Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the USA House of Representatives, says that the Central Intelligence Agency, during their briefings to Congress, never mentioned planned “enhanced interrogation techniques” (torture) of Muslim prisoners back when Dubya and the Dick Cheney were managing our foreign policy. In other words, the CIA “lied.” The horror! But seriously, was it their first time?

Consider for a moment that the CIA’s stated mission is simply to defend the USA. The agency gathers secret international “intelligence” which is then delivered to Congress and the President (or occasionally a sinister Vice President) even if their intent is on playing nasty tricks without a paper trail. Then the CIA is expected to keep their lips zipped. But there are also rumors, merely rumors, that the CIA is by now an international cartel of “private contractors” selling drugs, weapons, military coups, bootleg petroleum, assassinations, whatever makes money. Who knows?

I mention all this because our former President George W. Bush now has a good alibi for his Really Big Mistake….how come a handful of Saudi terrorists in 2001 were able to sneak into the USA, get “one-way” flight training for big airliners, then they hijacked some airliners and, among other accomplishments, knocked down BOTH of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. The CIA briefed Bush in detail about the probability of such plans more than month before the 9/11 attacks. After the briefing (at Bush’s Texas ranch), the President went fishing.

So here’s my point. There’s nothing more embarassing to a Texas cowboy than to get outright “bushwhacked,” especially considering how small the bushes are in Texas, and how hard it is for outlaws to hide behind them. You might even call them “shrubs” — the bushes, I mean. And there’s not much in the way of hills and mountains in Texas to hide behind, neither. So having someone get the drop on you is, well, mortifying!

And, hypothetically speaking, if a happy Texas rancher and his sidekick Dick were to get bushwhacked, don’t you think they’d spend the remainder of their lives wanting some revenge, maybe a lynching or a little torture here and there? And they’d forever after accuse their political opponents of being weak on “national security,” right? Not that it’s going to undo what happened on 9/11, but at least we could pretend that the CIA didn’t warn us?

What was he thinking? Louis Caldera, until recently Director of the White House Military Office, was not doing anything radical when he activated a plan to send “Air Force One,” the President’s Boeing 747-200B jet airliner, low over Manhattan for a photo-opportunity. Apparently the plan never got President Obama’s thumbprint, nor did the plan get top-level approval at the Pentagon.

Photo-shoots with Air Force One are nothing new. One of my favorites shows the huge aircraft viewed from above, flying rather low over Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Another good photo (we get credit!) shows the recent stop that Air Force One made on the White House front lawn, presumably so that our nation’s Commander-in-Chief could have a little chat with the pilot. Or maybe to provide a quick escape for Mr. Caldera?

But why should New Yorkers be so touchy about an airliner flying a bit low? Do they remember the jet, crippled by birds hitting its engines, which then barely missed Manhattan and landed on the ice-choked Hudson River? Or was it the TWO jets which on 9/11 hit the World Trade Center buildings in Manhattan (total casualties 2,603 in the Twin Towers and on the ground)?

– COST of one Air Force One flyover of Manhattan: $357,000.00

– STREET PRICE (5/10/09) of PHOTOSHOP SOFTWARE for Macintosh (able to create composite photo of Air Force One flying over Manhattan or any other place you prefer): $650.00

QUICK QUIZ….

How many “planes called Air Force One” exist (trick question)?

How many miles per gallon of fuel does a Boeing 747 get (on the high way)?

To help America make sense of the knuckledraggers, many in wealthy Southern California, who are staging cute “Tea Party” demonstrations (against Obama’s tax-reform plans to get us out of the Bush Depression), we have assembled the following “Top 10 Reasons NOT To Pay Taxes.”

Along with bonehead right-winger Rupert Murdoch, the deep-thinkers who promote this stuff presumably want a nice, old-fashioned “flat tax” and maybe still believe the Earth itself is flat. In case you never studied recent American history, “flat tax” means that the wealthy who will soon own pretty much everything would only have to pay the same tax rates as everyone else — the poor, the minimum-wagers, union members, and the middle class. Clueful voters and modern economists long ago lost all respect for that old flat-tax religion, but conservative (and rich!) Republicans cling to that pagan faith. As for the Earth being flat — oh, hell, if you never leave the safety of your country-club, the Earth DOES look flat.

