Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Bailout fraud cases emerge
In the first major disclosure of corruption and fraud in the $750 billion federal bailout program, investigators said Monday that they have opened 20 criminal probes into possible securities fraud, tax law violations, insider trading and mortgage modification fraud.
Ultimately, fraud could run into the tens of billions of dollars. The risk of those kinds of criminal activities is growing as the bailout becomes bigger and more complicated...
[Seriously, who didn't see this coming?]
READ MORE
CNN Touts Obama $100M Spending Cut, but Even White House Acknowledges Insignificance
It must be hard to keep a straight face when you report that the President of United States going to cut $100 million from a $3.5 trillion budget and then say he is serious about cutting government spending.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs couldn't pull it off. In the White House's April 20 press briefing, Gibbs was asked by Associated Press reporter Jennifer Loven why the $100-million target was so small and she even accused him of making a joke about it.
But somehow, CNN correspondent Elaine Quijano pulled it off. Originally on CNN's April 20 "American Morning," and again on CNN throughout April 20, Quijano reported the Obama administration was making an effort to cut spending.
READ MORE
Cheney Calls for Release of Memos Showing Results of Interrogation Efforts
.
"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort,"
Cheney said he's asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.
"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was." [snip]
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has repeatedly criticized the use of certain techniques that have been described by critics as torture. But McCain said earlier in the day that the decision to release the Justice Department memos "helps no one."
"(The release) doesn't help America's image, does not help us address the issue and I think it was a serious mistake,"
[Q: What other nation publicizes its clandestine operations?]
READ MORE
CIA Confirms: Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style Attack on Los Angeles
.
CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) -- including the use of waterboarding -- caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.
Before he was waterboarded, when KSM was asked about planned attacks on the United States, he ominously told his CIA interrogators, “Soon, you will know.”
According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack -- which KSM called the “Second Wave”-- planned “ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.” [snip]
A CIA spokesman confirmed to CNSNews.com today that the CIA stands by the factual assertions made here.
READ MORE
HEROES
.
Soldiers in Afghanistan Get Dirty to Stay Connected
Paratroopers at Forward Operating Base Salerno here are busy running fiber-optic lines to keep critical lines of communication open.
We provide all of the connectivity for the brigade throughout the Task Force Yukon area of operation,” Collins said, referring to a sector of eastern Afghanistan about the size of Maryland. “It is a huge tasking for the smallest company in the entire brigade.”
“We have soldiers that fly out to different forward operating bases on signal maintenance, we have the help desk located in the tactical operations center, network operations, and constant troubleshooting,” ... ”We do a lot in 24 hours.”
“We have to do our job very well, because if we don’t, then everyone else can’t do their jobs,” ... “Yeah, we may get a little wet and muddy, but the bottom line is that the job has to be done.”
[The next time my IS guy complains about his working conditions...]
READ MORE
Soros worms his way into the Pentagon
Billionaire financier and convicted inside trader George Soros has never lacked for access to the highest levels of government. Now it appears he will have an ally strategically placed in the Pentagon where he might influence our defense policy Rowant Scarborough writes in Human Events.
Democratic Party financier George Soros, who puts much of the blame for Islamic terrorists on America and former president George W. Bush, can celebrate his first foothold inside the Pentagon.
It is in the person of Rosa Brooks, far-left former Los Angeles Times columnist. She was once counsel to billionaire Soros' Open Societies Institute, whose funding arm bankrolls a number of hard-left pressure groups, such as MoveOn.org. MoveOn.org, of course, is the Washington outfit that smeared Gen. David Petraeus as a betrayer of his country, and depicted Bush in a Web ad as Adolph Hitler.
Brooks, who has also likened Bush to Hitler and claims the former president is "psychotic" and "fanatical," will not be a minor player. The Pentagon's No. 3 official and top policymaker, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, has selected Brooks as a "principal adviser."
The title means Brooks will have the constant ear of the Defense Department's policy chief as Flournoy weighs in on the budget, troop deployments, secret missions and weapons buying. In the Pentagon bureaucratic elevator, every major decision flows through Flournoy's shop on its way to the defense secretary.
