The Priss is Back and Full of Sass
Is this the real reason Prissy hasn't been blogging?
Obama admin. to end use of term 'enemy combatant'
So what are they now? POWT's? (Prisoners of War on Terror?)It's a good thing, because otherwise there are a lot of others who might get swept up by definition of that terminology...
Dearest Readers, How have you been? Prissy sure needed a hiatus after the election...fighting to get President Obama into office tough, but a great success and took a lot out of us here in Ohio. Needed to take time off too allow the corporate owned media to catch up with The Prissy Patriot...Recall this? A Chat With the "D.C. Madame" Deborah Jeane Palfrey Update
Now those who scoffed are saying this: (H/T to WhatReallyHappened)
The Palfrey-Cheney Connection Tags:* ASSASSINATION
Well, lookie, lookie, Roll Call, Politico and Wonkette all served up items yesterday that mentioned the possibility that Dick Cheney used the services of Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s escort service in the 1990s.
Will we hold our new president as accountable as we did Bush?
As Ding-a-Ling Sarah Palin would say "You betcha!" We expect more from him mostly because he has a much higher IQ than Dubya ever dreamed of.
Besides, with the new President being half African American, he can't pretend not to know what oppression really is, unlike the drunken Frat boy.
So much has happened, where shall we begin? By now you all know by way of Seymour Hersh that Dead Eye Dick is all that and more. Prissy told you years ago to put nothing past this bunch. Kind of makes you wonder about the long list of "suicides" such as Debra Jean Palfrey, aka the DC Madame, Dr. Kelly of Great Britain, Mike Connell, the GOP IT guru and his "plane accident"...more on this later.
Deadly Dick the assassin. You heard it here first, Dick would stop at nothing to shut people up...Prissy has seen his kind before- of course, she was their guard in a maximum security prison.
Hot Links
Minnesota Post Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh describes 'executive assassination ring' which reported directly to Cheney But what does Hersh know? Plenty, here's a run down on scoops over the years that he has exposed:
* The My Lai massacre, which Hersh first revealed publicly and which he last night called “the end of innocence about us and war.” * The Pentagon Papers case, which Mondale called the best example of the “government’s potential for vast public deception.” * Henry Kissinger’s secret dealings, mostly relating to the Vietnam War. (Hersh, who has written volumes about Kissinger, said that he will always believe that whereas ordinary people count sheep to fall asleep, Kissinger “has to count burned and maimed Cambodian babies.”)
* The Church Committee investigation of CIA and FBI abuses, in which Mondale played a major role. (He talked about the fact that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover not only spied on Martin Luther King but literally tried to drive him to suicide.) * The Iran Contra scandal. (Hersh said the Reagan administration came to office with a clear goal of finding a way to finance covert actions, such as the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, without appropriations so that Congress wouldn't know about them. Mondale noted that Reagan had signed a law barring further aid to the Contras, then participated in a scheme to keep the aid flowing. Hersh said that two key veterans of Iran-Contra, Dick Cheney and national security official Elliot Abrams, were reunited in the George W. Bush White House and decided that the key lesson from Iran-Contra was that too many people in the administration knew about it.)
* And the Bush-Cheney years. (Said Hersh: “The contempt for Congress in the Bush-Cheney White House was extaordinary.” Said Mondale of his successor, Cheney, and his inner circle: “they ran a government within the government.” Hersh added: “Eight or nine neoconservatives took over our country.” Mondale said that the precedents of abuse of vice presidential power by Cheney would remain "like a loaded pistol that you leave on the dining room table.")
BBC The Bush/Blair years will never end for his victims UK resident freed from Guantanamo Bay
US interrogators told him, "This is the British file and this is the American file," Binyam Mohamed, 30, told the BBC in his first broadcast interview.
He said he wanted to see ex-President George Bush put on trial and, if there were evidence, former UK PM Tony Blair.
The UK says it does not condone torture, but will examine any claims.
The US has dropped all charges against Mr Mohamed.
Yet another "terrorist" case that wouldn't stick...
If you want the best advice and food for thought on the net, read George Washington's Blogspot. Prissy reads him every day. He's one of the best on the net to make sense of the economic disaster.
Let's not forget who started the bailout-and the need for one...
