Treacherous Senate Rolls Out New Cybersecurity Bill

The number one enemy of the American people and enablers of the ongoing spree to gut the US Constitution is at it again with yet another attack on privacy. The Senate, led by the impenetrable firewall of cellulite that protects the NSA Stasi - California's Dianne Feinstein - has just passed out of committee a new cybersecurity bill that represents the institutionalized rottenness of the legislative body in all of it's resplendent putrescence. The onerous bill, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) was voted on in secret to avoid that always pesky public scrutiny and with a 12-3 win is headed to the full Senate in an election year where it should easily pass given the renewed climate of fear-mongering and demagoguery since the magnificently fortuitous appearance of ISIS and the return of US troops to Iraq. The Republicans will bludgeon the always feckless Democrats as being weak on terrorism and the party of Obama and Hillary, terrified at being called chicken will submit.

The bill is a resurrection of CISPA which while passing the House of Representatives - it was championed by the puffy fascist from Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers who will soon be leaving for a right-wing talk radio career - didn't make through the Senate which allowed Feinstein and her fellow snakes ample opportunity to scheme and CISA was the result. This bill is nothing but one more betrayal by the US Congress and a sellout to corporate America, which will have bestowed upon it the gift of immunity as customer data is passed onto the NSA without a warrant under the guise of protection against cyber attacks - the newest version of WMD which serve as justification to sell out Americans for political gain.

According to a story in The Guardian, "Senate committee adopts cybersecurity bill opposed by NSA critics":

Pushed by Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss, the California Democrat and Georgia Republican who lead the committee, the bill would remove legal obstacles that block firms from sharing information "in real time" about cyber-attacks and prevention or mitigation measures with one another and with the US government.

Worrying civil libertarians is that the NSA and its twin military command, US Cyber Command, would receive access to vast amounts of data, and privacy guidelines for the handling of that data are yet to be developed.

A draft of the bill released in mid-June would permit government agencies to share, retain and use the information for "a cybersecurity purpose" – defined as "the purpose of protecting an information system or information that is stored on, processed by or transiting an information system from a cybersecurity threat or security vulnerability" – raising the prospect of the NSA stockpiling a catalogue of weaknesses in digital security, as a recent White House data-assurance policy permits.

It would also prevent participating companies from being sued for sharing data with each other and the government, even though many companies offer contract terms of service prohibiting the sharing of client or customer information without explicit consent.

AND

Champions of a similar bill that passed the House of Representatives last year despite a White House veto threat urged the full Senate to follow the intelligence panel's lead.

"These attacks cost our country billions of dollars through the loss of jobs and intellectual property. We are confident that the House and the Senate will quickly come together to address this urgent threat and craft a final bill that secures our networks and protects privacy and civil liberties," said Mike Rogers of Michigan and Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House intelligence committee.

[That would be the same Dutch Ruppersberger whose  Congressional district happens to include the Fort Meade command center of the NSA Stasi and Mike Rogers whose wife is a lobbyist - isn't it a conflict of interest to have a husband who presides over the House Intelligence Committee?]

But digital rights advocates warn that the measure will give the government, including the NSA, access to more information than just that relating to cyberthreats, potentially creating a new avenue for broad governmental access to US data even as Congress and the Obama administration contemplate restricting the NSA's domestic collection.

The bill contains "catch-all provisions that would allow for the inclusion of a lot more than malicious code. It could include the content of communications. That's one of the biggest concerns," said Gabriel Rottman, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

The CISA data-sharing agreement is nothing more than a convenient end-around, a circumvention of any sort of legal restraint that will throw open the door to increased data-mining and content grabbing of millions of innocent US citizens/consumers which will be delivered to an unaccountable NSA without any oversight. But then again that is what Congress, particularly the high-powered committee heads are there for, to grease the rails and use every sort of legal trickery in the book to violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution while selling out their constituents for a dollar a dozen.

There is still an opportunity to stop CISA by bringing immense public pressure and utilizing privacy organization petitions and mailing tools but it is going to be a pitched, uphill battle against an entrenched enemy that in no way other than lip-service represents regular Americans. 

