Gunman In Congresswoman’s Shooting Identified As Jared Lee Loughner

This is a sad day for all parties involved.  Expect parasitical elements in government and media to use this tragedy to push their agenda of a disarmed, surveilled America. – Editor

SarahPac Called for Ariz. Congresswoman to be ‘Targeted’ By Lori Price, www.legitgov.org 08 Jan 2011 Sarah Palin’s fundraising instrument, SarahPac, had posted an advertisement to target Democratic Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The photo has since been removed from her website. However, CLG has obtained it and reposted it here. (Photo supplied by Bruce L.)

Traitor, Sock-Puppet Obama Eyes JP Morgan Executive for Chief of Staff

By Julianna Goldman and John McCormick - Jan 3, 2011 6:53 PM ET

William Daley, JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive. Photographer: Tim Boyle/Bloomberg

President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a high-level White House post, possibly as his chief of staff, people familiar with the matter said.

Such a move, which is still under discussion and which White House officials wouldn’t confirm, would bring a Washington veteran — and someone with strong business ties — into the administration as Obama enters the second half of his term. The president is faced with a Republican majority in the House of Representatives and is trying to accelerate the U.S. economic recovery while addressing the budget deficit.

Daley, 62, who typically responds to questions, didn’t return two messages seeking comment left on his cell phone yesterday or a phone call to his office and an e-mail sent to him today. White House officials declined to discuss the matter.

“I’m not going to comment on personnel speculation,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbssaid in an e-mail.

As he remakes his staff at the midway point of his presidency, Obama also is seeking to address complaints from some executives that the Democratic administration is anti- business. Daley is JPMorgan’s Midwest chairman and the bank’s head of corporate responsibility.

Replacement for Summers

Among the pressing personnel decisions Obama must make is naming a successor to Lawrence Summers as head of the National Economic Council, which could come as early as this week.Gene Sperling, a counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, has emerged as the leading candidate for the post.

If selected, Sperling would be returning to the position he held for four years under PresidentBill Clinton, making him the longest-serving NEC director. While he doesn’t have strong ties to the business community or Summers’ standing as an economist, Sperling has played key roles crafting the administration’s economic policies, most recently in forging Obama’s compromise with Republican leaders to extend Bush-era income tax cuts.

Yale University President Richard Levin and Roger Altman, the founder of Evercore Partners Inc., are under consideration for the NEC post as well.

If named as chief of staff, Daley would replace Pete Rouse, whom Obama selected to fill the role on an interim basis after Rahm Emanuel resigned Oct. 1 to pursue a bid for mayor of Chicago.

Rouse has indicated to administration officials that he is reluctant to serve in that job for the remainder of Obama’s presidency, according to a person familiar with the matter. Rouse also has signaled that he would stay as chief of staff if asked by the president, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the discussions are private.

Internal Review

Rouse, who has worked for Obama since his days in the Senate, is conducting an internal review that covers personnel, policy and political strategy as the president contends with a new political landscape and gears up for his re-election bid less than two years from now. Obama is considering a number of staff changes. Senior adviser David Axelrod has said that he plans to leave in the coming months, and former campaign manager David Plouffe will join the administration.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Daley served as an Obama economic adviser. After the election, he was a co-chairman of Obama’s transition team.

Daley’s Work

Daley, the younger brother of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, was Commerce secretary during the second term of the Clinton administration, serving from January 1997 to June 2000. He was chairman of Vice President Al Gore’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2000.

After serving as president of SBC Communications for more than two years, he joined JPMorgan Chase in 2004.

While there, Daley has worked on some of the Midwest’s biggest takeovers. He advised Chicago’s Exelon Corp. on its unsuccessful 2004 proposal to buy Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. for $17.8 billion, and CBOT Holdings Inc., also based in Chicago, on its 2007 sale to CME Group Inc. for $11 billion, according to Corporate Control Alert, an industry newsletter.

Daley was a political mentor to Emanuel. The two worked together to get the union-opposedNorth American Free Trade Agreement passed in 1993. Emanuel was then a senior aide to Clinton, and Daley was a special counsel to the president.

The youngest of seven children born to longtime Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and Eleanor “Sis” Daley, William Daley is a member of Illinois’ most powerful political dynasty.

Besides his work as a banker, he serves on several corporate boards, including Boeing Co. andAbbott Laboratories.

Business Outreach

The administration has come under fire from the business community, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The nation’s biggest business lobbying group opposed Obama’s health-care and financial-regulatory overhauls and committed $75 million to political ads in the midterm congressional elections, mainly directed against Democrats.