Why Obama Must Fire Geithner and Summers
As Robert Kuttner writes:Geithner has ... come up with the idea of subjecting the largest banks to "stress tests" to determine just how badly damaged their balance sheets are. This has been advertised as government examiners crawling all over bank records, but much of this belated effort will rely on the banks' own risk models--the same risk models that got the banks into this mess.
Come to think of it, where have the examiners been all along? Why wasn't there serious investigation of bank balance sheets all along? Why should stress tests be performed only after disaster has struck (shades of Hurricane Katrina)?
The worst culprit among the feeble regulators is the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose examiners are responsible for assessing the safety and soundness of the holding companies of Wall Street's largest banks. It was high risk speculative activities by holding company affiliates that put the big banks under water.
Who dropped the ball? You may recall that Secretary Geithner, before he assumed his present post, was president of the New York Fed Bank. According to a withering feature piece from Bloomberg, he was asleep at the switch, and far too cozy with the banks. Heckuva job, Timmy.
Prissy concurs with George on this one. Geithner is a horrible pick, unless he's willing to tell us "where the bodies are buried." Is it Rahm Emanuel who is responsible for these awful cabinet picks?
In depth interview with Geithner and Charlie Rose. Hat tip to Justice League Blogspot, another favorite blog... BTW, Prissy heard Geithner say he has worked in public service all of his life. He was president of the Federal Reserve bank, but isn't aware that is not a federal government entity? Oh come now! Charlie Rose show: A conversation with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
A must see if you haven't already. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart blasts self proclaimed money expert Jim Cramer. Cramer is an expert with his own money, not yours or mine...Comedian calls financial "reporter" on his bullshit
Powerful video of today's reality facing America. Posted two years ago...Note at this video's end: The Prissy Patriot does not advocate the legalization of all drugs. Our law enforcement professors used to comment that pot legalization would be OK with them-tax it, regulate it and remove the criminal element. As they had yet to be on a domestic violence call where the perpetrator was just smoking pot-alcohol was nearly always the drug involved...
WSJ. Maxine Waters voted against Israel regarding their latest bloodbath in Gaza. Apparently she didn't think shooting fish in a barrel was fair. Is this her punishment? Waters Defends Ties to Bank
Ms. Waters (D., Calif.) said her efforts were intended to aid minority-owned banks overall, not just OneUnited Bank, an institution that received $12 million in federal bailout money.
Reports this week in The Wall Street Journal and New York Times detailed Ms. Waters's efforts to help OneUnited in recent years, in particular last fall, when she sought help from Treasury officials after the bank's capital dried up and it was in danger of failing.
"I have been an outspoken advocate for minority communities and businesses in California and nationally for decades," she said. "These articles only revealed one thing: I am indeed an advocate for minority banks."
Ms. Waters's statement said she asked former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to meet with the National Bankers Association, a group of African-American bankers whose president is the senior counsel of OneUnited.
Mr Sharif was ousted as prime minister in 1999 during a coup by General Pervez Musharraf, who ruled until August 2008.
Tensions between Mr Zardari and Mr Sharif date back to the 1990s, but the two formed a brief partnership in government after parliamentary elections in February 2008.
Mr Sharif's party later left the alliance, complaining of reluctance by Mr Zardari's Pakistan People's Party to reinstate the judges sacked by the last government.
Relations have been further strained in recent weeks by a Supreme Court decision to ban Mr Sharif and his brother Shahbaz from elected office, and President Zardari's decision to put their stronghold in Punjab province under direct rule from Islamabad.
The same Pakistan which retrofitted fighter planes (which we sold them) with nuclear weaponry. Hurray for instability in a country that butts up against Iran,Afghanistan and India- the worlds largest democracy and Pakistan's mortal "enemy."
More on the situation in Pakistan from YahooProtests against Pakistani government turn violent
Sharif denounced the order as illegal and later left the house in a convoy of vehicles packed with chanting, flag-waving supporters, headed for a downtown rally that had already turned violent.
Mobs accompanying the swelling convoy smashed the windows of buses parked along the route. Others torched tires, sending plumes of black smoke into the blue sky over a usually bustling boulevard littered with stones and empty tear gas shells.
And...Washington worries that the crisis will further destabilize the shaky the year-old government and prevent it from being an effective ally in the fight against insurgents in Afghanistan.
