthodox people in the USA and Canada. The present structures have regressed… the OCA and ROCOR are relics… priests are out of control… Raymond Velencia proves that… John Whiteford proves that. We’ve got a job to do…

Deus videte et iudicare.

Barbara-Marie Drezhlo

Thursday 27 January 2011

Albany NY

A Sad Day for American Justice… Kangaroo Court Hands Down Illegal Sentence in Ghaliani Case

Read this:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110125/ap_on_re_us/us_guantanamo_detainee

Note this:

The first, and possibly the last, Guantánamo detainee to have a US civilian trial was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for his role in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa, a case that nearly unravelled when the defendant was convicted on just one of more than 280 counts.

Ahmed Ghailani, who served as Osama bin Laden’s cook and bodyguard after the bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, sought leniency, claiming he was tortured at a secret CIA detention site after his arrest in Pakistan seven years ago. But US District Judge Lewis A Kaplan imposed the maximum sentence, saying that whatever Ghailani suffered “pales in comparison to the suffering and the horror” caused by the nearly simultaneous attacks, which killed 224 people and injured thousands more.

What’s wrong with this picture? No US court has jurisdiction over the bombings… they occurred in Kenya or Tanzania… that is, the CIA didn’t want Ghaliani tried in Africa because they were afraid that they wouldn’t convict him. Indeed, in particular, the GOP feared that the truth about the Bush administration torture centres would come out, and, in this instance, Obama is protecting GWB for some odd reason. American special services kidnapped Ghaliani, transported him out of Kenya in violation of the sovereignty of the Kenyan government, tortured him in an American gulag in Pakistan, and, then, transferred him to the Guantánamo prison, where he languished without charges for eight years. These actions are extralegal and extrajudicial… the Americans involved acted much like a secret NKVD troika, didn’t they? No bilateral treaty or any US or Kenyan statute authorised the transfer of judicial responsibility from Kenya to the USA in this case.

This didn’t happen in World War II or the Cold War. Why? The USA feared reprisals from very real and very strong enemies. Nazi Germany and the USSR could have retaliated if the USA brutalised their citizens… that was one of the reasons why no farce like the Ghaliani trial occurred (the Nazi saboteurs put to death in the hot seat at Sing Sing committed an admitted crime on American territory, indeed, the customs of war allow franc tireurs in civilian dress to be shot out of hand).

This travesty unfolded because the USA doesn’t fear reprisal from terrorist organisations… the “War on Terror” is a fraud from stem to stern, basically, the USA feels itself stronger to most other states, and it thinks that it can arbitrarily haul people off to the USA for show trials worthy of Andrei Vyshinsky and Roland Freisler. The “War on Terror” is an excuse for the overclass to line their pockets via inflated military budgets. There’s no way that one can wage a war on “terror”… one man’s terrorist is another’s hero. Note well that Fox News didn’t carry footage of the carnage that followed the Georgian Grad bombardment of South Ossetia… or the US bombing of Federal Yugoslavia… those caused damage and casualties greater than any caused by any “terrorist attack”. If you use a truck bomb, you’re a terrorist… if you drop bombs from an aircraft at 10,000 metres, you’re legit… such is the American rationale. In any case, one can fight identified terror bands (which are more legal/law enforcement matters rather than military concerns)… but one cannot fight “terror”… it doesn’t go bump in the night.

Nevertheless, if you had told US veterans returning home from World War II that, sixty years hence, that the USA would kidnap people, torture them, and try them before compliant courts for actions that weren’t in the competence of the US justice system, they would have looked at you as if you had two heads. “America doesn’t do that sort of thing… that’s what Nazis do”. Yes, Virginia, “that’s what Nazis do”… we’ve sunk to a new low. Dear Lord, save us before we sink into the abyss.

Barbara-Marie Drezhlo

Thursday 27 January 2011

Albany NY

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day… No One is Forgotten… Nothing is Forgotten

11 April. International Day to Remember the Liberation of the Prisoners of the Nazi Concentration Camps

YefimTsvik

1985

______________________________

Today’s commemoration is a reminder of the millions of people massacred by the Nazis throughout Europe…

66 years ago, Soviet troops liberated the surviving prisoners at Auschwitz (Oświęcim) in the south of Poland, one of the largest Nazi prison camps. When the Red Army entered, only about 7,500 out of almost 4 million prisoners sent there were still alive. According to the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant, the Nazis killed 2.5 million people in the gas chambers and 500,000 more died of disease, neglect, and starvation. Most, but not all, of the victims were Jews (one of the most famous Christian victims was Fr Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic saint; another was Edith Stein, a Carmelite nun of Jewish blood). German President Kristian Wolf will attend remembrance ceremonies at the Auschwitz memorial, the first time in history that a German president has done so. International Holocaust Remembrance Day will be marked in the Russian capital with a candle lighting ceremony at the Moscow Jewish Community Centre, as well as at the Great Choral Synagogue. Memorial events will be held in Bryansk, Voronezh, Samara, and other Russian cities. On 26 January 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that condemned the denial of the Holocaust as a historical fact, and it designated 27 January, the day that Red Army soldiers liberated the Konzentrationslager Auschwitz complex in 1945, to be International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

NB:

Click on the URL below for a two-minute video, the audio is in Russian, but the visuals show the historical deniers to be lying racists:

http://rian.ru/video/20110127/326642762.html

27 January 2011

Voice of Russia World Service

http://rus.ruvr.ru/2011/01/27/41444296.html

http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/01/27/41445196.html

http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/01/27/41535515.html

Editor’s Note:

This day shall not be marked in the USA as it is in Europe and Russia. One reason is that the Republican Party is full of wingnut racists. Make no mistake upon it… the Nazi racial policies were fact… the concentration camps were fact… the death toll was real… it was THE enormity of the twentieth century, the worst excess of a horrific century, a period that Solzhenitsyn was right in calling “the New Dark Ages”. Note well that many of the konvertsy embrace Holocaust Denial, a fact that doesn’t surprise one when one knows that the racist policies of the Nazis had their basis in American Anglo-Saxon eugenicist theories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hadamar was nothing but a logical extension of the policies followed by many American jurisdictions at the time. A Russian monk said, “What started in Russia, shall end in America”. Actually, most of the godless ideologies that have plagued the world in the New Dark Age came from the USA… again, no surprise when one considers those theomachistic movements such as Mormonism, Pentecostalism, consumerism, “democracy”, globalisation, and eugenics that all grew up amongst Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans. If the end times were to come today (and I’m not convinced that they’re coming in our time), America would be the leader of those opposing God, and it would be the standard-bearer for Anti-Christ. Look at Sectarianism, ponder the fact that Sectarianism is Satan’s simulacrum of Christianity, and you’ll come to the same conclusion. Remember, to be religious is NOT the same as being Christian. They CAN be antipodes apart. Christ is NOT “Jayzuss”… NEVER forget that. In the meanwhile, mark down who denies the historical fact of the Jüdenmord… they’re not only godless deniers of the truth; they’re all rightwing nutters of the worst sort. NEVER forget… NEVER!

BMD