Still, Obama is generating more optimism among corporate executives after a series of actions and overtures, including a deal to extend tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003, efforts to boost exports such as a U.S.-South Korea free-trade agreement, and a loosening of controls on some technology sales.

Obama met with 20 company executives on Dec. 15 in Washington and said afterward that he made “good progress” toward establishing closer cooperation between government and business to accelerate the economic recovery. The president has said private companies are crucial to the U.S. climbing out of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

To contact the reporters on this story: Julianna Goldman in Washington atjgoldman6@bloomberg.net; John McCormick in Chicago at jmccormick16@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva in Washington atmsilva34@bloomberg.net.

 

THE SENATOR FROM TEL AVIV: Joe Lieberman – WTC 7 Collapse Did Not Occur

“Senator” Joseph Lieberman is a disgusting liar and traitor to the United States.  He should be tried for treason for putting the interests of a foreign nation above those of the United States.  Israel is not the 51st state and we need to start thinking about what our unconditional support and financing means for the interests of the American people.  Saying that “God gave Palestine to the Jews,” does not cut it with me either!

Anyone honestly  looking into the events of 9/11/2001 will see that there is evidence of Israeli Mossad involvement and that that alone demands a new investigation.

JOSEPH LIEBERMAN “THE SENATOR FROM TEL AVIV” LIES THROUGH HIS TEETH:

Threats to the Establishment Don’t Make the Cover of TIME Magazine

Wikileaks: A Big Dangerous US Government Con Job

by F. William Engdahl*  The story on the surface makes for a script for a new Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. However, a closer look at the details of what has so far been carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to North Korea. TheWikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.

It is almost too perfectly scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled “computer geek,” sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan. Bradley Manning Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained “incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC.” The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems. Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided it was rape. He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the LondonGuardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Grouptogether with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others. Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view. Not so secret cables… The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people.” And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the “September 11 of world diplomacy.” The British government calls them a threat to national security and an aide to Canada’s Prime Minister calls on the CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin. Most important, the 250,000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document, [1] and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. SIPRnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret. [2] Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics. But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, send dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler. Excuse to police the Internet? What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaksserver in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken. What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaksserver in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken. The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). IIt would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill “would allow the president to ’declare a cyber-security emergency’ relating to ’non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.” We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January. The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11 2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous “Department of Justice” logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim “violate copyrights,” yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what? F. William Engdahl Author of Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century and Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. His other books includeSeeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.

Friends of Israel — Enemies Inside the Gates

Obama money from abroad could total $3.3 million

Oct 7, 9:13 PM (ET)

WASHINGTON (AP) – Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has raised about $3.3 million from contributors who did not list a home state or who designated their state with an abbreviation that did not match one of the 50 states or U.S. territories, according to records provided by the Federal Election Commission.

Most of those contributors did identify themselves as living abroad in foreign cities. Under federal law, foreign citizens cannot make political contributions, but U.S. citizens living abroad can.

The Republican National Committee filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Monday asking for an investigation of Obama’s foreign contributions, among other things.

The FEC on Monday provided The Associated Press with a spread sheet of potential overseas donors that did not include contributors who left their state designation blank. As a result, the list was incomplete.

The $3.3 million total does not include donors who have given less than $200 and whose contributions do not have to be itemized. Some of that money could also have come from overseas. About half of Obama’s $455 million in contributions so far are unitemized. The campaign does not identify those donors.

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, speaking to reporters en route to Nashville, Tenn., on Tuesday, noted that anyone can donate to the campaign through the Internet. “We monitor these things as best we can,” he said.

Republican John McCain’s campaign lists all his donors, even those who give less than $200, on his Web site.

The Obama campaign has begun to request passport numbers from donors to verify their citizenship.

Asked why the Obama campaign doesn’t do the same and open its database to the public, Axelrod said the campaign returns improper contributions.

“Obviously we’ve got a huge database of contributors,” he said. “It’s valuable to our campaign… We’re probably more forthcoming about disclosure than anyone.”

Independent watchdog groups, however, have asked the campaign to provide more information about its fundraisers and to at least provide information about small donors by zip code or country from where they donate.

Tell the Truth About Obama in Missouri, Go to Jail

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
September 26, 2008

In Missouri, if you “lie” about Barack Obama the cops may arrest you. “The effort appeared to be part of a move by the Obama campaign to block advertisements to which it objects. The campaign also sent ‘threatening’ letters to several news agencies in Pennsylvania and Ohio demanding they stop airing ads exposing Obama’s gun stance, according to the National Rifle Association,” writes WorldNetDaily, never mind Obama is a gun-grabber who claims to support the Second Amendment.

