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| 2/9/2012 |
The Top Twelve Reasons Why You Should Hate the Mortgage Settlement As readers may know by now, 49 of 50 states have agreed to join the so-called mortgage settlement, with Oklahoma the lone refusenik. Although the fine points are still being hammered out, various news outlets (New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal) have details, with Dave Dayen’s overview at Firedoglake the best thus far. The Wall Street Journal is also reporting that the SEC is about to launch some securities litigation against major banks. Since the statue of limitations has already run out on securities filings more than five years old, this means they’ll clip the banks for some of the very last (and dreckiest) deals they shoved out the door before the subprime market gave up the ghost. The various news services are touting this pact at the biggest multi-state settlement since the tobacco deal in 1998. While narrowly accurate, this deal is bush league by comparison even though the underlying abuses in both cases have had devastating consequences. The tobacco agreement was pegged as being worth nearly $250 billion over the first 25 years. Adjust that for inflation, and the disparity is even bigger. That shows you the difference in outcomes between a case where the prosecutors have solid evidence backing their charges, versus one where everyone know a lot of bad stuff happened, but no one has come close to marshaling the evidence. (Naked Capitalism) | |||
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keywords: Adam Levitin, Alternative Media, Arizona, Bank Of America, Barack Obama, Big Tobacco, Countrywide, Dave Dayen, Delaware, Fannie Mae, Fbr Capital Markets, Financial Crisis, Financial Times, Fire Dog Lake, Foreclosure, Freddie Mac, George Orwell, Kemp V Countrywide, Massachusetts, Mers, Missouri, Naked Capitalism, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Paul Miller, Pensions, Residential Mortgage-backed Securities, Robosigning, Securities And Exchange Commission, The New York Times, Tobacco, Tom Adams, US Department Of Justice, United States, Wall Street Journal
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| 8/11/2011 |
Rupert Murdoch's Greatest Moments in Ethics and Integrity Are we still talking about this whole phone-hacking scandal at News Corp.? That's such old news. Tapping into the voicemails of major political figures and murder victims? Everybody did it. Top executives at one of the world's largest media companies arrested? A few bad apples. A cover-up that reaches the highest levels of the British government and law enforcement? Trumped-up charges from jealous rivals. Pie throwing in Parliament? OK, that guy must be a terrorist. Good thing Wendi clocked him. You want Congress to investigate what News Corp. might have done in the United States? Are you some kind of Marxist? Let's get back to what really matters. Profits are up at News Corp. And, as Rupert Murdoch assured investors yesterday, "There can be no doubt about our commitment to ethics and integrity." (Huffington Post) | |||
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keywords: 9/11, Alternative Media, Barack Obama, China, Dow Jones, Falun Gong, Federal Communications Commission, Fox, Frank Rich, General Motors, Iowa, Minneapolis, New Jersey, New York, New York Post, News America Marketing, News Corp, Preet Bharara, Privacy, Reed Hundt, Republican Governors Association, Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin, The New York Times, UK Parliament, US Congress, United Kingdom, United States, Usa Patriot Act, Viet Dinh, Wall Street Journal, Washington DC
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| 4/14/2011 |
The Cure for Your Fugly Armpits: How advertisers create body anxieties women didn't know they had, and then sell them the solution. Dove recently unveiled its latest campaign, and it hinges on the idea that your armpits are ugly. Dove Ultimate Go Sleeveless is supposed to give women "softer, smoother underarms in just five days"—in ads for the product, which Stephen Colbert calls a "breakthrough shame-o-vation," women cut the sleeves off their tops with joyful expressions, as if they've been liberated from a terrible scourge. If it's news to you that this part of your body is not so hot, Dove says you're in the minority, citing a survey in which 93 percent of women said they "think their underarms are unattractive." And if you doubt statistics culled from 534 women in an anonymous online poll, rest assured that Dove's best advertising efforts will be directed at making those numbers true. Pity the poor deodorant-makers. What else are they to do? As the Wall Street Journal points out, they're in a bind—almost the entire U.S. population