Suspected militants attacked a transport terminal in northwestern Pakistan used to supply NATO troops in Afghanistan before dawn on Sunday and torched dozens of containers and military vehicles, police said.
Dubya should have kept Pakistan out of his "War on Terror" as an "ally".
From Pakistan, The News A study conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has cast doubt over Israel’s survival beyond the next 20 years.
The study, which has been made available only to a certain number of individuals, further forecasts the return of all Palestinian refugees to the occupied territories, and the exodus of two million Israeli - who would move to the US in the next fifteen years.
And...
He said CIA, in its report, alludes to the unexpectedly quick fall of the apartheid government in South Africa and recalls the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, suggesting the end to the dream of an ‘Israeli land’ would happen ‘way sooner’ than later.
The study further predicts the return of over one and a half million Israelis to Russia and other parts of Europe, and denotes a decline in Israeli births whereas a rise in the Palestinian population.
Lamb said given the Israeli conduct toward the Palestinians and the Gaza strip in particular, the American public—which has been voicing its protest against Tel Aviv’s measures in the last 25 years—may ‘not take it anymore’.
Professor Juan Cole Did Schumer and Emanuel Sink Freeman?
My interpretation of Chas Freeman's withdrawal from appointment as the chairman of the National Intelligence Council is that it was provoked primarily by Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel. Schumer's call to White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was probably the decisive event, though we don't know what Emanuel's reaction was.
That is, the original charge against Freeman was led by the spy for Israel, Steve Rosen, whose hiring by Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum/ Campus Watch is excellent evidence of what those operations really are. Rosen, when he was a head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's Middle East bureau, handed over classified Pentagon documents to the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, which were given to him by the agent Larry Franklin, a high-level Pentagon employee who reported to Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz.
And...Schumer angered some of his constituents with his defense of the Israeli total war on Gaza's civilian population this winter, and you wonder if his isn't the last AIPAC generation in US politics. I like Schumer and loved the way he stood up to Bush, but he and other admirable people like Mike Bloomberg just have this moral black hole in their souls when it comes to supporting far rightwing Israeli policies (policies that they would unalterably oppose if pursued by the US government).
Freeman gave his own take on the whole affair to NPR. What happened to Freeman is further evidence for the resilience of the Israel lobbies and their enormous power in US politics. The Neoconservatives were roundly defeated on the budget, and even had to swallow George Mitchell as a special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But they still have the power to exclude a Washington Arabist such as Freeman even from an appointive position.
Interesting to note that the two AIPAC spies who bought information from former Defense Department analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, who was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison. Larry gave Rosen and his fellow AIPAC lobbyist friend Weissman info about a number of subjects, including American policy in Iran, terrorism in central Asia, Al Qaeda and the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment in Saudi Arabia, which killed 23 Americans, mainly members of the military.(NYT, 01/06)
WaPo Bailout King AIG Still to Pay Millions In Bonuses
The issue came to a head when Geithner called Liddy and told him the payments were unacceptable and had to be renegotiated, said an administration official who was not authorized to comment on the Geithner conversation.
In a letter to Geithner yesterday, Liddy agreed to restructure some of the payments. But Liddy said he had "grave concerns" about the impact on the firm's ability to retain talented staff "if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury."
Lawyers at both the Treasury Department and AIG have concluded that the firm would risk a lawsuit if it scrapped the retention payments at the AIG Financial Products subsidiary, whose troublesome derivative trading nearly sank AIG. The company promised before the government started bailing out the firm in September that employees would be awarded more than $400 million in retention pay this year and next.
"I do not like these arrangements and find it distasteful and difficult to recommend to you that we must proceed with them," Liddy wrote.
Prissy finds it distasteful and wasteful AIG is still in business. Not happy, once again, with President Obama's pick of Geithner. "No guts Geithner" (while kinda cute) couldn't put the hammer down on these guys if the country's life depended upon it...and the CEO's with their hands out should tell him to put those hands back into their own pockets. No bailouts for bonuses. That is about as ethical as jacking up the credit cards for glorious trips abroad and then declaring bankruptcy.
Yahoo News Barbara Bush leaves hospital after heart surgery
"Nobody ever had better medical treatment than I did this past week and a half," she added.
