American Hitler

Dick Cheney will go down in history as one of the most evil men this country has ever produced.

We will only fully appreciate this fact, after we deal with the world war he intentionally helped to start.

The most recent $250 million payment by Halliburton to the Nigerian government's anti-corruption police, is the latest of his Teflon-Antichrist acts.

He had been charged in connection with a bribery case involving a $6 billion natural gas lease. Muh-huh-illions! had been paid in bribes - allegedly - to government officials for securing that lease but when the government began to implode under the weight of its own corruption all the truth cookies fell out for all the world to see.

Again, Dick skates.

Let's review:

1. Dick escapes the Skooter Libby indictment. Remember? Valerie Plame's outing as a CIA agent? See the movie Fair Game for details.

2. The aforesaid scandal let the cat out of the bag on the absolute crock of shit the original "credible intelligence" was on the oh-so-deadly and yet non-existent weapons of mass destruction program of Saddam Hussein.

3. Hallibuton was served up buh-illions! in contracts for the war which resulted.

4. Cheney held a 100-day long meeting with oil industry execs within the White House during his time as Vice President that allegedly nutted, de-fanged and de-clawed regulatory agencies overseeing domestic oil drilling operations. Halliburton and BP were represented at these meetings. No minutes from the meetings have been available to the public.

5. Cheney accepted a huge final payout from Halliburton at the time of his (wink) "exit interview" before becoming vice president. He then urged his president on to a war...........which resulted in a number of multi-billion dollar contracts for services, that went to Halliburton and subsidiary KBR.

Where is Cheney now? Anecdotal reports have him constructing a massive underground bunker somewhere but who knows, and the media never finds out. He pioneered such a structure allegedly, beneath the official Vice President's residence, in 2002. When neighbors complained of all the noise and construction, Cheney's people reported that the vice president was merely creating an office work space on an upper floor. Current Veep Joe Biden later confirmed that indeed there exists an underground bunker beneath the residence.

You note that Halliburton is NOT named as one of the defendants of the US Government's limp lawsuit in the BP oil spill, despite the conspicuous reports that there was something, at the very least different, if not deficient, about their cement mix used prior to the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill.

The televised media shied totally away from the Nigerian bribe within a bribe.

Only those of us who assiduously read the internet for BP news and watch our YouTubes are really aware that the former Vice President of the United States was named as a defendant in a bribery lawsuit in Nigeria. Has this sort of thing ever happened before in the history of this country? Much less that his former employers paid a $250 million highwayman mordida to make those nasty charges simply vanish.

Why? Why is cable news afraid of Dick Cheney?

How docile is the allegedly-left television winky-tinks, to the former republican veep, who should normally provide red meat for the libby grist mill? Why is there this deafening silence where there should be outrage and clamor?

How is it the allegedly responsible players, CNN and MSNBC, haven't reported on it? Choosing instead to snatch the predictable divisive issues, perennial low-hanging fruit, such as Don't Ask Don't Tell?

At the beginning of the summer Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper stood with their concerned gazes before the scenic backdrops in places like New Iberia, vowing to get to the bottom of it all. Oh how those teary concerned eyes lied to us.

"Look how concerned she is. She really means it, doesn't she?" we said, feeling good that a voice and a face America trusts would not let us down.

Now? The beltway sword dances during the lame duck weeks, the idiotic tears of John Boehner, and other nonsense minutia, these bits of awful fill the screens of gelded lightweight MSNBC, and CNN between the Cadillac commercials and celebutard news: Lindsay Lohan slapping a nursing tech at her rehab center.

Disgraceful, emblematic of a society in decline, piloted there by a media controlled by plutocrats who silently, malevolently brook no dissent, no discussion, no protest against their atrocities.

Ooopsie Daisy. Blow-Out Preventer Useless as Evidence?

Yeppers. Steep chance that this is now a sad fact.

Coming up on one month ago we made a comment concerning the blow-out preventer in this article that postulated corporate sabotage as a potential root cause for the oil spill.

You'll note deep in the article we discuss the Blow Out Preventer, that earlier reports note the BOP sitting on a NASA dock, open to the elements and largely unsecured.

Now The Houston Chronicle and MSNBC report that the very same BOP (oops and gosh golly) is possibly null and void as a key piece of evidence.

Anymore I hate it when I am correct.

So let me get this straight: a supervisor works for Transocean one of the three major players in the drama. He's working on the rig before the explosion happens. He then goes to work for a contractor helping to investigate the blow-out preventer and there's video of him putting his hands on this key piece of evidence?

