August 30, 2008

Raid on RNC Activist Convergence Center

according to the latest RNC Emergency Dispatch, the welcome mat was rolled out for our friends as they were just sitting down to dinner and a movie. some people have no manners... and should never be spoken to.





h/t - skinnychef for the blip
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August 25, 2008

Freedom is Golden

Central Planning is sold to a hopeful people as a way to solve societal problems, to right wrongs, and bring about perfect justice and equality. Central Planning promises you everything you are entitled to. As a bonus, goods and services produced by others are added to the list of commodities that everyone has a "right" to. Suddenly everyone is entitled to healthcare, housing, education, food, et cetera. It might sound nice that the state will magically provide all these wonderful things, but these rosy promises mask a dehumanizing, ugly reality. The other side of these entitlements is that now the doctor, the builder, the teacher, the farmer are slaves to the all-powerful state. No longer do they serve patients, students, or customers. They work in complete obedience to the state, their only customer.

Central planning will tell you that you are entitled to many things. Liberty tells you that you are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; to whatever you earn, and nothing that you don't. While it may seem harsh to some, we must look to basic economic truths and to history to see which model is cruel and which model is kind.

The truth is that central planning cannot provide for economic success like freedom can. Central planning makes promises it cannot possibly keep. We live in a world of unlimited wants and limited resources. If you put a massive and powerful government in charge of distributing those resources, it is not a surprise that government and those in bed with government are first in line for those resources. The poor and the middle class – the most hopeful and trusting – are hurt the most, as the state always underestimates their needs and overestimates their ability to pay taxes and absorb inflation.


the rest
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August 18, 2008

8/18/2008: it's the End of the World...

as we know it, until after the conventions, anyway.







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August 14, 2008

Facebook: Making Slavery Socially Acceptable

I'm surprised that myspace (read: Rupert Murdoch) didn't beat them to it.

August 14, 2008 (New York, NY) – ServiceNation, a diverse new coalition of more than 100 organizations dedicated to expanding voluntary community and national service opportunities, today announced that it has selected Facebook as its lead social media partner.

The partnership with Facebook will support ServiceNation’s effort to build a national, grassroots movement of Americans who volunteer, share service experiences, and build community around the idea that citizen service can help transform our democracy. ServiceNation aims to elevate the ideal of voluntary service as a core element of citizenship, and the coalition is targeting specific social problems with proven service strategies (http://www.servicenation.org).

Facebook will support ServiceNation and the upcoming ServiceNation Summit with a number of key resources, including technical expertise and advertising. Facebook will help ServiceNation build its presence on Facebook, create awareness and community through the use of Facebook’s tools, and engage Facebook users in a number of critical ServiceNation campaign initiatives.

“Facebook is already a place where people are acting on their interests and ideals, connecting with each other and sharing information that can lead to meaningful change,” said Elliot Schrage, Vice President, Global Communications and Public Policy, Facebook. “Through this partnership with ServiceNation we can be part of an historic effort to inspire Americans to act together to get more directly involved in and connected to their real-life communities.”

“Facebook has itself made history by helping millions across the world to come together by connecting and communicating in an easy to use, state-of-the-art online environment,” said Michael Brown, CEO of City Year, one of four organizations (along with Be the Change, Inc., Civic Enterprises, and Points Of Light Institute) that did the initial work to lead non-profit organizers of the ServiceNation coalition together. “Using Facebook’s highly-regarded organizing tools, we hope to channel the idealism and energy of our citizens into real-world action that can promote the ideal of voluntary service.”

The ServiceNation campaign will kick-off with a September 11th Presidential Candidates Forum on citizenship and service, featuring Sen. John McCain (Sen. Obama has also been invited) and moderated by TIME Magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengel. The second day of the ServiceNation Summit will include distinguished leaders from American business, government, and leading non-profit institutions including New York Governor David Paterson, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Caroline Kennedy, Alma Powell of America’s Promise Alliance, Vartan Gregorian of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Bill Novelli, CEO of AARP, and Laysha Ward, President, Community Relations and Target Foundation.

The Summit is convened and underwritten by a grant from Carnegie Corporation, and presented by TIME, AARP and Target. The keynote address will be delivered by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who earlier this year became the first governor to create a cabinet post dedicated to service and volunteering.

The ultimate vision of ServiceNation is an America in which, by 2020, 100 million citizens will volunteer time in schools, workplaces, and faith-based and community institutions each and every year (up from 61 million today), and that increasing numbers of Americans annually will commit a year of their lives to national service.

To that end, the Summit will endorse a Declaration of Service that all Americans will be able to sign—in person or online—to declare their support for the idea that citizen service can strengthen our communities, unite and engage Americans in shared sacrifice, and help build a better future. And two weeks after the Summit, on Sept. 27, ServiceNation will stage a national Day of Action where tens of thousands of Americans will gather at hundreds of events across the country to celebrate the power and potential of citizen service. ServiceNation will use Facebook as a key tool to organize and drive both these initiatives.

