(It is comforting to know that government is looking after such vitally important issues. Once collectivism is accepted as the political model, it always grows until it controls even the most inconsequential aspects of human activity.)

AP | Yahoo.com

Dismissing complaints from some members that Congress had more pressing matters, a House subcommittee approved legislation Wednesday aimed at forcing college football to switch to a playoff system to determine its national champion.
“We can walk across the street and chew gum at the same time,” said the subcommittee chairman, Illinois Democrat Bobby Rush, one of the bill’s co-sponsors. “We can do a number of things at the same time.”

The legislation, which still faces steep odds, would ban the promotion of a postseason NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision game as a national championship unless it results from a playoff. The measure passed by voice vote in the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s commerce, trade and consumer protection subcommittee, with one audible “no,” from Rep. John Barrow, D-Ga.

“With all due respect, I really think we have more important things to spend our time on,” Barrow said before the vote, although he stressed he didn’t like the current Bowl Championship Series, either.
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Former agency translator called to testify in Ohio election case this Saturday on Turkish infiltration of U.S. government.

Brad Friedman | BradBlog.com

Unless the Dept. of Justice re-invokes their twice-invoked “state secrets privilege” claim in order to once again gag former FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, her attorneys have notified the department by hand-delivered, sworn letter of declaration [PDF] this week, that she intends to give a deposition, open to the media [Updated: see bottom of article for details], in response to a subpoena this Saturday in Washington D.C..

Edmonds has confirmed her intentions to answer any questions asked of her during the sworn proceedings, fully and publicly, during conversations with The BRAD BLOG this week. She notes that her agreement with her former employer, the FBI — who fired her illegally after she filed whistleblower allegations about corruption and foreign infiltration in the linguistics department — includes certain non-disclosure requirements. However, those requirements do not preclude her answering to a legally issued court subpoena.

The subpoena and request for sworn deposition is part of a case now pending before the Ohio Elections Commission in which Ohio’s Republican U.S. Congresswoman Jean Schmidt (R-2nd District) has filed a complaint against her 2008 independent challenger, David Krikorian who Schmidt has charged distributed false statements about her during last year’s campaign.

The resulting testimony, if it indeed occurs this weekend, could be far more explosive than either Schmidt or Krikorian might have ever guessed…

‘Blood Money’

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DemocracyNow.org

Watch Democracy Now Segment online Now

Newly declassified documents reveal that an active member of Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in Washington state was actually an informant for the US military. The man everyone knew as “John Jacob” was in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis. The military’s role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement inside the United States. The Fort Lewis military base denied our request for an interview. But in a statement to Democracy Now, the base’s Public Affairs office publicly acknowledged for the first time that Towery is a military operative. “This could be one of the key revelations of this era,” said Eileen Clancy, who has closely tracked government spying on activist organizations.
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Rolling Stone: The Great American Bubble Machine 1 of 5

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Alex welcomes in-studio Robert M. Bowman, former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for the U.S. Air Force in the Ford and Carter administrations, a former United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel with 101 combat missions, and presidential candidate for the Reform Party in 2000.
http://thepatriots.us/
http://prisonplanet.tv/

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Chris Hedges | TruthDig.com

The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton’s draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

Our economic crisis—despite the corporate media circus around the death of Michael Jackson or Gov. Mark Sanford’s marital infidelity or the outfits of Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest incarnation, Brüno—barrels forward. And this crisis will lead to a period of profound political turmoil and change. Those who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must begin to mobilize quickly or we will lose our last opportunity to save our embattled democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the organs of communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize movements of social change and empower proto-fascist movements such as the Christian right.

American culture—or cultures, for we once had distinct regional cultures—was systematically destroyed in the 20th century by corporations. These corporations used mass communication, as well as an understanding of the human subconscious, to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. Old values of thrift, regional identity that had its own iconography, aesthetic expression and history, diverse immigrant traditions, self-sufficiency, a press that was decentralized to provide citizens with a voice in their communities were all destroyed to create mass, corporate culture.

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10 reasons why Wall Street has absolute power over America’s democracy

Paul Farrell | MarketWatch.com

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Two mind-numbing fast-paced dramas. Two parallel worlds. One real, one fiction, both deadly. Jack Bauer, mythic hero of “24.” Dying from a deadly bio-pathogen leaked from weapons developed by Starkwood, a rogue mercenary army attacking the presidency, hell-bent on taking over America.

The other drama in play: “Hank the Hammer” Paulson, iconic Wall Street hero, a Trojan Horse placed inside Washington by Goldman Sachs as Treasury Secretary in control of America’s $15 trillion economy. Goldman, a modern dynasty with vast financial powers much like those once used by the de’ Medici, Rothschilds and Morgans to control nations.

Both dramas play high-stakes games with financial WMDs that have lethal consequences. Jack compresses thrills, kills and chills into 24 hours. Hank, Goldman and their army of Wall Street mercenaries move with equally blinding speed, heart-pounding action.

Drama? You bet. Six short months ago Hank led an assault on Congress. The scene parallels one in “24:” Sangala War Lord Juma’s brazen attack inside the White House. But no AK-47s necessary. The Hammer assaulted Congress with just a two-and-a-half page memo in hand. Like a crack special-ops warrior, he took down the enemy, demanding $750 billion, absolute control, total secrecy, no accountability and emergency powers to act immediately … warning that inaction was not an option, that collapse of America’s banking system was imminent, would bring down the global monetary system, pushing world’s economies into a “Great Depression II.” Congress surrendered.

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What’s in your wallet? Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean would like to know.

