craigslist | politics in SF bay area

I wonder what other conspiracy theories Emma subscribes to (berkeley)

2009-11-15T15:23:25-08:00

Contrails? Is the government using contrails to poison its own people?

Digital TV? Is this a way of spying on Americans?

Let me on that New York jury (9-11 terrorist)

2009-11-15T15:11:29-08:00

I'd hang that jury in a heart beat and convince some simple minded fool to go along with me. Why? So these terrorist can go forth and kill agian, and throw egg in Obama's face

Credit Card Charges (napa county)

2009-11-15T14:51:30-08:00

I am against credit card charges. Years ago, I had a Credit Card company that was charging me an annual fee; after several years of this, I decided to call this credit card company and ask them to discontinue their annual fee; they said, "No". I said, "Why?". They said, "When you signed on with us to use our card you agreed to pay these fees in accordance with our contract with you." I said, "But, I have been with you for several years (10 plus years) and have been an excellent customer, never was late, always made my payments." So, I put it this way to them: "Well, I have several other cards that don't charge me an annual fee and I am the same way with them, I make my payments every month and I am never late. So, do you want to keep me as a good custom or do want to lose me?" They said, "No, we don't want to lose you so how about if we lower your annual rate?" I said, "That's all you will offer me?" They said, "That's all we can offer you."
So, I took their offer for a day to give my self a chance to think about it and decided to discontinue that credit card. That is the same thing that is going to happen in regards this article "By Sandra Block, USA TODAY- follow this link: http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/block/2009-10-19-bank-of-america-card-fee_N.htm?se=yahoorefer

Tell us your feeling, Hell, don't just tell us, tell your congressmen and women.

I just don't believe it, first the government rips us off, of course the banks have always ripped us off and will continue to do so. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT. The banks have found another way to milk us dry, to rip us off. IF IT'S NOT TAKING OUR PROPERTIES, IT'S TAKING THE REST OF WHAT WE HAVE LEFT TO SURVIVE ON.

re6:Zionist logic - Berkeley Stupidity (Berkeley loves being the Villa (berkeley)

2009-11-15T14:29:00-08:00

You're right, 64% comes from central banks, but so what? Where do you think those central banks get their money? From the taxpayers of those countries! Governments can't just print their own money to pay for things, otherwise they wouldn't have to collect any taxes at all. If they try to print a large amount of money without anything to back it up, it's called inflation, you dumbass!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ahhh??? is there no end to your idiocy? Excuse me that's a rhetorical question, of course there isn't! LOL

You stand corrected you are once again wrong! The governments of the below mentioned countries have lent us hundred of billions and China nearly a trillion dollars, not individuals and corporations they just don't have that kind of money to lend.

Obviously you are wrong again Berkeley, ye ole Village Idiot as US tax payers are not sending aid in the form of money to Israel because the money is being borrowed from again those countries listed below.

Thus far the only situation I would accept is you refraining from being such a Village Idiot but not much of a chance of that I surmise! LOL

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that money come from individuals and corporations, not the governments of those countries, whereas we spy on the governments? Obviously, the aid that goes to Israel comes from U.S. taxpayers (although there might also be private donations, but that's irrelevant to this argument). Tell you what: Would you accept a situation where ALL American aid to Israel comes from private sources? Probably not, because then there wouldn't be enough money to keep Israel afloat, proving just how unpopular Israel is in reality.

Legalize marijuana??? NO! (downtown / civic / van ness)

2009-11-15T14:13:45-08:00

No heavy drug users started at the top. They all started with a toke on a joint. After a while the high was not enough. There was a change to a higher drug of choice.

I was a high school teacher in the 1960s and 1970s and went to a lot of funerals of drug users. The worst was a pretty, bright young girl who smoked crystal almost every day. An only child, she was found dead by her father with a needle in her arm in her bedroom closet. Her smoking companion lived but spent her life in and out of jail and prisons.

"Brave New World" describes drug use as a "Soma Holiday" and would be the accepted way of life in the future. This idea is tragic.

re5: Why doesn't Obama call it Terrorism? (berkeley)

2009-11-15T13:40:00-08:00

I served my country, probably before you were even born, so STFU.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You dumb ass! Muslims need no reason from us to want to kill us. Their retarded religion tells them that if they cannot convert us to Muslim, then we should die at their hands. As far as I'm concerned, we can waive that bit in the Constitution about religious freedom when it comes to them. They need to all be rounded up, put in intern camps until they can be shipped offshore in a leaky boat. Muslims SHOULD NOT be in our military, our children's schools, our cities, our states, our country. Fuck Muslims!

I highly doubt that you ever served our country. Otherwise, you would know better. At best, you were probably a paper pusher stationed back here in the states.

**********

re3: Why doesn't Obama call it Terrorism? (berkeley)
Date: 2009-11-13, 4:34PM PST
Reply to: comm-xmuy8-1465041076@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

No, the OP has a point. This shooter did not threaten or attack any civilians. Our government chose to go to war against Muslims. He did what any troops do when they stage an ambush--for instance, in Vietnam. I had a friend in Chicago who served in Vietnam as a lieutenant. He said there was an incident where the sergeant took his troops on a road and they were ambushed by Viet Cong. I'm sorry to say that our military must now always be on the alert for ambushes even here at home. Bush had the choice between making the response to 9/11 a police operation and waging war. He decided to do the latter. He blew it and our troops are paying the price.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Everyone except for you piece of shit Demoshats considers this terrorism. You're messiah doesn't want it called that because he feels for his Muslim brothers and doesn't want to admit that terrorism happened on his watch. It's a big sham just like everything else from the Obumer Administration. LIES LIES LIES LIES

re X 2 re:What 89% of America thinks about one issue of health care (Read you own material carefully)

2009-11-15T12:37:26-08:00

Wrong again. Read your own stuff carefully. I am quoting your post now.

Yes, the GOP bill prevents some cancellation of existing polcies, and improves portability (COBRA), it still permits carriers to refuse new business based on preexisting conditions. Yes, old customers can't be dumped, but new ones looking for coverage they did not previously have before are still excludable. The Democratic Party therefore concludes the GOP plan would cover, at best, no more than about 3 million of 47 million now uninsured. People with conditions like, for example, diabetes, are still out, if they were not covered previously by someone.

I also note how people like you scream when online, rather than try to have rational discussions.

Frankly, and I speak as a former recovering ex Conservative, one thing that turned me off about the Right was the endlessly angry tone of voice. Democrats and liberals may be silly at times, but they are really a lot more fun and pleasant to be around. This I state from experience.

Why can't the Right ever just lighten up? It's like you were born furious, and I got tired of that demeanor, and left. Look at Ronald Reagan: he got al those votes, including mine, by his sunny, cheerful dispoisition. I really miss him, unlike your sort. Better liberals who are fools but happy than Conservatives who endlessly rage about everything. Over all these long decades, what have you accomplised by it? Chill, and mellow out.

A local Bay Area poster

re:What 89% of America thinks about one issue of health care : ('local Bay Area poster' is a LIAR!)

2009-11-15T10:04:22-08:00

You are a flat out liar and I will prove it. You clain the Republican Healthcare Plan proposal allows insurance companies to deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions. Here is the proof that you are a LIAR!

Ways & Means Republicans Committee

THE COMMON SENSE HEALTHCARE REFORM AND AFFORDABILITY ACT
Section 102: Elimination of certain requirements for guaranteed availability in individual market.
The bill extends existing HIPAA guaranteed availability protections, which will improve insurance portability and protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. Under current law, individuals purchasing health insurance in the individual market are protected from pre-existing condition exclusions if there is not a substantial break in coverage, their previous coverage was through an employer, and they fully exhaust COBRA coverage. This provision would allow individuals to receive those same protections regardless of the source of their prior coverage and without requiring them to exhaust COBRA coverage, which is often very expensive for both employees and employers.

Section 103: No annual or lifetime spending caps.
The bill prohibits health plans from arbitrary annual or lifetime spending caps, thereby protecting individuals with a catastrophic diagnosis or chronic disease by ensuring health plans meet their obligations to those with the most expensive medical needs.
Section 104: Preventing unjust cancellation of insurance coverage.

The bill prohibits health insurers from unlawfully canceling health insurance (�rescissions�). If an insurance company attempts to cancel health coverage on the basis of fraud the policy holder can appeal that decision with an independent external appeals panel and the coverage would remain in force while that appeal is being considered. This provision insures that no American�s access to needed medical care will be harmed by the wrongful cancelation of their health insurance plan.

Yes, you read correctly. No misprint, no typo here. A galactic eighty-nine percent (89%) of Americans polled, people from all parties and political views and independents, feel that insurance companies should be legally banned from their current practice of refusing to cover people with such preexisting conditions as diabetes and even, as in one case, a surgery to take out an appendix six months before a man broke his leg in a completely unrelated event. Eighty-nine of Americans think such a policy is absurd and immoral. (You have to wonder about the last 11%!)

Please put this in persepctive. No politcian has ever won a political race with that many votes, 89%, even in safe seat districts, assuming anyone is running against them at all. 89% is what North Korean tyrants get - maybe.

Let's be clear. Many people argue over such issues as public options, abortion coverage and what not. But 89% of Americans feel that insurance carriers must stop this cruel practice of denying coverage to those with preexisting conditions they cannot help. A whopping number.

So, then, which party disagrees with the 89% and valiantly supports the hardball attitude of that last 11%? you ask.

Yes, you guessed it. The Republicans, our beloved GOP. Against the wishes of the 89%, their so-called "alternative" package (try not to laugh) to health care reform (I use the word with utmost looseness) baldly permits insurance carriers to continue this brutal current practice, which goes on every day and excludes millions of people, even the very wealthy who could otherwise afford the sky high premiums.

It's the GOP versus 89% of America, folks.

It's a free country. You can think, say or vote however you may or may not desire regarding this astounding statistic.

But you all really ought to know this cosmic fact. I owe it to you to simply inform you of this information, and now I have done so.

You can Google it if you don't believe it.

Thank you very much.

Most Respectfully,

A local Bay Area poster

Here's one link to the 89% figure on preexisting conditions (See current attitudes today)

2009-11-15T09:41:50-08:00

See this link, as to current Obama era attitudes polled, increased from 1994 under Clinton.

http://publicaffairs.fleishmanhillard.com/index.php/2009/11/06/the-idea-vs-the-reality-of-health-care-reform/

What 89% of America thinks about one issue of health care (Guess who disagrees with all of them? )

2009-11-15T09:17:38-08:00

Yes, you read correctly. No misprint, no typo here. A galactic eighty-nine percent (89%) of Americans polled, people from all parties and political views and independents, feel that insurance companies should be legally banned from their current practice of refusing to cover people with such preexisting conditions as diabetes and even, as in one case, a surgery to take out an appendix six months before a man broke his leg in a completely unrelated event. Eighty-nine of Americans think such a policy is absurd and immoral. (You have to wonder about the last 11%!)

Please put this in persepctive. No politcian has ever won a political race with that many votes, 89%, even in safe seat districts, assuming anyone is running against them at all. 89% is what North Korean tyrants get - maybe.

Let's be clear. Many people argue over such issues as public options, abortion coverage and what not. But 89% of Americans feel that insurance carriers must stop this cruel practice of denying coverage to those with preexisting conditions they cannot help. A whopping number.

So, then, which party disagrees with the 89% and valiantly supports the hardball attitude of that last 11%? you ask.

Yes, you guessed it. The Republicans, our beloved GOP. Against the wishes of the 89%, their so-called "alternative" package (try not to laugh) to health care reform (I use the word with utmost looseness) baldly permits insurance carriers to continue this brutal current practice, which goes on every day and excludes millions of people, even the very wealthy who could otherwise afford the sky high premiums.

It's the GOP versus 89% of America, folks.

It's a free country. You can think, say or vote however you may or may not desire regarding this astounding statistic.

But you all really ought to know this cosmic fact. I owe it to you to simply inform you of this information, and now I have done so.

You can Google it if you don't believe it.

Thank you very much.

Most Respectfully,

A local Bay Area poster

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (willow glen / cambrian)

2009-11-15T08:49:58-08:00

Have you ever heard of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

No?

Well, you see, that's the problem. Not enough people even know they have
those basic rights because nobody had ever told them.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created by the
United Nations in 1948.

Today there are 192 countries that are part of the United Nations. In theory, every member nation has agreed to follow this
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In practice, they don't.
The result is human misery across the entire globe, in terms of millions of people unjustly treated by the governments which are supposed to protect them.

Go to www.youthforhumanrights.org.

Find out all about it. Tell your kids. Tell your neighbors. Tell your schools. Tell
everybody. If we all take responsibility for enforcing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we will have a happier and saner planet.

Rocking the Vote.com -Petition to Legalize Marijuana In California and

2009-11-15T08:38:09-08:00

Rock the Vote is asking for your support of Assembly Bill 390, the Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education Act -- the first bill ever introduced to legalize the sale and use of marijuana in California.
As introduced, this groundbreaking proposal would raise over $1 billion in annual revenue by taxing the retail production and sale of marijuana for adults over 21 years of age.

The bill would not alter existing legislation on the use of medicinal cannabis, nor would it impose new taxes or sanctions on the medical cultivation of cannabis.

Assembly Bill 390 proposes to make California the first state in the nation to enact a rational public policy for the control and regulation of marijuana. Please show your support for this measure by contacting your California Assembly members and urging them to support the Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education Act.
Petition:
Now is the perfect time to legalize, tax & regulate marijuana.
Taxes could be used to offer free college tuition to all students

Sign Petition at

www.RockingtheVote.com

Democrats not telling the truth about tea partys....

2009-11-15T07:49:28-08:00

sorry democrats it is you who are lying
you've always say republicans are trailer trash and uneducated while you are all so smart and college educated
therefore you are clearly the ones sucking each others balls while in college getting high

re:Aid to Israel; the Terror State?

2009-11-14T22:08:57-08:00

I'm sure you're aware because you know so much about US Foreign Aid that Egypt gets $1.3 billion a year from us. They have built a wall keeping Palestinians from Gaza out of Egypt, they shoot those that try to enter illegally, the won't allow trucks to deliver food or medicine preferring to charge black market inflated prices for that which is brought in through underground tunnels. Egypt has treated the Palestinian people like this since 1948 when the only way the people of Gaza got supplies was through Egypt. Talking about being a terrorist state, a country that controlled Gaza for 19 years from 1948 until 1967 and built a wall to lock them out, shooting those that entered for aid without permission, now that's a REAL terrorist state!

