Test AltBib.Com Backup Copy Report Broken Link and Get Redirected To Backup Copy
In a number of big ways, the offline backup
is far inferior to this online version,
but it is there juuust in case we lose
free speech as we know it on the internet.
DATABASE TOTALS:6,082 Reference Links,
with 11,639 Tags/Keywords,
with 68,035 Taggings
AltBib.Com is a free, research database with articles,
documents and videos shining light on interesting topics.
Most links are to significant information 'validated' as 'true' by the Mainstream Media, sometimes buried in the final paragraphs,
which are directly referenced by the Alternative Media/New Media in creating controversial alternative analysis.
So check out some mainstream evidence and see if you naturally end up agreeing with an alternate analysis.
You can pick a tag/keyword/topic or source from the menus above to start wandering the database,
or make more complicated Custom Filters.
Or use the Search bar to type in tags or news headlines to refine your filter.
Please help this resource grow by suggesting new links, and adding tags to or rating links.
More tools launching soon...
Documents are largely from what is referenced by interesting films, Prison Planet/Infowars and the Corbett Report. This database is a quick reference and for your analysis, more independent from others' interpretations. The database includes almost all source documents and articles from these films: Loose Change (Final Cut & 2nd Edition), Fabled Enemies, The Obama Deception, End Game, Martial Law 9/11, American Dictators, Matrix of Evil, Zeitgeist: Addendum, Who Killed The Electric Car?, The World According To Monsanto, Mind The Gap, and 7/7 Ripple Effect.
Click Now for all the details
Total Link Matches Found: 184Showing Links #1 - 50+more
Iran: a quickly evolving geopolitical imbroglio As the days go by, the situation with Iran just gets increasingly complex and worrisome given the egregious saber rattling coming from both the West and Iran alike.
As I outlined in my article entitled “Positioning for war with Iran?”, it has become clear that the West is either arming surrounding neighbors as a deterrent, preparation for an unprovoked strike, or perhaps even to goad Iran into attacking Western interest first, thus justifying brutal retaliation.
My fledgling series about the global growth of NATO and the Western empire also covers aspects of this greater trend and how these issues constantly evolve and how so many seemingly disconnected events are in fact inseparably linked.
While these issues may seem disconnected for some, I think it is quite important to point out that in fact they couldn’t be more closely related in that they are both symptoms of the cancerous war profiteering industry that is not only robbing the American people blind in the name of freedom but also eliminating our civil liberties and slaughtering innocent people around the globe. (End The Lie)
ACLU report card finds fault with Obama, rivals The American Civil Liberties Union has issued "Liberty Watch 2012," its report card for presidential candidates on issues like surveillance, torture, gay rights and immigration. No one gets an A, including President Obama.
Obama, the only Democrat among the 10 candidates rated, got a perfect score
four "torches"
on only one issue, allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, for his backing of the December 2010 law that repealed "don't ask, don't tell."
But he received lower marks on immigration, abortion rights and "closing Guantanamo Bay and indefinite detention," where his one-torch rating was attributed to backtracking on a promise to shut the prison for suspected terrorists and his support for holding their trials in military commissions.
The highest overall rating went to former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republican-turned-Libertarian, who opposes the Patriot Act and
unlike Obama
supports the right of gays and lesbians to marry. Among the leading Republican candidates, libertarian-leaning Rep. Ron Paul also got a higher score than Obama despite low ratings in several categories.
The ACLU gave the Texas congressman high marks for opposing the Patriot Act and indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, condemning waterboarding and voting to repeal "don't ask, don't tell." But it criticized Paul's call for an end to "birthright citizenship" for children of illegal immigrants, his support of the law that denies federal marriage benefits to same-sex couples and his opposition to abortion. (San Francisco Chronicle)
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)
Hawaiian singer surprises Obama summit with 'Occupy' song A popular Hawaiian recording artist turned a top-security dinner of Pacific Rim leaders hosted by President Barack Obama into a subtle protest with a song in support of the "Occupy" movement.
Makana, who goes by one name, was enlisted to play a luau, or Hawaiian feast, Saturday night for leaders assembled in Obama’s birthplace Honolulu for an annual summit that is formulating plans for a Pacific free-trade pact.
But in the midst of the dinner on the resort strip Waikiki Beach, he pulled open his jacket to reveal a T-shirt that read "Occupy with Aloha," using the Hawaiian word whose various meanings include love and peace. He then sang a marathon version of his new song "We Are The Many." (Agence France-Presse)
The New Progressive Movement (Opinion) OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.
Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze.
Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time. (New York Times)
Why Occupy Wall Street Is Bigger Than Left vs. Right (Matt Taibbi) I was surprised, amused and annoyed all at once when I found out yesterday that some moron-provocateur linked to notorious right-wing cybergoon Andrew Breitbart had infiltrated
a series of private e-mail lists – including one that I have been participating in – and was using them to run an exposé on the supposed behind-the-scenes marionetting of the OWS movement by the liberal media.