Is this accurate? Are we serious here?

Is that not like putting an Oswald relative in charge of securing Dealey Plaza prior to an investigation on the Kennedy assassination?

Cluster-fuck alert!

Well, of course, this is all just random, see? There IS no conspiracy here, folks. Nothing to see, go about your business. Move along now sheeple. Er, uh, I mean people.

The bad decision count on the logic board by now is certainly up to 20 to 0. The null set representing good decisions start to finish.

The Obama administration of course should register its outrage with regard to this by orchestrating a Rose Garden photo op with the nuns and orphans fund, sometime following the Holiday week. So please look for it.

What no one will report on this week is the potential sabotage angle.

"Really? Pfft. You must be joking. C'mon, nnnnnno one would ever THINK of doing something so heinous. Get real and have some egg nog. Go ahead, have sex with an office mate atop a copy machine or something, like the rest of us. Go soak for a while, would you please?"

If there was any evidence to be found of any sort of negligible culpability, or sabotage, either exculpatory or damning to any party in this mess whatever, that evidence is now tainted.

And what we all know about that from either the Simpson trial or a thousand cops shows we have watched is, that introduces reasonable doubt, which lets everyone off the hook.

Merry Christmas BP, Halliburton and Transocean! You've just been handed your "get out of a meaningful trial free" card.

Halliburton: "Hey Nigeria! Here's $250 M! Buh-bye, thanks for playing."

The Nigeria vs Halliburton bribery case that threatened to ensnare our former vice president Dick Cheney has evaporated.

What made it go poof? $US250 million.

The next time someone decries a rapper getting off with only probation on a weapons charge, you tell them where the real gangstas can be found.

Nigeria's anti-corruption police are human, after all. They have needs as do any of us; needs for brilliant things, electronic devices, plasma screens, the Almighty HD; things that go zoom in the night, like on all the commercials: Lexus, Mercedes, Cadillac. Needs of wearing the latest from Armani to Bvlgari. And we can't forget the need to take elaborate vacations; yes, trips to Swiss banks with shiny, metal, cases.

Why do the same names keep popping up in the negative column as we read about Cheney, Halliburton, KBR, and BP?

The usual suspects.

In the records of the Old Bailey, there can be seen court notations for those characters who frequently found themselves before the magistrates. One asterix meant you had appeared in court before. Two indicated you were previously convicted. And a cross beside your name, indicated you were a frequent guess of His Majesty. Double cross pegged you as a known associate of on-going criminal enterprises, a villain.

Analogs in the current circumstance? You get the drill.

Meanwhile, our television media concentrates on the surprising fact that there is a thing called winter, that it definitely exists, and it has brought us this curious substance called snow this week. And it is AMAZING!

CNN is skywriting in the mundane today. Weatherman Rob Marciano - and he must have had an argument with a higher-up - is somewhere in Arkansas; again and again describing what is snow, how it works, how it can gum up traffic and so on; how a snow-plow operates, how road salt helps to lower the freezing point of water to about to 28 degrees, so that the ice on the street melts.

Groan.

While our news media continues on toward its eventual death rattle, let us walk away from the television and sit here at our computer and reflect on a few facts.

One, WikiLeaks has released a new document today about BP's narrow escape from another blow-out in Azerbaijan. This comes hours after Obama administration's Eric (place)Holder, released the US Department of Justice's meekly delayed, mincingly announced decision to sue the oil giant for damages from the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.

No criminal charges have been filed.

In reading these preliminary reports we see the curious absence of one potential defendant: Halliburton.

Is it fair to picture the scene?

Somewhere high over the Atlantic, a man sips Brut in his first class cabin. He's quite pleased with himself. All is well.

The camera pans up from his reclining form to the overhead bin, wherein can be found a shiny, metal, case.

Cheney's Nigeria Connection? HELL-O!!!

Now might be time for the Big Dick to get sick all over again. The hours are counting down.

Dickensonian Cheney in his bed, awaiting the big one or the spirits one, two, and three, to erase all his sins, and "God Bless us EVERY ONE!"

Okay charges were filed earlier this month. That's right as CEO of Halliburton, along with then subsidiary KBR, it is alleged Cheney and others gave out serious cash to secure a $6 billion oil and natural gas lease in the African country.

You'll note the stalwart denials, of course. "Nigeria? Never even heard of the place! I protest!"