Re. How can you tell Rep. Lynn Woolsey is gay? (She was married to a

2009-11-14T20:22:00-08:00

I don't see how saying someone is gay is libelous or slanderous. It might be incorrect, like saying I'm Asian (I'm not), but how would that be slanderous? Only an ignorant homophobe would think being called gay, even incorrectly, is an insult, or libel, or slander.

~~~~~~~

Date: 2009-11-14, 8:02AM PST
Reply to: see below

Representative Woolsey was once married to a man. This man then chose to divorce her, which he did for uncertain reasons. Personal matter.

So, while it is true she's pro gay rights, how can you tell whether she's gay herself? Where's your evidnece?

If she's not gay, then she should sue your stinking pants off for libel and slander.

I speak as one who voted for GOP Ronald Reagan twice. You may dislike people's views, but you can't slur them with untruths.

* Location: She was married to a man
* it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 1465657848

Re: $10K in-state-student annual fees in CA state univ system?

2009-11-14T19:36:41-08:00

With all the griping about 'greedy' C.E.O.'s has anyone ever mentioned that university Presidents are making well over a million dollars a year just in salary?
Think about that the next time you here a politician say that we need to increase funding to Colleges.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-11-02-college-salaries_N.htm

Peace Signs, Still "Groovy"? Join the Blog (bayview)

2009-11-14T18:10:44-08:00

Peace Signs, please join in...
http://peacesignsstore.blogspot.com/

Aid to Israel; the Terror State? (Boycott Israel, boycott Intel)

2009-11-14T17:53:13-08:00

Please visit this site for a good look at how they use your tax money.

This is a terrorist state depending on violence and terror for its' survival.

http://www.israeli-weapons.com/

re Insurance co. Rove style the Original Poster (oakland east)

2009-11-14T17:49:54-08:00

Perhaps I was a little hasty in my choice of discripitive words while refering to you. I just tend to call it the way I see it.
It does tick me off when people blame their life situation on someone else instead of taking responsibility for their own lives.
Nothing in this life is guaranteed and we make the best out of what life leaves us with or we sit around whining and feeling sorry for ourselves.
You seem to have chosen the latter.
And yes, I've been where you claim you are now. Medical problems forced me to leave my chosen profession and find one that I allowed me to still provide for myself and my family.
We moved to an apartment, sold my new car,bought an older one and survived until I had paid all the bills I owed. I did it without expecting someone to do it for me or blaming others for my problems.
It could be that I am a little cynical but I have a low threshold when it comes to people not taking responsibility for themselves and try to blame others for their lot in life.
This is not to say that those who are truly unable to provide for themselves should not be given all the help they need, but I see way too many people taking advantage of a overly generous welfare system that encourages slackers to accept a life of dependency instead of encouraging them to reach for the outer bounds of their potential.

re:Who is really behind the Teabag anti health care protests (there is a difference)

2009-11-14T17:48:33-08:00

Just for the record Teabagging is an activity primarily practiced by the homosexual community of the Democrat Party

Tea Parties are protests primarily practice by Republicans

Democrats don't protest Teabagging, in fact they rather enjoy the activity and consider it a recreational event

Republicans attend Tea Parties exercising their Constitutional right to assembly for free speech purposes.

When this year's Tea Parties began, Democrats mistakenly assumed Republicans where copying one of the Democrats favorite recreational events and till this day haven't been able to differentiate between the two!

RE ALL U.S. taxpayers are taxed to provide aid to Israel (berkeley) (Try to understand civics, pardner!)

2009-11-14T17:47:30-08:00

I am neither part of the Israel can do no wrong crowd nor the bunch that thinks Palestinians and other Arabs are pure and virtuous freedom figthers, nor am I the sort of cretin stormtrooper who denies the mass murders of World War II of over six million Jews (or possibly more than seven million) and millions of others (like Gypsies) by gas and other atrocities. Overall, I like Israel better than the Arabs, since at least Israel doesn't force women to wear tents in hot desert weather. As a Christian, I know what my future is under Islam, by comparison, life under Jewish rule is pure Paradise! At the same time, I realize that Israel is no angel, Jonathan Pollard helped Mossad sell information to the Soviets (exchanged for Jewish prisoners in Russia) that the Soviets could well have used to destroy America in a massive nuclear first strike.

So, like the old 50s song, everybody is a little bit like a "devil or angel, who knows which one you are." Nobody is pure saint.

Having said all this, it's not a matter of what each taxpayer thinks or opposes.

No, we all vote for a government.

Then that government we elect decides whether or not to finance Israel. Probably, to do so is a good idea, but I sometimes doubt myself.

Then, when our governmnet decides, we ALL pay taxes toward what Washington's policy is pro or not pro at any given moment.

Simple as that. Just basic civics.

NO COUNTRY ON EARTH cna afford to go around and ask what EACH taxpayer wants or doesn't want. That can't work. A democratic government must pool ALL tax money into one pot, and decide how, collectively, it will be spent. No individualism allowed, pardner.

Either the government decides to give Tel Aviv a bit of that pot or not. Vote for the candidates who reflects your views the closest, but no voter or taxpayer gets everything they want or believe in or oppose. Learned that in junior high school.

re5:Zionist logic - Berkeley Stupidity (Berkeley loves being the Village Idiot!)

2009-11-14T17:38:01-08:00

Ahhh??? is there no end to your idiocy? Excuse me that's a rhetorical question, of course there isn't! LOL

You stand corrected you are once again wrong! The governments of the below mentioned countries have lent us hundred of billions and China nearly a trillion dollars, not individuals and corporations they just don't have that kind of money to lend.

Obviously you are wrong again Berkeley, ye ole Village Idiot as US tax payers are not sending aid in the form of money to Israel because the money is being borrowed from again those countries listed below.

Thus far the only situation I would accept is you refraining from being such a Village Idiot but not much of a chance of that I surmise! LOL

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that money come from individuals and corporations, not the governments of those countries, whereas we spy on the governments? Obviously, the aid that goes to Israel comes from U.S. taxpayers (although there might also be private donations, but that's irrelevant to this argument). Tell you what: Would you accept a situation where ALL American aid to Israel comes from private sources? Probably not, because then there wouldn't be enough money to keep Israel afloat, proving just how unpopular Israel is in reality.

ALL U.S. taxpayers are taxed to provide aid to Israel (berkeley)

2009-11-14T16:39:16-08:00

It doesn't matter whether you're Jewish or non-Jewish, believe in Zionism or oppose it, YOU GET TAXED! Making Israel rely entirely on voluntary donations would be a much fairer way to aid it. Agree? Disagree?

" FREEDOM from the sins of porn/homosexuality/etc........ at........." (settingcaptivesfree.com)

2009-11-14T16:25:11-08:00

You can start being FREE from the sins of porn/homosexuality/drugs/alcoholism/rodent fondling/gambling/etc.............
Free online courses at :

http://settingcaptivesfree.com

The GOP went downhill very rapidly after Lincoln (berkeley)

2009-11-14T16:24:59-08:00

The second president after Lincoln was the Republican Ulysses S. Grant, whose administration was one of the most corrupt in U.S. history.

re:Imminent $10K yearly in-state student fees in CA state univ system? (berkeley)

2009-11-14T16:19:12-08:00

It might be very revealing if somebody took the tuition for a year and divided that by the number of hours spent in class during that period. How would this compare to the hourly rate charged by lawyers, for example? Is it possible that college students actually pay more per hour than it would cost them to hire a lawyer? If so, how can that be justified?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It�s crunch time for California�s college students.

While our elected officials in Sacramento fail to get the job done, students in California are staring down daunting increases in their tuition and fees � in many cases a 30% jump that could mean thousands of dollars more every year. And while students are scrambling to figure out how to cover these costs, university leaders are threatening to cut some of their most important programs and classes. This is not the California we know.

I [Phil Ting] am leading a campaign that could help rescue California higher education from this downward spiral. It�s called Close the Loophole � and it could potentially raise billions of dollars for vital public services like higher education by closing the vast corporate tax loopholes created by Proposition 13. We are building an online, grassroots campaign of thousands of Californians who are demanding change.

Prop. 13 was initially advertised as protection for elderly homeowners � but today, it protects corporations who use its tax loopholes to avoid paying their fair share in property taxes.

Because of the loophole in Proposition 13, California loses up to $7.5 billion of tax revenue every year. If we fix this problem, the funds we raise by closing the tax loophole could be dedicated to saving our higher education system and re-investing in California�s students.

I hope you will read my article called Close the Loophole to Protect Higher Education that was published recently in the Daily Californian, the newspaper of UC Berkeley. In the article, you can learn about the campaign we are building to Close the Prop. 13 Loophole. And watch this call to action video recorded at UC Berkeley.

We are building incredible momentum. Thousands of Californians have signed our online petition and joined the campaign on Facebook and Twitter. Californians like you are demanding change and looking for a way to make their voices heard. In just a few short months, thousands of Californians from across the state have signed up to help restore fiscal sanity to our state by closing the Prop. 13 corporate tax loophole.

This month, UC, CSU and community college students walked out of their classes in mass protest of the unfair fee hikes. You may have been one of these students or you may know someone affected. Being a part of our campaign is a way you can make your voice heard on this important issue.

I�m a UC Berkeley graduate and I know the value of a quality education. While California teeters on the brink of financial collapse, I see first-hand as San Francisco�s Tax Assessor-Recorder how billions of dollars in tax revenue go down the drain because of Proposition 13.

Please join us to make a change. Forward this email to your friends and be a part of the conversation atFacebook.com/ClosetheLoophole and Twitter.com/Close_Loophole.

Thank you,

Phil Ting
San Francisco Assessor-Recorder
Chair, Close the Loophole Committee

P.S. According to a poll conducted by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, 58 percent of California voters are in favor of changing Proposition 13 to require businesses to pay property taxes according to their current market value. Join us on Facebook to make your voice heard.

Paid for by Close the Prop. 13 Loophole. 150 Post St., Suite 405, San Francisco, CA 94108: closetheloophole.com/

Geneva, Switzerland

Hawaii's famed white sandy beaches are shrinking (berkeley)

2009-11-14T16:08:50-08:00

Hawaii's famed white sandy beaches are shrinking
By AUDREY McAVOY, Associated Press Writer Audrey Mcavoy, Associated Press Writer 1 hr 50 mins ago

KAILUA, Hawaii � Jenn Boneza remembers when the white sandy beach near the boat ramp in her hometown was wide enough for people to build sand castles.

"It really used to be a beautiful beach," said the 35-year-old mother of two. "And now when you look at it, it's gone."

What's happening to portions of the beach in Kailua � a sunny coastal suburb of Honolulu where President Barack Obama spent his last two family vacations in the islands � is being repeated around the Hawaiian Islands.

Geologists say more than 70 percent of Kauai's beaches are eroding while Oahu has lost a quarter of its sandy shoreline. They warn the problem is only likely to get significantly worse in coming decades as global warming causes sea levels to rise more rapidly.

"It will probably have occurred to a scale that we will have only been able to save a few places and maintain beaches, and the rest are kind of a write-off," said Dolan Eversole, a coastal geologist with the University of Hawaii's Sea Grant program.

The loss of so many beaches is an alarming prospect for Hawaii on many levels. Many tourists come to Hawaii precisely because they want to lounge on and walk along its soft sandy shoreline. These visitors spend some $11.4 billion each year, making tourism the state's largest employer.

Disappearing sands would also wreak havoc on the environment as many animals and plants would lose important habitats. The Hawaiian monk seal, an endangered species, gives birth and nurses pups on beaches. The green sea turtle, a threatened species, lays eggs in the sand.

Chip Fletcher, a University of Hawaii geology professor, says scientists in Hawaii haven't yet observed an accelerated rate of sea level rise due to global warming.

Instead, the erosion the islands are experiencing now is caused by several factors including a steady historical climb in sea levels that likely dates back to the 19th century.

Other causes include storms and human actions like the construction of seawalls, jetties, and the dredging of stream mouths. Each of these human actions disrupts the natural flow of sand.

But a more rapid rise in sea levels, caused by global warming, is expected to contribute to erosion in Hawaii within decades. In 100 years, sea levels are likely to be at least 1 meter, or 3.3 feet, higher than they are now, pushing the ocean inland along coastal areas.

Fletcher says between 60 to 80 percent of the nation's shoreline is chronically eroding. But the problem is felt particularly acutely in Hawaii because the economy and lifestyle are so dependent on healthy beaches.

The state is doing everything it can to keep the sand in Waikiki, for example, joining with hotels in the state's tourist hub on a plan to spend between $2 million and $3 million pumping in sand from offshore.

Sam Lemmo, administrator of the state's Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands, says the state would need a variety of adaptation strategies for different beaches.

It would likely have to abandon hope for beaches in posh Lanikai and suburban Ewa Beach on Oahu because they're already lined with seawalls and are badly eroded.

The same probably goes for shoreline next to highways or other critical public infrastructure, where seawalls already exist or may have to be built.

Seawalls protect individual properties from encroaching waters but they exacerbate erosion nearby by preventing waves from reaching the sand needed to replenish the beach.

For undeveloped shoreline, the state wants to make sure these areas stay pristine. This happened recently when a Florida-based developer announced plans to build luxury homes on sand dunes in Kahuku on Oahu's North Shore.

"We just kind of went nuts, pulled out all the guns on that one, basically got them to back off," Lemmo said. "We're working pretty hard to keep any new development away from these areas."

The University of Hawaii's Sea Grant program is working with a consultant to develop a beach management plan for Kailua that would address how to deal with a 1 meter rise in sea level. The state hopes this will be the first of many site-specific management plans for Hawaii's beaches.

A "triage," strategy could be applied to Kailua, which is lined by multimillion-dollar homes but doesn't have seawalls.

Fletcher proposes identifying areas where a land conservation fund would buy five or six adjoining properties. The state would tear down buildings on these plots and allow the beach to shift inland.

He said when erosion hits more sections of Kailua beach, there's going to be a clamor to put up seawalls.

"That will be a very important moment," Fletcher said. "If we allow the first home to put up a seawall, then we're probably dooming the entire beach over the course of a couple of decades . . .

Ultimately the beach will disappear. Or we could have an alternative to that, to identify now some portions of Kailua shoreline where we want the beach to live."

Imminent $10K in-state-student annual fees in CA state univ system? (LaSeer)

2009-11-14T15:22:56-08:00

It�s crunch time for California�s college students.

While our elected officials in Sacramento fail to get the job done, students in California are staring down daunting increases in their tuition and fees � in many cases a 30% jump that could mean thousands of dollars more every year. And while students are scrambling to figure out how to cover these costs, university leaders are threatening to cut some of their most important programs and classes. This is not the California we know.

I [Phil Ting] am leading a campaign that could help rescue California higher education from this downward spiral. It�s called Close the Loophole � and it could potentially raise billions of dollars for vital public services like higher education by closing the vast corporate tax loopholes created by Proposition 13. We are building an online, grassroots campaign of thousands of Californians who are demanding change.

Prop. 13 was initially advertised as protection for elderly homeowners � but today, it protects corporations who use its tax loopholes to avoid paying their fair share in property taxes.

Because of the loophole in Proposition 13, California loses up to $7.5 billion of tax revenue every year. If we fix this problem, the funds we raise by closing the tax loophole could be dedicated to saving our higher education system and re-investing in California�s students.

I hope you will read my article called Close the Loophole to Protect Higher Education that was published recently in the Daily Californian, the newspaper of UC Berkeley. In the article, you can learn about the campaign we are building to Close the Prop. 13 Loophole. And watch this call to action video recorded at UC Berkeley.

We are building incredible momentum. Thousands of Californians have signed our online petition and joined the campaign on Facebook and Twitter. Californians like you are demanding change and looking for a way to make their voices heard. In just a few short months, thousands of Californians from across the state have signed up to help restore fiscal sanity to our state by closing the Prop. 13 corporate tax loophole.

This month, UC, CSU and community college students walked out of their classes in mass protest of the unfair fee hikes. You may have been one of these students or you may know someone affected. Being a part of our campaign is a way you can make your voice heard on this important issue.

I�m a UC Berkeley graduate and I know the value of a quality education. While California teeters on the brink of financial collapse, I see first-hand as San Francisco�s Tax Assessor-Recorder how billions of dollars in tax revenue go down the drain because of Proposition 13.

Please join us to make a change. Forward this email to your friends and be a part of the conversation atFacebook.com/ClosetheLoophole and Twitter.com/Close_Loophole.

Thank you,

Phil Ting
San Francisco Assessor-Recorder
Chair, Close the Loophole Committee

P.S. According to a poll conducted by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, 58 percent of California voters are in favor of changing Proposition 13 to require businesses to pay property taxes according to their current market value. Join us on Facebook to make your voice heard.

Paid for by Close the Prop. 13 Loophole. 150 Post St., Suite 405, San Francisco, CA 94108: closetheloophole.com/

Lake Geneva, Switzerland

Lake Geneva, Switzerland

RE re Insurance companies, Rove style swift boats (The original poster)

2009-11-14T14:48:33-08:00

Au contraire. Insurance companies right now will not sell to me at any price, regardless of my wealth. Agents have so informed me in person.

One thing I notice about ultra conservatives. They can seldom speak in proper English without using coarse and vulgar language, yet it is they who are always lecturing the rest of us about morality and family values, whatever that means. How about being godly with your own words?

re Insurance companies, Rove style swift boats (oakland east)

2009-11-14T14:27:56-08:00

In other words, you want someone else to pay for your insurance.
Typical butt crack smoking liberal.

Who is really behind the Teabag anti health care protests (Insurance company Rove style Swift Boats)

2009-11-14T13:10:32-08:00

Please see the link below.

To no one's surprise at all, the insurance industry has been orchestrating and choreographing this whole thing better than George Balnachine, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham could meticulously organize their precisely moving dance troupes! That old Rover gang!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30219673/the_lie_machine

Now then, how about some people around here pack it in on the Truth Movement and go fight for proper health care, the lack of which kills far more Americans per year than the September 11 terrorist hijackers could ever imagine. This means even many prosperous people making a lot of money working hard for a living, but unable to get coverage due to preexisting conditions, such as being born with Type I genetic diabetes, or asthma from childhood to present, as in my case, and I am an educated person who tries to work two separate careers at once, but am unable to do it, because my body is just too messed up in many multiple ways.

re4:Zionist logic (berkeley) (berkeley)

2009-11-14T11:49:15-08:00

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that money come from individuals and corporations, not the governments of those countries, whereas we spy on the governments? Obviously, the aid that goes to Israel comes from U.S. taxpayers (although there might also be private donations, but that's irrelevant to this argument). Tell you what: Would you accept a situation where ALL American aid to Israel comes from private sources? Probably not, because then there wouldn't be enough money to keep Israel afloat, proving just how unpopular Israel is in reality.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hmmm........then why do we spy on China, Japan & Britain all of them have loaned us billions if not trillions of dollars?
Who are you (we) to judge so harshly?
Disagree explain why?

You're right about spying on those folks, but what about the United States? Is spying on the U.S. any way to treat a country that sends huge amounts of aid their way? This has happened. Does the name Jonathan Pollard ring a bell?

It's really bizarre (berkeley)

2009-11-14T11:37:50-08:00

Republicans get all pissy when you report overtly homosexual conduct by a Republican official, but they expect Democrats to accept their characterization, based on nothing but suspicion, of a Democratic official as homosexual. Whoever is posting innuendo about Lynn Woolsey, cease and desist! I'll flag your next post along those lines.

What happens with private individuals elsewhere is not "Politics" (Flag such posts as Miscategorized)

2009-11-14T11:22:20-08:00

Whatever men or women supposedly do in England, Australia, Canada or wherever between or to each other, and whatever courts may feel about it in such places, is just not "Politics" and does not pertain to the Bay Area or California. You may think whatever you want about it, but such matters don't belong on this Board. They should be flagged under CL rules as "Miscategorized."

You can take your opinions on these things to "Rants and Raves" where they properly belong, and no one will object there. But please leave these issues off the local San Francisco "Politics" board where they are not appropriate. Please consider this a polite request.

Respectfully,

A local Bay Area resident conforming with posted Craigslist Rules

China sentences notorious gang 'godmother' (no glass ceiling for the competent)

2009-11-14T10:27:03-08:00

Dubbed the "godmother" of the Chinese underworld, she was notorious for her toughness and a lavish lifestyle that reportedly included luxury villas and a stable of 16 young lovers.

Her criminal reign ended Tuesday when Xie Caiping, 46, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for running illegal casinos and bribing government officials. Her trial was one of a series of gang prosecutions in the southwestern city of Chongqing that have featured lurid testimony about sex, corruption and the violent underworld.

Xie is the only female gang boss to be tried as part of a monthslong crackdown on local gangs, known as "black societies," in the sprawling southwestern megacity of 30 million. The trials have exposed the tangled web of links between government officials and police officers who sought to provide cover for the crime syndicates.

Besides her luxury homes, Xie reportedly enjoyed her own Mercedes-Benz and "retained 16 young men for personal entertainment," local media reported. On Tuesday, her driver Luo Xuan, 29, who was also her lover, was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail for his role.

Wearing an inmate-assigned vest of bright orange, the short-haired and plain-faced Xie was grim and emotionless as she was led out of the No. 5 Intermediate People's Court after the sentencing.

Xie had been protected for years because she was the sister-in-law of the city's long-serving deputy police chief, Wen Qiang, who was detained for investigation by the ruling Communist Party in August. Wen, who is regarded as being at the heart of an extensive network of protection of local gangs for over a decade, will go on trial later in the month.

Xie once absconded with a suitcase full of money after being tipped off by Wen before a police raid on one of her gambling dens, according to a local newspaper. Last year, she hired gang members to beat an undercover police officer unconscious, put him in a bag and dump him in the countryside.

During the trial, Xie's profanity-laced testimony drew a rebuke from the judge. Victims who had been terrorized by the gangs waited patiently for Tuesday's sentencing.

Xie was convicted of "organizing and leading a criminal organization, running gambling dens, illegal imprisonment, harboring people taking illegal narcotics and giving bribes to officials," the official Xinhua News Agency reported. She was also fined 1.02 million yuan (about $150,000).

Chen Yanling, a Chongqing resident who says she was beaten by thugs after refusing a corrupt policeman's request to turn her teahouse into a casino, said she and other victims waited outside the court for the verdict. But they were angered by Xie's sentencing, with some people refusing to leave until police escorted them away.

"We didn't believe our ears when we first heard it's just 18 years. How many crimes has she committed?" Chen said.

The crackdown in Chongqing has netted some 1,500 suspects � gangsters, prominent businessmen and 14 high-ranking officials. Six gang members in the city have already been sentenced to death for crimes including murder and blackmail.

On Tuesday, 20 others, including officials who offered protection to gang members, were sentenced to between one and 13 years in prison, according to a notice on the Chongqing court Web site.

The court notice said Xie's gang "severely broke the normal order of society," and illegally detained others and allowed loan sharking at the casinos. The casino took a cut of the profits won by gamblers, the notice said. It said casino bosses hired stand-ins to take the blame when there was a crackdown and paid bribes to judicial officials.

Since September 2004, it said, Xie's gang had made 2 million yuan ($293,000) in illegal earnings by running more than 10 gambling dens.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091103/ap_on_re_as/as_china_gangs

Police: Florida wife faked her own abduction ('cooked up with lover')

2009-11-14T10:19:29-08:00

It sounds like the sort of romantic-mystery potboiler that keeps readers on the edge of their summer beach chairs: A strikingly pretty Florida housewife with a handsome husband and two beautiful young daughters is kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and held for $50,000 ransom.

Or was she?

Prosecutors contend the strange case of 37-year-old Quinn Gray, who claims she was abducted and held for four days in hellish captivity, is a cleverly planned ruse. They claim her supposed abductor, a 25-year-old Bosnian immigrant, was actually her lover, and that the pair plotted to extort cash from Quinn�s well-heeled husband, Reid.

Quinn Gray and her alleged lover, Jasmin Osmanovic, are charged with extortion. But two of her lawyers appeared on TODAY Tuesday to say that Gray, who has a history of mental illness, is a terrorized victim, not a scheming co-conspirator. The case has set the community around Jacksonville, Fla., abuzz.

