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Obama administration seeks to block wiretap suit

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Devlin Barrett - Oct. 31 (News Report) - The Justice Department invoked the state secrets privilege Friday to try to stop a lawsuit over Bush-era wiretapping -- the first time the Obama administration has done so under its new policy on such cases. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision in a California lawsuit challenging the warrantless wiretapping program begun after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

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ACORN and Accountability

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Christopher Hayes - Sep. 23 (News Analysis) - With the notable exception of handing over $700 billion to Wall Street last year, the United States Congress is not known for quick, decisive action. But recently, in a resounding bipartisan vote, members of both houses voted to deny federal dollars to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Over the past fifteen years, ACORN and its affiliates have received on average about $3.5 million a year from the government, or approximately one-millionth of this year's budget. The votes came just a few days after the release of a series of (now infamous) videos in which young right-wing activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles pose as a pimp and a prostitute. They take a hidden camera to a number of ACORN tax preparation offices around the country seeking tax and business advice. (Why a pimp and prostitute? Who the hell knows. Neither answered my request for an interview.) The undercover duo provoked responses from ACORN staff that ranged from the unconscionable (an employee in Baltimore reacting to O'Keefe's plan to bring in thirteen Salvadoran girls as prostitutes with the suggestion he claim some as dependents) to the obviously sketchy (a Brooklyn tax adviser suggesting the couple put their cash profits in a can and bury it in the backyard) to the praiseworthy (the ACORN offices in Philadelphia called the cops and filed a police report)--O'Keefe and Giles haven't seen fit to post that tape. Mostly, though, the tapes are a testament to what might be called the Borat Effect: human beings' intense socialization to be helpful and not rock the boat, even when confronted with someone doing something objectionable, outrageous or preposterous.

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Sam Stein Discusses Cheney 2012, Condoleeza Rice's Afghanistan Comments On Rachel Maddow Show (VIDEO)

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Huff TV - Sep. 23 (News Analysis) - Huffington Post political reporter Sam Stein weighed in on Condoleeza Rice's comments on Afghanistan during his appearance Tuesday evening on The Rachel Maddow Show.

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Flushing Blackwater

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Jeremy Scahill - Aug. 26 (Investigative Report) - Blackwater, the private mercenary company owned by Erik Prince, has been thrust back into the spotlight by a series of stunning revelations about its role in covert US programs. Since at least 2002, Blackwater has worked for the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan on "black" contracts. On August 19, the New York Times revealed that the company was, in fact, a central part of a secret CIA assassination program that Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. The paper then reported that Blackwater remains a key player in the widening air war in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it arms drone aircraft. These disclosures follow allegations--made under oath by former Blackwater employees--that Prince murdered or facilitated the murder of potential government informants and that he "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe."

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t r u t h o u t | Supreme Court Opens Door to Possibility of Corporate Political Spending

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Reid Wilson - Jun. 30 (News Analysis) - Campaign finance watchdogs are concerned that a little-seen order issued on the Supreme Court's final day could lead to tens of millions of corporate dollars being spent on television advertising - an ad blitz candidates would have difficulty countering.

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Bush's Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to "Erase" Mid-East Enemies "Before a New Age Begins"

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Clive Hamilton - May. 25 (News Analysis) - The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means? The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush's Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

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In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti - Apr. 22 (Special Report) - The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

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Obama's Transparency Promise: We're Still Waiting | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

eff.org - By David L. Sobel - Apr. 19 (Special Report) - When President Obama – in one of his first official acts – committed his new administration to an "unprecedented" level of transparency, EFF applauded the change in policy. Likewise, when Attorney General Holder, at the President's direction, issued new guidelines liberalizing agency implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), we welcomed it as a "particularly promising development." But we also noted that it remained to be seen whether reality would match the rhetoric as the new policy was applied, particularly in the context of pending lawsuits – several of which EFF is pursuing – that challenge Bush-era decisions to withhold requested information. Unfortunately, the early indicators are not encouraging. Last week, the Justice Department told a federal judge (PDF) in Washington that the FBI – despite the new Holder FOIA guidelines – will not be altering its previous decision to withhold a substantial amount of information concerning its massive Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), which the Bureau describes as "the FBI’s single largest repository of operational and intelligence information." The database contains hundreds of millions of records and has been characterized as an "uber-Google."

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Bush Adm. Weighed Restricting 1st Amendment

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Michael Isikoff - Mar. 04 (News Report) - In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department secretly gave the green light for the U.S. military to attack apartment buildings and office complexes inside the United States, deploy high-tech surveillance against U.S. citizens and potentially suspend First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights in order to combat the terror threat, according to a memo released Monday.

