BuzzFlash presents Barbara's Daily BuzzFlash Minute
exclusively on BuzzFlash.com

A collection of insightful ruminations, reflections, and rants on the events of the day (with the exception of the weekend). Come visit each weekday to see what's pushing Barbara's buttons.

May 12, 2006

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“Turley calls attention to the fact that Bush likes hiring officials who have either been convicted or pleaded guilty to crimes or others who should have been indicted.”  What better way for a crook to maintain political control than to have a whole cadre of crooks carrying out your bidding?

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Alert, alert, how do I change my phone service to Qwest???  Why would anyone in America, a so called “democracy,” pay out hard earned money to companies that illegally violate the privacy of their customers?  The question now becomes, what else in our lives are they monitoring?  Where else in our lives are they poking their noses into without our permission?  And some questioned the “Hitler” comparison!  Did they think we were all so stupid as to not recognize the diabolical symptoms?

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Who are you going to believe???  The liar in chief who’s told so many lies you can’t keep track of them, or the so-called “leakers” who are risking their jobs to keep the American people informed?  “Bush said Thursday the government is "not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans." He may not be trolling through your personal life, but he’s making damn sure, “The agency's goal is 'to create a database of every call ever made' within the nation's borders … For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.” How can anyone believe they aren’t “listening to or recording conversations,” these, the same people who in the beginning said they weren’t conducting domestic surveillance?  If not now then how long will it be before they do include “listening to or recording conversations”?  Is this another step towards the final goal of dictatorship in 2008?

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Kudos!  Unlike the many over at CNN, Jack Cafferty is his own man and it would do us all well to heed his latest comments--“Cafferty: We all hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cause he might be all that stands between us and a full blown dictatorship in this country. He's vowed to question these phone company executives about volunteering to provide the government with my telephone records, and yours, and tens of millions of other Americans. Shortly after 9/11, AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth began providing the super-secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens, all part of the War on Terror, President Bush says. Why don't you go find Osama bin Laden, and seal the country's borders, and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports? The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and declared the government is doing nothing wrong, and all this is just fine. Is it? Is it legal? Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn't have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation. Read that sentence again.  A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it's not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says ok and drops the whole thing. We're in some serious trouble, boys and girls."

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Just who cashed in on the Flight 93 story??  I honor the heroism of the patriotic passengers of “Flight 93”, but I can’t help but question the “official” explanation of the crash!  In the end the heroes died, but the final results that we’ve been told played in favor of everything the Bush administration needed from the American people---a patriotic fight to the death for God and country!  How different it all would have been for the Bush administration if indeed the patriots had fought the terrorists and won, and then to have been shot down by their own government!

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Perhaps the real reason we haven’t had another terrorist attack on the “homeland” is because bin Laden knows he doesn’t have to expend the energy, when George Bush is doing the job for him!  If thwarting “freedom and democracy” was bin Laden’s ultimate goal, then most certainly the Bush administration is doing all that’s unholy to accomplish bin Laden’s goals.

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“Four in 10 Malpractice Cases Groundless”--- Better to have a 60% ratio of vindication than none at all!  “According to a Harvard analysis…It also found that for every dollar awarded to patients, about half went to cover lawyers' fees and other expenses.”  Again considering the expense one has to undergo to prove malpractice, it’s better to have half of the award than nothing at all.  Recently my neighbor had an accident in a well known “do it yourself” place of business. She suffered permanent injury to her shoulder due to merchandise falling from a shelf above. I cannot begin to tell you the grief and pain she went through with the company, the medical facilities, as well as the injury itself. The acute expenses alone were far more than she could afford, as the company refused to admit culpability from the very beginning, and the long term effects she suffered were more than she could possibly endure. Had it not been for her knowledge of medicine, and her lawyer she would have ended up with a permanent injury without compensation.  In the end, the company lawyers “settled” out of court and her quality of life though not as good today is at least bearable.

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Hallelujah!!!!!  “Rep. Tom DeLay, the once-powerful majority leader whose career was undermined by scandal, said today that he would resign from the House on June 9.”  The next best thing would be to hear he’s being “frog marched” off to jail!  Alas and alack, he plans “to pursue new opportunities to engage in the important cultural and political battles of our day from an arena outside of the U.S. House of Representatives."  This means the Repuglican sleaze and corruption is truly a vast right-wing conspiracy and it will continue!

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