(Security is Number One...)
liminal perspectives on consensus reality...,
By CNu at September 17, 2008 0 comments
Labels: History's Mysteries
In video footage of the speech, she is seen saying: “As I was mayor and Pastor Muthee was here and he was praying over me, and you know how he speaks and he’s so bold. And he was praying “Lord make a way, Lord make a way.”- Full monty at timeonline blog - Palin linked electoral success to prayer of Kenyan witchhunter. Apparently, Bishop Muthee vetted Palin to approximately the same extent as the McCain campaign did.
“And I’m thinking, this guy’s really bold, he doesn’t even know what I’m going to do, he doesn’t know what my plans are. And he’s praying not “oh Lord if it be your will may she become governor,” no, he just prayed for it. He said “Lord make a way and let her do this next step. And that’s exactly what happened.”
McCain's campaign has sent at least one dozen researchers and lawyers to Alaska to pore over Palin's background, ready to respond to questions about her tenure as governor and mayor of Wasilla, a small town outside Anchorage. Griffin has been leading the team in Alaska, which includes operatives of the Republican National Committee.Of course now the McCain campaign is working feverishly to rectify or suppress the continuous hemorrhaging of idiosyncratic details about Paling, her background, beliefs, family, politics, etc...,
Republicans are rebutting what they describe as smears against Palin. Last week, McCain's campaign formed a "truth squad," which includes current and former GOP politicians who agree to speak with reporters. Heading up the effort from Arlington, Va., are Mark Paoletta and O'Callaghan, both Republican lawyers, and Brian Jones, a former communications director for McCain.
By CNu at September 17, 2008 0 comments
Labels: Ass Clownery , reality casualties
Any other day, Wall Street would have cheered a 5.4% drop in oil prices. That decline for crude futures, however, was accompanied by a nearly 5% tumble for the Standard & Poor's 500 index on Sept. 15. Stocks—as was made painfully clear to investors—are no longer trading inversely with oil prices.If lower oil prices are here to stay, will consumers return to old patterns of consuming more petroleum products? Many analysts think not. "The demand destruction is irreversible," says Schork. "It's a situation of once bitten, twice shy. Prices may be down for now, but consumers know they could eventually move high again."
Analysts say that investors, who had been pouring funds into commodities as an alternative to creaky stock markets, are now pulling out of the market. The withdrawal reflects a fear that the economic picture will remain bleak, causing reduced demand in both developed and developing countries. The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil slid $5.47, to settle at $95.71 on the New York Mercantile Exchange (CME). It was the first settlement below $100 per barrel in six months. "A weak economy and financial turmoil mean lower demand; that means lower [oil] prices," says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance and energy markets at the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston.
By CNu at September 17, 2008 0 comments
By CNu at September 17, 2008 0 comments
Labels: Great Filters , The Great Game
By CNu at September 16, 2008 0 comments
Labels: Ass Clownery , helplessness
Americans are justified to be worried, says Nouriel Roubini, of NYU's Stern School and RGE Monitor, who notes there is already a "slow-motion run on retail banks" occurring nationwide.There is no systemic approach to dealing with this problem. Plugging holes one after another and no end in sight.
That "run" could accelerate as people realize the FDIC fund has about $50 billion to "insure" about $1 trillion in assets at the nation's financial institutions, says Roubini. "They're going to run out of money" unless Congress acts soon to recapitalize the FDIC.
In addition, the recent spike in number of banks on the FDIC's "troubled list" is only through June, meaning even that inflated number understates the problem.
The intent here isn't to add to people's anxieties, but Roubini is one of the few market watchers to correctly predict the severity of this ongoing credit crisis. If nothing else, he says people with accounts exceeding $100,000 in value should spread their money - and the risk - among different firms.
By CNu at September 16, 2008 0 comments
Labels: truth
The big risk is that foreign holders of Treasuries will no longer accept low interest rates to help fund U.S. debt spending, says Roubini, noting countries like China, Russia and oil-producing nations in the Middle East have becoming increasingly important holders of Treasuries. Should they demand higher rates to hold U.S. debt or, worse, dump their holdings, it could have profound ramifications on the U.S. economy and the value of the dollar.Roubini further notes the Federal Reserve has put its balance sheet -- and independence -- at risk via its intimate involvement in thus-far failed attempts to stem the crisis.The demise of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns this year has investors contemplating the long-term outlook for other once-venerable institutions, including Dow members Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America. But there's an even bigger financial institution with greater debt and an increasing level of bad loans on its books: The U.S. government.