According to various web reports, what happened was that a private "cyber-security researcher" named Thomas Ryan somehow accessed a series of email threads between various individuals and dumped them all on BigGovernment.com, Breitbart's site. Gawker is also reporting that Ryan forwarded some of these emails to the FBI and the NYPD.
I have no idea whether those email exchanges are the same as the ones I was involved with. But what is clear is that some private email exchanges between myself and a number of other people – mostly financial journalists and activists who know each other from having covered the crisis from the same angle in the last three years, people like Barry Ritholz, Dylan Ratigan, former regulator William Black, Glenn Greenwald and myself – ended up being made public. (Rolling Stone)
In Protest, the Power of Place THE ever expanding Occupy Wall Street movement, with encampments now not only in Lower Manhattan but also in Washington, London and other cities, proves among other things that no matter how instrumental new media have become in spreading protest these days, nothing replaces people taking to the streets.
Another reminder came late last week when the landlord of Zuccotti Park, where the demonstrators in New York City have settled, at the last minute withdrew a request for police assistance in cleaning up the park. This, at least temporarily, averted a confrontation in front of the global media over what protesters regarded as just a pretext to evict them.
We tend to underestimate the political power of physical places. Then Tahrir Square comes along. Now it’s Zuccotti Park, until four weeks ago an utterly obscure city-block-size downtown plaza with a few trees and concrete benches, around the corner from ground zero and two blocks north of Wall Street on Broadway. A few hundred people with ponchos and sleeping bags have put it on the map.
Kent State, Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall: we clearly use locales, edifices, architecture to house our memories and political energy. Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations. (New York Times)
Quake raises safety concerns as nuclear plant shut The largest earthquake to hit the East Coast of the United States in 67 years raised concerns on Tuesday about the safety of the country's nuclear power plants.
The 5.8 magnitude quake's epicenter was just a few miles from the two-reactor North Anna nuclear power plant operated by Dominion Resources in Mineral, Virginia, 80 miles southwest of Washington.
The plant lost power and automatically halted operations after the quake. While a Dominion spokesman reported no "major" damage to the facility, three diesel generators were required to kick in and keep the reactors' radioactive cores cool. A fourth diesel unit failed.
While nuclear power plants can operate safely on back-up power, failure of generators was a key reason for the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant after a 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami in March.
"Nuclear power plants lose a significant margin of safety when they're forced to rely on these emergency back-up systems," said Paul Gunter, director of reactor oversight at Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear lobby group. (Reuters)
Stop Coddling the Super-Rich OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.
These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.
Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent. (New York Times)
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)
Vermont Becomes Eighth Medical Marijuana Dispensary State Vermont is now set to become the eighth medical marijuana dispensary set. Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) Thursday signed into law a bill that will create a system of up to four explicitly authorized and state regulated dispensaries for medical marijuana patients. (Drug War Chronicle)
Grameen yet to bring micro-loans to D.C., a year after Muhammad Yunus announcement Since its founding in 1976 by Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank has made more than $9 billion worth of micro-loans to 8 million poor and unemployed borrowers, a track record impressive enough to earn the man and bank the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
Its U.S. offshoot, however, has been unable to raise $6 million to bring Yunus’s banking for the poor to Washington. (Washington Post)
Pakistanis disclose name of CIA operative The public outing of the CIA station chief here threatened on Monday to deepen the rift between the United States and Pakistan, with U.S. officials saying they believed the disclosure had been made deliberately by Pakistan’s main spy agency.
If true, the leak would be a sign that Pakistan’s powerful security establishment, far from feeling chastened by the killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison city last week, is seeking to demonstrate its leverage over Washington and retaliate for the unilateral U.S. operation.
Less than six months ago, the identity of the previous CIA station chief in Islamabad was also disclosed in an act that U.S. officials blamed on their counterparts in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI.
The new station chief, who runs one of the largest U.S. intelligence-gathering operations in the world, played an instrumental role in overseeing efforts to confirm bin Laden’s location before last week’s raid. (Washington Post)
Osama Bin Laden Pronounced Dead…For the Ninth Time When Obama pronounced Osama Bin Laden dead in a televised announcement heard round the world last night, he was at least the ninth major head of state or high-ranking government official to have done so.
Given Bin Laden’s documented kidney problems and consequent need for dialysis, government officials, heads of state and counterterrorism experts have repeatedly opined that Osama Bin Laden has in fact been dead for some time. These assertions are based on Bin Laden’s failing health in late 2001 and visible signs of his deteriorating condition, as well as actual reports of his death from the same time frame.
