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at this point were going to have 2 choices.romney,an experienced businessman or obama,a man hiding his past
Sorry redfisher. We don't need another sociopath in the White House. NEITHER candidate offers America anything of worth. Vote Green, Progressive, or Libertarian.
oh i see...you can post your crap and i cant....i understand..
Most here are smarter than that.
lol...i aint skeered...they may get deleted an i may be the only one posting it but i imagine theres alot more that think it that dont post it
thats just what this country needs....a pres with balls...anyone dont like it can move in with obama and suckle up to that side in the 'rainbow room
LOL! As Americans, I'll bet you guys never thought you'd be put in a position where you must defend '...the guy who strapped the family dog to the car roof, who led a blind man into a door, who held down a screaming boy and cut off his hair, just because he was different.'.
its better to have a pres with balls than a pres with balls in his hand
Choice is a good thing, right?
... The choice in November could not be clearer. There’s the man who risked the election by coming out in favor of gay marriage, a major step in welcoming a once shunned group into the circle around the campfire. Then there’s the guy who strapped the family dog to the car roof, who led a blind man into a door, who held down a screaming boy and cut off his hair, just because he was different. Just because he could.
http://open.salon.com/blog/luminousmuse/2012/05/14/bully
Starting with the Obama administration
lol
Chris
America has been defeated from within you are correct. The attack started with 9/11 and continues to this day. Some argue it started with the assasination of JFK and they do have a compelling case. Others claim it started with Woodrow Wilson, nevertheless it is international in scope with the name Rothschild at the helm.
This morning, the Obama campaign released a two-minute ad attacking Romney over the fate of GST Steel, a steel mill controlled by Bain Capital. The ad featured interviews with steelworkers who lost their jobs when the company went bankrupt. The ad's implication that Romney was somehow responsible is ridiculous, because Romney had left Bain Capital two years before the bankruptcy.
This afternoon, however, the Romney campaign counter-punched with a new ad featuring workers at another steel plant, Steel Dynamics, where Bain Capital invested its money. Unlike GST Steel, which was already a troubled company when Bain invested, Steel Dynamics was a fresh start-up. The successful firm has since expanded from just over 1,000 employees to over 6,000.
Taken together, the two ads could serve as something of a lesson in how markets work for the Obama campaign. Companies must continually adapt to changes in the marketplace. Those that don't, die. Those that do thrive and create choice, opportunity and wealth for all of us. To focus on one or two failures misses what is dynamic about our free market economy.
I think the ads serve as something of a lesson in something else: the need to adapt quickly to changes in the political landscape. That Obama would attack Romney on events after he had left Bain Capital is a clear signal that Obama is losing the economic argument. That Romney would have a solid response ad ready to go within hours is a clear signal that Romney isn't going to let Obama and the media control the narrative of the campaign.
Romney has a lot of fight in him.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/14/rapid-response-romney-campaign-fires-back-at-obama-ad
Gary yes she is! I prefer Andrea and I've
always liked Dana Perino back when she was press secratary. I didn't realize how young she was! Michelle Malkn, Megyn Kelly, and Shannon Bream are just plane smart and easy on the eyes. But you know who I really like as a FOX broadcaster? Harris Faulkner. I don't know how to descibe it but there's something about her that just is infectious. IMO
thanks for posting that -- so true -- partly raised on a farm in the 30's, early 40's -- the day started at 4:30 am -- hogs, horses, chickens, cows to milk and feed -- breakfast at 7:30 -- potatoes, ham and eggs -- all home grown -- then the days work began -- harnessing the team working that week and off to the field, plow, tiller, scythe, binder, planter, manure spreader, hay wagon (what ever was required) -- all horse drawn
life was good
It's being defeated by our own country
from within! Starting with the Obama administration and fueled by the main stream media and anything to do with education. I don't think I'm wrong. I just don't know what I can do about it! I think it started a long time ago and conservatives fell asleep. On the other hand the 2010 elections proved that Americans were paying more attention than anyone thought. I pray it's more so this November.
it must be in the air.....the "raconteur contagion".....
whatever you do.....don't drink a lot of vodka, it will only make the ailment worse!!!!! :)
Dear Ma and Pa:
I am well. Hope you are.
Tell Brother Walt and Brother Elmer the Marine Corps beats working for old man Minch by a mile. Tell them to join up quick before maybe all of the places are filled. I was restless at first because you got to stay in bed till nearly 6 a.m., but am getting so I like to sleep late.
Tell Walt and Elmer all you do before breakfast is smooth your cot and shine some things. No hogs to slop, feed to pitch, mash to mix, wood to split, fire to lay. Practically nothing. Men got to shave but it is not so bad, there's warm water.
Breakfast is strong on trimmings like fruit juice, cereal, eggs, bacon, and stuff, but kind of weak on chops, potatoes, ham, steak, fried eggplant, pie and other regular food. But tell Walt and Elmer you can always sit by two city boys that live on coffee. Their food plus yours holds you till noon, when you get fed again.
