If Third Way Democrats continue to the right with TPP, union bashing, privatization it's because

they don't care if Republicans win.

Let's face it - we know that representing historically liberal values like good wages and benefits for working families, environmental protections and strong regulation for industry gets out to vote.

But today all you hear from the Third Way is abstract bullshit like "inclusive capitalism" and "wealth envy".

Wow. Let's fire up the base.

When you hear mealy-mouthed PowerPoint jargon like "inclusive capitalism" it's just another way to say "trickle down" which is the idiotic idea that if you legislate exclusively for the rich and corporations, eventually some crumbs will fall to the floor for the little people to fight over. It also means Larry Summers is hiding in the broom closet, waiting to sweep another million jobs to Asia.

Be warned as Wasserman Shultz's DNC doubles down on conservative politics. Third Way Democrats are close enough to Republicans that it really, really doesn't matter to them who wins as long as their corporate interests are served.

The Third Way doesn't give a fuck which establishment McCandidate wins. Hillary or Jeb, they will continue to profit either way.

Will you?

Democrats Scrap Primary System, Appoint Hillary Clinton as Nominee

WASHINGTON -- Calling the primary system “biased and unreliable” the Democratic National Committee announced today that it is eliminating the old fashioned ballot based system used to nominate Democrats for the general presidential election.

Reached for comment, DNC’s Debbie Wasserman Shultz explained that primaries confuse voters who are generally unaccustomed to critical thinking and decision making. “Rather than bewilder people with so many choices on Election Day, we’ve narrowed down the field so voters can choose a winning candidate every time. It’s an enormous boost to people’s self-esteem knowing they have picked the best possible candidate.”

Indeed, the new process revealed by Wasserman Shultz appears to be a major simplification. Dollar bills of various denominations are collected from rank and file subjects and assembled into a large pile. During a sacred midnight ceremony, the Highest Lama, festooned in gilded robes, lights the pile on fire. As crackling orange flames leap high into the sky, a committee of Lesser Lamas studies the resultant smoke, paying close attention to its prevailing direction, inevitably pointing to the Northeast. The Highest Lama ruminates day and night as Lesser Lamas stoke the blaze with dollar bills. The ceremony continues until a reincarnate Clinton appears in a vision, a state known as the golden enlightenment.

From there, the candidate’s spiritual awakening begins with lessons from monks of Goldmanvishnu. During this time the candidate gives up all worldly principals in order to achieve a Zen state of maximal pragmatism known as The Third Way.

Wasserman Shultz is confident the new candidate will bring needed change. “America is Ready for Her Holiness to Complete Her Spiritual Ascension ™.”

For blue ink concerners, here's the link:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1277&pid=4381

No apologies from me, I can't imagine a more vomit inducing nominee for the Democratic Party

than Hillary Clinton.

What makes her so fucking horrible?

She is the very cold, gutless soul of the 1%. Carefully means testing the value of her words against the Wall Street pay scale.

All the while, notably absent without leave against the most pressing and polarizing problems the US has faced since the civil war:

Civil rights, constitutional checks and balances, racism, police state overreach, NSA, CIA, income disparity, oil lobby, the health care lobby, the banking lobby, the telco lobby, Israeli lobby, CEO lobby, off shoring to India, on and on and on.

She can't be bothered.

But... if you have $300,000 to throw her way and the proper number of teleprompters, she'll give you a carefully vetted speech on some motherhood and apple pie issue which is guaranteed not to make anyone on Wall Street uncomfortable.

And the scary fucking thing is - her silence, as the nation burns, is the very thing her giddy sycophants are telling us makes her so presidential.

We deserve better. Our children deserve better.

We are literally fucking ourselves.

IBM Offers To Move Laid Off Workers To India

Salt of the Earth Hillary Clinton wants $300,000 from you PLUS your vote

The savior of the middle class wants your vote. And she'll only charge you $300,000 to hear why (oh why) you should vote for her.

