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POPSThe sleazy advocacy of a leading "liberal hawk" What Galbraith kept completely concealed all these years was that a company he formed in 2004 came to acquire a large stake in a Kurdish oil field whereby, as the NYT put it, he "stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars." In other words, he had a direct -- and vast -- financial stake in the very policies which he was publicly advocating in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other American media outlets, where he was presented as an independent expert on the region. As Cobban wrote: Galbraith has never expressed any such regrets, and last November, he was openly scornful of Bush's late-term agreement to withdraw from Iraq completely. The revelation that for many years Galbraith had a quite undisclosed financial interest in the political breakup of Iraq may now further reduce the clout, and the ranks, of the remaining liberal hawks.
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POPSThe Great Dollar Coin Conspiracy The designers of the coin - the ones who "call the shots" - are a matter of public record: Joel Iskowitz did the obverse and Don Everhart did the reverse. and it all happened under the Bush administration
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POPSMajor Hasan - the secret weapon! "He indicated that he would give me a call back and let me know. He contacted me on Saturday and said, I think we're going to make this work. A couple of hours later he called back and said, between the lines, I've been overruled by the White House. There will be no briefing for you this weekend, and early next week on Tuesday we'll give you a briefing.
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POPSI CALL AS I SEE IT The Obama Administration has sent every American out on a limb, and I don't think it matters to him one way or another. It's all about him and his agenda.......
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POPSDunn to Step Down as White House Communications Director In an interview, Dunn said she will stay on in a consulting role, but her communications director title was always meant to be temporary. The first communications director, Ellen Moran, stepped down in April to become chief of staff at the Commerce Department.
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POPSFannie & Freddie NOT included in Obama's Financial Regulations In analyzing the mortgage crisis, economist Walter E. Williams has written: “Starting with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, that was given more teeth during the Clinton administration, Congress started intimidating banks and other financial institutions into making loans, so-called sub-prime loans, to high-risk homebuyers and businesses. “The carrot offered was that these high-risk loans would be purchased by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Anyone with an ounce of brains would have known that this was a prescription for disaster but there was a congressional chorus of denial,” he added. “The financial collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is not a failure of the free market because lending institutions in a free market would not have taken on the high-risk loans,” said Williams. “They were forced to by the heavy hand of government.”
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POPSFacts About US Energy How long are we going to allow our government to prohibit us from accessing our OWN ENERGY? Heck all this talk about the economy and yet we let billions and billions of dollars sit in the ground while we ship our money to other countries to buy their resources that they are more than happy to sell. WAKE UP AMERICA before we are all living in the DARK LITERALLY!
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POPSBarack "Houdini" Obama Promises were broken with no apology, the same creative legalese that infested the Bush administration, in the form of John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez, was again used to deny justice to the inmates of Guantanamo, It was used to justify more torture, more destruction of the Constitution and more illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens
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POPSFrom both sides of his mouth!!!!! This latest move by the administration follows a pattern replicated countless times by Obama since assuming the presidency in January: denounce the lawless behavior of his Oval Office predecessor while continuing, even expanding, the reach of unaccountable security agencies that subvert constitutional guarantees barring "unreasonable searches and seizures."
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POPSNidal Hasan Bought A Para-Military Automatic Pistol With Armor-Piercing Capabilities
The FBI dispatched agents from Austin, San Antonio and Waco to the scene, and pressed into service a 15-member forensic unit to help military police collect evidence. Agents from the bureau's Washington field office interviewed relatives, neighbors and friends who knew Hasan during his years in the Washington area. Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also are on hand to help with weapons analysis. Investigators also focused on Guns Galore, a firearms store just down the highway from the mosque. Store owner David Cheadle said federal agents interviewed him about the sale of a FN Herstal Five-Seven pistol that was used in the shootings. "It is a popular choice for personal defense," Cheadle said, pulling one from his case, "but it's expensive" -- more than $1,100 at his store. The officials said a continuing search of Major Hasan’s computer indicates that he had logged on to Web sites that celebrated radical Islamic ideologies and that he had....
