Onward and downward! I guess this blog is too sophisticatedly progressive for me.

The George Bush Presidency has been the worst thing that has happened to this country in my lifetime.

No, Jimmy Carter has him beat all to hell. Remember 9% unemployment and the prime pegged at 21%?

Carter was much, much worse.

Remember 9% unemployment and the
prime pegged at 21%?

Just as it was in 1981 and 1982 -- Reagan time.

I'd take Jimmy Carter over the Chimp in a New York second.

Ah, yes, Carter. That idiot who put us on a path to energy independence and environmental health, both swiftly undone by Reagan. What a loser.

No, Jimmy Carter has him beat all to hell. Remember 9% unemployment and the prime pegged at 21%?

And runaway inflation, and soaring gas prices, and increasing foreclosures, and trouble with Iran, and a huge deficit, and, uh...

Wait, who were we talking about, again?

The only good thing about Jimmy Carter, was he kept Ted Kennedy out of the Oval Office.

It's a shame that the Republicans didn't have such a hero in 2000.

Assuming that your lifetime is yet not concluded, Mr. Bogdanski, we look forward to your assessment of the Obama presidency.

It would be extremely difficult for him to screw up as badly as the people we have now.

"It would be extremely difficult for him to screw up as badly as the people we have now."

Agreed, but thankfully he won't get the chance. I'm confident that America will "just say no" to electing a racist and a communist.

Al, I have no idea why people refer to folks such as yourself as loony.

Thanks for commenting, Al. See you after the election.

I'm confident that America will "just say no" to electing a racist and a communist.

Wow, Al....you really believe that? Good grief.

Im not a big supporter of Obama, (although I think he is probably a better choice than McCain), but I am pretty sure he is neither of those.
And turn off Savage and Rush, you will live longer without all the hate in your life.

Carter came in when inflation already had driven loan rates over 12% and climbing. Gone wild from oil quadrupling in price, overnight, in 1973. The 'last straw' that turned everyone unanimous against Nixon. And why Ford's 1976 're-election' campaign theme was "WIN - Whip Inflation Now," which was already out of control. It was 1976, I think, when Oregon Legislature emergency session redacted Oregon's usury statute, which had capped loan interest rates at 6%; (memory is dim -- I was away then, 'back East' -- it's '76 or '78, and it's 6% or 7% cap, gotten from the Bible).

Obama faces coming into more of the GOP-aftermath same scorched-Earth economic desolation that Carter came into ... and later, revisionists lying to the children that Carter did it.

"Reagan. What a loser."

Reagan was a frightened, selfish calculating no-talent. Whereas Bush is a brain-damaged lowlife puppet of spite.

Reagan unprincipled coward: -- success also won him a series of deferments from military service (at the request of Warner Brothers).... He spent the war in California making army training movies at a military base in Los Angeles ..., he lived at home with his family ... never left the country and never saw combat.... studio public relations efforts to portray him as a soldier, who left his family to go "off to war." Feature stories described Wyman bravely carrying on, raising the children and maintaining the household while her man was away. Newsreels and magazine photos depicted Reagan "coming home" for leaves and visits. Reagan later sometimes seemed actually to have believed the ruse. Even decades later, he liked to talk about "coming back from the war," like other veterans, eager to take up family life again (a life that in his case had hardly been interrupted).

As his career and his marriage languished, Reagan had begun to ... politics. His first vehicle was the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the film actors' union.... In 1946, he chaired a union strike committee.... In 1947, he became president of the union. Reagan still considered himself a liberal Democrat, and he used his new political distinction to campaign for Harry Truman in 1948. There was occasional talk of Reagan himself running for Congress as a Democrat, but party leaders apparently opposed the idea because they considered him too liberal.

[Hoover then sent FBI agents threatening Reagan to be ruined, as a 'communist' by past association, planted 'evidence' and smear propaganda.]
In 1950, after initially endorsing the actress Helen Douglas for the United States Senate, he switched his support to Richard Nixon in mid-campaign. And as president of SAG, he became active in efforts to distance the union from Communist influence (driven to do so, no doubt, by the savagely anti-Communist political climate ...). By the late 1940s, he was cooperating with the FBI and testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities against Communism ..., he cooperated with the studios [and Reagan named names to smear them, like the FBI-stooge McCarthy] as they quietly administered the notorious blacklist of alleged Communists who were to be barred from employment in the movie industry. Reagan later claimed that the effort by Hollywood Communists to "take over the motion picture business ...," was responsible for his political turn.

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Yeah, those "Hollywood Communists," they were 'taking over,' and getting all the Big Bucks movie roles that uncharismatic Reagan was NOT getting.

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Hoover/Nixon stooge Reagan, then: (www.truthdig.com, October 8, 2007) -- Sixty years ago, as wicked witch-hunters descended upon the movie industry, Judy Garland took to the microphone for a coast-to-coast radio program called "Hollywood Fights Back!"

"Have you been to a movie this week? ... Any magazines on your table? Any books on your shelves? It's always been your right to read or see anything you wanted to. But now ... the House Committee on Un-American Activities has been investigating the film industry. Now, I have never been a member of any political organization. But I've been following this investigation and I don't like it...."