“Top 10 Reasons NOT To Pay Taxes”
from DIOSA.NET/circus

Reason #10 - In the beginning, God made Man and Woman. There were no taxes, just that liberal Serpent. End of discussion.

Reason #9 - Hey, if those huge corporations who didn’t pay royalties for leased Federal offshore oil-fields (during the carefree Bush years) weren’t arrested, shouldn’t the government cut me some slack too?

Reason #8 - All those do-gooders just want to pay out our money for Federal “entitlements” like Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. Forget all those old and sick people. Instead, take care of traditional charities like the Pentagon and defense contractors (I own stock in those).

Reason #7 - I promise never to call the police, the fire department, the local school district, the Coast Guard, National Guard, highway-repair department, hospitals, National Park Service, or any other wasteful government office. So I deserve an exemption from taxes.

Reason #6 - I’m from Indiana and can’t remember what the question was. Can I be excused?

Reason #5 - The rebel yell at the original Boston Tea Party was “no taxation without representation!” I haven’t voted in years. So “no taxation” for me, right?

Reason #4 - The guy in the White House doesn’t even look like me. Wrong color. Doesn’t represent me at all. So, again, “no taxation” for me.

Reason #3 - I’m pretty sure there’s no house of representatives in Washington-DC to authorize Federal budgets and taxation, and anyway Dick Cheney proved we can bend the laws and even torture people when we feel like it (he even shot a lawyer and got away with it).

Reason #2 - The government has enough money, so they don’t need mine.

Reason #1 - If the government taxes rich people, we won’t have enough of them, and only poor people will be left.

– Matthew Walker

In the painful aftermath of George W. Bush’s eight years as President of the USA, Americans have suddenly become interested again in “The Economy,” especially in that spicy sauce called “economic stimulus.” Bush’s amazing $10-trillion National Debt apparently caught the attention of younger voters who must now pay, after the fact, for Bush’s faith-based financial planning.

Unfortunately, many Democrats who subsequently rode into power in Washington-DC with President Obama are now ready to throw taxpayer money in all directions, hoping that plentiful paper money on the ground will at least lift people’s spirits and trickle up through businesses and banks. Who knows? It could happen.

Meanwhile, Republicans who were not beaten into submission (or simply thrown out of office) in the last election have already begun calling for “more tax cuts!” This prescription, after eight years of Republican budget deficits and tax cuts which helped only the rich and emptied the U.S. Treasury, brings to mind the acronym “S.O.S.” — an expression favored by prison inmates when they are served the same old….food.

Sadly, most voters have trouble staying awake when TV commentators discuss economics, especially weird science like an “economic stimulus.” Worse, modern economists who could explain how these things work often have trouble communicating with the real world, and in any group of economists each seems to see things somewhat differently — rather like the ancient parable from India about six blind men who grasped different parts of an elephant and described the animal variously like a stone pillar, a rope, a tree branch, a handheld fan, a wall, or a thick pipe.

In September 1982, Scientific American Magazine published an entire special issue whose subject was The Mechanization of Work. Like so many important concepts found only in the best objective journalism, the big central idea in this magazine issue floated unnoticed over the talking heads in mainstream media. Pity, because much of what now torments the American economy was predicted by the Scientific American authors.

After an introductory article by Eli Ginzberg, the Scientific American issue included articles detailing how mechanization throughout modern history had made nearly all human endeavors (agriculture, mining, design and manufacturing, commerce, office work, women’s work) vastly more efficient and much less dependent on “employees.” Both the productivity increases and the labor decreases described were enormous. The last article concerning “distribution of work and income” explained calmly that highly-productive machinery, the concentration of factory ownership, and finally the near-elimination of human labor together mean that a modern industrialized economic system can no longer be managed automatically by market forces but instead must now include the forced recirculation of money to keep consumers active and the system running — or economic collapse and “social unrest” will ensue.

