In a few short months, the term “stimulus” went from a $175-billion campaign promise to the most-expensive law ever passed by Congress. Nearly $800 billion of special interest funding, healthcare plans and precious little infrastructure made up the final agreement.
New President Obama had strong majorities in both the House and Senate to push his massive stimulus bill through. But he had another advantage – the same news media that helped him get elected was covering the “bold” push for a stimulus plan. Two broadcast networks – ABC and NBC – showed particularly strong support for the president by relying on pro-stimulus voices by a more-than 2-to-1 ratio (139 to 56). As reporter Scott Cohn told the NBC “Nightly News” audience about a struggling Indiana community. “Economic stimulus isn’t just a political debate around here. It could be a matter of survival.”
If we hear in the coming days that former Vice President Dick Cheney has fired one of his speechwriters — or perhaps grounded Lynne or Liz — it will be clear why.
Oozing out of the sleazy speech he gave Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute was an inadvertent truth regarding the Israeli albatross hanging around the neck of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
I watched the speech, but had missed the gaffe until I went carefully through the written text before a radio interview Thursday evening. It amounts to a major faux pas, though I’ll give you odds that the usual-suspect pundits of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) will not touch it, because it raises troubling questions about the close U.S. alliance with Israel.
I wanted my 10-year-old grandson to learn a nice word to describe the arguments in the former Vice President’s speech, so he has now learned “disingenuous.”
Today we’ll study “superficial,” for that is the right adjective to assign to both Cheney and President Barack Obama as they addressed the threat of “terrorism,” the threat always guaranteed to resonate among Americans — much like the threat of communism did, not too many decades back.
If you scrub the above YouTube video to 3 minutes, 45 seconds, you will hear the globalist George Soros at the elite confab last month in Davos, Switzerland, admit that the price of oil is being used as a weapon against the “enemies of the prevailing world order,” i.e, the New World Order. Soros pegs these enemies as Venezuela, Iran, and Russia. In Iran, the price of oil will lead to the defeat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and bring in a “more reasonable regime,” that is to say a regime that takes orders from the global elite.
ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL voices of the pro-Israel lobby has published a shocking essay suggesting that, in the future, there should be “military attacks” on journalists and media outlets that oppose American military ventures on behalf of Israel.
In the spring 2008 issue of its Journal of International Security Affairs, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a particularly vocal force of the Jewish lobby, published a series of articles devoted to the subject: “The U.S. Military Faces the Future.”
One article, entitled “Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars,” written by Ralph Peters (described as “a retired U.S. Army officer”) states flatly that “Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.”
The JINSA essay says “Freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.”
JINSA’s suggestion that the media in America opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq—a key demand by Israel and JINSA—flies in contrast to the truth. In fact, the major media banged the drum for war. AMERICAN FREE PRESS and a few independent newspapers strongly opposed this needless war.
Tuesday evening offered an unusual opportunity to question the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (2001-2005), Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, at an alumni club dinner. He was eager to talk about his just-published memoir, Eyes on the Horizon (and I was able to scan through a copy during the cocktail hour).
Myers’s presentation, like his book, was thin gruel. After his brief talk, he seemed intent on filibustering during a meandering Q & A session. He finally called on me since no other hands were up. Some were yawning, but it was too early to simply leave.
I introduced myself as a former Army intelligence officer and CIA analyst with combined service of almost 30 years. I thanked him for his stated opposition to interrogation techniques that go beyond “our interrogation manual”; and his conviction that “the Geneva Conventions were a fundamental part of our military culture”—both viewpoints emphasized in his book.
I then noted that the recently published Senate Armed Services Committee report, “Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody,” sowed some doubt regarding the strength of his convictions.
Why, I asked, did Gen. Myers choose to go along in Dec. 2002 when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized harsh interrogation techniques and, earlier, in Feb. 2002, when President George W. Bush himself issued an executive order arbitrarily denying Geneva protections to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees?
Republican Representatives have demanded answers from the Department of Homeland Security over the origins of the leaked security intelligence assessmentwhich equates veterans and gun owners with violent terrorists.
Editor in chief of Open Chemical Physics Journal resigns after controversial article on 9/11 by SnowCrash 911blogger.com
The editor in chief of the journal where recently the paper: “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe” was published, resigned, claiming she wasn’t informed of the publication. She proceeds to provide not a single solid scientific rebuttal, only administrative bickering and personal political bias against, well.. inconvenient science. One particularly notable comment attributed to Ms. Pileni is this one: “Marie-Paule Pileni points out that because the topic lies outside her field of expertise, she cannot judge whether the article in itself is good or bad.”.
HOMELAND INSECURITY
Mother claims teen jailed by Patriot Act
FBI holds 10th-grader for months with little contact from family
Ashton Lundeby, a 16-year-old homeschooled boy from North Carolina was taken away from his home in handcuffs two months ago and has been held by the FBI in Indiana ever since, a victim, his mother claims, of the Patriot Act spun out of control.
According to Annette Lundeby of Oxford, N.C., armed FBI agents and local police stormed her home around 10 p.m. on March 5, looking for her son, Ashton. The officers presented a federal search warrant and seized the tenth-grader’s computer, cell phone and bank statements.
Ashton was then taken to a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind., charged with making a bomb threat in Indiana from his home computer.
His mother, however, told Raleigh’s WRAL-TV that she argued with the authorities, claiming someone must have hacked into her son’s IP address and used it to make crank calls. The agents’ search, she claims, also failed to uncover any trace of bomb-making materials.
“Undoubtedly, they were given false information,” Lundeby told the station, “or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats.”
In a television interview with Tucker Carlson on MSNBC, McGovern said: “I‘ve been using the acronym O.I.L. for many — for two years now: O for oil; I for Israel; and L for logistics, logistics being the permanent — now we say “enduring” — military bases that the U.S. wants to keep in Iraq.”
McGovern testified at a Democratic National Headquarters forum in 2005 that had been convened by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) of the House Judiciary Committee on the Downing Street Memo.
The Washington Post reported that, in his testimony, McGovern “declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration ‘neocons’ so ‘the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world.’ He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. ‘Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation,’ McGovern said. Genuine criticism of official Israeli policy is often portrayed as if it were anti-Semite bigotry: ‘The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic.’”
Two weeks before the U.S. Department of Homeland Security penned its controversial report warning against “right-wing extremists” in the United States, it generated a memo defining dozens of additional groups – animal rights activists, black separatists, tax protesters, even worshippers of the Norse god Odin – as potential “threats.”
Though the “Domestic Extremism Lexicon” was reportedly rescinded almost immediately, Benjamin Sarlin of The Daily Beast recently obtained and published online a copy of the unclassified memo, dated March 26, 2009.