Just Like Torture: NSA Spying is Legal

Just like the crushing of a child's testicles can be interpreted to be "legal" within the context of the dictatorial power of the unitary executive as former Bush-Cheney lawyer John Yoo once infamously declared but now all of that NSA mass surveillance and data-mining is "legal" now too.  In a resounding endorsement of the unconstitutional abuses of the American Stasi the "independent"  Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board - which happens to reside within the executive branch  and was formed in 2004 after 9/11 or 'the day when everything changed' has issued a report that is being touted by defenders of the corrupt US power structure as vindication for the programs that NSA whistleblower revealed. George Orwell was definitely an optimist in that he never could have foreseen his grim visions of a savage totalitarian society so meshed with the circus maximus that is the USA!, USA! USA!

According to a story from The Guardian entitled "Some NSA data collection is 'legal and effective', says independent board" , I excerpt the following:

An independent board has declared a set of National Security Agency data collection programs both "legal and effective in protecting national security", despite expressing concern about "intrusions" into individuals' privacy.

As the NSA's troves of ostensibly foreign emails and Americans' international communications come under heavy scrutiny, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board dealt the NSA a victory on Tuesday night by calling the information reaped "valuable". It pointedly rejected similar claims for the bulk collection of US call data in a January report.

Under the so-called "702 program" – named after section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008 – the NSA can harvest large amounts of ostensibly foreign digital information, including Americans' international communications.

AND

In another vindication for the NSA, the PCLOB assessed that the NSA's massive amounts of data collected under section 702 is not "bulk" collection, describing itself as "impressed with the rigor" of government surveillance targeting.

The NSA defends its Prism and "upstream" communications troves long after it has accepted divestiture of US phone records. Representatives from the intelligence agencies and the Obama administration sternly defend both the legality and the wisdom of retaining those content and metadata databases as a measure to defend the US against terrorism, espionage and even crime.

The PCLOB is "independent" alright - in the same way that a Tony Soprano ordered internal audit of the Bada Bing Club conducted by Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti would be and this is just pure damage control, pails of whitewash being applied to our nearly fully evolved fascist state and indicative of a concerted effort to make all of the NSA bad publicity just go away.

The rogue establishment is riding high too, especially after at least temporarily quashing that much heralded Glenn Greenwald piece, conducting a mafia style knee-capping on the journalist while he was busy doing his victory lap after the Polk Award, the Pulitzer Prize and his best-selling book on the Snowden revelations "No Place to Hide". There are probably high-fives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Fort Meade NSA Stasi HQ and throughout the national surveillance state, tax-dollar eating great parasite after Greenwald was forced by the government (and likely his billionaire boss Pierre Omidyar whose money funds neo-Nazi atrocities in Ukraine) to pour water over the "fireworks". The preemption of the Greenwald story is likely going to be a mortal wound to the fledgling website The Intercept as well as his long-term reputation itself. This is a shame because the man had stones in standing up to Uncle Scam and his murderous machine of plunder and oppression but you can really only push things so far if you are working within the establishment.

So the state-corporate media will continue to trumpet the "legal" NSA surveillance just as they covered up the same sort of torture techniques that had members of the Nazi command and the Japanese Empire hanged after war crimes trials at the end of World War II - the end of a bygone era when there was actually some moral clarity in this country.

And the "legalization" comes just in time for those patriotic Fourth of July BBQ's where Americans will drink beer, ingest Pink Slime laced hamburgers and dance the slow grind to Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" as though it were our own equivalent of "The Horst Wessel Song". 

They will also be enjoying the fireworks - too bad that they won't be the ones that Glenn Greenwald promised. 

