NOT propaganda

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link, which I already explained, and when you click on the red "require" link, it takes you directly to OBAMA'S PLAN, which does NOT SAY THAT. The original link IS A LIE.

It was cleverly worded, intended to promote the propaganda that's attractive to predisposed Obama haters, who apparently are known to NOT click on the "supporting" link which, in this case, DOES NOT support their assertion. I agree it worked with some, and that's sad.

Right down to the music that is being played in the background. Anyone can take bits and pieces of articles and flash them on the screen. Those aren't facts.

Since 1960 the nation's deficit has risen during every republican administration and dropped during every democratic administration.

The standard of living and income has improved for everyone in the country during every democratic administration since 1960, EVEN for the top 1% of the country. It has gotten worse for everyone in the country during every republican adminstration EXCEPT the top 1%.

While Nixon and Ford were in office interest rates for mortgages had ballooned to 11%-13% and many people in this country could not afford to buy a home. Carter brought those rates down so that more people in this country could afford to buy homes.

What caused this mess is not the people who were extended credit. Here is part of what caused it: Banks issued subprime mortgages to people at a rate they could initially afford but which would increase to an inflated rate after a period of time. Those banks then immediately sold those mortgages at the inflated rates to other banks. First-time home buyers were especially targeted. A lot of them didn't understand what they were getting into because it was misrepresented to them. They didn't know, for example, they could not refinance for a period of time without huge penalities. Then the market started to decline and many of those homeowners found themselves upside down on their loans and they were unable to refinance. Their interest rates had ballooned to rates they could no longer afford. As homeowners lost their homes the banks who were sold the loans at inflated prices were no longer able to collect on those loans. But the banks (and the CEOs) that initated those loans walked away with a great deal of money.

It was because of greed. And the deregulation that the republicans passed allowed it to happen.

If you had been alive or old enough to remember, things like this were not that uncommon. The hippie cult was rampant, especially in California and most of them were drug crazed, LSD I believe was the drug of choice, haven't heard of that in years.. The Viet Nam War was even more controversial than the Iraq War. Soldiers came home from Viet Nam and were spit on by these kinds of radicals. It was on the news daily. Anyone else remember? These people now have grandsons and granddaughters in Iraq and I can tell you first hand that at least some of them regret what they did and said in the 60s.

Now, considering this was back in the 60s and there is absolutely no proof that Obama was best buds with Ayers in the first place, why not let it go? Apparently Ayers is a respected professor today. How many of you who are of a ripe old age like myself would like to be judged on what you did when you were in your 20s? I wouldn't.

Republican Whip Eric Cantor meets with his staffers. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)

Today's Republicans are thumbing through Newt Gingrich's worn playbook of 1993 looking for tips on how to blunt President Barack Obama's political momentum and flip it to their advantage. In doing so, they also appear to have dug in to what might be called the secret appendix.

The official history of what happened during Bill Clinton's difficult first two years - which ended in a sweeping Republican congressional victory in 1994 - focuses on the GOP's united resistance to his economic plan and Hillary Clinton's failed health care reform. But there was a darker side to the political damage inflicted on the early Clinton administration.

Republicans and their right-wing allies disseminated what - in a covert operation - would be called "black propaganda." Some exaggerated minor scandals, like the Travel Office firings and Clinton's Whitewater real-estate deal, while other key figures on the Right, such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell, spread ugly conspiracy rumors linking Clinton to "mysterious deaths" and cocaine smuggling.

Sometimes, these multiplying "Clinton scandals" built on themselves with the help of their constant repetition in both the right-wing and mainstream news media. For instance, overheated accusations about some personnel changes at the White House Travel Office pushed deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster into a deep depression.

Then, on July 30, 1993, a distraught Foster went to Fort Marcy Park along the Potomac River and shot himself. The Right quickly transformed the tragedy into a new front in the anti-Clinton psychological warfare, with Foster's death giving rise to a cottage industry for conspiracy theorists and a new way to raise doubts about Clinton.

Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, among others, popularized the notion that Foster may have been killed elsewhere, with his body then transported to Fort Marcy Park. Repeated official investigations confirmed the obvious facts of Foster's suicide but could not quell the conspiracy rumors. [For the fullest account of the Foster case, see Dan Moldea's A Washington Tragedy.]

The "mystery" around Foster's death also bolstered the "mysterious deaths" list, which mostly contained names of people who had only tangential connections to Clinton. The effectiveness of the list was the sheer volume of the names, creating the illusion that Clinton must be a murderer even though there was no real evidence implicating Clinton in any of the deaths.

