Since no Congressperson will vote to cancel a weapons program, the solution to cancelling weapons program is to form a commission, similar to the base closure commission which actually worked very well.
They can first get rid of Trident submarines and ICBMs and focus on effective box-cutter detector.

"'Peace Prize' President Submits Largest War Budget Ever"

- So, any of you still waiting on the sweet and lovable messianic Obama to END the WARS and bring Peace and Unity to the world?

Or have you all seen the reality, the glint of G.W. Bush's soul in the eyes of Obama. Or even really, since W was as much a puppet as O is, do you see the glint of the upper echelon elites, the Banksters, Fed Res, Government Subsidized corporate CEO's, the souls of the truly evil reflecting deep in the eyes of Obomber.

This man cares not for the little guy. Since before he was elected he was all over the Embezzlement scam aka the TARP Bailouts. Within his first two weeks of office, the same two weeks he was being nominated for the PEACE Prize, he was ordering DRONE Attacks on Pakistan, killing innocent civilians, bombing wedding parties, killing children.

Not to mention he is all about growing the Civil Liberties destroying Bills like FISA and the Patriot Act. Obama is a madman, working for the likes of even madder men.

These people use words like National Security, America's Interest, In the name of Safety, In the name of the good for ALL people, for Peace and Democracy - But everything they do is for them. They restrict us at every corner, taking away our Rights, watching us, recording us, and they say its for us, and so many people buy into the madness and Lies - They give the Billionaires more Billions and they say it is for the Benefit of the Main St. - But in reality it is only the Wall St. CEOs getting the Bonuses, and the Too Big to Fail Insurance companies and Banks are the only ones getting Bailed out - While we continue to Lose our jobs, our homes our life savings. The too small to save Local Businesses they go out of Business, get shut down repossessed etc.

People the Government is NOT here to help us, Not the Democrats Not the Republicans.

Then they tell us the economy is fine. It's a JOBLESS Recovery. What the heck is a Jobless Recovery? There is NO SUCH THING.

We gotta get smart people. We need to Wake Up. We need to Stop fighting each other -
We Need to Get All The Bums out of Office, keep the few good ones like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich and take back out government. De-Centralize the power and start creating more localized economies, businesses etc.

Obomber is NOT Our friend. Obomber is going to be the President of WWIII if we do not do something to stop this madness.

peace. love. anarchy.

Here's an idea: How about if a large group of us gets together and petitions the Nobel Committee to rescind the Peace Prize award to Obama? If we could get 100,000 or more to sign a petition like that, even if it didn't work, it would at least show that there are many in this country who don't think Obama deserves the peace prize.

Glad to see he's declared 'war' on the deficit.

History will record that Obama responded to the Nobel Peace Prize with all of the humility and grace that may be expected from a narcissist:

1.) I didn't ask for this award;
2.) I don't deserve this award;
3.) I'm keeping this award.

· Yr Obd't Servant

I can see why American banks don't want to cancel Haiti's huge debt. If the US banking community were to stop collecting interest from the third world countries whose dictators it does business with, how in the world could they afford to pay the army that helps them control these countries in the first place?

Once the rubble is cleared, US banks and MBAs will be back to being "smart" in Haiti.

The people that sit on the Nobel Committee must be suffering from terminal thought-disorders. They deserve what they're getting. Anyone here at CD could have told them not to give the Peace Prize to this demagogue and servant of Empire.

Let them thoroughly discredit themselves and the institution of Nobel Prizes.

Jeevee

It all boils down to the transliterated Sanskrit word "Lobha (greed), which our guruji reminds us, destroys knowledge.

My contempt for this man increases by the day.

Nothing else need be said...

If the Democratic Party were to oppose wars of aggression, would not they be in power forever?

For our Empire would go bankrupt without wars to sustain that plunder of weak nations, and Republicans without the terror of wars would never be able to force the public into submission.

Once Obama put that stupid flag lapel on it was obvious where he was going. He then invited that idiot right wing preacher to speak at his inauguration and so he embraced the two most important institutions of repression in american society; the military and religious cults.