According to the Pentagon, Brooks will be an advisor to Flournoy on how the military shapes its relations with other countries. But there is little doubt she will get her two cents in on other policy matters as well.
To have a radical, anti-military leftist in such a high position - not to mention her close connection to Soros - is almost incomprehensible.
Until you remember who is president and what party he represents.
READ MORE
Twofer
.
Obama envoy tells Israel U.S. wants Palestinian state
Jerusalem - U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East envoy told Israel's ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, on Thursday that Washington wants to see the creation of a Palestinian state. I reiterated to the foreign minister that U.S. policy favours, with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a two-state solution which will have a Palestinian state living in peace alongside the Jewish state of Israel envoy George Mitchell told reporters, with Lieberman at his side.
READ MORE
Netanyahu demands Palestinians recognize 'Jewish state'
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told visiting U.S. envoy George Mitchell on Thursday that his government would condition talks over Palestinian statehood on the Palestinians first recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. ''Israel expects the Palestinians to first recognize Israel as a Jewish state before talking about two states for two peoples,'' a senior official in Netanyahu's office quoted the new prime minister as telling Mitchell, U.S. President Barack Obama's special envoy to the Middle East.
READ MORE
2nd Twofer
.
Report: Hamas killed, maimed dozens of opponents
Ramallah, West Bank - Hamas directed gunmen to eliminate political opponents and suspected collaborators under the cover of Israel's military offensive in Gaza, killing 32 people and wounding dozens in such attacks since December, an international human rights group said Monday.
Such practices are aimed, in part, at quashing dissent in Gaza and make a mockery of Hamas' claim it upholds the law, the group said.
READ MORE
British lawmakers meet Hamas leader in Syria
A British parliamentary delegation on a visit to Syria has met Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal as part of European efforts to communicate with the Palestinian Islamist group, Hamas said on Wednesday.
The meeting with Meshal, who lives in Syria, took place in Damascus on Tuesday. The British Embassy confirmed the meeting but denied a Syrian media report that Ambassador Simon Collis attended.
READ MORE
Trouble Brewing In Caucasus, But Media Silent
Here’s a quick informal poll: Who has heard news of Russia’s recent troop buildup in the South Ossetia region of Georgia?
Chances are, nobody has heard of it.
According to a Newsweek interview dated April 11, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia claims:
A week ago Russian tanks arrived in South Ossetia. We have information that there are about 5,000 Russian troops in the territory of South Ossetia, and 5,000 troops in Abkhazia.
A week before April 11, Russian tanks were apparently rolling into South Ossetia. One might immediately think that there was something else occurring in the world about that time; and indeed there was. President Obama was in Strasbourg, France, at a NATO summit.
That’s right, Russia timed its troop buildup to coincide with the NATO summit.
So why is this slowly leaking through the cracks now? This morning, Jackson Diehl wrote an editorial in the Washington Post containing the following paragraph:
Those aren't the only signs that the new medicine isn't taking. Europeans commonly blamed Bush for Russia's aggressiveness -- they said he ignored Moscow's interests and pressed too hard for European missile defense and NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine. So Hillary Clinton made a show of pushing a "reset" button, and Obama offered the Kremlin a new arms control agreement while putting missile defense and NATO expansion on a back burner.
Yet in recent weeks Russia has deployed thousands of additional troops as well as tanks and warplanes to the two breakaway Georgian republics it has recognized, in blatant violation of the cease-fire agreement that ended last year's war. The threat of another Russian attack on Georgia seems to be going up rather than down.
This is the best coverage that NewsBusters could find of the recent Russian troop movements – and that’s no exaggeration.
