 Dealing with IGNORANT PUTZ REDNECKS 101, Welcome to the Big Apple JUNIOR ... |
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 Mar 31 2008, 12:47 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 17 Joined: 5-September 05 Member No.: 3,041  |
The next time a caller asks if Ed will carry forward the words that any candidate has a black heart, say sure. And ask what organization they represent so they can be appropriately investigated as the TERRORIST THREAT that they manifest. Keeping them on without having a canned response is going to lose you market share? Ya think?!!!!
Just so we're all on the same page, here's your homework: What was "TEAM-B" and what about its premise matches McAntient's HEADS I WIN TAILS YOU LOSE, stay in Iraq forever either way argument?
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_s...#External_links What year was the ATC PATCO strike busted by the FEDS? http://www.en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ronald_R...fic_controllers What did the USPS have to do with the PULLMAN STRIKE of 1894? http://review.society.cz/index.php?option=...52&Itemid=2 QUOTE During the Depression of 1893, George Pullman laid off 3,000 of 5,800 employees, and cut 25-40 percent of the wages, but not his rent and other charges. When Pullman fired three members of a grievance committee,[3] a strike began on May 11, 1894. Pullman workers had been joining the American Railway Union, founded the previous year by Eugene V. Debs. Once Debs, the secretary-treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, had decided that such brotherhoods were too exclusive. He set out to organize an industrial union to include all railway workers. Late in June, the union workers ceased to handle Pullman cars, and by the end of July had tied up most of the roads in the Midwest. The roads brought strikebreakers from Canada and elsewhere, instructing them to connect mail cars to Pullman cars so that interference with Pullman cars meant also interference with the mails. Attorney-General Richard Olney swore in 3,400 special deputies to keep the trains running, and when clashes occurred between these and some of the strikers, lawless elements exploited the situation. Finally, on July 3, President Cleveland answered an appeal from the railroads, and sent federal troops into the Chicago area, where the strike was based. Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld insisted that the state could keep order, but Cleveland claimed authority, and a duty to ensure the delivery of the mails. Meanwhile Olney had got an injunction from the federal district court forbidding any interference with mail or any attempt to restrain interstate commerce; the principle was that a strike or boycott violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. You knew that Maryland's Sixth Regiment during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 fired on workers in Baltimore, RIGHT?!!! The governor had called out the troops on behalf of the railroad company. http://www.ranknfile-ue.org/uen_1877.html Jury delivers its verdict of guilty for the 8 defendants from that strike. All defendants, except Neebe, are sentenced to receive the death penalty. Neebe is sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.
Given all of the above, when did the destruction of the country that you once knew kick off? BTW, READ THIS TOO: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act And who do you think listens to AAR to hear about Kerry's baseball picks? Is that some kind of BONEHEAD CODE, bringing up non sequiters like your dinner at rue 57. Or do you expect them not charge you for the box of wine you drink when you binge there again? QUOTE Born in a Crossfire Hurricane: Anticipation of Death, worse than Death Itself "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) QUOTE     NYT exporting Judith Miller's disdain for the facts from the newsroom to the opinion page Effete Warmonger Kristol/Sanitizing Five Years in Iraq http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print/13520/ QUOTE AMERICAN DRUG WAR - The Last White Hope (TV14) (2007) 9/11 Catalyzes USA PATRIOT Act's transformation of medicinal and john doe POT HEAD's into GWoT Targets while Afghan POPPY MONEY LAUNDERING industry BOOMs. http://www.sho.com/site/schedules/product_...com_home#shonav (Also ON Demand Showtime) Inspired by the deaths of family members from drug use, writer/director Kevin Booth set out to chronicle the failure of America's long-running, expensive, but ineffective "war on drugs" with this startling, eye-opening documentary. The film "American Drug War - The Last White Hope" has won three consecutive awards for “Best Feature Length Documentary." In late spring of 2007, Kevin signed with Page Ostrow of Ostrow & Company who secured “American Drug War” a deal with the Showtime cable network (CBS). In November of 2007, "American Drug War" was honored at the 2007 [Artivist] Awards Ceremony as the Best Feature Film in the International Human Rights category. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1033467/plotsummary http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1033467/usercomments Gary Webb's Enduring Legacy Webb was correct in his reporting about the Nicaraguan contras' role in smuggling cocaine into the United States in the 1980s.