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Bipartisanship Is All but Dead

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Jonathan Alter - Feb. 18 (News Analysis) - Say sayonara to "kumbaya." Bipartisanship is all but dead in Washington. President Obama cut a deal to win passage of his necessary—if not sufficient—stimulus bill with the last three moderate Republicans in Congress. But his effort to put a true conservative, Judd Gregg, in his cabinet turned out to be a bridge too far. While Obama wins points for coming across as a gracious and accommodating leader, his dream of a less polarized politics has been deferred—at least until he builds a new mass movement of independent voters with the help of the Terminator. Before I explain what California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has to do with the detoxification of Washington, let's briefly review how the purple dream went bust. After the economy tanked last fall, every sentient economist, including the top economic advisers to Ronald Reagan and John McCain, knew that we needed a large stimulus to avoid a depression. It looked like the new president would get at least a handful of GOP members of the House and as many as 20 Senate Republicans.

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Don't miss a credit card payment, or the APR could soar - Los Angeles Times

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By David Lazarus - Feb. 18 (Investigative Report) - Even in the best of times, carrying a balance on your credit card is a risky -- and costly -- proposition. These days, it can be downright foolish, at least if there's a chance you might miss a payment or two. Millions of cardholders have recently received letters from the likes of Citibank, Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and American Express Co. notifying them that their interest rates are going up, in some cases to 30% if a single payment is missed. JPMorgan Chase & Co., the nation's largest issuer of plastic, has begun charging hundreds of thousands of cardholders a $10 monthly fee for having carried large balances for more than a couple years. Why? In part it's because default rates are rising and banks are dealing with additional risk. But lawmakers and consumer advocates say the higher rates also reflect banks' massive losses from betting wrong on the housing boom, and they're basically sticking credit card customers

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Iraq sells its uranium to Canadian company

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Agence France-Presse - By Staff Report - Feb. 17 (News Report) - Iraq has sold its 550 tonnes of uranium concentrate or "yellow cake", built up by former dictator Saddam Hussein, to Cameco of Canada for 90 million dollars, the government said on Tuesday.

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The $4.7 trillion pyramid

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Michael Hudson - Feb. 13 (Special Report) - Social Security, formerly the “third rail” of American politics, has now been trod upon, in rather dramatic fashion, by George W. Bush. Given that the maneuver is both stupid and unnecessary, one must ask why. After all, the program's alleged deficiencies, if there are any, will not manifest themselves until at least 2018. This is not quite the same as worrying about the sun's eventual collapse into a black hole, but for most politicians a problem that lies thirteen years in the future is nearly the same thing. Clearly all is not what it seems. Bush himself offers two reasons for the present boldness. The first—that Social Security is “in crisis”—is easily dismissed. Government actuaries, backed by economists from across the political spectrum, insist there is no funding problem. The Social Security Administration will take in more money than it pays out for the next thirteen years; it has built up a reserve of $1.8 trillion in interest-bearing Treasury bonds for the years after that; and any later shortfall can be covered easily by even a partial rollback of the recent tax cuts for the rich. Bush's second argument sounds more promising. If the American people will simply follow his plan, he says, they too will become rich.

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How to Save Capitalism: Fundamental fixes for a collapsing system (Harper's Magazine)

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Michael Hudson - Feb. 13 (Special Report) - If the financial debacles of the past decade—the enormous bubbles, the credit collapse and its trillion-dollar consequences—have taught us anything about the American economy, it is that capitalists have done a remarkably poor job of safeguarding the future of capitalism. Our system became so dominated by finance, insurance, and real estate, and by the complex derivative securities these industries engendered, that the most eminent financiers (and their unsleeping computers) were unable to protect us from economic shocks. For a number of years, farsighted commentators—including in this magazine—warned of the looming credit collapse, and yet the masters of our economy took no action until the crisis was already upon us. Now we must not only repair our tenuous financial system but shore it up to withstand two great, gathering storms: dwindling energy supplies and accelerating climate change. To this end, Harper’s Magazine asked a group of leading economic thinkers to offer sweeping but concrete proposals for the rescue of capitalism, and capitalists, from doom.

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Exclusive: Leahy Talks To White House About Investigating Bush

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Sam Stein - Feb. 10 (News Report) - Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and White House Chief Counsel Greg Craig discussed on Tuesday the Senator's proposal to set up a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate potential crimes of the Bush administration. "I went over some of the parameters of it and they were well aware at the White House of what I'm talking about," Leahy told the Huffington Post. "And we just agreed to talk further."

