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Excellent analysis and statement of facts in evidence.   Conclussion is that Osama is well on his way to winning on every one of his stated objectives, and GM is heading for a real bankruptcy, despie $100 Billion in taxpayer bailout funds.  GM is expected to cost taxpayers upwards of $56 Billion when all is said and done. excerpt: "Vice President Joe Biden has a suggested slogan for the Obama/Biden 2012 campaign. He repeats it everywhere he goes. "Osama Bin Laden is dead," he bellows, "and General Motors is alive!" There's only one problem. He's wrong. Yes, Bin Laden's dead, thank God. And General Motors is still an operating concern. But in point of fact, the cause for which Osama Bin Laden stood is stronger than at any time in American history, thanks in large part to the Obama administration. And as for GM, it's not so much alive as it is a member of the corporate living dead, feasting on taxpayer brains while slowly deteriorating, the first zombie company created by Obama's cronyism. On the eleventh anniversary of Osama Bin Laden's attack on America, it's worthwhile to examine just what he hoped to accomplish. He spelled out his goals in three documents: a 1996 fatwa titled, "Declaration of War Against The Americans Occupying The Land of the Two Holy Places"; a 2002 "Letter to America"; and a 2004 video. In these manifestos, he declared his willingness to die, of course. His goals included:"

3. The major still-unanswered question from 9/11 may be this: Why did the CIA keep information about Khalid Al-Mihdhar - the 9/11 team member who was identified before the attacks as having a U.S. visa and tracked into the United States - secret from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies? Clearly this information could have been used to stop the 9/11 plot, yet CIA officials lied about it repeatedly, and have never been held to account either for their failure to inform or their lies. Do you have an answer? My hands started shaking. I didn't know what to think. "They just sent these reports," the [CIA chief of station*] said, seeing my reaction. I walked out of the room, sprinted down the corridor to the bathroom, and fell to the floor next to a stall. There I threw up. I sat on the floor for a few minutes, although it felt like hours. What I had just seen went through my mind again and again. The same thought kept looping back: "If they had all this information since January 2000, why the hell didn't they pass it on?" My whole body was shaking… I got myself to the sink, washed out my mouth, and splashed some water on my face. I covered my face with a paper towel for a few moments. I was still trying to process the fact that the information I had requested about major al-Qaeda operatives, information the CIA had claimed they knew nothing about, had been in the agency's hands since January 2000. The SWAT agent asked, "What's wrong, bud? What the hell did he tell you?" "They knew, they knew." -From The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda. (*Redacted in original - text restored by Harper's). Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Co., © 2011 Ali Soufan. Sadly no. To date we've never been told why the information wasn't passed to the team investigating the USS Cole attack, the State Department, or the Immigration and Naturalization Service, nor why he wasn't put on a no-fly list, al

Very interesting perspective on why Banks are taking down the world economy.  Starts with discussion on the Clinton 1994 Interstate Banking Act that allowed banks to cross over State lines and consolidate services.  Lots of acquisitions.  Propensity by Banksters to take larger risks. Interesting question for fixing the Bankster problem: tougher government regulation and micro management rules OR capitalism?  Let government take over, or let the free market sort things out?  quote: " Right now, we have the worst of both worlds. We have a purportedly capitalistic system with a lot of rules that are not strictly enforced, and when things go wrong, the government steps in to protect banks from the market consequences of their own worst decisions. To me, that's not capitalism."

quote:  Regardless of what those Occupying Wall Street have to say about it, you can be a capitalist and believe that what is happening here is wrong. A private corporation should not be able to plunder the U.S. Treasury to cover its losses via the FDIC. There appears to be very little information publicly available as to what could possibly even be worth 75 trillion dollars, but it's most definitely not cash or paychecks from the individual depositors the FDIC was designed to protect. In fact, it appears to be 75 trillion dollars of risky debt packaged as derivatives. To put that in perspective, the annual GDP of all of planet Earth is only 58 trillion dollars!

Former NSA officials publish an open memorandum to Obama, seeking a meeting with him to explain how the NSA is drowning in data that it cannot effectively process, how more than $1 billion was wasted on a never-completed system to process it, and how a $3 million system that could and did process it effectively was shot down by former NSA Director Michael Hayden so he could award the contract for the much more expensive version to his buddies. And much, much more

Reuters explains why Gen. Dempsey's was wrong in his estimate that the military strikes on Syria would cost only "tens of millions of dollars."  His estimate was apparently counting only the costs that would be incurred before the end of the fiscal year on September 30.   If the U.S. used only as many cruise missiles as was used against Libya, the cost would be over $100 million. More are likely because Syria, unlike Libya, has advanced anti-missile and anti-aircraft defenses. Throw in the cost of using aircraft too, and the cost rises to over $1 billion.

Wrong approach, in my opinion. None of the NSA reform measures so far take aim at the problem's roots. Those are unwarranted government secrecy, lack of reviewability by the courts at the request of the affected public, and no clear definition of digital privacy rights. Make something illegal for the NSA to do and DoD will just transfer those responsibilities to another of its agencies or farm it out to one of the other 5 Eyes nations to perform for them.   

Okay. The Bank of England finally fesses up and tells the truth about banking and government. Incredible!