 QUOTE The Weapons of Mass Deception http://www.prisonersofthecave.blogspot.com...%20A%20bookmark Imagine an exactly identical group in Germany – how would these documents and their authors have measured up at Nuremberg where the Chief Prosecutor, the United States of America, hung the Nazi's for the crimes of invading other countries, of “goosestep[ing] the Herrenvolk across international frontiers”? Letter to President Bush on the War on Terrorism September 20, 2001 {A6 41} http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm Richard Perle * Bruce P. Jackson * William Kristol * Richard V. Allen * Gary Bauer * Jeffrey Bell * William J. Bennett * Rudy Boshwitz * Jeffrey Bergner * Eliot Cohen * Seth Cropsey * Midge Decter * Thomas Donnelly * Nicholas Eberstadt * Hillel Fradkin * Aaron Friedberg * Francis Fukuyama * Frank Gaffney * Jeffrey Gedmin * Reuel Marc Gerecht * Charles Hill Eli S. Jacobs * Michael Joyce * Donald Kagan * Robert Kagan * Jeane Kirkpatrick * Charles Krauthammer * John Lehman * Clifford May * Martin Peretz * Norman Podhoretz * Stephen P. Rosen * Randy Scheunemann * Gary Schmitt * William Schneider, Jr. * Richard H. Shultz * Henry Sokolski * Stephen J. Solarz * Vin Weber * Leon Wieseltier * Marshall Wittmann Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson (May 31, 1912 - September 1, 1983) http://www.en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti...p;printable=yes U.S. Congressman and Senator for Washington State from 1941 until his death. Jackson was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 and 1976. As a Cold War anti-Communist Democrat, Jackson's political philosophies and positions have been cited as an influence on a number of key figures associated with neoconservatism, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. U.S. Committee to Expand NATO (USCN): PAC lobbied Congress heavily for expansion. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title...p;printable=yes Bruce P. Jackson, President (Lockheed Martin's director of global development) Board of Directors: Richard N. Perle Julie Finley, "founder of the U.S. Committee on NATO" * Tillie K. Fowler * Jeffrey Gedmin * Philip H. Gordon * Robert Kagan * Will Marshall * Sally A. Painter * Paige E. Reffe * Peter W. Rodman * David J. Rothkopf * Randy Scheunemann * Gary Schmitt * Elaine Shocas Leading the NATO enlargement lobby was the neoconservative Committee to Expand NATO, which brought together several prominent neocons now serving in the Bush administration, along with conservative Democrats such as Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and the Democratic Leadership Council. http://www.antiwar.com/barry/?articleid=2234#columntext Among USCN's first board members were Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Stephen Hadley. Hadley, who serves in the Bush administration as deputy national security adviser to Condoleezza Rice, was a partner in the Shea & Gardner law firm, whose clients included Boeing and Lockheed Martin. http://www.doublestandards.org/nato.html Until 2002 Bruce Jackson was planning and strategy vice president at Lockheed Martin, where he served as the advance man for global corporate development projects. One prominent neocon described Bruce Jackson as “the nexus between the defense industry and the neoconservatives. He translates us to them, and them to us.” http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1566.html SPEAKING OF NATO: Christie Blatchford suggests that her perspective of the Canadian NATO contingent in Afghanistan might have been... biased by the practiced hand of US 'handling of journalists'. http://www.thiscanadian.typepad.com/this_c...#entry-47662818 CONNECT THE DOTS: ''We need to think about charging some of the high-value detainees because there could be strategic political value to charging some of these detainees before the election ... '' http://www.miamiherald.com/guantanamo/v-pr...ory/474196.html 90-page charge sheets list the names of 2,973 victims of the 9/11 attacks. The men have not been formally charged. Instead they are in the control of a White House appointee, Susan J. Crawford, whose title is the war court's convening authority, and her legal advisor, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann. Bill Clinton bribed and buttered up every member of Congress he could to pass NAFTA in 1993. http://www.counterpunch.org/wypijewski03082008.html The prison population and prison labor (engaged in everything from taking reservations to sewing jeans to building furniture and transmissions for pennies an hour) mushroomed under Clinton's three-strikes-you're-out and kindred crime policies, and organized labor didn't fight. Prisons expanded, and organized labor didn't fight. (To the extent that more cops and more prison guards and more construction crews were real or potential union members, this development was sometimes even welcomed.) Privatization moved apace here as in so many other sectors, and organized labor didn't fight. The prisons filled with young black and Latino men, and black leadership didn't fight, Latino leadership didn't fight, the civil rights movements didn't fight -- not in any robust, sustained and visible fashion, just like the unions with job loss, NAFTA and the decline in real wages. Now one in less than 100 adult Americans