Flying White Elephant Succeeds in Knocking out a Tank

From Reuters, October 31, 2013:
 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jet dropped a 500-pound bomb this week, hitting a tank at Edwards Air Force Base in California and marking the first time the new warplane has fired a laser-guided weapon, the Pentagon said Wednesday.  

Full text of article.

Each F-35 costs between $153 million and $199 million, depending on the model--that's between one hundred fifty three and one hundred ninety-nine million dollars.  That's for ONE of them.   And it managed to drop a 500-lb bomb to knock out a tank.  And they've already rolled out 63 of them.  (You do the math.)  And the whole fleet has been grounded twice so far in 2013. And it only has one engine, as opposed to a twin-engine configuration, which provides a backup in case of an engine failure.
 
And...well...Lots more here.

Here, friends, are your taxpayer dollars [and the $1.8 trillion the U.S. Government has borrowed from the Chinese] at work, hundreds of billions of dollars being squandered on the most expensive white elephant in the entire history of humanity.

Just in case you ever wondered why the Republicans are trying so desperately to slash food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid and aid to education and do defund health care for all Americans, now you know where the money is really going.

Ain't America great?

For more about the Flying White Elephant see the Jagoriade post from March 8, 2013.

Flash! Nine Justices on Supreme Court Not Constitutional!

According to the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the power to regulate the structure, administration and jurisdiction of the federal courts.  These powers are limited by precepts of due process, equal protection and separation of powers

Having nine justices on the Supreme Court is not in the Constitution, but a simple custom, determined by Congressional vote.  The Constitution allows Congress to change the number of Supreme Court justices if it so deems.  The Judiciary Act of 1789 provided for a six-member Supreme Court with one Chief Justice and five Associate Justices. 

Since the act of 1789, there have been eight more changes to the number of Supreme Court justices, which have varied from a low of five to a high of ten. 

I wonder how many Americans know that!

Consequently, if President Obama wanted to name one or two more justices so that the right-wing activist Gang of Five [Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas]--AKA The Impeachables--could be outvoted or at least stymied, who could stop him, as long as he had enough votes in the Congress? 

Certainly it would be entirely constitutional to change the number of justices on the Supreme Court. It's already been done eight times!

Murdering Afghan and Pakistani Kids is OK; Murdering Syrian Kids Isn't

I couldn't bear to listen to Barry's trio of bellicose liars [the identical clones of George W. Bush's gang of bellicose liars, all of whom should be hauled before the International Criminal Court to be judged for crimes against humanity] delivering their prepared remarks on September 3, 2013. I either would have vomited my guts out or smashed my TV set.

So I hit the mute button and waited until the distinguished members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked their questions.

I identified four of them, three Republicans and one Democrat, who appeared not have guzzled Barry's poisonous Kool-Aid--so far--and tried to ask real, thoughtful questions.  They were:

Jim Risch [R-ID]
Tom Udall [D-NM]
John Barrasso [R-WY]
Rand Paul [R-KY]

As Kerry, Hagel and Dempsey--Barry's Three Stooges--and most of the Democrat senators, were slobbering crocodile tears over the dead Syrian kids, I could only think of the scores or hundreds of Afghan and Pakistani kids [not to mention their mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, grandparents, siblings and  playmates] murdered in cold blood by Barry's assassination drones on a weekly basis.

Yeah, I get it: it's just fine for a Nobel Peace Prize winner to blast Afghan and Pakistani kids to smithereens with his assassination drones but--somehow--it's a crime against humanity for Bashar Al-Assad [or, maybe even the Syrian "democratic" opposition] to gas Syrian kids.

Can somebody please explain the difference?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Military Missteps: Bomb-first diplomacy becomes habitual to US

Fantastic!  Film clips on the RT television network show "bomb first" warmongers spouting the very same lies about Syria that they screamed before bombing Serbia, Iraq and Libya. It's as if Barry & Co. just dusted off the old speeches and filled in the blanks with "Syria."  

And, since the "enemy" must always be personified as one amoral monster who "murders his own people," Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi are replaced with a new face to hate, the face of Bashar Al-Assad who, like the others, is "murdering his own people" and therefore must "step aside."   

We all know, however, what followed when Milošević and Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi "stepped aside."  Their countries became anarchies where murderous factions continue massacring each other to this day.

Does anyone with half a brain actually think that "this time it's different" in Syria?

Why do so many Americans--particularly the ruling class in Washington--allow themselves to be bamboozled and brainwashed over and over?  Why do  they keep believing the same lies and guzzling the same poisonous Kool-aid?

By the way, wasn't Einstein's definition of "insanity" doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?  If that's the case, then Washington, DC, has turned into a gigantic loony bin!

Abolish Private Prisons

Prison privatization in the United States means that the for-profit companies such as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group [formerly Wackenhut] want as many people jailed as possible for as long as possible in order to continue maximizing their income and, thereby, their profits. 

Private prisons should be abolished by law, but their lobby is one of the most powerful on Capitol Hill and in state capitals. In 2011  the private prison lobby spent $45 million on lobbying, while collecting $5.1 billion for immigrant detention alone.

There is, however, some movement against them:three states, Idaho, Texas and Colorado closed CCA prisons in the month of June 2013.

Mass incarceration in privatized prisons is in reality nothing more than a modern versin of  feudalism and slavery because the detainees, the modern equivalent of slaves or serfs, are put to work, manufacturing goods or performing services such as computer programming, for which they are paid far below the legal minimum wage--often just pennies per hour.

The U.S. is not only the country with the most people incarcated, 2,266,800, it's also the country with the most people incarcerated per capita. 

Here's a chart that shows prisoners per 100,000 population, country by country: the U.S. heads the list with 716.people incarcerated for every 100,000 people.

Abolish private prisons now!