~from the book "Money Creators" by Gertrude M. Coogan (1935)"
P.S. Man-made global warming does not exist, of course. Even if it did, it could not be cured by a few countries buying and selling carbon scams while polluters continued to pollute. (sm)
Political Islam has been at the heart of Middle Eastern politics since the late 1940s.
Throughout the Cold War, the US regarded Islam as a bulwark against communist penetration into the Middle East. Washington supplied Afghanistan's fighters with arms and money to drive the Soviets out of the country, helped Iran in the early days of the war with Iraq and supported Islamic conservative regimes from Indonesia to Morocco.
After the Cold War, political Islam fell from grace, but retained a role in regional politics. Washington overlooked the activities of some Islamists and provided sanctuary to their leaders - the case of Shaikh Omar Abdul Rahman, leader of the Egyptian Al Jama'a Al Islamiyya is a case in point.
The logic behind this policy was to use Islamists as a leverage to extract concessions from Middle Eastern regimes and consolidate US hegemony in the region. In addition, and by way of applying pressure on Arab governments to secure an (Israeli) peace and also to prevent a repetition of the Iranian scenario, Washington recognised Islam as a major political force and did not hide its intentions to co-operate with Islamist regimes as long as they did not pose significant threat to its two intrinsic interests: oil and Israel.
The Bush administration came to power looking for an enemy to justify its aggressive foreign policy agenda and convince a wary public of major increases in military expenditures. In the early days of its tenure, China was the target, but 9/11 supplied the Bush administration with a more credible and much needed enemy to pursue its priorities. A new policy line was established and some US scholars volunteered to provide the logic for the long-awaited crusade. ...
Should Barack Obama change this policy? I think he should. But would he?"
(Jake Tapper blog): "On the Chicago TV show "Public Affairs with Jeff Berkowitz" on June 27, 2002, state Sen. Obama said, "Right now, my main focus is to make sure that we elect Rod Blagojevich as Governor, we..."
"You working hard for Rod?" interrupted Berkowitz.
"Hot Rod?" asked the host.
"That's exactly right," Obama said.
In 2004, then-Gov. Blagojevich enthusiastically endorsed Obama for the Senate seat after he won the nomination, and Obama endorsed Blagojevich for his 2006 re-election race in early 2005.
In the Summer of 2006, then-U.S. Sen. Obama backed Blagojevich even though there were serious questions at the time about Blago's hiring practices.
At the time, numerous state agencies had had records subpoenaed, with U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald telling authorities he was looking into "very serious allegations of endemic hiring fraud" with a "number of credible witnesses.""...
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About your Nobel Peace Laureate:
7/18/11, "The War on Terror, now starring Yemen and Somalia," Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com
"There is a concerted campaign underway to ensure that the War on Terror bonanza continues unimpeded in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, and even despite Leon Panetta's acknowledgment that Al Qaeda has a grand total of "fewer than two dozen key operatives" on the entire planet. That effort relies primarily on touting a growing villainous alliance -- the scariest since Marvel Comic's Masters of Evil -- between Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (mostly in Yemen) and the al Shabab group in Somalia. To accomplish this, all the standard fear-mongering propaganda is being trotted out, and the War on Terror apparatus is simply being re-directed to those nations. Most notably,
Just like The Communist was seamlessly replaced by the Terrorist when
In December, 2009, U.S. cruise missile carrying cluster bombs were dropped in Yemen, killing 41 people, including 14 women and 21 children. Cables released by WikiLeaks subsequently revealed that the Obama administration perpetrated that attack, as well as a second air strike that same month (which targeted Awlaki). In May, 2010, the Obama administration launched another attack in that country, one that
Those 2009 and 2010 attacks...are playing a very significant role in why there is a Terrorism problem in Yemen in the first place. As The Christian Science Monitor explained when reporting on the 2009 American cluster bomb attack in Yemen:
Just as high civilian casualties in US attacks on militants have fed extremism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the same phenomenon is now playing out in Yemen, says Yemen specialist Gregory Johnsen....