�Please do this, honey�

No one is arguing the basics of the case. Quinn Gray went missing the Friday of Labor Day weekend. A ransom note, written in Quinn�s handwriting, was found tacked to the front door of the Gray�s $4 million home, stating: �There are three men holding me right now, and they want $50,000 cash. Stay at the house NO COPS! Keep your cell phone on you. Keep the kids with you. Please do this honey, please!�

But authorities believe it was all trickery. They believe Gray was having an affair with Osmanovic that began when the two met in June at a gas station where Osmanovic worked, and that the pair cooked up a fake kidnapping plot.

�It became more and more evident to really everybody involved that there was something far more complex and involved than a kidnapping,� St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar told NBC. �Quinn Gray was not kidnapped.�

Authorities cite, among other things, the manager of the hotel where Gray was allegedly being held saying she �didn�t seem to be in distress at all,� and a 90-minute audiotape they say captured the sounds of Gray and Osmanovic in the throes of passion, and then plotting the details of a fake kidnapping.

Mental illness, substance abuse

But Gray attorney Mark Miller has a simple explanation: Quinn Gray is a very sick woman. Miller told Matt Lauer live on TODAY, �Her reaction to the kidnapping, it may seem bizarre, but it�s all explained by her mental illness.�

Miller says psychiatric problems run in Gray�s family, and that she tried to mask her own emotional problems by abusing alcohol. Gray checked in to the renowned Hazelden clinic in Minnesota last June to receive treatment, but when she checked out in July, she was a virtual mental powder keg, her attorneys say.

�Quinn has grown up with a stigma against recognizing what she was going through,� Miller told Lauer. �She self-medicated for much of her adult life with alcohol; that led to a substance abuse problem. In the middle of the summer, she was treated for alcoholism.

�When she came back, for the next six weeks she was untreated, undiagnosed and she was no longer self-medicating. She was in a manic phase of her bipolar disorder when she was kidnapped.�

That made Quinn Gray easy pickings for the likes of Osmanovic, Miller contends. He said that when the case goes to court, he will move to have the incriminating audiotape tossed out under rape shield laws. Far from being a tape of two people making love, then scheming to collect $50,000, said Miller, the tape is actually �an audio recording of a woman who has been kidnapped, abducted and being raped.�

Standing by his wife

For now, Quinn Gray is at a psychiatric facility on St. Simons Island in Georgia, and Osmanovic is in jail. Attorney Rick Jancha, also representing Gray, told Lauer Tuesday that she is �doing rather well. Of course she�s very anxious about what�s going on. She�s in the middle of her treatment.�

And Reid Gray is standing by his wife, both believing her version of the events and bankrolling her defense. In a statement, he said, �This has been an extraordinarily traumatic experience for me and my entire family. I am deeply concerned over how this incident has, and will continue to, affect our children. I love my family and will do whatever I can to make sure that Quinn receives all of the help and support that she needs.�

Osmanovic continues to assert to authorities that he and Gray had a six-week relationship that included trysts at his gas station, at a hotel and even at her home. He says Gray made him a house key and gave him the home�s security code � and gave him a cover story to use if anyone came to the door while he was there.

Miller asserts that Osmanovic�s claims, and the prosecutor�s contention that the pair were having an affair, are bogus.

�Not one e-mail, not one text message, not one cell phone record � there is nothing that supports their contention that it�s a faked kidnapping,� Miller said.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/33600013/ns/today-today_people/?GT1=43001

(She is a victim. She will be hospitalized.

He is a victimizer. Or, if you prefer, a fall guy. He will be imprisoned, and punished.

Funny how that works!)

Sportscaster Nantz to pay ex-wife $916K a year

2009-11-14T09:59:54-08:00

CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz must pay $916,000 yearly in alimony and child support to his ex-wife and give up their Connecticut home under terms of a newly issued divorce decree.

The ruling, made Monday in Bridgeport Superior Court, dissolves the 26-year marriage of Nantz and Ann-Lorraine "Lorrie" Carlsen Nantz. It comes after both testified about the breakdown of their marriage; Judge Howard Owens concluded neither was at fault.
Nantz, described by Owens as "our nation's most prominent sportscaster," filed for divorce last year from his wife after years of marriage counseling, according to the decree.

Although Nantz, 50, acknowledged he started dating a 29-year-old woman before the divorce was final, the judge concluded the marriage deteriorated years earlier and "this remote event in no way contributed to the breakdown of the marriage."

Owens noted that the couple didn't share the same interests in Nantz's television career, which required frequent travel as the network's primary commentator for college football, golf and basketball, as well as appearances at charity events.

"In fairness, for most of the years he prioritized his family obligation and put his wife and daughter Caroline first. As frequently happens in marriages of lengthy duration, the parties do not have the same interest and ardor for their spouses' endeavors," the judge wrote in his decision.

Under the ruling, Nantz must pay $72,000 in alimony monthly until he dies or his ex-wife remarries, and another $1,000 weekly in child support for the next two years.

Nantz's attorney, Gaetano Ferro of New Canaan, said Tuesday that the famed sportscaster only wants what's best for his daughter and will not fight the terms of the divorce decree.

"He always wanted a peaceful resolution of an unfortunate situation," Ferro said. "He never wanted a trial, never wanted it to come out this way, never wanted a public spectacle. He wants to put it behind him."

Lorrie Nantz will get their home and a separate condominium in Westport, while Jim Nantz will get their home in Houston and a luxury condominium in the Deer Valley ski resort in Park City, Utah. They were awarded joint custody of Caroline, 15.

He also must pay Caroline's college expenses until she reaches 23 years old and has to split various joint accounts with Lorrie Nantz, including the current value of his pension through the Screen Actors Guild.

He also must keep his ex-wife listed as beneficiary of a $3 million life insurance policy while he's still paying alimony and/or child support, and pay $70,000 so she can join any country club of her choice.

She had been seeking more than $1.5 million in yearly alimony and child support.

Court documents cited Jim Nantz's $3.2 million salary from CBS and other assets, including millions in other income, shared investment accounts, real estate and other property.

Nantz, who started his broadcast career at a local CBS affiliate in Salt Lake City, testified that Lorrie Nantz grew uninterested in his career over time, did not want to attend events that were important to him and didn't provide the emotional support he desired.

Lorrie Nantz said she went as often as possible, but that those events were not her life's major interest and her main focus was raising their daughter.

"They're two good people, and as sometimes happens over 26 years, they grew apart," Ferro said.

Cynthia George, Lorrie Nantz's Greenwich-based attorney, said she and her client had no comment except that they were pleased with the decision.

http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/10315260/Sportscaster-Nantz-to-pay-ex-wife-$916K-a-year

(Ka-ching!)

"Haaa! 'morning CA!" Woolsey (Queer ass slept so well)

2009-11-14T09:18:24-08:00

"I just woke up after a wonderful night's sleep next to another woman who gently kissed my queer ass until I dozed off last night. It's so fun to do what you want. I'm going to do absolutely nothing today, as usual. It's so fun to be a U.S. rep. I get so many perks and it's at best a part time job. I go here and there and everywhere. I've got money in the bank, a nice place to live and tons of respect, especially off of you. I just love telling people the way things are and will be. It makes me feel so good right down to my queer ass pink toes each day.

So, here's the deal. I'm here to stay whether you like it or not. Barbara has assured me as she does each day on the phone. It' none of your business to bother with me or even to suggest you'd replace me because you can't and you won't. I'm very confident about it so take off all of you cheap shot small timers. I'm looking forward to terms in the house until I damn well don't want it any longer which will be never. I don't have an ounce of pity for anyone in the district. I'm tired of all of you. So, you can just be on your own. If it weren't for the Democratic party, where would any of you be? That's right. You'd be totally conserv and hating every minute of it. All you'd have is hate. So just remember that. People like me are about non hate whether you get it or not. Nothing else even counts."

childo's real job: posting lies about rape, defending rapists (alameda)

2009-11-14T08:37:40-08:00

Police decry false report of sexual assault ('girl crying wolf')

2009-11-14T08:17:39-08:00

The U Police Department has determined that a reported rape last week was nothing more than a teenage girl crying wolf.

On Tuesday, U Police were notified that a 16-year-old girl was suspected to be the victim of a rape the day before near the Residence Halls. That afternoon, Housing and Residential Education put out a campuswide emergency alert that a light blue car, parked on Fort Douglas Boulevard between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., was suspected to have been the location of the rape, based on the girl�s account.

U Police say the girl had consensual sex after skipping school and made up a rape story to avoid getting in trouble�undermining the experiences of real rape victims.

�Rape is a very ugly, violent crime which law enforcement and the community take very seriously,� said Capt. Lynn Mitchell of the U Police. �However, there are many fraudulent reports of rape each year.�

According to the U Campus Safety Report, about six sexual assaults (by which phrase, they mean, 'date rapes' - which can range from actual aggression from a predatorial individual, in the dark, outside ... to two drunken teenagers, one of whom regrets her unladylike conduct, the next morning, and, in denial over her inner sluttiness, accuses her friend of rape - by which, she actually means, "seduction", but this word, alas, is not in her lexicon, it seems) occur on campus each year. But this wasn�t one of them.

�The juvenile victim did in fact have physical evidence showing that she had recent sex, but the story had loopholes and inconsistencies,� Mitchell said. (Yes, the hickeys on her throat ... not to mention the trail of hickeys on the insides of her thighs.) U Police began to suspect she hadn�t been honest with them, he said. After further questioning, the juvenile admitted the sex was consensual.

U Police closed the case for being unfounded.

According to the police, the girl and three of her friends skipped school and came to the U to see a friend. They visited their friend for 15 minutes before the girl and one of the friends she came with left to go home. Before leaving, the girl and her 16-year-old friend had sex.

The next day, the principal of the girl�s high school called her to his office to talk about the absence the previous day. In an apparent attempt to deflect the tension, the girl told the principal that she had been raped, according to the U Police.

�The principal correctly called law enforcement, which started the ball rolling,� Mitchell said. The girl said this occurred on campus, so the local detective alerted the U Police, who in turn told HRE.

It�s not the first time U Police have been notified of a sexual assault, only to find out there was nothing to it. On Oct. 25, a woman claimed to have been raped while she was a patient at the U Hospital. As it turned out, she made it up, according to U Police.

When women falsely claim to have been raped, it does a great disservice to women who actually have been raped, Mitchell said.

Sometimes it�s to avoid trouble or out of revenge.

�It�s more complex and complicated than a simple false report,� said Debra Daniels, director of the U Women�s Resource Center.

Women who make false claims of sexual assault should still be consulted about what is going on in their life that would prompt them to do so�for instance, the teenage girl from last week. According to the police, she skipped school to go drinking with her friends and have sex, issues that might need to be asked about, Daniels said.

The U Police probably won�t press charges against the girl for making a false sexual assault report, since she didn�t pin it on a specific person, Mitchell said.

(Nothing wrong with inflating statistics, I guess - never mind the fact that they are used to justify draconian changes in public policy - and the awarding of staggering amounts of money, yearly, to women's organizations.)

According to the Utah Coalition Against Sexual Assault, rape is still one of the most underreported crimes in Utah. It�s a serious offense that still needs to be treated and reported as a serious matter every time, Mitchell said.

(That's right. A lot of people's jobs depend upon it.)

http://www.dailyutahchronicle.com/news/police-decry-false-report-of-sexual-assault-1.2046587

How can you tell Rep. Lynn Woolsey is gay? (She was married to a man)

2009-11-14T08:02:52-08:00

Representative Woolsey was once married to a man. This man then chose to divorce her, which he did for uncertain reasons. Personal matter.

So, while it is true she's pro gay rights, how can you tell whether she's gay herself? Where's your evidnece?

If she's not gay, then she should sue your stinking pants off for libel and slander.

I speak as one who voted for GOP Ronald Reagan twice. You may dislike people's views, but you can't slur them with untruths.

'British women who think fathers are irrelevant'

2009-11-14T07:51:27-08:00

Having reached the age of 38 without meeting Mr Right, Karen Shefras decided to become a mother by using donated sperm.

As a result, Karen, who runs her own company, has never met her ten-month-old daughter's father. The closest she came to him was at the clinic where five of her eggs were injected with sperm donated by the dark-haired and intelligent businessman.

'Ideally, it would have been nice to have met a man and had a baby the conventional way,' says Karen, now 41. 'I always pictured myself getting married - but it just didn't happen.

'I grew up as part of a generation of women being told we had lots of choices. It never occurred to me that one day I'd be 30 and single, and before I knew it I would be 40 and single.

For women who find themselves in this position, having a baby via a sperm donor suddenly becomes an option.'

The story of how Karen brought her daughter Addie into the world - at a cost of �12,000 - is remarkable enough, but statistics suggest it is becoming more commonplace.

Latest figures from the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority (HFEA) show that nearly one-fifth of all women using sperm donors are single.

More often than not, these women are educated, middle-class, financially independent females who have succeeded in every area of their lives but have failed to find a husband to father their children.

On October 1, the law changed to reflect this growing trend by removing the requirement for single women to demonstrate that their sperm donor baby will have a father figure.

The Human Fertility & Embryology Act 2008 means that doctors no longer need to take into account the 'need for a father'.

Instead, a woman requesting sperm must only demonstrate that any child will receive 'supportive parenting'.

As leading fertility law specialist Natalie Gamble of Gamble and Ghevaert says: 'The recent changing of the wording is designed to be welcoming to different family forms. Single women are now in no worse a position in establishing that they will be able to offer parenting just as supportive as heterosexual couples.'

Critics of the Act claim the change in law is another nail in the coffin of traditional family life. Others insist that it merely reflects the complex social make-up of Britain today.

Karen herself, who runs an exhibition management agency from her home in Twickenham, Surrey, admits that her position is not ideal, but argues that she made the best choice she could given her circumstances.

Like so many women of her generation, Karen pursued a career believing that it would bring her fulfilment.

'I got so buried in work between the ages of 20 and 30,' she says. 'I was having fun, I suppose, but it was a false life. I got to 38 and everything was great, but I just felt so empty.

'My brother had two children, which made me feel even more sorry for myself. Everything felt pointless and directionless in my life.'

Karen was 38 when, in her own words, 'the truth really started to kick in' and she decided to take control of her situation. 'I realised it was now or never,' she says.

'I wanted children while my parents were still young enough to enjoy them. I had this fear of life passing me by, and them dying while I was waiting for something tohappen.'

In August 2007, she registered with the London Bridge Clinic and was put on their waiting list for a sperm donor. Her parents supported her decision.

'My mum was completely overjoyed, and my dad said: "It's a changing world. Why not?"

'There were only a few people who said: "That's not the correct way to do it." And my answer to them was: "What is?"

'I'm not anti-man and I still hope to meet one. But due to my age, I did not have time to wait any longer.'

By the time she had undergone all the medical tests required before treatment begins, Karen was at the top of the clinic's list and given a choice of five donors.

The clinic provided details of the donors' hair and eye colour, height and build, as well as occupation, education, hobbies and marital status. Some clinics even offer baby photos of the donor and audio recordings of interviews with them.

'I wanted someone with similar colouring to my own,' Karen says. 'I didn't want a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby, because I'm not. And intelligence was important to me. I opted for my donor because he sounded grounded and intelligent.'

In November 2007, Karen underwent intrauterine insemination, where donor sperm is injected directly into the uterus, but failed to conceive. A second attempt in December was also unsuccessful.

In desperation, she turned to in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Karen's eggs were harvested from her ovaries and fertilised outside the womb.

'They removed 14 eggs, and in the end they had five possible embryos. They put two back, so I could have had twins - but when I went for my eight-week scan, only one had thrived.'

Addie was born on December 17 last year by Caesarean section.

'I was absolutely overwhelmed with love,' says Karen. 'Of course it would have been nice to have shared that moment with a man, but we don't live in an ideal world.

'People have accused me of being selfish - but there are lots of incredibly unhappy mothers and fathers out there. I am very contented and so is Addie. There is constant harmony in my flat.'

Karen says her job means she is able to support both herself and Addie, and she insists her daughter will have male role models in her life. 'I have my brother, my dad and male friends. I have a wide social circle. She gets attention from them.

'Perhaps if I had once been married and experienced that partnership, I'd feel that I was missing something more. But I don't feel a big gap - I feel so complete with her.'

According to one gynaecologist the Mail spoke to this week, as many as 50 per cent of patients being given sperm at his clinic are single women or are in same-sex relationships.

Tim Child, consultant gynaecologist at Oxford Fertility Unit, says this high percentage can be explained partly by the fact that medical advances mean that traditional couples are less likely to need the assistance of a sperm donor.

But he admits: 'We've certainly noticed an increase in requests from single women. Until October 1, we were required by law to ask about a male role model for the child. There was usually a brother, or a friend, or their father.

'Sometimes single women would question why they needed to answer that, and we'd have to explain that it was a legal requirement. The change in the law means that we don't have to go into as much detail. I actually think it's a realistic change in light of society today.'

According to a spokeswoman for the Donor Conception Network, a quarter of the support group's membership is now single women.

'For a number of women, the reality is that if they want to become mothers they will have to do it alone,' she says. 'The stigma of being a parent on your own is reducing.

'And women are generally more educated, more economically independent, more stable and confident, and therefore more able to make a decision that if they want to be mothers and can't find a man to do it with them, they can go ahead by themselves.'

TV executive Ruth Rackham, 44, who became a single mother by choice four years ago, admits that her son's need for a father-figure was ever present in her mind. She made the decision to become a mother at 39, having failed, like so many of her friends, to find a partner.

'In every other area of my life, I had made conscious decisions about what I wanted. But when it came to what, potentially, was the most important thing of all, I was leaving it to chance.

'I had tied in all hopes for children with the desire for a lasting relationship. It suddenly dawned on me that these two things might never coincide.' Instead of using sperm from a registered clinic, she turned to a gay friend, who lives in Italy, for help.

She needed IVF to conceive, but was pregnant by her 40th birthday. Her son Luca, who has contact with his biological father when he visits from Italy, celebrated his fourth birthday this week.

'Because I had a boy, I felt it was very important to offer my son a positive male role model,' she says. 'I felt uncomfortable about the idea of a boy brought up on his own with his mother.'

Then, two years ago, she met her husband Tim - and Luca now has two father figures.

'My son has become incredibly attached to his stepfather, whom he calls Daddy, which is hard for his biological father, whom he calls Papa - but we all get on well together,' says Ruth.

She admits that at the moment, though, the situation is somewhat confusing for her son.

'Luca doesn't understand the difference between biological and stepfather. I have tried to explain to him that Mummy and Daddy met after he was born.

'We have to be very careful to let him understand in his own way, in his own time and keep it as simple as possible. I try to take my cue from what he wants to hear.'

Ruth, who lives near Aylesbury in Bucks, says she did not want to use an anonymous donor at that stage.

'I was happy to have a known donor who wanted to help me in my attempt to conceive. I'd have felt uncomfortable using unknown donor sperm - but maybe if that had been my only option, it would have been different.'

Of the HFEA's decision to remove from their latest regulations the requirement for a potential mother to demonstrate her baby will have a father figure, she says: 'There's a certain sadness in this.

'The most important thing is supportive parents, whatever sex they are. But it's undeniable that it must be a good thing for a child to have a hands-on relationship with both their biological parents.'

But for many women, the ideal remains out of reach.

Ruth adds: 'I think that in the future there will be more sperm donor babies and more options for women over the age of 35. Many women are now starting to freeze their eggs.'

According to lawyer Natalie Gamble, the new Act is, in effect, simply rubber-stamping changes which have already taken place in society.

'Family structures are becoming more diverse, women are taking more control over their procreation and doing it at the right time for them. The increase in single women deciding to have families on their own is just one aspect of that.

'In the past, before clinics treated anyone, they had to consider the child's need for a father. Historically, this was seen as a discouragement to single women, and for many years it was very difficult for single women to access treatment through licensed clinics.

'Over the years, that policy has evolved. Over the past five years, women have already been able to access more treatment.'

BUT, of course, not everyone welcomes the changes. Sociologist Patricia Morgan, of the Institute for Economic Affairs, describes the new Act as 'dreadful'.

'It's the feminist dream come true,' she says. 'I don't think we've ever had this in history - the removal of the need for a father.

'What are men meant to do now? If they're not needed as responsible fathers, as providers, what is their role in life now? What is their status?

'And even if these women can financially support themselves, what kind of family is it when the mother is out at work all day?

'The implications of this law change are momentous. Nobody seems to have thought of the child here and what kind of future he or she will have.'

Women such as Karen and Ruth would no doubt be irritated by the suggestion that they are no better than impetuous and irresponsible teenagers who become pregnant.

Karen, who is hoping to have another baby next year using the same sperm donor, points out: 'I do have small regrets. It would be nice not to have to worry about bringing in money.

'It is hard being alone, but I don't dwell too much on it. My life has taken the direction it's taken. I feel very blessed to be a mother.'

But she admits to feeling anxious about the future.

'There are moments when I think: "God, I hope she doesn't react badly when she finds out." I'm hoping it won't be detrimental to her personality, but I come from quite a grounded family and I'm hoping that her surroundings and her upbringing will help her.

'By the time she goes to school, I don't think being a sperm donor baby will be such a strange thing. In the U.S., there are already thousands of donor children.'

But the most telling thing of all is that Karen still hopes to meet 'Mr Right' - a positive sign at least that having a baby without a man does not remove a woman's emotional need for a life partner.

'I really do hope a man comes along,' she says. 'I can't see myself without a man for ever.'

In the end, perhaps the truth is that, for complete fulfilment, women need both a partner and children.

The most worrying question of all is why the most natural thing in the world has become so seemingly difficult to achieve, and why a generation of women have fallen foul of their dreams.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1224225/Daddies-damned-Who-British-women-think-fathers-irrelevant.html

(It's strange, how all these self-impregnated women stop self-impregnating after they have exactly one child.

Is childbirth, and motherhood, just another 'thing' that they simply have to try, once - like hang-gliding, or parachuting from an airplane, or going bungee-jumping - that is to say, a mean to achieving a thrill, and not an end in itself?

Are these single children, just 'vanity' children?

They are consigned to brotherlessness and sisterlessness by their single mother's obsession with her self, and her image - and her desperate need for a child ... just one child, easy to dominate, easy to control, not too much of a demand upon her time and resources, easy to drop off, easy to pick up, easy to train.

Is this really in society's, or the next generation's, best interests?

At best, we are raising a generation of self-centered children whose lack of involvement with siblings will translate into a lack of empathy for others' familial responsibilities. They'll make fine candidates for corporate management, though - without any familial responsibilities, they will be able to travel, when and where their father figure - The Employer - dictates.

At worst, we are raising a generation of children whose unassuaged fears and bottled-up angers will boil forth in the decades to come, and create future traumas for another generation of complete strangers who did absolutely nothing to deserve what happened to them, as a result of being at the wrong place, at the wrong time.)

RE:Old Catholic Documents: St Augustine (actually Escondito Judeo)

2009-11-14T07:18:10-08:00

This poster is full of shit. The article does not even mention the word Jew, or convert, or anything remotely suggestive of jews in any form. Why the fuck did you even post this? Are you so desperate to slam Jews, you worthless, ignorant, hateful dipshit? Oh, and BTW, even if converts HAD owned slaves, they were CONVERTS> That means they would have been Catholics.
Free Hit Counter Analytics!

re: Look and learn (SF)

2009-11-13T22:22:28-08:00

What is this terrorist crap the shit eaters on the right are talking about?