In July of 2001, Osama Bin Laden was flown to the American Hospital in Dubai for kidney treatment. According to French intelligence sources, he was there met by the local CIA attache. When the agent bragged about his encounter to friends later, he was promptly recalled to Washington.
On the eve of September 11, Osama Bin Laden was staying in a Pakistani military hospital under the watchful eye of Pakistan’s ISI, the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA with deep ties to the American intelligence community. (Corbett Report)
"Hold Both Parties to High Standards": Van Jones, Obama’s Ex-Green Jobs Czar More than 10,000 people converged in Washington, D.C., this past week to mobilize around the issue of climate change at the Power Shift 2011 conference. Van Jones, a longtime environmental advocate and former green jobs adviser in the Obama White House, gave the keynote address. "We pull out of the ground death, and we burn it in our engines. And we burn death in our power plants, without ceremony," Jones said. "And then we act shocked when, having pulled death out of the ground and burned it—we act shocked when we get death from our skies in the form of global warming and death on our oceans in the form of oil spills and death in our children’s lungs in the form of asthma and cancer."
VAN JONES: Shift the power politically, and don’t let anybody tell you that you should only hold one party in this town accountable. You have to be wise enough to hold both parties to high standards. Both parties. Hold this whole town accountable. Hold people, but keep them accountable, because that’s how you can shift the power.
So don’t let anybody divide you. I love that we have a movement of people in America now talking about liberty: our sisters and brothers in the Tea Party. I’m glad they’re talking about liberty. And we need to understand that we believe in liberty in this movement. But we’re not stopping with just the first word in the Pledge of Allegiance. I love liberty. Given what’s happened with my ancestors, nobody loves liberty more than I do. But the Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t stop there. The Pledge of Allegiance says, "Liberty and justice for all." "Liberty and justice for all." And that’s what your movement is about: liberty, yes, and justice—justice for the immigrants, justice for the lesbians and the gays, justice for the African Americans, justice for women, justice for the rural poor, justice for the Native Americans. "Liberty and justice for all." Shift the power! Shift the power! Shift the power! Shift the power! Thank you. (Democracy Now)
Obama's Off Base Maddow:
A Democratic President kicks his base in the teeth on something as fundamental as civil liberties—he puts the nail in the coffin of a civil liberties promise he made on his first full day in office—and he does it on the first day of his re-election effort. And Beltway reaction to that is... huh, good move. That's the difference between Republican politics and Democratic politics. The Republicans may not love their base, but they fear them and play to them. The Democratic Party institutional structures of D.C., and the Beltway press in particular, not only hate the Democratic base—they think it's good politics for Democratic politicians to kick that base publicly whenever possible. Only the base itself will ever change that.
Greenwald:
One thing is for certain: right now, the Democratic Party is absolutely correct in its assessment that kicking its base is good politics. Why is that? Because they know that they have inculcated their base with sufficient levels of fear and hatred of the GOP, so that no matter how often the Party kicks its base, no matter how often Party leaders break their promises and betray their ostensible values, the base will loyally and dutifully support the Party and its leaders (at least in presidential elections; there is a good case that the Democrats got crushed in 2010 in large part because their base was so unenthusiastic).
In light of that fact, ask yourself this: if you were a Democratic Party official, wouldn't you also ignore—and, when desirable, step on—the people who you know will support you no matter what you do to them? (The Stranger)
San Francisco Rainwater: Radiation 181 Times Above US Drinking Water Standard Radiation from Japan rained on Berkeley, California, during recent storms at levels that exceeded drinking water standards by 181 times. A rooftop water monitoring program managed by the University of California at Berkeley’s Department of Nuclear Engineering detected substantial spikes in rain-borne iodine-131 during those torrential downpours. The levels exceeded federal drinking water thresholds, known as Maximum Contaminant Levels -- or MCLs -- by as much as 181 times or 18,100%. Iodine-131 is one of the most cancer-causing toxic radioactive isotopes spewed when nuclear power plants are in meltdown. It is being ingested by cows, which have begun passing it through into their milk and radioactivity has been detected. [Multiple Sources]
Specific Scientific Data
The iodine-131 level in the rainwater sample taken on the roof of Etcheverry Hall on the campus of UC Berkeley on March 23rd, 2011, from 9:06-18:00hrs Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) states radioactivity levels at 20.1 Becquerels per Litre (Bq/L) = 543 PicoCuries per Litre (pCi/L). The federal maximum level of iodine-131 allowed in drinking water is 3 pCi/L or 0.111 Becquerels per Litre. The sample exceeded the federal guidelines for drinking water by 181 times. The UC Berkeley researchers also discovered trace levels of iodine-131 and other radioactive isotopes, believed to have originated in Fukushima, in commercially available milk and in a local stream within California. [UC Berkeley] (Business Insider)
How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs As the violence spread, billions of dollars of cartel cash began to seep into the global financial system. But a special investigation by the Observer reveals how the increasingly frantic warnings of one London whistleblower were ignored
On 10 April 2006, a DC-9 jet landed in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, on the Gulf of Mexico, as the sun was setting. Mexican soldiers, waiting to intercept it, found 128 cases packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100m. But something else – more important and far-reaching – was discovered in the paper trail behind the purchase of the plane by the Sinaloa narco-trafficking cartel.
