Dreamland, USA. 8 July 2011. President Obama began his remarks today by saying ghat he didn't want to upstage the celebration of Independence Day in America, so he had waited until the pollution from the fireworks had cleared to make what he modestly called his historic and heroic announcement. He was accompanied to the podium by Vice-President Biden, Chief Justice Roberts representing the judiciary, and Senator McConnell representing the legislature.

It has been reported by reliable sources inside Vice-President Biden's grin that Chief Justice Roberts' appearance was bought with a promise that new legislation criminalising stupidity on the Supreme Court would be grandfathered, and that Senator McConnell was promised a free Get-Out-Of-Hell card.

Mr. Obama announced that Private Bradley Manning would be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and that a small, life-size statue of Manning standing naked in front of his cell at Quantico would be erected (sic.) on the white house lawn.

Mr. Obama called Manning "one of the nation's greatest leaders," and announced his appointment as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In making this appointment, Mr. Obama commented that Manning would "for the first time in the agency's history, bring actual intelligence to the job."

Mr. Obama also said that, in exchange for Manning's acceptance of this important post, he had promised that within ninety days, the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay would be closed, all four of the nation's current wars against the Arab world would cease, the illegal U. S. embargo against Cuba would end, and Hugo Chavez would be invited to Washington for reconciliation talks and provided with free medical care.

In closing, Mr. Obama said that he had directed the Attorney General to file criminal charges against all those involved in torturing prisoners, including President George W. Bush and himself.

I Am Bradley Manning

Why don't I hear from anybody about Bradley Manning? Why aren't we ALL writing about Bradley Manning?

He is a 23 year-old soldier. He spilled the beans concerning who all knew about--and ignored--U.S. torture in Guantanamo, and all sorts of other nasty stuff. He spent a year in punitive solitary confinement in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico--half of the time, he was confined naked: as torture. Now he is awaiting charges--finally. But what can they charge him with? Both U.S. civil law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice make hiding a crime a serious offense: in civil jurisdiction it's called being an "accessory before the fact"; under military law, it's called "misprision of a felony." So had Manning NOT made public what he knew, he would have been committing a serious crime.

Mr. Obama said--it's the lawyer in him speaking, the "you are not guilty until proven so" understanding at the base of all U.S. law--that "Bradley Manning has broken the law." Damn you, Mr. Dictator! You can't say that.

But we all sit quiet. Why? Are we stupid? Cowards? Closet vigilantes?

I have lived for seventy-five years, through World War II, and our Korean War; I even participated in our trying to start a war in 1958 by invading Lebanon. I have lived through Lyndon Johnson's lies and the Vietnam War, and the Nixon-Kissinger murders toward the end of that war; through George Bush's lies and his attack on Iraq; through Clinton's three belligerences--in Iraq, Somalia, and Kosovo--and though George W. Bush's stupid Second Iraq War and his war in Afghanistan, and his concentration camp at Guantanamo. And now Obama. He is as bad as Johnson, or Nixon and Kissinger, or the first Bush; worse than Clinton, and even worse than George W. Bush.

Obama is a liar, a coward, and a violent man. I don't doubt that he is an intelligent man; but he is spineless, irresponsible, and completely unprincipled. I find it hard to imagine a worse president--even though I was quite literally afraid of a President McCain.

Court-Martial Bradley Manning? No, let's have Bradley Manning for President.

Bradley Manning for President! I mean it.

Bert Hornback

GOD BLESS THE GREEDY!

The absurdity of rich people's greed describes the United States. We are a liberty-first country, not a society at all. We are united, not socially, but by our greed. Greed is the one great American virtue. And if it sounds odd to hear Greed called a virtue, then you--like me--are unAmerican.

Many of my oldest friends no longer speak to me because I oppose Greed, and they know that they are greedy. I have never called them greedy, but they know they are. Not like the big-timers, but greedy. And as long as there in anybody else who has more money than they do, they will remain greedy.

Will any of them object to the executives who last year received from $5,000,000 to 54,000,000 in "compensation? How many unemployed people could $54,000,000 provide jobs for? Only 2,000. There are a lot more than 2,000 unemployed people in this country. But if you add up the "compensation" of the 2,000 highest-paid executives-- you get salaries for 200,000 jobless people.

Now, if we tax the wealthof all the greedy Americans who have more than $10,000,000 in real estate, stocks, hide-away bank accounts--tax them at, say, 90%--then we will have changed things enough that maybe America can be called a society.

Oh. Another tax: let's impost a 50% socialtax on the Defense Department's budget. And divide that money up among the nation's poor.

I'm serious. If I were the head of a family that had made such a mess as has been made of what could have been--maybe once was--the American family, I would expect one of my daughters or sons to take over, and implement just such a plan to save us.

Greed is just like cancer: stupid. Cancer keeps eating its host until it kills the host it fed on. And then the cancer dies. Greed suffers from the same damnable stupidity--and it and its practitioners are eating--greeding--this country to death.
The military is what it is because military spending satisfies a lot of our greediest Greeds. Military contractors--ask Dick Cheney--are leaders in the Greed business.

I hope that some day the greedy have to eat all the ugly, soiled, dirty, and worthless money they have hoarded. The rest of us may be dead by then--but we will have died as decent humans. The greedy aren't decent, and they disgrace humanity.
Well, let them try to live on dollar-bill salad.

Bert Hornback

The field is, as they say, wide open. The Democrats are giving the Republicans the presidency--but the Republicans can't find anybody to take it.

President Obama, the incumbent, is of course running backwards, away from the finish line.

The Republicans can't find a respectable candidate to run against the man who can't face that his disastrously erroneous, counter-productive, broken-promises lying term is coming to an end.

Is it possible that Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul, or Michelle Bachmann could be the next president of the United States? Or course it is--because Barack Obama plans to run for re-election.

His platform will be that he is the president of broken promises.

He promised to close the torture-camp at Guantanamo Bay--and didn't.

He promised to end our illegal and immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--and instead expanded them to include Pakistan--and any other country that might harbor a Taliban (our creation--does anybody remember that?) leader--and now Libya and probably Syria: and of course Iran.

He promised to stop torturing people, and to protect whistle-blowers--and has been torturing Bradley Manning for more than a year for obeying the law.

He was going to provide a real health care bill--but didn't.

He has done nothing good. And his young daughters will grow up to know that their father was a fraud. And black Americans will be ashamed to have him as their representative. And all of us who trusted him will be tempted to cry, "Never again!"

Does the Unites States hate Arabs? and Islam? Or course. Why? Is it just because of the Arab countries' oil? Or is because, since Americans are forbidden by law to hate black people, and have learned that they can't openly hate Jews, they are busy hating Arabs and Muslims--and ignorantly assuming that Arab and Muslim are interchangeable terms? And of course American Jews hate their fellow-Semite Arab brothers.

Along comes America's first black president, who is also sort of a Muslim and an Arab, but a Christian too. And he is very intelligent, but also utterly immoral.

In 2012 Barack Obama is a candidate to be defeated. But which one of the utterly unqualified, incompetent Republicans will be the one to defeat him?

Or will the Democrats get smart, refuse to endorse Obama, and maybe choose Governor Cuomo as their presidential nominee?

Bert Hornback

OBAMA OUTDOES JOHNSON AND BOTH BUSHES

What an amazing arrogance. What obscenity. What shame for all of us who hold United States citizenship.

Our president has announced his intention to murder the new head of Al Qaida. No suggestion of using civilised procedures, like finding him guilty of anything: just a mad, uncivilised determination to murder him.

Sleep well, Mr. Obama. If the world survives you long enough, your daughters will grow up to know that their father was (a) a a gross hypocrite, (b) a lawless hate-monger and murderer, and (c) a man who betrayed millions and millions of good people all over the world who trusted him to be an honorable, thoughtful, just man.

To these charges I put my name.

Bert G. Hornback

"THE OLD FOOL SAID TO PUSH ON"

Robert D. Gates, retiring as the U.S. Secretary of Defense, has complained that the European member-states of NATO are not supporting the U.S. the way they should, financially. Their governments aren't spending enough on "defense"--which used to be called "war."

Gates thinks that the Europeans should all follow the U.S. into bankruptcy. When the U.S. only had two major wars going--in Iraq and Afghanistan--it was spending $1,000,000,000 a day on its wars. That was all money that the U.S. didn't have, of course. Now Mr. Obama has expanded on what Mr. Bush--remember his "mission accomplished" claim?--started but didn't end. We are now at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. And maybe several more countries: Mr. Obama has already proclaimed that he will send troops--or other, non-human drones--anywhere in the world to murder any future would-be Osama bin Laden.

And how will Mr. Obama pay for these wars? He won't. The U.S. will just keep spending money it doesn't have. Murder is expensive: how much did Obama's office say he spent before the U.S. actually caught Osama bin Laden and murdered him? Was it $13,000,000,000?

Osama bin Laden's death was indeed murder: U.S. soldiers illegally operating in another country, shot at close range an unarmed man, and killed him. Who ordered his murder? Mr. Obama. Never mind law.

Mr. Obama--a lawyer--has no respect for law. He held Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for 365 days, torturing him. His justification for this was simple: though Manning had not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of a crime, Mr. Obama justified his treatment by declaring, "he broke the law."

There is no law, it seems--just as there is no money.

And with the U.S. as a part of it, NATO is a farce. And Robert Gates is a fool.

The U.S. should close down its absurd and disgracefully un-American Defense Department, and start spending what little money it has on its poor and its homeless--and on education and health care and paying its debts. Then someday our great, great grandchildren may have a country they can be proud of. And with the U.S. no longer trying to lead the world, their world should be a much safer world--and better, too, and cleaner and healthier and happier.

I suppose Mr. Gates's comments were welcomed by his NATO colleagues with roars of laughter. Or maybe they weren't listening. Maybe they weren't even there.

Does anybody remember the night the Smothers Brothers had Pete Seeger singing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, and the Old Fool Said to Push On"? That was back in 1967. CBS in New York tried to cut the song--and did, but the response to their censorship was so strong that they relented, and aired the show. Seeger sang his song for Lyndon Johnson and his war in Vietnam: "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, and the Old Fool Said to Push On."

The CBS station in Detroit, Michigan refused to air the song--and then, to prove that they were correct in censoring it, played the whole song the next night--with the words running across the bottom of the screen so the audience could read as well as hear them--as a feature on the six o'clock news. Of course, the six o'clock news had a much larger audience that the Smothers Brothers did: even conservatives watch the news.

The U.S. is 'way more than "waist deep" now.

ORLANDO!!!!

Orlando is the fifth largest city in Florida, with a population of 240,000 people. It has more than 750 Christian churches. And Orlando actually has a law that make it a crime for anyone to feed the poor in the city.

Three people have recently been arrested for feeding Orlando's poor, in a public park.

Somebody who has long been associated with Christianity and Christian churches once told Christians to feed the poor. More than once: over and over again. And he promised that those who refused to feed the poor would go to Hell.

Has anybody ever mentioned that in any of Orlando's 750 Christian churches?

Isn't there a higher law that trumps Orlando's shameful, disgusting law that makes feeding the poor a criminal act?

Let's all go to Orlando and feed its poor. Isn't that what Jesus would have told us to do?

Bert Hornback