Obama’s Syrian Quandary: Why is 2012 Any Different from 1982?

With each passing day, the Obama administration and the international community appear to be struggling to find a way to deal with the crisis in Syria. Just four days ago the United States closed the US Embassy in Syria after Russia and China blocked a UN resolution drafted by Arab and European countries on Saturday that may have supplied aid or set up a buffer zone that would involve a military dimension to protect vulnerable civilians.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the veto a “travesty” and Washington’s U.N. ambassador Susan Rice said she was “disgusted” by Russia and China’s vetoes adding that “any further bloodshed that flows will be on their hands.” President Barack Obama's asked for the U.N. Security Council to hold firm against the Syrian regime's "relentless brutality" and has indicated that the ongoing conflict in Syria should be resolved without foreign military interference, suggesting that a solution for Syria can be proffered via negotiations.

The problem for the President is twofold. First the position and inconsistencies his policy has manifest throughout the democratic uprisings in the region from Egypt to Libya and the appearance that his cabinet officials could send a strong message of accountability and/or his perceived lack of desire to hold his senior appointees responsible for their performance.

The entire situation in the Middle East is untenable in its present state. From the current inaction and war of words, it is almost as if the Obama administration sees the real targets of the Syria regime-change goal as Russia and China, since both see the U.S. as seeking to establish absolute control over the strategic oil supplies in the Persian Gulf. Not to mention that human rights advocates view the UN’s resolution’s failure and U.S. inaction might encourage the Assad government to intensify its violent crackdown on anti-government protesters, as evident from increased attacks in areas in protest against the Assad regime.

Obama is in a serious quandary. The Syrian army has continued to launch mortar and rocket attacks in the city of Homs, Syria's third-largest city, and the leading focus of unrest in the 11-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's rule. On the record Obama has openly stated that "Assad has no right to lead Syria, and has lost all legitimacy with his people and the international community." But in the eyes of the world he gives the locution of being selecting favorite as well as ignoring the same democratic principles he outlined for supporting a no-fly zone in Libya. Also, and more troubling, his assertion that not every situation allows for the type of military action taken in Libya when his global middle –east policy purports otherwise.

Obama’s actions are also affiliated with election year politics, since it may be seen that taking military options off the table is a political ploy to demonstrate his conviction to his campaigning on reducing US military intervention around the globe prior to election. Whatever the case, the US needs define their purpose and outcome in Syria as it pertains to the entire region. Thus the administrations proclamation that outside military involvement in Syria by the US as being more difficult and risky than the mission in Libya appears disingenuous, especially to those nations in the Middle East whom we claim we desire to see democratic change.

The President in my estimation should not be dragged into another military exercise, in particular give his campaign promises of 2008 and his seemingly anxiousness to do all in his power to show how grand of a friend he is too the state of Israel. Truth is told this is nothing new to Syria. In February 1982, when Reagan was in the Whitehouse former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad initiated a brutal crackdown in the western Syrian city of Hama in order to quell an emergent uprising and a Sunni rebellion. The assault lasted for three weeks and Hama was effectively demolished. With the number of casualties estimated to be between 20,000 and 40,000 civilians, including women and children.

The Hama Massacre was the bloodiest event in Syrian history. President Hafez al-Assad was the father of the current president Bashar al-Assad. It should be remembered (and I hope President Obama does) that it occurred during a period during the aftermath of Israel's attack on Syrian forces in Lebanon in 1982. The administration of Ronald Reagan had to choose to support one of the two nations and landed on the side of Syria.

For the GOP to forget this history is strange. Maybe because it was a time when Donald Rumsfeld met with Saddam, to speak about regional issues of mutual interest, mainly their shared enmity toward Iran and Syria. No one asked Reagan to intervene in Syria in 1982, but everyone is asking Obama to do so. My query is, what makes 2012 any different than 1982? A question no pundit or Republican will ever ask.

Attention for Celebrity Overshadows Death of Civil Right Heroine

Once in our community, it was not the singers or entertainers who upon an untimely death received the most attention, but rather the heroes and community leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. I guess I may be dating myself, for I remember when martin Luther King died and suspect that most living African Americans do not.

Over this past week we lost a great and wonderful woman, who contributed and gave her life for our community, and it was not Whitney Houston, it was Patricia Stephens Due.

I’m am certain that many may have never heard of Patricia Stephens Due, and as such, may reflect the behavior of attending to things that are not as important as we realize in a tangible sense. Or even worse, reflects what Marcus Garvey meant when he stated “The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.”