If you drop cluster bombs in a country and slaughter dozens of women and children with drones and then kill a popular governor, you're going to spawn pervasive amounts of anger and hostility towards the responsible foreign country and also embolden the message of extremists that they are under attack from the U.S and jihad is thus warranted: a shocking observation, I know -- but readers of the LA Times, or at least this article on the supposed emerging threat, would have no idea that the U.S. has even been doing that in Yemen. That the U.S. is creating the very Terrorism problem it claims to be combating is one of the most crucial points in discussions of American Terrorism policy -- it was one explicitly recognized even by a Rumsfeld-created Terrorism task force back in 2004 -- but it barely is heard in American political discourse....
American media reports such as the one appearing this weekend in the LA Times reflexively depict escalating American military attacks as a response to the growing Terrorist threat rather than as what they are: a leading cause of that threat. One might also take cognizance of the obvious connection between these escalating attacks under Obama and the
.
Here are just some of the “highlights” of the Wilson Research Strategies poll of 1,000 voters whose demographic breakdown was an exact replica of the total voting population and whose results totally vindicate the controversial Zogby poll:
Mr. Soros's influence on Democratic policy has been years in the making, through groups like
the group is expected to play a role in the Obama administration.
The problem for Mr. Obama, of course, is that not all Mr. Soros's ideas fly as well with voters as with the New York and D.C. cognoscenti. The Soros connection already created trouble for Mr. Obama last year over the billionaire's comment that Democrats should "liberate" themselves from the influence of the pro-Israeli lobby. Mr. Soros also is a prominent advocate of drug legalization. So while the hedge-fund legend may pour money and staffers into the Obama administration, Warren Buffett is likely to remain the billionaire Mr. Obama still prefers to share photo-ops with."
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"Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.
"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts.
Halperin, who maintains Time's political site "The Page," cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.
"Zogby Statement on Ziegler poll
| "We stand by the results our survey work on behalf of John Ziegler, as we stand by all of our work. We reject the notion that this was a push poll because it very simply wasn't. It was a legitimate effort to test the knowledge of voters who cast ballots for Barack Obama in the Nov. 4 election. Push polls are a malicious effort to sway public opinion one way or the other, while message and knowledge testing is quite another effort of public opinion research that is legitimate inquiry and has value in the public square. In this case, the respondents were given a full range of responses and were not pressured or influenced to respond in one way or another. This poll was not designed to hurt anyone, which is obvious as it was conducted after the election. The client is free to draw his own conclusions about the research, as are bloggers and other members of society. But Zogby International is a neutral party in this matter. We were hired to test public opinion on a particular subject and with no ax to grind, that's exactly what we did. We don't have to agree or disagree with the questions, we simply ask them and provide the client with a fair and accurate set of data reflecting public opinion." - John Zogby | |
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via the Drudge Report ORIGINAL |
“No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
The numerous lawsuits (at least 8 in various states) that have been filed challenging Obama’s eligibility to run and serve as President have changed that. It wasn’t until tonight, however, that the importance of my August question became clear. Thanks to Leo Donofrio, for finally putting all of the pieces in place . It finally makes sense.
The Framers distinguised between”natural born Citizens” and all other “Citizens”. And that’s why it’s important to note the 14th Amendment only confers the title of “Citizen”, not “natural born Citizen”. The Framers were Citizens, but they weren’t natural born Citizens. They put the stigma of not being natural born Citizens on themselves by law....
The Framers were not comfortable with the possibility of future generations of Presidents being born under the jurisdiction of Foreign Powers. The Framers declared themselves not eligible to be President as “Natural Born Citizens” so they wrote the grandfather clause in for a limited exception.
Nobody alive today can claim eligibility to be President under the grandfather clause since nobody alive today was a citizen of the US at the time the Constitution was adopted.
Note, Article 2, Section 1 of our Constitution does not allow for dual citizenship, in fact, the Framers of our Constitution went out of their way to make sure that no person serving as President of these United States would have to suffer conflicting loyalties to more than one country. It has already been suggested that Barack has demonstrated divided loyalties because of his association with Raila Odinga in Kenya.