The American Military KILL innocent men, women and children every
single day in the Middle East!

So who are the terrorists?

"Good night suckers. I'm far better than you." Woolsey (My queer ass says so)

2009-11-13T22:19:30-08:00

I'll bet my queer ass against any challenger. I know I'll always win. It takes a queer, queer, queer ass to be like me. Sleep tight. Tomorrow's just another day of me, Woolsey who does any damn thing she pleases while you twist and burn.

re re re3, why doesnt Obama call it..... (santa clara)

2009-11-13T21:40:43-08:00

You Hit it On the Head, RETARDED MU-SLUM Religion. All religions are retarded, they just want you to believe what they want you to believe to control the masses, which makes sense and some are great guides to follow in life, but when you die your dead, you dont go to heaven, (imagine the population in heaven after thousands of years of people), Its probably like the great mall you just keep going around in a circle masses of people after masses of people. If there right does that mean heaven is full of women in full black dresses with vails and men all have the worst, and I mean the Worst BO. Those folks should be mad at there god for leaving them in a big sand pit, like poop in a litter box.
How could a person dressed in middle eastern fashion be on an army base, How could an officer be allowed to continue on the way he did...........
We are getting lax again, and we are prime for another attack. We don't give the appearance of a country that is on the look out for further attacks. The Hippy's of the late 60's now run the country and they suck. They couldn't manage a turd filled bag on fire, I hope the next generation is paying attention and ready to move these morons aside that are running (or ruining) our, once was great country, out and unfortunately will have hard work to repair this country unless its too late.
Religion is ruining this planet. Religion is ruining this planet. (God hasnt struck me down yet).
There is no Devil, There are no ghost, No one can prove that there are these things.
Maybe its time to change the playbook, the bible is like Aesops tales, Who cares about Jesus, and were is he now? (Still alive no lightning bolt)
Allah probably smelled worse than a camels butt on the hottest day.
Where is the ARK?
Where is the Commandments?
WAKE UP AMERICA< WE COULD BE GREAT AGAIN< WE ARE DRAGGING ARE SELVES DOWN>WE ARE BEING LIED TOO>ARE YOU FEELING WHAT YOUR SAYING>ARE YOU AFRAID OF BEING STRUCK DOWN>GIVE UP RELIGION
If there is a GOD he hates us, we are ruining the planet not god, not allah, Our kids and there kids will surely suffer
YOU KNOW WHAT IS RIGHT AND WRONG YOU DONT NEED A BOOK TO GUIDE YOU.
VOTE ALL OFFICIALS IN OFFICE OUT AND VOTE IN ALL NEW ONES THAT"S HOW CHANGE WILL HAPPEN> NOT ELECTING SOMEONE TO CONTINUE COVERING UP WHAT THE LAST GUY DID< THERE ALL TOGETHER LET THEM KNOW WE ARE ON TO THEM>
ALL YOU NEED IS PEACE AND EVOLUTION< WE NEED TO EVOLVE ON TO THE NEXT BIG THING

Wake UP AMERICA! (whats going on around here?)

2009-11-13T20:33:09-08:00

George Carlin said that AMERICANS are too content with their lives to question anything, hell, they have cell-phones that make pancakes ...

A! QUESTION EVERYTHING! Ask QUESTIONS DEMAND ANSWERS!

Wake up and smell the burnt Reichstag!

Open your eyes, .... Bust the emperor for INDECENT EXPOSURE!

The Emotionally Abusive Woman: Is She a Borderline or a Narcissist?

2009-11-13T20:27:21-08:00

If you�re involved with an emotionally abusive woman, at first you probably wondered, �What�s wrong with her?� If you�ve been with her for a significant length of time, you probably now wonder, �What�s wrong with me? Why does she treat me so bad?�

Emotional abuse grinds you down over time and leaves you feeling depressed, anxious, helpless and worthless. You don�t deserve to be treated badly. People who are emotionally abusive typically fall into specific personality types and by types, I mean disorders.

The emotionally abusive cluster B disorders, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD), Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), and Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD), lie on a continuum. Depending on the day, hour, minute or second, your wife or girlfriend may exhibit different characteristics of these personality disorders. They�re all similar flavors of crazy.

So how can you tell if your emotionally abusive girlfriend or wife has Borderline or Narcissistic traits? The following are general rules of thumb I use when trying to tease out the difference.

How do they approach relationships?

The Narcissistic Woman: �Love me�or else.� If you don�t unconditionally accept the NPD and all of her horrible behaviors, you are, as one of my readers describes it, �unforgiving and mean.� She initially charms and then bullies you into loving her. If you reject her or she thinks that you�re criticizing her, you�re treated to a narcissistic rage episode or cold sullen withdrawal and the death stare.

Every now and again, a narcissist will be nice to you, even affectionate. This is because she is:
about to manipulate you into doing something for her;
making a public display in order to be seen by others as magnanimous or loving;
celebrating because she�s duped or tricked you about something; and/or
lulling you into a false sense of security because she�s about to clobber you again.

In other words, if she�s being nice to you, be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Borderline Woman: �Please love me. I didn�t mean it. Don�t leave me.� Initially, the BPD will mutate into the woman she thinks you want her to be. This ideal fantasy woman has nothing to do with who she is in reality. She�ll do everything in her power to please you in order to make you love her and then the mask starts to crumble.

Can you feel sympathy for her?

The Narcissistic Woman: The NPD woman is a very unsympathetic creature. It�s damned near impossible to feel sorry for her. If she manipulates you into feeling sympathy for her, it�s to get you to let down your guard so she can steamroll you again. They invented the term crocodile tears for NPDs. She cries when she�s terrified of losing control over her half dead mouse�that would be you�or of having her true self exposed.

The Borderline Woman: Even when she�s off the charts crazy, there�s still something sort of pitiful about her. It�s easier to feel sympathy for a BPD, but pity and guilt shouldn�t be the glue that holds a relationship together. Intention does not negate consequence. In other words, even if a BPD woman can articulate, �I didn�t mean to hurt you,� it doesn�t absolve her from the responsibility of having inflicted harm whether it was intentional or unintentional. A person with these issues has a very hard time understanding this.

Is she capable of accepting personal responsibility?

The Narcissistic Woman: She rarely, if ever, admits she�s wrong unless it�s to zing you with a thinly veiled insult. For example, �I thought you were a kind and generous man. I see now that I was wrong.� She never ever takes personal responsibility for her hurtful actions. If you call her on her bad behaviors, she claims it was your fault for pushing her into it (i.e., you deserved it) and you�re a bad man to make a good woman like her act that way. You should be ashamed of yourself!

Alternatively, she�ll use dime store psychology or dogmatic religion to justify her inexcusable behaviors. For example, �A true christian practices forgiveness� or �You have unresolved issues with your mother� or �My therapist said I should do what�s in my heart.� How do you not respond, �You�re kidding, right?� to these kinds of statements.

The Borderline Woman: The BPD will admit what she did was wrong, BUT she�ll follow it up by blaming you for triggering her. That�s not real personal responsibility. It�s what a 5-year old says when they get caught doing something wrong. �Yes, what I did was wrong, but it wasn�t my fault.� The NPD won�t acknowledge any wrong-doing�that�s the difference. The NPD believes she was right to hurt you.

Is she capable of empathy?

The Narcissistic Woman: The NPD is virtually incapable of feeling empathy for others. She is 100% ENTITLED, which means other people�s feelings don�t really matter. There is one exception. If someone else is giving you a hard time, the NPD will say, �Well I never had a problem with �Joe.� He�s always been nice to me. He must be really stressed. You�re probably bringing this on yourself.� The NPD woman shows empathy for others at your expense. She�s a real gem.

The Borderline Woman: BPDs can be guided to feel empathy by reminding them of specific instances when they felt bad, but it�s usually pretty fleeting. Bottom line: A BPD�s emotional distress takes precedence over everything and everyone else, no matter how empathic she may seem to be from time to time.

Is she capable of giving?

The Narcissistic Woman: That would be no, no and no. NPDs are all TAKERS. It�s definitely a one-way street when you�re involved with a narcissistic woman. She may make a show of being kind and generous in front of others, but that�s only because she wants to protect her highly controlled public image. Alternatively, if she does something �generous� it�s because she believes �those are the rules� of etiquette, society or her religion. NPDs are big rules and regulations types. She will then expect to be lavishly acknowledged and praised for her act of generosity (or something as minor as cleaning up after herself in the bathroom) and never lets you forget it.

The Borderline Woman: BPDs are givers, but it comes with a price. It�s part of what I mentioned earlier about doing anything to please you to get you to love them.

Most of the behaviors I�m describing are entirely unconscious. They�re learned at an early age and some of them may be hardwired. Whether she�s more NPD or BPD, both traits are extremely painful and damaging to the people who love them.

http://mensnewsdaily.com/2009/11/02/the-emotionally-abusive-personality-is-she-a-borderline-or-a-narcissist/

(Reminds me of FDV-93-005153.)

A Court Decision that Reflects What Type of Country the U.S. is

2009-11-13T18:28:04-08:00

It's not often that an appellate court decision reflects so vividly what a country has become, but such is the case with yesterday's ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Arar v. Ashcroft (.pdf). Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent. A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal's McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he's 17 years old. In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was "rendered" -- despite his pleas that he would be tortured -- to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured. He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured. Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing. I've appended to the end of this post the graphic description from a dissenting judge of what was done to Arar while in American custody and then in Syria.

In January, 2007, the Canadian Prime Minister publicly apologized to Arar for the role Canada played in these events, and the Canadian government paid him $9 million in compensation. That was preceded by a full investigation by Canadian authorities and the public disclosure of a detailed report which concluded "categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada." By stark and very revealing contrast, the U.S. Government has never admitted any wrongdoing or even spoken publicly about what it did; to the contrary, it repeatedly insisted that courts were barred from examining the conduct of government officials because what we did to Arar involves "state secrets" and because courts should not interfere in the actions of the Executive where national security is involved. What does that behavioral disparity between the two nations say about how "democratic," "accountable," and "open" the United States is?

Yesterday, the Second Circuit -- by a vote of 7-4 -- agreed with the government and dismissed Arar's case in its entirety. It held that even if the government violated Arar's Constitutional rights as well as statutes banning participation in torture, he still has no right to sue for what was done to him. Why? Because "providing a damages remedy against senior officials who implement an extraordinary rendition policy would enmesh the courts ineluctably in an assessment of the validity of the rationale of that policy and its implementation in this particular case, matters that directly affect significant diplomatic and national security concerns" (p. 39). In other words, government officials are free to do anything they want in the national security context -- even violate the law and purposely cause someone to be tortured -- and courts should honor and defer to their actions by refusing to scrutinize them.

Reflecting the type of people who fill our judiciary, the judges in the majority also invented the most morally depraved bureaucratic requirements for Arar to proceed with his case and then claimed he had failed to meet them. Arar did not, for instance, have the names of the individuals who detained and abused him at JFK, which the majority said he must have. As Judge Sack in dissent said of that requirement: it "means government miscreants may avoid [] liability altogether through the simple expedient of wearing hoods while inflicting injury" (p. 27; emphasis added).

The commentary about this case from Harper's Scott Horton perfectly captures the depravity of what our Government has done -- and continues to do -- to Arar. His analysis should be read in its entirety, and he concludes with this:

When the history of the Second Circuit is written, the Arar decision will have a prominent place. It offers all the historical foresight of Dred Scott, in which the Court rallied to the cause of slavery, and all the commitment to constitutional principle of the Slaughter-House Cases, in which the Fourteenth Amendment was eviscerated. The Court that once affirmed that those who torture are the "enemies of all mankind" now tells us that U.S. government officials can torture without worry, because the security of our state might some day depend upon it.

I want to add one principal point to all of this. This is precisely how the character of a country becomes fundamentally degraded when it becomes a state in permanent war. So continuous are the inhumane and brutal acts of government leaders that the citizens completely lose the capacity for moral outrage and horror. The permanent claims of existential threats from an endless array of enemies means that secrecy is paramount, accountability is deemed a luxury, and National Security trumps every other consideration -- even including basic liberties and the rule of law. Worst of all, the President takes on the attributes of a protector-deity who can and must never be questioned lest we prevent him from keeping us safe.

This is exactly why I find so objectionable and dangerous the ongoing embrace by the Obama administration of these same secrecy and immunity weapons. Obama had nothing to do with the Arar case -- all the conduct, and even the legal briefing, occurred before he was President -- but he has taken numerous steps to further institutionalize the core injustice here, including in cases that are quite similar to Arar: namely, that the Executive can use secrecy and national security claims to shield himself from the rule of law, even when he's accused of torture and war crimes. That's exactly what happened here, yet again. As Judge Parker wrote in dissent,

Identically, Judge Calabresi -- one of the most respected and non-ideological appellate judges in the country -- accused the majority of "utter subservience to the executive branch." Surely that's true, but it isn't only the Arar majority that is guilty of that. It is the nation as a whole -- drowning in infinite claims of "state secrets" and executive immunity and war necessity and the imperatives of "looking forward" -- that has meekly acquiesced to the pernicious idea that the President in an allegedly national security context must never have his actions disclosed, let alone judicially scrutinized and held accountable, no matter how criminal, brutal and inhumane those actions are.

**********************

Here's Judge's Sack's description of what was done to Arar in Syria, which accords perfectly with what the Canadian investigation found -- this is what our Government (both the executive and judicial branches) has continuously insisted it can purposely cause to happen without any accountability or even transparency (pp. 13-15):

Judge Sack's equally horrific description of exactly what the U.S. did to cause all of that to happen to Arar is here ( http://utdocuments.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post.html ).

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23896.htm (from Salon)

(Interestingly enough, I was unable to publish this article - all attempts were met with a requirement that I log in - until I removed the offending URL - "http://www.informationclearinghouse.info" - after which, the article published without problem.

Apparently Craigslist is censoring www.informationclearinghouse.info.)

watch and learn (san jose south)

2009-11-13T18:18:22-08:00

You can learn much about the man from this vid not that many people have any doubts anymore. Yes there are a few cuts but you get to see the content and context.

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=tCAffMSWSzY#t=28

A new low. childo ridicules murdered women ! (alameda)

2009-11-13T18:17:21-08:00

You're a real POS childers. You make fun of women who were raped and murdered by Sowell, a man you probably admire.

I won't ask you you have no Shame. You don't. You're violent, repulsive Scum.

Don't you know how disgusting you are to normal people?

Old Catholic Documents: St Augustine (actually Escondito Judeo)

2009-11-13T17:36:50-08:00

Escondito Judeo, hidden Jews, Jews that converted to Catholism as a required by Spain to remain citizens but still remained Jewish. TheSpainish Inquistition

The earliest documents detail the births, confirmations, marriages and deaths of the Spanish residents in St. Augustine from 1594 to 1763, when the British took over Florida.

There are also records of the diocese's nine bishops and the Spanish colonial government, and microfilm of records on explorations, the attacks of English and French corsairs, the development of SLAVERY and reports on Indian customs and languages.

This verifies that the Jews were major players in slavery in the new world!

http://www.contracostatimes.com/search/ci_13762218?IADID=Search-www.contracostatimes.com-www.contracostatimes.com

Smell permeated Cleveland neighborhood where 11 bodies found

2009-11-13T17:19:00-08:00

The smell permeated the neighborhood, turning the stomachs of residents and curtailing their outdoor activities.

"We used to think that it was coming from out of Ray's Sausage," said one resident. "But you smell these smells, and I live right there and ... we used to come out here and oh, these smells would just be horrible."

Ray's Sausage Co. replaced a sewer line and grease traps, trying to rid the area of the stench. But Ray's wasn't to blame after all. Instead, police said, the foul odor had a much more sinister source.

Eleven victims have been found inside and outside a home adjacent to Ray's -- six inside and five outside. A skull, wrapped in a paper bag and stuffed into a bucket in the basement, apparently is all that remains of one of the 11 victims, authorities said Wednesday.

The home's inhabitant, Anthony Sowell, 50, is a registered sex offender. Now, Sowell is facing five counts of aggravated murder, rape, felonious assault and kidnapping, police said. A judge on Wednesday denied bond for him, saying the latest allegations against him are "gruesome" and the "most serious" he has heard in his years on the bench.

Seven of the victims died from strangulation by a ligature, said Frank Miller, Cuyahoga County coroner. A ligature can include a string, cord or wire. All of the seven still had something tied around their necks, Miller told reporters.

An eighth victim died from manual strangulation -- strangulation by hands. Two other bodies were too badly decomposed to determine the cause of death, although Miller said he believes they were victims of "homicidal violence." Autopsy results on the 11th victim are pending.

"It's most likely strangulation in all cases," Miller said.

The first victim was identified Wednesday as Tonia Carmichael, who was 52 when she was last seen on November 10, 2008, police said in a statement. Carmichael was identified using DNA. She disappeared from Warrensville Heights, a Cleveland suburb near Sowell's home, and her vehicle was found in Cleveland.

In the missing persons report, obtained by CNN, Carmichael's mother, Barbara, told police her daughter was addicted to crack and had previously disappeared for several days at a time. But she said she believed something had happened to her because she had not picked up two paychecks.

Tonia Carmichael's daughter, Danita, told CNN's sister network HLN the identification did not come as a surprise.

"This is what I've been saying since Monday, when, you know, we were called to the coroner's office and since this story broke, we automatically knew that this was going to be here," Danita Carmichael said.

Asked how her grandmother was holding up, she said, "As you can imagine, it's heartbreaking for the whole family, but this was her child. This was her daughter, her angel, her princess, and now we will never see her again. She's gone."

Danita Carmichael said she believed more victims may be found. "I think we are going to go as high as 15, 16 on this case because he had five years to do what he did before anybody thought about stopping him."

Some of the victims could have been missing for up to five years, Cleveland Police Chief Michael McGrath told reporters, and he doesn't believe authorities were able to discern any pattern relating to the disappearance of African-American women.

Police will execute a warrant later Wednesday for Sowell's DNA, to enter it into the known national DNA database, said the statement from Cleveland police Lt. Thomas Stacho.

McGrath said earlier authorities had no information about the smell in the area before the bodies were found.

"You could smell it," said another neighborhood woman. "I came around the corner and I smell it. You could smell the dead bodies. How are you going to tell me people in the neighborhood couldn't smell that?"

Sowell showed no emotion during his hearing Wednesday before Municipal Judge Ronald Adrine. Asked whether he could afford a lawyer, Sowell responded quietly, "No sir."

In asking the judge to deny Sowell bond, Cuyahoga County Assistant Prosecutor Brian Murphy said, "The state believes he's an incredibly dangerous threat."

Adrine, in turn, told the suspect, "This is without question the most serious set of allegations I have faced. Given the gruesomeness of what's facing you ... you are being remanded without bond."

Kathleen Demetz, the public defender representing Sowell, asked that he undergo a psychiatric evaluation. She also said that Sowell, an ex-Marine, has a heart condition and wears a pacemaker.

Sowell has told authorities he had been collecting unemployment payments since being laid off from his job two years ago. It wasn't immediately known what that job was.

Stacho has said Sowell had been making his living as a "scrapper."

"He walks around and picks up scrap metal and takes it to junk yards to make a few pennies," he said.

Police said authorities in Coronado, California, also were checking to see if Sowell might be tied to a rape case there.

Investigators finished digging for more possible remains and evidence Wednesday outside Sowell's home. Detectives were not returning to the home Wednesday, Stacho said, but "will evaluate intelligence gathered from Dr. Miller's examination of the victims to determine what additional steps will be taken at the home before returning."

"I like to believe there is nothing else more there, but we will not know until we finish the search," said McGrath earlier. "It appears that this man had an insatiable appetite that he had to fill."

Police initially went to Sowell's home last Thursday to follow up on a rape accusation. A week earlier, neighbors reported seeing a naked woman fall from the second floor, but no charges were filed.

Neighbors called 911 after the October 20 incident, and emergency personnel -- but not police, initially -- were sent to the home, McGrath told reporters Tuesday. Firefighters later notified police, who responded to the hospital where the woman was taken, he said. She told officers that she was at the home and "partying," he said. "They were doing coke, drugs, getting high." The woman said she was on an upper balcony and fell off the roof while trying to pick up her keys. A man described as her boyfriend -- Sowell -- told police the same story.

"At any point, that gal could have said, 'Hey, wait a minute,' but she did not," McGrath said.

Sowell was arrested Saturday, two days after police discovered the first bodies inside and outside the home.

Sowell was charged with a 1989 rape, but pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted rape under a plea agreement, court records show. Police said he was imprisoned from 1990 to 2005. Since his release from prison he was listed as living at the Cleveland home where the bodies were found, McGrath said.

Authorities from the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office checked on Sowell regularly, with the most recent check coming on September 22 to confirm his address, McGrath said. They found no problems, he said.

Police began to get suspicious of Sowell about a month ago, after a woman accused him of rape and assault, said Stacho. Investigators obtained the warrants that set off the search after getting the "cooperation of the victim," he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/04/ohio.cleveland.bodies/index.html

(If only those poor women had contacted WOMAN, Incorporated, they would, undoubtedly, still be alive, today.)

Afghans oppose U.S. hit list of drug traffickers ('criminals hate competition')

2009-11-13T17:18:27-08:00

A U.S. military hit list of about 50 suspected drug kingpins is drawing fierce opposition from Afghan officials, who say it could undermine their fragile justice system and trigger a backlash against foreign troops.

The U.S. military and NATO officials have authorized their forces to kill or capture individuals on the list, which was drafted within the past year as part of NATO's new strategy to combat drug operations that finance the Taliban. The list is thought to include people with close ties to the Afghan government and others who have served as intelligence assets for the CIA and the U.S. military, according to current and former U.S. and Afghan officials.

Afghan counternarcotics officials expressed frustration that U.S. and NATO military leaders have refused to divulge the names on the list, a decision that they said could undercut joint operations to hunt down opium traffickers.

Gen. Mohammad Daud Daud, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for counternarcotics efforts, praised U.S. and British special forces for their help recently in destroying drug labs and stashes of opium. But he said he worried that foreign troops would now act on their own to kill suspected drug lords, based on secret evidence, instead of handing them over for trial.

"They should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes," Daud said. "We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own."

For years, the NATO-led military coalition in Afghanistan ignored the opium trade, saying their mission was to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda, not drug dealers. Afghanistan's poppy fields supply about 90 percent of the world's opium.

At a meeting in Budapest last October, however, NATO defense ministers reversed their strategy and authorized their forces to confiscate narcotics and target drug labs as well as kingpins who provide monetary or other support to the Taliban.

Target list of 50

Since then, the U.S. military has developed a target list of about 50 drug kingpins thought to support the insurgency and has ruled that they can be killed or captured "on the battlefield," according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report released in August.

Two unnamed U.S. generals in Afghanistan told the committee's staff members that the list complies with international law and the U.S. military's rules of engagement because it contains only drug lords with "proven links" to the insurgency. To add someone to the list, the Pentagon requires "two verifiable human sources and substantial additional evidence," according to the Senate report.

U.S. Army Col. Wayne M. Shanks, chief of public affairs for coalition forces in Afghanistan, declined to answer questions about the list or to say whether anyone on it has been killed or captured.

The military "is concerned when we see a nexus between insurgent activity or financing and drug trafficking in Afghanistan," he said in an e-mail. "We regularly conduct operations to limit the insurgents' ability to intimidate, or otherwise threaten the Afghan people."

Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister, said that he had long urged the Pentagon and its NATO allies to crack down on drug smugglers and suppliers, and that he was glad that the military alliance had finally agreed to provide operational support for Afghan counternarcotics agents. But he said foreign troops needed to avoid the temptation to hunt down and kill traffickers on their own.