...the Hollywood 10 and the Hollywood Blacklist, an epidemic of censorship in the movie industry that set the stage for "McCarthyism," a term that evokes the fearful and oppressive mood of that bygone era and resonates with our current age of repression under the Bush regime.

... J. Edgar Hoover led the attack against left-leaning La-La-Land, authorizing a "massive investigation of the industry under the code name COMPIC (Communist Infiltration-Motion Picture Industry)." When anti-Semite and racist John Rankin became chairman of HUAC in 1945, the ['blue-dog' Democratic] Mississippi congressman claimed he was investigating "one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of the government. ... The information we get is that [Hollywood] is the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States.

It's true there was a significant left-wing and Communist Party [CP] presence in Hollywood during the 1930s and '40s. The 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Depression led onetime Communist Ring Lardner Jr., who won the Oscar for co-authoring 1942's "Woman of the Year," to conclude, "The whole system had broken down and was not going to be fixed. That it needed a change."
"From the time of the Spanish Civil War, the CP fought fascism abroad and at home," contended Norma Barzman, who wrote "The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate." The ex-Communist added, "During the Roosevelt years, the CP was responsible for Social Security, unemployment insurance legislation. ... We fought racism against the Japanese [and other minorities]. ... "
Hollywood's Reds were inspired by the Russian Revolution and its use of movies as agitprop, as evidenced by Lenin's dictum: "For us, the cinema is the most important of the arts."

Talking pictures also spurred the creation of Hollywood's Left. Unlike silent films, the talkies needed dialogue writers, so studios recruited playwrights from Broadway, including radicals such as John Howard Lawson and Clifford Odets. They "brought to Hollywood the dissatisfaction of Dramatists Guild enlightenment and union tradition," Nancy Lynn Schwartz wrote in "The Hollywood Writers Wars." "We organized the guilds and unions-they have all these benefits we fought for-and went out on strike for the medical, pensions and what young people today take for granted," noted Barzman, whose husband Ben co-wrote 1944's "Meet the People," starring Lucille Ball.

Before America entered World War II, Hollywood Communists and independent leftists-such as Lawson and Charlie Chaplin, respectively, in "Blockade" and "The Great Dictator"-struggled to sound the alarm about fascism. ... The Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 sidelined the Soviet Union-and CPUSA-from the antifascist cause, until the Nazis invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941. ...Communists were now on the side of official U.S. foreign policy and the studios, fighting to save the world from totalitarianism. As Howard Zinn pointed out, "It became easier to have antifascist films after the U.S. was in the war." In "Radical Hollywood," Buhle and Wagner declared, "The [Communist] Party out-patrioted everyone else in Hollywood, from films to sales of war bonds and, above all, in mobilizing public support for the servicemen. ..."
Alec Baldwin, narrator of 1996's "Blacklist: Hollywood On Trial" documentary, commented: "Hollywood produced hundreds of patriotic war films. ... Left-wing writers were in demand. They could express the ideals the soldiers were fighting for."

As WWII ended, Lardner experienced "a growing good feeling." As he put it, "An Allied victory ... had been won by the two great powers ... one democratic, one Communist, who ... work[ed] together for shared ideals," he said. But in "I'd Hate Myself in the Morning," the left-leaning screenwriter noted, "Almost no one had anticipated how quickly the tide would turn to rightist reaction. ..." Hollywood was particularly hard-hit by postwar backlash. "One of the first acts of the Republicans who took control of Congress in 1946 (for the first time in 20 years) was to convert a temporary [HUAC], which had been investigating fascist sympathizers during the war, into a permanent [committee] concentrating on the ... left," Lardner said.

In Tinseltown, John Huston, then vice president of the Directors Guild, met with director William Wyler and screenwriter Philip Dunne (neither of whom were part of the "Unfriendly 19") to create a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. CFA organized Hollywood's liberals and left to resist HUAC, and lyricist Ira Gershwin hosted a star-studded anti-witch-hunt party that included Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster, Danny Kaye, Billy Wilder and others. Their position was that the impending inquisition had nothing to do with communism per se but was about civil liberties, especially free speech.

Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been? -- The hearings in the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building was a congressional media circus worthy of a Hollywood production. Rep. J. Parnell Thomas chaired the committee that included Congressman Richard Nixon. Preparing the scene for the drama to unfold, beginning Oct. 20, 1947, the cooperative witnesses were the first to take the stand. The "friendly witnesses" were allowed to read prepared statements, starting with three producers: Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer (ex-chairman of the Republican Party's California State Committee) and Sam Wood.
Warner told HUAC: "Ideological termites have burrowed into many American industries, organizations and societies." ... Russian émigré Ayn Rand attacked "Song of Russia," complaining that the Soviet peasants SMILED too much. Red-baiter Adolphe Menjou testified on Oct. 21 that he believed the Communist Party should be "outlawed." Friendly witnesses Walt Disney, Robert Taylor, Robert Montgomery, George Murphy, Gary Cooper and Ronald Reagan also testified. While HUAC asked unfriendly witnesses about left-wing affiliations, the committee didn't ask "Coop" about his membership in the 1930s right-wing paramilitary group Hollywood Hussars. In 1947, Reagan was not only Screen Actors Guild president, but according to Victor Navasky, "FBI informant 'T-10,' " who "enforced the blacklist." In "Naming Names," Navasky writes that under special agent Reagan's SAG presidency, the guild "banned Communists and noncooperative witnesses from membership."