As the list was blast-faxed far and wide, one of my right-wing sources called me up about the list and said, "even if only a few of these are real, that's one helluva story." I responded that if the President of the United States had murdered just one person that would be "one helluva story," but that there was no evidence that Clinton was behind any of the deaths.

Other dark Clinton "mysteries" were spread through videos, like "The Clinton Chronicles" that Falwell hawked on his "Old-Time Gospel Hour" television show. Plus, salacious tales about the personal lives of the Clintons were popularized via right-wing magazines, such as The American Spectator, and the rapidly expanding world of right-wing talk radio.

The Right also generated broader conspiracy theories about "black helicopters" threatening patriotic Americans with a United Nations takeover. The paranoia fed the rise of a "militia movement" of angry white men who dressed up in fatigues and went into the woods for paramilitary training.

By fall 1994, Clinton's stumbling performance in office and the public doubts created by the black propaganda opened the way for a stunning Republican victory. Recognizing the influence of talk radio in spreading the Clinton smears, House Republicans made Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of the GOP caucus.

However, the forces that the anti-Clinton psy-war campaign set in motion had unintended consequences. In the months after the Republicans gained control of Congress, one pro-militia extremist, Timothy McVeigh, took the madness to the next step and blew up the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Clinton Coup d'Etat?"]

Reprising the Smears

Now, 16 years since the start of Clinton's presidency, the Republicans and their right-wing allies are again on the outside of Washington power and are back studying the lessons of 1993-94. Only a month into Obama's presidency, there are some striking similarities in the two historical moments.

In both cases, the Democrats inherited recessions and huge budget deficits from Republican presidents named Bush. In both cases, congressional Republicans rallied against the economic package of the new President hoping to strangle the young Democratic administrations in their cradles.

And, as congressional Republicans worked on a more overt political level, their media allies and other operatives were getting busy at subterranean depths, reviving attack lines from the campaigns to sow doubts about the two Democratic presidents - and trying to whip up the right-wing base into a near revolutionary fervor.

So far at least, the Republicans are experiencing less success against Barack Obama than they did against Bill Clinton. According to opinion polls, Obama remains widely popular with an American public that favors his more activist agenda for reviving the American economy and confronting systemic problems like energy, health care and education.

Though Republicans scored points inside the Beltway with their opposition to Obama's $787 billion stimulus bill - and their complaints that Obama "failed" in his bipartisan outreach to them - the GOP tactics appear to have backfired with the American people.

Gauging public opinion one month into Obama's presidency, polls found that most Americans faulted the Republicans for rebuffing Obama's gestures of bipartisanship, and a New York Times/CBS News poll discovered that a majority said Obama "should pursue the priorities he campaigned on � rather than seek middle ground with Republicans." [NYT, Feb. 24, 2009]

But the Republicans seem incapable of coming up with any other strategy than to seek Obama's destruction, much as they torpedoed Clinton. The three moderate Republican senators who supported the stimulus package - Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter - were widely denounced by the right-wing media as "traitors."

Indeed, the Republican Party arguably has become captive to the angry right-wing media that the GOP conservatives did so much to help create in the late 1970s, after the Vietnam War defeat and Richard Nixon's Watergate debacle.

This Right-Wing Machine proved useful in protecting Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal; undermining Clinton in the 1990s; dirtying up AL Gore in 2000; and wrapping George W. Bush in the protective garb of a full-scale cult of personality after 9/11.

But the machine wore down in its defense of Bush's multitude of disasters and ultimately could not generate enough suspicions about Obama to elect John McCain. Still, it remains a potent force in the country and particularly among the Republican "base."

It is also a machine that can run only on the high-octane fuel of anger and hate. If it tried to down-shift to a more responsible approach to politics, it would stall out, losing its core audience of angry white men who feel deeply aggrieved by their loss of status.

In turn, Republican leaders can't disown the right-wing media infrastructure that has advanced their interests for so long. In the first month of Obama's presidency, the congressional Republicans fell in line behind Rush Limbaugh's openly declared desire for Obama to fail.

Now, the Republicans may see little choice but to bet on the ability of their Right-Wing Machine to continue spreading doubts and hysteria about Obama.

More books and DVDs can be expected soon, recycling the 2008 campaign's rumor-mongering on Obama - that he wasn't born in the United States, that he's a secret Muslim, that he's in league with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, etc.

Rumbling Insurrection

Much like the Clinton-era militia movement's fear of "black helicopters," there already are rumblings about the need for an armed uprising to thwart Obama's alleged "communist" agenda.

