I am listening to this radio call-in talk show, called Clout, where the host Richard Greene does an excellent job of letting all kinds of people come on the show and talk about what they think and want to say. Congrats Richard.

This guy comes on ranting and raving about how Hillary didn't mean anything about this and that, and then so what, because Obama needs to toughen up and wise up, and that he is so sick of constantly hearing everyone tell Hillary to quit, like she is gonna break the party, and blah, blah. Richard allowed Brent Budowsky comment, and then let the man have his say, and back and forth. Brent was very judicious and warm in his statements. This man appeared to not hear a damn thing anyone else was saying. All he did was complain, while heatedly trying to convince everyone that Hillary is the one to trust, because no matter what, "we can't let another Republican take the Presidency in 2008."

Everyone agrees with that last statement. But it is commpletely disconnected with everything else the man tried to say. Even when Richard and Brent 120% agreed with him, it wasn't enough. It become obvious after 5 minutes, when Richard politely moved on to another caller. Then I got to thinking. Maybe that man was paid to act that way. Maybe the whole point was to try to inflame the listeners of the radio show with some contrived thought process. It explains a whole lot.

That's what television and corporate media are. They disperse ways of thinking that permit weak minded people to cheerlead and hold beliefs that are anti-thetical to their existence.

Ya dig.

• She gets a picture of Obama in a traditional Kenyan Muslim robe when he recently made an official visit to Kenya last year, and sends it to smear merchant Matt Drudge.

• She recently makes a verbal statement that she has national experience, John McCain has national experience, but Obama, he just made a good speech.

• She accuses him of plagarizing when her own speeches are replete with phases her own speech writers write, and use from other great speeches in American History.

• Back when John Edwards was still in the primary, I think the 2nd debate, she accused her two opponents of acting like Republicans when they questioned her on specifics about her policies, INSTEAD of answering the question. John Edwards replied calmly that he was just asking policy questions.

• Then, she answers "No, as far as I know" when asked the question "Is Obama a Muslim?" The correct response is "No" followed by a "and even if he is, what does it matter. In this country, we have a constitution, and we don't have a religious test in order to be considered qualified for public office." That's what Hillary should of said. But instead, her instinct was to make a slippery statement that is a mild innuendo about religion.

This is how the current Republican party acts. Democrats don't do this. Democrats don't send pictures to the Republican smear merchant machine. Democrats answer questions about specifics in their policy. Democrats politely elaborate and address the criticisms others have about the specifics in their policies. Democrats do not raise red herrings and deflect the questions about specifics by accusing others of acting unfair when they ask questions. Democrats also don't accuse others of what they themselves do.

This really disgusts me. I don't like seeing this kind of instinct in someone who runs for polical office. What you are seeing is a women who is so desirous to become President that she is willing to act like a Republican. Maybe that's why she has been enabling George Bush all this time. Who voted for Anthony Alioto and John Roberts. Where was she when the Militiary Commissions Act of 2006 occurred? (NOTE: Google search link, choose wisely.)

I'm not saying Obama is free of a certain amount of compromise himself, but he doesn't act like this in pursuit of the throne. He might get into a fake skirmish with Paul Krugman about what his health-care policies are or are not, but nothing personal occurred in that skirmish. Obama didn't elude that Krugman is just an ivory tower man of books who hides behind a newspaper column. No. He didn't go that route in order to have a victory. He just "respectfully disagreed" and didn't attack the man in order to attack the policy.

Understand the difference. These two individuals are under the most intense stress that any human being could experience in a life-time. At these times. people respond to stress instinctively, so how people respond during the duress of a political election is quintessential to how they are as people.

And I'm not liking the person I see in Mrs. Hillary Clinton. She has gone a long way in undermining what happy notions I may have had or stated in the past. Going forward, I really am disgusted by this, and mind you, I really haven't mentioned about 2 to 5 more things about Hillary's actions too. The four above should be quite fine to make my point.

But all that being said, if Hillary secures the nomination, I will vote for her, and I will focus upon her positives. Lyndon Johnson was a bastard and a cut-throat son-of-a-bitch himself, but guess who got Medicare passed. All these one-dimensional purists out there who want the whole package need to wake the hell up and realize that we are talking about the Supreme Court. Plain and simple. The current law-breakers and fascist appointments in the government will multiply like the German National Socialist party when it went from 6 to 25 to 134 representatives and got the 81 year old General President to annoint Hitler as Chancellor, in only 5 years. If there is any government or non-out sourced job at a decent wage left.