Patricia Stephens Due died last Tuesday as a consequence of thyroid cancer in Smyrna, Georgia at the age of 72. Born on Dec. 9, 1939, in Quincy, Fla. as Patricia Gloria Stephens, as high school students, she and her older sister started a petition to have the principal removed. She was one of the rare occurrences during the early days of the fight for justice and equality during the initial period of the struggle for civil rights – young Black women out in front organizing protest.
She started early in her life. At 13, Patricia Stephens challenged Jim Crow laws and the culture of segregation in the south by trying to use the "whites only" window at a Dairy Queen. As a college student, she led demonstrations to integrate lunch counters, theaters, and swimming pools and was repeatedly arrested. She became world renown after she and 10 other students were arrested for sitting at the “whites only” lunch counter at a Woolworth’s store in Tallahassee, Fla., on Feb. 20, 1960. It was 19 days after four black students in Greensboro, N.C., had made civil rights history by doing the same thing. She along with seven others refused to pay $300 fines for violating laws and served the full 49-day sentence.

She marched with and met John D. Due Jr., a civil rights lawyer, whom she eventually married in 1963. For their honeymoon, they rode the Freedom Train to Washington to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. give his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Now I am not suggesting that we should not celebrate the life of Whitney Houston. What I am saying is that her life was great and may have not manifested if it were not for women like Mrs. Stephens Due. Without her, Whitney may have not won a Grammy or been allowed to kiss a white man on the big screen. How quickly we forget about what allow us to be in the position were in.

Mrs. Due paid a price for this devotion. She wore large, dark glasses day and night because her eyes were damaged when a hissing tear gas canister hit her in the face. She took a decade to graduate from Florida A&M University because of suspensions for her activism.

She ammased an F.B.I. file of more than 400 pages and was kicked and threatened with dogs, including a German shepherd whose police handlers gave it a racial slur for a name.

In 1959, she formed a local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. In 2003, Mrs. Due and her daughter wrote about the ambivalence and hesitancy of black people’s regarding the civil rights struggle in the movement’s early days in “Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.”

It is sad to loose a talent like a Whitney Houston, but what is even sadder and pathetic, is the incessant adoration and infatuation we have with idols and celebrity when compared to people who actually did something to benefit toe world of African Americans than singing like Patricia Stephens Due: unfortunately a person the average individual of African descent in America has never heard of or taken the time to find out about. I guess this is what the Great Indian philosopher teacher Chanakya meant when he wrote: "There is no disease (so destructive) as lust; no enemy like infatuation."

British journalist Lizzie Phelan Exposed the Lies of MSM on Syria : Western Media Fabricated Mass Killings

2012: And Negroes More Slaves Than Ever

“Ugly is what ugly does,” that what my grandmother used to tell me. It was one of the many philosophical idioms she used to instruct me throughout my life as I was growing up as a child. Over the years I started to understand what she meant. I take that it means that people stuck on stupid and fixed on foolishness are ugly and means that you must be judged by your actions. It means that and intelligent person who does stupid things is still stupid. You are what you do.

And without the aid of any screed, I will like to use this to present the premise that regardless of what we call ourselves, African descendants in the united States are even more of slaves now than they were prior to the emancipation proclamation and display more disdain and rancor for who we are than ever in any time prior. To validate this apriorism., will use three recent examples: the newfangled excursus pertain to the description of whether we are African American or Black, the cruel and demoniac, beating on 20-year-old Brandon White and Roland Martin for his perceived homophobic tweets during the Super Bowl.

The first is part of the problem, whether or not people should call them Black or African American. In a nut shell it suggest that conformity has no boundaries and even worse – that African descendants in these United States have successfully been imbued with the outcomes desired by colonialism since we continue to select to define and see ourselves through the spectacles of white European culture. This may be why we tend to be more responsive than proactive. As such, no wonder that African Americans spent $507 bill (out of our total estimated buying power of $836 billion) in 2009 on hair care & personal grooming items. Or that we spend more on self mutilating products (perms, fake nails, and fake hair) than any other ethnic group. As a people in general, we spend almost $50 billion on vehicles alone while less than 50% of African Americans owned their homes as opposed to whites (70%).

The reasons for those that deny any connection to Africa reflect more of a bland and opaque sciolism than actual reality. “Africa was a long time ago” or “It denotes something else to me than who I am.” To even have such a discussion in evidence of a people without any direction and we all know that in order to have direction, as in math and science there must be a starting point. Why is that of all the humans in the world, we are the only people who are afraid to own our connection with our history without apology? Although other ethnic groups from India, Iran, China or wherever, although they came via means other than slavery, when their kids grow up her, they still remain connected to their ethnic heritage. Why, because they accept who they are. If we cannot believe in ourselves and do not accept who and what we are via our colonial indoctrination, we will never succeed as a people.