It's no wonder these city boys can't walk much. We go on "route" marches, which the Platoon Sergeant says are long walks to harden us. If he thinks so, it is not my place to tell him different. A "route march" is about as far as to our mailbox at home. Then the city guys get sore feet and we all ride back in trucks. The country is nice, but awful flat.
The Sergeant is like a schoolteacher. He nags some. The Capt. is like the school board. Majors and Colonels just ride around and frown. They don't bother you none.
This next will kill Walt and Elmer with laughing. I keep getting medals for shooting. I don't know why. The bulls-eye is near as big as a chipmunk head and don't move. And it ain't shooting at you, like the Higgett boys at home. All you got to do is lie there all comfortable and hit it. You don't even load your own cartridges. They come in little metal boxes.
Then we have what they call hand-to-hand combat training. You get to wrestle with them city boys. I have to be real careful though, they break real easy. It ain't like fighting with that ole bull at home.
I'm about the best they got in this except for that Tug Jordan from over in Silver Lake. He joined up the same time as me. But I'm only5'6" and 130 pounds and he's 6'8" and weighs near 300 pounds dry.
Be sure to tell Walt and Elmer to hurry and join before other fellers get onto this setup and come stampeding in.
Your loving daughter,
Gail Ann
wisdom
DEAD HORSE THEORY, OR HOW GOVERNMENT WORKS
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."
However, in government & the public service sector, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:
1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses – politicians love this one.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse's performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
11. Declaring that, since the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
And of course....a very favorite tactic in government:
13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.
fair enough...ty...
Geo, I'm only re-posting it, I made no comment on it's validity, that's for the reader to do for themselves.
The obvious and saddest part of the post is that it would never float at all if Obama wasn't so pro-black and Muslim while being so anti-Caucasian and anti-Christian. It allows this kind of shit foster in peoples minds.
JMO!
****************
Progressiveness Must Die Today,
In Order That We May Be Free Tomorrow
OMG/OBAMA MUST GO - NOBAMA IN 2012!!!
IMO Fred is getting excited over nothing.
There's a big difference between issuing an IDIQ contract and actually buying that much ammo.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/atk-secures-40-caliber-ammunition-contract-with-department-of-homeland-security-us-immigration-and-customs-enforcement-dhs-ice-2012-03-12
DHS easily has about 20,000 Federal agents. So that comes out to 4000 rounds per agent per year. And only if they're needed. Big deal.
As far as the detention facilities go, there are maybe 30 on the entire eastern time zone. A lot of them look like county jails that DHS has made arrangements to also detain illegal immigrants. These places are small. way to small to worry about being used to lock up entire cities.
Besides we've got lots of militry bases thay can use for that, lol.
Chris
I thought Border Patrol carried .223 Ar-15/M-16 carbines...??
ATF agents?
DHS has some 27 different agencies under their umbrella that used 40 caliber pistols. I imagine some use.223 carbines too.
That's a lot of ammo. But how many rounds would it take for twice-a-year range practices and qualifications for their large number of agents.
The order was to cover a five year period too, if I remember correctly.
I'm not sure what to make of it, other than it is a lot of ammo.
I don't put anything past this administration, but on the other hand five years worth of qualification firing and familiarization firing would take a lot of rounds, for the large number of folks DHS would be supplying.
how is that possible when he was overseas
What else you don't know about Obama boyhood
President tied to Bill Ayers' radical leftist organization from age 11
Editor’s note: In 2008, WND thoroughly vetted Barack Obama’s radical background. Many of those original exclusive reports, almost entirely ignored by the establishment news media, currently are being utilized four years later by some media outlets in the lead up to this year’s presidential election. From now until Election Day, WND will present original investigations into Obama and his radical ties with bonus updates.
Although the Washington Post this past week featured an extensive profile of Mitt Romney’s high school days, which alleged the presidential hopeful engaged in bullying, the news media has yet to probe important aspects of Obama’s early education that may evidence later radical ties.
In 2009, WND exposed Obama’s attendance in a church Sunday school that espouses far-left politics and served as a sanctuary for draft dodgers from the Students for a Democratic Society during the time Bill Ayers was a leader in that organization.
WND had caught up with Rev. Mike Young, pastor of First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, who affirmed the congregation where Obama attended Sunday school as a boy has “always” been involved in political activism.
“The Sunday school has always been and to this day still is involved in political activism,” said Young.
“We are involved in community organizing, helping churches in foreign countries, social justice issues, like making sure inmates get dinner,” said Young, speaking from Hawaii.
While Obama’s membership as an adult in the controversial Trinity United Church of Christ has received widespread media attention, almost nothing has been reported about his Sunday school attendance at First Unitarian, a far-left activist church that may have helped provide the president’s initial political education.
Andrew Walden, publisher and editor of the Hawaii Free Press, dug up newspaper clippings from that period as well as print editions of “The Roach,” an SDS publication describing the group’s draft-dodging activism, including at the Unitarian church.
