Self-Portrait With Pencil Launcher

…in memory and solidarity. Je suis Charlie!

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Never forget how the State used the attacks of September 11, 2001 as a pretext to shred the Constitution and encourage the escalation of police thuggery against citizens.

Never forget how the State used September 11 to encourage profiteering in the “defense” and “security” industries at the expense of citizens.

Never forget how the State used September 11 as a pretext for illegal wars and military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Never forget how the State used September 11 as a pretext for illegal imprisonment, secret courts and torture.

Never forget that the atmosphere of oppression, suspicion, paranoia and racism which has taken root in this country since September 11, 2001 has been fostered and maintained by both Republican and Democratic governments.

And last, but certainly not least…

Never forget how you, the American people, rolled over and allowed yourselves to be bullied and cowed into silence by the likes of Bush, Cheney, Obama, Ridge, Chertoff, Napolitano, Clinton, and Lieberman while they waged wars of aggression, built a gulag, committed genocide and torture and stripped away your liberty and dignity.

Never forget.
Happy Anniversary

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The 9/11 Conspiracists: Vindicated After All These Years? by Alexander Cockburn at CounterPunch.

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They range from borderline delusional to flat-out certifiable – and they vote.

I’d been seriously wondering about the root causes of the quality of “leadership” in this country over the past twenty-odd years, beginning late in Reagan’s second term and continuing off and on during the Clinton and Bush years, but it didn’t really start banging the doors down in my head until the 2008 Presidential “election” cycle began. Things finally reached critical mass when I saw this article in Slate a couple of months or so ago. I didn’t quite agree with all of its points, but you can’t possibly imagine the thrill and relief when I finally realized that, yes, I’m not the only one thinking that the number one problem is, in fact, The People.

I couldn’t stop being amazed at the plunging quality and the attendant skyrocketing of ignorance and sociopathy among the USA’s “leadership” in the past decade. I and others often wondered just how in the hell we wound up saddled with such a bunch of sociopaths, liars, and thieves? Then it hit me: this bunch wouldn’t be in power now if they hadn’t been put there by You, The People. Yeah, that’s right – you. You, the voters, have shown yourselves to be just as ignorant and sociopathic in a trend increasing upwards since at least the 1980 “election”, climbing steadily into the “zany” category in the Bush I and Clinton years, until it finally sailed off the edge of the Earth and into the realm of “batshit” shortly after 9/11. The “election” of 2008 totally iced the deal for me. This class of hucksters and shysters is in power because You, The Voters, put them there. You complain your asses off about the quality of your “leadership” until you’re blue in the mouth, and then promptly slog off to the polls like zombies, punch a chad for a fresh batch of sociopaths, liars and thieves, then slog off home to fall asleep watching American Idol. The names and faces of the “leaders” and the little letters after their names are different, but they’re basically the same class of sociopaths, liars and thieves. Then, the cycle of bitching/voting begins again, without your having learned a single thing from any of it, like that one really stupid cow in the herd who keeps walking into the electric fence.

And, no wonder, too. Just take a look at yourselves, f’cripesake. Despite Chris Matthews and Anderson Cooper showing you Barack Obama’s birth certificate right there on TV, right to your faces – and despite the numerous third-rate forged Kenyan birth certificates exposed as fraud, right there on TV in front of your faces – a buttload of you still think Obama’s not a natural-born US citizen. Despite his having been a servant of bankers and industrialists since forever, some of you actually think that Barack Obama is a Marxist. Despite no evidence, a bunch of you think he’s a Muslim (as if there were something bad about it). Despite mountains of evidence, some of you still think that climate change is a hoax. Even more of you think that the weak, late, lamented “public option” in the healthcare “reform” bill was socialist. Despite the initial study being proven a massive fraud, huge numbers of you still insist that vaccines cause autism. Many of you still think — despite any tangible proof — that 9/11 was a conspiracy, an “inside job” perpetrated by the Bush Regime with the aid of the Saudis and Mossad and Israeli Art Students and all that other crap.

Many of you profess a love for liberty, but are so shit-scared of your own shadows that you’ll fall in line behind the first proposal that comes along requiring you to pose for digital x-ray porn at the airport. Despite reports of events coming largely from NGOs’ press releases and George Clooney on the Today Show, many of you still cry out for intervention by the greediest, most violent, genocidal and hypocritical state on the planet — the USA — in a tiny, half-assed civil war in Africa with the idea of “saving Darfur”, even though you know the only thing the “leaders” you elected care about saving is the massive puddles of oil in the ground under The Sudan.