One has to wonder, why is that we adopt such positions. One is that we do not own our connection with our history and even worse consequently do not accept such with any apology or reservation. This is what is so problematic with what happened to Martin – a man who should have known better, just one day after the beating of Brandon White.

The actuality is that we spend time on speaking about such, which really are not important, than the root causes of our self-destruction, taking responsibility and things that do mater. We would be more likely to stand and Support the irresponsible and ignorant actions of Roland Martin than take the side of righteousness – even suggesting that what he tweeted was no directed toward gays. “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him! #superbowl” Martin tweeted,

No secret about it, it was. We all know what a “real Bruh” means, “pink” and that any one that looks or is attracted to another man’s crotch are key words. And don’t forget slapping the “ish” out of someone is equal to knocking someone out violently. Yes Martin should have known better but it may be his lack of connection to our community, all of our components regardless of beliefs and practices led him to this outcome. Yes, he can be seen by a reasonable person as cheerleading for violence against men who are excited to see the crotch of another man - gays. Yes like many of us, he was a pawn in the game, defeated by his own self inflicted wounds as many of us, through the main tool of mentacide today – the television.

For example, remembering the television show the “Fresh Prince of Bel Air can provide a vivid example of this. Will Smith’s character was the one most folks attended to. He was book dumb but street smart, he could dance and could get all the girls while Carlton was the one to be hated, an educated black man who could not dance. Even in our schools, the popular kids do poorly academically and cause havoc while the straight A students are looked down upon. About 69% of Black children in America cannot read at grade level in the 4th grade, compared with 29% among White childrenThere is a reason why black folks will break in your home, trash the place and take everything except books. Chances are book shelves are never trashed in robberies.

All of the aforementioned, the discussion of whether we are African American or Black, the beating on 20-year-old Brandon White and Roland Martin for his irresponsible and ill-informed tweets during the Super Bowl are as Dr. Na'im Akbar stated, "We are ignorant of who we are and what we can do.” It means what Dr. Carter G. Woodson wrote in "The Miseducation of the Negro," "When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his "proper place" and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary."

What we do and say is important and an intelligent person who does stupid things is still stupid (Roland Martin) and people stuck on stupid and fixed on foolishness are ugly (The Attackers of White). Not valuing who and what we are and where we come from contributes to such idiocy and unfortunately makes me think that Brown versus Board of Education means nothing now, because most of us don’t value education, care to accept our origins are in Africa and don’t care about learning. “Just because a cat has kittens in an oven doesn’t make them biscuits.”

Obama Invokes NDAA, Declares Threat From Iran "A National Emergency"

Pork Belly: Another Name for Yellow Belly Sap Sucking House Republican

Funny how time flies when you are having fun. Just two years ago, the November massacre occurred in Washington, DC and the Congress, bring in a flock of freshmen tea part republicans vowing to change the political as usual mantra inside the beltway.

I guess some folks can talk a mean game, especially when they just talk out the side of their necks. It was just less than two years ago on November 22, 2010 when the House Republicans Vote to End Earmarks. It was supposed to be an important first step toward fundamentally changing the way taxpayer dollars are spent in Washington” since a large corpus of US citizens see earmarks as wasteful spending and another form of corruption. At the time, Doug Lamborn (CO-05) wrote on his webpage, “The new House Republican Majority is firmly committed to cutting spending, reining in government, and listening to the people who sent us here. We have an enormous task ahead to get America’s fiscal house in order. Today’s vote to end earmarks is proof that Republicans are serious about ending wasteful spending.” He added, “I call on my Democrat colleagues in the House and Senate to get equally serious about reforming Washington and pass their own earmark bans. The task before us requires a bipartisan commitment to reform.”

Earmarking is the longtime Washington practice in which lawmakers insert money for home-state projects. Although it was said they this practice would end if Cut-happy Republicans were elected to office, it has not and the practice of embedding legislation with billions of dollars in pet projects and federal contracts is still alive and well on Capitol Hill.

Personally, only a fool would have believed that earmarks would be obviated completely in Washington, in particular for the GOP clowns who vowed to end them and even got elected for having such position. But their effort to permanently ban earmarks has split Republicans with a majority wanting to go back to earmarking, even placing them in contradiction with GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, who according to A spokeswoman for the former Massachusetts governor is in favor of a permanent earmark ban.