Obama told ABC he supports the D.C. handgun ban. His campaign told the Chicago Tribune “Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.” Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation, probably the largest private funder of anti-gun and pro-ban groups and research in the country. In addition, Obama voted for a bill that would “expand the definition of armor piercing ammunition” and “support[ed] banning the sale of ammunition for assault weapons,” including 223 and .308 caliber bullets, the most common rifle ammunition. He supported the Illinois Firearms Owners Identification (FOID) Card, mandatory for residents when they buy any firearm in the state. (For more information on Obama’s assault on the Second Amendment, see Analysis: Fact-Checkers Fall Short in Criticizing NRA’s Anti-Obama Ads.)

In other words, if you cite Obama’s voting record or his publicly stated opinions and this rubs his “truth squads” wrong, they will sic the cops on you. “We want to keep this campaign focused on issues,” Jennifer Joyce, a Missouri prosecutor, told told KMOV (see video). “We don’t want people to get distracted. Missourians don’t want to be distracted by the divisive character attacks,” that is to say she does not want the sheep distracted by the truth — Obama is a gun-grabber who pretends to respect the Second Amendment. In addition to Joyce’s warming, Obama lawyer Robert Bauer threatened Missouri television and radio station managers that he would rat them out to the Federal Communication Commission if they dared tell the truth.

This is precisely how political campaigns are run in despotic third world countries and dictatorships that pretend to be democracies. In Bolivia, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Burma, Georgia, Haiti — there is no shortage of recent examples — the opposition is routinely arrested, even killed, but we are supposedly above such tactics here in America. Instead, we just fix the voting machines and nix thousands of voters from the rolls.

It appears all of this has changed under Obama. Isn’t this the sort of behavior Hitler’s goons engaged in before he swept into power and killed millions of people, beginning with his political opponents? Isn’t this the sort of thing Stalin and Mao did, eventually graduating to mass murder and genocide? Didn’t East Germany’s Stasi encourage people to turn in their neighbors, even their family and friends, for holding the wrong political opinions?

Of course, Obama is no Stalin and his opponents are not showing up dead on the side of the road. But with this effort to silence the critics through coordinated police action we can see such fascism in a germination stage. Remember, Hitler’s brownshirts started out by intimidating communists, anarchists, and Social Democrats and then graduated to beatings, murder, and finally death camps.

Pelosi: The US election nightmare scenario

By Professor Larry Sabato
University of Virginia

The odds are that the victor of the American presidential election on 4 November will secure a clean-cut victory in the electoral college – an absolute majority of 270 votes or more.

But that isn’t a guaranteed result.

The closer the election gets – and right now the polls have it very tight indeed – the greater the chance that a tie of 269 to 269 will occur.

Nancy Pelosi: The next president of the United States?

There are dozens of ways for the College to tie, given the 51 moving parts: the 50 states (each state assigned a number of electoral votes equal to the total of its House and Senate delegation) and the District of Columbia, assigned three electoral votes by constitutional amendment.

However, most of the ties are nonsensical, since most states have an established tilt to one party or the other. California will not go Republican, and Texas will not vote for the Democrat.

Yet take a look at the current electoral college map, which is based both on historical trends and this month’s polls:

The totally safe and likely states for Obama have 200 electoral votes. For McCain, the similar total is 174.

Leaning to Obama at present are Iowa, New Mexico, and Wisconsin, bringing the Democrat to 222. McCain has a slight edge for now in Florida, Missouri, and North Carolina, which would push him up to 227.

That leaves in the toss-up category seven states with a total of 89 votes: Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

How it might happen

Given the results in 2000 and 2004, when Michigan and Pennsylvania voted Democratic, it is not unreasonable to assign them to Obama, bringing him to 260, just 10 votes short of the White House. While Obama has a real chance to win in Colorado, Ohio, and Virginia, all three states have tended to vote Republican in many or most election years.

So what happens if a tie occurs? In two words, a mess

If McCain wins them, while Obama carries two small toss-up states, where recent surveys have given him a tiny edge, Nevada and New Hampshire, the 269-269 tie results.

Alternatively, let’s suppose McCain manages to carry New Hampshire – a Kerry state in 2004, but one that has given McCain key primary victories in 2000 and 2008. In this case, if McCain also wins Nevada, and Obama wins Colorado (while our other assumptions remain the same) we again end up with the 269-269 result.