UPPER CLASS LOVE ---- LOWER CLASS HATE

20% country club class hand picked Obama.

40% intelligent middleclass campaign funded Obama.

50% laboring class did not even show up at the polls for their dictator Obama.

The war and related industries generate as much or more corporate wealth for politicians as most corporations. The corrupted government will not shut down the war machine. The one way to do it, though, would be to reinstitute the military draft and expand it to cover all loopholes.
Of course, the privatization of the wars would have to be discontinued, as well. With all America's youth serving in some capacity (not too much to ask of patriotic Americans), many who for some reason are not suitable for combat could perform the work done by most private contractors. The fighting would be left to the military...like in the wars we won.

Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."

Meanwhile, yesterday, 1/31/2010, on NBC's Meet the Press:

GREGORY: "The question of spending and common sense steps that could
be taken, you heard [Obama top advisor & press spokesman] David
Axelrod say, 'Look, the Republicans voted against paying as you go.
They voted against a commission to control the debt.' They suggest a
spending freeze, the president’s budget will. And Speaker Pelosi has
said that should not exempt defense spending, it should include it.
What do you say? Should the spending freeze be a good start but be
expanded?"

REPUBLICAN SENATE MINORITY LEADER JOHN BOEHNER: "I think the
President’s proposal on freezing nonsecurity domestic spending is a
good first step, but it’s only $15 billion for each of the next three
years. I think we can do much better than that. I don’t think any
agency of the federal government should be exempt from rooting out
wasteful spending or unnecessary spending. And I, frankly, I would
agree with it at the Pentagon. There’s got to be wasteful spending
there, unnecessary spending there."

Now, when the second most vicious SOB in the GOP advocates Pentagon
spending cuts in this economy and the DLC Dimocrat president doesn't?
What's the matter with this picture? Boehner (pronunciation in German
is closer to "boner" than "baynor") may be using the typical
Republican trick of inoculating the GOP against criticism down the
line (if Obama proceeds without Pentagon cuts). The GOP can rely on
the corporate media these days not to blow up Boehner's quote into the
major issue it deserves to be. But if enough small "d" Democrats,
progressives and cable TV comedians pointed out Boehner's remarks it
might compel Obungle to wince into action.

Why Afghanistan is re-charred toast no matter what happens:
U.S. Geological Survey: Afghanistan's Geological Reserves Worth a
Trillion Dollars:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/02/01-6

"While Afghanistan is not renowned as a resource-rich country, it has
a wide range of deposits, including copper, iron ore, gold and
chromite, as well as natural gas, oil and precious and semi-precious
stones...Little has been exploited because the country has been mired
in conflict for 30 years..."

Foreign players are already cutting mining deals in there but I don't
see how any of the world's big resource extractors are going to secure
any of these facilities, let alone the old Unocal pipeline route they
still want to build.

The situation in Pakistan is rapidly getting out of hand and will blow
back into Afghanistan the more foreign interests try to move into that
region. Pakistan is the real nightmare coming to fruition. We need
to remove the Pakistani nukes and A.L. Kahn, get the hell out of
Pakistan and do a treaty to restrain India from taking advantage of
the situation AFTER we've removed the Pakistani nukes.

Our pressure on the Pakistani military to go after the Taliban plus
our growing presence there with drone missile strikes and incursions
are splitting the population in the spreading Taliban-infested areas
into what may become a civil war. Friends are turning on friends
because one family in the same village has family members maimed or
killed by the Taliban and another family has family members maimed or
killed by the Pakistani Army or U.S. missiles. The Taliban's
madrasses are proliferating in poor over-populated urban areas
around Pakistan and indoctrinating legions of child suicide bombers
for generations of conflict. There are already a million Pakistanis
displaced from the Tribal Agencies and the Swat Valley.

PBS Frontline World (ironically sponsored by Royal Dutch Shell oil
company) sent a female Afghani reporter fluent in all the dialects
into Pakistan and did a riveting and very grim report on the situation
in Pakistan. Every policy maker in the U.S. should watch this thing.
She went into areas no Westerner could get into. One of her
interviews was especially important: She interviewed a Taliban
fighter and asked him why the Taliban decided to stop focusing on
Afghanistan and begin fighting so much inside Pakistan. His reply
basically boiled down to 'We once thought the Pakistani Army were our
Muslim brothers, but then they started attacking us in our Pakistani
villages so we must do jihad."