already uses deodorant, and consumers appear reluctant to switch to new brands. Dove's empowerment-via-shame marketing approach for Go Sleeveless has its roots in advertising techniques that gained popularity in the 1920s: a) pinpoint a problem, perhaps one consumers didn't even know they had; b) exacerbate anxiety around the problem; c) sell the cure. The history of ads directed at women is particularly rich with such fear tactics. Thus, ad copy from the 1920s and '30s warned women of their place in the "beauty contest of life" (a corset manufacturer) and reminded them that "The Eyes of Men …The Eyes of Women/ Judge your Loveliness every day" (Camay soap). A 1953 ad for Chlorodent toothpaste stated point-blank: "There's another woman waiting for every man." Yikes! (Slate) | |||
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keywords: Dove, Gerard Lambert, James Twitchell, Juliann Sivulka, Nora Ephron, Stephen Colbert, Stephen Fox, Susan Kim, Wall Street Journal
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| 10/3/2010 |
CIA backed by military drones in Pakistan The CIA is using an arsenal of armed drones and other equipment provided by the U.S. military to secretly escalate its operations in Pakistan by striking targets beyond the reach of American forces based in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said. The merging of covert CIA operations and military firepower is part of a high-stakes attempt by the Obama administration to deal decisive blows to Taliban insurgents who have regained control of swaths of territory in Afghanistan but stage most of their operations from sanctuaries across that country's eastern border. The move represents a signification evolution of an already controversial targeted killing program run by the CIA. The agency's drone program began as a sporadic effort to kill members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network but in the past month it has been delivering what amounts to a cross-border bombing campaign in coordination with conventional military operations a few miles away. The campaign continued Saturday amid reports that two new CIA drone strikes had killed 16 militants in northwest Pakistan, following 22 such attacks last month. (Washington Post) | |||
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keywords: Aerial Drones, Afghanistan, Al-qaeda, Asif Ali Zardari, Barack Obama, Brookings Institution, Bruce Riedel, Central Intelligence Agency, David Petraeus, European Union, George W Bush, Haqqani, Inter-services Intelligence, Jalaluddin Haqqani, James L Jones, Kabul, Kandahar, Leon Panetta, Military, New America Foundation, New York City, Pakistan, Robert Gates, Taliban, Terrorists, US Department Of State, US National Security Council, US Special Operations Command, United States, Wall Street Journal, White House
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| 9/22/2010 |
Colbert Grills Eric Schmidt On Privacy, 'Don't Be Evil' Motto (VIDEO) Google CEO Eric Schmidt went head-to-head with Stephen Colbert yesterday evening to discuss everything from data-mining to China to Schmidt's "joke" about privacy. Colbert grilled Schmidt about Google's search algorithm, and what information the company collects about its users. "It's true that we see your searches, but then we forget them after while," Schmidt explained (he later told Colbert he would "encourage" him to erase his browser history). "And I'm supposed to trust you on that?" Colbert probed, asking later, "You wouldn't call that data mining?" Not surprisingly, Schmidt answered with firm, "We actually don't do data mining." (Huffington Post) | |||
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keywords: China, Eric Schmidt, Google, Internet, Privacy, Stephen Colbert, Wall Street Journal
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| 9/6/2010 |
The Right Comparison Between Recoveries The Wall Street Journal ran a graph this weekend claiming, “The private sector is adding jobs … but the recovery is slower than in past cycles.” In fact, even though it is not fast enough, the rate of job growth is actually faster now than was the case at comparable points of the past two recoveries. How did the Wall Street Journal get it wrong? The problem is that their graph indexes job growth to the start of the recession, not the start of the recovery. The economy stopped contracting at the end of the second quarter last year and has since expanded for four straight quarters. So June 2009 is a reasonable date to pick for the start of the recovery, although the “official” date has not yet been set by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Private sector job growth started six months after GDP started expanding in the current recovery. By contrast, in the 2001 recovery private sector job growth did not begin until 22 months after the official NBER end date of the recession, and in the 1991 recovery job growth did not start until 12 months after the official NBER end date of the recession. (White House) | |||