Everything you know about FDR, The New Deal and the Great Depression Banking Crisis is wrong!!!! "From David Stockman's Contra Corner. Remarks to the Committee For The Republic, Washington DC, February 2014 (Part 4 in a 6-Part Series) Go to Part 1. The Great Depression thus did not represent the failure of capitalism or some inherent suicidal tendency of the free market to plunge into cyclical depression-absent the constant ministrations of the state through monetary, fiscal, tax and regulatory interventions.  Instead, the Great Depression was a unique historical occurrence-the delayed consequence of the monumental folly of the Great War, abetted by the financial deformations spawned by modern central banking. But ironically, the "failure of capitalism" explanation of the Great Depression is exactly what enabled the Warfare State to thrive and dominate the rest of the 20th century because it gave birth to what have become its twin handmaidens--Keynesian economics and monetary central planning. Together, these two doctrines eroded and eventually destroyed the great policy barrier--that is, the old-time religion of balanced budgets- that had kept America a relatively peaceful Republic until 1914. To be sure, under Mellon's tutelage, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover strove mightily, and on paper successfully, to restore the pre-1914 status quo ante on the fiscal front.  But it was a pyrrhic victory-since Mellon's surpluses rested on an artificially booming, bubbling economy that was destined to hit the wall. The Hoover Recovery of 1932 Worse still, Hoover's bitter-end fidelity to fiscal orthodoxy, as embodied in his infamous balanced budget of June 1932, got blamed for prolonging the depression.  Yet, as I have demonstrated in the chapter of my book called "New Deal Myths of Recovery", the Great Depression was already over by early summer 1932."

"There are allegations [the NSA] listen to all our emails; that's wrong. We don't," Alexander said, adding that of 54 different terrorist-related activities identified through PRISM, 42 of which were disrupted, including 13 in the U.S., and 25 in Europe. "And if we did, we would be held accountable. There is 100 percent auditability on what we do." Technically accurate but materially misleading (only those with text-to-voice capabilities "listen" to emails). Meanwhile, assuming that Alexandeer meant to say "reading" instead of "listening to," the linked Guardian UK reporting on the NSA XScore program brands Gen. Alexander as a liar. 

excerpt: "….Transnationalists want to rewrite the laws of war, do away with the death penalty, restrict gun rights and much more-all without having to win popular majorities or heed American constitutional limits. And these advocates are making major strides under an Obama administration that is itself a hotbed of transnational legal thinking…. To be clear, transnationalism isn't a conspiratorial enterprise. In the legal academy, its advocates have openly stated their aims and means. "International law now seeks to influence political outcomes within sovereign States," Anne-Marie Slaughter, then dean of Princeton's public-affairs school, wrote in an influential 2007 essay. International law, she went on, must expand to include "domestic choices previously left to the determination of national political processes" and be able to "alter domestic politics." The preferred entry point for importing foreign norms into American law is the U.S. court system. The Yale Law School scholar Howard Koh, a transnationalist advocate, has written that "domestic courts must play a key role in coordinating U.S. domestic constitutional rules with rules of foreign and international law." Over the past two decades, activist judges have increasingly cited "evolving" international standards to overturn state laws, and Mr. Koh has suggested that foreign norms can be "downloaded" into American law in this manner…. Ms. Slaughter and Mr. Koh held top posts at the State Department during Mr. Obama's first term, and their tenures coincided with an aggressive push to ratify or recognize as customary law… a host of … progressive causes. For proof that the transnationalist threat isn't merely theoretical, look no further than the European Union…. Today over half of the regulations that affect Europeans' lives are made by administrators in Brussels, not by national legislatures. These regulations include the EU's ban, announced in May, on restau

"Ghouta, Syria - As the machinery for a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria gathers pace following last week's chemical weapons attack, the U.S. and its allies may be targeting the wrong culprit. ........ continued ............... Interviews with people in Damascus and Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, where the humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders said at least 355 people had died last week from what it believed to be a neurotoxic agent, appear to indicate as much. The U.S., Britain, and France as well as the Arab League have accused the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for carrying out the chemical weapons attack, which mainly targeted civilians. U.S. warships are stationed in the Mediterranean Sea to launch military strikes against Syria in punishment for carrying out a massive chemical weapons attack. The U.S. and others are not interested in examining any contrary evidence, with U.S Secretary of State John Kerry saying Monday that Assad's guilt was "a judgment … already clear to the world." However, from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack. "My son came to me two weeks ago asking what I thought the weapons were that he had been asked to carry," said Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of a rebel fighting to unseat Assad, who lives in Ghouta. Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant, known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion. The father described the weapons as having a "tube-like structure" while others were like a "huge gas bottle." Ghouta townspeople said the rebels were using mosques and private houses to sleep while storing their weapons in tunnels. A

'Twould be nice if it worked out this way. But Obama is spineless so I won't hold my breath. 

Outrageous. I read the court's opinion. This happened only because: [i] federal judges are reluctant to impose sanctions on government attorneys; and [ii] government attorneys know that. In all my years of legal practice, I read only one court opinion where an assistant U.S. attorney was sanctioned and instead of the normal sanction of paying the other side's attorney fees and expenses of litigation, the judge just awarded a $500 sanction. That is also why litigating against the Feds is such a chore; you spend half your time shooting down blatantly implausible arguments. That's far less of a problem when facing attorneys who are in private practice. But so much for Obama's "transparency" platform; this was the result of the Obama Administration itself asserting a preposterous privilege claim supported only by ridiculous arguments, no more than a delaying action.  

Some surveillance programmes remained a "really critical ingredient in our homeland security." So the politics of fear and faux terrorism is more important to Hillary than civil liberties. There is only one political party in the U.S., the War Party.