Big Greenwald NSA Story Squashed - For Now

"I chose a half measure, when I should have gone all the way... I'll never make that mistake again. No more half measures”

- Mike Ehrmantraut

With that cryptic tweet from Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald yesterday it is time to consider seriously that the “imminent” game-changing story on NSA surveillance targets and other acts of wanton criminality has been sunk by the US government. Whatever it is that those “new last-minute claims” that preempted the publication by The Intercept at midnight last night consisted of, they must have been of the gravest nature to derail the biggest story of Greenwald’s career. As to what exactly they were may never be known, perhaps a sealed indictment, the shutdown of The Intercept and billionaire Pierre Omidyar's businesses under some trumped up bullshit interpretation of a terrorist law written in secret then approved by a secret court or even a death threat could have done the trick. There could have been a mole inside of Greenwald’s operation – there has been no secret that The Intercept was hiring – providing leaked information to the government or conducting sabotage or maybe Omidyar just lost his nerve but the fact is that the story has for the moment been effectively killed. 

Greenwald's work on the Snowden documents has been extraordinary and has made him many an enemy within both the corrupt state-corporate US media as well as within the US power structure and political class alike which is truly a badge of honor for the man considering the criminality of the scum that he has exposed. The wrath of the United States government and national security state and their relentless drive to keep the big story under wraps and therefore censored could be expected. I have no doubts towards Greenwald's integrity but his one major blind spot over the last year was his decision to cast his lot with moneybags Omidyar and the fledgling First Look Media which his near barren site The Intercept is a part of. The intentions of Omidyar have already been questioned by many with his fortune and his political support of neo-Nazis in Ukraine and murderous fascists in India and his rapacious globalist interests in pursuit of more money for his eBay expansionism would seemingly make him a strange bedfellow to a crusading journalist like Greenwald. The halting of the publication of the story will only give the doubters, as well as many fence-sitters more reason to question this relationship.

One can understand why Greenwald would jump at the alleged opportunity to build a new media outlet that would challenge the contaminated electronic and print media in The Homeland but perhaps he should have done a more thorough job of researching his new employer. When the blog Pando came out with a story breaking Omidyar's dabbling in foreign dictatorships Greenwald was Johnny on the spot with a lengthy defense but with last night's bad news one has to think that perhaps he was hoodwinked and maybe it was a honey trap all along and a damned good one at best considering the serious damage that may have been inflicted on our already endangered species of investigative journalism in the USA!, USA!, USA!

Not only was Greenwald lured by Omidyar's money but also Jeremy Scahill (Dirty Wars) and perhaps the greatest of the new generation of muck-raking financial writers Matt Taibbi whose departure from Rolling Stone magazine was as much the end of an era as was the passing of Hunter S. Thompson. Taibbi was brilliant in his scathing attacks on the depravity of Wall Street and crony capitalism and the hijacking of democracy by the greedy gamblers who are able to operate with impunity and his finale at Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs commodities trading scams along with Greenwald's work on the NSA looked like First Look had an unbeatable pair of cops on the beat. Taibbi really pushed the envelope in “The Vampire Squid Strikes Again”, turning up the heat on Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder who has presided over the Justice Department's passing out of 'get out of jail free' cards since Barack the transparent took office. Back during the days when the entire scam was being set up the infamous global swindler and friend of  Bill and Hillary Clinton, the now deceased Marc Rich was instrumental in establishing the conditions for the ongoing commodities con. I excerpt the following from Taibbi:

Goldman and Chase – along with Glencore and Trafigura, a pair of giant Swiss-based conglomerates that were offshoots of a firm founded by notorious deceased commodities trader and known market manipulator Marc Rich – all made notably coincidental purchases of metals-warehousing companies in 2010.

The presence of these Marc Rich entities is particularly noteworthy. According to famed Forbes reporter Paul Klebnikov, who was assassinated in 2004 after years of reports on Russian corruption, Rich made a fortune in the early Nineties striking crooked deals with the Soviet bosses who controlled the U.S.S.R.'s supplies of raw materials – in particular commodities like zinc and aluminum. These deals helped create a fledgling class of profiteers among the bosses of the crumbling Soviet empire, a class that would go on years later to help push Russia out of its communist past into its kleptocratic present.

"He'd strike a deal with the local party boss, or the director of a state-owned company," Klebnikov said back in 2001. "He'd say, 'OK, you will sell me the [commodity] at five to 10 percent of the world-market price . . . and in return, I will deposit some of the profit I make by reselling it 10 times higher on the world market, and put the kickback in a Swiss bank account.'"