And she does mean nobody... Allow Prissy to point out it was taxpayer funded healthcare who picked up the tab on ole Babs.
MSNBC The Mess George Bush Left Behind (with complicity of the GOP, Congress and Corporate owned media)MSNBC calling it Obama's "new strategy", Prissy calling it "the truth of the matter."
Over the past month, Obama has reminded the public at every turn that he is facing problems "inherited" from the Bush administration, using increasingly bracing language to describe the challenges his administration is up against. The "deepening economic crisis" that the president described six days after taking office became "a big mess" in remarks this month to graduating police cadets in Columbus, Ohio. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here
"By any measure," he said during a March 4 event calling for government-contracting reform, "my administration has inherited a fiscal disaster."
Obama's more frequent and acid reminders that former president George W. Bush left behind a trillion-dollar budget deficit, a 14-month recession and a broken financial system have come at the same time Republicans have ramped up criticism that the current president's policies are compounding the nation's economic problems.
Bush is accustomed to having minorities and/or women cleaning up after him...
CNN = Certainly NOT News Commentary: Why bin Laden is speaking out CNN Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst and a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington and at New York University's Center on Law and Security. His most recent book is "The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The new 22-minute tape posted Wednesday on a radical Islamist Web site is the first one from Osama bin Laden in nine months. On it, the al Qaeda leader urges Muslims to wage jihad against Israel because of its offensive in Gaza.
U.S. counter-terrorism officials had been expecting that bin Laden would release a tape before the 2008 presidential election just as he had done four years earlier.
On October 29, 2004, he released a videotaped address to the American people in which he said that it was irrelevant whether Americans elected Sen. John Kerry or George W. Bush as president. The key issue, as far as he was concerned, was that the United States needed to change its policies in the Muslim world.
Bin Laden, however, made no comments during the 2008 campaign season, and his recent silence has been puzzling.
However, Peter Bergen using the latest "news" for his Osama book isn't so puzzling...
BBC, you know they are a true ally, just don't ask to whom they are true... 'Bin Laden urges war on Israel' Note key word in bold by PP.
A new audio message purported to be from Osama Bin Laden has urged Muslims to launch a holy war to stop the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip.
The message also said Israel's assault was a desperate attempt to benefit from the last days of President George Bush.
It also accused Arab leaders of colluding with the Jewish state.
The US has dismissed the tape, saying it shows the al-Qaeda leader's isolation, and looks like an attempt to raise money.
And why you should "dismiss" the tape and laugh yourselves silly over his next purported news release...
Flashback from WaPo Feb. 1, 1999 When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing
"Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government." So begins a statement being delivered by Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former Commander-in-chief, U.S. Special Operations Command.
At least the voice sounds amazingly like him.
But it is not Steiner. It is the result of voice "morphing" technology developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
By taking just a 10-minute digital recording of Steiner's voice, scientist George Papcun is able, in near real time, to clone speech patterns and develop an accurate facsimile. Steiner was so impressed, he asked for a copy of the tape
Online Journal Who’s behind Madoff? by Wayne Madsen
As the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it had cut a deal with $50 billion Ponzi scammer Bernard Madoff whereby Madoff will neither admit nor deny fraud claims against him in a suit brought by the SEC. In return Madoff has agreed to pay civil fines and penalties levied by the SEC. The agreement has no bearing on Madoff’s criminal trial.
WMR has learned that in addition to 20 million documents stored by Madoff in a warehouse in Queens that were stored without any indexing system and merely placed in boxes and strewn around the floor are millions of additional documents that were stored by Madoff in a Brooklyn warehouse that was partially flooded. A number of the Madoff documents there were destroyed by water damage.
WMR has also learned that a key element in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was Madoff Energy LLC, formed as a Delaware corporation in February 2007. Other Madoff firms in the energy arena were Madoff Energy Holdings LLC, Madoff Energy III LLC, and Madoff Energy IV LLC. There are links between these now-defunct Madoff energy entities and Texas oil and natural gas industry interests, some close to the Bushes and Dick Cheney.
WMR has also learned that the kid glove treatment given by federal authorities to Madoff, including allowing him to remain in his Upper East Side luxury town home, is because Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was part of a much larger operation, one involving top officials of both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, as well as the notorious Russian-Israeli Mafia.