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POPSStay Off of Fox News: Obama Administration Warns Democrat Strategist White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said that she had checked with colleagues who "deal with TV issues" and that they had not told people to avoid Fox. On the contrary, they had urged people to appear on the network, Dunn wrote in an e-mail. But Patrick Caddell, a Fox News contributor and former pollster for President Carter, said he had spoken to Democratic consultants who said they were told by the White House to avoid appearances on Fox. He declined to give their names. Caddell said he had not gotten that message himself from the White House. He added: "I have heard that they've done that to others in not too subtle ways. I find it appalling. When the White House gets in the business of suppressing dissent and comment, particularly from its own party, it hurts itself." Some observers say White House officials might be urging consultants to spurn Fox to isolate the network and make it appear more partisan. Los Angeles Times
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POPSALL POLITICS IS LOCAL...or is it? the more sophisticated the populace the more likely national issues will be percieved as local as voters realize the local impact of national decisions
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POPSIs the Economy Recovering? The Curious Case of 1920 vs. 1929 The basic questions we need to ask here are: 1. Why do economies recover? 2. Are we recovering? Q. Why do economies recover? A. They recover because bad investments made during the bubble are liquidated, valuable capital is no longer being wasted on them, new capital is formed from savings, and profitable enterprises attract new capital to expand. Low real interest rates caused by increased savings encourage borrowing, manufacturers use the capital to make new machines, producers of consumer goods buy them, cash goes through the system, consumers see things are getting better, more consumer goods are produced, and consumers buy them. It has to happen this way or the recovery will fail. The difficult part of a recovery is ugly. Bankrupt firms need to fail so that valuable capital resources are not wasted on their continuing activities. This means that unemployment rises (10.2% now) and business bankruptcies are high. Trillions of dollars of asset values are wiped out.
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POPSBarbara Ehrenreich: The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up More: According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the government was misled by these companies, which failed to report manufacturing delays as they arose. Her department, she says, was "relying on the manufacturers to give us their numbers, and as soon as we got numbers we put them out to the public. It does appear now that those numbers were overly rosy." If, in fact, there's a political parable here, it's about Big Government's sweetly trusting reliance on Big Business to safeguard the public health: Let the private insurance companies manage health financing; let profit-making hospital chains deliver health care; let Big Pharma provide safe and affordable medications. As it happens, though, all these entities have a priority that regularly overrides the public's health, and that is, of course, profit…
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POPSHated Roosevelt, Hate Obama: Paleoconservative Persuasions
Nock saw the state as “them,” not “us,” and “them” really came to mean Roosevelt. You must know that Roosevelt was hated by many during the Great Depression. Not disliked, hated. The laissez faire crowd saw every move toward government relief of intolerable conditions as government self-aggrandizement—Nock’s term, not mine. Despite the fact that people were desperate in the streets, extreme-sport capitalists saw only usurpation of the powers of the church (as the precursor to the modern social relief agency) and the individual—that old fall-back, the rugged individual—Nock’s term, not mine. Professor Nock pulls no punches. With a Beckian flourish he proclaims, “This regime was established by a coup d'État of a new and unusual kind, practicable only in a rich country.” Yup. A coup d’etat. You almost want to ask for Mr. Roosevelt’s birth certificate. Nock’s antipathy to Roosevelt knew few boundaries. Perversely, Nock saw in the New Deal, “the erection of po
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POPSThe Democrats have lost the source of their passion This point by Paul Krugman is so true. Many people who voted for Obama, including myself, did so primarily out of hope that his spirit and belief in change deserved a chance to succeed. My candid perspective is that his spirit began to diminish during his swearing in and has continued to dissipate ever since. It's hard to understand and very frustrating...but i think my feelings of disappointment are shared by many in this country.