Even in 2010, just days after the Senate GOP caucus imposed a voluntary moratorium on earmarking, Sen. Jon Kyl, the No. 2 Senate Republican, dropped $200 million to settle an Arizona Indian tribe’s water rights claim against the government for his home state via a spending bill right before final passage. There is Rep. Vicky Hartzler of Missouri, won an additional $20 million for "mixed conventional load capability for Air Force bombers." Hartzler's district is home to Whiteman Air Force Base, keeper of the nation's B-2 bombers, and Fort Leonard Wood.

In fact, during the 111th Congress, six sitting Republican senators voted against considering a three-year earmark moratorium: Sens. Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), James Inhofe (Okla.), Dick Lugar (Ind.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Richard Shelby (Ala.).

But this is not all. Republicans wolf tickets were all about stopping excessive government and bring an end to earmarks reflect another reality of the GOP that is rarely talked about – their two-facedness (if such is a word.)

Even last summer, when the $553 billion bill providing a budget for the Pentagon was passed, it contained millions of dollars that President Barack Obama didn't request for other projects in places from Illinois to Mississippi represented by House GOP freshmen. Including $2.5 million for weapons and munitions advanced technology, money for the Quad City Manufacturing Lab at the Rock Island Arsenal in freshman Rep. Bobby Schilling's Illinois district. Ironic since during his 2010 campaign, the tea party-backed, pizza-business owner Schilling ran against Democratic Rep. Phil Hare’s penchant for earmarking. Then there is also Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who bought Vista Medical Center and requested $2 million to expand the road in front of his “long-term investment,” in 2008 but only received $245,000 from the government. Eventually receiving an additional $570,000 he personally earmarked to widen the road, add bus stops, improve the sewer system, and other utility work to benefit his business investment.

Now the sad story line is that for many in the GOP, these are not considered as Earmarks. Now they have a new name for these which is described by the New York Times as “special funds in spending and authorization bills that allow them to direct money to projects in their states.”

U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill recently released a report finding that members of the U.S. House of Representatives attempted to side step their own self-imposed ban on earmarks, via methods designed by the House Armed Services Committee’s Chairman, Howard McKeon (R-Cali.). It was effective since of the 225 amendments to the legislation that were approved by the House Armed Services Committee, McCaskill proved that 115 of the amendments added had previously been earmarks$834 million in proposed federal spending. More damaging was that of the earmarks secretly inserted into the legislation, 20 were from freshman House GOP members who at one time or another campaigned to end earmarks. Sad truth is that earmarks do not account for no more than 1 percent of the entire federal budget.

I do not know if things will ever change inside the beltway.I do know it is getting more difficult each day to find a politician, democrat or republican that is working on behalf of the people moreso that doing work because of the feeling of owing favors to those that may have greased their palms. It is as Mark Twain said, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Mother attacks 5-year-old girl on school bus

FDA Claims Human Body Is a Drug and the Authority to Regulate It

According to the National Institutes of Health, Stem cells are cells with the potential to develop into many different types of cells in the body and serve as a repair system for the body. There are two main types of stem cells: embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Scientist believes they may be used to make cells and tissues for therapy of many diseases, including Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.

Now the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and the government want to make a ridiculous claim suggesting they own your stem cells because they are drugs. This has come about as a consequence of the FDA’s latest claim in its dispute with a Colorado clinic over its Regenexx-SD™ procedure, a non-surgical treatment for people suffering from moderate to severe joint or bone pain using adult stem cells. The Food and Drug Administration has filed an injunction to stop the clinic from using a person's own stem cells to alleviate pain.
The FDA argues that the clinic is violating federal standards by injecting patients with their cultured stem cells. The clinic's doctors remove cells from the patient and grow them in an outside lab before injecting the cells into painful joints. The backwards logic proffered by the FDA in court documents suggesting it has the right to regulate the clinic is twofold. First they state that “Stem cells are drugs and therefore fall within their jurisdiction.” Last, that the Colorado clinic “is engaging in interstate commerce and is therefore subject to FDA regulation because any part of the machine or procedure that originates outside Colorado becomes interstate commerce once it enters the state.”

The FDA in its own legal briefs and documents state that the agency wants to protect the market for FDA-approved drugs more than all else. If upheld in the courts, the implication of the FDA’s interpretation of the law, is that al cells produced by the human body are the property of the FDA and any use of these cells, even by the person that produces them would be against the law, even if it is to treat their own body. Because according to the FDA, “Stem cells, like other medical products that are intended to treat, cure, or prevent disease, generally require FDA approval before they can be marketed. At this time, there are no licensed stem cell treatments.”

This is just another example of how the FDA is concerned more with serving the interest of large drug and pharmaceutical companies over the people they supposedly are in existence to protect. They are quick to approve questionable medications like the chemical aspartame when it has been shown to cause cancer in rats.