Wwwah, wwwah, wwwaaaaaah. Come to find everyone will likely settle and make nice. Of course deniability is still there, right? Why? Because Nigeria is only slightly more corrupt than we are.

And by the way, that's how completely out-of-touch the news cycle is. Apparently the former vice president of the United States being charged in Nigeria for fu-hu-cking BRIBERY! isn't news-worthy.

What? That's SICK!

MSNBC with its thundering away, pontificating Keith Olbermann, and the Queen of Sanctimony Herself Rachel "DADT is the ONLY issue" Maddow?

Nope. Didn't touch it.

CNN?

See Kyra Philips, Kiran Chetry, John Stossel, ANDERSON COOPER all collectively looking up into the trees; "Hey, that's a neat bird!" while whistling Christmas Carols to no one.

Can't even type. Fingers shaking. Eyes blinking.

Will the Lord God pardon Dick Cheney after he croaks?

We know that pussy, otherwise known as President Barack Obama, will likely do so. But will God?

Okay, I'm God. Just for a minute now, work with me. I'm God, okay?

And I say "fuck that motherfucker! He goes RIGHT TO HELL!"

Now I am not God. Okay? I'm back. Just me at the controls of my little hate machine here. And yet, somehow, I'm imagining God getting back to his desk, checking his email, and realizing that I have ordered Cheney to Hell while he was at lunch.

"Hmmmn," God says. And maybe he even takes out a bag of Cheeto's from his desk. He leans back in his chair, mulls it over, downs one Cheeto, then then next and goes.

"Yeah, sure. What the hell. Let's go with it."

More later.

Feinberg: "BP Will Pay Fee For pro-bono Lawyers"

File it under "yeah, that'll work."

Watch to the end of this video. Did you hear that?

Let me see if I have this correct. If you need to get a lawyer to address your issues with BP and you need one pro-bono - which is like, free to you! - BP will foot the bill out of the goodness of their sweet baby Jesus hearts.

Feinberg, says that "in no way" will this impact the sort of legal advice doled out to the unfortunate victims of the worst oil spill in our nation's history.

Nnnah. Come on.

And y0u believe that with all your heart, don't you?

Just like you believe him when he says the liability release waivers he is asking those afflicted parties to sign, holding BP harmless, are no way timed with the Christmas season and the need for families to at least put something on the table?

Sure. You buy that too, don't you?

Because you're a trusting person, right? And the government and large corporations don't lie, and if I close my eyes really hard and pray, everything will be alright.

This is what is going through my head just now:

Because I believe whatever it is Santa-Jesus BigGovCorp tells me.

Of course Feinberg's comments represent the latest hypnotic idiot-speak that has passed muster with a docile, auto-orgasmic media all flutter-eyed and shivering to its own rhythmic strokes at the hypocrisy of the extended Bush tax cuts.

Mmmmmnn, yeah! so good, as it flails away at that which is glisteningly obvious: on the one hand Tea Partiers begging for more debt, and on the other a campaign pledge broken.

"Did he really?"

"Oh hell yes he did. Look at the tape!"

"Really?

"Look again!"

(snore)

And President Obama in no way shape or form made this latest boo-boo to deflect the nation's attention from what continues to happen in the Gulf.

You believe that right?

You believe there are no back room deals flying all over the place at the moment. Florida trial attorney Mike Papantonio was looking into whether Feinberg was getting a cut of whatever he saves the oil giant, but that issue vanished into thin air. All quiet, all better.

You would agree that if Feinberg is getting a percentage at whatever BP saves is a pretty big conflict of interest right? That's huge, right?

That's why in Florida real estate law you can't perform property appraisals AND be paid fees based on the appraised value, right? Because, somehow, gosh golly, every property you looked at would suddenly be worth $1 million or better. Makes sense.

But we, here down the other end the information pipe have no answer either way on this seemingly ridiculous question that is suspiciously going unanswered.

Just shit-nuts crazy enough to be true? Consult history on this thing.

Yup.

In the end, if you want to go back to sleep, take none of this seriously. DON'T think that Ken Feinberg is now BP's legal and financial point-man. DON'T think that he is doing everything in his power to minimize damage to the oil giant who has maximized damaged to the people on the Gulf Coast for decades. DON'T think Ken Feinberg's mission in life is to keep BP out of court at all costs, including the skin of the very people the company has harmed the most.