Another Republican and you can kiss this country and its constitution goodbye, while looking forward to a hundred years of self-destruction wars. There really is no choice.

I just figured out what it is about Sex that drives Americans crazy, and why Sex tends to dominate our politics either because some politician is having an affair with a young girl, or because some homophobe is secretly having gay sex.

Mind you this is something only a single male could figure out at 3:45 am, but the problem in America is actually quite simple. Nobody here is having sex. And those couples (married or not) who have sex, are actually dissatisfied with the sex half of the time. It's either too quick or too boring or the feelings for the other person are gone and the sex can't compensate.

Yep, that's it. Look around. The guys are all desperate and the babes are all wishing for Mr. Right despite the Mr. So-So's they tend to date. We American's pay too much attention to sex because we are trying to overcompensate for are own dissatisfactions. We are lonely and seeking companionship, and sex is the consolation prize.

If you look much closer however, you realize that the problem is not really about sex. It's about the lack of close relationships with others, and the proponderance of unfulfilling superficial relationships. You have a conversation with someone once, then when you see them again, you get a blank stare. The other person is too shell-shocked to admit to the former conversation. People actually categorize their relationships with others, and if you aren't in that special category you get the vouchsafed acknowledgement. And saying hello or good morning to complete strangers is a dying vestige of a culture that existed before 24 hour cable TV distorted our understandings of personal interaction. You don't learn about people by watching Television shows, nor do you gain any better understanding of yourself.

The CIA's secret interrogation program has made extensive use of outside contractors, whose role likely included the waterboarding of terrorist suspects, according to testimony yesterday from the CIA director and two other people familiar with the program.

Many of the contractors involved aren't large corporate entities but rather individuals who are often former agency or military officers. However, large corporations also are involved, current and former officials said. Their identities couldn't be learned.

According to two current and former intelligence officials, the use of contracting at the CIA's secret sites increased quickly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, in part because the CIA had little experience in detentions and interrogation. Using nongovernment employees also helped maintain a low profile, they said.

How come the "liberal media" isn't all over this revelation that came out of a Congressional hearing this week? "Using nongovernment employees also helped maintain a low profile" ... yea, I bet.

When are American's going to realize that rogue elements are operating independent of the government. Cliques of political elites are enabling decisions with winks and nods that are out of their control. Is this really to help better fight the "terrorists" ? Consider how the contracting process has already corrupted the military operations in Iraq. Consider the history of rogue intelligence operations since the growth of the Intelligence establishment since World War Two. In almost every single case, the secretive actions back-fire and force government policy-makers to deal with the resulting mess.

Here's a brief list:

• Iran-Contra
• Bay of Pigs
• Vietnam
• Secret missions into Laos and Burma during Vietnam
• assassination of Panamanian Trujillo leads way to oligarchy and puppet dictator Noriega
• creation of the Shah of Iran leds to Iranian revolution
• support of bin Laden in early 80's in Afghanistan

In all of the above cases, secretive actions by rogue elements in the national security/defense establishment created the groundwork for the eventual blowback which occurred. This is why open democratic processes are necessary. Because the short-sighted, group think of insiders will only perceive their own limited self-interests, colored by human biases that can only be exposed when done in the open. The policy of promoting corrupted elements in foreign nations involves unsavory methods like murder and propaganda that do not attract the love and admiration of the very foreigners the policy is supposed to be helping. Were the Iranians supposed to be happy when the United States funded and supported the torture-driven police state of Iran for over 20 years when the Shah was in charge?

The credit squeeze, which seemed brutally bad only a few months ago, is getting worse.

Consider Solutia, a chemical company that filed for bankruptcy back in 2003, and got bankruptcy court approval for an exit plan just three months ago. That plan was based in part on a financing commitment for $2 billion from Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.

That commitment was signed in late October, but now the banks say the market has gotten worse and they will not make the loans. Solutia sued the banks this week, trying to force them to fork over the money even if they cannot sell the loan to others, as they had intended to do. Citigroup says the suit is without merit.

Regardless of how that suit turns out, it is an indication of how much harder it has become to get financing for highly leveraged companies. In recent years, companies that ran into problems could almost always get loans to rescue them. Now they can’t. And that is before a recession hits most industries.

