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POPSBlackwater:Ain't Misbehaving, Saving My Contracts for You
Of course the US government was blind to this - they didn't want to know, they turned a blind eye to what Blackwater was doing because it would have been too hard to arrange for another contractor to do all the security missions that it had ongoing. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, there are as many private contractors as there are uniformed military personnel. Most of them are not security guards as Blackwater's most visible function was. The lack of oversight is abhorrent but not surprising; the State Dept's failure to can this company is inexcusable. My only observation on this article is to suggest how the US government got into this predicament, and it's pretty easy to see. The Bush administration wanted to hold onto the fiction of a few conservative principles, one of those being the concept of a small federal government. Since it already blew that "principle" with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, I'm betting there was White House guidance that directed "no mo
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POPSBright sample of the politic as... unusual... When the politicians will start to talk from the bottom of their hearts and not from the bottom of their pockets only then we will start to sense fresh breeze of real changes around. So far speeches like this is rare bright sample of brave people's representative. When you are on political scene you cannot escape from people's judgment and scrutiny...
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POPSHillary Clinton: US Wants Israel To Stop Building West Bank Settlements 'Forever' But Clinton has had to do a lot of explaining since last Saturday, when she stood with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem and praised his offer to limit settlement construction without halting it. Clinton has since tried to clarify the remarks, saying that the Israeli offer does not got far enough. Still, she has indicated that the Palestinians should resume negotiations with Israel without a full settlement halt as they demand.
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POPSRussia Reconsiders "There's no question that Stalin is undergoing a sort of renaissance in Russia. Despite the many millions killed or sent to labor camps during his reign, many now view his rule with a sort of hazy nostalgia. "The cynical position of the Stalinphobes is that only innocent people were kept in the gulag," he said. "Criminals who violated the law were kept in the gulag. And let the Western reader ask himself, should criminals be kept in spas or resort hotels?" Meanwhile, Stalin's image and name, systematically bleached out as the waning Soviet empire began to grapple with its bloody past, are creeping back into Russian life. His name was restored this fall to a Moscow metro station. His unmistakable mustached face beams from the wall of Soviet Meatpies, a kitschy diner downtown."
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POPSCalifornia's old-growth redwoods: Tree therapy amid ancient coastal giants More: The national spotlight is being cast on the park again this month with the Redwood Empire featured in National Geographic magazine. The centerpiece is a fold-out photograph of one of the park's giants, the Iluvatar Tree, the world's third-largest coast redwood at 20 1/2 feet in diameter and 320 feet tall… Of the trails that provide access to old-growth in California, the James Irvine Loop is one of the best. This loop is a 7.5-mile round trip that provides a route past a succession of giants. It's easy enough that most anybody can simply walk a half mile and back to get a feel for an ancient forest. It's long enough that the entire loop delivers a sense of discovery and awe with each grove, and the good, clean feeling that comes with hiking a few hours in a pristine landscape. This trip can change how you feel about things for a long time. Big trees can do that.
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POPSUS founded as a Christian Nation Most of the fifty-five Founding Fathers who worked on the Constitution were members of orthodox Christian churches and many were even evangelical Christians. The first official act in the First Continental Congress was to open in Christian prayer, which ended in these words: "...the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Savior. Amen". Sounds Christian to me. Ben Franklin, at the Constitutional Convention, said: "...God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?" John Adams stated so eloquently during this period of time that; "The general principles on which the fathers achieved Independence were ... the general principles of Christianity ... I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that the general principles of Christianity are as etemal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God." more at source
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POPSPuerto Rico Unions Protest Job Cuts From the article: Several protesters, holding signs demanding work, directed their criticism at Gov. Luis G. Fortuño. He was elected to his first term last year as a Republican, promising to jumpstart the economy, but so far, job losses and negative growth have continued, punishing the island with its fourth year of recession. Governor Fortuño has said repeatedly that he did not want layoffs, but had no choice. In interviews on radio and television on Thursday, he said that it was the only way to avoid a government shutdown because of the territory’s $3.2 billion deficit. “There was no alternative,” Mr. Fortuño said. “And there is no turning back.” ----- Which I can tell you is an total lie.
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POPSThe cost of supporting Israel
These have cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion, excluding the additional costs incurred since 2001. The cost of supporting Israel increased drastically after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. U.S. support for Israel during that war resulted in additional costs for the American taxpayer of between $750 billion and $1 trillion. When Israel was losing the war, President Richard Nixon stepped in to supply the Jewish state with U.S. weapons. Nixon’s intervention triggered the Arab oil embargo, which cost the U.S. as much as $600 billion in lost GDP and another $450 billion in higher oil import costs. The 1973 oil crisis cost the U.S. economy no less than $900 billion, and probably as much as $1.2 trillion. As a result of the oil embargo the U.S. government created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to “insulate Israel and the U.S. against the wielding of a future Arab “oil weapon.” The billion-barrel SPR has cost taxpayers more than $134 billion so far. Making things worse, Israel gets “first
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POPSHere’s What Israel Is Really Costing American Taxpayers Want to know what's really sinking America? These have cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion, excluding the additional costs incurred since 2001. The cost of supporting Israel increased drastically after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. U.S. support for Israel during that war resulted in additional costs for the American taxpayer of between $750 billion and $1 trillion. When Israel was losing the war, President Richard Nixon stepped in to supply the Jewish state with U.S. weapons. Nixon’s intervention triggered the Arab oil embargo, which cost the U.S. as much as $600 billion in lost GDP and another $450 billion in higher oil import costs. The 1973 oil crisis cost the U.S. economy no less than $900 billion, and probably as much as $1.2 trillion. As a result of the oil embargo the U.S. government created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to “insulate Israel and the U.S. against the wielding of a future Arab “oil weapon.”
