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From June 2014, an important one I forgot to bookmark before. 

More efforts to get Obama thriough the Summit of the Americas conference that begins today with the least embarrassment stemming from the failed U.S. attempt to overthrow Venezuela's government earlier this year. The most detailed account of the coup attempt and its defeat is at http://www.voltairenet.org/article186879.html

The Saudis did request that Pakistan send in ground troops. The Pakistan Parliament is in its fourth day of debating the issue, with very strong opposition to the Saudi request. Still, the Saudis have sent Parkistan so much financial aid that fears of not acceding to the request might prevail. But another factor is that Pakistan has its domestic unrest to fight along the Afghan border where U.S. drones keep the kettle aboil; it may be reluctant to dilute its strength to send sufficient troops to Yemen to do the job.   Although the Saudi Army is ridiculously well-armed, it has no experience in fighting wars. The Saudis have preferred to work through mercenaries instead. If forced to send in its own troops, Yemen could indeed become the House of Saud's Afghanisatan.   The Houthi are battle-hardened and well organized along Hezbollah guerrilla lines with a Hezbollah advisory force in attendance. The Houthis took Yemen and no one should forget that Hezbollah has repelled the best that Israel could throw at them in Lebanon at least twice. (Hezbollah was originally trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces in the early 1990s.) There is also the enormous home court advantage for the Houthis, even more pronounced if the Saudis send in their own troops; the Houthis would then be fighting Salafists for their very survival as a culture.  

Rove explains Obama's deceitfully clever use of the "strawman" argument. Excellent discussion of how a dangerous demagogue manages to position his extreme and radical views as "reasonable". Just paint your opponent as evil and uncaring without having to actually describe the who, what, where, when facts. ...."President Barack Obama reveres Abraham Lincoln. But among the glaring differences between the two men is that Lincoln offered careful, rigorous, sustained arguments to advance his aims and, when disagreeing with political opponents, rarely relied on the lazy rhetorical device of "straw men." ...... Mr. Obama, on the other hand, routinely ascribes to others views they don't espouse and says opposition to his policies is grounded in views no one really advocates.

Whenever a government regulatory agency proves itself to be incredibly incompetent or corrupt, the respectable media swoop in to declare that the "free market" has failed and the agency in question obviously needs more money and power. Whether it's the Department of Education's failure to produce kids who can read, the FBI's accusations against innocent people in high-profile cases, or the FDA cracking down on tomatoes, the answer is always the same: proponents of bigger government argue that yes, mistakes were made, but the solution of course is to shovel more taxpayer money into the agencies in question. In the private sector, when a firm fails, it ceases operations. The opposite happens in government.

Excellent editorial taking a clean shot at Google and the many other "aggregators" stealing "news" content.  Rupert also hits the news industry itself for not serving their customers with truth-filled journalism.  He points out that editors have lost the trust of their consumers. excerpt: We are at a time when many news enterprises are shutting down or scaling back. No doubt you will hear some tell you that journalism is in dire shape, and the triumph of digital is to blame. My message is just the opposite. The future of journalism is more promising than ever-limited only by editors and producers unwilling to fight for their readers and viewers, or government using its heavy hand either to overregulate or subsidize us.

s the GOP really just the party of no, as Democrat talking points say and the Democrat party controlled media echo? Or do Republicans have a positive vision for America besides their well-justified opposition to the ultra-left Obamacrat agenda? This article covers: ..... Gingrich's American Solutions ..... The Paul Ryan Roadmap ..... A Healthcare discussion "Patient Power v. Government Power" The article is an excellent read and good resource for future reference.  One thing though.  it would be helpful if Constitutional Conservative writers replaced the Democrat/Marxist Media term for Republicans as "the Party of NO", with a more accurate description; "The Party of HELL NO!"

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON Published: August 21, 2011 Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, has come under increasing pressure from the Obama administration to drop his opposition to a wide-ranging state settlement with banks over dubious foreclosure practices, according to people briefed on discussions about the deal. Eric T. Schneiderman has objected to elements of the settlement for months.  In recent weeks, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and high-level Justice Department officials have been waging an intensifying campaign to try to persuade the attorney general to support the settlement, said the people briefed on the talks. Mr. Schneiderman and top prosecutors in some other states have objected to the proposed settlement with major banks, saying it would restrict their ability to investigate and prosecute wrongdoing in a variety of areas, including the bundling of loans in mortgage securities. But Mr. Donovan and others in the administration have been contacting not only Mr. Schneiderman but his allies, including consumer groups and advocates for borrowers, seeking help to secure the attorney general's participation in the deal, these people said. One recipient described the calls from Mr. Donovan, but asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