And, please don’t get me started about the Liberals and Pwogwessives, because I really loves me some busting on Liberals and Pwogwessives. You totally went for Obama because you were so desperate and pants-pissing scared that you couldn’t think of anything else besides the possibility of a President with a “D” after his name who could pronounce the word “nuclear”. It’s not like you couldn’t have gotten onto the Internet and done some judicious search-engine sifting to find out that he was hooked up with the Democratic Leadership Council and had Wall Street and the nuclear and “defense” industries among his largest campaign donors, and seen what a cynical fake the guy was, and how he was basically a Republican. I guess that would’ve ruined your fun, though. Some of you supported Obama because he was a “peace candidate” – even though he waffled on the war and threatened Iran in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convension (or, as I like to call it, his 2008 Democratic Presidential Nomination announcement speech), and even though, in his I Heart Israel Speech at the 2008 Conference of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, he pretty much gave the green light to Israel to do whatever it wanted to do in Gaza, i.e. bombing, strafing, shooting, torturing, blockading and collective-punishing the living hell out of the place.

Oh, and, what percentage of black voters went for Obama – 90%, something outrageous like that? – even though he never made any commitment to actually improve life for black Americans, though nearly every campaign speech he ever gave was designed to reassure white America that he wouldn’t cause any trouble (especially that horrid Fathers’ Day speech)? It’s as if everybody totally forgot what King and Malcolm X were trying to teach us about house slaves and field slaves, and how to spot a “player”, and how we should judge people by the content of their character rather than their color. They didn’t give a damn’ about his being a corporate tool; they only cared what color he was. I’ll never forget the interview I read on the wire services, with black voters at a campaign stop in South Carolina, where one woman just flat comes right out and says she’s voting for Obama because he’s black. Man, oh, man, how fuxored is that? You don’t care about the campaign contributions from BP and Goldman Sachs, or that he’s going to escalate the war in Afghanistan; you’re going to vote for the guy anyway because he’s black.

Christalmighty. Somebody tie me to a railroad track.

That’s the really sad thing about this cavalcade of crazy: these are people who actually vote in elections in this damn’ country. It’s bad enough that the “election” process itself is rendered illegitimate by the Party’s dirty tricks, distortions, half-truths and corporate cash-whoring, but insult is added to injury when a bunch of greedy, selfish, ignorant, thieving sociopaths are empowered by several million other greedy, selfish, ignorant, thieving sociopaths, who then have the gall to claim that I have no right to complain about the shape things are in because I don’t vote. WTFF? You people helped maintain these bastards in power for thirty years; it looks like you’re the ones who have no right to complain. Losers.

Back when I first got involved in the IMCs and the antiglobalization movement, a common slogan chanted at the protests was “This Is What Democracy Looks Like!” With all due respect to my comrades, I have to disagree. This is what “democracy” looks like.

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Well, here we are, a year into this glorious new post-racial, post-partisan Hope’n'Change Era, so let’s just pause to take stock of all the momentous Change that President Booker T. Obama has brought us:

The Economy: worse. President Hope has given away absurdly huge buttloads of our tax money to bankers and Wall Street. Bonus? Of course. That’s what the bankers have done to us for the past year or so.

Health Care: worse. To paraphrase a recent Keith Olbermann broadcast, it’s not health, it’s not care, and it sure as hell isn’t reform. President Change’s idea of health care reform involves shutting single-payer supporters out of the “debate”, massive corporate giveaways to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the threat of fines or jail for people who don’t buy corporate health insurance even if they can’t afford it — and if you can afford decent health insurance, President Yes We Can wants to tax the living shit out of your benefits. Still, with any luck, that Coakley woman will lose that special Senate election in Massachusetts, and it’ll be Sayonara Charlie to The Bill That Needs Killing.

Civil Liberties: worse. Some doorknob in Detroit tries to blow up a plane with his underwear, and the next thing we know, President Hope wants to institute Jim Crow for Muslims and make us all to pose for digital x-ray porn. Meanwhile, one of President Hope’s fellow Harvard punks over at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs wants to assign CIA spooks to troll duty at any blogs that happen to bug him.

Illegal Foreign Wars: worse. President Change — or, as Code Pink called him during the campaign, the “Peace Candidate” — makes a big-ass deal out of appearing to seriously ponder the situtation before initiating a 40,000-troop escalation of the war in The Graveyard Of Empires — or, as it’s more commonly called, Afghanistan. The Nobel Prize committee finishes slurping the dregs out of the bottom of the Kool-Aid bowl and awards President Change a Nobel Peace Prize; President Change, on accepting the Prize, gives a pro-war speech. Now, that’s class.

So, congratulations to one and all of you Obamabots who allowed yourselves to be motivated by fear and desperation and fall for the first slick-assed huckster who can speak in complete sentences and knows how to pronounce the word “nuclear”. I just can’t thank you enough.

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T-shirts and Stickers at Mike’s Schwag Shop.

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