Why this is important; according to Fact Check, Obama was both a British Citizen and U.S. citizen, thereby making him ineligible to be POTUS. Quoting directly from the site:
When Barack Obama Jr. was born on Aug. 4,1961, in Honolulu, Kenya was a British colony, still part of the United Kingdom’s dwindling empire. As a Kenyan native, Barack Obama Sr. was a British subject whose citizenship status was governed by The British Nationality Act of 1948. That same act governed the status of Obama Sr.’s children:
British Nationality Act of 1948 (Part II, Section 5): Subject to the provisions of this section, a person born after the commencement of this Act shall be a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies by descent if his father is a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies at the time of the birth.
In other words, at the time of his birth, Barack Obama Jr. was both a U.S. citizen (by virtue of being born in Hawaii) and a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies (or the UKC) by virtue of being born to a father who was a citizen of the UKC.
Here’s the bottom line,
Among the full roster of about 150 staff members being assigned to government agencies between now and Inauguration Day are dozens of former lobbyists and some who were registered as recently as this year. Many more are executives and partners at firms that pay lobbyists, and former government officials who work as consultants or advisers to those seeking influence.
After campaigning on promises to end the influence of lobbyists in the White House, Mr. Obama has imposed rules that bar officials on his transition team from handling any issues in areas of policy where they have lobbied over the last 12 months or from seeking to influence the same agencies for the next 12 months.
The rules also bar officials from working on matters where family members or recent business associates may have a direct conflict of interest. In cases where there is even an “appearance of conflict,” officials must seek a waiver from the transition’s executive director, an Obama Senate aide and law school classmate, Christopher Lu.
At least one official initially involved in the transition appears to have been reassigned because of concern about his lobbying or legal work. Henry Rivera, a former Democratic commissioner on the Federal Communication Commission who was involved in planning for the agency’s transition, has dropped out of that role because he had represented clients on communications policy in the last year, the newsletter Communications Daily reported Friday.
Instead, on the list that was made public on Friday, Mr. Rivera was listed on the team handling science, technology, space and the arts. The rules permit people who have lobbied in one area to join an Obama transition team in another. (With Mr. Rivera is Jim Kohlenberger, executive director of an advocacy group for Internet companies.)
Representatives of the transition team declined to comment on the assignment, and Mr. Rivera did not return a phone call seeking comment....
Some appear to skirt the edges of the ban on working in areas of the transition where they have recently lobbied. Handling some Interior Department issues is Keith Harper, who lobbied earlier this year for Native American tribes. Overseeing the Consumer Products Safety Commission is Pamela Gilbert, a former executive director of the agency who as recently as two years ago lobbied for a consumer advocacy group. Within the last year she has lobbied for the company Barr Laboratories, for an investor group, and for an antitrust enforcement group.
Among the group handling the Justice Department and civil rights areas of the transition is Theodore Shaw, a litigator for an arm of the N.A.A.C.P. He has registered as a lobbyist for the group in the past, but N.A.A.C.P. officials say he has not lobbied in the past 12 months.
David J. Hayes, part of the 12-member group overseeing the transition and co-head of the team handling the areas of energy and natural resources, is the chairman of the environmental practice at the law and lobbying firm Latham & Watkins. He was personally registered as a lobbyist as recently as 2006, for clients including San Diego Gas and Electric.
Sally Katzen, another member of the supervisory group who is also on teams for the office of the president and government operations, was registered last year to lobby for the pharmaceutical company Amgen on Medicare reimbursements. Louisa Terrell, another member of the top working group, is on leave from the public policy office of the Internet company Yahoo! Tom Wheeler, another of the 12, is on leave from a firm that invests in technology companies and before 2004 lobbied for the cable television and wireless industries.
John L. White, a former Clinton official charged with overseeing the new Defense Department, is a partner in a firm that invests in defense contractors. Michael Warren, charged with overseeing Treasury, is chief operating officer of a firm that lobbies for clients including the U.S.-India Business Council.