READ MORE
I still have US support, says Georgian leader
President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia has insisted that he still enjoys the backing of his Western allies, despite America's concerted drive to achieve reconciliation with Russia
Eight months after Russia invaded Georgia to support rebels in South Ossetia, Mr Saakashvili is facing mass protests urging him to resign. The West has snubbed Georgia's long-cherished hopes of joining Nato amid signs that European politicians - especially those dependent on Russian energy supplies - increasingly portray the president as an impetuous embarrassment. [snip]
President Barack Obama has already held cordial talks with Dmitry Medvedev, his Russian counterpart, and is planning to visit Moscow in July. But its contact with Georgia has been limited to one phone conversation between Mr Saakashvili's national security adviser and "a high-up US official".
"I still hope to meet Mr Obama," said Mr Saakashvili. "I'm confident this will happen this year."
READ MORE
Russia may cancel military talks with NATO
Moscow - Russia threatened on Monday to call off a meeting of senior military commanders with NATO next month if the alliance went ahead with planned exercises in ex-Soviet Georgia, Interfax news agency reported.
''If we see no reaction (to Russia's protests about the exercises) ... the Russia-NATO meeting of the chiefs of staff planned for May 7 will not take place''
READ MORE
Hugo Chavez Says Venezuelan Socialism Has Begun to Reach U.S. under Obama
Inspired by his meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the Americas Summit, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared on Sunday that Venezuelan socialism has begun to reach the United States under the Obama administration.
''It would seem that the changes that started in Venezuela in the last decade of the 20th century have begun to reach North America''
READ MORE
America is heading down the road to socialism
The stimulus plan has something for every important Democratic special interest group - labor, the teachers unions, big-city bosses, environmentalists, Hispanics, and African-Americans. Key constituencies will benefit from school construction, infrastructure projects, public works, retooling federal buildings with green technologies, expanding Medicaid and unemployment insurance, and more money for strapped states and localities. The plan is primarily designed not to stimulate the economy, but the size and scope of government. More citizens will be dependent upon government largesse.
This empowers the Democratic Party and its liberal elite.
As National Review's Jonah Goldberg has rightly noted, modern American liberalism is a form of fascism - otherwise known as national socialism. Its goal is to establish a centralized corporatist state, in which a ruling class manages to transfer power from the private to the public sector.
Liberalism champions huge entitlements, expensive social programs and the regimentation of nearly every aspect of people's lives - from smoking bans and university admissions policies, to prayer in schools and how much right-wing talk-radio one can listen to. It seeks to dominate not only politics and the economy, but culture and the arts as well... [snip]
Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it...
READ MORE
MSM's Tea Party Cognitive Dissonance
In all my years of watching news coverage in America, I don't believe I have ever witnessed more condescending, amateurish, purely politicized reporting than what just transpired among the liberal MSM covering America's Tax Day Tea Parties. The Tea Parties represented a very significant news event.
Whenever close to 300,000 middle-class Americans put their productive lives on hold on a midweek workday, make original signs with their own hands, and travel miles and miles to stand with other private citizens just to demonstrate their anger with government, in more than 300 cities from coast to coast and everywhere in between, that's NEWS.
Yet, many local newspapers - even the Boston Globe for crying out loud - pettily refused to even cover their local protests. When every news channel - except the only one thriving on the block, Fox - finally decided to cover the events, it was with derision, mockery and elitist condescension.
Note to MSM: This is why you're going broke
READ MORE
Tea Parties about Far More than Taxes
Folks who believe that the American Revolution was over nothing but taxation -- a penny more for a cup of tea or sugar or any of the other fees and taxes that the British were constantly adding to colonists' backs -- are as dimwitted as was King George in his day. The tea tax may have been the single match that started the fire, but the British had been soaking their American colonies in tyrannical kerosene for a long, long time.
But the message in grassroots Tea Parties today is of exactly the same character as its historical inspiration.
The Tea Parties represent a growing anger against encroaching tyranny by a federal government that pays far more heed to billionaire financiers, union bosses, special interest lobbyists, and those on the bottom who pay no income taxes, than it does to all the folks in the middle, who work hard to pay their taxes and all their other bills.
