News that make you go GRRR!

Almost three times the amount given to McCain

While some sunlight has been shed on the hefty sums shoveled into congressional campaign coffers in an effort to influence the Democrats’ massive healthcare bill, little attention has been focused on the far larger sums received by President Barack Obama while he was a candidate in 2008.

A new figure, based on an exclusive analysis created for Raw Story by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that President Obama received a staggering $20,175,303 from the healthcare industry during the 2008 election cycle, nearly three times the amount of his presidential rival John McCain. McCain took in $7,758,289, the Center found.

The new figure, obtained by Raw Story through an independent custom research request performed by the Center for Responsive Politics — a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics — is the most comprehensive breakdown yet available of healthcare industry contributions to Obama during the 2008 election cycle.

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SOURCE: http://rawstory.com/2010/01/obama-received-20-million-healthcare-industry-money-2008/

Washington (CNN) — One hundred and fifty new full-body scanning machines are set to be placed in airports across the United States as federal authorities work to close security loopholes exposed by the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S.-bound airliner.

The Transportation Security Administration ordered the scanners before the bombing attempt for up to $170,000 apiece. Plans are also in place to purchase an additional 300 units by 2012, TSA officials said.

Forty body scanners are currently in use at 19 U.S. airports. Use of the technology — considered overly invasive by critics — is optional, according to the TSA Web site. Passengers who opt out of the screening receive an alternate form of checking, which includes a pat-down procedure.

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December 31, 2009 1:05 p.m. EST

SOURCE: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/12/31/airport.body.scanners/index.html

There is an old saying, “when in doubt follow the money.” These days investors have lots of doubt about pretty much everything (if not so much money). And with data from the government increasingly bearing the Quality Control stamp of approval of the Beijing Communist Party, there is much doubt in store courtesy of an administration which will stop at nothing in its competition with China as to who can blow the biggest asset bubble the fastest, data integrity be damned. Undoubtedly, of all government released data, the most important is, and continues to be, anything relating to unemployment. This is precisely where the government’s propaganda armada is focused. Yet in matters of (un)employment, the ultimate authority is, luckily, the Treasury, and not the Fed. “Luckily,” because when it comes to making money “difficult to follow” Tim Geithner’s office still has much to learn. Which is why when we looked at the Daily Treasury Statement data we were very surprised: because it indicates that the government could be underrepresenting employment data by up to 32%!

The suddenly very prominent topic of Unemployment Insurance, whether it pertains to Initial Claims or to Emergency Unemployment, has one very useful characteristic: it is based on “money”, specifically money outflows from the US treasury which goes to fund the weekly “paychecks” of those that have not been in the workforce for well over a year. And as pointed out earlier, money can be followed. The US Treasury presents a daily in and outflow of all money sources in the Daily Treasury Statement prepared by the Financial Management Service. And in the plethora of data presented here, probably the most relevant and useful data series is the Withdrawals quantified in the form of Unemployment Insurance Benefits.

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Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/01/2010 09:38 -0500

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/government-misrepresenting-unemployment-32

Who says Al Qaeda takes credit for a bombing? Rita Katz. Who gets us bin Laden tapes? Rita Katz. Who gets us pretty much all information telling us Muslims are bad? Rita Katz? Rita KatzRita is the Director of Site Intelligence, primary source for intelligence used by news services, Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA. What is her qualification? She served in the Israeli Defense Force. She has a college degree and most investigative journalists believe the Mossad “helps” her with her information. We find no evidence of any qualification whatsoever of any kind. A bartender has more intelligence gathering experience.
Nobody verifies her claims. SITE says Al Qaeda did it, it hits the papers. SITE says Israel didn’t do it, that hits the papers too. What does SITE really do? They check the internet for “information,” almost invariably information that Israel wants reported and it is sold as news, seen on American TV, reported in our papers and passed around the internet almost as though it were actually true. Amazing.
Do we know if the information reported comes from a teenager in Seattle or a terror cell in Jakarta? No, of course not, we don’t have a clue. Can you imagine buying information on Islamic terrorism from an Israeli whose father was executed as a spy by Arabs?

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By Gordon Duff and Brian Jobert

SOURCE: http://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/is-israel-controlling-phony-terror-news/

Citing Justice Department missteps, a judge has dismissed all charges against the Blackwater guards accused in the killing of civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the AP is reporting.

From the AP:

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina said Thursday the Justice Department overstepped its bounds and wrongly used evidence it was not allowed to see. He said the government’s explanations have been contradictory, unbelievable and not credible.

In the September 2007 Nisour Square incident, 17 Iraqi civilians were killed by Blackwater guards. They have said they were fired on.

Indictments charging the five former Blackwater guards with manslaughter were unsealed one year ago this month.

While Nisour Square contributed to Blackwater falling out of favor with the State Department in Iraq, it is now working Pentagon contracts in Afghanistan.

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Justin Elliott December 31, 2009, 3:43PM

SOURCE: http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/ap_all_charges_dismissed_against_blackwater_guards.php

There is no “war” against terrorism. What George W. Bush launched and Barack Obama insists on perpetuating does not qualify.

There is no “war” against terrorism. What George W. Bush launched and Barack Obama insists on perpetuating does not qualify. Not if by war one means doing the obvious and checking a highly suspicious air traveler’s underwear to see if explosives have been sewn in. If Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had put the stuff in his shoes we would have had him because that was tried before, but our government was too preoccupied with fighting unnecessary conventional wars and developing anti-missile defense systems to anticipate such a primitive delivery system.