The SDS connection to Obama’s boyhood church is instrumental. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama notoriously brushed off Ayers’ extremism as irrelevant since most of the Weathermen radical’s violent actions were carried out when Obama was a kid.
“This is a guy [Ayers] who lives in my neighborhood … the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago – when I was 8 years old – somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense,” Obama said in 2008.
Obama, however, likely learned values during his Sunday school days at the First Unitarian in the early 1970s.
After living from age 7 with his mother and step-father in Indonesia, where he was enrolled as a Muslim under the name “Barry Soetoro” in public schools, Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 11 in 1971 to reside with his grandmother. His mother moved back to Hawaii in 1972 and stayed there until 1977, when she relocated again to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
In his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama recounts on page 17 moving to Hawaii and being enrolled in the Unitarian church.
When Obama’s maternal grandmother died in November 2008, the memorial service, attended by the then-presidential candidate, was held in Honolulu’s Unitarian church.
First Unitarian Church of Honolulu
According to an account in the Tampa Tribune, when Young reminded Obama at his grandmother’s memorial service that he attended the church’s Sunday school as a kid, Obama’s eyes lit up, and he turned to his wife, Michelle, and said, “Hey, that’s right. This is where I went to Sunday school.”
Young recounted to WND in 2009 how the bathrooms for the main sanctuary were in full use after the service. Obama said he had to use the restroom, so Young directed Obama and his secret service detail to instead utilize the upper floor facilities, located at the church’s Sunday school operations.
“When he returned,” Young recalled, “I asked Obama if the Sunday school looked familiar. He said it didn’t, but I explained to him we recently remodeled.”
Notorious hotbed of far-leftist activism
Young came to the Honolulu church in 1995. He claimed to WND the church and Sunday school is non-partisan. However, just as it is now, during Obama’s attendance in the early 1970s, the church was a hotbed of far-leftist activism.
The church notoriously granted sanctuary to U.S. military deserters recruited by the SDS. The deserters’ exploits at the church were front page news for months in 1969, including articles in the New York Times.
Eventually, the police raided the church as well as another nearby Honolulu worship house, Crossroads, that was also providing sanctuary to draft dodgers.
Aside from its early connections to the SDS, Young confirmed to WND his church was instrumental in founding the League of Women Voters and activating a local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The church is still active is liberal politics. It reportedly helped to launch the Save Our Constitution effort to fight the constitutional amendment on same-sex marriages. In 2003, the church sponsored a Death with Dignity poll that collected a 72 percent response in favor of end-of-life legislation.
In February 2003, the Unitarian church celebrated its 50th anniversary at a ceremony replete with “Liberal Religion for 50 Years” T-shirts.
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported bumper stickers on cars outside the church gave insight into its members’ beliefs: “No War.” “If you want peace, work for justice.” “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/what-media-didnt-tell-you-about-obama-boyhood/?cat_orig=politics
then they intend to kill what they aim at
best be prepared
How Long Before We Have An Honest Drug Discussion?
Posted 2012-05-13 16:53
by Karl Denninger
Seriously folks, this is not about marijuana -- and never has been.
MONTERREY, Mexico – Forty-nine decapitated and mutilated bodies were found Sunday dumped on a highway connecting the northern Mexican metropolis of Monterrey to the U.S. border in what could be the latest outburst in an escalating war of terror among drug gangs. (story below)
That's another 49 people. The last batch were hung off a bridge or cut up into pieces.
Why?
Because we have a "drug war" in the United States. And the enormous amount of money has prompted a real war in other nations, whether it be Afghanistan (opium poppies) or Mexico (trafficking of various sorts.)
Some 50,000 Mexicans have lost their lives in the last few years over this war -- a war that is our responsibility. A war that we started, we promote, we fund and we even arm with things like "Project Gunwalker", not to mention money laundering -- including accusations and even admissions that some of our largest financial institutions have been involved in it.
It's time to cut the crap. We got this in the 1920s:
And what did we learn from it? Exactly nothing, other than that this sort of "war" is profitable for the law enforcement community and gets civilians killed without doing a damned thing to deter drug use.
As a direct and proximate cause of our stupidity in this regard you can't buy brake cleaner in WalMart without being asked if you're 18. We're so worried about people getting high on various things we want to prohibit that we've made it more-attractive for kids to inhale chemicals that will destroy their minds and bodies instead of smoking a joint, which clearly comes with risks -- but not of immediate death or serious bodily injury.
You think you can prevent people from getting high? Then how come we're worried about brake cleaner, nail polish remover and lighter fluid -- all things that I bought as a youth for their original intended purposes before I was 18, and never "huffed" any of them? Why is it that we have bars everywhere where the very purpose of the establishment is to intentionally consume an intoxicant?
As a matter of human rights did we not know back in the early part of the 1900s that we needed to pass a Constitutional Amendment to bar people from taking into their bodies anything on their own volition? It sure looks that way, doesn't it?
So what changed, other than hubris, jackbooted statism and our collective idiocy quotient?
Nothing.
So why are we still maintaining a "drug war" when all it's doing is getting people killed by the literal truckload, jailing people for consensual personal conduct in which the risk is entirely personal to the party(s) engaged in it, and the cost in both money and lives is hideous and indefensible?
Simple: Money feeding politicians.
Just as with the health care debacle in which we "need" Obamacare because the government granted special privileges to certain entities and thus made health care unaffordable without them, we have the same paradigm here.
We claim that part of the reason for the "drug war" is that if you get drug-addled society will have to take care of you. The question not asked but which must be asked is why we put together a system that created a problem we then demand government solve!
In other words, why is it that the solution isn't to remove both the "safety net" for those who want to use drugs and the laws against their use?
This does not impact public safety; if I go upon the road in my car and smash into someone while stoned, I can and should be prosecuted irrespective of what I'm stoned on! Whether that's booze, marijuana, heroin or cough syrup the fact remains that I was willfully and intentionally impaired and if that voluntarily-impaired state of mind was part or all of the reason for the accident I should be held fully criminally and civilly accountable for my acts.
But that same substance, used within my home or other place (e.g. a "dope bar") where one does not present a public risk should be entirely at my risk -- both at the moment of use and down the road if and when the consequences are served upon my body and/or mind.
That approach -- along with looking at drug addiction as a condition that can be treated if and when the addict wants to stop, is both cheaper and respects human rights. At the same time it eviscerates the money that currently flows into criminal gangs.
When Prohibition was repealed we stopped having Tommy Gun fights in the middle of our cities. That didn't happen because the gangsters decided to "be nice" -- it happened because the profit in running booze, which had previously funded their acquisition of guns and ammunition, was cut off.
All we have to do to solve this problem is learn from history.
Are there any politicians who will take an honest look at this issue in full and not pander to some subset of the population (e.g. those who want to smoke a joint) while refusing to address the actual problem?
We must address the actual issue, both shrinking government involvement in our lives along with the monetary cost of this indefensible policy and saving tens of thousands of lives in places like Mexico.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=205911
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dozens of bodies, some mutilated, dumped on Mexico highway
May 13, 2012
Associated Press
A true pity we do not have such a leader of our country today.
Charles Krauthammer: Netanyahu’s unity government prepares the ground for May 1967
Charles Krauthammer
May 11, 2012 – 9:56 AM ET
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shakes hand with Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz after he was sworn in as a minister at the Knesset
In May 1967, in brazen violation of previous truce agreements, Egypt ordered UN peacekeepers out of the Sinai, marched 120,000 troops to the Israeli border, blockaded Eilat (Israel’s southern outlet to the world’s oceans), abruptly signed a military pact with Jordan and, together with Syria, pledged war for the final destruction of Israel.
May ’67 was Israel’s most fearful, desperate month. The country was surrounded and alone. Previous great-power guarantees proved worthless. A plan to test the blockade with a western flotilla failed for lack of participants. Time was running out. Forced to protect against invasion by mass mobilization — and with a military consisting overwhelmingly of civilian reservists — life ground to a halt. The country was dying.
On June 5, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on the Egyptian air force, then proceeded to lightning victories on three fronts. The Six-Day War is legend, but less remembered is that on June 1, the nationalist opposition (Menachem Begin’s Likud precursor) was for the first time ever brought into the government, creating an emergency national-unity coalition.
Everyone understood why. You do not undertake a supremely risky pre-emptive war without the full participation of a broad coalition representing a national consensus.
Forty-five years later, in the middle of the night of May 7-8, 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked his country by bringing the main opposition party, Kadima, into a national unity government. Shocking because just hours earlier, the Knesset was expediting a bill to call early elections in September.
Why did the high-flying Netanyahu call off elections he was sure to win?
Because for Israelis today, it is May ’67. The dread is not quite as acute: The mood is not despair, just foreboding. Time is running out, but not quite as fast. War is not four days away, but it looms. Israelis today face the greatest threat to their existence — apocalyptic mullahs publicly pledged to Israel’s annihilation acquiring nuclear weapons — since May ’67. The world is again telling Israelis to do nothing as it looks for a way out. But if such a way is not found — as in ’67 — Israelis know they will once again have to defend themselves, by themselves.
Such a fateful decision demands a national consensus. By creating the largest coalition in nearly three decades, Netanyahu is establishing the political premise for a pre-emptive strike, should it come to that. The new government commands an astonishing 94 Knesset seats out of 120, described by one Israeli columnist as a “hundred tons of solid concrete.”
So much for the recent media hype about some great domestic resistance to Netanyahu’s hard line on Iran. Two notable retired intelligence figures were widely covered here for coming out against him. Little noted was that one had been passed over by Netanyahu to be the head of Mossad, while the other had been fired by Netanyahu as Mossad chief (hence the job opening). For centrist Kadima (it pulled Israel out of Gaza) to join a Likud-led coalition whose defense minister is a former Labor prime minister (who once offered half of Jerusalem to Yasser Arafat) is the very definition of national unity — and refutes the popular “Israel is divided” meme. “Everyone is saying the same thing,” explained one Knesset member, “though there may be a difference of tone.”
To be sure, Netanyahu and Kadima’s Shaul Mofaz offered more prosaic reasons for their merger: national service laws, a new election law and negotiations with the Palestinians. But Netanyahu, the first Likud prime minister to recognize Palestinian statehood, did not need Kadima for him to enter peace talks. For two years he’s been waiting for Mahmoud Abbas to show up at the table. Abbas hasn’t. And won’t. Nothing will change on that front.
What does change is Israel’s position vis-a-vis Iran. The wall-to-wall coalition demonstrates Israel’s readiness to attack, if necessary. (Its military readiness is not in doubt.)
Those counseling Israeli submission, resignation or just endless patience can no longer dismiss Israel’s tough stance as the work of irredeemable right-wingers. Not with a government now representing 78 percent of the country.
Netanyahu forfeited September elections that would have given him four more years in power. He chose instead to form a national coalition that guarantees 18 months of stability — 18 months during which, if the world does not act to stop Iran, Israel will.
And it will not be the work of one man, one party or one ideological faction. As in 1967, it will be the work of a nation.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/post_new.aspx?board_id=1125
Why Can't Obama Bring Wall Street to Justice?
Despite his populist posturing, the president has failed to pin a single top finance exec on criminal charges since the economic collapse. Are the banks too big to jail—or is Washington’s revolving door at to blame?
May 6, 2012 1:38 PM EDT
Peter J. Boyer and Peter Schweizer investigate:
• Obama’s 2009 White House summit with finance titans, in which the president warned that only he was standing "between you and the pitchforks"
• Why, despite widespread outrage, financial-fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice are at 20-year lows
• Attorney General Eric Holder’s lucrative ties to a top-tier law firm whose marquee clients include some of finance’s worst offenders
• How Obama’s trumpeted “task force” for investigating risky mortgage lenders—announced in this year’s State of the Union speech—is badly understaffed and has yet to produce any discernible progress
With the Occupy protesters resuming battle stations, and Mitt Romney in place as the presumptive Republican nominee, President Obama has begun to fashion his campaign as a crusade for the 99 percent--a fight against, as one Obama ad puts it, "a guy who had a Swiss bank account." Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough. But the president's claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance.
Obama came into office vowing to end business as usual, and, in the gray post-crash dawn of 2009, nowhere did a reckoning with justice seem more due than in the financial sector. The public was shaken, and angry, and Wall Street seemed oblivious to its own culpability, defending extravagant pay bonuses even while accepting a taxpayer bailout. Obama channeled this anger, and employed its rhetoric, blaming the worldwide economic collapse on "the reckless speculation of bankers." Two months into his presidency, Obama summoned the titans of finance to the White House, where he told them, "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."
The bankers may have found the president's tone unsettling. Candidate Obama had been their guy, accepting vast amounts of Wall Street campaign money for his victories over Hillary Clinton and John McCain (Goldman Sachs executives ponied up $1 million, more than any other private source of funding in 2008). Obama far outraised his Republican rival, John McCain, on Wall Street--around $16 million to $9 million. As it turned out, Obama apparently actually meant what he said at that White House meeting--his administration effectively would stand between Big Finance and anything like a severe accounting. To the dismay of many of Obama's supporters, nearly four years after the disaster, there has not been a single criminal charge filed by the federal government against any top executive of the elite financial institutions.
"It's perplexing at best," says Phil Angelides, the Democratic former California treasurer who chaired the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. "It's deeply troubling at worst."
Strikingly, federal prosecutions overall have risen sharply under Obama, increasing dramatically in such areas as civil rights and health-care fraud. But according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data-gathering organization at Syracuse University, financial-fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice are at 20-year lows. They're down 39 percent since 2003, when fraud at Enron and WorldCom led to a series of prosecutions, and are just one third of what they were during the Clinton administration. (The Justice Department says the numbers would be higher if new categories of crime were counted.)
"There hasn't been any serious investigation of any of the large financial entities by the Justice Department, which includes the FBI," says William Black, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who, as a government regulator in the 1980s, helped clean up the S&L mess. Black, who is a Democrat, notes that the feds dealt with the S&L crisis with harsh justice, bringing more than a thousand prosecutions, and securing a 90 percent conviction rate. The difference between the government's response to the two crises, Black says, is a matter of will, and priorities. "You need heads on the pike," he says. "The first President Bush's orders were to get the most prominent, nastiest frauds, and put their heads on pikes as a demonstration that there's a new sheriff in town."
Obama delivered heated rhetoric, but his actions signaled different priorities. Had Obama wanted to strike real fear in the hearts of bankers, he might have appointed former special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald or some other fire-breather as his attorney general. Instead, he chose Eric Holder, a former Clinton Justice official who, after a career in government, joined the Washington office of Covington & Burling, a top-tier law firm with an elite white-collar defense unit. The move to Covington, and back to Justice, is an example of Washington's revolving-door ritual, which, for Holder, has been lucrative--he pulled in $2.1 million as a Covington partner in 2008, and $2.5 million (including deferred compensation) when he left the firm in 2009.
Putting a Covington partner--he spent nearly a decade at the firm--in charge of Justice may have sent a signal to the financial community, whose marquee names are Covington clients. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Deutsche Bank are among the institutions that pay for Covington's legal advice, some of it relating to matters before the Department of Justice. But Holder's was not the only face at Justice familiar to Covington clients. Lanny Breuer, who had co-chaired the white-collar defense unit at Covington with Holder, was chosen to head the criminal division at Obama's Justice. Two other Covington lawyers followed Holder into top positions, and Holder's principal deputy, James Cole, was recruited from Bryan Cave LLP, another white-shoe firm with A-list finance clients.
Justice's defenders point out that prosecuting financial crime is a complicated matter requiring the highly specialized expertise found in the white-collar defense bar. But some suggest there is also the potential for conflicting interest when the department's top officials come from lucrative law practices representing the very financial institutions that Justice is supposed to be investigating. "And that's where they're going back to," says Black. "Everybody knows there is a problem with that." (Two members of Holder's team have already returned to Covington.) A spokesperson for Covington was not available for comment. (Newsweek uses the firm as outside counsel.)
Top bankers after meeting with Obama, who told them “my administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.” (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)
Justice's inaction regarding the big Wall Street firms is not for a lack of suspicious activity. Three different government entities exhaustively examined the practices that contributed to the financial collapse, and each has referred its findings to the department for possible criminal investigation. One such matter involved a 2007 transaction by Goldman Sachs, in which Goldman created an investment, based on mortgage-backed securities, that seemed designed to fail. Goldman allowed a client who was betting against the mortgage market to help shape the investment instrument, which was called Abacus 2007-AC1; then both Goldman and the client bet against the investment without informing other clients (whose investments were wagers on its success) how the securities included in the portfolio were selected. These uninformed clients lost more than $1 billion on the investment.
In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Goldman with securities fraud "for making materially misleading statements and omissions" in marketing the investment. The SEC, which conducts only civil litigation, referred the case to Justice for criminal investigation.
A year later, in April 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin, after a two-year inquiry, issued a fat report detailing several transactions, including Goldman's Abacus deal, that Levin and his staff believed should be investigated by Justice as possible crimes. The subcommittee made a formal referral to the department (as did the federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, chaired by Phil Angelides), and Levin publicly stated his view that criminal inquiry was warranted. Goldman executives, including the firm's chief executive officer, Lloyd Blankfein, started hiring defense lawyers.
Meanwhile, Obama's political operation continued to ask Wall Street for campaign money. A curious pattern developed. A Newsweek examination of campaign finance records shows that, in the weeks before and after last year's scathing Senate report, several Goldman executives and their families made large donations to Obama's Victory Fund and related entities, some of them maxing out at the highest individual donation allowed, $35,800, even though 2011 was an electoral off-year. Some of these executives were giving to Obama for the first time.
Justice insists that political operations such as fundraising are kept strictly distanced from the department, in order to avoid even the appearance of political influence. But the attorney general and his team are not unfamiliar with the process; Holder was himself an Obama bundler--a fundraiser who collected large sums from various donors--in 2008, as were several other lawyers who joined him at Justice.
It would be a leap to infer these Goldman contributions were made--or received--as quid pro quo for dropping a criminal investigation. Still, the situation constitutes what one Justice veteran acknowledged is a "bad set of facts."
Maintaining public faith in the justice system is one of the reasons why people such as Angelides continue to call for a rigorous criminal investigation into Wall Street. "I think it's fundamental that people in this country need to feel that the justice system is for everyone--that there's not one system for those people of enormous wealth and power, and one for everyone else," he says.
In July 2010, three months after the SEC charged Goldman in the Abacus case, the agency reached a settlement with the firm. Goldman agreed to pay $550 million, but admitted no wrongdoing. The agency touted the amount of the fine as the biggest ever--but to Goldman it was a relative pittance. The fine amounted to about 4 percent of the sum that Goldman paid its executives in bonuses ($12.1 billion) in 2007, the year of the Abacus transaction.
Earlier this year, it was reported that Goldman executives were feeling optimistic that the Justice inquiry would not result in criminal charges against the firm, or its executives. Goldman declined to comment on the case, as did the Justice Department. But spokeswoman Alisa Finelli said, "When we find credible evidence of intentional criminal conduct--by Wall Street executives or others--we will not hesitate to charge it. However, we can and will only bring charges when the facts and the law convince us that we can prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt." Holder, speaking in February at Columbia University, said that while "we found that much of the conduct that led to the financial crisis was unethical and irresponsible ... we have also discovered that some of this behavior--while morally reprehensible--may not necessarily have been criminal."
Midway through his State of the Union speech this year, President Obama announced plans "to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis," and he vowed again to "hold accountable those who broke the law."