Rich made these reported deals while in exile from the United States, which he fled in 1983 after the U.S. government charged him with tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering and trading with the enemy after being caught trading with rogue states like Iran, among other things. The state filed enough counts to put him away for life, and he remained a fugitive until January 2001, when a little-known Clinton administration Justice Department official named Eric Holder recommended Rich be pardoned. A report by the House Committee on Government Reform later concluded that Holder had not provided a credible explanation for supporting Rich's pardon and that he must have had "other motivations" that he didn't share with Congress. Among other things, the committee speculated that Holder had designs on the attorney general's office in a potential Al Gore administration.

In any case, in 2010, a decade after the Rich pardon, Holder was attorney general, but under Barack Obama, and two Rich-created firms, along with two banks that have been major donors to the Democratic Party, all made moves to buy up metals warehouses. In near simultaneous fashion, Goldman, Chase, Glencore and Trafigura bought companies that control warehouses all over the world for the LME, or London Metals Exchange. The LME is a privately owned exchange for world metals trading. It's the world's primary hub for determining metals prices and also for trading metals-based futures, options, swaps and other instruments.

With the NSA abuses including names of those who have been spied on (or blackmailed) as well as Taibbi's foray into the crooked financial aspects (NSA ties as well?) it seemed like an awesome and unprecedented run at the Deep State was nigh with some of the revelations coming very close to the domain of the mysterious and legendary "Octopus" of which was the subject of work by investigative reporter Danny Casolaro who was found dead under very mysterious circumstances back in 1991. Casolaro's research came to reach into the upper echelons of politics at the time and included the use of the sophisticated, ahead of its time software program PROMIS and according to some accounts - notably Guy Lawson's book "Octopus" and Cheri Seymour's "The Last Circle" - was being used to rig financial markets as well as facilitate the trafficking of drug money though the financial system. In the case of Seymour's research the US Department of Justice (or more accurately elements within) are implicated, particularly Reagan administration figures such as Edwin Meese - and Holder has a long history within the department. While most do not probably have the necessary knowledge to recognize these historical linkages they are such which would make the establishment very wary of the possibility of Snowden's leaks being used as a point of reference for backtracking through a very sordid history. It had the potential to blow the lid off of the entire fucking sewer which is truly what these bastards are afraid of, there are far too many crimes and crimes to cover up those crimes going back decades to risk exposure.

But I digress..

So as it sits now, with Greenwald's story in limbo - the "imminent" scoop is starting to look like it has been squashed like a pesky insect by the red, white and blue jackboot of Leviathan. There is absolutely no way that the government is going to allow it to be published in a form that will challenge the corruption of the entire system - we are not only talking about the NSA here but everything and that will not happen. Greenwald fucked up by allowing himself to be put under the control of one who benefits from the existence of that corrupt system through what is really starting to look like a legacy killer in The Intercept and First Look Media. Perhaps it is hubris, he has been so busy making appearances in an obviously dishonest domestic media conducting his victory tour after the publication of "No Place to Hide" that he never saw it coming. His delay - there have been many calling for the publication of the entire Snowden trove - has only allowed for the government to regroup, plot and bring pressure to kill the story. If the story is halted, substantially delayed or gutted then it represents a major strategic failure on his part and a successful attempt to dilute or halt the story will do immense damage to those who are desperately fighting for justice and the return to accountability.

Greenwald's failed calculus was in believing that the bastards could actually be beaten - they can't, like that classic Dire Straits song puts it "the man's too strong". This is a guerrilla war in which the only victory is in causing them problems with an ongoing series of non-centralized swarm attacks by dedicated activists, bloggers and writers - this is why the Occupy Movement was such a threat and was crushed.

While Greenwald's delay may only be temporary the cave in to the government that he himself has acknowledged will make any future revelations suspect, as much as the affiliation with The Intercept and Omidyar which already has suffered a ding in credibility by not publishing that other country being involved in the SOMALGET program. This was a transgression that Wikileaks - which saved Snowden's ass from a US torture chamber - immediately decried and revealed what the bosses at First Look Media would not.