During a 22-month investigation by agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and others, it emerged that the cocaine smugglers had bought the plane with money they had laundered through one of the biggest banks in the United States: Wachovia, now part of the giant Wells Fargo.
The authorities uncovered billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveller's cheques and cash shipments through Mexican exchanges into Wachovia accounts. Wachovia was put under immediate investigation for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme. Of special significance was that the period concerned began in 2004, which coincided with the first escalation of violence along the US-Mexico border that ignited the current drugs war.
Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. Now that the year's "deferred prosecution" has expired, the bank is in effect in the clear. It paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine. (London Guardian)
Border deal raises sovereignty issues, ex-envoy says A proposed border deal between Canada and the United States will mean a tradeoff between sovereignty and security, says a former ambassador to Washington.
Michael Wilson, a retired diplomat and one-time Tory finance minister, told a defence and security conference there must be understanding, trust and confidence for the plan to work.
The planned perimeter deal is aimed at increasing cooperation on security practices to fortify the North American border while allowing the unfettered flow of goods, people and services across the 49th parallel.
“This border agreement does raise some very significant issues on sovereignty, on privacy, on the form of collaboration between both sides. Sharing of information is very important to being able to make this agreement work,” Wilson said Thursday. (Toronto Star)
Revolution U: What Egypt Learned From The Students Who Overthrew Milosevic Early in 2008, workers at a government-owned textile factory in the Egyptian mill town of El-Mahalla el-Kubra announced that they were going on strike on the first Sunday in April to protest high food prices and low wages. They caught the attention of a group of tech-savvy young people an hour's drive to the south in the capital city of Cairo, who started a Facebook group to organize protests and strikes on April 6 throughout Egypt in solidarity with the mill workers. To their shock, the page quickly acquired some 70,000 followers.
But what worked so smoothly online proved much more difficult on the street. Police occupied the factory in Mahalla and headed off the strike. The demonstrations there turned violent: Protesters set fire to buildings, and police started shooting, killing at least two people. The solidarity protests around Egypt, meanwhile, fizzled out, in most places blocked by police. The Facebook organizers had never agreed on tactics, whether Egyptians should stay home or fill the streets in protest. People knew they wanted to do something. But no one had a clear idea of what that something was.
The botched April 6 protests, the leaders realized in their aftermath, had been an object lesson in the limits of social networking as a tool of democratic revolution. Facebook could bring together tens of thousands of sympathizers online, but it couldn't organize them once they logged off. It was a useful communication tool to call people to -- well, to what? The April 6 leaders did not know the answer to this question. So they decided to learn from others who did. In the summer of 2009, Mohamed Adel, a 20-year-old blogger and April 6 activist, went to Belgrade, Serbia. (Foreign Policy)
Sen. Leahy on anthrax case: 'It's not closed' After the deadly shooting rampage in Tucson, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) was asked to reflect on his own experience as the would-be target of an assassin. That's when he let slip something that he rarely talks about publicly: He has never accepted the FBI's decision to close the case in the series of anthrax-laced letters mailed to public officials in fall 2001.
"I still wonder who sent it and why they sent it," the Judiciary Committee chairman told a crowd gathered last month at the Newseum in Northwest Washington to hear his 2011 legislative agenda.
More than a month later, Leahy was given fresh evidence this week that the science in the case was not airtight, reopening emotional wounds 91/2 years after letters sent to him and then-Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) helped cause the deaths of five people and sickened 17 others. On Tuesday, the National Research Council questioned the efficacy of the genetic testing used by the FBI to allege that a Fort Detrick scientist had acted alone in mailing the deadly letters to Capitol Hill and media outlets. (Washington Post)
Rahm's Back In The Running For Chicago Mayor Host Scott Simon talks to Carol Marin, political columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and political editor for NBC 5 News, about the Illinois Supreme Court ruling that put former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel back of the ballot in the Chicago mayor's race.
Rahm Emanuel's name is back on the ballot, this time for good. The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously overturned an appellate court ruling that Mr. Emanuel did not meet the Chicago's residency requirements to run for mayor, because he had lived in Washington D.C. while serving as President Obama's chief of staff and hadnt returned to reside in Chicago long enough before he started to run.
