Category: American Empire

The San Diego Free Press – our sister online publication – has just announced the location of the secret Koch brothers’ confab this weekend in the San Diego area.

It’s the Park Hyatt Aviara Resort up in Carlsbad. Here’s the report:

By Kimberley Beatty / Special to San Diego Free Press

Republicans feign outrage over “Operation Fast and Furious,” ensure more illegal firearms flood the streets.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most powerful lobbies in the US, has relentlessly tried to destroy the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) since it was created in 1972. They came close under Ronald Reagan in 1981, when the NRA pushed legislation to abolish the agency. Realizing that federal gun law enforcement would transfer to the then much esteemed Secret Service, the NRA scuttled the proposal.

Republicans like to denounce the so-called extremism of the liberal Warren Court. But the 5-4 decisions of the Roberts Court are the most divisive in American history.

by Michael Tomasky / The Daily Beast / Jun 21, 2012

As we gather in our respective bunkers awaiting the white smoke from the Supreme Court, I thought a little history discussion might be in order. We’ve heard conservatives say many times that the Warren Court overreached, legislated from the bench, and divided America.

By Catherine New / Huffington Post / June 20, 2012

Dory Hayes’ credit card complaint started with an honest mistake. And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau agreed. When she bought a new couch at Jennifer Convertibles in April 2011, she financed it by charging $500 on a GE Money Card, which had an annual percentage rate of 0 percent.

By Lucas O’Connor / San Diego Free Press

By now, most of us agree that the concept of treating corporations as people has, in practice, been a disaster. The flood of corporate money into elections since Citizens United has been just as bad as advertised, deference to the supremacy of corporate health as national health continues to rise, and still the very concept remains just as laughable now as it’s always been.

Wall Street “Quant” Alexis Goldstein Joins the Opposition

By John Lawrence / San Diego Free Press / Will Blog For Food

Wall Street recruits young, just out of college computer science majors and mathematicians to become “quants” whose skills are used among other things to predict when pension funds are going to make huge trades so that Wall Street can jump in ahead of them and do deals effectively raising the price the pension fund must pay or lowering the profit they might make.

Five Things To Know About The Republican Witchhunt Against Attorney General Holder

By Ian Millhiser / Think Progress /Jun 13, 2012

In 2006, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the Justice Department launched the first of a series of misguided “gunrunning” schemes that eventually led to the death of federal Agent Brian Terry. Rather than look to ways to prevent such a tragedy from happening again, however, House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) spent his tenure as a committee chair trying unsuccessfully to embarrass Attorney General Eric Holder.

This week, Issa escalated this witchhunt by holding an committee vote on a resolution to hold the Attorney General in contempt of Congress. Here’s what you need to know about this vote:

1. Issa Has No Case: Issa’s uncovered no evidence showing Holder bears any blame for the botched operations begun under George W. Bush, even though the Justice Department turned over thousands of pages of documents concerning the operations.

The old Hermit Dave is back rhyming the news of the week and a poem @ Winston’s.

Fly on the wall

a poem by Old Hermit Dave

So many crazy nuts in today’s world is such a disgrace
As old man with a beard hope one don’t bite off my face

Chucklenuts visits where Obama is now the chief resident
He wants to see them hang portrait of first play president

NYC Mayor says ban big cups of sugar soda pop
Claims it might keep Big Apple from FATSO top

Real honest leaders, America could sure use one
Since 9/11/01 our troops died for less freedom

Bilderberg having meeting with super rich all
Would be so lot of fun to be a fly on their wall

Wouldn’t you just love to be a fly on the wall

Here are links and stories from across the country – and at times, from across the seas – national news that you can naturally use.

Did Republicans deliberately crash the US economy? So why does the US economy stink? Why has job creation in America slowed to a crawl? Why, after several months of economic hope, are things suddenly turning sour? The culprits might seem obvious – uncertainty in Europe, an uneven economic recovery, fiscal and monetary policymakers immobilized and incapable of acting. But increasingly, Democrats are making the argument that the real culprit for the country’s economic woes lies in a more discrete location: with the Republican Party.

Woodward and Bernstein: 40 years after Watergate, Nixon was far worse than we thought. This is written by Woodward and Bernstein themselves – more than a retrospective.

by J. D. Heyes / Natural News /June 12, 2012

Anyone who has spent longer than a day on a computer knows how dangerous to your hard drive malware and other malicious code can be. Most of us have fallen victim to one or the other and have cursed the day the hacker who developed it was born.

Now, according to reports, some of the most sophisticated malicious code ever developed is a product of the United States government, leaving more than a few tech experts and analysts concerned that maybe now, Washington has become a bigger info-terrorist than some of the country’s worst enemies.

by John Lawrence/ San Diego Free Press

Criticisms of Mitt Romney’s background at Bain Capital and his record as a “job creator” are fair game.

I have never heard so many conservative pundits offering gratuitous avuncular advice to Barack Obama that his campaign strategy attacking Bain Capital will not get him anywhere. Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe on msnbc and others have gone on and on about how using Bain Capital against Mitt Romney is not a good strategy. Well, when conservatives offer advice to Barack Obama about what will or will not work for him, Obama better do just the opposite of what they recommend because ultimately they want him to lose. Therefore, he should double down, not abandon, the Bain Capital strategy.

The 99% and all that stuff
is a movement that’s all about US
and with that in mind
one might opine
that many of US
can remember times
when we could barely
pay the rent
and when the rent
was made good with all good intent
the food money
was gone…spent.