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POPS Uncle Sam’s Collections Continue Their Steep Drop It is ironic to say the least that Congress and the Obama administration are glorifying the idea of a “public option” that would ultimately lead to government-run health care while Treasury receipts continue to shrink. If the private health insurance market disappears, so will its taxes. To name just one example, Aetna’s recorded income tax expense on its financial statements for 2005-2008 (including state and local taxes) averaged roughly $900 million per year. Put the company’s health insurance segment out of business, and a large portion of those taxes would stop coming in, digging the country’s and various states’ debt holes that much deeper. The establishment press has paid very little attention to fiscal 2009’s drop of 19.5% in receipts from economic activity, so I expect similar treatment of October’s continuation of the trend. It would appear that they don’t want any unsettling news getting in the way of the statist agenda.
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POPSIranian Protesters to Obama: "You're Either With Us or With Them" "I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect." Now the Iranian protesters know who the man is with. Since we've never had a President who favored tyranny over liberty before, this appears to be uncharted territory for not only the protesters -- but the American citizenry as well.
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POPSMajor Malik Nadal Hasan.......But First A “Shout Out” to Obama’s Bud No reason I can’t go golfing, shoot some hoops, and hit the town with Michelle. President Bush used to break into tears when addressing soldiers and was reviled as a stone-hearted warmonger; Donald Rumsfeld was demonized for using a machine to sign notification letters to fallen soldiers’s next-of-kin. President Obama gives out rounds of virtual fist-bumps to his buds before even mentioning a slaughter of American soldiers, perpetrated by Americans, in mid-America. We desperately need an adult in the White House. Sadly, today’s press conference proves we do not have one. (Incidentally, the shooter " who killed 12 people with two handguns " is reportedly an adherent of the Religion of Peace who was incensed about being sent to war.)
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POPSUnited States Pushing International, Mandatory Copyright Laws. Guilty Until Proven Innocent! "* * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)" Now that is a worriying development. Let see the Teabaggers chew on this. Nah, it's a pro-corporate treaty which enforces American will on the REST of the world, so it doesn't set off the NWO alarm bells.
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POPSItaly Convicts 23 Americans In CIA Terrorist Kidnapping Case One of those convicted, former Milan consular official Sabrina De Sousa, accused Congress of turning a blind eye to the entire matter. "No one has investigated the fact that the U.S. government allegedly conducted a rendition of an individual who now walks free and the operation of which was so bungled," she said, speaking through her lawyer Mark Zaid. Despite the convictions capping the nearly three-year Italian trial, several Italian and American defendants – including the two alleged masterminds of the abduction – were acquitted due to either diplomatic immunity or because classified information was stricken by Italy's highest court. The case has been politically charged from the beginning, with attempts to mislead investigators looking into the cleric's disappearance and derail the judicial proceedings once the trial was under way. But the Italian-American relationship, conditioned on such issues as participation in the Afghan campaign, is unlikely to be hurt by the convic
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POPSCall your SENATORS......today! Nor does much of the rest of Mr. Siddiqui’s résumé. The White House has touted his role in the first phase of developing national organic standards. But those standards, as they first emerged in draft form in the Clinton years, were notoriously loose about allowing genetically engineered crops and the use of sewage-sludge fertilizers to be labeled as “organic.”
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POPSPro-Pot - Anti-Gay Election Results
Yesterday in the state of Maine there were "pro-pot," and "anti-gay," referendums on the ballot. Results: Pot, yea; Gay, No. But...maybe that exaggerates the results. It wasn't like the people of Maine voted to pass out marijuana at the schools (they formalized a distribution method) and it wasn't like the voters of Maine wanted to start gay folks witch hunts (they didn't want to approve state "marriage status," to gays). There are lots of ways of looking at these political decisions. Should gay rights even be an item up for vote or a right protected by the Constitution? But is gay marriage a gay right? Maine is now the 31st state to have a direct referendum on gay marriage and they have all turned it down. Maine is now the 5th state to allow the "medical," use of marijuana. With Obama telling the Feds not to prosecute individual users acting in accord with their state's laws, I'd expect a lot more states to go this way. No knighthoods being given out, in either cas
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POPSThe High Price of Nuclear Waste The federal government agreed in 1982 to provide a permanent site to deposit nuclear waste...and now, just like that, it's off the table & closed. MORE incompetency. He just jerked the rug out from under the nuclear power program and the nation's utilities are in a real financial bind..
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