is locked up. That was a blip in the news during the campaigns in Ohio and Texas. Hillary Clinton called for even more cops on the streets, more community policing and only lastly a review of sentencing. ... Economic Meltdown: The Consequences of Legal Bribery - By Peter Dreier, Huffington Post, March 27, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/80581 ... One of government's important roles is to establish ground-rules, and to regulate companies and industries, to save them from their own short-sighted greed. Government is necessary to make business act responsibly. Without it, capitalism becomes anarchy. Washington now needs to put a short-term tourniquet on the banking industry to stem the damage, and to get back into the business of protecting consumers, employees, and investors from corporate greed. The icing on the cake was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, enacted during the Clinton years by the Republican-controlled Congress, which tore down the remaining legal barriers to combining commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance under one corporate roof. As a result of industry consolidation, between 1984 and 2004, the number of FDIC-regulated banks declined from 14,392 to 7,511. In 1960, the 10-largest banks held 21 percent of the industry's assets; by 2005, the 10 largest banks controlled 60 percent of the assets. ... John McCain's suicide attempt and his resulting PTSD http://www.usveterandispatch.com/dec07/mcc...uicide_ptsd.htm McCain says because he survived 5½ years of brutal torture, while a prisoner of the communist Vietnamese, he is better qualified to be president of the United States than any other candidate. McCain claims his POW sufferings included three years in solitary confinement where he was tortured so badly that he "broke," causing him to attempt suicide. What McCain's promoters have carefully edited out of their McCain-for-president equation is his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Department of Defense psychiatrists have evaluated McCain for PTSD several times, the results of which remain locked by privacy laws. Selective Prosecution endorsed by DEM Officials per "Operation Chaos" http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local...yes&sid=101 In Ohio, party-switchers are supposed to sign a form attesting, under penalty of election falsification -- a felony -- that they support the principles of the party whose ballot they are obtaining. "We have no intention of prosecuting Rush Limbaugh because lying through your teeth and being stupid isn't a crime," said Leo Jennings, a spokesman for Democratic Attorney General Marc Dann. "I had the temerity, ladies and gentlemen, to tinker with a tradition, a liberal Democrat tradition: voter manipulation." - Rush Limbaugh "...But John McCain is another matter. "He's the toughest of the crop,'' said [Sen. Bill] Nelson. "The only one of the Republican candidates that really can win in November, that has a chance to win in November, is John McCain." - Sen. Bill Nelson Sr. - U.S. Senate, Sr (FL - Democratic), St. Petersburg Times' Buzz Blog 1/4/08 "Democratic race over? Clinton doesn't think so" - John Whitesides, Reuters - By Andy Sternberg http://www.laist.com/2008/03/27/will_the_clinto.php#content ... Hillary has flirted with disaster before in the back-and-forth nominating battle with Obama, shrugs off growing predictions of doom and still sees at least a narrow path to victory. "I hear it in the atmosphere," Clinton said of the increasingly loud chatter about whether she should drop out and let Democrats focus on the general election campaign. "But the most common thing that people say to me ... is 'Don't give up, keep going. We're with you.' And I feel really good about that because that's what I intend to do," she told reporters on Tuesday. Clinton has not been hearing those words of encouragement from a chorus of media commentators and Obama supporters who have questioned why she is pursuing her uphill fight to catch the Illinois senator. ... The longer she continues, the more chance Obama might slip up and make a mistake that turns the tide of the campaign. Clinton has made it clear she will not consider bowing out of the race until all of the states have concluded their voting. ... THUS ONE CORPORATE PARTY GOVT: An Open Letter to John Conyers: Put Impeachment Back on the Table March 27, 2008 http://www.counterpunch.org/nader03272008.html ... Prominent Constitutional law experts believe President Bush has engaged in at least, five categories of repeated, defiant "high crimes and misdemeanors", which separately or together would allow Congress to subject the President to impeachment under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution. The sworn oath of members of Congress is to uphold the Constitution. Failure of the members of Congress to pursue impeachment of President Bush is an affront to the founding fathers, the Constitution, and the people of the United States. In addition to a criminal war of aggression in Iraq, in violation of our constitution, statutes and treaties, there are the arrests of thousands of Americans and their imprisonment without charges, the spying on Americans without juridical warrant, systematic torture, and the unprecedented wholesale, defiant signing statements