The President's Shylock

Ken Feinberg, playing Ken Feinberg, in Barack Obama's modernized Shakespearian tragedy The Merchant of Menace!

Seen here in an earlier role as Uncle Kindly, he says "you don't have to give up your right to litigate." He also says that the small business person is a "priority!"

But this morning on MSNBC "Morning Joe" the allegedly "independent" administrator of the $20 billion fractional-reserve damage check disbursement account/morale murdering program of patronization, is on tape admitting that, yes, in order for the damaged fishermen and business operators to get their lump sum checks and expedite the process, they must first sign a paper that gives up the claimant's right to sue at a later date.

Of course, this sort of "give me my pound of flesh" tactic was used by the oil giant at the beginning of this disaster and was roundly lambasted as underhanded. Recall that lawyers -checkbooks, pen and paper in hand - were all over the Gulf Coast at the start, urging those wishing to earn at least something while the oil came ashore to sign the papers giving up their right to sue.

This was one of the reasons an independent disbursement authority and fund was set up in the first place: to eliminate the conflict of interest and cut through smokescreen harassment and strong-arm tactics used to stay out of the courtroom.

How quickly we forget why in hell Ken Feinberg was called into this game by President Barack Obama, in the first place, right?

Bloomberg won't let me embed this video, but, you just have to watch it. This is the party line now. IT'S ONE TIME ONLY FOLKS! HERE'S A DEAL FOR YOU JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS!!!

Joe Scarborough had Alabama Governor Bob Riley on MSNBC's Morning Joe today discussing this. Riley told the story of a young Alabama couple forced out of business because they were coming up short, but they refused to give up their right to sue.

"These aren't corporate people," he said. That says a lot, coming from a republican governor. One, who obviously very much gives a damn about small business. The convenient Kewpie-doll to others who use "mom and pop" as a touchstone of vanishing Americana all the time, while they blithely sell our small business interests down river to Chinese sweatshops.

When the producers played the tape, just referenced above, Scarborough nearly gagged from laughing. Not at the tragedy of this all but, in my view, the unbelievable absurdity, the spectacle of this game of Three Card Monty, "take it or leave it" attitude from the president's "Compensation Tsar."

Here's the Ed Show's, radio version on it. Perhaps more will be aired on it this evening. Or perhaps Ed will want to stay out of this prickly situation, as it reflects poorly on his president. Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow still have that warm, "I Have Dream/Yes We Can" dust in their eyes, and a major blind spot for the bad policies of this president. Which is why it's been so easy for them to close their eyes to the on-going economic holocaust along the Gulf. For what it's worth, here's what was said recently on Ed's radio segment about Feinberg.

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Numgesser the rare exception, nearly every other public official that has anything to do with this tragedy, through their close working association with BP, has undergone a transformation from honorable public servant and concerned watchdog, to spokesperson for BP.

Feinberg's transformation may not have taken root as quickly as some others. Or, perhaps the agenda to slide gracefully into the oil giant's arms was always in the works from the moment he took over the compensation fund.

No matter, Ken Feinberg now joins Thad Allen, President Barack Obama and the chairpersons of the President's National Oil Spill Commission in that regard.

Oil corrupts, and BP oil corrupts absolutely.

Julian Assange: We will Shoot this Messenger

One day we'll all call this guy a hero. Mark my words.

People who bring us the truth have a habit of ending up dead first before we do.

Because that's what we do to our human heroes, we canonize them, memorialize them, after we murder them for bringing us the truth. Or after we have appreciated their bravery, with pity, following the destruction of their villages, tribes etc.

Examples: Sitting Bull (America), Montecuzoma (Mexico), Lenca (Central America) Atahualpa (Peru), Martin Luther King, Jr. (USA), Bobby Kennedy(USA). Oh yeah! Gandhi (India)! Oh, and who else? Now I remember, Jesus (Nazareth).

"Wasn't he a good fellow," we say. "Wasn't he brave. Let's put up a statue in the park. There, all better."

He will be murdered soon. Does he have a hinky sex background? Perhaps. But the odds that the recent charges against him in Sweden are trumped up and built on shaky evidence, at best, are now astronomically inclined in his favor.

Intelligence people know this: such coincidences don't exist in reality.

No matter. He'll either be zapped in prison - carry it under the heading "found hanging in his cell" - or he will be found in a hotel room in city X having died after an alleged "drug overdose".

"Depressed, poor fellow, from all the hubbub. Moving on."