Got that? What an eventful week, that began with the ruling that knocked Mr. Emanuel off the ballot, the decision that put him back on and a debate of the mayoral candidates. (National Public Radio)
The Fourth American Revolution The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. -- The Fourth Turning -- Strauss & Howe --1997 (The Burning Platform)
EXPOSED: Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago Political Syndicate (w/ Wayne Madsen) Who is Rahm Emanuel? How did he get into politics? The Emanuel family; just how powerful are they? What influence do they have on lobbying, and power politics? His workings with the Chicago Democratic Machine, how did he get started, is there a shady past he is trying to hide? Is Rahm being blackmailed because of his past with Obama on Chicago's North Side? The Blago trial; why was he and others never questioned about Obama, Valerie Jarret, and Jesse Jackson Jr. What role did he play in the attempt to bring the Olympics to Chicago? What is the connection to key players in Chicago and Washington DC winding up dead? Are there secret video tapes waiting to surface? If he is Mayor, what will the city of Chicago look like? Could he become another Rudy Giuliani? In this exclusive Special Investigation the Reality Report begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting goes deep and digs up the dirt that no Chicago media outlet would dare to report. This is a must see expose for anyone who has questions about Rahm Emanuel but just didn't know who to ask. (Reality Report)
Rep. Ron Paul, G.O.P. Loner, Comes In From Cold As virtually all of Washington was declaring WikiLeaks’s disclosures of secret diplomatic cables an act of treason, Representative Ron Paul was applauding the organization for exposing the United States’ “delusional foreign policy.”
For this, the conservative blog RedState dubbed him “Al Qaeda’s favorite member of Congress.”
It was hardly the first time that Mr. Paul had marched to his own beat. During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, he was best remembered for declaring in a debate that the 9/11 attacks were the Muslim world’s response to American military intervention around the globe. A fellow candidate, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, interrupted and demanded that he take back the words — a request that Mr. Paul refused.
During his 20 years in Congress, Mr. Paul has staked out the lonely end of 434-to-1 votes against legislation that he considers unconstitutional, even on issues as ceremonial as granting Mother Teresa a Congressional Gold Medal. His colleagues have dubbed him “Dr. No,” but his wife will insist that they have the spelling wrong: he is really Dr. Know.
Now it appears others are beginning to credit him with some wisdom — or at least acknowledging his passionate following. (New York Times)
Budding Prospects: Youth Activists Push Marijuana Reform On November 7 a group of student activists gathered in a room on the University of Colorado campus to discuss strategies for how to run a marijuana legalization campaign in the 2012 elections. Five days earlier, voters in California had defeated Proposition 19 by a margin of seven points. Although the vote represented the largest percentage a US legalization measure has ever garnered (46.5 percent), many in the drug policy reform community were discouraged. Young activists who had spent the past several months encouraging students on California campuses to register, and who worked furiously in the final days to get out the vote, were exhausted. There were a lot of sullen expressions in downtown Oakland on election night. But for the students in Boulder, and in some ways for the legalization movement more broadly, the fight is just beginning.
After all the media attention heaped on the Prop 19 campaign, it should come as no surprise that the vanguard of the legalization drive in Colorado is made up of college-age activists. Motivating young voters was a central focus of the grassroots effort for Prop 19, and to a large extent it worked. In a postelection follow-up, the Public Policy Institute of California found that 62 percent of voters under 34 supported the initiative. The campaign I helped to organize through Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) printed more than 100,000 door hangers with bar codes that, when scanned by cellphones, directed students to their polling place. And we didn't stop with California. We worked with our partners in the Just Say Now campaign to organize phone banks staffed by students from all over the country, who made thousands of calls for the low cost of several pizzas per night. (The Nation)
Fmr. Intelligence Director: New Cyberattack May Be Worse Than 9/11 Speaking at the Washington Ideas Forum at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., former Director of National Intelligence and Director of the National Security Agency Mike McConnell said that the U.S. is unprepared for a cyberattack and must overhaul its defenses.
"The warnings are over. It could happen tomorrow," he said of a large-scale cyberattack against the U.S., which could impact the global economy "an order of magnitude surpassing" the attacks of September 11. McConnell, in a panel with Bush administration Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend and Washingtonian reporter Shane Harris, called cybersecurity "the wolf at the door." (The Atlantic)
Big Brother Obama: US to spy on Internet messaging -- Regulations to target Skype, Facebook, Blackberry The Obama White House is backing new regulations that would compel popular Internet messaging services like Facebook, Skype and Blackberry to open up their systems to FBI surveillance, the New York Times reported Monday, citing federal law enforcement and national security officials.
The threat to democratic rights goes far beyond anything envisioned by the Bush administration. The goal is to make all forms of electronic communication that use the Internet subject to wiretapping and interception by federal police agencies.
In the past few years there has been a large-scale shift from conventional telephone communication to Internet-based messaging, which is both cheaper and more secure.