Ironically, right-wingers who defended George W. Bush when he mounted a radical assault on the Constitution - seeking to establish an imperial presidency while eliminating habeas corpus and other key freedoms - are suddenly seeing threats to the Constitution from Obama.

Fox News, in particular, has been floating the idea of armed rebellion. On Feb. 20 - the one-month anniversary of Obama's inauguration - Glenn Beck hosted a special program called "War Room" that "war-gamed" various scenarios including the overthrow of an oppressive U.S. government when "bubba" militias rise up and gain the support of the American military.

The segment featured former CIA officer Michael Scheuer, retired U.S. Army Sgt. Major Tim Strong, and Gerald Celente, a prognosticator who began pitching the idea of an armed rebellion on Fox News shortly after Obama's election last November.

"This is going to be violent," said Celente, founder of Trends Research Institute. "People can't afford it [taxes] anymore. The cities are going to look like Dodge City. They're going to be uncontrollable. You're going to have gangs in control. Motorcycle marauders. You're not going to have enough police or federales - just like Mexico - to control the situation."

Beck envisioned the uprising - theoretically set in 2014 - starting "because people have been so disenfranchised" leading to a "bubba effect" touched off by federal agents from the ATF or FBI arresting some rancher in Texas or Arizona who has taken the law into his own hands in defending his property.

"That's totally possible," ex-Sgt. Strong said. "You've got people who are going to do the right thing to truly protect the interests of the United States, to include their own. � Your second and third orders of effect are going to be your bubbas hunkering down and being anti-government."

Beck, who was a longtime fixture on CNN's Headline News before moving to Fox, then expanded on the justification for the bubba uprising against a federal government that was "coming in and disenfranchising people over and over and over again - and having the people say please listen to us."

According to Beck, these oppressed Americans "know the Constitution. They know the writings of the Founders and they feel that the government - or they will in this scenario and I think we're on this road - the government has betrayed the Constitution. So they will see themselves as people who are standing up for the Constitution."

Beck then turned to ex-CIA officer Scheuer and asked, "So how do you defuse this, Michael, or how long even do we have before this becomes a crazy real scenario?"

"I don't think you'd want to defuse it, Glenn," Scheuer responded. "The Second Amendment is � at base not about hunting or about a militia, but about resisting tyranny. The Founders were very concerned about allowing individual citizens weaponry to defend themselves as a last resort against a tyrannical government."

As the discussion edged toward advocacy of violent revolution, Beck sought to reel it back in a bit.

"Don't get me wrong," the host said. "I am against the government. And I think they've just been horrible. I do think they are betraying the principles of our Founders every day they're in office. But I have to tell you this scenario scares the living daylights out of me because it is shaking nitroglycerine."

Beck then got back to the point: "Do the soldiers come in and do they round up people or do they fight with the people for the Constitution? What does the Army, what does the military do?"

Scheuer answered: "I don't think the military is ever going to shoot on the American people, sir. I think the military - of all people - read the Constitution every year, right through."

Beck then suggested that Obama's stimulus package might lead to this back-door federal tyranny.

"We just had in our stimulus package a way for if your governor says no to the money, the legislature can go around the governor and go right to the Feds," Beck said. "It's this kind of thing that would make the federal government say, �You know what? We can call up the National Guard. We don't need your governor to do it.'"

Such insurrectionist musings on Fox News are not likely to be taken seriously by most people. Indeed, many Americans may find it amusing that Fox has developed a heartfelt concern about disenfranchising voters after its enthusiastic embrace of Bush's undemocratic "election" in 2000 or that Fox now feels a sudden reverence for the Constitution after eight years of defendin Bush as he trampled it.

But this sort of Fox chatter runs the risk of feeding the well-nursed grievances of angry white "bubbas" and possibly inspiring a new Timothy McVeigh.

More significantly, today's Republican leaders - finding themselves with little new to offer - appear to have turned to the well-worn pages of this earlier GOP playbook to choose the same game plan that set the nation on a dangerous and destructive course 16 years ago, a course that only now, finally, may be playing out.

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Could those of you who label some posts as having a less than credible news source share your techniques for finding and recognizing purely factual unbiased news and also how you keep from adding your own perspective in order to relay such incredibly unalloyed information to us?

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered.

We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons, Santorum said.

The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.