declaring that the President, in his unbridled discretion, is the law. In 2005, a plurality of the American people polled declared that they would favor impeachment of President Bush if it was shown that he did not tell the truth about the reasons for going to War in Iraq. ... http://www.WexlerWantsHearings.com http://www.snipr.com/2000Lawyers_v_shrub The Bush administration has proven impervious to public pressure http://www.digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/03...008935477448567 Use this prolonged primary to leverage the two candidates against each other on the issue of ending the war instead of joining in the fun and games of primary politics. ... Look past the rhetoric and it becomes clear that neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton has a real plan to end the occupation. They could, however, be forced to change their positions--thanks to the unique dynamics of the prolonged primary battle. ... http://www.ResponsiblePlan.com/plan "Body of War" with Phil Donahue on his new documentary and the situation in Iraq Friday March 28th, 2008 http://www.therealnews.com/web/index.php?t...em#consoleinner QUOTE Debate and Protest at Spy Program’s Inception By ERIC LICHTBLAU This article is adapted from the book “Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice,” by Eric Lichtblau, which is being released Tuesday by Pantheon Books. WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program sparked heated legal concerns and silent protests inside the Bush administration within hours of its adoption in October 2001, according to current and former government officials. In making its case to Congress for broadened spy powers, the White House has emphasized the firm legal foundations of the program conducted after the Sept. 11 attacks. It has even taken the unusual step of giving lawmakers access to classified presidential orders from 2001 and early legal opinions to try to show that the program was on sound legal footing from the start. But many of the tensions that were roiling the administration at the start of the program have never become public. In one previously undisclosed episode, Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson refused to sign off on any of the secret wiretapping requests that grew out of the program because of the secrecy and legal uncertainties surrounding it, the officials said. With the veil of secrecy around the program, Mr. Thompson was not given access to details of the N.S.A. operation, and he was so uncomfortable with the idea of approving this new breed of wiretap applications that he had a top adviser write a memorandum assessing the legal ramifications. The adviser warned him not to sign the warrant applications because it was unclear where the wiretaps were coming from. Inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation, meanwhile, technicians stumbled onto the N.S.A.’s program accidentally within 12 hours of its inception, setting off what officials described as a brief firestorm of anxiety among senior officials. Some who had not been told about the program were concerned that the agency was violating laws that required a court order for the singling out of Americans in wiretaps, and they immediately alerted higher-ups to what they had discovered. “What’s going on here? Is this legal?” one F.B.I. official asked after learning of the N.S.A. operation on American soil. Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, assured nervous officials that the program had been approved by President Bush, several officials said. But the presidential approval, one former intelligence official disclosed, came without a formal legal opinion endorsing the program by the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. At the outset of the program in October 2001, John Ashcroft, the attorney general, signed off on the surveillance program at the direction of the White House with little in the way of a formal legal review, the official said. Mr. Ashcroft complained to associates at the time that the White House, in getting his signature for the surveillance program, “just shoved it in front of me and told me to sign it.” Aides to Mr. Ashcroft were worried, however, that in approving a surveillance program that appeared to test the limits of presidential authority, Mr. Ashcroft was left legally exposed without a formal opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, which acts as the legal adviser for the entire executive branch. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/washingt...agewanted=print  Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, President Gerald Ford and Deputy Chief of Staff Richard Cheney at the White House, April 28, 1975 (Photo: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library) http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB178/  After much debate, the Ford administration in 1976 decided to support legislation requiring a warrant for the government to conduct electronic surveillance within the U.S. for foreign intelligence purposes, according to this memorandum prepared for President Ford by his counsel, Philip Buchen.  Washington, D.C., January 26, 2006 - A secret Pentagon "roadmap" on war propaganda, personally approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for "boundaries" between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but provides for no such limits, any leakage of PSYOP to the American public does not matter. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB177/index.htm FLASH: The government "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody picks up a phone in Iraq and calls the United States," Mukasey said in a question and answer session.." after his talk. Before the 2001 terrorist attack "we knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan, and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went. You've got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn't come home, to show for that." http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/31/25...67/487503#story QUOTE (Warren) Bass (a member of the 9/11 Commission) told colleagues that he gasped when he found a memo written by Clarke to Rice on September 4, 2001, exactly a week before the attacks, in which Clarke seemed to predict what was just about to happen. It was a memo that seemed to spill out all of Clarke's frustration about how slowly the Bush White House had responded to the cascade of terrorist threats that summer. The note was terrifying in its prescience. "Are we serious about dealing with the al-Qaeda threat?" he asked Rice. "Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al-Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US. Bass's colleagues said he knew instantly that the September 4 email was so sensitive - and potentially damaging, especially to Rice - that the White House would never voluntarily release a copy to the commission or allow him to take notes from the room if they came close to reproducing its language. Under a written agreement between the commission and the White House, notes could not "significantly reproduce" the wording of a classified document. ... "Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations" (April 20)and "Bin Ladin Threats Are Real" (June 30) It was especially troubling for Hurley's team to realise how many of the warnings were directed to the desk of one person: Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser. Emails from the National Security Council's counter-terrorism director, Richard Clarke, showed that he had bombarded Rice with messages about terrorist threats. He was trying to get her to focus on the intelligence she should have been reading each morning in the presidential and senior briefings "Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack" (May 3) "Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot" (May 23) "Bin Ladin's Networks' Plans Advancing" (May 26) "Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent" (June 23) "Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats" (June 25) "Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks" (June 30) "Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays" (July 2) As is now clear, Rice never took any serious action in response to these warnings......
http://justacitizen.org/JustaCitizen-Interviews.htm http://patriotsquestion911.com This post has been edited by SingSing: Mar 31 2008, 10:29 PM |
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Mar 31 2008, 02:41 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 17 Joined: 5-September 05 Member No.: 3,041 |
Foreign investment and currency deregulation has been a real boon for the stock market which thrives of a steady flow of cheap capital. It’s also been good for ravenous consumers who like to borrow boatloads of low interest cash for their toys, SUVs and McMansions.
The financial system has decoupled from the productive elements of the economy and is now beginning to show disturbing signs of instability. That’s why there’s the big blow-off in the bond market. The halcyon days of supplying our armies, funding our markets and building our subprime “ownership society” empire on the backs of foreign creditors is over. The stock market is headed for the landfill and housing is leading the way. Economic fundamentals can only be ignored for so long. The problems began when Greenspan dropped interest rates to 1 per cent in 2003 for more than a year pumping trillions of low interest credit into the economy. This created the appearance of prosperity but it also inflated a massive equity bubble in housing which is now in its death throes. The Fed “rubber stamped” many of the “creative financing” scams which lowered lending standards and turned the subprime fiasco into a $1.5 trillion doomsday machine. Greenspan said this week that he hadn’t anticipated the real estate disaster. The devastation in real estate is almost too vast to comprehend. The mortgage bubble is roughly $5.5 trillion, and yet, prices have just begun to fall. It’s a long way to the bottom and there’s bound to be plenty of bloodshed ahead. Two million homeowners will lose their homes. 