ServiceNation’s bipartisan Summit Leadership Council includes mayors, governors, former senators and leaders from every sector of American society (full list is available at http://tinyurl.com/617vju). Major supporters of ServiceNation, in addition to AARP, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Target, and TIME, include the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, The Home Depot Foundation, Bank of America, Case Foundation, Charina Endowment Fund, and James J. Jensen, the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, and Goldman Sachs.


thanks to FTL for the head up, and to blog of bile for making the connection available.

pound it up sideways, Faceplant. have fun with that lawsuit.
Facebook and its advertising partners are facing a federal class action lawsuit targeting its Beacon program launched last fall, which alleges that Facebook violated federal wiretap law when it began monitoring and publishing what Facebook users were doing on sites like Blockbuster.com and Zappos.com.

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August 7, 2008

Has Suskind been "had"?

well, according to more reliable sources than those that are flacks of the Bush Crime Family, that certainly is the appearance from the latest revelation in the corruption continuum. since when does Cheney entrust the CIA, of which he has been actively trying to dismantle and/or discredit from day one, with such a damning task of fabricating documents, when he has created a specific arm of the bureaucracy for such "Special Plans"?

Philip Giraldi notes just that, for those who refrain from following the leader...
My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith’s office specialized in such activity.


oh, what won't they do in the name of career advancement:
KWIATKOWSKI: Yes, John’s (ph) story is interesting, just a low-level guy like me, a civil servant, GS-14 I think it was, also an Air Force reservist. He is actually the only trained intelligence person, in my view trained being military intelligence trained person, who worked in OSP, Office of Special Plans. He was on loan to Bill Luti in the year of 2001-2002. His time of going back to his own organization, which was the Defense Intelligence Agency, he was basically on a career enhancement program. They wanted him back. They offered him two jobs. One was in the basement of the Pentagon in J2, and that’s our intelligence arm down there, and the other was back at Bolling Air Force Base, which is DIA headquarters.
Neither one of those jobs would have had him working on Iraq, and Iraq was heating up. So, he asked Bill Luti if Luti would step in and find a place for him. And Luti did that and, as far as I know to this day, John Trigilio (ph) still works in Near East-South Asia policy. So, he really, during the time that OSP was really, really working hard, in the fall of 2002 and spring 2003, Trigilio (ph) was a trained intelligence person working for Bill Luti in whatever way that he could. And I had numerous conversations with John (ph) in the hallway, I think almost habitually, after one of the president’s speeches, or the vice president’s speeches, where I heard crazy things coming out of the president’s mouth about capabilities that Saddam purportedly had.
And I remember talking to John (ph) after one of these briefings the day after. I said, ”Who’s feeding?” I said, ”You guys ought to be worried.” I said, ”Who’s feeding the president this information, because you should be concerned. This is not intelligence.” And he argued with me for a while, and finally, to end the argument, or conversation, as you’d have it, he said, ”Look, Karen.” He said, ”We have sources that you don’t have access to.” And quite frankly, when he told me that in the fall of 2002, I believe him. He probably does. He has better sources, things that I’m not seeing at the secret level he’s seeing at the top-secret level. That’s fine. But see, the bad thing is, after it all comes out, who were his sources? Well, Curveball, friends of Achmed Chalabi, Achmed Chalabi himself, basically to a man previously proven unreliable, sources that the CIA and DIA had rejected, for the most part. I mean, until pressured to go back and pull these little reports that were known not to be good.


that's ok, just keep whistling that happy little tune while the smiling faces are marching you off into tyranny.

Related:
Office of Special Plans
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
The Lie Factory
Has Suskind been "had"?Share/Save/Bookmark

August 3, 2008

The Bogus Intel Game - Rated: PG

as explained by Philip Giraldi,

Some intel types are beginning to express concerns that the Israelis might do something completely crazy to get the US involved. There are a number of possible “false flag” scenarios in which the Israelis could insert a commando team in the Persian Gulf or use some of their people inside Iraq to stage an incident that they will make to look Iranian, either by employing Iranian weapons or by leaving a communications footprint that points to Tehran’s involvement.




The unstated premise for Morris's rant is the assumption that only Israel can be trusted to have nuclear weapons in the Middle East and that Israel has the right to act preemptively if any other country has the temerity to seek to obtain weapons of its own. While this is a formula that would guarantee Israeli regional supremacy it is a policy that is far from reassuring for Tel Aviv's neighbors, most of whom have been on the receiving end of Israel's conceit that it can strike whenever and wherever it wishes. Being victimized by a paranoid Israeli regime is a virtual guarantee that the country that has been assaulted will seek a "weapon of mass destruction" to deter such attacks, ironically providing less security for the Israelis rather than more.


more lies for more war. who's your messiah now...
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Tropical Lumpy Monster

aside from the 9/11 reference, great video.


posted with vodpod

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