The Times article gave two examples of government efforts to intercept encrypted or peer-to-peer communications that ran into technical obstacles, one involving a drug cartel, the other related to the failed Times Square bombing earlier this year. These examples were chosen to support the claim by the Obama administration that the buildup of surveillance is part of a struggle against crime and “terrorism.”
However, the Obama administration has defined “terrorism” so widely that the term now covers a vast array of constitutionally protected forms of political opposition to the policies of the US government, including speaking, writing, political demonstrations, even the filing of legal briefs. (World Socialist Web Site)
Daily Buzz: US Airmen Give Eerie Testimony at UFO Press Conference An interesting development for UFO conspiracy theorists, a group of former US Airmen held a press conference Monday to call the US government to task for saying UFOs don't pose any national security threat.
During the press conference in Washington D.C., seven former air force officers who had been stationed at different nuclear defense bases around the country not only said they witnessed UFOs but that the UFOs were able to disable nuclear weapons.
"Nobody was injured and I don't consider it an attack but it certainly it was a national security incident and something the Air Force said has never happen in their official policy documents," said Robert Salas, a former U.S. Air Force Nuclear Launch Officer. (Woman's Day)
Was San Bruno Explosion a Plane Crash? A number of reports suggest that the "natural gas pipeline explosion" Sept. 9 that killed seven, injured 50 and leveled 40 homes in San Bruno CA may have involved a plane crash or a missile. If so, there is a massive cover-up taking place.
On 09-10-10 at 11:06 A.M. a huge jet, resembling Air force One flew over San Jose. At 11:29 A.M. an F-18 flew over, and at 12:46 P.M. an AC -130 gunship (with the side gun turrets) followed.
The F-18's engines were roaring like a freight train. The F-18 appeared to be carrying large fuel tanks and ordinance. Being shortly before 9-11, I thought, "here comes another false flag incident."
Above is a photo of the F-18 as it flew over. Below is a photo showing the ordinance these jets can carry. It is not unusual to see an F-18 fly overhead here. It is very unusual for them to be heavily laden with weapons. It had its landing gear down, as you can see, and was headed north (towards Moffett Federal air base, Travis Air Force base, and San Francisco). These are all within thirty miles of San Bruno, where the pipeline allegedly exploded. (Henry Makow)
Congress Mulls Stiff Crypto Laws The encryption wars have begun.
For nearly a decade, privacy mavens have been worrying that a terrorist attack could prompt Congress to ban communications-scrambling products that frustrate both police wiretaps and U.S. intelligence agencies.
Tuesday's catastrophe, which shed more blood on American soil than any event since the Civil War, appears to have started that process.
Some politicians and defense hawks are warning that extremists such as Osama bin Laden, who U.S. officials say is a crypto-aficionado and the top suspect in Tuesday's attacks, enjoy unfettered access to privacy-protecting software and hardware that render their communications unintelligible to eavesdroppers.
In a floor speech on Thursday, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire) called for a global prohibition on encryption products without backdoors for government surveillance. (Wired)
COLUMN-In drug war, the beginning of the end? Bernd Debusmann Between 1971, when Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, and 2008, the latest year for which official figures are available, American law enforcement officials made more than 40 million drug arrests. That number roughly equals the population of California, or of the 33 biggest U.S. cities.
Forty million arrests speak volumes about America's longest war, which was meant to throttle drug production at home and abroad, cut supplies across the borders, and keep people from using drugs. The marathon effort has boosted the prison industry but failed so obviously to meet its objectives that there is a growing chorus of calls for the legalization of illicit drugs.
In the United States, that brings together odd bedfellows. Libertarians in the tea party movement, for example, and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization of former police officers, narcotics agents, judges and prosecutors who favor legalizing all drugs, not only marijuana, the world's most widely-used illicit drug.
"Taking all this together, there is reason to believe that we are at the beginning of the end of the drug war as we know it," says Aaron Houston, a veteran Washington lobbyist for marijuana policy reform.
Far-fetched? Perhaps. But how many people in the late 1920s, at the height of the government's fight against the likes of Al Capone, would have foreseen that alcohol prohibition would end in just a few years? Prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933 and is now considered a failed experiment in social engineering.
Alcohol and marijuana prohibition have much in common: both in effect handed production, sales and distribution of a commodity in high demand to criminal organizations, both filled the prisons (America's population behind bars is now the world's largest), both diverted the resources of law enforcement, and both created millions of scoff-laws. (Reuters)
Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they're viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that "scanned images cannot be stored or recorded."
Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for "testing, training, and evaluation purposes." The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports.