Dean and Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan were speakers at a luncheon at the National Press Club Nov. 5, where both reflected on what went right and wrong with their efforts during the 2008 election cycle.
Dean revealed his party used credit card data to predict voting outcomes. However, Democrats and the media have been highly critical of credit card companies that provide that data.
“We now can do what they can do,” Dean said. “We have your credit card data like they do. They’ve been for years doing something that we, until 2006, weren’t able to do. We can predict with 85 percent accuracy how you’re going to vote based on your credit card data without bothering to see what party you’re in – the Secretary of State’s office.”

Michael Collins | 911blogger.com

“Some say” that no matter who gets elected we’re still going to be in Iraq, the bailout will continue, and there will be no drawdown of the bloated budgets, particularly the military, that feed the defense contractors their daily ration. We’re not getting national health, rather an electronic exchange and so forth down “the middle of the road” of national leadership.

Here’s some news from the election fraud segment of our precipitous decline thanks to greed and avarice, not to mention stupidity, on the part of the ruling elite. Everyone of the problems mentioned could be solved without much cost in a few months. Everybody in power knows that and only a few officials act to serve citizens. They’re rarely rewarded and frequently punished and marginalized for their service.

The Elements of Election Fraud

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An Interview With Mark Crispin MillerCarolyn Baker | GlobalResearch.caShortly before a public lecture presented at Champlain College, I sat down with Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies at New York University, to ask him a number of questions regarding stolen elections-a subject Miller has researched and written about extensively. Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Bev Harris, Steve Rosenfeld, Bob Fitrakis, and Lynne Landes, have provided monumental contributions to the subject of election fraud, each with their own unique styles and methods of targeting the issue. Mark Crispin Miller’s 2005 book Fooled Again, impeccably documents the stealing of the 2004 election, and Loser Take All, a 2008 collection of essays on stolen elections incorporates the research of other investigators of election fraud such as Robert Kennedy, Jr; Bob Fitrakis, and Steve Rosenfeld.Generously, Professor Miller gave me both time and disturbing insights regarding the upcoming election of 2008. 

CB: In progressive circles there are countless issues that attract people, and I’m curious about what drew you to fight for clean, legitimate, democratic elections in the United States as opposed to some other issue.

MCM: What immediately drew my interest was the overwhelmingly obvious fact that the 2004 election was stolen. We already know the 2000 election was stolen because the Supreme Court intervened so flagrantly, but I think the 2004 election was stolen on an even grander scale. What struck me was not just that fact, but no less, the general refusal to admit it which was evident not only throughout the corporate media but on the left as well. Even now I can’t quite get over how the left fell into line and dismissed the evidence as “conspiracy theory” on the basis of very sloppy reporting by very good reporters in progressive circles.

So the immediate reason why I got into it was because of this staggering miscarriage of proper civic procedure and a betrayal of democracy. The more I thought about it, the more I also came to believe that this is the most important issue, precisely because we can make no progress on any other front if we don’t have the right to pick our representatives, and more importantly, reject those who don’t represent our interests. That’s vital, so I often say in my talks that regardless of what your issue is, you’re kidding yourself if you think you can get anywhere when government is able to act with impunity.

CB: So what are the maybe top half-dozen pieces of evidence that the 2004 election was stolen?

MCM: Well primarily, there is the audit of the vote in 18 counties of Ohio that was carried out by Richard Hayes Phillips who published Witness To A Crime which is the result of three years labor by Richard and his researchers who literally scrutinized every single ballot that was cast in 18 Ohio counties. This book is scrupulous, precise, and explicit-fully illustrated and comes with a CD with illustrations of ballots and how they were tampered with.

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Tom Burghardt
Antifascist Calling…
October 7, 2008

Ten months before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved an updated version of the U.S. Army’s secret operational Continuity of Government (COG) plans.

A draft document published by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks entitled, “Army Regulation 500-3, Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources. Army Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program,” dated 19 January 2001, spells out changes in Army doctrine.

Issued by Headquarters, Department of the Army and signed off by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Secretary of the Army, the document is affixed with a warning: “Destruction Notice: Destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document.” The restricted document as published by Wikileaks states:

History. This regulation is a revision of the original regulation that was effective on 10 July 1989. Since that time, no changes have been published to amend the original.

Summary. This regulation on the Army Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program has been revised to update Army COOP policy and extend the requirement for all-hazards COOP planning to all Army organizations. Classified information contained in the 1989 version of this AR has been removed and placed in a classified HQDA Operations Plan (OPLAN).

Applicability. This regulation applies to the Active Army, the U.S. Army Reserve (USAR), and when federalized to the Army National Guard (ARNG). In the event of conflict between this regulation and approved OSD or JCS publications, the provisions of the latter will apply. (”Army Regulation 500-3, Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources. Army Continuity of Operations (COOP) Program,” 19 January 2001, p. 3) [emphasis added]

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October 4th, 2008

Zeitgeist - Addendum , exploring the Federal Reserve System, IMF, World Bank, debt based finance and more, has just been released and made available at Google video, YouTube, and of course the official Zeigeist website. Considering recent economic events it is sure to be watched by millions of outraged citizens worldwide and feared by the elite few.

truthout.org
Wednesday 01 October 2008
by: Robert Schwartz, Labor Notes

An overlooked order by the Labor Board’s lead lawyer this summer dealt a serious blow to the rights of U.S. workers to protest government policies.

    On May Day 2006, hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers walked off their jobs to protest restrictive immigration legislation. Some were fired, and brought complaints to the board. Ronald Meisburg, the National Labor Relations Board general counsel, responded by posting a directive on “political advocacy” this July that enables bosses to immediately fire employees who participate in work stoppages of a political nature.

The directive, as yet apparently unnoticed by both unions and labor lawyers, cannot be appealed. Read the rest of this entry »