The Pakistani ISI (CIA equivalent) used to train and equip Taliban and
there were several generals in the Pakistani military who were also
sympathetic with them. Many of these same figures held the old
Generalissimo/President Musharif as an enemy. I think they did this
to help impede Western ambitions in the region and also to inoculate
themselves against becoming future targets of the inter-wed Taliban
and Al Qaeda so they could focus on what they conceived of as their
primary enemy, India. Now the Taliban see the new Pakistani government as an
outright military puppet of the U.S. and this is why we should have
refrained from pushing the Pakistani government and military to
attack the Taliban in their home villages in the Pakistani Tribal
Agencies.

In other words, since the U.S. stupidly chose to treat terrorism as a war issue
instead of an international police problem, the war hawks and Pentagon
should control their military/foreign policy hubris
enough to sufficiently resolve one war with one country before we bite
off more than we can chew by igniting another major civil war next
door. That would, in turn, depend on following the Powell Doctrine of
overwhelming force and a coherent end game--which we jettisoned at the
front end of these wars. We needed a military draft regarding all
this mess years ago if we really had intentions of a decisive military
victory and successful rebuilding and democratization. By Gen.
Petraeus' own math we should have 600,000 troops in Afghanistan. We
would need somewhere between 2 to 3 times that many in Pakistan.

The Republicans, if they get into power again in 2012 may try for a
Draft and claim it's the only way to rebuild the U.S. economy out of a
second Depression. If these were just wars with coherent occupation
plans, then I'd agree with them to the degree that a Draft and full
economic mobilization around a Draft would be half of the economic
solution. But we still more urgently need a Green New Deal to
rebuild our peacetime manufacturing sectors or we will just be fiscally
accelerating the probably already inevitable decline and fall of our
economy. Big expensive war efforts like these cannot go on
forever, no matter how many social programs are cut and how many oil,
munitions and mercenary companies are enriched.

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Gore Vidal: "Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die."

Cosmetic (for media consumption) tweaks aside, all the economic and foreign policies being pursued by the Democratic & Republican two headed beast are now a full on direct assault on what's left of the middle- and lower middle-class. The only thing standing between them and an inevitable bleed-out of what is left of the bottom two thirds of the middle-class is the TARP-inflated stock market bubble. How long are the suckers in this TARP-inflated fantasy bubble going to buy the sustainability of these policies with respect to their own exposed necks? Many scream they should remain protected at all costs. I say the sooner these people have to try to find a real job the better. We won't get progressive change until enough of the middle-class gets its teeth kicked in by the very same effed up policies it voted for for decades. They have to have their noses rubbed in their own shit to get the concept. The rest of us on the downscale side of the economy are going to suffer whether they get their overdue ass kicking or not so they might as well suffer with us. Plenty of those fools have wiped their cozy asses for years using dividends from blood for oil and munitions investments. Screw 'em into the streets, I say.

Worst. President. Ever.

imagine if obama pulled all troops from iraq(because we had learned a few years ago that there were no WMDs and saddam hussein and iraq were not a threat to our security) and then explained to the american people that the cost savings would be used to either reduce federal spending( a big item on the republican wish list) or to help pay for a health care system overhaul. in a clear and simple story line he would regain the support of his base supporters and reduce the republican obstructionists into choosing between perpetuating the wrong war or being against reducing government spending and health care reform. seems like a win-win situation. but of course, the democratic party couldn't accomplish this act even if a republican laid it out for them! the democratic party doesn't know what it wants to do and thus can't talk to the american people coherently. the republican party only seems to misrepresent the facts and thus mislead the american people. what a quandary that leaves this country in!

It would seem that the weaker the U.S. gets economically, the more borrowed money its government throws into its military. Is this a mere coincidence or is there a connection between these two phenomena?