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keywords: Barack Obama, Financial Crisis, National Bureau Of Economic Research, United States, Wall Street Journal, White House
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| 9/3/2010 |
Did market manipulation cause Wall Street ‘flash crash?’ The Securities and Exchange Commission is keeping a close eye on a stock market practice that may violate rules against market manipulation, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. The practice, called quote stuffing, happens when stock exchanges are flooded and, at times, clogged by huge numbers of buy and sell orders orders that are ultimately cancelled. Regulators are trying to determine if traders are using rapid-fire computerized trading systems to cause the inundation by design, purposefully gumming up the exchanges and giving traders an information advantage on small price movements in stocks. The Journal reported that the SEC is investigating whether quote stuffing may have been one of the causes of the May 6 flash crash, when the Dow briefly plunged 1,000 points in a matter of minutes. To get an idea of the volume of quotes produced by high-speed, computerized trading, consider this: During the day of the flash crash, there were hundreds of times that a single stock had over 1,000 quotes from one exchange in a single second, according to Nanex, a ticker of quotes and trades. (The Raw Story) | |||
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| 8/10/2010 |
Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead A confidential, seven-page Google Inc. "vision statement" shows the information-age giant in a deep round of soul-searching over a basic question: How far should it go in profiting from its crown jewels—the vast trove of data it possesses about people's activities? (Wall Street Journal) | |||
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keywords: AOL, Aitan Weinberg, Alma Whitten, Ari Brand, Bluekai Inc, Doubleclick, Exelate Media, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, Gokul Rajaram, Google, Internet, Microsoft, Privacy, Sergey Brin, Tim Armstrong, United States, Wall Street Journal, Yahoo
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| 6/7/2010 |
'The Rig's on Fire! I Told You This Was Gonna Happen!' Tony Buzbee, a lawyer representing 15 rig workers and dozens of shrimpers, seafood restaurants, and dock workers, says he has obtained a three-page signed statement from a crew member on the boat that rescued the burning rig's workers. The sailor, who Buzbee refuses to name for fear of costing him his job, was on the ship's bridge when Deepwater Horizon installation manager Jimmy Harrell, a top employee of rig owner Transocean, was speaking with someone in Houston via satellite phone. Buzbee told Mother Jones that, according to this witness account, Harrell was screaming, "Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen." (The Atlantic) | |||
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keywords: American Bureau Of Shipping, Big Oil, British Petroleum, Deepwater Horizon, Donald Vidrine, Douglas Brown, Gulf Of Mexico, Houston, Jimmy Harrell, Mike Williams, Minerals Management Service, Mother Jones, Prestige, Robert Kaluza, Spain, Texas City, Tony Buzbee, Transocean, Truitt Crawford, US Coast Guard, United States, Wall Street Journal
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| 5/6/2010 |
Link emerges between Times Square bomb attempt and Pakistani militant group A member of the Al Qaeda-allied Pakistani militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad is being held by authorities in Pakistan. That man spent time with Faisal Shahzad, the person charged in the failed bomb plot, although sources say that does not mean Jaish-e-Muhammad engineered the plot. (Los Angeles Times) | |||
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keywords: Afghanistan, Al-qaeda, Athar Abbas, Baitullah Mehsud, Daniel Pearl, Faisal Shahzad, India, Inter-services Intelligence, Jaish-e-muhammad, Karachi, New York City, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Pakistan, Peshawar, Sheik Mohammed Rehan, Taliban, Terrorists, Wall Street Journal, Waziristan
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| 4/27/2010 |