Similar outcomes have occurred with Yaz (birth control), which the FDA first approved in 2001, with Yasmin to follow in 2006, but since then he two studies by Boston University School of Medicine and published in the British Medical Journal had shown that the risk for blood clots, or venous thromboembolism (VTE), was 2-3 times higher for those women who were taking pills that had drospirenone.

Still the query remains, how far can the FDA go into our private lives and are they actually concerned with protecting the public or making drug companies wealthier?

GOP Have Journalist Arrested At Congressional Hearing On Fracking

MegaUpload Fiasco Show DC Politicians Have No Gonads to Go After Wall Street

Riddlemethis? Would the Government or Obama administration arrest banking Presidents/CEOs and seize their assets because it contained the money of drug kingpins? Would the Government or Obama administration arrest and seize the assets of red W. Smith, the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Federal Express because their truck may transport 10 kilograms of cocaine or a warehouse may contain 20 tons of marijuana? I don’t thinks so.

It is obvious that the Federal Government do not have the gonads to tackle corruption and white collar crime objectively. Just last week, an action reminiscent of Elliot Ness pouring beer into a river occurred when the FBI and Justice Department seized the website Mega Upload accusing the owner of causing $500 million in copyright infringements. My query is why is doing the work of the motion picture and recording industries more vital than the work of the people?

Either Congress or the President is so brazen or so cretinous, that they cannot envisage what they are doing me their efforts to censor the website Mega upload. Maybe a little bit of bot now that I think about it. Brazen because it is pronounced their actions are mainly taken on the bequest of the motion picture and recording industry lobbies. Stupid because most politicians prefer to brag on their ignorance on internet technologies and their low level use of such resources that attempting to learn more about the – a myopia more prescient of Washington politicians dysfunction than seeing the desires and needs of the common, non-super Pac affiliated US denizen.

The Obama administrations seizure of the site and the owner’s assets is more an attestation and forewarning of America’s fascist future of protecting US oligarchs than the penchant of protecting liberty. I mean really, going after a site and using the FBI and department of Justice Resources for what is basically a cloud-based repository for data storage, is like the examples I cited in the beginning of this essay.

No bank or Delivery company or website can track all of the user lot, packages or uploaded data which it hosts. To assume that one could, is silly. Meaning - to arrest the site’s founders under the assumption that they knowingly participated in copyright infringement, is moronic if we’re blaming site owners for user uploaded content now, we’d better start arresting people affiliated with all industries from YouTube to Bank of America (THEY HAVE MORE THAN $1 BILLION IN TOXIC ASSETS).

Now I know inside the belt way folks don’t understand. As an artist, mega upload allows me to get 90% on all the music I write, make and produce without the need of a record company gatekeeper who wants to Romanesquly decide for the public if they should hear or have the right to purchase my music. Not to mention this 90% on every dollar made allows them to get my music for free.

Maybe it is about the loot. Former Democratic senator and current head of the Motion Picture Association of America Chris Dodd have given tons of loot to the campaign of President Barack Obama. DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg raised at least $500,000 for the campaign and the Democratic National Committee and contributed $2 million to a super PAC backing the president was his biggest donor. Not to mention the zillion times the President has held fund raisers held by Hollywood big wigs the likes of Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein and Sony Pictures .

I also think that we have ignorant folks making laws and talking about things they have no honest understanding about. I’m sure there are large numbers of individuals inside the beltway like Senator Ted Stevens describing said internets as “a series of tubes,” or Rep. Mel Watt who proudly asserts that declares proudly that he doesn't understand internet/computer technology.

The truth is that a host of variables and factors are involved with the recent and present this financial crisis including everyone from the rating agencies, the bankers and the brokers, and that there is strong evidence for criminal culpability. However, no Wall Street banker wreaking havoc via their exotic derivatives has been charge criminally. What Madoff did to individual investors is what the mortgage & banking industries and Wall Street did to the US taxpayer and the US economy. No one from Goldman Sachs, Lehman’s, Countrywide, Citi, AIG, Bea Sterns or Wachovia just to name a few have been charged criminally or prosecuted by the Obama Administration. Why because we do not count and although the majority of Americans would see greater value in using the FBI and department of Justice Resources by going after criminals that looted $100s of millions and even billions of dollars, congress and Obama do not have the gonads to do such and wag the dog by going after mega uploads $42 million.

Wall Street controls D.C. As long as the financial companies can donate as many dollars as they have been to both sides of the aisle, you will see little in the way of reform of the financial sector and even less in the way of prosecution of wrong-doers. Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild was correct when he said, "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws”