First, a link to the translated Al Qaeda message. Then Chuck Spinney's commentary on the rmessage (there is no assurance it is actually from Bin Laden, who may be long dead). Finally, a Phi Beta Iota comment that will outrage the lame of mind and resonate with every average American.
The American people have been taken hostage to a broken system. It is a system that remains in place to this day. . . . . . . .
It has become startlingly clear that we as a country, and I as a journalist, had made a grave error in affording those who built and ran those banks and insurance companies the honorable treatment of being called capitalists. When in fact the exact opposite was true, these people were more like vampires using the threat of Too Big Too Fail to hold us hostage and collect ongoing ransom from the US Government and the American taxpayer.
This was no unlucky accident. The massive spike in unemployment, the utter destruction of retirement wealth, the collapse in the value of our homes, the worst recession since the Great Depression all resulted directly from these actions.
Phi Beta Iota: The following accompanied the story: “Ratigan departed CNBC last spring under circumstances many believe were not he result of his contract coming up for renewal but because he started speaking out against what he was seeing from his perch at CNBC.” Our own comment: had John McCain listened to his better angels instead of the Bushies bent on wrecking the Straight Truth Express, he would be President today. All he had to do was respect the inherent common sense of the House conservatives and tell President Bush (Junior): “over my dead body will you bail out Wall Street.” See ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig for our October 2008 recommendations, as well as the prefaces by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Thoma Hartman, Tom Atlee, and our own “Paradigms of Failure.” America is a wreck because we have given up our Integrity. All it takes is one simple fix: the Electoral Reform Act of 2009.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Intelligence activities across the U.S. government and military cost a total of $75 billion a year, the nation's top intelligence official said on Tuesday, disclosing an overall number long shrouded in secrecy.
Phi Beta Iota: So much for all those who questioned our long-standing repetitive statement that secret U.S. intelligence is costing the U.S. taxpayer $65 billion a year. We were deliberately off by $10 billion. Now that we have established this, perhaps the time has come for both the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Accountability Office (GAO) to ask the obvious question: What does the taxpayer get for this vast sum, and how could it be spent better?
With a tip of the hat to MILNET, these two stories go so very well together, they had to be combined her.
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Telkom says it cannot be blamed for slow broadband services at a Durban-based company which claims a pigeon can carry its data bundles faster. . . . . . . . In total it took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds for Winston the pigeon to fly to Hillcrest and to upload the data from the card on to the call centre system. By that time, the ADSL transmission of the same data size was about 4% complete.
With a tip of the hat to authors Patrice McDermott and Army Fuller Bennett as well as Steven Aftergood and the other founders and leaders of Open the Government, here is their Secrecy Report Card for 2009. Their motto is “Less Secrecy, More Democracy. Amen!
Van Jones is authentic. He was fired as a convenience by the white-half of Barack Obama, the half that is slicker than goose shit on a hot day. The black half of Obama, the authentic half that “would no more renounce Reverend Wright than my own mother,” that half has been bought off and silenced.