151 mortgage lenders have already gone belly up. Many of the hedge funds—which are loaded with billions of dollars in “mortgage-backed” securities are struggling to stay alive. Perhaps the most shocking projection was made by Yale University Professor, Robert Schiller, who believes that home prices could decline as much as 50 per cent in some of the “hotter markets”. (Schiller’s book “Irrational Exuberance” predicted the dot.com bust before it took place.) The effects on the US economy would be considerable. If other factors come into play---like a stock market crash and a subsequent period of deflation---we could see housing prices descend 90 per cent as they did between 1928 and 1933. ... http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney09152007.html The Veep's Curious Investment Portfolio: Cheney's Betting On Economic Collapse Kiplinger Magazine ran an article based on Cheney's financial disclosure statement and, sure enough, found out that the VP is lying to the American people for the umpteenth time. Deficits do matter and Cheney has invested his money accordingly. The article is called "Cheney's betting on bad news" and provides an account of where Cheney has socked away more than $25 million. While the figures may be estimates, the investments are not. According to Tom Blackburn of the Palm Beach Post, Cheney has invested heavily in "a fund that specializes in short-term municipal bonds, a tax-exempt money market fund and an inflation protected securities fund. The first two hold up if interest rates rise with inflation. The third is protected against inflation." Cheney has dumped another (estimated) $10 to $25 million in a European bond fund which tells us that he is counting on a steadily weakening dollar. So, while working class Americans are loosing ground to inflation and rising energy costs, Darth Cheney will be enhancing his wealth in "Old Europe". As Blackburn sagely notes, "Not all bad news' is bad for everybody." This should put to rest once and for all the foolish notion that the "Bush Economic Plan" is anything more than a scam aimed at looting the public till. The whole deal is intended to shift the nation's wealth from one class to another. It's also clear that Bush-Cheney couldn't have carried this off without the tacit approval of the thieves at the Federal Reserve who engineered the low-interest rate boondoggle to put the American people to sleep while they picked their pockets. http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney07052006.html QUOTE EXCLUSIVE: Federal Fraud Complaint Against Voting Machine Company Unsealed After Two Years, the Qui Tam Suit Against Hart InterCivic, Brought by Whistleblower William Singer with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio , May Proceed After DoJ Declines to Join Case ... Singer's suit is the fraud case which originally made waves when it was first filed two years ago, with the aid of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Florida attorney Mike Papantonio, until it then went "underground" due to the legally mandated seal disallowing the plaintiff and his attorneys from offering any specific details to the public. As AP reported today, the seal on that federal qui tam (fraud, false claims) complaint, brought on behalf of the United States by Singer against Hart, one of the big four American voting machines companies, has now been lifted, and the case may finally proceed as originally filed. http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5847 Americans find it hard to accept that their leaders can't be trusted about something as serious as war. Forget the many presidential lies of the past: Harry Truman about the necessity to bomb Hiroshima; John F. Kennedy about the missile gap with the Russians; Lyndon Johnson on the Gulf of Tonkin; Ronald Reagan about the reasons for invading Grenada. Patriotism and the need to feel united in wartime cause us to give presidents a wide berth, even when later revelations show they deceived us. It turned out all right in the end, we rationalize, and the world is surely better off without Saddam Hussein. As for Bush, Americans appear to have accepted a whole new lack of responsibility in their president, acknowledging that he's not a deep thinker and that he depends heavily on his advisers. Apart from being a cheerleader for the war, it's as if he's disconnected from it. We assume that the hard questions, the attention to detail, the grilling of the experts on the facts, the demands for proof, even the final decisions about strategy, were done by others. Bush was just the front man, so if mistakes were made, others must be to blame. The current haggling over what the president knew and when he knew it concerns only a tiny bit of his pro-war argument. Frankly, it's a distraction from the biggest chunk of non-evidence that's come to light: that so far not a trace of the weapons of mass destruction Hussein was supposed to have has turned up. We should be angry about the weapons scam, but it seems only the Washington press corps and a few presidential contenders are making a fuss. No one is saying the obvious: that when you take the country to war based on sparse and unreliable evidence that's disputed by your own experts, a war in which thousands of people died and more are being killed daily in its aftermath, that's the moral equivalent of lying. http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print....s03/0728-01.htm This post has been edited by SingSing: Mar 31 2008, 03:18 PM |
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Mar 31 2008, 04:07 PM
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 ED HEAD  Group: Members Posts: 13,707 Joined: 28-December 05 Member No.: 7,185 |
from curiosity, just what sort of response do you imagine these posts will elicit?
