These are the dates of weekly memos provided by National Drug Intelligence Center Director Michael Walther to Attorney General Eric Holder. Each was a short document that included information on Operation Fast and Furious, including descriptions of the operation as a multi-agency task force targeting a gun trafficking ring headed by Manuel Celis-Acosta that had purchased “1,500 firearms that were then supplied to Mexican drug trafficking cartels.”
The release of these documents from mid-2010 — and supporting documents from Department of Justice insiders discussing “gunwalking” — has led House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) to ask President Obama to appoint a special prosecutor. The special prosecutor would investigate whether or not Attorney General Holder committed perjury when he stated in sworn testimony in March: “[I] probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”
Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) yesterday called for Holder to resign, and Arizona Senator John McCain is “leaning towards” demanding a special council appointment to investigate.
With the increased attention on the case — including coverage from johnny-come-lately ABC that needed to add a backstory section to get their readers up to speed — the White House and Department of Justice are fighting back, alleging that the growing scandal is nothing but a game of “gotcha” being played by Republicans:
“Here they go again. Chairman Issa and Senator Grassley can re-package and re-release the same documents every other day and it won’t change the facts: the attorney general’s testimony to both the House and Senate committees has been consistent and truthful,” the department said.
The department said the “brief” passages were “buried in a few written reports” and did not detail the full extent of the operation.
“Instead of peddling selectively edited transcripts and distorting questions and answers in some distracting political game of gotcha, these congressional leaders should be focusing their attention on the underlying public safety problem we confront as a nation — that too many guns are being illegally trafficked to Mexico,” the statement said.
It is worth noting: the documents being released are new; the information was not buried, but featured bullet points of weekly summary reports; and there were no “selectively edited” transcripts or “distorted questions.” The DOJ pushback seems rooted in political firefighting, not facts.
Even left-leaning NPR — which seems to doubt Holder’s truthfulness — reported the details of the key question and answer accurately:
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Gunwalker: ".......perjury is going to be the least of the worries for those involved."
Believe it or not: Thieves steal bridge
Via Survival
As the value of scrap metal — including copper and steel — increases, thieves have been becoming more daring and less respectful of institutions such as churches and schools.But one group of thieves might have set the standard last week by stealing a 50-foot-long bridge. State police said the bridge was stolen between Sept. 27 and Wednesday in North Beaver Township. The theft was discovered shortly after 9 a.m. Wednesday.
The bridge, around 20 feet wide, was in a wooded area along a railroad line in the township’s Covert’s Crossing region.
Whiskey Myers "Ballad of a Southern Man" = Re-post
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Whiskey Myers "Ballad of a Southern Man"
Ron Paul Tops Family Values Straw Poll
Congressman Ron Paul, R-Tex., comes on top in the 2012 GOP presidential straw poll conducted at the Family Research Council's "Values Voter Summit" in Washington, DC.
Paul led the pack with 37%, trailed by Herman Cain at 23% and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum at 16%. Tex. Gov. Rick Perry and Minn. Rep. Michele Bachmann with each getting 8%. Former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney followed with 4% and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich scored 3%. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman scored zero.
White percent by state
The $PLC should love this as a money making venue:)
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HERE
Obama Response on Solyndra 'Disgusting' & Emails Expose Fresh West Wing Cronyism
Obama Response on Solyndra 'Disgusting'
Taxpayers are unlikely ever to see any of the $535 million lost when solar panel firm Solyndra went bust amid accusations of fraud, Rep. Cory Gardner, a member of the House Energy Committee tells Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview.
And Jonathan Silver, who quit on Thursday as head of the agency which approved the loan, is likely to be only the first of many heads to roll as House Republicans widen their investigation into the scandal, he added.
“Right now it’s not looking good,” said the Colorado Congressman when asked if there was any chance of the money getting returned to the public coffers. “What’s so disgusting about this is to hear the president say, ‘we didn’t have a crystal ball.’ Yet his administration had warning flags all over the place about the fact the taxpayers could very well lose half a billion dollars. That’s exactly what happened.”