It's tempting to dismiss the notion of a "run" on the U.S. government as unthinkable and some bears have been warning for years, even decades, about such a worst-case scenario. But after the events of this weekend, much less the past six months, it's clear that (almost) anything is possible and no scenario too "outrageous" to seriously contemplate.
By CNu at September 16, 2008 1 comments
Labels: establishment , hegemony , helplessness , The Hardline
By CNu at September 16, 2008 0 comments
Labels: reality casualties , truth
By CNu at September 15, 2008 0 comments
Labels: Ass Clownery
In Denver two weeks ago, Mr. Obama said, "If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from." That's what he's trying to do, only the object of his painting is Sarah Palin, not John McCain.In large measure, like Bill O'Reilly, Rove is pressed to this not only because he's on Rupert Murdoch's payroll, but also because Murdoch, Ailes, and others understand just how pernicious and uncontrollable the populist daemon that Paling embodies could turn out to be. In my time as an observer of political affairs, this is an unprecedented closing of establishment ranks around the objective of maintaining governance continuity in the face of a very serious threat.
In Mrs. Palin, Mr. Obama faces a political phenomenon who has altered the election's dynamics. Americans have rarely seen someone who immediately connects with large numbers of voters at such a visceral level.
WITH all due deference to lipstick, let’s advance the story. A week ago the question was: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The question today: What kind of president would Sarah Palin be?Thanks again to Nana for bringing the Rich article up in the comments. That was EXACTLY the frosting I was looking for as I puttered about the kitchen this morning trying to assemble a subrealist cake.
It’s an urgent matter, because if we’ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election.
No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory,” whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.
The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. You can almost see them smacking their lips in anticipation, whether they’re wearing lipstick or not.
This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin’s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with “a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,” she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, “run our factories” and “fight our wars” and are “always proud” of their country. As opposed to those lazy, shiftless, unproud Americans — she didn’t have to name names — who are none of the above.
There were several creepy subtexts at work here. The first was the choice of Truman. Most 20th-century vice presidents and presidents in both parties hailed from small towns, but she just happened to alight on a Democrat who ascended to the presidency when an ailing president died in office. Just as striking was the unnamed writer she quoted. He was identified by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal as the now largely forgotten but once powerful right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler.
Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, misrepresented Pegler’s too. He decreed America was “done for” after Truman won a full term in 1948. For his part, Truman regarded the columnist as a “guttersnipe,” and with good reason. Pegler was a rabid Joe McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (“geese,” he called them) were all likely Communists.
Surely Palin knows no more about Pegler than she does about the Bush doctrine. But the people around her do, and they will be shaping a Palin presidency. That they would inject not just Pegler’s words but spirit into their candidate’s speech shows where they’re coming from. Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, said that the Palin-sparked convention created “a whole new Republican Party,” but what it actually did was exhume an old one from its crypt.
The specifics have changed in our new century, but the vitriolic animus of right-wing populism preached by Pegler and McCarthy and revived by the 1990s culture wars remains the same. The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay “cosmopolitan” urbanites (as the sometime cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani has it) who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.
The racial component to this brand of politics was undisguised in St. Paul. Americans saw a virtually all-white audience yuk it up when Giuliani ridiculed Barack Obama’s “only in America” success as an affirmative-action fairy tale — and when he and Palin mocked Obama’s history as a community organizer in Chicago. Neither party has had so few black delegates (1.5 percent) in the 40 years since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies started keeping a record.
But race is just one manifestation of the emotion that defined the Palin rollout. That dominant emotion is fear — an abject fear of change. Fear of a demographical revolution that will put whites in the American minority by 2042. Fear of the technological revolution and globalization that have gutted those small towns and factories Palin apotheosized.
By CNu at September 15, 2008 0 comments
Labels: alarm , elite , establishment
Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.
Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.
But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.
By CNu at September 15, 2008 0 comments
Some provinces oppose Morales' push to empower the indigenous majority [AFP] Morales has offered no detailed evidence of Philip Goldberg's alleged conspiracy with the opposition, but has accused Goldberg of egging on anti-Morales forces through meetings with governors who have publicly called for the president to be removed.and venezuelanalysis.com elaborates in-depth - Magisterial Counter-Attack of the new Latin-American Political Class in Venezuela and Bolivia
But Goldberg denied the charge and called the decision to expel him a big mistake on Sunday in his first public comments on the matter.
"I would like to say that all the accusations made against me, against the embassy and against my nation are completely false and unjustified," he told reporters in La Paz as he prepared to leave.