"There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven guilty," he said. "If you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that they are really guilty in terms of legal process?"
Need for secrecy

At the same time, Jalali said he could understand why U.S. and NATO officials would want to keep their target list a secret from their Afghan counterparts. Corruption in the Afghan government is widespread, and some high-ranking officials are suspected to be involved in the drug trade.

Jalali said the Afghan government once kept its own secret list of drug traffickers. The list was considered highly sensitive, he said, because many of the suspects had ties to influential Afghan leaders, while others had served as intelligence assets for the CIA or the U.S. Defense Department.

"Many of these people were empowered by the international community when they were fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda after 9/11," said Jalali, now a professor at the National Defense University in Washington. "There was no political will to go after them."

In general, NATO forces have taken a more aggressive approach against Afghan drug operations in recent months, particularly in southern poppy-growing provinces.

In Kandahar, U.S. and British troops are joining a new task force consisting of Afghan police officers, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and officers from Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency. The task force's mission is to seize heroin stockpiles, blow up drug labs and investigate corrupt Afghan officials.
New approach praised

U.N. officials, who closely monitor the drug trade in Afghanistan, praised the new cooperative approach. They said the joint police-military operations were especially timely because opium production has dropped by more than one-third since 2007 because of a supply glut on the global market.

Jean-Luc Lemahieu, Afghanistan director for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said the decline represented a one-time opportunity to make a permanent dent in production levels. He said NATO's help in going after drug labs and stockpiles had proven effective, but he cautioned the military against taking the fight a step too far.

"Extrajudicial killing is not something you want to see," Lemahieu said. "Let's be very, very clear. Don't expect the military to do the job of a police officer. It won't work."

Afghanistan's nascent judicial system, however, has struggled to enforce the law against traffickers. And when it does win convictions, cases can still fall apart.

In April, five traffickers who had been sentenced to long prison terms received pardons from President Hamid Karzai, who said he intervened "out of respect" for their family members. One defendant was the nephew of Karzai's campaign manager.

"We have some people, powerful people, inside and outside government, who can freely smuggle drugs," said Nur al-Haq Ulumi, a member of the Afghan parliament from Kandahar. "If we had an honest government, the government could track down and arrest these people -- everybody knows this."

But Ulumi said it would make things worse if coalition troops began to kill drug dealers. "Already, people feel that foreigners didn't really come here to reconstruct our country," he said. "They think the foreigners just came here to kill us."

Ahmad Big Qaderi, director general of prosecutions for the Criminal Justice Task Force, which oversees narcotics cases and is financed largely by the U.S. government, said NATO forces needed to trust his agency to prosecute drug dealers.

"We should go through the Afghan legal channels to convict criminals," he said. "We have professional staff here and all the mechanisms to prosecute the big fishes."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/23/AR2009102303709_pf.html

Erdogan: Use of WMDs in Gaza is a fact

2009-11-13T17:16:02-08:00

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that the use of weapons of mass destruction by Israel is a fact, and that it is unfair to remain silent while civilians are targeted with white phosphorus bombs.

In a television interview, Erdogan added that despite the passing of almost nine months since the Gaza events and almost seven months since the donor conference in Sharm al-Sheikh, nothing was achieved regarding the promised reconstruction process due to the Israeli siege that prevents building materials from entering or reaching Gaza.

He pointed out that there are atrocities uncovered by Goldstone report, which was voted for by the Human Rights Council, calling on the UN take a serious stance in that regard and assume its responsibilities towards putting that report into use.

"Turkey will follow the fate of the Goldstone report at the UN until the end," Erdogan affirmed, demanding that the people responsible for this report continue pursuing it until a result is achieved.

He noted that Israel didn't stop at murdering Palestinians by the hundreds, but also destroyed hospital, infrastructure and schools in Gaza, including a UN school.

On Turkey's decision to cancel Israel's participation in the "Anadolu Eagle" maneuvers, Erdogan stressed that these maneuvers are Turkish, so Turkey will decide who can participate in them, and that no-one can impose anything on Turkey in that regard.

"Previously, Israel participated in these maneuvers upon our invitation, but now because of the war on Gaza we decided not to invite Israel in response to the will of the Turkish street, which was deeply affected by the atrocity of the Israeli aggression," he explained.

Erdogan went on to say that no-one can justify killing 1500 women and children using deadly weapons of mass destruction, wounding over 4000 civilians, and destroying hospitals, schools and infrastructure, noting that Israel used its deadliest weapons in an uneven battle, which cannot be justified.

Regarding the growing relations between Turkey and the region's countries, the Turkish Premier said that signing agreements for establishing strategic cooperation councils with Syria and Iraq are important steps, particularly since they involve strategic cooperation in the economic field which should connect these countries and improve relations between them.

Erdogan affirmed that these agreements are in the interest of the three countries, establishing the basis of a triangle of mutual interests in the region that will increase the volume of exchanged investments, leading to further coordination and cooperation on the political level based on mutual interests.

He also affirmed his country's commitment towards Iraq in the fields of education, training Iraqi forces, security, establishing schools and hospitals, transport and energy.

On Turkey's stance regarding the Iranian nuclear issue, the Turkish Premier affirmed that his country wants to remove nuclear weapons from the Middle East, saying that it is unfair and unacceptable for one country to have nuclear weapons and ignore that and focus on Iran, which says that its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes.

He called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to expand its search to include non-member countries through a mechanism devised by the UN to inspect the nuclear facilities in these countries.

"How can countries that possess weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, seek to punish Iran? Do those who possess weapons have the right to demand that others not possess them?" Erdogan concluded.

http://www.sana.sy/eng/22/2009/10/25/252002.htm

re:Turkey PM says Lieberman threatened to nuke Gaza

2009-11-13T17:10:14-08:00

This is so much of a bullshit story for you to think anyone would believe it is incredible LOL

Re: Another Crooked Democrat Bites the Dust (haight ashbury)

2009-11-13T17:01:07-08:00

mmmmmmmm...............mmmmmmmmmmm.............. mmmmmmmmmmm

re re3: Why doesn't Obama call it Terrorism?

2009-11-13T16:59:33-08:00

You dumb ass! Muslims need no reason from us to want to kill us. Their retarded religion tells them that if they cannot convert us to Muslim, then we should die at their hands. As far as I'm concerned, we can waive that bit in the Constitution about religious freedom when it comes to them. They need to all be rounded up, put in intern camps until they can be shipped offshore in a leaky boat. Muslims SHOULD NOT be in our military, our children's schools, our cities, our states, our country. Fuck Muslims!

I highly doubt that you ever served our country. Otherwise, you would know better. At best, you were probably a paper pusher stationed back here in the states.

**********

re3: Why doesn't Obama call it Terrorism? (berkeley)
Date: 2009-11-13, 4:34PM PST
Reply to: comm-xmuy8-1465041076@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

No, the OP has a point. This shooter did not threaten or attack any civilians. Our government chose to go to war against Muslims. He did what any troops do when they stage an ambush--for instance, in Vietnam. I had a friend in Chicago who served in Vietnam as a lieutenant. He said there was an incident where the sergeant took his troops on a road and they were ambushed by Viet Cong. I'm sorry to say that our military must now always be on the alert for ambushes even here at home. Bush had the choice between making the response to 9/11 a police operation and waging war. He decided to do the latter. He blew it and our troops are paying the price.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Everyone except for you piece of shit Demoshats considers this terrorism. You're messiah doesn't want it called that because he feels for his Muslim brothers and doesn't want to admit that terrorism happened on his watch. It's a big sham just like everything else from the Obumer Administration. LIES LIES LIES LIES

Another Crooked Democrat Bites the Dust (novato)

2009-11-13T16:47:17-08:00

William Jefferson, the former U.S. congressman caught with $90,000 in marked currency stuffed in his freezer, was sentenced to 13 years in prison for using his office to solicit bribes.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria, Virginia, today sentenced Jefferson, more than three months after a federal jury here found him guilty on 11 of 16 counts. He had faced as many as 20 years on each conviction.

Jefferson, 62, was convicted of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and unlawfully seeking millions more, mainly by promoting business deals in Africa. Prosecutors claimed he was involved in 11 separate bribery schemes from August 2000 to August 2005 and that he and his family stood to gain more than half a billion dollars.

The Louisiana Democrat, who lost his bid for a 10th term in the House of Representatives in December, was videotaped in July 2005 accepting $100,000 in a leather briefcase at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, and putting it in his car. About $90,000 in the marked bills were later recovered from Pillsbury pie crusts and Boca meatless burger patty boxes in the freezer of his Washington residence.

Turkey PM says Lieberman threatened to nuke Gaza

2009-11-13T16:44:50-08:00

Turkey's prime minister has further inflamed simmering Israel-Turkey tensions, claiming that Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatened to use nuclear weapons against Gaza, The Guardian reported Monday.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quoted as making the allegation in an interview published by the British newspaper. The comments came amid a crisis in ties between the two allies, which erupted earlier in the month after Turkey banned Israel from participating in a NATO air force drill.

The crisis was deepened two weeks ago, when Ankara refused to take off the air a television drama that depicts Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian children.

In the interview, Erdogan reportedly insisted that the Turkey-Israel strategic alliance remained alive, but chided Lieberman over the alleged nuclear threat regarding the Gaza Strip.

The Turkish leader also stressed that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly called for Israel's destruction, was a "friend" of Turkey's.

"There is no doubt he is our friend," Erdogan was quoted as saying. "As a friend so far we have very good relations and have had no difficulty at all."

He reportedly rejected on Western accusations that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon, saying: "Iran does not accept it is building a weapon. They are working on nuclear power for the purposes of energy only."

Pro-Islam Turks protest 'Israel violence in Temple Mount'

Some 500 pro-Islamic Turks have held an anti-Israel protest in Istanbul over violence at a Jerusalem holy site claimed by both Arabs and Jews.

The protesters on Monday marched toward the heavily guarded Israeli Consulate and burned an Israeli flag, chanting 'we will protect Al-Aqsa mosque'. Muslims regard Al-Aqsa as Islam's third-holiest site.

Relations between Israel and Turkey - a key Muslim ally - have soured since Israel's war against Islamic militants in Gaza at the beginning of this year.

Earlier this month, Turkey canceled a military exercise in which Israeli pilots were planned to participate. Tensions deepened after Turkey's state-run TV aired a drama series that portrays Israeli soldiers as cruel and repressive.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1123646.html

re3: Why doesn't Obama call it Terrorism? (berkeley)

2009-11-13T16:34:55-08:00

No, the OP has a point. This shooter did not threaten or attack any civilians. Our government chose to go to war against Muslims. He did what any troops do when they stage an ambush--for instance, in Vietnam. I had a friend in Chicago who served in Vietnam as a lieutenant. He said there was an incident where the sergeant took his troops on a road and they were ambushed by Viet Cong. I'm sorry to say that our military must now always be on the alert for ambushes even here at home. Bush had the choice between making the response to 9/11 a police operation and waging war. He decided to do the latter. He blew it and our troops are paying the price.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Everyone except for you piece of shit Demoshats considers this terrorism. You're messiah doesn't want it called that because he feels for his Muslim brothers and doesn't want to admit that terrorism happened on his watch. It's a big sham just like everything else from the Obumer Administration. LIES LIES LIES LIES

Woolsey's queer ass is laughing at all of you (Dying laughing with Boxer's ass)

2009-11-13T16:32:29-08:00

Ha, ha ha! "My queer girl's ass is shitting all over you. You'll never get the seat that my fuckin' queer ass sits upon in the house. Ha, ha-ha, ha. Obama tells me so." Woolsey.

craig hemphill take it to M4M in the personals

2009-11-13T16:19:44-08:00

Im not interested in emails from men this is Politics you want to talk to men theres a section for it!

re RE: Why doesn't Obama call it Terrorism?

2009-11-13T15:27:28-08:00

Everyone except for you piece of shit Demoshats considers this terrorism. You're messiah doesn't want it called that because he feels for his Muslim brothers and doesn't want to admit that terrorism happened on his watch. It's a big sham just like everything else from the Obumer Administration. LIES LIES LIES LIES

The Bible: The Roots of Liberalism

2009-11-13T15:08:30-08:00

Philosophically during the Enlightenment man saw it as possible for him to reason his way to God. In a real sense this was the modern tower of Babel with all the hubris that implies.
They attacked the supernaturalism of historic Christianity in general and such doctrines as the trinity, the deity of Christ, the atonement, the virgin birth, the resurrection, Chalcedonian Christology and the existence of Satan.

What say you?

http://conservative-vs-liberal.com/index.php?board=1.0

RE: Why doesn't Obama call it Terrorism? (berkeley)

2009-11-13T15:06:06-08:00

Because it's not. Terrorism is using threats and attacks on civilian targets to affect change.

Attacking the military of the country that invaded your people's homeland (Although I admit, he's an american, not from a country we invaded - so, if it is terrorism, which it is not, it is domestic) is either patriotism or simply WAR! We are at war with them, so they have every right to attack our military.

I don't like any violence, and I feel for those harmed - in all battle fields. A militarty base of a country that attacks other nations is, however, as are all its inhabitants, a viable target in war.

I hope that clears it up for you, the meaning of Terrorism. If you have contact to him, please tell Joe Lieberman what you just learned.

New Santa Cruz Blog site (santa cruz)

2009-11-13T14:41:13-08:00

Tired of the crime in Santa Cruz and a City Council that is getting way out of hand?

Sound off!

http://santacruzissues.blogspot.com/

Obama: "I will never hide the truth because it is uncomfortable." (REALLY?!)

2009-11-13T14:37:11-08:00

President Obama says this to the public:

"On all of these matters related to the disclosure of sensitive information, I wish I could say that there is a simple formula," Obama said. "But there is not. These are tough calls involving competing concerns, and they require a surgical approach. But the common thread that runs through all of my decisions is simple: we will safeguard what we must to protect the American people, but we will also ensure the accountability and oversight that is the hallmark of our constitutional system. I will never hide the truth because it is uncomfortable. I will deal with Congress and the courts as co-equal branches of government. I will tell the American people what I know and don�t know, and when I release something publicly or keep something secret, I will tell you why."
This U. S. Patriots, NATIONWIDE reacted to Obama's statement in stunned amazement.

Yet, on May 20th, 2009, Obama meets with Human Rights Groups May 20 and gets angry at them for calling Obama on his untruths.

{view the OBAMA'S SECRET MEETING)......shown below to discover the truth!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#30856294

This Progressive Liberal has had just about ENOUGH!

Put the meltdown blame where it belongs...Bush! (Jail The Ex-Commander-In-Thief )

2009-11-13T14:34:06-08:00

The Associated Press reviewed regulatory documents and found that "the Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown."

Far from being *pressured*, the banks were themselves pressuring Bush to ease the lending rules, which he did, precipitating the meltdown. Bush sort of got drunk on the money he made helping his Saudi Investors {Can you say.... GREED ) ??

One thing the Bush phenomenon has taught us: (berkeley)

2009-11-13T13:42:19-08:00

yes let's speak of lightweights, Obama for example who without the largest assemblage of teleprompters in American Presidential history becomes the ahhhhhhs & uhhhhhhhs King of fumbled statements!
a dubious puppet figurehead with a deep voice and threatening stare who has managed to explode the Federal Deficit, devalue our currency, broken one campaign promise after another, had his administration factually lie about job creation, transparency.
sits on the fence about Afghanistan Policy while soldiers are dying everyday who depend on his leadership.
he supports the unconstitutional demand by the Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance, the first time in American history the Congress passed legislation forcing Americans to buy anything!

Obama is a 'phenomenon on steroids'!
a one term and kick to the curb President

a lightweight can win. So if Sarah Palin runs, we shouldn't be surprised if she actually wins. But at least it should be the Republicans who take the blame, not the Democrats. If Lincoln were alive today, he'd be chagrined to see the GOP field so many featherweights for serious public office.

re3:Zionist logic (berkeley)

2009-11-13T13:00:34-08:00

Hmmm........then why do we spy on China, Japan & Britain all of them have loaned us billions if not trillions of dollars?
Who are you (we) to judge so harshly?
Disagree explain why?

You're right about spying on those folks, but what about the United States? Is spying on the U.S. any way to treat a country that sends huge amounts of aid their way? This has happened. Does the name Jonathan Pollard ring a bell?

KY Judge Suspended for Acting as Advocate for Mother (after half a century of playing stupid)

2009-11-13T12:38:34-08:00

On the second count, the commission found that Gormley entered a change of custody order that removed a child from the custody of her father but denied the father the right to put on his own evidence. Gormley, the commission found, acted as an advocate for the mother in that case.

A Kentucky family court judge has been found guilty of two charges of judicial misconduct and suspended from judicial practice for 45 days. Judge Tamra Gormley had a third charge dismissed. The first charge was for denying a hearing to a man whom she had found in contempt of court. The second was for denying a father a hearing when she removed his child from his custody. Read about it here (Lexington Herald-Leader, 11/3/09)

I don't know about Kentucky, but here in Texas, it's mighty hard to suspend a judge because of misconduct on the bench. Alcohol and drug abuse, yes, but not what they do in the conduct of their office. As to attorneys generally, when the state bar disciplines one, the stated reason is almost always just the tip of the iceberg. The bar will say it disciplined so-and-so because she "neglected a client matter, failed to return phone calls, etc." But there are many other, often more serious charges that go unmentioned.

My guess is that the same is true of this judge. If these three complaints are the only ones against her, I'll eat my hat. She sounds like a rogue judge - one who thinks the robe permits her to conduct herself and her courtroom any way she chooses. Read what the Judicial Conduct Commission said about her:

Gormley's actions "were not mere legal error," the ruling says. "A reasonably prudent and competent judge would conclude the conduct of Judge Gormley to be obviously and seriously wrong in all the circumstances of the cases."

Those words describe a rogue judge. Notice too that what she did was to deny due process to two men in family law matters. I'd bet money there are plenty more where those two came from. The good news is that, once a judge like Gormley has come to the attention of a judicial oversight body, she'll have to mind her Ps and Qs for a long time or she'll get busted again.

With any luck, the voters will save the Commission the trouble.

http://mensnewsdaily.com/glennsacks/2009/11/11/ky-judge-suspended-for-denying-fathers-rights-and-acting-as-advocate-for-mother/

(Reminds me of The Honorable Commissioner Marjorie Slabach.)

One thing the Bush phenomenon has taught us: (berkeley)

2009-11-13T12:28:24-08:00

a lightweight can win. So if Sarah Palin runs, we shouldn't be surprised if she actually wins. But at least it should be the Republicans who take the blame, not the Democrats. If Lincoln were alive today, he'd be chagrined to see the GOP field so many featherweights for serious public office.

re2:Zionist logic (berkeley) (berkeley)

2009-11-13T12:19:08-08:00

You're right about spying on those folks, but what about the United States? Is spying on the U.S. any way to treat a country that sends huge amounts of aid their way? This has happened. Does the name Jonathan Pollard ring a bell?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Depends who they're spying on, if it's Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah it's the right thing to do!
Disagree explain why?

If a Jew spies, that's perfectly fine--but if a non-Jewish German spies, THAT'S WRONG!

Zionist logic: "We're the Chosen People, so everything we do is right."

This Rants and Raves post is brilliant (berkeley)

2009-11-13T12:14:19-08:00

Sarah Palin: Going Retard (inner sunset / UCSF)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2009-11-13, 11:09AM PST

Reply To This Post

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Katie Couric asked Palin about her dubious claims that Alaska�s proximity to Russia gave her relevant foreign policy experience and Palin never responded, but in her book she claims Couric was biased (but we all heard Palin's statement) and Palin speculates that the anchor [Katie Couric] has �low self-esteem.� An anchor person with low self-esteem? More proof of Palin's amazing powers of reason and logic? A worthy political candidate would have been able to demonstrate her foreign policy knowledge.

* If you grow up in Hawaii, half white and raised by your grandparents, you�re �exotic, different and black.�

* If you grow up in Alaska eating moose burgers, you�re a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Obama, you�re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

* If you name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you�re a maverick.

* If you graduate from Harvard law School, you�re qualifications are questionable.

* If you attend five different small colleges before graduating, you�re well grounded and ready to lead the country.

* If you spend three years as a community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend eight years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate�s Health and Human Services committee, spend four years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran�s Affairs committees, you don�t have any real leadership experience.

* If your total resume is: local weather girl, second place in a beauty contest, four years on a city council and six years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people--and can see Russia from your house--you�re qualified to become the country�s second highest ranking executive.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising two daughters, all within Protestant churches, you�re not a real Christian.

* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife--while she was fighting cancer--and then married the heiress the next month, you�re Presidential material representing good Christian values.

* If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you're eroding the fiber of society.

* If, while governor, you tried to ban books from libraries, staunchly advocate abstinence only and offered no other option in sex education in your state�s school system--and your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant--you�re a moral leader.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, then your family�s values don�t represent America�s.

* If you�re husband has DWI convictions, no college education, didn�t register to vote until age 25 and once belonged to a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, and your unwed daughter�s boyfriend breaks his promise to marry (or becomes a participant in a charade to deceive the public) once the election is over--then your family represents American family values.

*You win the Nobel Peace prize, after only nine months in office, because your message of unity, understanding and communications has given the world hope, but you get less respect than Rodney Dangerfield. *You're under investigation for misappropriating funds, so you quit your Governor�s job two years early and use your, �fame,� to promote a seven million dollar book deal and you�re a respected, Republican party presidential contender in 2012.

OK, *much* clearer now

Please Republican party, please run Palin in 2012, I beg you, please, please, please. In these difficult times--we all need a good laugh--and the Republican party needs a good lesson in respecting the voters. If Sarah Palin was a Democrat, the Republican's would laugh her off the stage, and I do mean, "stage."

re:Zionist logic (berkeley)

2009-11-13T12:06:44-08:00

Depends who they're spying on, if it's Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah it's the right thing to do!
Disagree explain why?

If a Jew spies, that's perfectly fine--but if a non-Jewish German spies, THAT'S WRONG!

Zionist logic: "We're the Chosen People, so everything we do is right."

re Woolsey; Obama will come full blast to support

2009-11-13T12:06:31-08:00

That's fine. Based on President Obama's track record of persuasion after his election it would be GREAT for him to endorse Woolsey. That would be a sure win for the opposition! Woolsey is toast in 2010!

Woolsey; Obama will come full blast to support (Clinton did it with Eschu)

2009-11-13T11:45:13-08:00

Fine, run against Woolsey. Find out just what Dem shit you're up against. They'll fight to the bitter end to spare just one house seat. Good luck.

Police in �9m scheme to log 'domestic extremists' (domestic protest is domestic violence)

2009-11-13T10:28:56-08:00

Police are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.

The hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor "domestic extremists", the Guardian can reveal in the first of a three-day series into the policing of protests. Detailed information about the political activities of campaigners is being stored on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime.

Senior officers say domestic extremism, a term coined by police that has no legal basis, can include activists suspected of minor public order offences such as peaceful direct action and civil disobedience.

Three national police units responsible for combating domestic extremism are run by the "terrorism and allied matters" committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). In total, it receives �9m in public funding, from police forces and the Home Office, and employs a staff of 100.

An investigation by the Guardian can reveal:

• The main unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), runs a central database which lists thousands of so-called domestic extremists. It filters intelligence supplied by police forces across England and Wales, which routinely deploy surveillance teams at protests, rallies and public meetings. The NPOIU contains detailed files on individual protesters who are searchable by name.

• Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. One man, who has no criminal record, was stopped more than 25 times in less than three years after a "protest" marker was placed against his car after he attended a small protest against duck and pheasant shooting. ANPR "interceptor teams" are being deployed on roads leading to protests to monitor attendance.

• Police surveillance units, known as Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) and Evidence Gatherers, record footage and take photographs of campaigners as they enter and leave openly advertised public meetings. These images are entered on force-wide databases so that police can chronicle the campaigners' political activities. The information is added to the central NPOIU.

• Surveillance officers are provided with "spotter cards" used to identify the faces of target individuals who police believe are at risk of becoming involved in domestic extremism. Targets include high-profile activists regularly seen taking part in protests. One spotter card, produced by the Met to monitor campaigners against an arms fair, includes a mugshot of the comedian Mark Thomas.

• NPOIU works in tandem with two other little-known Acpo branches, the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Netcu), which advises thousands of companies on how to manage political campaigns, and the National Domestic Extremism Team, which pools intelligence gathered by investigations into protesters across the country.

Denis O'Connor, the chief inspector of constabulary, will next month release the findings of his national review of policing of protests. He has already signalled he anticipates wide scale change. His inspectors, who were asked to review tactics in the wake of the Metropolitan police's controversial handling of the G20 protests, are considering a complete overhaul of the three Acpo units, which they have been told lack statutory accountability.

Acpo's national infrastructure for dealing with domestic extremism was set up with the backing of the Home Office in an attempt to combat animal rights activists who were committing serious crimes. Senior officers concede the criminal activity associated with these groups has receded, but the units dealing with domestic extremism have expanded their remit to incorporate campaign groups across the political spectrum, including anti-war and environmental groups that have only ever engaged in peaceful direct action.

All three units divide their work into four categories of domestic extremism: animal rights campaigns; far-right groups such as the English Defence League; "extreme leftwing" protest groups, including anti-war campaigners; and "environmental extremism" such as Climate Camp and Plane Stupid campaigns.

Anton Setchell, who is in overall command of Acpo's domestic extremism remit, said people who find themselves on the databases "should not worry at all". But he refused to disclose how many names were on the NPOIU's national database, claiming it was "not easy" to count. He estimated they had files on thousands of people. As well as photographs, he said FIT surveillance officers noted down what he claimed was harmless information about people's attendance at demonstrations and this information was fed into the national database.

He said he could understand that peaceful activists objected to being monitored at open meetings when they had done nothing wrong. "What I would say where the police are doing that there would need to be the proper justifications," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/25/police-domestic-extremists-database

(When all protesters have been sentenced with civil 'temporary' restraining orders (TROs) and ASBOs, and no one can protest without violating the law and being subject to criminal sanctions ... then, perhaps, the general public will understand why the publication of FDV-93-005153 was such a turning point.)

HP Employees and Alumni - Stop Carly Fiorina!

2009-11-13T10:26:56-08:00

If you were employed at HP during Carly's years of mismanagment, please share your opinions at www.carly-fiorina.com

Her Senate bid is based on her experience running a major corporation... people need to know what a TERRIBLE job she did at Hewlett-Packard

WHY DOESN'T OBAMA CALL IT ISLAMIC TERRORISM ? (berkeley)

2009-11-13T10:12:50-08:00

YOU BE THE JUDGE AS TO WHY OBAMA AND HIS CRONIES DOESN'T CALL THE MASSACRE AT FORT HOOD WHAT IT REALLY IS....ISLAMIC TERRORISM AND NOT A MEDICAL CONDITION !

If this is true, shouldn't heads roll at the FBI? (berkeley)

2009-11-13T10:11:09-08:00

KSM's claim that he ran the 1993 World Trade Center bombing is also highly suspect because it also conveniently sweeps under the carpet the fact that it was the FBI who provided the terror cell with the bomb materials through their informant and ordered the bombing to go ahead.

Congress - DO NOT INCREASE THE DEBT CAP!!!!!! (What are you thinking?)

2009-11-13T09:59:47-08:00

Congress, DO NOT INCREASE THE DEBT CAP! What are you thinking??? In the private sector if there is not enough money, cuts are made to survive. Government needs to do the same. The increase of the debt cap puts nails in the coffins of our children and grand children. You rich politicians may not care but we the people do. DO NOT COMMIT GENERATIONAL THEFT FROM OUR YOUTH!!!!! Stop your radical spending NOW!

re Woolsey gets to run unopposed. (So shut up or sign in as a candidat

2009-11-13T09:45:48-08:00

The local GOP has so many running mates poised to go against Woolsey that they will have a primary! WhoooooHooooo! Woolsey is toast come 2010. Once I get further information on the candidates, I will post.

Zionist logic (berkeley)

2009-11-13T09:44:54-08:00

If a Jew spies, that's perfectly fine--but if a non-Jewish German spies, THAT'S WRONG!

Zionist logic: "We're the Chosen People, so everything we do is right."

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed- fake confession- surprised? (mountain view)

2009-11-13T09:40:11-08:00

http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/ksm_confessed_attacking_bank_founded_after_his_arrest.htm

KSM "Confessed" To Attacking Bank Founded After His Arrest
Fallacy of testimony exposed as story blows up in Pentagon's face

Prison Planet | March 16, 2007
Paul Joseph Watson

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's alleged confession testimony has been thoroughly discredited after it emerged that one of the targets he identified, the Plaza Bank, was not founded until 2006, four years after the alleged Al-Qaeda mastermind's arrest.

In his confession, KSM claims, "I was responsible for planning, training, surveying, and financing for the New (or Second) Wave of attacks against the following skyscrapers after 9/11: ...Plaza Bank, Washington state."

KSM was arrested in March 2003. According to the Plaza Bank's website , the organization was founded in early 2006, making it impossible for KSM to have even known of the bank's existence before 2003, never mind plotted against it.

Skepticism about the legitimacy of KSM's confession has gushed forth from all quarters, leaving the credibility of the Pentagon and the process of military tribunals in ruins and provoking additional questions about why the alleged Al-Qaeda mastermind admitted to involvement in such a vast range of plots.

After media commentators across the spectrum, from Time Magazine to Matt Lauer and even Rosie O'Donnell were openly cynical of the accuracy of KSM's testimony, officials speaking on condition of anonymity admitted that the claims were exaggerated, but still insist KSM's responsibility for 9/11, "from A to Z" is genuine.

Former CIA field officer Robert Baer also expressed his doubts , questioning "What the Pentagon's objective really is in releasing the transcript of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession."

"On the face of it, KSM, as he is known inside the government, comes across as boasting, at times mentally unstable. It's also clear he is making things up. I'm told by people involved in the investigation that KSM was present during Wall Street Journal correspondent Danny Pearl's execution but was in fact not the person who killed him. There exists videotape footage of the execution that minimizes KSM's role. And if KSM did indeed exaggerate his role in the Pearl murder, it raises the question of just what else he has exaggerated, or outright fabricated," writes Baer.

The Internet leader in activist media - Prison Planet.tv . Thousands of special reports, videos, MP3's, interviews, conferences, speeches, events, documentary films, books and more - all for just 15 cents a day! Click here to subscribe! Find out the true story behind government sponsored terror, 7/7, Gladio and 9/11, get Terror Storm!

The facet of the Pearl murder and why the establishment would want to shut the lid on the whole affair by pinning the blame on KSM is interesting in the context that in September 2006, Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf fingered Omar Sheikh as Pearl's assassin, adding that he was an MI6 agent working for British Intelligence . In the transcript of his alleged confession, KSM cryptically discusses CIA and Mossad involvement in the Pearl execution but the text is heavily redacted.

KSM's claim that he ran the 1993 World Trade Center bombing is also highly suspect because it also conveniently sweeps under the carpet the fact that it was the FBI who provided the terror cell with the bomb materials through their informant and ordered the bombing to go ahead.

In addition, KSM was a known CIA asset in the eighties and was used as a go between during the CIA-funded Afghan "jihad" against the occupying Soviets.

It is well established that before his mysterious arrest as the alleged mastermind behind the September 11 plot, Mohammed was granted a visa to enter the US just six weeks before the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York.

Other questions that have arisen concerning the testimony revolve around KSM's Americanized use of the English language, including the term "A to Z," which many see as a form of slang that befits tabloid headlines more than it does the vernacular of radical Muslim extremists.

A CNN online poll shows that a massive 74% disbelieve all of the claims made by KSM and BBC respondents were equally cynical.

Think Progress makes the point that KSM's comments on torture and any potential reference to the fact that he was tortured himself are redacted in the transcript.

The upshot of all this is that the much vaunted KSM confession, which seems to have been intentionally inflated so the book could be closed on a number of nebulous plots cited by the Bush administration as justification for its policies, has blown up in the establishment's face and only succeeded in detracting credibility from the government's official 9/11 story and the mythical war on terror.

Police: Largo woman in relationship triangle falsely claimed rape

2009-11-13T08:35:59-08:00

Another one that falls under Kanin. And I do love how the media makes it seem that the triangle was a planned thing. I'm sure the boyfriend wasn't happy or agreeable to it.

Woman falsely claims rape to cover up cheating

LARGO - A 20-year-old Largo woman was arrested Tuesday after her boyfriend found her with another man at her home, and she falsely claimed the man was raping her, according to Largo police.

Coffii Ann Castellion, of 605 16th Ave. N.W., lot 1, was charged with making a false report to a law enforcement officer.

A Largo police officer came upon a disturbance at 16th Street and Clearwater-Largo Road at about the same time dispatchers received a call regarding a sexual assault, according to Largo police.

The officer listened as Castellion told him she was the victim of a sexual assault, and he thought there was more to it, so he had Castellion and the alleged suspect transported to the police station for further interviewing.

Within an hour, Castellion admitted the sexual battery was bogus, Largo police said. She said her boyfriend had recently been released from the Pinellas County Jail and caught her with another man at her home. She also believed that by filing a sexual battery report she could receive some medical treatment related to her recent sexual activity, Largo police said.

Thanks to one of our readers for the tip.

Link:
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/oct/14/police-largo-woman-relationship-triangle-falsely-c/news-breaking/

http://www.misandryreview.com/?p=16129

(PS: I found that I was unable to post this article, yesterday or this morning - every attempt to do so led to a demand that I log in using my Craigslist account.

Odd, that ... because I was able to post another article or two, without any such challenge, before and after.

I did a bit of experimentation and discovered that if I removed the URL "http://www.misandryreview.com/?p=16129" from the text that I was posting, that Craigslist would allow me to proceed wiothout challenge.

From this and other similar or identical experiences I infer, among other insights, that Craigslist has added the URL "http://www.misandryreview.com" to their list of forbidden URLs.

Based on information and belief, Craigslist's administration is deliberately interfering with my freedom of speech, guaranteed under the United States Constitution - apparently they think that free speech is something that can be stolen away with a clause or two in an unsigned contract.

I beg to disagree.

In so doing, they also, in passing, attempt to rob the word 'politics' of its meaning, by attempting to turn an agora into, at best, a parking lot for the opinions of those whom they agree with.

Shame on you! Whomever you are, you obviously do not respect freedom of speech. Maybe you should go back to wherever you came from ... comrades!)

I keep reading nonsense about the Florida Supreme Court (berkeley)

2009-11-13T08:24:05-08:00

The truth is that the Florida Supreme Court's decision was entirely justified under the doctrine of force majeure, triggered by the fact that 2000 was an extremely close election.

Supe Daly does Inspector Clouseau impersonation

2009-11-13T07:52:04-08:00

The comedy that is San Francisco City Hall continues in earnest, with Mayor Gavin Newsom holed up in his office playing the Invisible Man while his nemesis, Supervisor Chris Daly, does his Inspector Clouseau act.

At issue now: questions over the authenticity of the letter that Newsom's office says the mayor wrote designating Supervisor Carmen Chu as acting mayor when he unexpectedly took off for Hawaii after dropping out of the governor's race.

Daly has questioned both the timing and the legitimacy of the letter, and was not content with viewing a copy. On Tuesday, he showed up at the mayor's office to inspect the original.

He not only read the letter carefully, but he also fingered its edges - and then the backside - to check the indentations of the signature.

Finally, he whipped out a high-quality magnifying glass - complete with light - for a closer inspection.

We called Daly for a report on his findings. His reply via Facebook: "Highlight of the day: Either personally inspecting the mayor's appointing signature with magnifier in hand or the phone call from Matier 10 minutes later. (Newsom press secretary) Nate Ballard, you smooth operator!"

For the record, no answer to what Daly thought of the letter's authenticity after his exhaustive investigation.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/11/BAC41AI2FQ.DTL&feed=rss.bayarea

(Obviously, Supervisor Daly has read about FDV-93-005153, and has realized that contempt for integrity, and due process, is at an all-time high ['it's just a God-damned piece of paper'], and has in particular read Richard Drury's declaration, and has studied the allegations of forgery, and the methods by which the forgeries were exposed ... and has learned, accordingly, to measure twice, where events within the San Francisco Civic Center complex are concerned.

I say good for him. We need more supervisors like him. Good job! I wish I could vote for you. Keep up the good work. Don't stop!

It's not a swamp ... it's a sewer ... and Supervisor Daly, I'd guess, deals with more shit, every day, than the oldest employee of the San Francisco Department of Sanitation has ever seen in a whole month.

This article, and the airbrushed picture of him, being one such example.

By mocking those whom pay attention to details, Those In Power hope to discourage everyone else from doing the same - but, really, what do they have to fear from everyone doing the same thing, and enjoying a higher standard of integrity as a result?

Inquiring minds want to know.)

Conservative Community (dublin / pleasanton / livermore)

2009-11-13T07:03:16-08:00

SF Bay 912 Project

Glenn Beck's 912 Project-We Surround Them. This is a clearing house site for the SF Bay Area. We have meetings set up in Walnut Creek, Hayward, Pleasanton, Santa Clara, Rohnert Park, San Jose, and Sunnyvale. Want to coordinate another location, please contact MSMECO. To see the 9 principals and 12 values that describe the program, go to http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/21018/
Click on the "See Our Full Cala...

Prepare for 2010, Build Conservative Community--PLEASANTON/LIVERMORE
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 7:00PM

Discuss and develop strategies for getting incumbents out of office at all levels of government. Come prepared knowing who your city council, school district, judges, and House of Representatives are. Let's not forget the lovely and charming Senator Boxer. How do we dump her?

Let's have a lively discussion and develop an action plan.

See the full event details, including location, at http://www.meetup.com/sfbay912/calendar/11420753/.

How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash

2009-11-13T07:01:08-08:00

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who's proposed a massive overhaul of the nation's banks. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."

John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who served on an advisory committee to the New York Stock Exchange, said that investment banks have wide latitude to manage their assets, and so the legality of Goldman's maneuvers depends on what its executives knew at the time.

"It would look much more damaging," Coffee said, "if it appeared that the firm was dumping these investments because it saw them as toxic waste and virtually worthless."

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's chairman and chief executive, declined to be interviewed for this article.

A Goldman spokesman, Michael DuVally, said that the firm decided in December 2006 to reduce its mortgage risks and did so by selling off subprime-related securities and making myriad insurance-like bets, called credit-default swaps, to "hedge" against a housing downturn.

DuVally told McClatchy that Goldman "had no obligation to disclose how it was managing its risk, nor would investors have expected us to do so ... other market participants had access to the same information we did."

For the past year, Goldman has been on the defensive over its Washington connections and the billions in federal bailout funds it received. Scant attention has been paid, however, to how it became the only major Wall Street player to extricate itself from the subprime securities market before the housing bubble burst.

Goldman remains, along with Morgan Stanley, one of two venerable Wall Street investment banks still standing. Their grievously wounded peers Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch fell into the arms of retail banks, while another, Lehman Brothers, folded.

To piece together Goldman's role in the subprime meltdown, McClatchy reviewed hundreds of documents, SEC filings, copies of secret investment circulars, lawsuits and interviewed numerous people familiar with the firm's activities.

McClatchy's inquiry found that Goldman Sachs:
Bought and converted into high-yield bonds tens of thousands of mortgages from subprime lenders that became the subjects of FBI investigations into whether they'd misled borrowers or exaggerated applicants' incomes to justify making hefty loans.
Used offshore tax havens to shuffle its mortgage-backed securities to institutions worldwide, including European and Asian banks, often in secret deals run through the Cayman Islands, a British territory in the Caribbean that companies use to bypass U.S. disclosure requirements.
Has dispatched lawyers across the country to repossess homes from bankrupt or financially struggling individuals, many of whom lacked sufficient credit or income but got subprime mortgages anyway because Wall Street made it easy for them to qualify.
Was buoyed last fall by key federal bailout decisions, at least two of which involved then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former Goldman chief executive whose staff at Treasury included several other Goldman alumni.

The firm benefited when Paulson elected not to save rival Lehman Brothers from collapse, and when he organized a massive rescue of tottering global insurer American International Group while in constant telephone contact with Goldman chief Blankfein. With the Federal Reserve Board's blessing, AIG later used $12.9 billion in taxpayers' dollars to pay off every penny it owed Goldman.

These decisions preserved billions of dollars in value for Goldman's executives and shareholders. For example, Blankfein held 1.6 million shares in the company in September 2008, and he could have lost more than $150 million if his firm had gone bankrupt.

With the help of more than $23 billion in direct and indirect federal aid, Goldman appears to have emerged intact from the economic implosion, limiting its subprime losses to $1.5 billion. By repaying $10 billion in direct federal bailout money � a 23 percent taxpayer return that exceeded federal officials' demand � the firm has escaped tough federal limits on 2009 bonuses to executives of firms that received bailout money.

Goldman announced record earnings in July, and the firm is on course to surpass $50 billion in revenue in 2009 and to pay its employees more than $20 billion in year-end bonuses.

THE BLUEST OF THE BLUE CHIPS

For decades, Goldman, a bastion of Ivy League graduates that was founded in 1869, has cultivated an elite reputation as home to the best and brightest and a tradition of urging its executives to take turns at public service.

As a result, Goldman has operated a virtual jobs conveyor belt to and from Washington: Paulson, as Treasury secretary, sent tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars to rescue Wall Street in 2008, and former Goldman employees populate some of the most demanding and powerful posts in Washington. Savvy federal regulators have migrated from their Washington jobs to Goldman.

On Oct. 16, a Goldman vice president, Adam Storch, was named managing executive of the SEC's enforcement division.

Goldman's financial panache made its sales pitches irresistible to policymakers and investors alike, and may help explain why so few of them questioned the risky securities that Goldman sold off in a 14-month period that ended in February 2007.

Since the collapse of the economy, however, some of those investors have changed their opinions of Goldman.

Several pension funds, including Mississippi's Public Employees' Retirement System, have filed suits, seeking class-action status, alleging that Goldman and other Wall Street firms negligently made "false and misleading" representations of the bonds' true risks.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, whose state has lost $5 million of the $6 million it invested in Goldman's subprime mortgage-backed bonds in 2006, said the state's funds are likely to lose "hundreds of millions of dollars" on those and similar bonds.

Hood assailed the investment banks "who packaged this junk and sold it to unwary investors."

California's huge public employees' retirement system, known as CALPERS, purchased $64.4 million in subprime mortgage-backed bonds from Goldman on March 1, 2007. While that represented a tiny percentage of the fund's holdings, in July CALPERS listed the bonds' value at $16.6 million, a drop of nearly 75 percent, according to documents obtained through a state public records request.

In May, without admitting wrongdoing, Goldman became the first firm to settle with the Massachusetts attorney general's office as it investigated Wall Street's subprime dealings. The firm agreed to pay $60 million to the state, most of it to reduce mortgage balances for 714 aggrieved homeowners.

Attorney General Martha Coakley, now a candidate to succeed Edward Kennedy in the U.S. Senate, cited the blight from foreclosed homes in Boston and other Massachusetts cities. She said her office focused on investment banks because they provided a market for loans that mortgage lenders "knew or should have known were destined for failure."

New Orleans' public employees' retirement system, an electrical workers union and the New Jersey carpenters union also are suing Goldman and other Wall Street firms over their losses.

The full extent of the losses from Goldman's mortgage securities isn't known, but data obtained by McClatchy show that insurance companies, whose annuities provide income for many retirees, collectively paid $2 billion for Goldman's risky high-yield bonds.

Among the bigger buyers: Ambac Assurance purchased $923 million of Goldman's bonds; the Teachers Insurance and Annuities Association, $141.5 million; New York Life, $96 million; Prudential, $70 million; and Allstate, $40.5 million, according to the data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

In 2007, as early signs of trouble rippled through the housing market, Goldman paid a discounted price of $8.8 million to repurchase subprime mortgage bonds that Prudential had bought for $12 million.

Nearly all the insurers' purchases were made in 2006 and 2007, after mortgage lenders had lifted most traditional lending criteria in favor of loans that required little or no documentation of borrowers' incomes or assets.

While Goldman was far from the biggest player in the risky mortgage securitization business, neither was it small.

From 2001 to 2007, Goldman hawked at least $135 billion in bonds keyed to risky home loans, according to analyses by McClatchy and the industry newsletter Inside Mortgage Finance.

In addition to selling about $39 billion of its own risky mortgage securities in 2006 and 2007, Goldman marketed at least $17 billion more for others.

It also was the lead firm in marketing about $83 billion in complex securities, many of them backed by subprime mortgages, via the Caymans and other offshore sites, according to an analysis of unpublished industry data by Gary Kopff, a securitization expert.

In at least one of these offshore deals, Goldman exaggerated the quality of more than $75 million of risky securities, describing the underlying mortgages as "prime" or "midprime," although in the U.S. they were marketed with lower grades.

Goldman spokesman DuVally said that Moody's, the bond rating firm, gave them higher grades because the borrowers had high credit scores.

Goldman's securities came in two varieties: those tied to subprime mortgages and those backed by a slightly higher grade of loans known as Alt-A's.

Over time, both types of mortgages required homeowners to pay rapidly rising interest rates. Defaults on subprime loans were responsible for last year's housing meltdown. Interest rates on Alt-A loans, which began to rocket upward this year, are causing a new round of defaults.

Goldman has taken multiple steps to put its subprime dealings behind it, including publicly saying that Wall Street firms regret their mistakes. Last winter, the company cancelled a Las Vegas conference, avoiding any images of employees flashing wads of bonus cash at casinos.

More recently, the firm has launched a public relations campaign to answer the criticism of its huge bonuses, Washington connections and federal bailout. In late October, Blankfein argued that Goldman's activities serve "an important social purpose" by channeling pools of money held by pension funds and others to companies and governments around the world.

KNOWING WHEN TO FOLD THEM

For investment banks such as Goldman, the trick was knowing when to exit the high-stakes subprime game before getting burned.

New York hedge fund manager John Paulson was one of the first to anticipate disaster. He told Congress that his researchers discovered by early 2006 that many subprime loans covered the homes' entire value, with no down payments, and so he figured that the bonds "would become worthless."

He soon began placing exotic bets � credit-default swaps � against the housing market. His firm, Paulson & Co., booked a $3.7 billion profit when home prices tanked and subprime defaults soared in 2007 and 2008. (He isn't related to Henry Paulson.)

At least as early as 2005, Goldman similarly began using swaps to limit its exposure to risky mortgages, the first of multiple strategies it would employ to reduce its subprime risk.

The company has closely guarded the details of most of its swaps trades, except for $20 billion in widely publicized contracts it purchased from AIG in 2005 and 2006 to cover mortgage defaults or ratings downgrades on subprime-related securities it offered offshore.