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Emails Expose Fresh West Wing Cronyism
An Obama administration appointee at the Energy Department pressed White House analysts to sign off on a $535 million loan to Solyndra even though his wife worked for the failed solar panel maker's law firm.The revelation, contained in a new batch of internal emails released Friday, adds new drama to a heated political battle over government backing for Solyndra, which has filed for bankruptcy and has been raided by the FBI.
The emails show frequent inquiries from Steven Spinner, who was an adviser to the Energy Department on its use of economic stimulus funding to spur clean energy technology, on the Solyndra loan, according to a report in the New York Times.
On Sept 29, the Energy Department had posted a "fact check" on Spinner's involvement in the Solyndra case on its website, explaining that he started his job after the company received conditional approval for its loan application.
The department said Spinner "was recused from engaging in any discussions on decisions affecting specific loan applications in which his spouse's law firm was involved out of concern for the appearance of a conflict of interest."
Allison Spinner is a partner at law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, which represented Solyndra.
Energy Department spokesman Damien LaVera said on Friday that the department's ethics officer had cleared Spinner to "oversee and monitor the progress of applications," although he was not allowed to make decisions on loans or their terms.
LaVera noted that Allison Spinner had "agreed not to participate in or receive any financial compensation from her law firm's work on behalf of any loan program applicant."
Stunning Poll: Cain Up 20% Over Romney, Beating Obama
Zogby has just released a poll that is sure to stun many: Herman Cain is not only the frontrunner for the GOP nomination, he’s leading Mitt Romney by 20 percentage points. But there’s more: he’s also beating President Obama 46%-44%.
Zogby has the numbers:
Cain’s share of the GOP primary has jumped 10 percentage points since Sept. 26 and is now at 38%. Mitt Romney is second with 18%, followed by both Rick Perry and Ron Paul, at 12% each.
The Oct. 3-5 IBOPE Zogby interactive poll also matches Cain, Romney and Perry against Obama. Cain led Obama, 46%-44%, while Obama is one-point ahead of Romney, 41%-40%, and leads Perry, 45%-40%.
And here’s how it breaks down visually:
The end of gun control
........the end of gun control is not politically or culturally driven, but was a historical inevitability that was written into the book of destiny by 1810, when Joseph Jacquard started using punched cards to control weaving patterns on his looms and when the practice of chucking rotary cutters into lathe headstocks was adopted en masse at water powered factories in Western Massachusetts in response to British attempts to confiscate American civilian-owned firearms.OK, if I’m going to do an impression of James Burke, let me do it right. Hold a moment while I put on a thick set of glasses and hammer myself in the mouth with a mallet. …and…MMFGH! .. Ah, yes, now I look more like a product of British government-run dentistry. < spits teeth ; makes appointment for follow-up care with NHS sometime in late 2017 >
So, how does weaving in France tie in to British seizure of civilian owned weapons, BITNET, and the Homebrew Computer Club, and lead us to the death of gun control in the 21st century?
People ascribe the invention of punched cards to Herman Hollerith in the late 1800s, but in fact they dated back 150 years earlier, where they were created as an easier-to-file version of the ancient concept of the tally stick (Pliny the Elder documents these before the birth of Christ, but it turns out that we can push the date back 20,000 years before that).
So we’ve got people recording data on punched cards in the early 1700s, and a few decades after that we’ve got Basile Bouchon using them to half-assedly control textile mills in France, and a few decades after that Jacquard drastically improved the mechanism.
(Hint: the end of the week quiz will cover this specific point, and in your response to the essay question you could do worse than to note the parallel between ‘using stored information to create physical items’ in 17-aught-mumble and 20-aught-mumble).So, we’ve established that information can be amplified into a nearly finished product by clever arrangements of spinning bits, moving bits, and stationary bits.
Let’s take a quick digression into metal working.
So Obama Said....
VERBATIM POST
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....the other day that "What Wall Street did was immoral, but it wasn't illegal" in response to a question about why nobody had gone to jail.
Really Mr. President? None of the following is illegal?
- Laundering drug money. Wachovia admitted to doing it in court. They got a "deferred prosecution agreement" and not only did nobody go to jail nobody other than a few bloggers like myself raised hell about it until days before that agreement expired. Then, magically, it got news coverage. This is a clear black-letter felony; where are the handcuffs?