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I know, I know, for all the dittoheads full of illiterate broadcast mush this is TOO MUCH INFORMATION. (But this is miniscule.)

Yet, as Reagan said, "the truth is out there." And the truth is, today's Lamebrain and LIARS tell false HeroMYTH, because in fact, in real life, Reagan feared despot Hoover's FBI rightwing totalitarianism, and unprincipled Reagan sold his soul and betrayed American artists to fascist fearmongering, for himself to have a job in that economy ... like Nixon ... like Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush ... like Lamebrain, LIARS, and the dumbfounded dunces devoted to HateTalk worship who are reading this and getting madder and madder at TOO MUCH TRUTH, instead of getting smartly informed (about media brainwash propaganda).

Truth is Bush LIED about the anthrax murders. Propaganda documented. And so invaded Afghanistan.

Bush LIED about the WMD Propaganda documented. And so invaded Iraq.

Before all that, Bush LIED about counting ballots in Florida. (And so invaded America.) After that, Bush LIED about counting ballots in Ohio. As the jock mentality says, "you can look it up;" (counting on the sure-bet probability that no 'jock mentality' ever looks it up).

You better believe Bush LIED about Nine-Eleven Op. Considering only two facets: First, they said IN ADVANCE, (PNAC, 1997), that they were GOING TO DO IT, (instigate a "new Pearl Harbor," like the one that 'made' Bush in the first place ... what, you thought I was talking about Junior Jughead? He's a drug-damaged vegetable-brain puppet, his Dad's cat's-paw); and, second, they never presented ANY evidence from Nine-Eleven Op events, indeed, ALL OF IT was 'classified,' withheld, and destroyed.

The so-called 'Bush bashing' is NOT what the grown-ups are shouting bloody murder about. Dumbo Jughead is only a dimensionless 'cut-out,' (in FBI/CIA terms, the scapegoat who is blamed, but is NOT the culprit). Millions of 'Bush bashers' are also 'bashing' Obama and Biden, and Pelosi and Reid, and Smith and Wyden -- 'bashing' ALL of them, in powerlust, oppressing American citizens, and citizenship.

We, the normal folks, have got to drain the infected pus of the inflamed differences between us. Because there is NO difference, in a Republican / Democrat false dichotomy.

The two 'classes' in America are the powermad corrupted-absolutely fascists, wannabe dictators, VERSUS the rest of us, citizens, wage-workers, voters, blog-goers, family and community constituents -- normal not-rich not-powercrazed folks.

We hold the stronger force than the propaganda dictators, in our communication in mind of each other. As we put the factual pieces together in one whole understanding which we all 'get' a part of.

It is easier, perhaps, to see what we have by looking at what we have not, by looking at America's situation from the opposing point of view -- the fascists' view of us. Stephen Biko, (look him up), said it concisely best: The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor ... is the mind of the oppressed.

That's why the slavish listeners to the broadcast mass-mind hate-talk LIARS are killing us, America's normal folks, themselves included.

All the people still reading here, both of them, take a look at this real-life demonstration of exactly what I mean. Especially read the Comments. Our country and ALL of US are fed up to stinky high heaven with politics same-old, same-old status quo, and we are going to start doing it a new INDEPENDENCE way.

Cindy Sheehan Bugged in Denver, by Rob Kall, August 25, 2008

A pox on both the Houses, AND the mass-media they rode in on ... which deliberately has NOT said one peep about this news story. Sheehan is going to defeat Pelosi.

We ALL are going to defeat our 'elected' office-holders, Public's Enemy No. 1.

Nice blitz Tensk, but for all of us who have been able to turn off Savage and Rush, others need to stop reading and believing the delusional theories from nut-ball anarchists at Indy-media.

And Tensk.....do you really believe someone was actually bugging Sheehan's phone? Please, no self respecting operative (even a Pelosi nickel add amateur) would be caught by the bugee returning to the room while in the act. In addition to that do really think that bugging a phone with today's technology requires a device on the hard phone?

Ah, yes, Carter. That idiot who put us on a path to energy independence and environmental health,

Energy independence and environmental health are not achieved by banning nuclear waste reprocessing by executive order, which US Navy-trained nuclear engineer Jimmy Carter did.

30 years of uranium which we've only used ~3% of sit in pools around the country now because of this executive order. Hardly environmentally responsible, and certainly not the road to energy independence.

Al, you hater you. Don't you know that any criticism of the One is hatred, pure and simple? But posting cute stories about encouraging children to play act assassinating the president, why that's just good ol' fashioned liberal fun!