In December 2006, after "10 straight days of losses" in Goldman's mortgage business, Chief Financial Officer David Viniar called a meeting of mortgage traders and other key personnel, Goldman spokesman DuVally said.

Shortly after the meeting, he said, it was decided to reduce the firm's mortgage risk by selling off its inventory of bonds and betting against those classes of securities in secretive swaps markets.

DuVally said that at the time, Goldman executives "had no way of knowing how difficult housing or financial market conditions would become."

In early 2007, the firm's mortgage traders also bet heavily against the housing market on a year-old subprime index on a private London swap exchange, said several Wall Street figures familiar with those dealings, who declined to be identified because the transactions were confidential.

The swaps contracts would pay off big, especially those with AIG. When Goldman's securities lost value in 2007 and early 2008, the firm demanded $10 billion, of which AIG reluctantly posted $7.5 billion, Viniar disclosed last spring.

As Goldman's and others' collateral demands grew, AIG suffered an enormous cash squeeze in September 2008, leading to the taxpayer bailout to prevent worldwide losses. Goldman's payout from AIG included more than $8 billion to settle swaps contracts.

DuVally said Goldman has made other bets with hundreds of unidentified counterparties to insure its own subprime risks and to take positions against the housing market for its clients. Until the end of 2006, he said, Goldman was still betting on a strong housing market.

However, Goldman sold off nearly $28 billion of risky mortgage securities it had issued in the U.S. in 2006, including $10 billion on Oct. 6, 2006. The firm unloaded another $11 billion in February 2007, after it had intensified its contrary bets. Goldman also stopped buying risky home mortgages after the December meeting, though DuVally declined to say when.

I'VE GOT A SECRET

Despite updating its numerous disclosures to investors in 2007, Goldman never revealed its secret wagers.

Asked whether Goldman's bond sellers knew about the contrary bets, spokesman DuVally said the company's mortgage business "has extensive barriers designed to keep information within its proper confines."

However, Viniar, the Goldman finance chief, approved the securities sales and the simultaneous bets on a housing downturn. Dan Sparks, a Texan who oversaw the firm's mortgage-related swaps trading, also served as the head of Goldman Sachs Mortgage from late 2006 to April 2008, when he abruptly resigned for personal reasons.

The Securities Act of 1933 imposes a special disclosure burden on principal underwriters of securities, which was Goldman's role when it sold about $39 billion of its own risky mortgage-backed securities from March 2006 to February 2007.

The firm maintains that the requirement doesn't apply in this case.

DuVally said the firm sold virtually all its subprime-related securities to Qualified Institutional Buyers, a class of sophisticated investors that are afforded fewer protections than small investors are under federal securities laws. He said Goldman made all the required disclosures about risks.

Whether companies are obliged to inform investors about such contrary trades, or "hedges," is "a very hot issue" in cases winding through the courts, said Frank Partnoy, a University of San Diego law professor who specializes in securities. One issue is how specific companies must be in disclosing potential risks to investors, he said.

Coffee, the Columbia University law professor, said that any potential violations of securities laws would depend on what Goldman executives knew about the risks ahead.

"The critical moment when Goldman would have the highest liability and disclosure obligations is when they are serving as an underwriter on a registered public offering," he said. "If they are at the same time desperately seeking to get out of the field, that kind of bailout does look far more dubious than just trading activities."

Another question is whether, by keeping the trades secret, the company withheld material information that would enable investors to assess Goldman's motives for selling the bonds, said James Cox, a Duke University law professor who also has served on the NYSE advisory panel.

If Goldman had disclosed the contrary bets, he said, "One would have to believe that a rational investor would not only consider Goldman's conduct material, but likely compelling a decision to take a pass on the recommendation to purchase."

Cox said that existing laws, however, don't require sufficient disclosures about trading, and that the government would do well to plug that hole.

In marketing disclosures filed with the SEC regarding each pool of subprime bonds from 2001 to 2007, Goldman listed an array of risk factors that grew over time. Among them was the possibility of a pullback in overheated real estate markets, especially in California and Florida, where the most subprime loans had been made.

Suits filed by the pension funds, however, allege that Goldman made materially false or misleading statements in its public offerings, failing to disclose that many loans were based on inflated appraisals and were bought from firms with poor lending practices.

DuVally said that investors were fully informed of all known risks.

"What's going to happen in the next few years," said San Diego's Partnoy, "is there's going to be a lot of lawsuits and judges will have to decide, should Goldman have disclosed more or not?"

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/77791.html

Wall Street's Naked Swindle

2009-11-13T07:00:58-08:00

On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody � nobody knows who � made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness � "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.

At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of � $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or�

Or what? That this was a brazen case of insider manipulation was so obvious that even Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the pillow-soft-touch Senate Banking Committee, couldn't help but remark on it a few weeks later, when questioning Christopher Cox, the then-chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission. "I would hope that you're looking at this," Dodd said. "This kind of spike must have triggered some sort of bells and whistles at the SEC. This goes beyond rumors."

Cox nodded sternly and promised, yes, he would look into it. What actually happened is another matter. Although the SEC issued more than 50 subpoenas to Wall Street firms, it has yet to identify the mysterious trader who somehow seemed to know in advance that one of the five largest investment banks in America was going to completely tank in a matter of days. "I've seen the SEC send agents overseas in a simple insider-trading case to investigate profits of maybe $2,000," says Brent Baker, a former senior counsel for the commission. "But they did nothing to stop this."

The SEC's halfhearted oversight didn't go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers � another top-five investment bank that in September 2008 was vaporized in an obvious case of market manipulation. From there, the financial crisis was on, and the global economy went into full-blown crater mode.

Like all the great merchants of the bubble economy, Bear and Lehman were leveraged to the hilt and vulnerable to collapse. Many of the methods that outsiders used to knock them over were mostly legal: Credit markers were pulled, rumors were spread through the media, and legitimate short-sellers pressured the stock price down. But when Bear and Lehman made their final leap off the cliff of history, both undeniably got a push � especially in the form of a flat-out counterfeiting scheme called naked short-selling.

That this particular scam played such a prominent role in the demise of the two firms was supremely ironic. After all, the boom that had ballooned both companies to fantastic heights was basically a counterfeit economy, a mountain of paste that Wall Street had built to replace the legitimate business it no longer had. By the middle of the Bush years, the great investment banks like Bear and Lehman no longer made their money financing real businesses and creating jobs. Instead, Wall Street now serves, in the words of one former investment executive, as "Lucy to America's Charlie Brown," endlessly creating new products to lure the great herd of unwitting investors into whatever tawdry greed-bubble is being spun at the moment: Come kick the football again, only this time we'll call it the Internet, real estate, oil futures. Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.

What really happened to Bear and Lehman is that an economic drought temporarily left the hyenas without any more middle-class victims � and so they started eating each other, using the exact same schemes they had been using for years to fleece the rest of the country. And in the forensic footprint left by those kills, we can see for the first time exactly how the scam worked � and how completely even the government regulators who are supposed to protect us have given up trying to stop it.

This was a brokered bloodletting, one in which the power of the state was used to help effect a monstrous consolidation of financial and political power. Heading into 2008, there were five major investment banks in the United States: Bear, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Today only Morgan Stanley and Goldman survive as independent firms, perched atop a restructured Wall Street hierarchy. And while the rest of the civilized world responded to last year's catastrophes with sweeping measures to rein in the corruption in their financial sectors, the United States invited the wolves into the government, with the popular new president, Barack Obama � elected amid promises to clean up the mess � filling his administration with Bear's and Lehman's conquerors, bestowing his papal blessing on a new era of robbery.

To the rest of the world, the brazenness of the theft � coupled with the conspicuousness of the government's inaction � clearly demonstrates that the American capital markets are a crime in progress. To those of us who actually live here, however, the news is even worse. We're in a place we haven't been since the Depression: Our economy is so completely fucked, the rich are running out of things to steal.

If you squint hard enough, you can see that the derivative-driven economy of the past decade has always, in a way, been about counterfeiting. At their most basic level, innovations like the ones that triggered the global collapse � credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations � were employed for the primary purpose of synthesizing out of thin air those revenue flows that our dying industrial economy was no longer pumping into the financial bloodstream. The basic concept in almost every case was the same: replacing hard assets with complex formulas that, once unwound, would prove to be backed by promises and IOUs instead of real stuff. Credit-default swaps enabled banks to lend more money without having the cash to cover potential defaults; one type of CDO let Wall Street issue mortgage-backed bonds that were backed not by actual monthly mortgage payments made by real human beings, but by the wild promises of other irresponsible lenders. They even called the thing a synthetic CDO � a derivative contract filled with derivative contracts � and nobody laughed. The whole economy was a fake.

For most of this decade, nobody rocked that fake economy � especially the faux housing market � better than Bear Stearns. In 2004, Bear had been one of five investment banks to ask the SEC for a relaxation of lending restrictions that required it to possess $1 for every $12 it lent out; as a result, Bear's debt-to-equity ratio soared to a staggering 33-1. The bank used much of that leverage to issue mountains of mortgage-backed securities, essentially borrowing its way to a booming mortgage business that helped drive its share price to a high of $172 in early 2007.

But that summer, Bear started to crater. Two of its hedge funds that were heavily invested in mortgage-backed deals imploded in June and July, forcing the credit-raters at Standard & Poor's to cut its outlook on Bear from stable to negative. The company survived through the winter � in part by jettisoning its dipshit CEO, Jimmy Cayne, a dithering, weed-smoking septuagenarian who was spotted at a bridge tournament during the crisis � but by March 2008, it was almost wholly dependent on a network of creditors who supplied it with billions in rolling daily loans to keep its doors open. If ever there was a major company ripe to be assassinated by market manipulators, it was Bear Stearns in 2008.

Then, on March 11th � around the same time that mystery Nostradamus was betting $1.7 million that Bear was about to collapse � a curious thing happened that attracted virtually no notice on Wall Street. On that day, a meeting was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that was brokered by Fed chief Ben Bernanke and then-New York Fed president Timothy Geithner. The luncheon included virtually everyone who was anyone on Wall Street � except for Bear Stearns.

Bear, in fact, was the only major investment bank not represented at the meeting, whose list of participants reads like a Barzini-Tattaglia meeting of the Five Families. In attendance were Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan Chase, Lloyd Blankfein from Goldman Sachs, James Gorman from Morgan Stanley, Richard Fuld from Lehman Brothers and John Thain, the big-spending office redecorator still heading the not-yet-fully-destroyed Merrill Lynch. Also present were old Clinton hand Robert Rubin, who represented Citigroup; Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group; and several hedge-fund chiefs, including Kenneth Griffin of Citadel Investment Group.

The meeting was never announced publicly. In fact, it was discovered only by accident, when a reporter from Bloomberg filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act and came across a mention of it in Bernanke's schedule. Rolling Stone has since contacted every major attendee, and all declined to comment on what was discussed at the meeting. "The ground rules of the lunch were of confidentiality," says a spokesman for Morgan Stanley. "Blackstone has no comment," says a spokesman for Schwarzman. Rubin declined a request for an interview, Fuld's people didn't return calls, and Goldman refused to talk about the closed-door session. The New York Fed said the meeting, which had been scheduled weeks earlier, was simply business as usual: "Such informal, small group sessions can provide a valuable means to learn about market functioning from people with firsthand knowledge."

So what did happen at that meeting? There's no evidence that Bernanke and Geithner called the confidential session to discuss Bear's troubles, let alone how to carve up the bank's spoils. It's possible that one of them made an impolitic comment about Bear during a meeting held for other reasons, inadvertently fueling a run on the bank. What's impossible to believe is the bullshit version that Geithner and Bernanke later told Congress. The month after Bear's collapse, both men testified before the Senate that they only learned how dire the firm's liquidity problems were on Thursday, March 13th � despite the fact that rumors of Bear's troubles had begun as early as that Monday and both men had met in person with every key player on Wall Street that Tuesday. This is a little like saying you spent the afternoon of September 12th, 2001, in the Oval Office, but didn't hear about the Twin Towers falling until September 14th.

Given the Fed's cloak of confidentiality, we simply don't know what happened at the meeting. But what we do know is that from the moment it ended, the run on Bear was on, and every major player on Wall Street with ties to Bear started pulling IV tubes out of the patient's arm. Banks, brokers and hedge funds that held cash in Bear's accounts yanked it out in mass quantities (making it harder for the firm to meet its credit payments) and took out credit- default swaps against Bear (making public bets that the firm was going to tank). At the same time, Bear was blindsided by an avalanche of "novation requests" � efforts by worried creditors to sell off the debts that Bear owed them to other Wall Street firms, who would then be responsible for collecting the money. By the afternoon of March 11th, two rival investment firms � Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs � were so swamped by novation requests for Bear's debt that they temporarily stopped accepting them, signaling the market that they had grave doubts about Bear.

All of these tactics were elements that had often been seen in a kind of scam known as a "bear raid" that small-scale stock manipulators had been using against smaller companies for years. But the most damning thing the attack on Bear had in common with these earlier manipulations was the employment of a type of counterfeiting scheme called naked short-selling. From the moment the confidential meeting at the Fed ended on March 11th, Bear became the target of this ostensibly illegal practice � and the companies widely rumored to be behind the assault were in that room. Given that the SEC has failed to identify who was behind the raid, Wall Street insiders were left with nothing to trade but gossip. According to the former head of Bear's mortgage business, Tom Marano, the rumors within Bear itself that week centered around Citadel and Goldman. Both firms were later subpoenaed by the SEC as part of its investigation into market manipulation � and the CEOs of both Bear and Lehman were so suspicious that they reportedly contacted Blankfein to ask whether his firm was involved in the scam. (A Goldman spokesman denied any wrongdoing, telling reporters it was "rigorous about conducting business as usual.")

The roots of short-selling date back to 1973, when Wall Street went to a virtually paperless system for trading stocks. Before then, if you wanted to sell shares you owned in Awesome Company X, you and the buyer would verbally agree to the deal through a broker. The buyer would take legal ownership of the shares, but only later would the broker deliver the actual, physical shares to the buyer, using an absurd, Brazil-style network of runners who carried paper shares from one place to another � a preposterous system that threatened to cripple trading altogether.

To deal with the problem, Wall Street established a kind of giant financial septic tank called the Depository Trust Company. Privately owned by a consortium of brokers and banks, the DTC centralizes and maintains all records of stock transactions. Now, instead of being schlepped back and forth across Manhattan by messengers on bikes, almost all physical shares of stock remain permanently at the DTC. When one broker sells shares to another, the trust company "delivers" the shares simply by making a change in its records.

Watch Matt Taibbi break down short-selling vs. naked short-selling on his blog, Taibblog.

This new electronic system spurred an explosion of financial innovation. One practice that had been little used before but now began to be employed with great popularity was short- selling, a perfectly legal type of transaction that allows investors to bet against a stock. The basic premise of a normal short sale is easy to follow. Say you're a hedge-fund manager, and you want to bet against the stock of a company � let's call it Wounded Gazelle International (WGI). What you do is go out on the market and find someone � often a brokerage house like Goldman Sachs � who has shares in that stock and is willing to lend you some. So you go to Goldman on a Monday morning, and you borrow 1,000 shares in Wounded Gazelle, which that day happens to be trading at $10.

Now you take those 1,000 borrowed shares, and you sell them on the open market at $10, which leaves you with $10,000 in cash. You then take that $10,000, and you wait. A week later, surveillance tapes of Wounded's CEO having sex with a woodchuck in a Burger King bathroom appear on CNBC. Awash in scandal, the firm's share price tumbles to 3�. So you go out on the market and buy back those 1,000 shares of WGI � only now it costs you only $3,500 to do so. You then return the shares to Goldman Sachs, at which point your interest in WGI ends. By betting against or "shorting" the company, you've made a profit of $6,500.

It's important to point out that not only is normal short-selling completely legal, it can also be socially beneficial. By incentivizing Wall Street players to sniff out inefficient or corrupt companies and bet against them, short-selling acts as a sort of policing system; legal short- sellers have been instrumental in helping expose firms like Enron and WorldCom. The problem is, the new paperless system instituted by the DTC opened up a giant loophole for those eager to game the market. Under the old system, would-be short-sellers had to physically borrow actual paper shares before they could execute a short sale. In other words, you had to actually have stock before you could sell it. But under the new system, a short-seller only had to make a good-faith effort to "locate" the stock he wanted to borrow, which usually amounts to little more than a conversation with a broker:

Evil Hedge Fund: I want to short IBM. Do you have a million shares I can borrow?

Corrupt Broker [not checking, playing Tetris]: Uh, yeah, whatever. Go ahead and sell.

There was nothing to prevent that broker � let's say he has only a million shares of IBM total � from making the same promise to five different hedge funds. And not only could brokers lend stocks they never had, another loophole in the system allowed hedge funds to sell those stocks and deliver a kind of IOU instead of the actual share to the buyer. When a share of stock is sold but never delivered, it's called a "fail" or a "fail to deliver" � and there was no law or regulation in place that prevented it. It's exactly what it sounds like: a loophole legalizing the counterfeiting of stock. In place of real stock, the system could become infected with "fails" � phantom IOU shares � instead of real assets.

If you own stock that pays a dividend, you can even look at your dividend check to see if your shares are real. If you see a line that says "PIL" � meaning "Payment in Lieu" of dividends � your shares were never actually delivered to you when you bought the stock. The mere fact that you're even getting this money is evidence of the crime: This counterfeiting scheme is so profitable for the hedge funds, banks and brokers involved that they are willing to pay "dividends" for shares that do not exist. "They're making the payments without complaint," says Susanne Trimbath, an economist who worked at the Depository Trust Company. "So they're making the money somewhere else."

Trimbath was one of the first people to notice the problem. In 1993, she was approached by a group of corporate transfer agents who had a complaint. Transfer agents are the people who keep track of who owns shares in corporations, for the purposes of voting in corporate elections. "What the transfer agents saw, when corporate votes came up, was that they were getting more votes than there were shares," says Trimbath. In other words, transfer agents representing a corporation that had, say, 1 million shares outstanding would report a vote on new board members in which 1.3 million votes were cast � a seeming impossibility.

Analyzing the problem, Trimbath came to an ugly conclusion: The fact that short-sellers do not have to deliver their shares made it possible for two people at once to think they own a stock. Evil Hedge Fund X borrows 100 shares from Unwitting Schmuck A, and sells them to Unwitting Schmuck B, who never actually receives that stock: In this scenario, both Schmucks will appear to have full voting rights. "There's no accounting for share ownership around short sales," Trimbath says. "And because of that, there are multiple owners assigned to one share."

Trimbath's observation would prove prophetic. In 2005, a trade group called the Securities Transfer Association analyzed 341 shareholder votes taken that year � and found evidence of over-voting in every single one. Experts in the field complain that the system makes corporate-election fraud a comically simple thing to achieve: In a process known as "empty voting," anyone can influence any corporate election simply by borrowing great masses of shares shortly before an important merger or board election, exercising their voting rights, then returning the shares right after the vote is over. Hilariously, because you're only borrowing the shares and not buying them, you can effectively "buy" a corporate election for free.

(Boy, that sure reminds me of Oracle Corporation.)

Back in 1993, over-voting might have seemed a mere curiosity, the result not of fraud but of innocent bookkeeping errors. But Trimbath realized the broader implication: Just as the lack of hard rules forcing short-sellers to deliver shares makes it possible for unscrupulous traders to manipulate a corporate vote, it could also enable them to manipulate the price of a stock by selling large quantities of shares they didn't possess. She warned her bosses that this crack in the system made the specter of organized counterfeiting a real possibility.

(Wow! I wonder if that's how Oracle Corporation kept their stock price artificially high for so long?)

"I personally went to senior management at DTC in 1993 and presented them with this issue," she recalls. "And their attitude was, 'We spill more than that.'" In other words, the problem represented such a small percentage of the assets handled annually by the DTC � as much as $1.8 quadrillion in any given year, roughly 30 times the GDP of the entire planet � that it wasn't worth worrying about.

It wasn't until 10 years later, when Trimbath had a chance meeting with a lawyer representing a company that had been battered by short-sellers, that she realized someone outside the DTC had seized control of a financial weapon of mass destruction. "It was like someone figured out how to aim and fire the Death Star in Star Wars," she says. What they "figured out," Trimbath realized, was an early version of the naked-shorting scam that would help take down Bear and Lehman.

Here's how naked short-selling works: Imagine you travel to a small foreign island on vacation. Instead of going to an exchange office in your hotel to turn your dollars into Island Rubles, the country instead gives you a small printing press and makes you a deal: Print as many Island Rubles as you like, then on the way out of the country you can settle your account. So you take your printing press, print out gigantic quantities of Rubles and start buying goods and services. Before long, the cash you've churned out floods the market, and the currency's value plummets. Do this long enough and you'll crack the currency entirely; the loaf of bread that cost the equivalent of one American dollar the day you arrived now costs less than a cent.

With prices completely depressed, you keep printing money and buy everything of value � homes, cars, priceless works of art. You then load it all into a cargo ship and head home. On the way out of the country, you have to settle your account with the currency office. But the Island Rubles you printed are now worthless, so it takes just a handful of U.S. dollars to settle your debt. Arriving home with your cargo ship, you sell all the island riches you bought at a discount and make a fortune.

This is the basic outline for how to seize the assets of a publicly traded company using counterfeit stock. What naked short-sellers do is sell large quantities of stock they don't actually have, flooding the market with "phantom" shares that, just like those Island Rubles, depress a company's share price by making the shares less scarce and therefore less valuable.

The first documented cases of this scam involved small-time boiler-room grifters. In the late 1990s, not long after Trimbath warned her bosses about the problem, a trader named John Fiero executed a series of "bear raids" on small companies. First he sold shares he didn't possess in huge quantities and fomented negative rumors about a company; then, in a classic shakedown, he approached the firm with offers to desist � if they'd sell him stock at a discount. "He would press a button and enter a trade for half a million shares," says Brent Baker, the SEC official who busted Fiero. "He didn't have the stock to cover that � but the price of the stock would drop to a penny."

(There's more ...)

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle/print

Nuke Gaza: A World Gone Mad ('give us the goods or the girl gets it')

2009-11-13T06:58:40-08:00

Israeli officials are right to worry. Gazans too. Yet Americans should worry even more. Israel�s �legitimacy� will not last.

Of course, that assumes its legitimacy was deserved. That issue also is now called into question in light of the consistency of Israeli behavior over the past six decades. The emerging issues are these: When and how will the recognition of Israel�s nation-state status be withdrawn? How will Tel Aviv behave in the interim?

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman may have tipped his Masada hand when he reportedly told Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan that Israel may use nuclear weapons against Gaza. The threat to Israel is not the 1.5 million Gazans who reside in the world�s largest open-air prison. The threat is the fast-growing global outrage at the abuse inflicted on Palestinians, commencing with the ethnic cleansing of 400-plus villages six decades ago.

Not since 1948 has this enclave of extremists mounted such a public relations offensive. Christian Zionist President Harry Truman trusted Jewish Zionist lobbyists when he solicited assurances that they would not become what they immediately became: a racist theocratic state with an expansionist agenda destined to create serial crises in the region.The merciless global agenda pursued by Colonial Zionists is the single greatest threat to world peace, as confirmed yet again by Lieberman�s warning. As the primary remaining ally of these Jewish nationalists, the risks to the U.S. increase with each passing day as Tel Aviv works behind the scenes to catalyze yet another conflict. This entangled alliance was destined to provoke resentments that would eventually endanger their super power ally and foremost arms provider.

Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the mass murder of 9-11, conceded that the motivation for that attack was to focus �the American people�on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people and America�s self-serving foreign policy that corrupts Arab governments and leads to further exploitation of the Arab Muslim people.

�The Joint Chiefs of Staff warned Truman 61 years ago that this militant enclave meant to establish Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East. Familiar with the duplicity for which Israel has since become infamous, the Pentagon chiefs warned:

�All stages of this program are equally sacred to the fanatical concepts of the Jewish leaders.�

Nuclear-Armed Fanatics

With each passing year, Tel Aviv adds a new chapter to the agent provocateur handbook on How To Succeed as a Victim. Israel�s strategic success traces directly to its capacity to radicalize and enrage�as those residing in the Occupied Territories endure a third generation of deprivation, degradation and periodic starvation.

Thus the in-depth planning that preceded Israel�s brutal �defensive� assault on Gaza between Christmas 2008 and the inauguration of Barack Obama�who said nothing about the attack throughout its 28-day duration. That silence continues even now after Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist, issued a report describing dozens of Israeli war crimes and evidence of crimes against humanity.

In the lead-up to the report�s release, a U.S. president gave Tel Aviv a rhetorical gift when, in a U.N. speech, the nation�s first Black president used the code phrase �Jewish state� as an implied endorsement of the apartheid policies of this racist enclave.

Even Truman did not go that far. But then his administration was not as thoroughly staffed with Zionists and pro-Israelis. In addition to killing some 1400 Palestinians, one-third of them women and children, Israel destroyed the infrastructure of Gaza including farmlands, factories and schools as well as its water supply and sanitation works.

The facts in the Goldstone Report were further confirmed by �Breaking the Silence��the personal testimony by thirty members of the Israel Defense Forces who described a murderous policy meant to teach the people of Gaza a lesson for their support of Hamas�which came to power in 2006 elections that were universally appraised as free and fair.

As Israel�s protector and apologist, the U.S. bears the brunt of the anger as Israeli extremism continues to enrage Muslims and radicalize the Islamic body politic.

A systematic assassination campaign ensured that Tel Aviv had �no one to talk to� except known collaborators with the occupation authorities in Tel Aviv and their arms suppliers in Washington.

Meanwhile, the steady expansion of Israeli settlements made a Palestinian state impossible�unless indigenous Arabs are happy to reside in an archipelago of isolated ghettos ringed by Israeli checkpoints. To suggest that the U.S. is culpable only states the obvious.

Yet Israeli extremism continues unabated even as Tel Aviv insists that its neighbors accept it as a �Jewish state� even before its borders are fixed and resolution of the occupied territories is known. After six decades of nonstop deceit, Arab states are understandably reluctant to further appease this �state.�

For Americans endangered by the behavior of Jewish fanatics, the lesson is uncomfortable but inescapable: we enabled this. By our continued appeasement, Barack Obama is inviting another violent reaction to Israel�s serial provocations. By failing to endorse the Goldstone Report, our commander-in-chief is putting U.S. forces at risk.

By implying that Israel is above the law, he only emboldens Tel Aviv. By suggesting that Israeli conduct is consistent with the values of a �Jewish state,� he endangers the broader Jewish community. That includes those moderate Jews who anticipated this extremist behavior when in May 1948 Truman overruled the strategic objections of Secretary of State George C. Marshall and enabled this fanaticism by extending nation-state recognition.

Small in numbers but large in ambition, this extremist enclave had no choice but to wage war by way of deception. The most insidious deceit was targeted, from within, at its purported ally to induce the U.S. military to lead an invasion of Iraq for its Greater Israel strategy.

Absent an Israeli strategy able to sustain serial crises, a long-deceived public will awaken to the common source of the fixed intelligence that led us into the last war�and now seeks to induce the next. As Americans awaken to how this duplicity proceeds in plain sight, they will see for themselves who and why.

That knowledge is the threat that Tel Aviv most fears. As the facts become known, Israeli legitimacy will no longer be an issue. The only issue will be how best to dis-arm these extremists and how to hold accountable those lawmakers who enable this ongoing treason.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=9153

Let's never forget how the Supreme Court justified its decision (berkeley)

2009-11-13T05:55:29-08:00

in Bush v. Gore.

They said further vote counting would hurt Bush's chances of winning the election.

Was that supposed to be an impartial Supreme Court?

You tell me!

Richard Childers: DO NOT HIRE. Employers - READ THIS!

2009-11-13T03:26:47-08:00

The purpose of this post is to warn YOU if you're a prospective employer about what sort of a person Richard Childers is. If you are searching on Google, I know for a fact that these posts come up and if you are doing a background check on Richard Childers then this will undoubtedly find its way to you. If you're thinking about hiring this person think twice and be sure to read this before you proceed. This post contains links to his racist, delusional rantings which are presesnted in his own words. It also documents his violence and poor attitude towards women. If you can stand to do any further research, be aware that ALL postings on CL politics with articles that minimize rape or are generally mean spirited about women are posted by Richard Childers

1) Richard Childers has been fired NUMEROUS times premiere companies like Oracle for insubordination, sexism, bigotry, not being a team player, not doing his job, being a crybaby, sending offensive material to coworkers, and threats of violence towards management and coworkers. I strongly suggest you get in touch with both Feeva.com and Oracle to discuss these disciplinary problems.

2) Childers has a history of violence against women. He constantly attacks women either verbally or physically without provocation. All you have to do is look up his numerous websites which attack the rights of women while justifying violence against women. He also lashes out against domestic violence shelters saying they're evil, murderous in some cases, and meant to be used as a spa or some sort of a resort. His hatred of these shelters is deeply disturbing as you will find and falls into a pattern of abuse which Childers engages in. If you have women in your office, don't expect them to be safe from either unwanted sexual advances or verbal, possibly physical abuse.

3) Richard Childers is sue happy. If he does not get his way, he will sue you. He is extremely vindictive and holds a grudge not for days, weeks, or months, but years and decades. He is still complaining about his girlfriend dumping him after a decade and a half. He has filed numerous lawsuits against past employers claiming that they conspired against him when in truth, he is just a miserable employee who does not fulfill his duties and does not live up to his resume. He refuses to accept responsibility for anything other than glory. When things go wrong, he blames others, finger points, finds excuses, and turns to the legal system to solve simple problems. He claims that Larry Ellison left his post as CEO due to a conspiracy directed at Childers. It's simply an insane scenario and is extreme implausible.

4) Childers has been served with multiple restraining orders for stalking and beating his ex-girlfriend. The restraining orders were made to last for years. It's been over a decade since he first beat up his ex-girlfriend yet he still continues to lash out at her online. He has a history of holding grudges and creating conspiracy theories. He is paranoid and delusional at times. He believes that people are out to get him. His step father was killed in a hit and run accident. He actually believed that the manager at a domestic violence shelter was responsible for the death.

I hope this has been of help to you. Take a look at this message board if you want to get a taste of Childers' delusions. I'm writing this as a favor to you. If you do hire Childers, you will regret it, I guarantee that.

Take a look for yourself at some of Childers' websites. He rants, he raves, he proves that he's completely insane.

Childers, in his own words:
http://www.fdv-93-005153.org/

Read about the Oracle Conspiracy! The Jews are involved....

http://www.orafraud.info/terminator_3.0.html

Childers history of abuse against women The TRUE LEGAL FACTS:

The First Restraining Order:

February 16, 1993: At the hearing for Childers' first restraining order, Childers�

ex-girlfriend testified that Childers slapped her in the face and in the mouth, and

that Childers tripped her. And that Childers broke the glass on her door.
Specifically:

JUDGE: Did you break the glass on her door?

CHILDERS: Yes. I knocked. Her doorbell was disconnected and that�s probably the
same spot that everyone else knocked.

Despite Childers� denials, the judge believed the ex-girlfriend, and Childers was
served with a three-year restraining order. In 1996, Childers� attempt to vacate
and expunge the order failed.

The Second Restraining Order:

June 2005 (Note: 12 years later): Childers leaves a letter the house of the same
ex-girlfriend, stating, among other things, �I am wondering how much longer we are
going to remain at war?�

July 1, 2005: Her birthday. Childers leaves flowers and a letter at his
ex-girlfriend�s house, stating, among other things:
�I am your �ex�... but your �ex� will not just go away� and that �you will always
have a relationship with your �ex.� �

�I am a convinced it is in your best interest to give me a fair hearing.�

�But by evading the consequences of your actions you have only put off the moment
of reckoning. It is still pending.�

July 7, 2005: Childers visits his ex-girlfriend�s house. She pretends to be not home.

July 8, 2005: Childers leaves a letter at his ex-girlfriend�s house, stating, among
other things, �I need some answers and I am not prepared to wait another twelve
years for you to accumulate your courage.�

Then, Childers includes with his letter an article about a murder-suicide where an
ex-boyfriend, so distraught over his breakup, kills his ex-girlfriend and then himself.
On which, Childers commented, �I know the parking lot he killed himself in; I spent
a lot of time there, thinking about killing myself, too, over a decade ago. For
similar reasons. So I can identify with him ... politically incorrect though it may
be, I have compassion for this man, who murdered his spouse, and then himself.�
July 15, 2005: Childers leaves flowers and a letter at his ex-girlfriend�s house,
inviting her to lunch.

July 22, 2005: Childers leaves flowers and a letter at his ex-girlfriend�s house,
stating, among other things: �I find that I still have strong feelings for you� and
�I still love you.�
August 5, 2005: Childers leaves flowers, a letter, and some pictures of his children
at his ex-girlfriend�s house.

August 19, 2005: Childers leaves flowers and a letter at his ex-girlfriend�s house,
stating, among other things: �How come I don�t hear from you?�

August 20, 2005: Flowers are delivered to his ex-girlfriend�s house. No card.
September 6, 2005: Childers� Craigslist postings begin. Childers posts an article
detailing a man who murdered his wife and kids.

October 20, 2005: Childers leaves a letter at his ex-girlfriend�s house, stating,
among other things: �I am still patiently waiting for you to find the courage to
face me.�

January 6, 2006: Childers leaves a cookie and note at his ex-girlfriend�s house.

January 13, 2006: Childers leaves a crafting catalog (presumably a hobby of hers) at
his ex-girlfriend�s house.

February 14, 2006: Valentine�s Day. Childers leaves flowers and a letter at his
ex-girlfriend�s house, stating, among other things:

�At least I can see you are
still coming, and going.� Childers writes, �I go out of my way� to walk by her house
�four to six times� daily, and that Childers has rented a storage space (that
Childers sometimes sleeps in) that is only ten minutes from her house.
The letter also states: �Is it so wrong for me to care about you?�

February 16, 2006: Childers leaves a letter at his ex-girlfriend�s house on what he
describes as their �anniversary,� i.e., the anniversary of when the first
restraining order went into effect. Childers letter states, among other things,

�Breaking off communications, changing telephone numbers, and disconnecting
doorbells are exactly the sort of counterproductive, self-sabotaging actions, in my
opinion, that lead to accidentally cracked door glass.� Also, Childers states that
he is waiting for her to admit that she is sorry.

March 22, 2006: After the judge finds Childers� conduct to be harassing and
threatening, the second restraining order is issued against Childers. This time it
is for five years. And Childers is ordered to surrender his firearms (two shotguns
and a .38) to the police.

(All information obtained from the Public Viewing Room of the San Francisco Superior
Court, where it can be easily verified)

We have a Corrupted Mental Health System in this Country (foster city)

2009-11-12T23:40:30-08:00

Here are some facts:
In the U.S. more than $20 billion is spent each year on psychiatric practice and treatment in the prisons and judicial system, yet the recidivism rate exceeds 60%.
Psychiatrists charge $3,600 to $25,000 for each court appearance in the U.S. They assert that the offenders are not responsible for their acts but are instead victims of
mental disorders.

Electric Convulsive Therapy is still in practice in the U.S. 660,000 electroshocks were administered annually in the U.S. and making $5 billion for the psychiatric industry
annually. The 2003 U.S. Mental Health Foundation ECT Fact Sheet reports that ECT causes brain damage, memory loss, and disorientation. In 2005 FDA reported
patients sustaining severe burns, deaths, and pregnant women suffering miscarriages. The number of American seniors aged 65 who receive electroshock is
more than three and a half times that of those aged 64. Why? Government health insurance for senior citizens becomes available at 65, yet it is a well-known fact that
with the increase in age, the risk of cardiac arrest increases during ECT.

Ritalin, a commonly prescribed medication for use on children, was classified in 1971 in the same abuse category as morphine, cocaine, and opium. More potent than
cocaine, it causes stunted growth, weight loss and psychosis. Suicide is a major complication during withdrawal. It can cause stroke and cardiac arrest.
After heavy lobbying by pharmaceutical interests, by 1991, federal funding of $400 was granted for every child labeled with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
(ADHD) in U.S. public schools. There has been a 900% increase in the number of children diagnosed with ADHD and a 665% increase in the production of stimulants
to treat it as a result. Today, millions of children are diagnosed with ADHD.

The facts are very clear. The mental health industry in this country is corrupted, greed-motivated, and ineffective.
visit www.drugfreeworld.org to learn more

Jordan Strips Palestinians of Citizenship (Do Arabs treat Arabs like this?)

2009-11-12T20:59:39-08:00

Jordanian authorities have started revoking the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians living in Jordan to avoid a situation in which they would be �resettled� permanently in the kingdom, Jordanian and Palestinian officials revealed on Monday.

The new measure has increased tensions between Jordanians and Palestinians, who make up around 70 percent of the kingdom�s population.

The tensions reached their peak over the weekend when tens of thousands of fans of Jordan�s Al-Faisali soccer team chanted slogans condemning Palestinians as traitors and collaborators with Israel. Al-Faisali was playing the rival Wihdat soccer team, made up of Jordanian-Palestinians, in the Jordanian town of Zarqa.

Anti-riot policemen had to interfere to stop the Jordanian fans from lynching the Wihdat team members and their fans, eyewitnesses reported. They said the Jordanian fans of Al-Faisali hurled empty bottles and fireworks at the Palestinian players and their supporters.

Reports in a number of Jordanian newspapers said that the Jordanian fans also chanted anti-Palestinian slogans and cursed Palestine, the PLO, Jerusalem and the Aksa Mosque.

Prince Ali bin Hussein, chairman of Jordan�s National Football Association, strongly condemned the racist slurs chanted by the Jordanian fans, saying those responsible would be severely punished.

Baker al-Udwan, director of Al-Faisali team, also condemned the behavior of his team�s supporters. He said that a minority of �outcasts� and �corrupt� elements were behind the embarrassing verbal and physical assault on the Palestinian soccer players and their fans.

�We condemn this uncivilized demeanor and welcome any step that would result in the elimination of this tiny group of parasites,� he said.

Tarek Khoury, chairman of the Wihdat team, instructed his players to abandon the field as soon as the Jordanian fans started hurling abuse against Palestinians and the Aksa Mosque.

Palestinians said that the confrontation with the Jordanians was yet another indication of increased tensions between the two sides.

�Many Palestinians living in Jordan are convinced that the Jordanian authorities are trying to squeeze them out,� said Ismail Jaber, a West Bank lawyer who has been living in the kingdom for nearly 20 years. �There is growing discontent and uncertainty among Palestinians here.�

Several Jordanian government officials, they said, are convinced that Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman are secretly working toward turning Jordan into a Palestinian state.

As a preemptive measure, the Jordanian authorities recently began revoking the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians, leaving many of them in a state of panic and uncertainty regarding the future.

The Jordanians have justified the latest measure by arguing that it�s aimed at avoiding a situation in which the Palestinians would ever be prevented from returning to their original homes inside Israel.

Since 1988, when the late King Hussein cut off his country�s administrative and legal ties with the West Bank, the Jordanian authorities have been working toward �disengaging� from the Palestinians under the pretext of preserving their national identity.

That decision, said Jordan�s Interior Minister Nayef al-Kadi, was taken at the request of the PLO and the Arab world to consolidate the status of the PLO as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

�Our goal is to prevent Israel from emptying the Palestinian territories of their original inhabitants,� the minister explained, confirming that the kingdom had begun revoking the citizenship of Palestinians.

�We should be thanked for taking this measure,� he said. �We are fulfilling our national duty because Israel wants to expel the Palestinians from their homeland.�

Kadi said that, despite the new policy, Palestinians would be permitted to retain their status as residents of the kingdom by holding �yellow ID cards� that are issued to those who have families and homes in the West Bank.

He said that Palestinians working for the Palestinian Authority or the PLO were among those who have had their Jordanian passports taken from them, in addition to anyone who did not serve in the Jordanian army.

The Jordanian minister said that the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank had been notified of the decision to revoke the Jordanian citizenship of Palestinians.

A PA official in Ramallah expressed deep concern over Jordan�s latest move and said that it would only worsen the conditions of Palestinians living in the kingdom. The official said that PA President Mahmoud Abbas raised the issue with King Abdullah II on a number of occasions, but the Jordanians have refused to retract.

Asked by the London-based Al-Hayat daily where the Palestinians should go after they lose their Jordanian passports, the minister replied: �We�re not expelling anyone, nor are we revoking the citizenship of Jordanian nationals. We are only correcting the mistake that was created after Jordan�s disengagement from the West Bank [in 1988]. We want to highlight the true identity and nationality of every person.�

Kadi claimed that the kingdom was seeking, through the new measure, to thwart an Israeli �plot� to transfer more Palestinians to Jordan with the hope of replacing it with a Palestinian state.

�We insist that Jordan is not Palestine, just as Palestine is not Jordan,� he stressed. �We will continue to help the Palestinians hold on to their Palestinian identity by pursuing the implementation of the 1988 disengagement plan from the West Bank.�

BM News: Egypt border police abuse two activists (Childers? Ibn Keleb? Comments?)

2009-11-12T20:53:48-08:00

Bikya Masr

5 July 2009

CAIRO: Natalie Abou Shakra and Jenny Linnell, two International Solidarity Movement activists and British nationals, were prevented from exiting the Gaza Strip via the Rafah Border Crossing on June 28 by Egyptian border authorities.

According to ISM, on June 27, after more than 18 hours of waiting at the entry gate to the Egyptian terminal on buses packed with Palestinian women, children and elderly people and patients in critical condition in ambulances, the Egyptian authorities demanded all be returned to Gaza. However, the people went down to the gates to �peacefully demonstrate and protest against the cruelty, inhumanity and injustice of the border authorities, after which only a few ambulances went in from the dozens present on the Palestinian side.�

The following day, after many hours of waiting, a bus carrying Palestinian passengers, as well as the two activists, were let through into the Egyptian terminal on the border. Palestinians were made to sit on filthy floors in the arrivals hall. There were many mothers and fathers with tired and sick children on their laps and a number of elderly people who had lost consciousness, as well as women who begged on their knees to be let through, only to be constantly turned down and screamed at by aggressive Egyptian officers, ISM said in a statement.

A young man who couldn�t speak and was in a wheelchair, at one point of desperation, hit himself on the chest constantly as he attempted to express himself as the police pushed him and the wheel chair away. When an elderly man fell unconscious on the floor, Abou Shakra approached to assist the man, while the officer who dealing with their case told her, �I will make sure YOU will never leave Gaza.� �How did you get into Gaza,� asked another officer who saw them sitting on the floor with their luggage, ISM reported. �We came on the Free Gaza Movement boats,� the activists said. He smiled and said, �So, you don�t need us to answer. You already know why you�re not being allowed out.�

After hours of waiting, the activists were told to enter the office and asked what they had been doing in Gaza and how they entered the Gaza Strip. A short time later, their names were called out with those on the return list. The two activists refused to leave on the basis that they should be told why they were being denied entry despite having been granted permission to do so by the ministry of foreign affairs and showing the permits they were holding from the ministry. No proper answer was provided. A little after midnight, Egyptian officers surrounded them and forcibly removed them from the Crossing, dragging them across the floor. As they forced the activists out, the man dragging Natalie by the wrists told her, �You�re lucky my shoe is not in your mouth as they would do in Jordan.� When she replied, �All that you have done to the people is registered them in notebooks,� he replied to her saying, �Who will hold me accountable?�

The Gaza Strip borders Egypt. (Does Ibn Keleb have the answer?)

2009-11-12T20:48:13-08:00

Can't the Palestinians get supplies trucked in from Egypt?

Em....Egypt shoots any Palestinian crossing the border. Only recently under pressure Egypt sent aid to Gaza and reluctantly let injured Palestinians seek treatment at an Egyptian hospital....they turned back the rest.

Look, every country around the Palestinians wants to keep out the Palestinians. Even they recognize the danger of Hamas. Jordan bans it. All other countries go all out and ban the Palestinians.

by supporting Hamas you OPPOSE human rights. The U.S. is not the "master" of Egypt and you cannot blame us for every foreign problem in your vicinity

EGYPT BUILT AND ETHNIC CLEANSING WALL?

Egypt has a wall - that they built & maintain
to prevent people from Gaza access into Egypt.
Guess they don't want them there even though
the people of Gaza are Muslim.

It would seem Egypt doesn't want the violence Hamas
brings as they guard the border against intusion. Also
Egypt doesn't like its guards being killed by Hamas.
Source(s):
Egypt sends in border guards to close breach in Gaza wall

EGYPTIANS PROFIT FROM PALESTINIAN SUFFERING

They haven't been allowed to have supplies trucked in but there are tunnels which go over into Egypt. Egypt has fully taken advantage of the situation by selling food, medicine and gasoline to Palestinians at inflated prices.

DV Charge Takes NY Anchorman off Air (Wife: 'He Never Put One Hand on Me')

2009-11-12T20:48:12-08:00

It's a continuing saga. The mere allegation of domestic violence can lead to dire consequences even if disproven, even if recanted by the accuser.

In this case, it's high profile TV anchorman Dominic Carter of NY1 television (New York Daily News, 10/29/09). He's one of their most-watched news anchors, but he's been yanked off the air. Why? Because over a year ago, his wife accused him of DV. Never mind that she sent a letter to prosecutors a month later saying,

"I have to set the record straight. My husband never put one hand on me."

Marilyn Carter backed up those words in court on Thursday, October 29th, telling Justice Arnold Etelson that she had lied in claiming Dominic had attacked her. But despite her withdrawal of her claims, Dominic Carter was taken off the air and placed on an extended leave of absence the same day his wife gave her testimony exonerating him. "Dominic will not be appearing on New York One," said general manager Steve Paulus.

Reading the whole article, Marilyn Carter's backup story - that she was beaten by a day laborer - doesn't sound overly plausible either. So when Dominic responded to a question about exactly what had happened this way,

"There are certain things that I can't say because it's personal and private and I don't want to destroy my wife's character,"

it suggests a lot, but says little. Of course his wife may have been telling the truth in the first place and thought better of it when she cooled down and figured out that she was in the process of destroying her husband's career. That's the same career that may be her meal ticket.

But the fact is, we'll never know what happened. That's because only two or possibly three people were present and the day laborer won't be found because Marilyn Carter says she doesn't remember his name. That leaves her and her husband, and they're not talking.

What we do know is that, in a case in which the complainant has recanted both in writing and under oath in court, the accused has at least temporarily lost his job. Perhaps more important to Carter, though, is his reputation. A highly-respected newsman, his reputation as trustworthy is all-important to him. As he told the court, "In the court of public opinion, if I leave here without an opinion, my career is over."

Would an allegation of car theft that the alleged victim admitted was made up be sufficient to place Dominic Carter under a cloud? What about a DUI that the officer admitted he fabricated? Would anyone even notice?

But an allegation of DV - even one that's been recanted twice - is enough to ruin a man's career.

It's the society we live in. Is it the society we want?

http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=4344