Several of the officials have ties to the Fannie Mae, the government-backed mortgage firm whose implosion this fall contributed to the financial meltdown. Thomas Donilon, overseeing the State Department, is a partner in the law and lobbying firm O’Melveny and Myers who until three years ago lobbied for Fannie Mae. Wendy R. Sherman, the other official charged with reviewing the State Department, once headed Fannie Mae’s charitable foundation. And James Johnson, a former top officer of Fannie Mae, is on the economics and international trade team, charged with reviewing the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.
Even Mr. Lu, the transition’s executive director charged with policing potential conflicts of interests, may have his own appearance problems. His wife, Kathryn Thomson, is a lawyer who represents corporate clients dealing with federal environmental regulations, while his older brother, Curtis Lu, is a top lawyer for Fannie Mae. (Such family connections may not be disqualifying conflicts depending on the nature of the transition job, ethics lawyers said.)
Mr. Lu has his work cut out for him in deciding which apparent conflicts may be of real concern, said Robert Walker, a Washington lawyer and former staff director of the Senate Ethics Committee. “I don’t think it is the brightest of bright lines, and there is going to be a lot of time spent thinking about just where that line is,” Mr. Walker said.
The people involved in the transition teams assigned to each federal department and agency have begun meeting with their current staff to collect information on budgets, pending issues and personnel matters. For now, the advisers assigned to each agency report back to the central 12-person working group, which coordinates the efforts.
The vast majority involved are second-tier officials of the Clinton administration, eager to help another Democrat take control of the White House. With the exception of a few academics, almost all of them spent the intervening years in the private sector, usually capitalizing on the connections and expertise they developed in the Clinton years.
For example, Sandy Berger, the Clinton national security adviser, founded Stonebridge International, a consulting and lobbying firm focused on helping clients resolve government issues here and overseas.
Mr. Berger took with him Mr. Warren, the former executive director of the president’s economic council who became chief operating officer of Stonebridge and has now become a major contributor to the transition in the pivotal areas of the Treasury Department and economic policy. Although not a registered lobbyist, Mr. Warren helped manage Stonebridge while it lobbied the government for clients including the U.S.-India Business Council within the last year as well as Dynergy International, Airbus and Conoco in earlier years. (More of Stonebridge’s business involves using government expertise and connections to help corporate clients abroad.)
Some transition officials now work at firms that do business with the agencies they are examining. John O. Brennan, a former Central Intelligence Agency official working on its transition, is president and chief executive of the Analysis Corporation, an intelligence contractor.
On the NASA review board, Lori Garver is now president of a strategic consulting company, Capital Space LLC, and previously worked for the aerospace company DFI International.
Among the transition officials charged with reviewing the Securities and Exchange Commission — likely to come under significant scrutiny amid the financial meltdown — is Mozelle Thompson, who runs a legal and policy consulting business for publicly traded companies including Facebook.com.
One name on the transition list comes unencumbered by potential conflicts but instead by bad luck. Jami Miscik,
Kitty Bennett, Mark T. Mazzetti and Barclay Walsh contributed reporting for this article.
This story, "In Transition, Tangle of Ties to Lobbying," originally appeared in the New York Times.
(Michelle Malkin): "I hope Barack Obama remembered to thank George Bush on behalf of his illegal alien aunt this week. The lame-duck Republican president did the Democratic president-elect a generous -- and dangerous -- favor right before Election Day: Putting politics above homeland security,
According to my sources, the Bush administration issued a 72-hour cease-and-desist order to all fugitive apprehension teams
The Associated Press reported on Nov. 1 that Onyango was a deportation evader -- one of an estimated 700,000 illegal alien absconders who have ignored orders from immigration judges to leave the country. The wire report mentioned that the Department of Homeland Security distributed "an unusual nationwide directive within Immigration and Customs Enforcement requiring any deportations prior to Tuesday's election to be approved at least at the level of ICE regional directors."
Another source close to ICE operations in a Southern California field office confirmed that immigration officials there received the same directive: "The reason they included all offices in the United States was to show that they were not targeting the district office where Aunti lived.
In other words, the Bush Department of Homeland Security determined that
Warped homeland security priorities are bipartisan. Democratic Rep. John Conyers has called for an immediate investigation -- not into the rank politicizing of our deportation policies, but into who leaked Onyango's deportation fugitive status to the press.