The Tea Parties represent real citizens' anger over watching powerlessly for the past two months as a president, who ran as a moderate to get elected, has taken the fastest, boldest leap to the far left of any president to date. Not only has President Obama upped the ante on the failed policies of FDR and Lyndon Johnson, he has gone on an apology tour of Europe, bowed to a Saudi King, and promised billions more of our hard-earned money to global entities over which we have absolutely no control.
All the while we in the modern-day Tea Party movement are being billed by the leftist press as greedy, insane, rightwing zealots who not only hate the poor, the minorities, the women and all the little children, but are now seen as a terrorist threat to homeland security.
Tax Day Tea Parties may merely be the tip of a growing-by-the-day iceberg of anger experienced by millions and millions of Americans who see the overreach of a federal government drunk on its own power. The American people know tyranny when they see it and they see it all around them now, threatening to finally extinguish what little liberty we have remaining.
[More, Recommended > ]
READ MORE
The Planet Cools While Romm Burns
[hysterical/unsubstantiated alarmist claims, then >] ... But Romm's longtime nemesis Lord Monckton recently observed that the exponential forecasts of the UN simply don't match reality [PDF]:
"The IPCC's estimates of growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration are excessive. They assume CO2 concentration will rise exponentially from today's 385 parts per million to reach 730 to 1020 ppm, central estimate 836 ppm, by 2100. However, for seven years, CO2 concentration has been rising in a straight line towards just 575 ppmv by 2100. This alone halves the IPCC's temperature projections."
I must confess, I chose Spencer and Lindzen in part because many alarmists consider them among the "small number of credible skeptics out there," and thereby don't automatically dismiss them outright, as they so arrogantly do others. But keep in mind that although CO2 continues to climb, there's been no warming since 1998. Not only was this little anthropogenic global warming (AGW) glitch obviously not predicted by IPCC models, but it lends great credence to those scientists who believe Earth's greenhouse effect to be either non-existent or inconsequential.
No wonder alarmists continue to ignore that the historic correlation between CO2 levels and temperature trends observed in Greenland ice core samples depict CO2 lagging, not preceding temperature, by hundreds of years.
Its implications shatter the theory on which their entire duplicitous agenda is built. [snip]
... [Romm] also denies the existence of "negative" feedbacks which many scientists believe hold climate sensitivity in check, among them Dr. Roy Spencer. The former NASA senior scientist believes one example -- cloud cover -- which both Romm and the IPCC declare to be a positive feedback, may in fact be a negative feedback and that " the ‘balance of evidence' suggests [clouds] have been acting to reduce the small amount of warming being caused by more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."
And MIT's Prof. Richard Lindzen recently reiterated his position that:
"The earth's climate (in contrast to the climate in current climate GCM[odels]s) is dominated by a strong net negative feedback. Climate sensitivity is on the order of 0.3°C, and such warming as may arise from increasing greenhouse gases will be indistinguishable from the fluctuations in climate that occur naturally from processes internal to the climate system itself."
Chart of Climate Researcher Alan Siddons and illustrates the difference when allowing for negative feedback is staggering. [I.e., bottom/0.3 line - snip]
Considering the want and suffering their progress-ravaging and unnecessary policies would inflict on people worldwide, particularly the poor and sickly in developing countries, it is they and he who threaten the health and well-being of "countless" billions among the earth's population.
And must be stopped.
[More, a little 'dry' as it's science, but Highly Recommended {it's your money and liberties on the line} > ]
READ MORE
Report: Ethanol raises cost of nutrition programs
WASHINGTON –Food stamps and child nutrition programs are expected to cost up to $900 million more this year because of increased ethanol use.Higher use of the corn-based fuel additive accounted for about 10 percent to 15 percent of the rise in food prices between April 2007 and April 2008, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
[Rarely has an idea been shown to be so bad so quickly than that of burning a staple food crop. And congress' response?
Increase ethanol mandates this year.]
READ MORE
FLASHBACK >
California regulators, trying to assess the true environmental cost of corn ethanol, are poised to declare that the biofuel cannot help the state reduce global warming..