Curry: The Backstory By now, many people must be wondering of Judith Curry: what’s her story? How did the respected Georgia Tech climate scientist go from global warming = more intense hurricanes to darling of climate skeptics? How did she go from staunch IPCC booster to harsh IPCC critic? And why, in heaven’s name, is Curry engaging in multiple conversations about the credibility of climate science on a blog? Well, the quick answer to that last one is that it all started last week, when Curry agreed to a Q & A for this site, which then morphed into a rollicking dialogue that is still going on. (Collide-a-Scape) | |||
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keywords: Carbon Dioxide, Climate Change, Climategate, Collide-a-scape, Georgia Institute Of Technology, Hurricane Katrina, Joe Romm, Judith Curry, Keith Kloor, New Orleans, Roger Pielke Jr, United States, Wall Street Journal, William Gray
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| 3/30/2010 |
Huge Petroleum Find In Gulf of Mexico Offers more support for theory that earth contains massive reserves Last week, Royal Dutch Shell PLC announced the discovery of 100 million barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico at a depth more than 25,000 feet below the seabed, in 7,217 feet of water, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. One of the continuing fallacies of peak oil theory is that there is a reliable way to know how much undiscovered oil remains yet in the earth. Peak-oil theorists are typically fossil-fuel advocates who believe that since there were only a limited number of fossils, the oil produced from those fossils must also be limited. Abiotic oil theory postulates that oil is formed on a constant basis deep within the mantle of the earth, requiring no deterioration of biological material to produce the oil. (Jerome Corsi) | |||
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keywords: Abiotic Oil, Alternative Energy, Atlantic Ocean, Big Oil, Brazil, British Petroleum, Cato Institute, Gulf Of Mexico, Harvard University, Julian Simon, Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, Netherlands, Nuclear Power Plants, Peak Oil, Petroleo Brasileiro, Royal Dutch Shell, Saudi Arabia, Sergio Gabrielli, Tupi Oil Field, United States, University Of Maryland, Wall Street Journal
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| 1/25/2010 |
Darrell Issa's Special Report On AIG Could Be The End Of Geithner GEITHNER’S ROLE IN THE AIG COVER UP REMAINS UNCLEAR When asked directly if he was involved in the efforts by the FRBNY to prevent disclosure of the AIG counterparty payments, Secretary Geithner responded, “I wasn’t involved in that decision.” On January 8, 2010, FRBNY General Counsel Thomas Baxter wrote Ranking Member Issa to clarify the role of then-President Geithner: [M]atters relating to AIG securities law disclosures were not brought to the attention of Mr. Geithner …. In my judgment as the New York Fed’s chief legal officer, disclosure matters of this nature did not warrant the attention of the president. Mr. Baxter reiterated this claim in an interview with Committee staff. Questions of securities disclosure, Baxter said, were “legal stuff,” and Baxter did not bring legal stuff to the attention of then-President Geithner. However, Baxter said that “on significant policy issues, of course I would go” to Geithner. However, documents received by the Committee suggest that Secretary Geithner was, at a minimum, engaged personally in reviewing what information about the AIG bailout would be revealed to Congress and the public. On November 6, 2008, SarahDahlgren, the FRBNY’s lead staff member in AIG’s operations, e-mailed Geithner with a proposed statement regarding AIG’s upcoming equity capital raise for Geithner’s approval: [I]n terms of saying something publicly about our intentions, we … think that saying something that conveys the following … makes sense: It is our (Federal Reserve/Treasury) continued intention to put the company in a sound capital position and exit the facility/preferred securities/common stock ownership as soon as practicable… [I]f you are good with this, …we would also make sure that the company sticks to this line (echo)…. [emphasis added] On November 13, 2008, Geithner received a report on AIG’s restructuring that would be sent to Congress, which Geithner had asked to personally review. Sophia Allison, a staff member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, e-mailed the draft congressional report to several Federal Reserve staff: Attached is a draft Congressional report for the restructuring package for AIG announced on Monday, November 10. …I tried to take everything in the report from publicly available documents, such as press releases, the prior AIG Congressional Report, and AIG’s most recent 10-Q. If there is anything in the report that you believe should not be publicly disclosed, please specifically point that out. [emphasis added] Michael Nelson, a staff member of the FRBNY, forwarded Allison’s email to Geithner with the following message: Tim – this is the draft EESA-required filing on AIG that the Board owes the Hill, as you requested. [emphasis added] In addition, Secretary Geithner’s meeting logs from his tenure as President of the FRBNY show that he was regularly engaged with top AIG officials and the FRBNY officials directly responsible for AIG’s disclosures to the SEC. Geithner’s schedule shows that he had at least six formal meetings with top FRBNY staff members about AIG-related issues between November 4, 2008, and November 21, 2008. It is unclear whether AIG’s disclosure obligations were discussed in these meetings. At a minimum, the cover-up of the details about AIG’s counterparty payments began on Secretary Geithner’s watch, and the culture of the FRBNY in which this behavior occurred reflected his leadership. Secretary Geithner needs to explain his role in the cover-up, and if he thinks the behavior of his staff at the FRBNY was appropriate. GEITHNER’S CLAIMS RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT PURPOSE OF AIG BAILOUT Secretary Geithner’s claim to SIGTARP that the backdoor bailout of AIG’s counterparties had nothing to do with the health of AIG’s counterparties also raises questions about why AIG was bailed out in the first place. As the Wall Street Journal notes: [I]f Mr. Geithner now says the AIG bailout wasn’t driven by a need to rescue CDS counterparties, then what was the point? Why pay Goldman [Sachs] and even foreign banks like Societe Generale billions of tax dollars to make them whole? Secretary Geithner now claims that the point of AIG’s bailout was to protect AIG’s insurance policy holders: AIG was providing a range of insurance products to households across the country. And if AIG had defaulted, you would have seen a downgrade leading to the liquidation and failure of a set of insurance contracts that touched Americans across this country and, of course, savers around the world. However, as the Wall Street Journal further explains: Yet, if there is one thing that all observers seemed to agree on last year, it was that AIG’s money to pay policyholders was segregated and safe inside the regulated insurance subsidiaries. If the real systemic danger was the condition of these highly regulated subsidiaries – where there was no CDS trading – then the Beltway narrative implodes. Secretary Geithner’s inconsistent statements and apparent contradictions raise important questions about the decision to not only funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to AIG’s counterparties, but also the decision to bail out AIG itself. The FRBNY and its attorneys at Davis Polk interfered with AIG’s securities disclosures in several ways. They edited AIG’s SEC filings in ways that made it more difficult for investors and the public to understand the ML3 transactions. They contacted the SEC directly and pressured it to treat AIG’s filings differently from other companies’ filings. In addition, they appear to have forced AIG to cancel a compensation-related filing that it was required to make. The FRBNY’s edits of AIG’s filings and the FRBNY’s pressure on the SEC were intended to serve the Fed’s interests by obscuring embarrassing details about the FRBNY’s backdoor bailout of AIG’s counterparties. Investors cannot be protected by a disclosure system that only requires full transparency when the Federal Reserve’s embarrassment is not at stake. The special SEC procedures established via FRBNY pressure also demonstrate that bailouts lead to enforced favoritism. Finally, the secrecy, concealment, and lack of transparency in the conduct of the Federal Reserve have serious implications for the continued health of democracy and free markets. The Federal Reserve’s payment of par to AIG’s counterparties and the subsequent cover-up of information about these payments raise concerns about the accountability of the unelected bureaucrats within the Federal Reserve System. The fact that a quasi-government agency, unaccountable to the American people, likely wasted billions of taxpayer dollars and went to great lengths to prevent Congress and the American people from learning about these actions demonstrates the threat that the Federal Reserve poses to basic principles of American democracy. (quotes selected by Zero Hedge) (US House of Representatives) | |||
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keywords: American International Group, Darrell Issa, Davis Polk, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, Goldman Sachs, Michael Nelson, Sarah Dahlgren, Securities And Exchange Commission, Sophia Allison, Thomas Baxter, Timothy Geithner, US Congress, US Department Of The Treasury, United States, Wall Street, Wall Street Journal
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| 10/26/2009 |