- The former chief risk officer for Citifinancial testified under oath before the FCIC that the company knowingly sold loans on to investors that did not meet their quality guidelines and published claims. In fact, he testified that by 2007 80 percent of those loans were defective. This is functionally identical to selling you a car and rolling back the odometer, peddling tainted medicine or selling melamine-laced baby formula. There is nothing complicated about this and there is under-oath testimony establishing that it was not an accident or an "error in judgment" as it continued for more than a year after it became known and was the subject of internal memos to corporate officers. This is not my conjecture or analysis, it is factual sworn testimony before a government body. Where are the damned handcuffs?
- Ponzi Schemes generally. Those are all illegal. They locked Charlie up for it (the originator of the name, natch) and more recently Bernie Madoff went to prison. Ok, Mr. President, how about all the stock analysts, the market callers, and pension fund managers along with the real estate industry that have been pumping 8, 10 or 11% annualized returns for the last three decades? These claims are all pyramid schemes and thus by the very definition of such a scheme are illegal. An 8% "annual return" for 45 years, the average working man's period of effort (20 to 65) produces a return of nearly 32 times the original amount invested. The 9% growth rate of medical cost over the last year (close to the premium increases over the last decade in annualized terms) for the person of age 50 that the government claims "will not see their Medicare harmed" has the annual cost of their medical insurance (assuming no increase due to age or greater risk) go from $5,000 a year to $100,000 by the time they're 85! The claims of Realtors that home prices would go up 10% "for the indefinite future" turns a $150,000 house into a $4.21 million house in 35 years. None of this was ever going to actually happen, and it still won't. Why did Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff go to prison when your administration, every member of Congress, those on Wall Street and otherwise in the "finance and investment" business community have not for the exact same offense?
- Jefferson County Alabama jailed several politicians and others for bribery and other crimes related to the infamous "sewer bond" nonsense. Why have no bankers gone to prison? It takes two people to commit bribery and similar offenses - someone who offers a bribe, and someone who accepts a bribe. One party went to prison while the other did not. No crimes in this case among the banksters? Pull the other one Mr. President; the damage here remains in that the water bills of these residents remains at ridiculously elevated levels as the financial harm done to the county was not forcibly returned from those banksters.
- Perjury is a felony in most circumstances. Banksters admitted to more than 100,000 instances of it by withdrawing perjured ("robosigned") affidavits. Just as with the testimony under oath in the case of Citifinancial, just as in the Wachovia admission of drug money laundering, in this case the violation of the law is clear. Perjury can only be cured at "no penalty" up until it is clear that the defective statement or filing will be discovered; once you're "caught" you cannot avoid liability by withdrawing the filing. Whether someone was paying their mortgage or not is immaterial as to whether filing a false affidavit is a criminal matter -- it is. Again, where are the damned handcuffs?
- Sarbanes-Oxley criminalized false accounting statements. There have been multiple bank failures by public companies that filed balance sheets under penalty of criminal prosecution were they to be false just weeks before they blew up -- balance sheets that showed perfectly-healthy institutions. The FDIC has documented dozens of bank failures, privately-held and publicly-traded, where those balance sheets were proved factually false, as the losses have been 20, 30, 40% or even more just a few weeks later. It is beyond comprehension that the assets in question could have actually lost 30 or 40% of their value within that period of time. The only rational explanation is that these financial statements were a work of fiction. Sarbanes-Oxley makes this a criminal matter. Again, where are the handcuffs?
I and many other bloggers and "alternative media outlets" have spent four years documenting these outrages and showing through simple mathematical analysis that the claims made by these charlatans, including yourself Mr. President, are mathematically impossible. That's the definition of a pyramid scheme. They're illegal because they cannot, mathematically, work. It is therefore illegal to hawk them to the public because they are by definition abusive; they will ultimately result in those who believe in them losing their money.
Your claim, Mr. President, that these acts were "morally repugnant but not illegal" is a lie. The simple fact of the matter is that your administration is intentionally refusing to enforce long-standing law and by doing so you and your administration have lent official support to an organized effort to defraud and rob the American public.