Economic comparison that describes the prosperity differences between a Republican led congress and a Democratic controlled congress. Excerpt: If you want to give Bill Clinton credit for economic results during his terms, you have to link those results to his policies.  If you want to give him credit for those policies, you must admit that they were virtually all in line with Republican rhetoric and antithetical to modern liberalism. But here's what you can't do and remain intellectually honest:  praise Clinton and damn Bush, and then encourage Obama to do the exact opposite of what Clinton did and to add multiple trillions of dollars to Bush's spending and deficit levels. Conservatives like me have always encouraged tax rate cuts, spending cuts, free trade and eliminating government programs like welfare and the byzantine farm program.  Reagan did what he could (with a Democrat-controlled House the entire time), and the economy grew 3.5% annually over his eight years.  Clinton did these things as well (with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress his last six years), and the economy grew 3.8% annually over his eight years. This is not hard: cut taxes, cut spending, cut programs.  Oh, and elect Republicans to the Senate.  At least that's what the facts say.

this is extreme stuff.  Which is perhaps why such an outlandish plan might actually work.  Bastardos! excerpt: an authoritarian control system engineered by the bankers and the global elite. "This new and complete Revolution we contemplate can be defined in a very few words. It is … outright world-socialism, scientifically planned and directed," H.G. Wells wrote in The New World Order. It is a mistake to believe the Cloward-Piven Strategy is scheme cooked up by academic Marxists of "New Left" bent dedicated to the destruction of capitalism in the name of some sort of vaguely defined humanitarianism. In fact, "the destruction of capitalism in America by swelling the welfare rolls to the point of collapsing our economy and then implementing socialism by nationalizing many private institutions" is a meticulous plan on the part of the global elite to consolidate power and destroy all opposition. It has nothing to do with liberating the proletariat but rather subjecting them to banker engineered "world-socialism, scientifically planned and directed" and devised to transform the planet into a banker dominated high-tech prison gulag.

This explains everything.  Sadly.  Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact. excerpt: The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. In a September 2009 article, James Simpson wrote an article entitled "Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis". Part of a series, it connected then presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government.   The basis of this strategy is a plan called Cloward-Piven.  

Ray McGovern, of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) fame, administers some serious whup-ass on editors of The Washington Post for its editorial reviving neocon ambition for the U.S. to go to war against Syria, as in American boots on the ground and handing over air-to-ground missiles to the Jihadi-dominated Opposition. As though the U.S. were not already heavily involved in a war-by-proxies against Syria. McGovern dumps gallons of cold water on wild new claims that the Assad government waged chemical warfare in mid-April. Then he bluntly confronts the neocon nature of the Post editorial, which by the way can be found at http://goo.gl/DNg7BL This is McGovern at his finest, a well-written essay that goes right to the heart of the matter, usefully defining a "neocon" as "one who has difficulty distinguishing between the national interests of Israel, on the one hand, and those of the United States, on the other." For as he explains, it is in the psychotic Israeli government's interest, not in the U.S. interest, to prolong the violence in Syria, but sadly the U.S. State Department, and now The Washington Post, are dominated by neocons. All in all, a truly inspired essay by a Citizen who dares to tell the crowd that the Emperor wears no clothes.  Buck naked, caught in the act. A must-read.    

I wound up joining this campaign at the urging of the ACLU after checking the Privacy Policy. The Reset the Net campaign seems to be endorsed by a lot of change-oriented groups, from the ACLU to Greenpeac to the Pirate Party. A fair number of groups with a Progressive agenda, but certainly not limited to them. The right answer to that situation is to urge other groups to endorse, not to avoid the campaign. Single-issue coalition-building is all about focusing on an area of agreement rather than worrying about who you are rubbing elbows with.  I have been looking for a a bipartisan group that's tackling government surveillance issues via mass actions but has no corporate sponsors. This might be the one. The reason: Corporate types like Google have no incentive to really butt heads with the government voyeurs. They are themselves engaged in massive surveillance of their users and certainly will not carry the battle for digital privacy over to the private sector. But this *is* a battle over digital privacy and legally defining user privacy rights in the private sector is just as important as cutting back on government surveillance. As we have learned through the Snowden disclosures, what the private internet companies have, the NSA can and does get.  The big internet services successfully pushed in the U.S. for authorization to publish more numbers about how many times they pass private data to the government, but went no farther. They wanted to be able to say they did something, but there's a revolving door of staffers between NSA and the big internet companies and the internet service companies' data is an open book to the NSA.   The big internet services are not champions of their users' privacy. If they were, they would be featuring end-to-end encryption with encryption keys unique to each user and unknown to the companies.  Like some startups in Europe are doing. E.g., the Wuala.com filesync service in Switzerland (first 5 GB of storage free). Compare tha

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has some very harsh words for Barack Obama and some good advice as well. I was a little slowed-down by McGovern's use of the term "right wing" to describe television networks; dumping on Sgt. Bergdahl certainly wasn't confined to Fox News; it's happening throughout mainstream media.  Then I realized that he was using the term in the sense employed nearly everywhere but in U.S. mainstream media land; "right-wing" denotes a position that supports maximal government power and minimizes the citizenry's rights. "Left-wing" takes the opposite tack. And within those senses, McGovern is absolutely correct to brand all of mainstream media as right-wing. They're virtually all pro-oligarchists peddling American exceptionalism fascism under an imperial presidency as being good for all Americans.      

That was on the third. Not a chance of making it into the House bill, in my estimation.