NSA director defends plan to maintain 'backdoors' into technology companies

Source: The Guardian

The National Security Agency director, Mike Rogers, on Monday sought to calm a chorus of doubts about the government’s plans to maintain built-in access to data held by US technology companies, saying such “backdoors” would not be harmful to privacy, would not fatally compromise encryption and would not ruin international markets for US technology products.
...
US technology companies have bridled at government pressure to introduce weaknesses in encryption systems in order to ensure government access to data streams, and technical experts have warned that there is no way to create a “backdoor” in an encryption system without summarily compromising it. An appearance by Obama at a cybersecurity conference at Stanford University last week to tout cooperation between the government and US tech companies was upstaged by an impassioned speech by Apple;s chief executive, Tim Cook, who warned of the “dire consequences” of sacrificing the right to online privacy.
...
The basic discomfort of the new partnership the government would like to see with technology companies once again burst into full view on Monday when Alex Stamos, the chief information security officer at Yahoo, challenged Rogers on his recommendation for built-in “defects-slash-backdoors, or golden master keys” to serve government purposes.

Stamos asked Rogers how companies such as Yahoo, with 1.3 billion users worldwide, would be expected to reply to parallel requests for backdoors from foreign governments, and told Rogers such backdoors would be like “drilling a hole through a windshield”.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/23/nsa-director-defends-backdoors-into-technology-companies

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan Wants U.S. Troops to Fight Boko Haram

Source: The Wall Street Journal

ABUJA, Nigeria—With his oil-powered economy faltering and just five weeks to go before he faces a close election, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan is appealing to the U.S. to send combat troops against his country’s most intractable problem: the Islamist insurgency Boko Haram.

The 57-year-old president of Africa’s largest democracy said in an interview that he has been asking the U.S. since early 2014 to send combat soldiers along with military advisers to Nigeria to battle Boko Haram. Citing intelligence reports, he said the militants were receiving “training and funds” from Islamic State, the jihadist group whose leadership is based in Iraq and Syria.

“Are they not fighting ISIS? Why can’t they come to Nigeria?” Mr. Jonathan said, in his first interview with Western media this year. “Look, they are our friends. If Nigeria has a problem, then I expect the U.S. to come and assist us.”

Read more: http://www.wsj.com/articles/nigerian-president-wants-u-s-troops-to-fight-boko-haram-1423850893

Dear Gen. David Petraeus,

Robert Parry publishes Ray McGovern's excellent open letter to Petraeus which considers (among other things) the famous Iraq surge. I never considered the "surge" concept to be anything more than a stupid, dangerous stunt of mass violence. But the media hype around it was so well organized, it became "mission accomplished" all over again.

You should probably check this out about measles if you are middle aged

When I heard about this latest outbreak, I wondered about the vaccine gap from 1957 to 1971. I heard about it from the shot nurse at a travel clinic a few years ago. It's a 14 year span, so conceivably this leaves millions potentially at risk.

I thought this problem was well known, but after reading so many "burn the witch" posts, I suspect most people never heard of it. Travel clinics are quite up to date with vaccine info. Maybe try them for quick conversation if you were of shot age during those years.

The way some are carrying on you'd think drug companies never screw up. They do. That's not an argument against vaccines, that's an argument to stop sounding like an authoritarian fool. Arrogance is dangerous on both sides of the vaccination debate.

I couldn't find more information about the brands at fault, ranges of potency, etc. Would be appreciate an update if anyone has more detailed info.

I added emphasis.

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2015/01/20/doctor-suspects-measles-inflicted-disney-employees-never-had-full-vaccination/

Can you put down your pitchfork long enough to discuss the root causes of the anti-vax problem?

As a culture are we able to stop attacking the anti-vax crowd long enough to dig below the surface?

I'll warn you - such retrospection requires rational logic, a bit of empathy, historical perspective and most importantly, you need to put down your pitch fork for a minute. And there are potentially some inconvenient truths lurking, so you must be brave.

(Yeah, I know. It's fun waving that thing around in a primal anger sort of way, playing war hero against an existential anti-vax army.)