-------------------- Then let us again examine whether that is a sound statement, or do we let it pass, and if one of us, or someone else, merely says that something is so, do we accept that it is so? Or should we examine what the speaker means? - Socrates, Euthryphro
i have always drawn attention to the links between power and violence and how authoritarian power uses coercion and ideology. i oppose violence and coercion and will continue to do so. - tritumi, march 5, 2009 The struggle of people against power is [the] struggle of memory against forgetting. - Milan Kundera Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. - Kenneth Boulding The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. - Steve Biko |
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Mar 31 2008, 04:29 PM
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 ~~Navy Brat~~ ~My Father's~ ~~Daughter~~ Group: Members Posts: 11,140 Joined: 14-August 05 From: The Heartland Member No.: 1,484 |
QUOTE(tritumi @ Mar 31 2008, 05:07 PM) [snapback]567268[/snapback] from curiosity, just what sort of response do you imagine these posts will elicit? 
--------------------    Stolen elections, 911 questions, a WAR for LIES, Outing of a covert CIA agent for Revenge, illegal wire-tapping Americans, LIES, profiteering by Big Oil, TORTURE, secret prisons, Katrina failures, Disenfranchisement, Congressional complicity, corruption, greed, Homeland INsecurity, No Oversight, signing statements, Abuse of Power....NO PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE |
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Mar 31 2008, 04:40 PM
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 ED HEAD Group: Moderator Posts: 14,490 Joined: 16-August 05 From: Erie Lackawanna country in upstate NY Member No.: 1,683 |
QUOTE(tritumi @ Mar 31 2008, 05:07 PM) [snapback]567268[/snapback] from curiosity, just what sort of response do you imagine these posts will elicit?  BTW, that first post looks like a complete cut n paste. I wouldn't be surprised if there were identical copies on other message boards, but I don't care enough about it to waste my time on searching for them. -------------------- All aboard the Big Eddie Express! Our destinations will include universal health care, wise foreign policy, clean water, education, better jobs, compassion for the little guy and a real transportation policy (hint hint). Neocons must yield the right-of-way at all crossings. Any troll caught on the train will be ejected by the Conductors- Holmey, Plunderer, Bernie or myself.
"If you want to live like a Republican, then you better vote for a Democrat" -President Harry S Truman "Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough." -President Franklin D. Roosevelt "The question we ask today is not whether government is too big or too small, but whether it works." -President Obama Learn about transportation and have fun at http://www.railfan.net, http://www.railroad.net and http://www.american-rails-forums.com/. 15 calls to the Ed Schultz Show and counting! Re-elect Higgins, Maffei, Massa, Schumer and Slaughter in 2010! Let's make sure Gillibrand keeps her Senate seat, too! |
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Mar 31 2008, 07:11 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 17 Joined: 5-September 05 Member No.: 3,041 |
QUOTE TO: tritumi - Posts: 8,482 prairiemermaid - Posts: 6,909 richard maxson - Posts: 1,761 AmtrakMatt Moderator - Posts: 11,367  Certainly once you have assimilated the history brought to life by the current HBO John Adams series and absorbed the data that has been linked above, you will have amassed the intellectual insight necessary to come to your own conclusion as to how to get this train back on the tracks once and for all. I would humbly suggest that you refer to my previous posts on Big Ed's board via the search engine using my name before replying via a one liner. Also once the AAR site is restored, see my regular posts for additional context to draw your own conclusion as to what my objective is. PS: Stream this from 7:30 am -11:58 am EST weekdays for more: http://www.mnn.org/sites/mnn.org/files/streams/ch34.asx If you find SEDITION and DISSIDENCE against TYRANNY an unpatriotic act, you must be a RUPUGNICON!!! http://edschultz.invisionzone.com/index.ph...c=21197&hl= http://edschultz.invisionzone.com/index.ph...ic=2281&hl= QUOTE The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt - Bertrand Russell Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King, Jr. If you can't get them to salute when they should salute and wear the clothes you tell them to wear, how are you going to get them to die for their country? - General George S. Patton To put it in rude, plain, unpalatable words — true patriotism, real patriotism: loyalty not to a Family and a Fiction, but a loyalty to the Nation itself! ... Remember this, take this to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medievel, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it. - Czar Nicholas II A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. - Edward Abbey Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. - Oscar Wilde Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. - Samuel Johnson Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. - Howard Zinn Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy - George Bernard Shaw Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca ( 4 b.c.