U.S. Newspaper Circulation Falls 10% The two-decade erosion in newspaper circulation is looking more like an avalanche, with figures released Monday showing weekday sales down more than 10 percent since last year, depressed by rising Internet readership, price increases, the recession and papers intentionally shedding unprofitable circulation. In the six months ended Sept. 30, sales fell by 10.6 percent on weekdays and 7.5 percent on Sundays, from the period a year earlier, for several hundred papers reporting to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. That means that the industry sold about 44 million copies a day — fewer than at any time since the 1940s. The figures join a list of indicators of the industry’s health — like advertising and newsroom headcounts — that, after years of slipping, have accelerated sharply downward, as newspapers face the greatest threats since the Depression. Through the 1990s and into this decade, newspaper circulation was sliding, but by less than 1 percent a year. Then the rate of decline topped 2 percent in 2005, 3 percent in 2007 and 4 percent in 2008. (New York Times) | |||
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keywords: Alan Mutter, Alternative Media, Audit Bureau Of Circulations, Gannett Company, Great Depression, Hearst Corporation, Internet, James M Moroney III, Lake Tahoe, Los Angeles Times, Mark Adkins, Modesto, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newspaper Association Of America, Nielsen Online, San Francisco Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, The Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, The Morning News, The Rocky Mountain News, The Seattle Post-intelligencer, The Seattle Times, The Star-ledger, United States, Usa Today, Wall Street Journal
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| 8/25/2009 |
Geithner: Auditing the Fed is a "line that we don't want to cross" In an interview released today by Digg and the Wall Street Journal, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was pressured about the growing popular movement to Audit the Fed spearheaded by Texas Congressman Ron Paul. A visibly uncomfortable Geithner attempts to dismiss the question by stating "I'm sure people understand that you want to keep politics out of monetary policy." (The Corbett Report) | |||
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| 5/16/2009 |
Riot Cops Smoke BombsTurn Bilderberg Protesters Back Dramatic Photos Media Black Out (Prison Planet) | |||
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| 5/14/2009 |
Obama will continue Bush-era military tribunals Breaking a key promise from his campaign, President Barack Obama is expected to announce Friday the return of military commission trials for a small number of terrorism suspects (The Raw Story) | |||
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| 2/17/2009 |
Obama's War on Terror May Resemble Bush's in Some Areas During her confirmation hearing last week, Elena Kagan, the nominee for solicitor general, said that someone suspected of helping finance Al Qaeda should be subject to battlefield law — indefinite detention without a trial — even if he were captured in a place like the Philippines rather than in a physical battle zone. (New York Times) | |||
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keywords: Al-qaeda, American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero, Barack Obama, Boeing, Central Intelligence Agency, Chicago, Cuba, Detainees, Elena Kagan, Eric Holder, Freedom Of Information Act, George W Bush, Gregory Craig, Guantanamo Bay, Leon Panetta, Margaret Satterthwaite, Military, New York University, Philippines, Privacy, Rendition, Terrorists, Torture, US Congress, US Constitution, US Department Of Justice, United States, Wall Street Journal, White House
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| 10/6/2008 |
Paulson to Name Kashkari to Oversee Bailout Kashkari's position as interim head of the Office of Financial Stability is expected to end when Bush leaves office, the paper said. He was a vice president at Goldman Sachs & Co. before joining the Treasury, and his role there included advising public and private companies on mergers, acquisitions and financial transactions. (Bloomberg) | |||
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keywords: Bailouts, Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, George W Bush, Goldman Sachs, Great Depression, Henry Paulson, Neel Kashkari, Office Of Financial Stability, Phillip Swagel, US Congress, US Department Of The Treasury, United States, Wall Street Journal