How did we get here?

It wasn't easy, that's for sure. It took arrogance, recklessness, fraud, and corruption and an unwillingness to invest in the checks and balances to maintain public trust.

1. PhRMA is responsible for their relentless pursuit of profit at any cost to human health. This erodes trust.

2. The government is responsible for failing to objectively regulate PhRMA due to the massive financial contributions PhRMA makes to election campaigns. People see how drug money is interfering with science and public health outcomes. We have the most expensive and inefficient health care system in the world, based on dollar input per positive output. We make a few people rich at the expense of public health. This erodes trust.

3. Recent cases of drug fraud and drug failures resulting in thousands of deaths and millions of injuries. Drugs remained on the market long long after evidence should have been used to pull them off the market.
http://prescriptiondrugs.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=005528

4. The India Generic Drug Scandal - Bone chilling account of cost cutting measures gone bad.
http://fortune.com/2013/05/15/dirty-medicine/

5. Bill Gates and HPV Vaccine Testing on the Poor in India
The committee found that consent for conducting these studies, in many cases, was taken from the hostel wardens, which was a flagrant violation of norms. In many other cases, thumbprint impressions of their poor and illiterate parents were duly affixed onto the consent form. The children also had no idea about the nature of the disease or the vaccine. The authorities concerned could not furnish requisite consent forms for the vaccinated children in a huge number of cases.

The committee said it was "deeply shocked to find that in Andhra Pradesh out of the 9,543 [consent] forms, 1,948 forms have thumb impressions while hostel wardens have signed 2,763 forms. In Gujarat, out of the 6,217 forms 3,944 have thumb impressions and 5,454 either signed or carried thumb impressions of guardians. The data revealed that a very large number of parents or guardians are illiterate and could not even write in their local languages, Telugu or Gujarati."
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-08-31/news/53413161_1_hpv-vaccine-cervarix-human-papilloma-virus

6. We are over-medicated. However, I believe, people are confusing use of vaccines with over use of antibiotics causing anti-bacterial resistance.

7. We are exposed to too many chemicals in our daily lives. And every one who has a vested financial interest in them claims they are perfectly safe. From hormone enriched meats and produce to volatile organic compounds, pesticides and herbicides in our water supply and food chain. All perfectly safe, no?

8. It was really, really stupid to leave mercury as a preservative in vaccines for so long. Everyone knows mercury is bad shit. Doesn't matter how loudly you exclaim it's perfectly safe, people remember mercury poisoning in Japan and the heartbreaking photos. My understanding is that mercury is now only used in flu shot, and the amounts of mercury used are lower than they were in the past. However, research into safer alternatives should be funded. As long as mercury is in the shot, people are going to freak out. Then there are amalgam dental filings, but I digress...

9. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment (/tʌsˈkiːɡiː/)[1] was an infamous clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African American men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

10. Arrogance. We don't see polio nor measles. A false sense of superiority attributed to "good living" is being confused with years of devotion to disease eradication via a very socialized medicine called vaccination. Vaccination requires a shared sacrifice. Too many people believe they are better than this. Finally, there is the arrogance of a people yelling at each other without really understanding the basis for fear, nor the recklessness of blind obedience.

Add it all up and perhaps it starts to make sense.

I've already been called a woo woo with blood on my hands killing people for daring to discuss this topic.

From this I assert we need a vaccine to prevent arrogance and stupidity more than any other disease.

We cannot begin to fix the problem without understanding the problem.


On edit - I have more than my share of vaccines. I will wager far more than those who will attack me on this thread. I took them because of frequent travel in Asia. All up to date.

And I really don't give a shit what you call me. i know I am doing the right thing by discussing this.

We created the problems. Now we have to deal with the consequences.

If you want vaccination more widespread, then that has to start with trust between Government and PhARMA. Better checks and balances need to be in place. Plenty of very well educated simply do not trust PhARMA or government assertions that everything is absolutely safe and effective.