Laissez-faire, regulations-be-damned capitalists pondering the Scientific American conclusions will immediately erupt in anger, calling them “communism” or lazy “socialism” or much worse names. Do-gooder liberals (like myself) will strenuously object that a cold-blooded technical concept such as the “recirculation of money” in an economy ignores the true potential of democracy: benevolently sharing all wealth among all citizens, regardless of their “productivity” (this is merely a different recipe for disaster).

How does all this relate to President Obama, the United States Congress, and your wallet? We have already seen during the Bush years what happens to an economy: when wealth and ownership concentrate further among the already rich; when jobs disappear, pay less, or are merely sent overseas; when cheap imported goods replace domestically-made products; and when tax cuts for extremely wealthy individuals and hugely profitable corporations empty the public treasury. During this time, “high tech” information-processing and automation (such as robotic manufacturing) continued to make much human labor obsolete, so even fewer consumer became available to “keep the motor running.”

The hard truth revealed by the Scientific American issue The Mechanization of Work is that, whether you prefer greed or compassion when designing your economy, you can’t just let the system dry up and stop. Forget for a moment about home mortgages, the stock-market, affordable healthcare, alternative energy, and fuel-efficient cars. Whether an economy falters from technology-driven unemployment or from political mismanagement, the point is “Who can buy stuff anyway if they no longer have any income?”

Memo to Democrat big-government zealots: Always remember that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s successful economic-recovery plan didn’t just hand out money but created thousands of useful, good-paying jobs — many of them “permanent.”

Memo to Republican tax-cut enthusiasts: Do you really expect the thousands of voters who have lost their jobs, homes, retirement/pension funds, and kids’ inheritance to take you seriously? Voters will remember your promises of ”bi-partisan” government when the next Congressional elections take place. Have you been naughty or nice?

So I bought myself some fine Obama Shoes (many styles available), which I will wear Inauguration Day and will throw at my television if it shows the previous President instead of our new, highly-improved President.

Our new President-elect got my vote (and campaign money), not because he’s black or African-American or even because he can pronounce “nuclear” instead of “nukular,” but because Obama’s got game. Even before Inauguration Day 2009, Obama had appointed an experienced, forwarding-thinking, multi-cultural, bi-partisan Cabinet capable of managing and rebuilding America’s economy and role in the world. But this former Senator from Illinois can also do fast breaks and layups, and his favorite team has been the Chicago Bulls.

Obama is one of the smartest, most clear-headed intellectuals and leaders on the scene. Before George W. Bush and the Dick Cheney invaded and occupied Iraq (which had no Al Qaeda terrorists but has tons of OIL), Senator Obama voted against the invasion. After Bush’s Iraqatastrophe eventually failed and also bombed America’s reputation in world politics, only then did American politicians who had supported the invasion realize their mistake and express “regrets.” Long before Bush’s $10-TRILLION National Debt bombed the U.S. economy, presidential-candidate Obama had an economic plan to protect American jobs and homes, and to regulate against the fraud and greed which destroyed ENRON, Lehman Brothers, most of Wall Street, and much of the world economy. Goodbye, George.

Personally, I loved the dress (she wore it on November 4, 2008, at the big partay in Chicago when Barack became president-elect). And I especially like her willingness to leave the Old School behind. But there are some country people (myself included) who grew up where the old folks warn you about “a red hourglass” and what might happen if you push your luck. So be polite with this lady.

NOTE: It’s only the Europeans who fearfully called it the “Black Widow Spider.” A prefered name is “Hourglass Spider,” which helps in species identification. The Dineh (Navajo) have more respect, crediting “Spider Woman” (Na’ashjéii asdzáá) in large part for the creation, survival, and education of all humans — especially weavers.

On November 4, 2008, the CIRCUS DIOSA weblog left the building temporarily (after two fun years on the Internet), in celebration of the successful election of Barack Obama as President of the USA. Now we’re back, having removed all our old blog posts and comments, many of which helped dump George W. Bush and elect Obama instead. We archived the old stuff and will recycle it in various ways, but now it’s time for “a new dawn of American leadership” — and new directions for CIRCUS DIOSA.