No - martial law discussed 9/18/09 - under Bush...

Sept.18: Congressional Leaders told US Economy Had Been Hours Away from Collapse

• He's right on the mark about the martial law thing.... - And we can all thank the Obama lovers!!! sm
  • I've already experienced martial law on American soil - happens after every big hurricaine
  • No - martial law discussed 9/18/08 - under Bush... - sm

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Sept.18: Congressional Leaders told US Economy Had Been Hours Away from Collapse

Scary, and very eye-opening as to what CAN and WILL happen on American soil if the circumstances are right.  Here's a few tibits of what I experienced first hand in Gulfport, MS after the storm

Phones - My house phone worked after Katrina!  I called my boss (who was in lockdown at the hospital) to see if all was OK there.  But within a few hours, when the authorities started flooding in, my phone didn't work any more, and didn't again for weeks.  When my phone DID work, if I tried telling anybody some of the stuff below, my phone suddenly went dead for the rest of the day.

Restricted areas - Walked down to the beach right after the storm.  Most everything gone, and any debris wasn't worth stealing.  So why did they string barbed wire for miles down our beach for our "safety"?  Something they didn't want us to see, I presume.

Resources - We started getting told on the radio that there was no gas or food, and to stay home and off the roads.  The media and military could get all the gas and food they wanted - but they guarded it with guns to keep the citizens from having it.  They managed to get generators for hotels and restaurants that were exclusively for the use of "important" people - no citizens allowed.  The same soldiers drove up and down my street all day and all night (between the court house and the fire house) at twice the legal limit and nearly ran me down if I didn't get out of their way.

Curfew - Both my kid and I worked at 2nd shift "deemed necessary" jobs - me at hospital, her at Walmart (although her store was heavily guarded against the citizens, who were told it was too damaged to reopen, she was working and the store was open for important folks like media and local officials).  We had to have our work badges with us at all times or we weren't allowed to go anywhere.  We were stopped every single night at check points coming home from work.  If we forgot something in our car and went to leave the house and get it, a soldier offered to shoot us if we left our porch.

Our only news and instructions came via battery powered radios or those in vehicles (when we were allowed to go to work), and most of that was lies to keep us home and quiet.  These are just a few of the things I experienced.  At the time I was horrified, and I realized that the majority of us have NO CLUE what can and will happen right here in the USA.

I think it is just plain sad really.  If you are white, you don't qualify for a job.  If you are highly skilled, you don't qualify.  Why wouldn't you want highly skilled people?  That is just plain retarded right there.  Things are bad enough right now that all people, including all races, are losing jobs and highly skilled people are losing jobs.  Why should they be not included in this opportunity?  Sounds to me like they would prefer to have unskilled minorities build stuff than highly skilled individuals.  To me that suggests p*ss poor work being done and very poor management...but whatever. 

Then again....we've always sort of had this problem.  Companies have a certain quota of minorities they have to hire and often pick a minority with less skill and qualifications over someone who is skilled just to meet their quota of hiring minorities.  So what is the point of being skilled?  Once again....the dumbing down of America right there.

(I think the article is over the top, and wishful thinking by the author, BTW)

So, after Katrina in Gulfport, MS, here's what martial law was like:

1.  When the troops moved in, they took over and started ordering us around like cattle.  Offered to shoot us for even trying to ask 'em a question.  Rude and mean to everyone.  The skies were full of helicopters - felt like living in a MASH rerun.  Jeeps raced up and down my street at double the speed limit, nearly running me over if I stuck a toe in the road.  Nobody lifted a finger to help me clear the debris in my yard - in fact they were irritated that I dared set foot outside at all.

2.  They commandeered any resource that was left, for the powers that be.  They took over every airport, every gas station, every Walmart still standing, every hotel or restaurant that had a generator, jammed all the phone lines (and yes, folks, MINE STILL WORKED until the troops arrived, then suddenly it did not).  All that stuff was appropriated for whoever they deemed important - the county officials, the media, rubbernecking senators they flew in.  Woe unto you if you tried to get a drop of gas, a cold drink, or speak to anyone about why you could not - a gun gets stuck in your face.

3.  Curfew makes you feel like a little kid when its given by your parents.  It makes you feel like a criminal when its set by your government.  Yeah, they offered to shoot me because I forgot something in my car and tried to leave my house to go get it.  They had roadblocks on every corner.  I worked at a hospital nights and daily had to show my ID just to get to work and back.  People that didn't have a good reason to be out and about got turned back and threatened.  They roadblocked all the highway exits to our town and turned away anybody that came offering help - saying it wasn't needed.  Actually, they just weren't organized enough to accept donations or direct would-be heros where they could help - so they just turned them away, rudely.  If you wanted to leave town after Katrina, forget it - they had taken all the gas away and didn't want us on the roads.