Body scanners penetrate clothing to provide a highly detailed image so accurate that critics have likened it to a virtual strip search. Technologies vary, with millimeter wave systems capturing fuzzier images, and backscatter X-ray machines able to show precise anatomical detail. The U.S. government likes the idea because body scanners can detect concealed weapons better than traditional magnetometers. (CNet News)
'Just Say Now': Left-Right Coalition Launches Campaign To Legalize Pot A transpartisan coalition of prosecutors, judges, cops, students, bloggers and political operatives on both sides of the aisle launched a campaign Tuesday to bring an end to marijuana prohibition, focusing on ballot initiatives in 2010 and 2012. The campaign, "Just Say Now," gets its name from Nancy Reagan's iconic anti-drug slogan from the 1980s that has become synonymous with the government's black-and-white approach to drug policy.
"The stars are aligning in a very interesting way with Tea Party activists, who are generally libertarian," said Aaron Houston, head of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, on a conference call Tuesday afternoon announcing the formation of the coalition. "On the right and left it's a very popular issue."
The campaign will be backing marijuana initiatives in 2010 in Arizona, Oregon, California, Colorado and South Dakota. The group will back initiatives in Nevada and elsewhere in 2012. (Huffington Post)
Capitol Hill Marijuana Lobby Readies New Voter Campaign Aaron Houston, who for the last seven years has been Capitol Hill's only full-time lobbyist for the legalization of marijuana, is preparing a new national campaign aimed at voters. He has high hopes that a union of liberal Democrats and small-government conservatives can coalesce around the marijuana issue. (Capitol News Connection)
In response to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and the litigation in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia pertaining thereto, the Marshals Service has completed a supplemental search for records relating to the component of your request seeking "All unfiltered or unoscured images captured using Whole Body Imaging technology." (Department of Justice)
The year America dissolved It was 2017. Clans were governing America.
The first clans organized around local police forces. The conservatives’ war on crime during the late 20th century and the Bush/Obama war on terror during the first decade of the 21st century had resulted in the police becoming militarized and unaccountable.
As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and
the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police.
The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money.
With the dollar’s demise, import prices skyrocketed. As Americans were unable to afford foreign-made goods, the transnational corporations that were producing offshore for US markets were bankrupted, further eroding the government’s revenue base. (Paul Craig Roberts)
Obama Is Preparing to Bomb Iran After about two and a half years during which the danger of war between the United States and Iran was at a relatively low level, this threat is now rapidly increasing. A pattern of political and diplomatic events, military deployments, and media chatter now indicates that Anglo-American ruling circles, acting through the troubled Obama administration, are currently gearing up for a campaign of bombing against Iran, combined with special forces incursions designed to stir up rebellions among the non-Persian nationalities of the Islamic Republic. Naturally, the probability of a new fake Gulf of Tonkin incident or false flag terror attack staged by the Anglo-American war party and attributed to Iran or its proxies is also growing rapidly. (Webster Tarpley)
NAACP Resolution Calls on Tea Party to Repudiate 'Racist Elements' in Movement The NAACP adopted a resolution Tuesday condemning "racist elements" in the Tea Party movement and calling on the movement's leaders to repudiate bigotry, despite claims from Tea Partiers that the measure is just a political ploy.
The nation's leading civil rights group took up the language at its annual convention in Kansas City, Mo. The resolution initially said the NAACP would "repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties" and stand against the movement's attempt to "push our country back to the pre-civil rights era," though the wording was amended to downplay criticism of all Tea Partiers while asking them to repudiate bigots in their own ranks. (Fox)
Hacking the Electric Grid? You and What Army? Grid-hacking is back in the news, with the unveiling of “Perfect Citizen,” the National Security Agency’s creepily named effort to protect the networks of electrical companies and nuclear power plants.
People have claimed in the past to be able to turn off the internet, there are reports of foreign penetrations into government systems, “proof” of foreign interest in attacking U.S. critical infrastructure based on studies, and concerns about adversary capabilities based on allegations of successful critical infrastructure attacks. Which begs the question: If it’s so easy to turn off the lights using your laptop, how come it doesn’t happen more often?
The fact of the matter is that it isn’t easy to do any of these things. Your average power grid or drinking-water system isn’t analogous to a PC or even to a corporate network. The complexity of such systems, and the use of proprietary operating systems and applications that are not readily available for study by your average hacker, make the development of exploits for any uncovered vulnerabilities much more difficult than using Metasploit.
To start, these systems are rarely connected directly to the public internet. And that makes gaining access to grid-controlling networks a challenge for all but the most dedicated, motivated and skilled — nation-states, in other words.
The fact of the matter is that it isn’t easy to do any of these things. Your average power grid or drinking-water system isn’t analogous to a PC or even to a corporate network. The complexity of such systems, and the use of proprietary operating systems and applications that are not readily available for study by your average hacker, make the development of exploits for any uncovered vulnerabilities much more difficult than using Metasploit.