Top official of the Obama administration? Gee, wonder who that could be...
Don't let this guy become your KKKarl Rove, Mr. President
From The Public Record, Jason Leopold- a great site DOJ Watchdog Probed Yoo/Bybee Rendition Memo; Report May Criticize Opinion
This memo is one of several that the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has scrutinized in a four-year-old investigation into the legal work of Yoo and Bybee, according to legal sources at the DOJ who have seen a still classified report on the work of the OLC. It's unknown what conclusions OPR reached as the draft report has gone through changes since it was completed late last year.
The memo, prepared for then Department of Defense General Counsel William Haynes, was the product of several high-level meetings that took place over the course of several weeks that Yoo and Bybee participated in along with senior Bush administration officials.
The legal opinion was not, legal sources said, the result of a question "asked and answered" but rather the result of Bybee and Yoo acting as advocates for administration policy and providing the legal framework so the White House could carry out its plans.
OPR has probed whether Yoo and Bybee deliberately signed off on the March 13, 2002 memo and purposely misinterpreted long-standing case law simply to give the administration legal cover for extraordinary renditions undertaken before a legal memorandum authorizing the policy was drafted.
More on those released memo's from A Time for Change Bush Memos Released By DOJ Are Outrageous Affront to Constitution
The release of 9 memos written by members of the Bush administration have unleashed a firestorm of criticism because as bad as people expected these memos to be, no one expected that the administration would try to sweep away the Constitution in favor of martial law. According to the New York Times, these memos mean that: * the president could use the nation’s military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids without obtaining search warrants * he president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants * the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally bars the military from domestic law enforcement operations, would pose no obstacle to the use of troops in a domestic fight against terrorism suspects * The memorandum discussed the use of military forces to carry out “raids on terrorist cells” and even seize property of US citizens * any objections based on the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches are swept away * “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.” It added that “the current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.” * judicial precedents approving deadly force in self-defense could be extended to allow for eavesdropping without warrants * Other memorandums said Congress had no right to intervene in the president’s determination of the treatment of detainees, a proposition that has since been invalidated by the Supreme Court.
Justice League Blogspot. Thank you to Bil for explaining the who, what and why on this subject. The Continuation of Obama Administration Addressing the Disposition of Detainees at Gitmo
On March 8, 2006, Karpinski gave an interview to Dateline on the Australian SBS network. When asked who was ultimately responsible for the actions of torture and humiliation depicted in the photographs, Karpinski stated: "you have to go back to the memorandum that was authored by our now-Attorney-General, Alberto Gonzalez, and John Yoo, from out in California, who was with the current administration at the time, and they did a memorandum, authorizing departures from the Geneva Convention."
"The memorandum, which was certainly discussed at length with the Secretary of Defense and the Vice-President, according to sworn statements by people who were there when those conversations took place, that authorized the initial departure [from the Geneva Convention]. And yes, there was a memorandum that was posted at Abu Ghraib prison, that I only became aware of, after I heard of this ongoing investigation out at Abu Ghraib, and it was signed by the Secretary of Defense." "...the signature on the memorandum was over the signature block of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and the ink that was used to sign appeared to be the same ink used for this handwritten note in the margin, "make sure this happens", and it was a list of interrogation techniques that were approved, so he obviously had knowledge of those [interrogation] techniques."
Bottom line: Obama Administration and DOJ have lot to piece together every secret memos and legal opinions on authorization of torture to decipher which detainee was a terrorist and who wasn't. As you can see, Bush authorized the detainees to be torture as the President of the United States but there were many more co-conspirators who were given power to torture the detainees. In order to remove the cancer in this issue and on-going investigation, Obama has to hold each individuals given authority to torture detainees accountable.
Quotes of the Day
The greatest oak was once a little nut who held its ground. ~ Unknown
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal and then leap in the dark to our success. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Headline of New York Herald Tribune, October 27, 1929 Brokers Believe Worst Is Over and Recommend Buying of Real Bargains
Headlines two days later...October 29, 1929 - Stock Market Crashes!
For Tim Geithner: An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.~ Friedrich Engels
(h/t to WMR) Paraphrasing Denis Diderot: Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last banker. (Banker was originally "priest.")