4.  They sectioned off parts of our town with barbed wire and told us it was unsafe.  Sorry, I walked through it right after the storm and knew it was no worse than the rest of the town.  They threw residents that had survived the storm off their property and wouldn't let them come back without an armed escort and government permission.  Sometimes they bulldozed their houses flat before letting them come back into the protected zone.  All in the name of protecting them.

5.  The majority of the soliders raced around acting important.  Never saw any lift a finger to help anyone in any type of distress.  I guess their orders were to stand around and wait for more orders, while intimidating us (obviously that's what the confused, scared, and needful survivors required from their government?).  They also took over our local radio and had them tell us to just sit isolated in our houses and wait for help, and discouraged us from helping one another or traveling across town to help a friend.  Nobody ever knocked on our door and asked us if we needed anything - so if I'd obeyed orders and believed help was coming I would have waited until I died.  I suppose they wanted us to just sit there and die, so we'd be less hassle.

6.  The only help we received were from average citizens brave enough to argue their way through the military road blocks. Not the government.  Their function was to take over, snatch whatever comforts still existed, and isolate and scare us.

I was shocked I could be treated the way I was on American soil, and I realized it can happen anywhere to anyone, if and when the powers that be decide to take over an area for whatever reason they deem necessary.  I suddenly realized this happens all over the world in wartime, when our troops move in to occupy their country - and I realized I felt like those people must have felt at the sight of the soldiers.  Most people just don't think it can happen here - well trust me, it can and it does.  Maybe next time, in your neighborhood.

(I think the article is over the top, and wishful thinking by the author, BTW)

So, after Katrina in Gulfport, MS, here's what martial law was like:

1.  When the troops moved in, they took over and started ordering us around like cattle.  Offered to shoot us for even trying to ask 'em a question.  Rude and mean to everyone.  The skies were full of helicopters - felt like living in a MASH rerun.  Jeeps raced up and down my street at double the speed limit, nearly running me over if I stuck a toe in the road.  Nobody lifted a finger to help me clear the debris in my yard - in fact they were irritated that I dared set foot outside at all.

2.  They commandeered any resource that was left, for the powers that be.  They took over every airport, every gas station, every Walmart still standing, every hotel or restaurant that had a generator, jammed all the phone lines (and yes, folks, MINE STILL WORKED until the troops arrived, then suddenly it did not).  All that stuff was appropriated for whoever they deemed important - the county officials, the media, rubbernecking senators they flew in.  Woe unto you if you tried to get a drop of gas, a cold drink, or speak to anyone about why you could not - a gun gets stuck in your face.

3.  Curfew makes you feel like a little kid when its given by your parents.  It makes you feel like a criminal when its set by your government.  Yeah, they offered to shoot me because I forgot something in my car and tried to leave my house to go get it.  They had roadblocks on every corner.  I worked at a hospital nights and daily had to show my ID just to get to work and back.  People that didn't have a good reason to be out and about got turned back and threatened.  They roadblocked all the highway exits to our town and turned away anybody that came offering help - saying it wasn't needed.  Actually, they just weren't organized enough to accept donations or direct would-be heros where they could help - so they just turned them away, rudely.  If you wanted to leave town after Katrina, forget it - they had taken all the gas away and didn't want us on the roads.

4.  They sectioned off parts of our town with barbed wire and told us it was unsafe.  Sorry, I walked through it right after the storm and knew it was no worse than the rest of the town.  They threw residents that had survived the storm off their property and wouldn't let them come back without an armed escort and government permission.  Sometimes they bulldozed their houses flat before letting them come back into the protected zone.  All in the name of protecting them.

5.  The majority of the soliders raced around acting important.  Never saw any lift a finger to help anyone in any type of distress.  I guess their orders were to stand around and wait for more orders, while intimidating us (obviously that's what the confused, scared, and needful survivors required from their government?).  They also took over our local radio and had them tell us to just sit isolated in our houses and wait for help, and discouraged us from helping one another or traveling across town to help a friend.  Nobody ever knocked on our door and asked us if we needed anything - so if I'd obeyed orders and believed help was coming I would have waited until I died.  I suppose they wanted us to just sit there and die, so we'd be less hassle.

6.  The only help we received were from average citizens brave enough to argue their way through the military road blocks. Not the government.  Their function was to take over, snatch whatever comforts still existed, and isolate and scare us.

I was shocked I could be treated the way I was on American soil, and I realized it can happen anywhere to anyone, if and when the powers that be decide to take over an area for whatever reason they deem necessary.  I suddenly realized this happens all over the world in wartime, when our troops move in to occupy their country - and I realized I felt like those people must have felt at the sight of the soldiers.  Most people just don't think it can happen here - well trust me, it can and it does.  Maybe next time, in your neighborhood.