The gravest challenge to Morales' nearly three years as Bolivia's first indigenous president stems from his struggle with the four eastern lowland provinces where the country's natural gas riches are concentrated and where his government has in effect lost control.
The provinces are seeking greater autonomy from Morales' leftist government and are insisting he cancel a December 7 referendum on a new constitution that would help him centralise power, run for a second consecutive term and transfer fallow terrain to landless peasants.
Morales says the new charter is needed to empower Bolivia's indigenous majority.
By CNu at September 15, 2008 0 comments
Labels: The Great Game
By CNu at September 15, 2008 0 comments
Labels: elite , establishment , ethics , theoconservatism
St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where, as one protester told me by phone, “people have been pepper-gassed, thrown on the ground by police who had drawn their weapons, had their documents seized and their tattoos photographed before being taken away to jail.” It is a future where illegal house raids are carried out. It is a future where vans containing heavily armed paramilitary units circle and film protesters. It is a future where, as the protester said, “people have been pulled from cars because their license plates were on a database and handcuffed, thrown in the back of a squad car and then watched as their vehicles were ransacked and their personal possessions from computers to literature seized.” It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.
The rise of the corporate state means the rise of the surveillance state. The Janus-like face of America swings from packaged and canned spectacles, from nationalist slogans, from seas of flags and Christian crosses, from professions of faith and patriotism, to widespread surveillance, illegal mass detentions, informants, provocateurs and crude acts of repression and violence. We barrel toward a world filled with stupendous lies and blood.
By CNu at September 15, 2008 0 comments
Labels: elite , establishment , ethics , The Hardline
By CNu at September 14, 2008 0 comments
Labels: elite , establishment , helplessness , reality casualties
Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.Paling is a reformer. Not a typical Washington spend, corrupt, feather your own nest politician. Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal. You can take THAT to the bank.....,
But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.
Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.
By CNu at September 14, 2008 0 comments
Labels: Ass Clownery
Our children require a great deal of love and attention from us, and often we feel the demands of church and ministry are overwhelming.Through observations made in over 22 years of children’s ministry, my wife and I have found that when young children act up in public, it is usually because they are experiencing a lack of love and attention in the home. PKs and their parents have experienced these problems since Bible times. Read between the lines when studying the accounts of Absalom and David (2 Samuel 18:33), or Hophni and Phinehas and their dad, Eli the priest (1 Samuel 2:12–34). Think about the lack of child raising that brought about such tragedies. We have all seen the fallout in our day: The pastor whose grown daughter calls every weekend in a drunken stupor; the district official who, unable to sleep, goes out to a lonely field late at night and cries out to God for the life of his drug-dealing child.
By CNu at September 14, 2008 0 comments
Labels: theoconservatism
The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively that Sarah's oldest son, Track, was addicted to the power drug OxyContin for nearly the past two years, snorting it, eating it, smoking it and even injecting it. And as Track, 19, heads to Iraq as part of the U.S. armed forces, Sarah and her husband Todd were powerless to stop his wild antics, detailed in the new issue of The ENQUIRER, which goes on sale today.When will this ferocious lambasting end? Is there no basic decency remaining in the zero-sum theatrics of American politics? What next, indecent scrutiny and reckless eyeballing of John McCain's physical limitations?
THE ENQUIRER also has exclusive details about Track's use of other drugs, including cocaine, and his involvement in a notorious local vandalism incident.
“I’ve partied with him (Track) for years,” a source disclosed. “I’ve seen him snort cocaine, snort and smoke OxyContin, drink booze and smoke weed.”
The source also divulged the girls would do anything for Track and he’d use his local celebrity status to manipulate other guys “to get them to steal things he wanted.”
“He finally did what a lot of troubled kids here do,” the source divulged. “You join the military.”
And as Gov. Palin has billed the state of Alaska for various expenses related to her children, as reported by The Washington Post, The ENQUIRER's investigation reveals that she was so incensed by 17-year-old Bristol's pregnancy that she banished her daughter from the house.
Another family friend revealed pre-prego Bristol was as much of a hard partier as Track was.
“Bristol was a huge stoner and drinker. I’ve seen her smoke pot and get drunk and make out with so many guys. All the guys would brag that the just made out with Bristol.”
By CNu at September 14, 2008 2 comments
Labels: Ass Clownery
nakedcapitalism | “Jury Instructions & Charges” (PDF) [Judge Juan Merchan, New York State Unified Court System ]. Merchan’s instruct...