That portion of the speech had a familiar ring. In November 2009, Attorney General Holder, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at his side, announced the creation of another special unit--the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force--that was similarly charged with investigating securities and mortgage fraud that contributed to the financial meltdown. Since its creation, that task force, which critics say was drastically under-resourced, has produced not a single conviction (or even indictment) of a major Wall Street player related to the financial disaster.
Some who heard the president's State of the Union speech thought they discerned a hidden purpose behind his new "special unit"--the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, as it would be called. The day before the president's speech, state attorneys general from around the country met in Chicago with Justice officials to discuss a proposed national settlement with five major banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, over questionable foreclosure practices. The administration was pushing the settlement, as were the banks. But a handful of attorneys general were resisting the settlement, believing it gave too much away to the banks--including protection from mortgage-related investigations that were still unfolding. These holdout state officials were supported by a coalition of activists, who argued that the banks would never make meaningful concessions--such as the reduction of principal on underwater mortgages--unless they faced the threat of investigation.
One of those activists, Mike Gecan, of the Industrial Areas Foundation, says he was disheartened when he heard Obama's speech, and the news that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman would be co-chairing the new "working group." Schneiderman, who is in the tough-guy mold of his predecessors, Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, had been a leader of the state holdouts; now, Gecan feared, Schneiderman had been co-opted by the Chicago Way. "I'm from Chicago, I've seen this game played my whole life," he says.
Gecan's view seemed vindicated two weeks later, when Obama announced that the settlement had been reached.
Nearly three months later, it is not clear what, if any, progress the "working group" has made. The unit was only promised 55 investigators, attorneys, and support staff--a tiny fraction of the resources afforded to similar groups investigating the S&L and Enron/WorldCom scandals--and it is not clear that even that commitment has materialized. "I think what happened is what usually happens: the administration rope-a-doped," says Gecan. "There's no office, there's no director, there's no staff, there's no space, there's no phone."
Last month, Gecan wrote an op-ed article for the New York Daily News, calling upon Schneiderman to quit the group in protest (Schneiderman's office did not respond to requests for an interview). In the meantime, Gecan said, he will work to bring pressure on Obama. "There's a little presidential campaign that's going to start, and we're going to make this issue central to this campaign," he said.
It may be, as the attorney general points out, that Wall Street was greedy, stupid, and immoral, without actually breaking any laws. But the powers of the Justice Department are immense, and a more aggressive prosecutor surely could have found cases to make. Black, the UMKC professor, says the conduct could well have violated federal fraud statutes--"securities fraud for false disclosures, wire and mail fraud for making false representations about the quality of the loans and derivatives they were selling, bank fraud for false representations to the regulators."
The absence of prosecutions, and the fact that the cops on the beat hail from the place that represents the banks, does not sit right with many who hoped Obama would fulfill his promise to hold Big Finance accountable. The left's frustration fuels the Occupy movement, and chills the Democratic base. And it gives Romney, the career capitalist, an opening he is avidly exploiting.
Through last fall, Obama had collected more donations from Wall Street than any of the Republican candidates; employees of Bain Capital donated more than twice as much to Obama as they did to Romney, who founded the firm. By this spring, however, resolution had come to the GOP contest, and Wall Street could see a friendly alternative to Obama. While most of Romney's contributions so far come mainly from the financial sector, Obama's donations from Wall Street have dropped sharply.
But this turn may yet help Obama, playing into the Romney-as-plutocrat theme. Just the other week, the Republican candidate quietly slipped into a fundraiser at the home of hedge-fund king John Paulson, who made a killing shorting mortgage futures (including about $1 billion on the Abacus deal). The Obama campaign pounced. Obama may yet fully liberate his inner populist--that Obama who in 2010 in an off-Prompter moment uttered a sentence that made blood run cold on Wall Street: "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."
Peter J. Boyer joined Newsweek/Daily Beast after spending 18 years as a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he wrote on a wide range of subjects, including politics, the military, religion, and sports. Before joining The New Yorker, Boyer was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and a television critic for National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” As a correspondent on the documentary series, Frontline, he won a George Foster Peabody Award, an Emmy, and consecutive Writers Guild Awards for his reporting. Boyer’s New Yorker articles have been included in the anthologies The Best American Political Writing, Best American Science Writing, Best American Spiritual Writing and Best American Crime Writing. He is at work on a book about American evangelism.
Peter Schweizer is the William J. Casey Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 2008-09 he served as a consultant to the White House Office of Presidential Speechwriting and he is a former consultant to NBC News. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. His new book is Throw Them All Out.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/why-can-t-obama-bring-wall-street-to-justice.html
Simply astounding and outrageous. TIme to defund the FDA... a ROGUE government agency working for multi-national corporations and banksters only.
Matt Taibbi: How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform
It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House.