The only solution is to PUT IT ALL OUT THERE and let the bloggers and alternative media have at it and if the establishment successfully suppress Greenwald's big "fireworks" show then there is really no other way.

It has been reported that there are more than one complete set of Snowden's documents out there and let one who is not subject to coercion by the rogue elements in Washington set off their own extravaganza and truly light up the sky - it would be delightful were this to happen on the Fourth of July as a symbolic gesture to the principles that this once great country was founded upon.

No more half measures.

The Hypocrisy of Obama's MSNBC Water Carriers

Seldom discussed as a propaganda organ that is in its own right every bit the equal of Fox News MSNBC plumbs the depths of political discourse in providing a constant forum of dishonesty and hypocrisy.  The network, which is owned by GE, one of the largest defense contractors of the U.S. military industrial complex regularly shills for more war albeit wrapped up in the bright shining lie of a package of humanitarian interventions. The resulting dead from the collateral damage of wars of aggression or missions of ‘mercy’ are no different and the profits reaped by GE remain constant. The network is so shameless of a water-carrier for the Barack Obama administration that it is astounding that it receives any legitimacy at all. Fox is after all very transparent as the media arm of the Republican party establishment which in a perverse and twisted sort of way is somewhat honorable. I suppose that some credit can go to former Richard M. Nixon media guru Roger Ailes who is as unabashedly incapable of shame as fellow former Nixon administration figures such as Pat Buchanan who wears his bigotry on his sleeve and G. Gordon Liddy who in his book “Will” admitted his admiration for Hitler.

Buchanan is among the last of a dying breed and a dinosaur who used to drink Wild Turkey with Hunter S. Thompson is not going to be sucked into the tar pit without a struggle but he has now become a cartoon. His contemporary G. Gordon Liddy, also getting ready to pass into history was always a no bullshit guy when it came to his true sentiments as well. I especially liked the following expression of his burgeoning man love for a newly discovered idol from "Will" where he speaks wistfully of how the Liddy family maid, Teresa inculcated in the young whelp an adoration of Der Führer:

One day Teresa was excited. He was going to be on the radio. Just wait till I hear him speak! Eagerly, I joined her at the Emerson [radio]. First the music, the now familiar strains of a song that started, “Die Fahne hoch…” – Raise the banner…” It was a rousing, powerful anthem the Horst Wessel song.

 We could tell he was about to speak. The crowd could hardly contain itself. They hailed him in the huge swelling ovations that carried me along. Sieg!”someone would shout, and what seemed like all the people in the world would answer with a roar, “Heil!”. For he was their leader, Der Führer, Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s voice started out calmly, in low, dispassionate tones, but as he spoke of what his people would accomplish, his voice rose in pitch and tempo. Once united, the German people could do anything, surmount any obstacle, rout any enemy, achieve fulfillment. He would lead them; there would be one people, one nation, one leader. Here was the very antithesis of fear – sheer animal confidence and the power of will. He sent an electric current through my body and, as the massive audience thundered its absolute support and determination, the hair on the back of my neck rose and I realized suddenly that I had stopped breathing.

Liddy’s love affair with full-blown Nazism would go on and he allegedly once arranged for a showing of Leni Riefenstahl’s famous propaganda film Triumph of the Will to fellow fascist worshipers in the White House. At least the old school guys from Nixon’s administration had a strange sort of integrity in that they are unabashed about their bigotry unlike the young turks currently operating in the political realm with their weasel words and focus group distilled blather. Only in the 2014 Homeland could one find any virtue in this but such is the world in which we now live, a dystopian nightmare where ignorance is exalted and with each passing day we see that Orwell was an optimist.