On Immigration, Large Gap Remains Between Mainstream America and Political Class
Sixty-six percent (66%) of likely voters nationwide say it is Very Important for the government to improve its enforcement of the borders and reduce illegal immigration. However, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 32% of America’s Political Class agrees.
An even more dramatic gap appears on the question of legalizing the status of those immigrants now in the country illegally. Voters nationwide are evenly divided on the question of whether it is even somewhat important: 48% say it’s important, and 45% say it’s not.
However, among the Political Class, 74% say legalizing the status of these residents is important, and only 17% disagree.
This finding confirms that little has changed since the 2006 debate when immigration reform legislation championed by President George W. Bush and senior senators of both parties was defeated. Although that legislation had tremendous support among the political elite, the Senate was eventually forced to surrender to public opinion.
[But we'll need do so again, as they will try again.]
READ MORE
Counting On Illegal Aliens
Robert M. Groves, nominated to be the next director of the bureau, recommended that the 1990 census be statistically adjusted to correct an alleged undercount of minorities in urban areas — areas that tend to vote heavily Democratic. Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher overruled him, saying the use of "statistical sampling," as it's known, was a form of "political tampering."
Statistical sampling is a technique akin to polling. You select what you consider a representative sample and extrapolate your findings over the general population.
The problem is that Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution forbids it. It requires an "actual enumeration" of all Americans every 10 years, not a guess based on statistical sampling. That means counting real, live, breathing people.
The Founding Fathers weren't fools. Sampling techniques have changed, but human nature has not... [snip]
The next U.S. census chief also wants to count people who aren't there, or are here when they shouldn't be.
And Acorn will help do the counting...
READ MORE
How to Buy A City Council
Eyebrows shot up last week when teachers-union operatives handed out pre-printed questions for City Council members to ask at a hearing. But the UFT was merely calling in an IOU.
As Chuck Bennett reported in yesterday's Post, the United Federation of Teachers paid good money for those council members. And the union expects value for its cash...
If you've any doubt as to who's interest teacher's unions serve...]
READ MORE
Yes, California, There Is an Individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms
[WARNING: Those of you who have followed the antics of the 9th Circuit SIT DOWN before reading...]
YESTERDAY the Ninth Circuit (the federal appellate court covering most Western states) ruled that the Second Amendment restricts the power of state and local governments to interfere with individual right to have guns for personal use.
That is, the Fourteenth Amendment “incorporates” the Second Amendment against the states, as the Supreme Court has found it to do for most of the Bill of Rights. I rarely get a chance to say this, but the Ninth Circuit gets it exactly right.
Here’s the key part of Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain’s opinion:
We therefore conclude that the right to keep and bear arms is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Colonial revolutionaries, the Founders, and a host of commentators and lawmakers living during the first one hundred years of the Republic all insisted on the fundamental nature of the right. It has long been regarded as the “true palladium of liberty.”
Colonists relied on it to assert and to win their independence, and the victorious Union sought to prevent a recalcitrant South from abridging it less than a century later. The crucial role this deeply rooted right has played in our birth and history compels us to recognize that it is indeed fundamental, that it is necessary to the Anglo-American conception of ordered liberty that we have inherited.
We are therefore persuaded that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment and applies it against the states and local governments.
In short, residents of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington now join D.C. residents in having their Second Amendment rights protected. And courts covering other parts of the country — most immediately the Seventh Circuit, based in Chicago — will have their chance to make the same interpretation in due course.
Just as interesting — and potentially equally [more] significant — is the footnote Judge O’Scannlain drops at the end of the above text in response to arguments that the right to keep and bear arms, regardless of its provenance as a fundamental natural right, is now controversial:
But we do not measure the protection the Constitution affords a right by the values of our own times. If contemporary desuetude sufficed to read rights out of the Constitution, then there would be little benefit to a written statement of them.
Some may disagree with the decision of the Founders to enshrine a given right in the Constitution. If so, then the people can amend the document. But such amendments are not for the courts to ordain.
Quite right.
[outstanding]
READ MORE
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