The number of corporate bankruptcies filed by leveraged borrowers so far this year is greater than the total filed in all of 2006 and 2007, Standard & Poor’s Leveraged Commentary and Data reports.

“Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope-hope-is what led me here today - with a father from Kenya; a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.”

"The President made a deal with Senator Kennedy and neither one of them meant to mess it up," Bill Clinton told a crowd of about 400 teachers and students in Texarkana.

"The deal was supposed to be, we will give the schools more money and get rid of two programs that Bill Clinton actually started -- hiring more teachers in the early grades which actually does help performance and help schools with construction needs if they are overcrowded," he said.

"And we will not put anymore money in the after school programs, which does help, and we will raise school performance by telling people their money depends on how their kids do on tests and we are going to give five tests five years in a row, and we will cut the states a check based on how they are doing. And then the law kind of winks at the state of Arkansas and says, 'don't worry about it too much because you get to pick the test and the passing score.' Now think about that you get the worst of all worlds," Clinton said.

Here's Lincoln Chafee, ex-Republican congressman from Rhode Island who did not support the invasion of Iraq. Mr. Chafee is one of the few Republicans who have a conscience that isn't intimately connected with Karl Rove's asshole. He recently published a book where he decries the inability to form government policy over the last 8 years.

"The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were," writes Chafee. "They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom.

"Instead of talking tough or meekly raising one's hand to support the tough talk, it is far more muscular, I think, to find out what is really happening in the world and have a debate about what we really need to accomplish," writes Chafee. "That is the hard work of governing, but it was swept aside once the fear, the war rhetoric and the political conniving took over."

Chafee writes of his surprise at "how quickly key Democrats crumbled." Democratic senators, Chafee writes, "went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration's nonsense. They knew it could go terribly wrong; they also knew it could go terribly right. Which did they fear more?"

Everyone had access to the same information in 2002. We knew that Iraq was not a threat and did not have weapons of mass destruction. But the fear of looking weak in the corporate controlled media dominated the minds of the weak-kneed politico's who voted for this god damn war -- or for the Patriot Act, or the Military Commissions Act of 2006, or the Medicare "Modernization" Act of 2003/4, or the Bankruptcy "Reform" Act of 2005, or ....

They voted for these despicable measures because they were afraid of being called weak by the corporate media. Now all of these measures are going to have to be changed in the next 4 to 8 years. Except now the fight against the false framing of the issues by the corporate media will be that much more difficult.

If I were President, the first act I would make would be to cancel every single piece of legislation passed by the Republicans during the reign of Dubya Bush. I don't care how unprecidented or politically infeasible that would be. The laws are horrible extensions of oligarchical authoritarianism and should be repealed.

The more I listen to him, the more I trust that Obama truly has an understanding of the entire problem that is Washington. As much as I love Hillary, the ability of Obama to make his point with clarity and reason puts him one step over.

I admit that I do have reservations about Obama's views on Health Care. I realize that the Health Insurance industry is ruthless, and that it would be unwise to say that you will pursue National Health Care. However an intelligent individual cannot escape the savings of efficiency inherent to a nationalized payment system. The costs would drop 60% because cost would no longer inhibit people to get preventative health care, the overhead of hundreds of insurance bureaucracy would be removed. Hospitals would no longer have to carry the burdens of the malignant health insurance payment system. I believe Obama gets this, and says as much when he talks about cost efficiency. He will also be the unequivocal bring the troops home now candidate, and be smart with how we use our military power, which is exactly what we need to defeat Saint McCain.

God help us if the Republicans appoint another Supreme Court judge. That's how important this election really is.

Here's what Peter Hahn, renowned economics professor gura in London (Cass Business School) had to say about the current economic conditions in light of the recent French bank Societe Generale which lost 7 billion, and is on the verge of bankrupcy unless they raise 50 billion in new capital.

"Si cela peut arriver à une banque innovatrice et bien gérée comme cette institution, il est clair que les banques sont amenées aujourd'hui à prendre trop de risques. L'augmentation de capital pour se prémunir contre les mauvaises surprises de ce type est plus que jamais à l'ordre du jour."

My translation: If this happens to a bank as innovative and well managed as this [the Societe Generale] institution, it is clear that the banks are being lead today to take too much risk. The accumulation of capital to prepare against future bad investments of this type is more than ever the order of the day