FDA Deletes 1 Million Signatures for GMO labeling Campaign
http://www.oneradionetwork.com/latest/fda-deletes-1-million-signatures-for-gmo-labeling-campaign-article/
While the Food and Drug Administration has seemingly reached the limit for unbelievable behavior, the company’s decisions continue to astound and appall consumers and health activists alike. In the agency’s latest decision, undoubtedly amazing thousands of individuals yet again, the FDA virtually erased 1 million signatures and comments on the ‘Just Label It’ campaign calling for the labeling of genetically modified foods.
FDA Deletes 1 Million Signatures for GMO Labeling Campaign
The ‘Just Label It” campaign has gotten more signatures than any campaign in history for the labeling of genetically modified foods. Since October of 2011, the campaign has received over 900,000 signatures, with 55 politicians joining in on the movement. So what’s the problem here?
Evidently, the FDA counts the amount of signatures not by how many people signed, but how many different individual letters are brought to it. To the FDA, even tens of thousands of signatures presented on a single petition are counted as – you guessed it – a single comment. This is how, despite over a million supporters being gathered by the petition, the FDA concluded a count of only 394.
“This is an election year and there are more than a million people who say this is important to them. This is petition has nothing to do with whether or genetically modified foods are dangerous. We don’t label dangerous foods, we take them off the shelves. This petition is about a the citizens’ right to know what they are eating and whether or not these foods represent a novel change.” said Andrew Kimbrell an attorney for the Center for Food Safety, one of the partner groups on the Just Label It campaign.
The argument as to whether genetically modified foods are dangerous is a whole discussion on its own, but for the FDA to completely sidestep away from the labeling of GM foods is completely and utterly irresponsible. Consumers have every right to know what they are consuming. Needless to say, biotechology giant Monsanto is against GMO labeling, claiming that it would mislead consumers since GMOs are ‘perfectly safe’. Of course there is plenty of evidence proving that GMOs are not completely safe, and how they affect life in the long-term is questionable to say the least. Either way, there is enough controversy surrounding the issue which is cause for alarm for millions of people, and Monsanto’s opinion on GMOs safety is a sorry excuse for not labeling foods as GM. Is the FDA avoiding such an issue because so many ties exist between genetically modified makers like Monsanto and the agency?
The bottom line is that you have the right to know what is in your food, and what your food IS. Denying that right, whether it be by the essential deletion of millions of signatures on a petition, or by ignoring the voices of thousands of people on the street, is taking power away from the people.
Read more: http://naturalsociety.com/fda-deletes-1-million-signatures-for-gmo-labeling-campaign/#ixzz1qgzgcT4J
From what I have read, the govt. supposedly orderd hollow point rounds, not FMJ. Doesn't make sense to me either.
What in the crap is going on? INSANE! People should stop worrying about the country going the way of our enemies economically, politically, etc.! They are importing them like freaking VIPs! They will take over from the inside WITH our govt's BLESSING!
Anyone who doubts what the NWO endgame is, is plant life or worse. It's happening right before our eyes, and NO ONE CARES! UFB!
http://theintelhub.com/2012/04/27/department-of-defense-confirms-russian-troops-to-conduct-terror-drills-inside-u-s/
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/welcome-to-the-invasion_052012
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/report-russian-troops-to-seize-cia-facility-in-elaborate-war-game-on-u-s-soil/
the story is correct
it happened
the real question is why
why so many .40 rounds......?????
and the .223 has been used since 'Nam
but wasn't as effective over in Afghanistan since body mass was greater than avg in 'Nam
the whackadoos just keep coming, when a 6.5mm round is more effective
downright efficacious
just like changing from .50 BMG to .338 Win Mag rounds supposedly for sniper rifles which is an inferior round overall against mud huts
but efficacious and downright evil if used here in the states
cut through 2x4 walls like a hot knife through butter
.40 rounds much better than 9mm, same thing
cut right through doors and even walls at close range with FMJ rounds
which is what they ordered
makes it very believable there is a preparation being made for armed insurrection here in the states
the .223 round order is what puzzles me.....
except a lot of local and county police forces use that round......
here's the problem I have with this story....
yes, the story has been around for a while....
but.....what weapon uses a 40 cal round?
and, the other part of the order was for 150 million rounds of .223.....
IMO....the 40 cal round is for a hand-gun.....
and, while .223 is "interchangeable" with 5.56, there is a technical difference.....and, US military rifles are made to chamber 5.56.......
so......two questions.....
1) why order so much pistol ammo??
2) why wouldn't the government order 5.56??
unless.....this story is BS or someone's "brother-in-law" is the owner/major stockholder of a munitions company?????
you're very knowledgeable about guns & ammo.....what's your opinion ???
I know the order covers a 5 year period....
nevertheless....
the story just doesn't seem right to me....
thanks
So BO is going to start a race war? Stokely Carmichael would be proud and the KKK would probably be OK with that too;) LOL. So I suppose Zimmerman is a tool of this plan also? Seems primitive and beneath BO's abilities to conjure up something as simple and lame as a race war. BO is capable of so much more I think. Only time will tell. Maybe BO is a double agent? A Superfly;) LMAO! And he's going to blow this conspiracy shit right out of the water.
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