To start, these systems are rarely connected directly to the public internet. And that makes gaining access to grid-controlling networks a challenge for all but the most dedicated, motivated and skilled — nation-states, in other words. (Wired)
When Capitalism Meets Cannabis One of the odder experiments in the recent history of American capitalism is unfolding in the Rockies: the country’s first attempt at fully regulating, licensing and taxing a for-profit marijuana trade, The New York Times’s David Segal writes in a lengthy look at the developing industry.
More than 80,000 people here now have medical marijuana certificates, which are essentially prescriptions, and for months new enrollees have signed up at a rate of roughly 1,000 a day.
As supply met demand, politicians decided that a body of regulations was overdue. The state’s Department of Revenue has spent months conceiving rules for this new industry, ending the reefer-madness phase here in favor of buzz-killing specifics about cultivation, distribution, storage and every other part of the business. (New York Times)
Kids of lesbians have fewer behavioral problems, study suggests A nearly 25-year study concluded that children raised in lesbian households were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers. The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations and assessed their children's well-being through a series of questionnaires and interviews. (CNN)
President Obama under fire for BP spill response President Barack Obama is on the defensive over his presidential multitasking, for refusing to scrub his schedule of events that seem peripheral — even trivial — compared with the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.
As oozing oil fouls Louisiana’s marshes, Obama has committed to maintaining the semblance of a regular schedule, adhering to his walk-and-chew-gum style of crisis management even as criticism of his administration mounts. (Politico)
Pentagon says military response to cyber attack possible The Pentagon would consider a military response in the case of a cyber attack against the United States, a US defense official said on Wednesday.
Asked about the possibility of using military force after a cyber assault, James Miller, undersecretary of defense for policy, said: "Yes, we need to think about the potential for responses that are not limited to the cyber domain."
But he said it remained unclear what constituted an act of war in cyberspace.
"Those are legal questions that we are attempting to address," Miller said at a conference in Washington, adding that "there are certainly a lot of grey areas in this field." (Agence France-Presse)
Rupert Murdoch Loves Hillary Clinton: Conservative Media Mogul To Host Fundraiser For Liberal N.Y. Senator To call them a political odd couple would be a rash understatement.
Conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch will host a fundraiser for liberal New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Financial Times reports.
The mating ritual of the unlikely allies has been under way for months. Clinton set political tongues to wagging last month by attending a Washington party celebrating the 10th anniversary of Fox News, the cable news channel owned by Murdoch.
The Financial Times quoted one unnamed source as describing the Clinton-Murdoch connection in this way: "They have a respectful and cordial relationship. He has respect for the work she has done on behalf of New York. I wouldn't say it was illustrative of a close ongoing relationship. It is not like they are dining out together." (CBS)
Global Weirding Is Here Therefore, climate experts can’t leave themselves vulnerable by citing non-peer-reviewed research or failing to respond to legitimate questions, some of which happened with both the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (New York Times)
This database has been loaded 1,799,663 times since May 2009.
FAIR USE NOTICE:
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically
authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance
understanding of criminal justice, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and
social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107,
the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own
that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Watch Interesting Films:
Corbett Report Podcasts:
Interesting 
Not Interesting 
Add Another Tag/Keyword To Link
Test AltBib.Com Backup Copy
Report Broken Link and 
AltBib.Com is a free, research database with articles,
documents and videos shining light on interesting topics.
Most links are to significant information 'validated' as 'true' by the Mainstream Media, sometimes buried in the final paragraphs,
which are directly referenced by the Alternative Media/New Media in creating controversial alternative analysis.
So check out some mainstream evidence and see if you naturally end up agreeing with an alternate analysis.
Washington DC / District of Columbia
Top Tags: 100 Keywords
Top Tags: 100 Groups
Top Tags: 100 People
Top Tags: 100 Locations
Most Recently Posted Links
Facebook Recommendations & Activity
Customize From Full List
United States 
Terrorists 
9/11 
George W Bush 
Barack Obama 
US Congress 
United Kingdom 
Central Intelligence Agency 
Federal Bureau Of Investigation 
Privacy 
Al-qaeda 
Military 
Police 
Financial Crisis 
White House 
Osama Bin Laden 
Iraq 
Internet 
Canada 
Climate Change 
Afghanistan 
Pentagon 
United Nations 
China 
European Union 
Wikipedia 
New York Times 
BBC 
CNN 
Associated Press 
Washington Post 
London Guardian 
London Telegraph 
Reuters 
The Raw Story 
FOX 
UK Daily Mail 
Bloomberg 
London Times 
CBS 
Prison Planet 
ABC 
Wall Street Journal 
Huffington Post 
Agence France-Presse 
MSNBC 
World Net Daily 
CSPAN 
The Register 
CBC 
Suggest Document Link
Web Site Feedback
Search: 
:
