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2/3/2012 Fact Checking the Media
During an interview last month on CBS' Face the Nation, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta set the record straight on Iran: "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No." But if you read recent news reports lately, you'd think otherwise. The media coverage on Iran is mirroring the coverage in the lead-up to the Iraq war: grand claims about a smoking gun that doesn't exist. For example, The New York Times incorrectly reported last month that the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran concluded that their nuclear program had a military objective. The paper's public editor, Arthur Brisbane, was forced to acknowledge their mistake and wrote: "Some readers, mindful of the faulty intelligence and reporting about Saddam Hussein's weapons program, are watching the Iran nuclear coverage very closely." Other media outlets such as National Public Radio, PBS and The Washington Post have been challenged on their coverage too. A recent publication from the Center for Strategic and International Studies titled "The IAEA's Iran Report and Misplaced Paranoia," noted that "With few exceptions, these revelations are not exactly new. More importantly, neither is the thrust of the report: that Iran is developing some capabilities that can only be understood as preliminaries to the development of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, early coverage of the report's release gives the opposite impression." Many have recognized that the media failed to do its job in the lead-up to the Iraq war. The potential consequences of treading on that same path with Iran are grave. The U.S. has thus far spent over $1.2 trillion of borrowed money on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military action against Iran would be disastrous for the region and for U.S. moral standing. A serious diplomatic track based on mutual trust and respect is the only way to achieve increased transparency. (Dennis Kucinich)
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posted: 2/13/12      
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#1 



11/27/2011 Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion
Banks worldwide earned an estimated $13 billion by taking advantage of below-market rates on emergency U.S. Federal Reserve loans from August 2007 through April 2010. Roll over the bars below to explore details for each. To compare results with banks' net income or losses for the same timeframes, click the corresponding button. Worldwide total is the sum for 190 firms with available data; those banks lost a combined $21.6 billion. The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing. The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue. (Bloomberg)
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posted: 11/29/11                   0       6
#2 
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6/6/2011 Gillibrand Announces New Steps in Ongoing Effort to Make Government More Open and Transparent at The Personal Democracy Forum 2011
Co-Sponsors Legislation Requiring Senators to File FEC Reports Online, Will Comply Before Law Passes Calls for All Public Government Documents To Be Posted Online

Speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum 2011 at New York University, U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) today announced she is supporting two new efforts in an ongoing effort to make government more transparent and accountable. Senator Gillibrand said she will co-sponsor a proposal in the U.S. Senate which would for the first time require all Senators to file electronic Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports, a practice she will voluntarily comply with beginning the next reporting period. Gillibrand is also co-sponsoring legislation requiring all public government documents be made available online or machine readable. Gillibrand has lead by example in making government more open and transparent, she was the first member of Congress to post her official daily schedule, all earmark requests and personal financial disclosure form on her official website. Senator Gillibrand said, “It is time to bring Congress into the 21st Century. I haven’t been in Washington long, but it doesn’t take long to know that it’s broken. Everyday people are not being heard because too much business is happening behind closed doors. My agenda puts the interests of families before all else by making government more transparent, accountable, and efficient. Citizens have a right to see who is in the pocket of special interests and who is running a real grassroots campaign without delay and access any public government information on their computers or mobile devices. My agenda makes that process fully open by ensuring that transparency keeps up with technology.” (Kirsten Gillibrand)
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posted: 6/16/11                   0       7
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2/16/2011 Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? Financial crooks brought down the world's economy -- but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them
By Matt Taibbi. Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that." I put down my notebook. "Just that?" "That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there." Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people. This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18. The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

"You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once." (Rolling Stone)
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posted: 3/12/11                   0       4
#4 
keywords: Al Dunlap, American International Group, Art Samberg, Arthur Tildesley Jr, Bailouts, Bank Of America, Barack Obama, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boston, Charles Grassley, Charles Schumer, Citigroup, Columbia University, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Credit Default Swaps, Credit Suisse, Davis Polk & Wardwell, Debevoise & Plimpton, Derek Jeter, Derivatives, Deutsche Bank, Dick Fuld, Dick Walker, Eliot Spitzer, Enron, Eric Dinallo, Fabrice Tourre, Fannie Mae, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Freddie Mac, Gary Aguirre, Gary Crittenden, Gary Lynch, General Electric, George W Bush, Germany, Goldman Sachs, Government Transparency, Heller Financial, Henry Waxman, Hillary Clinton, Hilton Hotels, Immigration, JP Morgan Chase, Jed Rakoff, Joe Cassano, John Mack, Joseph St Denis, Lanny Breuer, Lehman Brothers, Linda Thomsen, Lloyd Blankfein, Lynn Turner, Mary Jo White, Merrill Lynch, Mexico, Morgan Stanley, New York City, New York Stock Exchange, Office Of The Comptroller Of The Currency, Ohio, Oliver Budde, Paul Berger, Philadelphia, Police, Portfolio Magazine, Preet Bharara, Residential Mortgage-backed Securities, Restricted Stock Units, Rite Aid, Robert Khuzami, Robert Morgenthau, Roger Clemens, Rudy Giuliani, Securities And Exchange Commission, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Sunbeam, Switzerland, Terrorists, US Congress, US Department Of Justice, United States, Wall Street, War On Drugs, Worldcom Add New Keyword To Link



1/3/2011 A Clear Danger to Free Speech
THE so-called Shield bill, which was recently introduced in both houses of Congress in response to the WikiLeaks disclosures, would amend the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it a crime for any person knowingly and willfully to disseminate, “in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States,” any classified information “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States.” Although this proposed law may be constitutional as applied to government employees who unlawfully leak such material to people who are unauthorized to receive it, it would plainly violate the First Amendment to punish anyone who might publish or otherwise circulate the information after it has been leaked. At the very least, the act must be expressly limited to situations in which the spread of the classified information poses a clear and imminent danger of grave harm to the nation. The clear and present danger standard has been a central element of our First Amendment jurisprudence ever since Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s 1919 opinion in Schenk v. United States. In the 90 years since, the precise meaning of “clear and present danger” has evolved, but the animating principle was stated brilliantly by Justice Louis D. Brandeis in his 1927 concurring opinion in Whitney v. California. The founders “did not exalt order at the cost of liberty,” wrote Brandeis; on the contrary, they understood that “only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom. Such ... is the command of the Constitution. It is, therefore, always open to Americans to challenge a law abridging free speech and assembly by showing that there was no emergency justifying it.” (New York Times)
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posted: 1/4/11                   0       5
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12/14/2010 Berkeley votes on naming Bradley Manning a hero
Berkeley City Council will today vote on whether to name the US Army private suspected of leaking military secrets to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, a hero. The resolution, from the city's Peace and Justice Commission, describes the military's treatment of Manning as unjust, and calls on the city to press the military for his release. It cites Marjorie Cohn, professor of International Human Rights Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, as saying: "If Manning did what he is suspected of doing, he should be honored as an American hero for exposing war crimes and, hopefully, ultimately, helping to end this war." (TG Daily)
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posted: 12/23/10                   0       9
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12/8/2010 Julian Assange: Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths -- WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.
IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win." His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public. I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth. (The Australian)
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posted: 12/7/10                   0       13
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12/6/2010 What is Julian Assange Up To?
Aaron Bady won the internet last week with his explication of a pair of essays Julian Assange wrote in 2006. Paddling against a vomit-tide of epithets and empty speculations that threatened to bury Assange under a flood of banalities, Bady proposed and executed a fairly shocking procedure: he sat down and read ten pages of what Assange had actually written about the motivations and strategy behind Wikileaks. The central insight of Bady’s analysis was the recognition that Assange’s strategy stands at significant remove from a philosophy it might easily be confused for: the blend of technological triumphalism and anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes “information wants to be free” as its gospel and Silicon Valley as its spiritual homeland. Noting the “certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing,” Bady argued that Assange's philosophy is crucially different: The question for an ethical human being -- and Assange always emphasizes his ethics -- has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. As Assange told Time: “It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society.” (3 Quarks Daily)
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posted: 4/19/11                   0       1
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11/1/2010 The Digital Disruption: Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power
Increased connectivity allows for the spread of liberal, open values but also poses a number of dangers. To foster the free flow of information and challenge authoritarian regimes, democratic states will have to learn to create alliances with people and companies at the forefront of the information revolution. ERIC SCHMIDT is Chair and CEO of Google. He is a Member of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and Chair of the New America Foundation. JARED COHEN is Director of Google Ideas. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Children of Jihad and One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide.

The advent and power of connection technologies -- tools that connect people to vast amounts of information and to one another -- will make the twenty-first century all about surprises. Governments will be caught off-guard when large numbers of their citizens, armed with virtually nothing but cell phones, take part in mini-rebellions that challenge their authority. For the media, reporting will increasingly become a collaborative enterprise between traditional news organizations and the quickly growing number of citizen journalists. And technology companies will find themselves outsmarted by their competition and surprised by consumers who have little loyalty and no patience. Today, more than 50 percent of the world's population has access to some combination of cell phones (five billion users) and the Internet (two billion). These people communicate within and across borders, forming virtual communities that empower citizens at the expense of governments. New intermediaries make it possible to develop and distribute content across old boundaries, lowering barriers to entry. Whereas the traditional press is called the fourth estate, this space might be called the "interconnected estate" -- a place where any person with access to the Internet, regardless of living standard or nationality, is given a voice and the power to effect change. (Foreign Affairs)
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posted: 3/10/11                   0       2
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9/15/2009 Obama Backs Extending Patriot Act Spy Provisions
The Obama administration has told Congress it supports renewing three provisions of the Patriot Act due to expire at year’s end, measures making it easier for the government to spy within the United States. In a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said the administration might consider “modifications” to the act in order to protect civil liberties. “The administration is willing to consider such ideas, provided that they do not undermine the effectiveness of these important authorities,” Ronald Weich, assistant attorney general, wrote to Leahy, (.pdf) whose committee is expected to consider renewing the three expiring Patriot Act provisions next week. The government disclosed the letter Tuesday. It should come as no surprise that President Barack Obama supports renewing the provisions, which were part of the Patriot Act approved six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. As an Illinois senator in 2008, he voted to allow the warrantless monitoring of Americans’ electronic communications if they are communicating overseas with somebody the government believes is linked to terrorism. That legislative package, which President George W. Bush signed, also immunized the nation’s telecommunication companies from lawsuits charging them with being complicit with the Bush administration’s warrantless, wiretapping program. That program was also adopted in the wake of Sept. 11. (Wired)
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posted: 11/2/10                   0       1
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8/11/2009 White House 51-page solicitation of bids
1. Purpose RFQ NUMBER: WHO-S-09-0003 PAGE 2 STATEMENT OF OBJECTIVES (SOO) The purpose of this Statement of Objectives (SOO) is to obtain the necessary services to ensure that content published by the Executive Office of the President (EOP) on publicly-accessible web sites is archived in accordance with the Presidential Records Act (PRA), that information posted on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence is archived in accordance with the PRA, and that all archived information is securely stored and provided to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for historical preservation, in accordance with the PRA.

2. Scope The contractor shall provide the necessary services to capture, store, extract to approved formats, and transfer content published by EOP on publicly-accessible web sites, along with information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP offices under PRA maintains a presence, throughout the term of the contract. The contractor shall if possible, capture, store, extract to approved formats, and transfer content published by EOP on non-public websites. The contractor shall include in the information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence both comments posted on pages created by EOP and messages sent to EOP accounts on those web sites. Publicly-accessible sites may include, but are not limited to social networking sites. The contractor shall provide a user-friendly way of organizing and searching captured information. The contractor shall properly transfer the captured information, as identified by EOP, to NARA in an acceptable format for both preservation in NARA’s Electronic Records Archive and presentation at the future Presidential Library. The Contractor shall provide a method to separate content posted by other EOP component offices as required. (National Legal and Policy Center)
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posted: 11/2/10                   0       1
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11/19/2008 Rahm Emanuel on the Opportunities of Crisis
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that its an opportunity to do things you'ld think you could not do before." (Wall Street Journal)
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posted: 5/4/09      
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9/22/2008 Dirty Secret Of The Bailout: Thirty-Two Words That None Dare Utter
"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." (Huffington Post)
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posted: 6/5/09                   2       28
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8/20/2007 In Depth Security and Prosperity Partnership: SPP FAQs
To hear some people talk, the Security and Prosperity Partnership meetings are nothing to get worked up about. Thomas D'Aquino, of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, has said the issues discussed at the SPP are "quite important but frankly quite boring. They're not terribly exciting." David Bohigian, the American assistant secretary of commerce for market access and compliance, told the magazine The Nation that the SPP is mostly concerned with bureaucratic minutiae and standards harmonization. "For instance, in the U.S., we sell baby food in several different sizes; in Canada, it's just two different sizes," he told the magazine. But if it's all boring bureaucracy and baby food jars, why are thousands of protestors expected to show up in Montebello, Que., a small town halfway between Ottawa and Montreal, for the third leaders' meeting under the SPP?

Who is opposed to the SPP? Opposition to the SPP exists in all three countries and on either end of the political spectrum. Progressive groups, particularly in Canada, say the SPP amounts to Canada's deep integration with the United States. The Council of Canadians says the SPP is anti-democratic, makes Canadians less secure and ties Canada to the U.S. "war on terror." The Council is also concerned about the SPP discussions about bulk water exports from Canada to the U.S. The NDP has said it has concerns about the SPP's "lack of transparency and democratic oversight." NDP trade critic Peter Julian has tabled a motion calling for public consultations and full Parliamentary oversight of the SPP.

On the Canadian government's website about the SPP, some of the agreement's accomplishments are listed: * Initiatives that make it easier to ship goods across the border. * Strategies to limit the impact of disasters and allow for a more co-ordinated international response and a faster recovery. * International co-operation on intelligence, law enforcement, transportation security and border management to help reduce criminal activity and terror risks. * Reduction of transit times by 50 per cent at the Detroit-Windsor gateway, the largest border crossing point between Canada and the U.S. Not listed is a planned "harmonization" of pesticide limits between Canada and the U.S., which would raise the acceptable level of pesticide residues on fruits and vegetables. The SPP's 2006 prosperity report identified "differences in pesticide maximum residue limits" as "barriers to trade." (CBC)
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posted: 11/8/10                   0       2
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7/23/2007 Canadians in the Dark About SPP Union with the USA and Mexico
The purpose of the Canada-USA-Mexico meeting in August, at Montebello, Quebec, is to ratify the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America In less than a month’s time, on August 20, the most powerful president in the world will be arriving in Montebello, Quebec, for a two-day conference. President George W. Bush will be meeting with Stephen Harper and their Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderon. So far, the silence from the Canadian and American media has been deafening. Talk to 90 percent of people on the street and they won’t know about this upcoming conference, and if by a slim chance they do, they won’t know the purpose of the meeting or why the leaders of Canada, the United States and Mexico are meeting in the dog days of summer under what amounts to a veil of secrecy. (Mexidata.info)
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posted: 11/8/10                   0       0
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2/23/2007 Officials play down criticism that talks too secretive
Top North American ministers deflected criticism that they had consulted only big business for their talks on trade and security rules, suggesting Friday there are "different venues" for public interest and labour groups to raise their concerns and suggestions. The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) is an ongoing dialogue between Canada, the United States and Mexico to find more common ground on issues ranging from border security to emergency preparedness. The group has an arm of business leaders that provides myriad recommendations, but has no formal mechanism for consulting the public at large. "That type of thing happens in different venues in a host of other occasions, and we're pleased to note that as we work together on the issues we discussed today then the quality of life of all our citizens improves," Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day told reporters at the close of day-long meetings. Day was flanked by his counterparts from Mexico and the United States, along with trade ministers from the three countries. The star attraction of the meetings was U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who appeared at a final news conference with Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay and Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa. (CANOE)
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posted: 12/2/10                   0       2
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10/12/2006 Secret Summit on Shared 'Security': Why was North America's power elite invited to Banff?
Stockwell Day may have been there, but his office isn't saying. Donald Rumsfeld may have been there, too. But again, no one seems to want to talk about it. Last month, a secret meeting called the North American Forum was held in Banff. The theme of the three-day event was "Continental Prosperity in the New Security Environment." Dozens of powerful figures from across North America attended. Many of the delegates are rumoured to have arrived at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel by bus in the middle of the night. It all sounds a bit like a conspiracy nut's black-helicopter fantasy, but the North American Forum is real and so was the meeting. (The Tyee)
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posted: 12/2/10                   0       2
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5/1/2005 Building a North American Community
Report of an Independent Task Force; Sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations with the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales

America’s relationship with its North American neighbors rarely gets the attention it warrants. This report of a Council-sponsored Indepen- dent Task Force on the Future of North America is intended to help address this policy gap. In the more than a decade since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, ties among Canada, Mexico, and the United States have deepened dramatically. The value of trade within North America has more than doubled. Canada and Mexico are now the two largest exporters of oil, natural gas, and electricity to the United States. Since 9/11, we are not only one another’s major commercial partners, we are joined in an effort to make North America less vulnerable to terrorist attack. This report examines these and other changes that have taken place since NAFTA’s inception and makes recommendations to address the range of issues confronting North American policymakers today: greater economic competition from outside North America, uneven develop- ment within North America, the growing demand for energy, and threats to our borders. The Task Force offers a detailed and ambitious set of proposals that build on the recommendations adopted by the three governments at the Texas summit of March 2005. The Task Force’s central recommen- dation is establishment by 2010 of a North American economic and security community, the boundaries of which would be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter.

More than a decade ago NAFTA took effect, liberalizing trade and investment, providing crucial protection for intellectual property, creating pioneering dispute-resolution mechanisms, and establishing the first regional devices to safeguard labor and environmental standards. NAFTA helped unlock the region’s economic potential and demon- strated that nations at different levels of development can prosper from the opportunities created by reciprocal free trade arrangements. Since then, however, global commercial competition has grown more intense and international terrorism has emerged as a serious regional and global danger. Deepening ties among the three countries of North America promise continued benefits for Canada, Mexico, and the United States. That said, the trajectory toward a more integrated and prosperous North America is neither inevitable nor irreversible. In March 2005, the leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the United States adopted a Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), establishing ministerial-level working groups to address key secu- rity and economic issues facing North America and setting a short deadline for reporting progress back to their governments. President Bush described the significance of the SPP as putting forward a common commitment ‘‘to markets and democracy, freedom and trade, and mutual prosperity and security.’’ The policy framework articulated by the three leaders is a significant commitment that will benefit from broad discussion and advice. The Task Force is pleased to provide specific advice on how the partnership can be pursued and realized. To that end, the Task Force proposes the creation by 2010 of a North American community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity. We propose a community based on the principle affirmed in the March 2005 Joint Statement of the three leaders that ‘‘our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary.’’ Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly, and safe. Its goal will be to guarantee a free, secure, just, and prosperous North America.

A North American Advisory Council. To ensure a regular injection of creative energy into the various efforts related to North American integration, the three governments should appoint an independent body of advisers. This body should be composed of eminent persons from outside government, appointed to staggered multiyear terms to ensure their independence. Their mandate would be to engage in creative exploration of new ideas from a North American perspective and to provide a public voice for North America. A complementary approach would be to establish private bodies that would meet regularly or annually to buttress North American relationships, along the lines of the Bilderberg or Wehrkunde conferences, organized to support transatlantic relations. (Council on Foreign Relations)
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posted: 5/5/09                   0       15
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3/24/2005 What Trumps What in the White House?
President Bush's hasty embrace of federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case -- followed by yesterday's partial retreat -- has some folks trying to ascertain the relative importance to the White House of such factors as the "culture of life," state's rights, activist judges, the gun culture, global catastrophes and brute political calculation. Here's how one reader put it in my Live Online discussion yesterday: "Now we learn that the Republicans have a trumping order of issues. The sanctity of marriage trumps the rights of gays and state's rights, but the 'culture of life' trumps the sanctity of marriage and state's rights. . . . (Washington Post)
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posted: 11/8/10                   0       0
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3/23/2005 Transcript: Bush, Fox, and Martin Joint Press Conference: The following is a transcript of the joint press conference by President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin
BUSH: Thank you all for coming. It's my honor to welcome two friends to Baylor University. First, I want to thank the Baylor University family for providing these facilities for us. Your hospitality is awesome. I appreciate the meetings we've just had. Our relationships are important today. We intend to keep our relationships strong. Our relationships will be equally important for the years to come. And so we had a good discussion about prosperity and security. Turns out the two go hand in hand. It's important for us to work to make sure our countries are safe and secure in order that our people can live in peace, as well as our economies can grow. We've got a lot of trade with each other. We intend to keep it that way. We've got a lot of crossings of the border, and intend to make our borders more secure and facilitate legal traffic. BUSH: We've got a lot to do. And so we charged our ministers with the task of figuring out how best to keep these relationships vibrant and strong. (Washington Post)
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posted: 11/8/10                   0       1
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1/20/1981 Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978
44 U.S.C. ß2201-2207, governs the official records of Presidents and Vice Presidents created or received after January 20, 1981. The PRA changed the legal ownership of the official records of the President from private to public, and established a new statutory structure under which Presidents must manage their records. (US Congress)
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posted: 11/2/10                   0       2
#21 




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