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Obama had his macaque moment when on camera he called GWB's appointees (ie: heck of a job brownie, cant recall gonzo, china's drilling off Florida coast Vader), prime specimens of the republican ethos.

As a result, the wealthy half of his flock, including his Harvard frat buddies and Chicago School of Economics Clarence Thomas loven Secret Society cohorts, have switched to McCain.

Imagine if he had mentioned DIOXIN DeLay, MANonDOG Santorum, Schiavo Frist, TOP GUN Cunningham, Keating 5 McCain, DEATH SQUAD Negroponte, "I'm not qualified" Goss & TailHook Dusty Fogo, NOTGAY Craig, boy page chasing Foley, Palfree Vitter, casino conartist Abramoff, KennyBoy Lay, Kurdish OIL Hunt, etc ...

Polls are being commissioned that are finding that 67 percent of Americans support offshore oil drilling, because they think it’s going to lower the price at the pump.

What’s actually going on is the oil companies may not even bother drilling. What they’re doing is they’re stockpiling leases. And what that means is that the oil companies will have a much greater control over the oil supply. When the oil companies have a much larger control over the oil supply, they can turn it on and off. They can control price. They can fix the price. So, in fact, what this is doing is the opposite of what they’re saying. It’s actually giving the oil industry much more power to drive the price of oil up by controlling supply, by just giving them all of these leases. And we keep hearing, well, they have all these leases already, and they’re not using them, and they want more. Why? Why do they want all these leases? Because that is what gives them control over supply. That’s what allows them to fix prices. ...

BHO's first response to the mortgage crisis, let’s remember, was he was worried about the government taking action to keep people from being evicted from their homes, because that would create moral hazard. And he was not talking about the big companies, the big mortgage lenders; he was talking about individual low-income people being thrown out of their homes. He was worried about moral hazard. That’s a very University of Chicago take on the situation. ...

Now BHO's chief economic adviser is Jason Furman, who has defended Wal-Mart, has attacked critics of Wal-Mart, saying that they’re doing more harm than good, that actually Wal-Mart is a progressive institution that is helping low-income people with their low prices, and that living wage campaigns, for instance, are actually hurting low-income people. So these are pretty conservative ideas, and I think it is important for people to understand that this is who Obama has chosen to take his advice from. ...

The fear is that some of the same people, like Rubin, responsible for, you know, Rubinomics, which turned into Clintonomics, which was, you know, the Democratic full-scale embrace of the ideology of privatization and so-called free trade, that this same sort of group of people are following—are now surrounding Obama. And Jason Furman is a Rubin protégé and worked with him at the Hamilton Project, which is a sort of sub-think tank of the Brookings Institution, which emerged a few years ago to prevent the Democratic Party from embracing what they saw as populist economic policies, the centerpiece of which would have been a reexamine of the ideology of free trade, which is being discredited around the world. ...

BHO had called the free trade agreement, in the debates with Hillary Clinton and with John Edwards, “a mistake.” He called it “an enormous problem,” but now, with Fortune, said, “Sometimes during campaigns rhetoric gets overheated and amplified. My core position has never changed. I’ve always been a proponent of free trade,” ...

The FISA AMNESTY is part of these parting gifts that the Bush administration is handing out to their cronies in the oil and gas industry and also in the telecommunications industry. ...

The most disappointing thing about the way in which Obama and other Democrats have defended their reversal on this law is that there’s a tremendous amount of dishonesty about what is in the law. I mean, they’re having to say that they’ve gotten all of these improvements, that it’s much better, that there’s much less to worry about, in order to justify their, I think, deeply immoral position. And so, there’s a lot of misunderstanding now about just how bad this law is. ...

And it’s just as bad as we feared, not just on the immunity for the telecoms, which is a disaster, but, more importantly, the fact that there, you know, is no burden of proof, except to say that the party being put under surveillance is outside of the United States. So if I’m communicating—I’m in the United States and I’m communicating with somebody in Argentina, they don’t—the government does not have to prove that they have reason to believe that that person in Argentina is affiliated with a terrorist group, is a suspected terrorist, has information about terrorism. All they have to prove (should they ever be challenged, since it's a SECRET TAP), is that they are not an American. ...

On Iraq, Obama does not have a plan to end the occupation; he has a plan to downsize the occupation slowly. He’s been clear that he wants to keep the Green Zone intact. That means, that they have to keep Blackwater in Iraq.

The point of this is not just to bash Obama. The point I’ve been trying to make is that Obama needs more than super fans. He needs pressure from his base, because he has all the energy of the antiwar movement and the antiwar infrastructure. You’ve got groups like MoveOn that really built their infrastructure out of the huge anger and desire for change around Iraq, and now the infrastructure of the antiwar movement largely is going to support Obama, but there aren’t clear demands being made of him to deserve that support. ...

What we have to understand is, with all the Wall Street money coming to Obama, with the weapons money coming to Obama, with the hedge fund money coming to Obama, these players have leverage. They can go to the Republicans. And so, what’s the leverage of the antiwar movement? You know, what’s the leverage of the grassroots supporters of Obama who have given him their trust, because they want change so badly on the environment, in Iraq, on domestic economic policy? ...

People do have some place else to go, which is—we’ve seen it over and over—the American people have made it very clear: stay home. That’s a credible threat. But I think Obama needs to hear a much more conditional, much more critical, much more demanding kind of support from his base, because his base is far to the left of the types of policies that we’re seeing and that we’re talking about here, whether it’s the mortgage crisis, whether it’s NAFTA, or whether it’s Iraq. ...

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/15/with_crises_in_fuel_food_housing#m...

Obama's love of markets and his desire for "change" are not inherently incompatible.

"The market has gotten out of balance," he says, and it most certainly has. Many trace this profound imbalance back to the ideas of Milton Friedman, who launched a counterrevolution against the New Deal from his perch at the University of Chicago economics department. And here there are more problems, because Obama--who taught law at the University of Chicago for a decade--is thoroughly embedded in the mind-set known as the Chicago School. ...

Another of Obama's Chicago fans is 39-year-old billionaire Kenneth Griffin, CEO of the hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. Griffin, who gave the maximum allowable donation to Obama, is something of a poster boy for an unbalanced economy. He got married at Versailles and had the after-party at Marie Antoinette's vacation spot (Cirque du Soleil performed)--and he is one of the staunchest opponents of closing the hedge-fund tax loophole. While Obama talks about toughening trade rules with China, Griffin has been bending the few barriers that do exist.

Despite sanctions prohibiting the sale of police equipment to China, Citadel has been pouring money into controversial China-based security companies that are putting the local population under unprecedented levels of surveillance.

Now is the time to worry about Obama's Chicago Boys and their commitment to fending off serious attempts at regulation. ...

The irony is that there is absolutely no reason for BHO backsliding. The movement launched by Friedman, introduced by Ronald Reagan and entrenched under Clinton, faces a profound legitimacy crisis around the world. Nowhere is this more evident than at the University of Chicago itself. In mid-May, when university president Robert Zimmer announced the creation of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute, an economic research center devoted to continuing and augmenting the Friedman legacy, a controversy erupted. More than 100 faculty members signed a letter of protest. "The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive," the letter states. "Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world's population."

When Friedman died in 2006, such bold critiques of his legacy were largely absent. The adoring memorials spoke only of grand achievement, with one of the more prominent appreciations appearing in the New York Times--written by Austan Goolsbee. Yet now, just two years later, Friedman's name is seen as a liability even at his own alma mater. So why has Obama chosen this moment, when all illusions of a consensus have dropped away, to go Chicago retro?

www.snipr.com/2z57n aka thenation.com/doc/20080630/klein

President Bush has lied, with the collusion of the media and the acquiescence of the public, to achieve his amoral aims, and how presidential candidates McCain and Obama are lying and eschewing morality in order to gain political acceptance by an ignorant populace.

If truth-telling is part of America's moral code, politicians and pundits failed to learn the code. If they did learn it, they sold their souls to Beelzebub for an earthly price.

President G.W. Bush, the inveterate non-stop liar, has already gained a reputation for being the worst president in America's history. His reputation is largely due to his pretence of being a God-fearing moralist while lying. He lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq 29 times. He lied about Iraq being an imminent threat to the USA, and he lied about Iraq being connected to Al-Qaeda.

A new film, "War made easy", based on Norman Solomon's eponymous book, uses archival footage to show the continuity of the propaganda messages that have been used to to justify war from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush

Bush has been caught lying about terrorist threats, about 9/11, about torture his administration authorized, about tax cuts, global warming, his political opponents, and the social security system. There’s not much he hasn’t lied about. As one commentator wrote, “As a ‘moral values’ president, George W. Bush has some explaining to do about bearing false witness.”

Meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and referring to Iran's nuclear development, Bush said, "The first choice is to solve it diplomatically and that's exactly what we're doing." He says that while refusing to meet with the Iranians. Saying one thing while doing another is typical of Bush’s falsehoods.

Bush also said an Iran with a nuclear weapon would be "incredibly dangerous" to world peace. Another lie. Iran has never attacked another country and hasn’t threatened to except in defence. The same can't be said of the US or Europe. Bush’s lies are well documented and continuous enough to make his lying pathological.

What about the pundits? In his book War made easy: how presidents and pundits keep spinning us to death, Norman Solomon makes it clear that the media has been complicit in turning a president's lies into spin. As Solomon points out, "the media assumption largely remains that Washington has laudable motivations”.

Both current US presidential candidates have sacrificed morality for politics: John McCain with outright lies and Barack Obama by sacrificing principle to electability.

www.snipr.com/2z56r aka redress.cc/americas/pjballes20080627