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Bush White House Cast Assails Obama

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Dan Eggen - Feb. 06 (News Report) - But Ex-President Has Held His Tongue Richard B. Cheney says President Obama's policies will make it easier for terrorists to kill Americans. Alberto R. Gonzales says the new attorney general could be undermining the morale of U.S. intelligence officials.

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More Pressure for Bush Torture Probe

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Consortium News - By Jason Leopold - Feb. 02 (News Report) - “We need to follow this thing into those dense weeds and shine a bright light into what was done,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, said in a speech at Brown University on Saturday. “We can paper it over if we choose, but the blueprint is still lying there for others to do it all over again. It’s important that we not let this moment pass.” Whitehouse’s remarks were made at two-day medical conference sponsored by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which has called for an investigation into the Bush administration’s use of interrogation techniques that have been widely regarded as torture.

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Fannie Mae's Last Stand

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Vanity Fair - By Bethany McLean - Jan. 31 (Investigative Report) - Many believe the government-backed mortgage giants known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were major culprits in the economic meltdown. But, for decades, Fannie Mae had been under siege from powerful enemies, who resented its privileged status, its hard-driving C.E.O.’s, and its huge profits. Surveying Fannie’s deeply dysfunctional relationships with Congress, the White House, and Wall Street, the author tells of the long, vicious war—involving most of Washington’s top players—that helped propel one of the world’s most successful companies off a cliff.

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Bush's War Totals

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Nation - By John Tirman - Jan. 28 (Special Report) - The mortality caused by the war is also high. Several household surveys were conducted between 2004 and 2007. While there are differences among them, the range suggests a congruence of estimates. But none have been conducted for eighteen months, and the two most reliable surveys were completed in mid-2006. The higher of those found 650,000 "excess deaths" (mortality attributable to war); the other yielded 400,000.

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FBI saw mortgage fraud early

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Paul Shukovsky - Jan. 28 (Special Report) - "We knew that the mortgage-brokerage industry was corrupt," the first of the retired FBI officials told the Seattle P-I. "Where we would have gotten a sense of what was really going on was the point where the mortgage was sold knowing that it was a piece of dung and it would be turned into a security. But the agents with the expertise had been diverted to counterterrorism."

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NSA Spied on Journalists? Whistleblower Reveals Surveillance Target

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Common Dreams - By Olbermann, Russell Tice - Jan. 22 (News Report) - In an exclusive interview tonight on MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," former NSA analyst Russell Tice says that the agency under the Bush administration secretly collected communications data on civilians, including journalists.

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Picking Up the Pieces

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Dan Froomkin - Jan. 21 (News Analysis) - What a difference a day makes. Yesterday's inauguration of President Obama represented an epochal shift for this country, from a conservative leader to a liberal, from one generation to another, from a child of privilege to someone entirely self-made, and ever so poignantly, from a white man to a black man. It also marked the purging of one cultural icon and the rise of another. George Bush leaves office as a symbol to many people of everything that's wrong with America, while Barack Obama enters the White House as a symbol to many of what's right. Obama, for his part, pulled no punches in his Inaugural Address, casting his presidency as a restorative to Bush's. "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America," Obama said. Though he did not blame the smallness of our politics solely on his immediate predecessor, the message was clear: To Obama, the central meaning of the day was that it represented the long overdue end of an era to which Bush was the capstone. "On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord," Obama said. "What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility. . . .

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Editorials worldwide pillory Bush one final time

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Reuters - By Erik Kirschbaum - Jan. 19 (News Analysis) - Editorial writers around the world have been taking their final printed whacks at George W. Bush, accusing the president of tarnishing America's standing with what many saw as arrogant and incompetent leadership.

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Obama: Highest Initial Approval For Elected President?

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FiveThirtyEight - By Nate Silver - Jan. 19 (Poll) - Barack Obama's favorability ratings have continued to improve as we approach Tuesday's inauguration. But how do they compare to those of his predecessors? The two highest initial, post-inauguration approval ratings as measured by Gallup belong to presidents who took over for others whose terms ended prematurely. About 86 percent of Americans approved of Harry Truman when he took over for FDR. And 77 percent approved Lyndon Johnson when he took over for JFK. The highest initial approval rating for a newly elected president, on the other hand, appears to belong to Kennedy, whom Gallup pegged at 72 percent approval shortly after his inauguration in 1961.

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Bush's Only Gift to America

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Consortium News - By Robert Parry - Jan. 17 (Investigative Report) - George W. Bush’s gift to the American Republic may be that he has discredited a host of right-wing theories and practices – “trickle-down economics”; “self-regulating markets”; “tough-guy” foreign policy; the “imperial presidency”; and the notion that “government is the problem.”

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