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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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keywords: Bailouts, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, George W Bush, Government Transparency, Graham Fisher & CO, Henry Paulson, Home Owners Loan Corporation, Jack Balkin, John Mccain, Joshua Rosner, Mcclatchy Newspapers, Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Residential Mortgage-backed Securities, The New York Times, US Congress, US Department Of The Treasury, United States, Wall Street, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, White House
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| 3/10/2008 |
Report: NSA’s Warrantless Spying Resurrects Banned ‘Total Information Awareness’ Project Total Information Awareness — the all-seeing terrorist spotting algorithm-meets-the-mother-of-all-databases that was ostensibly de-funded by Congress in 2003, never actually died, and was largely rebuilt in secret by the NSA, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman. In a fantastic story Monday, Gorman pulls together threads and lays out what many have suspected and alleged in lawsuits — the NSA is collecting and sifting through immense amounts of data about who Americans talk to, what they are interested in, how they spend their money and where they travel in order to find secret terrorism cells inside America. The NSA is engaged in a widespread mining of so-called transactional data — domestic telephone records, credit card purchases, travel data, international financial data, internet searches, subject lines and headers of emails — pulling in immense data about Americans and foreigners, which it then uses to find particular targets — or even, according to Gorman — to decide what cities to target for blanket surveillance. (Wired) | |||
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keywords: Cybersecurity, Detroit, Digital Collection System, Federal Bureau Of Investigation, George W Bush, Internet, National Security Agency, Privacy, Seymour Hersch, Siobhan Gorman, Terrorists, US Congress, US Department Of Justice, US Information Awareness Office, United States, Wall Street Journal
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| 10/1/2007 |
Prime Minister Harper officially endorses North American Union with Council of Foreign Relations visit Prime Minister Stephen Harper's appearance at the New York City based Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) on 25 September 2007, was an official endorsement and expression of solidarity on the North American Union agenda. Harvard University educated CNN Veteran anchor Lou Dobbs, has further confirmed the official endorsement of the Stephen Harper Minority Conservative government on North American Union, or "New America". Mr. Harper has been apparently directed by the principal funders of the Conservative Party of Canada, which are ideologically linked to the CFR, to assimilate Canada into a new "Fortress North America" which is controlled by the U.S. political-military-industrial complex by no later than 2010. Indeed, the Stephen Harper government has been reported to be in the process of getting various Canadian government departments and agencies to "harmonize", with U.S. governmental agencies, to expedite the assimilation of Canada into the neo-conservative vision of a "Fortress North America". (The Canadian) | |||
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keywords: CNN, Canada, Conservative Party Of Canada, Council On Foreign Relations, George W Bush, Harvard University, John Manley, Lou Dobbs, Mexico, Military-industrial Complex, New World Order, New York City, North American Free Trade Agreement, North American Union, Ottawa, Parliament Of Canada, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, Terrorists, United States, Wall Street Journal
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| 4/18/2007 |
Gardasil: the Cervical Cancer Vaccine? FDA Approval Not Based On Actual Cancer Prevention The FDA-approved cervical cancer vaccine "Gardasil," has been debated for a number of reasons including its cost of $360 (plus the cost of doctors visits to get the shots) and the fact that it is approved for young girls and the moral and sexual implications associated with this. Up until recently, however, no one challenged the vaccine on the grounds of its presumed safety and efficacy. The fact that it is FDA approved was considered prima facie evidence that the vaccine is both safe and effective. We must remember, however, that the FDA that approved Gardasil is an agency with countless conflicts of interest that has approved drugs and vaccines that were later found to be dangerous or deadly such as Vioxx and RotaShield. When Cancer Monthly began looking at the research that enabled this "cervical cancer vaccine" to receive FDA approval we were astounded to find that this approval was not based on the vaccine's actual prevention of cervical cancer. Instead a surrogate was used precancerous lesions. We were pleased to see a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that echoed these same issues "Questions on Efficacy Cloud a Cancer Vaccine" April 16, 2007; Page A1. The WSJ stated, "The Food and Drug Administration didn't ask its panel of experts advising on Gardasil to rule on whether the vaccine specifically prevented the cancer itself." Cancer Not Measured How effective is Gardasil in decreasing the incidence of cervical cancer? 