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POPSEmpire State Building Lit For Chi-Coms Draws Protesters Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, called the lighting "outright, blatant approval for a communist totalitarian system." "It’s a great public relations coup for the Chinese state," Tethong said as tourists gawked at the protesters. "But on the other hand, it’s sure to backfire because the American public and the global public will speak against it." At the lobby ceremony, building manager Joseph Bellina called the lights a high honor and said he was proud of the relationship between "our countries and our people." Chinese Consul General Peng Keyu, who pulled the switch on the glass-encased model, said he was "honored and delighted." He said China’s reforms of the past 30 years have led to greater openness and "tremendous change." Keyu and Bellina didn’t address critics and declined to answer questions… Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican, said it was "a sad day for New York."
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POPSWill NATO's 60th Anniversary Be Its Last? The painful truth is that NATO may be suffering from a terminal illness. Its current mission in Afghanistan, the alliance's most significant and far-flung muscle-flexing to date, might be its last. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of many an imperial power from the ancient Macedonians to the Soviets. It now seems to be eyeing its next victim. For NATO, this year should have been a celebration, not a dirge. After suffering a transatlantic rift of epic proportions during the Bush years, the alliance thrilled to the election of Barack Obama and his politics of conciliation. The new American administration swore it would shift troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to give NATO more of what it wanted to fight "the right war." Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both promised to push the "reset button" on U.S.-Russian relations, potentially removing one of the greatest obstacles to NATO's health and well-being. And in a final flourish for the alliance's diamond jub
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POPSThe Tax Club Shared opinions from the customers about the Tax Club. The Tax Club is a company that specializes in personalized tax plans for individuals and small business owners.
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POPS The Long Retreat ~ Part II by Mark Steyn
Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-Il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? Okay, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever farther west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon . . . Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto tsar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire " not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a . . .
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POPSAfghanistan and the Wages of Empire
WASHINGTON -- On Monday, as the vote-counting in Afghanistan was nearing an end, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was briefed by the American ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry. The same day, the ambassador delivered a blunt message to the front-runner, President Hamid Karzai: "Don't declare victory." The slim majority tentatively awarded Mr. Karzai in Afghanistan's fraud-scarred election has put the Obama administration in an awkward spot: trying to balance its professed determination to investigate mounting allegations of corruption and vote-rigging while not utterly alienating the man who seems likely to remain the country's leader for another five years. Another way of putting it might be to say that U.S. officials are finding it increasingly difficult to construct a rationale for allowing the man they put in charge of Afghanistan to remain in charge of Afghanistan. This is not a new problem. Colonial powers have faced these challenges throughout h
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POPSDownload Jay Z - The Blueprint 3 Free blueprint 3, blueprint 3 torrent, download jay z 3 blueprint free, jay z blueprint 3, jay z blueprint 3 download, jay z blueprint 3 leak http://freemuzikxpress.blogspot.com/2009/08/download-jay-z-blueprint-3.html
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POPSFind Best New York Vacation Packages at New York Guest At NewYorkGuest.com, we offer some of the very best New York vacation packages available. Now you can see more and experience the best of what NYC has to offer. We offer NYC vacation packages, deals on New York cheap hotels and New York luxury hotels, plus tickets to some of the hottest shows available including Lion King New York and West Side Story Broadway. Visit us today!
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POPSU.S. Military Base Plan Puts Colombia in Hot Water Foreign Minister Bermudez insists that any activities carried out by the Americans would be confined to Colombian territory. But South American governments plan to pursue the issue at another presidential summit in Buenos Aires later this month.
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POPSCanoe Fire Whitewashing Unsavory After my post critical of the Canoe Fire, prompted by my interviews of officials when I was an editor, the federal government REMOVED the PDF report on the fire but left up the HTML and then said its Web server was down, despite the HTML being available and all other PDFs on that server being available. If my criticisms are so wrong, why remove the document?
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POPSThe Obama opiate: Crisis deepens, crowds cheer "The destabilization of Iran, a product of massive US covert operations (and overt political manipulation) continues unabated, built upon the pretext of “restoring democracy”—a “stolen election” hoax, and an aggressive “color revolution” spearheaded by Anglo-American surrogates, aspiring puppets, and hordes of intelligence assets and so-called “liberals” touting “democracy”. The Iranian corridor remains critical, for the control of Central Asian and Middle East energy, and the Anglo-American empire is intent upon controlling it. A blatant coup in Honduras has been carried out in the classic fashion, according to the same intelligence playbook that has been at the core of US-Latin America policy since the Iran-Contra era; the same destabilization tactics used in recent years to topple the governments of Venezuela and Haiti. Domestically, Obama has endorsed the continued surveillance of the American people, and an even more ironclad electronic police state. While the average Ameri
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POPSSearch for the Lost Tomb of Genghis Khan Genghis Khan was perhaps the greatest and most ruthless conqueror the world has ever know. More than three million people may have died during the bloody creation of his empire. During his twenty year reign Khan subdued the Russian princes; his army conquered Persia, Asia Minor, Korea, South-East India, Indonesia, and China.
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POPSWhy is President Obama Doing His Bidding? Not exactly a friendly discourse from Hugo Chavez, but when Hugo wanted help in overthrowing the legitimate government of Honduras, he called the US and it worked. The US is taking Chavez's side against democracy. But with Hugo's continued animosity toward the US, why is President Obama doing his bidding?: The U.S. Steers Left on Honduras Why would Hugo Chavez expect Obama to help him? By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124804541071763577.html
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