But as the Dylan song goes, “you know sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace” and there is much brimstone scented smoke that emanates from the MSNBC sets. Some of the worst swill that is upchucked from the Democratic party electronic propaganda sewer spews forth five nights a week on the Rachel Maddow Show.  Maddow, who is a lesbian regularly uses her broadcast to hide her task as a Democratic party saleswoman under layers of identity group saturated diatribes that primarily serve as polemics against some of the more blatantly asinine statements by Republican party politicians, primarily those of the so-called tea party. Maddow, who parlayed her fame as a member of the Air America liberal radio network into her present career, much like Minnesota Senator Al Franken a fellow traveler is now an essential protector of the establishment while other former hosts who did not conform (Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy) have been exiled to the fringes. I will admittedly on occasion tune in to Maddow although I often regret it fairly quickly given the lack of substantive coverage of real issues, a failure to hold the Obama administration accountable and the selling of the war machine, a good deal of it by resident Pentagon flack Richard Engel who tried his damned best to push for war in Syria.

Last night prior to the BCS Championship game really getting revved up I happened to catch Maddow’s interview with  Senator Chuck Schumer (D-Wall St.).  The bagman for financial criminals, following the lunatic Peter King (R-IRA) chose to pile onto Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a favorite punching bag for the two-party syndicate that protects the corrupt system. Schumer, reciting straight from the Obama-DNC talking points went for Pauls throat over the expiration of extended benefits for the long-term unemployed painting him as the leader of the “hard right Republicans” who are “stopping everything”, using a comment attributed to the son of Ron that “unemployment insurance is a disservice to the American worker”, more than likely taken out of context and packaged as a chunk of bloody red meat.

While it wasn’t exactly King accusing him of letting New Yorkers be murdered by Muslim terrorists it was every bit as disingenuous. When Schumer gets up on his soapbox on the Maddow Show and proclaims that “The turning away from the middle class is dominated by one party” and brays in ginned up outrage about Rand Paul’s comments fly in the very face of (gag) the “American ethos” being attacked:

“What he’s saying is, that people would rather not work and collect these meager unemployment benefits. That is not true. There is a work ethos in America, it’s part of our American being and it doesn’t just apply to CEOs or nuclear physicists. The guy who cleans the floor late at night has a pride in making sure that floor is really clean. The woman who will organize an office has a real pride in making sure it is extremely well organized and everything is in it’s place. So this idea that the hard right has that people will stop looking for work and is just bunk and insulting to the American worker and to the American ethos”

What a condescending phony prick. Just think of how MSNBC would portray that sort of a rotten elitist comment were it to have come from Mitt Romney. It brings to mind Judge Smails from Caddyshack who proclaimed that “The world needs ditch-diggers too”.

Maddow of course would never dare to question the Wall Street's own senator and senator from the party and the administration that has continually screwed the American worker, ethos be damned while pumping 85 billion dollars of month into the banking casinos. Nor as to why any American worker who has a shit job such as cleaning the floors late at night (probably for minimum wage) or the woman who organizes offices would have any reason to be “proud” of such lousy employment opportunities while Schumer and his ilk continue to loot the coffers to subsidize the banksters who destroyed the economy once and are rapidly inflating the mother of all bubbles that will ultimately bring about the final collapse. That an unprincipled charlatan such as Schumer can go out and make this argument is as obscene as it is insulting to the intelligence of anyone who has been paying attention to the joint bipartisan effort to dismantle the middle class through the Ponzi schemes of high finance, crony capitalism, cheating and offshoring American jobs by the millions to low-cost third world shitholes where people will work in abhorrent sweatshop conditions for pennies an hour. As the late H.L. Mencken would have put it “imagine a gentleman and you will imagined everything that he was not”.

Senator Schumer by the way is also one of the key drivers of the efforts to undermine the P5+1 talks to restrict the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. It has been pretty much acknowledged that the sabotage of the current diplomatic negotiations by swine like Schumer who don’t give a rat’s ass about American interests will lead to war. But that war will make GE and Shumer’s buddies on Wall Street very happy with the tide of blood money that will come rolling in.

Another Day in the Empire of Idiocy

Economic collapse, wars and rumors of wars, offshored jobs, unconstitutional domestic surveillance, militarized police, kangaroo courts, eradication of civil liberties – no problem. A rodeo clown in Missouri goes out in an Obama mask and performs a simulated lewd act with a broom? Now there’s a real news story. In continuing their ongoing contribution to the downtrend and ultimately the collapse of this once great nation the putrid gaggle of sycophants that is the mainstream media has once again stooped to the occasion. While the country continues the long, slow crawl into fascism and the emperor fiddles while the place burns the always dependable presstitutes will continue to mesmerize the masses of asses with silly tabloid tales, trumped up local stories that are of great national importance. Missing teenage girls, major league baseball steroid suspensions, celebrity suckling, lurid sex abuse tales and isolated incidents trumped up into racist outrages, the bought and paid for media will always have everything to sell to the public but the truth. If there is one thing that the dumbed-down American sheeple understand completely it is what happens when someone pokes Mr. Wiggly into the dirty place, it is all bread and circuses.

Real news has been abandoned, especially reportage that focuses on systemic corruption that has metastasized throughout the government and every institution in this rotting empire. A good deal of this can be attributed to Slick Willie’s Telecommunications Act which in turn led to a wave of media consolidations. Corporations increasingly controlled the messaging and brooked zero tolerance of any upsetting of the apple cart in terms of profits. Combine the corporate hijacking of independent media with a highly secretive and corrupt government seeking to squash exposure of the morass of criminality into which it has descended, mix in the careerist flacks that get shat out of our journalism schools and you have a media which now ceases to inform on anything relevant. It is all lies, sleaze, manufactured scandal and button-pushing emotional nonsense.

Take for instance the tempest in an electronic teapot that is the rodeo clown, a guy named Tuffy Gessling who appeared during a routine at the Missouri State Fair wearing an Obama mask and stuck a broomstick in his ass. This was an attempt at humor and in this country it used to be that lampooning the president was a time honored right that was as American as apple pie. While Obama has seen a spike in racist morons who really are offensive with their displays (and are racists) not every criticism of El Presidente is an overt act of racist behavior. To me personally any act that portrays Barry as a clown with a stick up his ass is pretty much spot on. I seem to recall a good many tasteless and ugly displays back in the day when George W. Bush was in office and while some of the low-rent swine that have attached themselves to the so-called Tea Party are full blown bigots who taint the entire movement by their presences. For every Photoshop picture of either Barrack or Michelle as simians there were also more than a fair share of the same type of pictures of Bush as a monkey and one liberal website, "the smirking chimp" is still operational and the title was a direct shot at Dubya. So let's get real here and pardon the pun, call a spade a spade.

The Missouri rodeo clown incident, in addition to giving the bottom-feeders in the media and the rogue Obama administration itself yet another distraction to milk instead of covering the wanton criminality of the NSA Stasi the usual suspects on BOTH sides are using this overblown incident for overtly political reasons. The NAACP is calling for a Department of Justice investigation into the clown's performance and learning to kiss the whip of the police state . Hey, it's not like the organization has anything better to do than to continue to throw gasoline on an already smoldering national tinderbox of race relations. The organization could much better serve it's membership by pushing for the DOJ to address why blacks are such a disproportionate portion of our unspoken national shame that is the for profit prison gulag system, or to address black on black violence within the inner cities but it dicks around with garbage like this and becomes yet another part of the problem. Conversely, you have an idiot like Texas congressman Steve Stockman who has invited Gessling to perform in his district. Now Stockman is a yahoo and a media whore who deliberately seeks out attention by engaging in outrageous behavior. He is the same congressman who invited the lunatic Ted Nugent to Obama's last State of the Union Address. Nugent has become a hero to a certain demographic for his strident pro-gun stance and is a board member of the NRA. But seriously, it boggles the mind to understand why anyone could possibly find anything heroic in a washed up former rock and roller who dodged serving in Vietnam by shitting in his pants and showing up at his local draft board. He also is a serial baby daddy who fathered multiple children out of wedlock. Nice role model for those who proclaim to believe in family values unless they are Manson family values. Stockman is guilty of the same injustice towards those who he supposedly represents as the NAACP in pimping this drivel for political gain.

The real clowns that Americans should be outraged at don't perform at rodeos, they practice their art under the Washington bigtop.