Note that the ball, on his arrest and capture, started moving faster, and with greater purpose AFTER he threatened to release documents pertaining to the untouchable:, the banks, and oil companies, who have both royally screwed us all.

If we could see all of those correspondences! Well, that's a REAL peek behind the reality curtain, isn't it.

No. Likely never happen. "Moving on."

BP was in his most recent statement: he was going to release documents related to BP. BigGovCorp simply cannot have that. That just won't do.

"Sorry Mr. Assange; but thank you, valued employee, for all your efforts. We must kill you now, and put up a statue later when we've all thought better on it, and we fool ourselves that we've seen the light and become civilized."

But four characters like him will be standing in his shoes on the following day, sixteen when those are removed, and so on.

Not that Mr. Assange isn't being used by our enemies, speaking as an American citizen, of course he is. But what is really happening?In my view Mr. Assange is using our enemies, and in jiu jitsu fashion, our own ills. By this he is liberating something we aren't accustomed to hearing or seeing: the truth.

In this case, it's truth about who we've become through years of closing our eyes.

I can't help but thinking of Oscar Wilde's novel, A Picture of Dorian Grey. I started reading it recently as research on the time period, for a novel I am working on.

You remember Wilde, jailed in London for being openly homosexual in 1893 or so? Ring a bell? No? Most of us were shielded from Wilde in school. I know I was. "Simply won't do" they said. "Moving on."

Recapping history, to be secretively gay was okay in Victorian London, but not openly. DADT was in place for all of the UK. The Anglo-Irish poet did 18 months hard labor because he got sick of lying about it. The time in prison crushed him. He died soon after as a sick, broken man.

In his one novel, which revealed the underside of the British upper crust - their lives of infidelity, homosexual leanings, languid sensuality, and disdain toward those less fortunate - the character Dorian Grey is given a painting that is such a precise representation of who he is, it subsumes his soul.

The Faustian bargain Dorian strikes with the universe is that, as he physically ages, everything bad that his soul has become is sort of slurped off of him and onto the painting, which itself begins to weather - the lip snarls at first after he hurtfully dumps an actress and so on. You get the drill - while Dorian retains all the vitality of youth and innocence in full-bloom physically.

So - and there's always an upper story attic in these sort of arrangements - he has the painting shrouded and hauled up to his secret place.

(hands flapping in the breeze) Right, so, off we go with the concept. You can imagine truth being like a gas under pressure. In this situation you'd want to contain it, but the lie forces you to contain more and more of it, right? Well pretty soon the vessel likely can't take it, and so too with this painting. Pop, out comes the truth which by now, has grown quite ugly.

You can see the analogies and the strange similarities and parallels between then and today and how life imitates art.

Julian Assange isn't Jesus, Gandhi or Dorian Grey. But, he is someone attempting to bring us the truth. His reasons are likely as egotistical and narcissistic as they are altruistic. This much I have gathered from his interviews.

It takes great narcissism to be so bold to think you, and you alone, are responsible for bringing the real truth forward into the world; so that you may transform all mankind with it. That takes near insanity. The sort in which you value your quest more than your own life.

What many of us fail to see is that Julian Assange is the tip of a gigantic iceberg of truth that has only now begun crashing into our shore.

All our business runs on machines operating with outdated code. Code created last week is already outdated the moment it was written. How much of the government do you suppose runs on something so idiotically vulnerable as Windows XP? A lot of it. How easy is it to sit passively across the net via a wireless point and monitor every word written, either in code or any language anywhere, even these words as I type them? The right tools and an eight year old can do it.

We share everything on an iPod made in China, or other complex machine, while the most difficult device to hack and monitor is a $3.95 cell phone bought at the Wal Mart checkout. A device which is also, curiously, made in China.

You see these posts and comments all across the net now, "anyone who would tell him anything should be shot!" That sort of thing.

Shoot all of us, then. Our information systems are as vulnerable, porous and defenseless as Sarah Palin's logic.

The problem isn't Julian Assange. The problem is us and our acid reflux to the truth. We avoid it like a vampire shuns the dawn.

Unless we change who we are on a fundamental level, how we treat our fellow earthlings, the truth will get out, that we are not who we seem to be, who we pretend to be.

I haven't reached the end of Wilde's novel yet. Like you I am playing catch up with culture. Somehow I see that Dorian's efforts to contain the truth behind the shroud are actually making things worse.

Somehow I don't think Dorian is going to make it. I hope we can do better.