If you mix and match states on the map, in fact, you will quickly see that it relatively easy to produce a tie in the electoral college. So what happens if one occurs? In two words: a mess.

Under the constitution, the election for president is thrown into the US House of Representatives, while the Senate picks the next vice-president (the Senate’s presiding officer).

The ‘unit rule’

But while the Senate simply requires a majority of its 100 members to select the vice- president, the House must vote by states, with each state delegation having a single vote, and a majority of the states (at least 26 of 50) required to agree on the winner.

Thomas Jefferson: The unit rule was fairer in 1800 than it is today

This is called “the unit rule”. The founding fathers centred the idea on the fact that the nation was a confederation of states rather than a pure democracy of individual voters. Just as the electoral college is state-based, the House selection of the president in the case of deadlock revolves around the states.

The unit rule has been employed twice in US history, in the long-ago elections of 1800, when Thomas Jefferson emerged as president, and 1824, when John Quincy Adams was elected.

Both elections were controversial, but not mainly because of the unit rule. Two centuries ago, the unit rule was less undemocratic since population disparities among the handful of states were smaller, and Americans were much more accepting of elite control and a lack of popular sovereignty.

The United States of 2008 has very different values.

Think about what House selection of a president would mean today. Gargantuan California would have the same single House vote in choosing the new president as sparsely populated Wyoming, even though California has about 70 times its population. The votes of the mega-states of Florida, New York, and Texas could be cancelled out by the tiny populations of Montana, Rhode Island, and South Dakota.

Furthermore, large state delegations could internally deadlock via tie votes. Some large states might be deprived even of their single vote for the presidency. Tens of millions of people could be disenfranchised in this fashion.

Equal pigs

Meanwhile, all the small states with single House members will certainly be counted. The smaller the House delegation, the more likely the state’s House members will be able to reach agreement or at least finish their tally. All pigs would be equal, but in this odd Orwellian case, the tiny pigs would be more equal than the huge ones.

How could a president elected in this fashion govern effectively?

The turmoil would be an international embarrassment, at the very least

If the public reaction to the Supreme Court’s Bush v Gore decision in 2000 was bitter, one can scarcely imagine the outrage that would greet a modern application of the unit rule. By the way, well over 90% of the American people are unaware of this constitutional provision.

So if a 269-to-269 tie occurs, what is the likely outcome?

On the surface, one would think Barack Obama would be likely to capture the Presidency – and that would be my early bet. Already, Democrats control a majority of 27 states’ House delegations, and the party is expected to pick up additional seats this November – perhaps pushing a couple of other state delegations their way.

But it may not be so straightforward.

The new Congress would take up the matter quickly in early January, but would have to produce a result by Inauguration Day (20 January).

Suppose some large state delegations reach an impasse? Suppose some of the more conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats decide to break with their party and vote the way their districts or states did, presumably for John McCain?

The turmoil would be an international embarrassment, at the very least. If a stalemate results, the constitution provides that the vice-president-elect would become acting president until the gridlock is broken. Presumably, that would be Joe Biden since Democrats are expected to have a comfortable majority in the new Senate.

However, what if the Senate gets tied up in parliamentary knots? It’s been known to happen.

Then America is likely to get its first female President, at least until the deadlock is broken. No, she won’t be named Hillary Clinton, nor will the acting chief be Sarah Palin. Next-in-line will be the Speaker of the House, Democrat Nancy Pelosi.

Professor Larry J Sabato is director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics and the author of A More Perfect Constitution.

Obama, McCain Share Iraq “Strategy”

Matthew B. Stannard
San Francisco Chronicle
September 22, 2008

A year ago, the Iraq war was a sure bet to dominate the 2008 presidential campaign.

Gen. David Petraeus, admitting frustration at the war’s slow progress, predicted that the size of the U.S. force in Iraq would remain largely unchanged for the foreseeable future. American troops were dying at a rate of two or three a day. And one-third of voters said in a Gallup poll that Iraq would be the determining issue in who they’d vote for in November.

Against that backdrop, the two future presidential nominees couldn’t have been further apart. Sen. Barack Obama was calling for an immediate troop withdrawal; Sen. John McCain was warning that a date for withdrawal would be “a date for surrender.”

What a difference a year makes.

Today, Iraq is quieter, a turn that most experts attribute to the increase in troop strength and a renunciation of violence by U.S.-paid Sunni militias and rogue Shiite groups. Just eight American troops were killed in action in Iraq in July, the lowest level since the war began, and just 12 were killed in August.

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