100%? 50%? No one really knows because this question has not yet been answered. As of today, the Gardasil vaccine has never been proven to decrease the actual incidence of cervical cancer. In the studies that led to the vaccine's approval, the incidence of cervical cancer was not measured. Instead CIN (cervical intraepithelial neoplasia) 2/3 and AIS (adenocarcinoma in situ) were used as the surrogate markers for prevention of cervical cancer because according to the vaccine's insert "CIN 2/3 and AIS are the immediate and necessary precursors of squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma of the cervix, respectively." While this is true it is also true that CIN 2/3 and AIS usually do not lead to cancer. For example, according to published data, CIN2 only leads to invasive carcinoma 5% of the time and CIN3 only leads to invasive carcinoma 12% of the time.1 (Cancer Monthly) | |||
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keywords: Cancer, Cancer Monthly, Centers For Disease Control, DNA, Elizabeth Unger, Food And Drug Administration, Gardasil, Hpv, Karen Goldenthal, National Cancer Institute, Rotashield, Scott Emerson, Steven Rosenberg, United States, University Of Washington, Vaccines, Vincent Devita Jr, Vioxx, Wall Street Journal
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| 12/16/2005 |
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications. The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches. "This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches." Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight. (New York Times) | |||
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| 9/10/2005 |
Cheney quip adds fuel to Katrina politics Dick Cheney became the latest high profile official to offer a soundbite about Hurricane Katrina, saying all evacuees he's met have been 'thankful,' adding to a spate of comments raising eyebrows regarding the Katrina disaster (The Raw Story) | |||
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keywords: Barbara Bush, Dick Cheney, Federal Emergency Management Agency, George W Bush, Houston Chronicle, Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana, Michael Brown, Michael Chertoff, Mississippi, New Orleans, Purva Patel, Richard H Baker, Tom Delay, US Department Of Homeland Security, United States, Wall Street Journal
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| 10/17/2004 |
Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion. ''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . . ''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.'' Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?''' (New York Times) | |||
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| 10/6/2001 |
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh Connection with 9/11 hijackers On October 6, 2001, a senior-level U.S. government official, told CNN that U.S. investigators had discovered Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh (Sheik Syed), using the alias "Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad" had sent about $100,000 from the United Arab Emirates to Mohammed Atta. (Wikipedia) | |||
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| 10/27/1998 |
Is the Internet dead? At a recent Wall Street Journal conference at New York's World Trade Center, two telephone company CEOs actually said the Internet is "dead." I want to assure you that it is not -- bogging and collapsing maybe, but not dead. Here come the Internet's next generations. CEO Bill Esrey talked about Sprint's ION. With acronyms including SONet, ATM, and DSL, ION will become the kind of network that Sprint customers really want, not the old Internet, which is "dead" really. CEO Rich Notebaert, who once wrote an op-ed in the Journal saying the Internet is "dead," scoffed at the idea that Ameritech and other telephone companies "don't get it." And then he actually let it slip again -- I was just 15 feet away -- and said the Internet is "dead." (CNN) | |||
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keywords: Ameritech, Bill Esrey, Internet, Internet2, Net Neutrality, New York City, Rich Notebaert, Sprint Nextel, United States, Wall Street Journal, World Trade Center, Y2k
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