(I think the article is over the top, and wishful thinking by the author, BTW)

So, after Katrina in Gulfport, MS, here's what martial law was like:

1.  When the troops moved in, they took over and started ordering us around like cattle.  Offered to shoot us for even trying to ask 'em a question.  Rude and mean to everyone.  The skies were full of helicopters - felt like living in a MASH rerun.  Jeeps raced up and down my street at double the speed limit, nearly running me over if I stuck a toe in the road.  Nobody lifted a finger to help me clear the debris in my yard - in fact they were irritated that I dared set foot outside at all.

2.  They commandeered any resource that was left, for the powers that be.  They took over every airport, every gas station, every Walmart still standing, every hotel or restaurant that had a generator, jammed all the phone lines (and yes, folks, MINE STILL WORKED until the troops arrived, then suddenly it did not).  All that stuff was appropriated for whoever they deemed important - the county officials, the media, rubbernecking senators they flew in.  Woe unto you if you tried to get a drop of gas, a cold drink, or speak to anyone about why you could not - a gun gets stuck in your face.

3.  Curfew makes you feel like a little kid when its given by your parents.  It makes you feel like a criminal when its set by your government.  Yeah, they offered to shoot me because I forgot something in my car and tried to leave my house to go get it.  They had roadblocks on every corner.  I worked at a hospital nights and daily had to show my ID just to get to work and back.  People that didn't have a good reason to be out and about got turned back and threatened.  They roadblocked all the highway exits to our town and turned away anybody that came offering help - saying it wasn't needed.  Actually, they just weren't organized enough to accept donations or direct would-be heros where they could help - so they just turned them away, rudely.  If you wanted to leave town after Katrina, forget it - they had taken all the gas away and didn't want us on the roads.

4.  They sectioned off parts of our town with barbed wire and told us it was unsafe.  Sorry, I walked through it right after the storm and knew it was no worse than the rest of the town.  They threw residents that had survived the storm off their property and wouldn't let them come back without an armed escort and government permission.  Sometimes they bulldozed their houses flat before letting them come back into the protected zone.  All in the name of protecting them.

5.  The majority of the soliders raced around acting important.  Never saw any lift a finger to help anyone in any type of distress.  I guess their orders were to stand around and wait for more orders, while intimidating us (obviously that's what the confused, scared, and needful survivors required from their government?).  They also took over our local radio and had them tell us to just sit isolated in our houses and wait for help, and discouraged us from helping one another or traveling across town to help a friend.  Nobody ever knocked on our door and asked us if we needed anything - so if I'd obeyed orders and believed help was coming I would have waited until I died.  I suppose they wanted us to just sit there and die, so we'd be less hassle.

6.  The only help we received were from average citizens brave enough to argue their way through the military road blocks. Not the government.  Their function was to take over, snatch whatever comforts still existed, and isolate and scare us.

I was shocked I could be treated the way I was on American soil, and I realized it can happen anywhere to anyone, if and when the powers that be decide to take over an area for whatever reason they deem necessary.  I suddenly realized this happens all over the world in wartime, when our troops move in to occupy their country - and I realized I felt like those people must have felt at the sight of the soldiers.  Most people just don't think it can happen here - well trust me, it can and it does.  Maybe next time, in your neighborhood.

"Anyone in my office involved with a leak will be fired" to "Anyone who is found guilty of leaking," I figured he had a handle on what the decision is going to be by the special prosecutor, who, incidentally, was appointed by BUSH.

I guess time will tell if justice truly does prevail.

Bush makes Nixon look like a choir boy.

    Wednesday 31 August 2005

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

A New Orleans resident waded through floodwaters coated with a fine layer of oil in the flooded downtown area on Tuesday, August 30, 2005.

    A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

    The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation.

    The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised no net loss of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

    In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection, said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as highly questionable, and boasted, Everybody loves what we're doing.

    My administration's climate change policy will be science based, President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as a report put out by a bureaucracy, and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive Report on the Environment, stating, Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment, the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.

    In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease. Bush completely ignored this statement.

    In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of abstinence. When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

    On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan. Bush had boarded his very own Streetcar Named Desire.

    --------

    Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of The Clinton Wars, is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

me as TAXPAYERS) pays Faux News for its' *fair and balanced* reporting. 

Ya gotta laugh at the morons who actually BELIEVE this nitwit, though!

Democrat.  There is no money in it and he couldn't fake the compassion required.

succeeded in passing his privitization of Social Security.  Then we would be seeing all you gung-ho True Believer Repubs freaking out at the devastation of your retirement money.  You would have to walk the walk instead of pontificating endlessly on your favorite subjects - scarey terrorists, Ayers, socialism, Salinsky, yak, yak, yak.  It would serve ya all right.