- 65 a.d ) The Government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion. - John Adams, 2nd President of the United States The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus…will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. - Thomas Jefferson, 1823 The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason - Benjamin Franklin Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people - Karl Marx Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionist and rebel men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. The military-industrial-complex cause military spending to be driven not by national security needs but by a network of weapons makers, lobbyists and elected officials. - Dwight D. Eisenhower There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. - General Smedley D. Butler Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real. - General Douglas MacArthur Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. - George Orwell I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for yound men to die in . - George McGovern, former US senator and presidential candidate Governments constantly choose between telling lies and fighting wars, with the end result always being the same. One will always lead to the other. - Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826), 3rd US President The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. - General Douglas MacArthur The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. - Harold Pinter, 2005 Nobel Laureate for Literature, acceptance speech People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage . - John K. Galbraith 1908-2006 If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. - Frederick Douglass, 1857 That which you do not resist and mobilize to stop you will learn to - or be forced - to accept. - Debra Sweet, National Director of World Can't Wait Access to power must be confined to those who are not in love with it. - Plato Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. - Abraham Lincoln Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - John F. Kennedy. When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present [ shrub ] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. - The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, July 4, 1776 (AKA United States Declaration of Independence) For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions ... Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life. There comes a time when silence is betrayal. In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war ... And we are criminals in that war. We have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride, and our arrogance as a nation. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. This war is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy and laymen-concerned committees for generations. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance of our neglect. "The moving finger write, and having writ moves on ..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. - Martin Luther King, Jr., March 1968 Yes I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be! - Langston Hughes, black bard of Harlem Once to every man and nation, Comes the moment to decide In the strife of truth and falsehood. For the good or evil side; Some great cause God's new Messiah Offering each the gloom or blight And the choice goes by forever Twixt that darkness and that light. Though the cause of evil prosper Yet tis truth along is strong Though her portion be the scaffold and upon the throne be wrong Yet that scaffold sways the future And behind the dim unknown - James Russell Lowell  This post has been edited by SingSing: Mar 31 2008, 10:23 PM |
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Mar 31 2008, 07:38 PM
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ED HEAD Group: Members Posts: 2,499 Joined: 19-October 05 From: Black Forest, Colorado Member No.: 4,961 |
Plagiarism with attribution...impressive! I think I'll incorporate this creative method into my posts to enhance my reputation on the board.
But you guys all know my favorite source is scripture...so on second thought.......... |
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Mar 31 2008, 07:46 PM
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#8
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ED HEAD Group: Members Posts: 13,707 Joined: 28-December 05 Member No.: 7,185 |
QUOTE(richard maxson @ Mar 31 2008, 07:38 PM) [snapback]567386[/snapback] Plagiarism with attribution...impressive! I think I'll incorporate this creative method into my posts to enhance my reputation on the board. But you guys all know my favorite source is scripture...so on second thought.......... yes, you pay higher royalties. -------------------- Then let us again examine whether that is a sound statement, or do we let it pass, and if one of us, or someone else, merely says that something is so, do we accept that it is so? Or should we examine what the speaker means? - Socrates, Euthryphro
i have always drawn attention to the links between power and violence and how authoritarian power uses coercion and ideology. i oppose violence and coercion and will continue to do so. - tritumi, march 5, 2009 The struggle of people against power is [the] struggle of memory against forgetting. - Milan Kundera Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. - Kenneth Boulding The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. - Steve Biko |
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Mar 31 2008, 10:23 PM
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 The Board's Elder Stateswoman Group: Members Posts: 12,670 Joined: 26-July 05 From: San Antonio, TX Member No.: 497 |
I have no problem with SingSing's posts, other than the fact that they force the reader to take on a sensory overload. And then there is the problem of having to scroll back and forth to read them.
Maybe if the information, links, etc. had been broken into palatable bits. It was like trying to cram an entire college course into one class meeting. I'm sure everything in these posts make for fascinating reading, but the delivery was overwhelming. Think we could try again? Sallie -------------------- "Nature abhors a moron" - HL Mencken
2007 Eddie for Best Avatar "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." - John Donne |
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