Question: Why shouldn't this information be public?
As for President-elect Obama, his true views about ICE are well known. Despite telling Katie Couric that his aunt should be required to follow the law because "we're a nation of laws. … I'm a strong believer you have to obey the law," Obama scolded ICE agents, who are doing their jobs, for "terrorizing" communities.
(Meanwhile, real terrorists have benefited enormously from lax enforcement of deportation orders and asylum loopholes. Ramzi Yousef, Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer and Mir Aimal Kansi all exploited our catch-and-release system by invoking asylum and evading swamped authorities before plotting and executing jihadist attacks.)...
He, too, used an intensely personal and inspirational appeal to compensate for a thin résumé. Having courted the public with flattering rhetoric—promising “a government as good as the American people”-...He had been selected by a process that rewarded running as a solitary savior, offering his personal qualities—his supposed moral excellence—as the key to national improvement.
"Race in America is no longer a matter of bigotry and hatred but of ‘rational' discrimination against underachievement
What more do black Americans want? They have already been handed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the abolition of segregation, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, a host of affirmative action programmes and now, unless something very strange happens to the American electorate in the privacy of the voting booth, a black president. Short of introducing the death penalty for using the N-word and dancing on the grave of General Robert E.Lee,
Strange as it sounds, many on the extreme Right are licking their lips at the prospect of an Obama victory: they see in his triumph the death of special pleading. Like most liberals they acknowledge that a black man in the White House would represent a watershed, but they emphasise not what it says about whites but what it says about blacks.
If an Obama presidency proves that the American Dream is colour blind, that racism is dying a death and that the civil rights movement is reaching its logical end point, who is left to blame for the chronic underachievement of blacks except blacks themselves?
If we can all agree that Obama's rise is symbolic of the great strides America has made towards racial modernity, how do we square this with the economic and social failure of blacks after more than four decades of progressive federal intervention? Must we accept the perilous assertion, which underpinned both slavery and Jim Crow segregation, that blacks have a genetic deficiency that no amount of legislation can eradicate? Roland Fryer, a young black economist at Harvard, rejects this conclusion and uses ingenious mathematical reasoning to show why.
In a nutshell, he asks us to imagine an employer on Main Street leafing through a couple of hundred CVs. The employer is a decent chap who firmly believes that blacks and whites are born equal. But he is also well read and knows that the legacy of two centuries of discrimination has left blacks with a serious social handicap so that they are, on average, less qualified than whites.
Ideally, our employer would like to test each candidate individually for his suitability, but this is not an ideal world: he is in a competitive market and interviewing is expensive. So what does he do? In a hurry, he uses the information that black skin is typically associated with lower quality and invites more whites for interview instead. Given that his fellow employers across the nation are doing precisely the same thing,
This is disturbing because, to use the terminology of the economist Tim Harford in a lucid essay on the subject, everyone is behaving "rationally". Prejudice of the redneck variety - where blacks are refused jobs on principle - is self-harming. By ignoring talented blacks in favour of ropey whites, these racists will eventually take a hit to the bottom line.
To test the prevalence of statistical racism, two American economists drafted 5,000 CVs and placed archetypal black names such as Tyrone or Latoya on half and white names such as Brendan or Alison on the other half. They then divided the white CVs into high and low quality and did the same with the black CVs.
A few weeks later the offers came rolling in, and guess what? The black candidates were 50 per cent less likely to be invited to interview. But, crucially, the researchers also found that although high-quality whites were preferred to low-quality whites, the relative quality of black CVs made no difference whatsoever. It was as if employers saw three categories: high-quality whites, low-quality whites and blacks. Is it any wonder that black children fail at school given that success is often ignored by employers?
The problem of race in America is no longer primarily one of bigotry and hatred: in that sense the progressive crusade that began with Abraham Lincoln and is likely to culminate with the presidency of Barack Obama has been a triumph.
His likely election merely signals the next stage in the long ascent towards racial equality; the slope remains as steep as ever."