The U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active. Neither the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

It's obvious your mind is already made up, so please do not force yours on us who do not agree with you one bit. If you're trying to make the rest of us swing in your direction by writing this litany of pettyness and sillyness, you're wrong. John McCain is pass�...gone, okay? If I hear him talk about his military service and his tortures one more time, I'm going to puke! This is 2008, the war in Vietnam is long over and the U.S. had to get out. The Russians were in Aghanistan for ten years and had to get out with millions of their soldiers dead. This is an unwinnable war, why smarty pants can't you understand that? And Palin....oh please! She's a controller freak, she'll be running McCain if he's elected! We don't want neither one of them and you will see why come November 4th. We will not put up with four more years of aq Bush.......he's screwed up the country so bad in every way possible! Now everyone hates americans thanks to your current president. He's a Clint Eastwood in disguise. The axis of evil is America, and not the countries Bush loves to denigrade. So stop your propaganda against Barack, he's a breath of fresh air which we all long for. Biden did a lot more than McCain did in Congress. We don't need a novice from Alaska that's for sure. I'm Canadian and up here, it's democrat all the way. I suppose Palin can see the Yukon from her bedroom now? Bush will go down as the worst President the U.S. has ever had. No wonder you're all so scared and nervous about terrorists....he dared them and challendged and now they hate his guts. Let's get Barack in there and start negotiating, communicating and get the world on you side once again, like it used to be. So don't give me your crap about Barack or Joe. Bet you don't even know where Khandahar is! So stop your propaganda and keep your hateful thoughts to yourself!

The economy is growing. I don't care if it is exploding. The fact here is that more and more people are becoming more and more desperate. I think going to college is fine but what jobs are these people going to get when they get out of college. You mentioned something about trades...please, all the manufacturing jobs are gone. Small business...only a handful ever succeed. My guess is that most people wiped out of good paying jobs with benefits are supposed to go to Wal-Mart and just pretend everything is okay, and here in Florida, join the service industry. Money, the real god of our times, is what is killing a lot of people here in Florida. As an example, in my town, there are hundreds of small mobile home parks inhabited primarily by the elderly. The big money developers are coming in here, buying the parks and the people are out on the street. The owners of the park get millions of dollars and the people are usually offered a flat fee that would pay rent for about 2 years, or given 60 days to find a place to move their homes, On fixed income this, of course, cannot be done. Many of these folks lived all their lives doing the right thing, playing by all the rules. They moved to Florida, own a little bit of property and now they are expected to rent again and work again. An apartment 1 BR 1 BA that is decent would be around $1000. You do the math. Even those communities that are owned by the homeowners themselves have no say. Eminent domain comes into play and then they are really in trouble so...being elderly, forced out of your home, having Medicare screwed up beyond belief is okay because the economy is strong. I don't care about words or pie charts. I care about what I see and know to be true by looking at it with my own eyes. Just who is it benefitting from this growing economy?? Oh well, the market will straighten everything out, just wait.

Another thing is that everyone is not college material, even these days when a degree doesn't mean all that much anyway. It surely won't guarantee you a job and if you went to college after the 1970s you don't even have to be smart to get in; not that smart people are not in college, you just don't have to be anymore. You don't even have to know how to read..but that is for another day. How many middle management degreed people have lost their jobs...quite a few. Airlines, GM, drug companies, utility companies...all these places hire degreed people. That old sheepskin won't save you anymore.

You say the poor will always be with us and I believe that as well. I do not believe that it is okay to walk over the additional bodies that greed has produced and there are legion. You call it lack of motivation on the part of the poor. I call it greed.

By the way, I see that the Iraq election is mysteriously mirroring the US election, split right down the middle.

Oh, and the drilling in Alaska. Why don't they drill in Detroit and make some cars that use some other form of fuel. It just never ends.

The teen was raised in that family, but as a human being she made her own decisions that her mother can't always control. Just because she didn't fully coincide with her mother's platform of abstinence, she is with her pro-life stance and keeping her baby, marrying the dad.

that some of the associations he has had in his lifetime condone terrorist attacks on our country and others condone racism by spouting hate messages from the pulpit. It has nothing to do with his name or his color. It has to do with who he associates with. If you want to know a true person.....look who they hang with. Birds of a feather, my friend.

But putting all sketchy associations aside, the bottom line is that there are issues that I just don't agree with Obama on. That is why I'm not voting for him. I do not condone abortion. I want to keep my guns. I do not want to raise taxes for anyone. I don't want to give welfare checks to people who are too lazy to get an education and work. I want to stop government spending. I want smaller government. There are just so many issues where Barrack Obama and I do not see eye to eye that I really don't even have to use his race or associations as a reason to not vote for him.

NOT propaganda - FACT