The explosives-laden underwear–worn by an airline passenger who had previously been flagged as a potentially dangerous fanatic, and who had paid cash for his ticket and had no checked luggage–was the terrorist’s weapon of choice, one that could have blown a hole in the side of Northwest Airlines’ Detroit-bound Flight 253 on Christmas Day, killing hundreds of innocents. But it is not a weapon to be effectively countered with the deployment of hundreds of thousands of American combat troops. Nor can it be stopped by the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of planes, subs and missiles in our arsenal of Cold War-era weapons, part of an annual defense budget that is higher in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any time in the past half-century.

In response to the 9/11 hijackers, armed with artillery that cost a couple hundred dollars at most, we threw money and, more important, attention at conventional military responses while neglecting the difficult police work and the intelligence evaluation and civilian-focused technology necessary to thwart homeland attacks. Yes, there are evildoers out there that mean us harm, as President Bush declaimed. But they are often the products of the best of Western education who, as examples ranging from the lead 9/11 hijackers–the Hamburg group–to the elite University College London-educated engineer in the latest incident demonstrate, move more easily in urbane Western societies than in Afghan villages.

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by Robert Scheer December 31, 2009.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/144880/the_global_war_on_stealth_underwear

You know, Chief, this nude bomb might solve a lot of problems. For one thing, flashers…. And there’d be no more trouble with concealed weapons. I mean, if everyone were nude, there’d be no place to hide a gun or knife. Well, there is a place, but it could be painful.

Maxwell Smart, the redoubtable Agent 86, finding the upside to KAOS’s terrorist threat to destroy the world’s clothing with its dreaded Nude Bomb.*

In an utterly predictable response to an unsuccessful attempt by a would-be Jihadist to emasculate himself in mid-air by detonating a small explosive charge (a very small one, of course), the Regime is moving, slowly but inexorably, in the direction of requiring airline passengers to strip nude.

There is plentiful evidence to suggest that the same Regime acted as an accomplice – most likely a passive one – in that same failed bombing attempt. Call it a delayed-action nude bomb: One Nigerian nutcase conceals a firecracker in his wedding tackle, and before long everybody will have to strip nude in order to fly.

Granted, the nudity would be “virtual,” temporary, and limited in its exposure. Passengers would be violated one at a time by the same thoughtful people who have made a career out of rifling through other people’s dirty underwear.

Airport security screeners have “got to have some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren’t easy to get at,” insists former Homeland Security Commissar Michael Chertoff. “It’s either pat-downs or imaging.”

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by William Norman Grigg

http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w123.html

During the first nine years of the new millennium we have been witness to a rapid erosion of freedom. Our basic liberties have been systematically denigrated and diluted by a vast expansion of coordinated global tyranny.

The decade is not over yet, there is still another year to go, however, given that the mainstream media is obsessively compiling it’s own decade lists, we felt it necessary to draw up our own to highlight the major events that have shaped the world we now live in and the future we face.

It is important to stress the fact that while we have indeed experienced a decade of tyranny, we have also seen a mass awakening, an expansion of knowledge and an exponential increase in opposition to the agenda we have come to know as the new world order.

Here in chronological order, follow’s Prisonplanet.com’s defining moments of the decade.

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Alex Jones, Steve Watson and Paul Watson Tuesday, Dec 29, 2009

SOURCE: http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-decade-of-tyranny.html

In its recent look back on the first ten years of the century, Time Magazine proclaimed the period to be “the decade from hell.” The editors made their case based on what they saw as the signature events of the last ten years, notably the ravages of terrorism, failed wars, and a global financial crisis. Taken together, these factors produced an era that Time is convinced will be remembered as one of the low points in our history.

As the media hates to dwell on the negative, the commentary was rife with notes of optimism about pending recovery. It could hardly be accidental that in the very next issue, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was named “Man of the Year” for his supposedly Herculean efforts to keep the economy afloat as we departed the Naughty Aughties. Although Time takes pains that to point out that the “Person of the Year” honor reflects impact rather than adulation, its profile of the Chairman was triumphant.

Even if you believe the “survived the worst/turned the corner” narrative offered by Time, it still should strike anyone as ironic that Chairman Bernanke, a chief architect of the economic problems that surfaced in 2007, should be held in such high esteem.

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Peter Schiff Dec 31, 2009

SOURCE: http://www.321gold.com/editorials/schiff/schiff123109.html

Kingston, NY, 29 December 2009 – For months, on radio, TV and in alerts to Trends Journal® subscribers, Gerald Celente, Director of The Trends Research Institute, forecast that terrorist attacks were imminent, and that in 2010 they would intensify within US borders and abroad.

In an on-air 13 November interview with the Governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, Celente said “we are looking for terror strikes to become very probable in 2010.” Singling out the barely reported Saudi/Yemen hostilities and citing the US-instigated massive attacks by the Pakistani military in the Swat Valley and South Wazirstan, Celente warned that the stage had been set for another round of terrorist activity.
http://enews.trendsresearch.com/m/656GdUADoKZhtwZo
FX3eYAV7xTwnIl3_vzH8nUA2ILlMjBqzRw

“The years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have intensified anti-American and anti-NATO hatred,” said Celente, “creating legions bent on seeking revenge. And now with America aggressively spreading its War on Terror into Pakistan, we see a strong possibility of the animosity metastasizing into far-flung strikes, potentially of 9/11 magnitude.”

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By Gerald Celente 12-29-9

SOURCE: http://www.rense.com/general89/celent.htm