Armed Chinese Troops in Texas

This should be the view of the Democratic Party if the two parties are really two parties and not just one.

To our shame, this is not one of ours. This is a Ron Paul ad.

Ron Paul supporters, OWS protesters join forces to harass Gingrich, Santorum

On Monday, militant Ron Paul supporters joined forces with Occupy Wall Street protesters to harass former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.

Fox News reported that Gingrich was forced to cancel an appearance at his New Hampshire campaign headquarters when Ron Paul supporters and Occupy Wall Street protesters swarmed the entrance:

About 40 protesters showed up Monday evening carrying placards reading "Ron Paul" and "Occupy." One played speeches by presidential candidate Ron Paul from a loud speaker.

Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond says the former House speaker's private security detail decided to cancel the event because of security concerns regarding the entrance and exit to the building.

Wall Street's Washington Infiltration Continues with New Chief of Staff Jacob Lew

U.S. President Barack Obama is keeping a trend alive with new White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew.

You see, Lew has something in common with his predecessors: He spent years raking in millions on Wall Street.

Like William M. Daley, who on Monday resigned from his post as chief of staff, and Rahm Emanuel, who vacated the position in 2009 to successfully run for mayor of Chicago, Lew has strong ties to the financial sector. Until 2009 he was the chief operating officer of Citigroup Alternative Investments, which made money betting against the housing market with controversial credit default swaps.

Lew also told the Senate during his 2010 confirmation hearing that he does not think financial deregulation contributed to the housing market crash.

Limbaugh syndication owned by Bain Capital!

No Way Can US Win A Non-Nuclear War With Iran

When Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking American officer, was asked recently on NBC’s Meet The Press whether the United States has a military plan for an attack on Iran, he replied simply: “We do.”

General staffs are supposed to plan for even the most unlikely future contingencies. Right down to the 1930s, for example, the United States maintained and annually updated plans for the invasion of Canada—and the Canadian military made plans to preempt the invasion. But what the planning process will have revealed, in this case, is that there is no way for the United States to win a non-nuclear war with Iran.

The U.S. could “win” by dropping hundreds of nuclear weapons on Iran’s military bases, nuclear facilities and industrial centres (i.e. cities) and killing five to 10 million people, but short of that, nothing works. On this we have the word of Richard Clarke, counter-terrorism adviser in the White House under three administrations.

In the early 1990s, Clarke revealed in an interview with the New York Times four years ago, the Clinton administration had seriously considered a bombing campaign against Iran, but the military professionals told them not to do it.

“After a long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favourably for the United States,” he said. The Pentagon’s planners have war-gamed an attack on Iran several times in the past 15 years, and they just can’t make it come out as a U.S. victory.


more details -- http://www.pakalertpress.com/2010/08/19/no-way-can-us-win-a-non-nuclear-war-with-iran/

Gingrich ads vs. Romney (claws and teeth come out mrowr hiss hiss hiss rar)

Governor pardons two convicted murderers after they carry out odd jobs at his mansion

A governor's decision to pardon two convicted murderers after they carried out odd jobs at his mansion has been slammed as 'completely unfair'.

Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, who leaves office this week, enraged families of the victims slayed by David Gatlin and Joseph Ozment in the 1990s.

The two men, who have served fewer than 20 years of their life sentences, were freed on Sunday, a Department of Corrections spokeswoman confirmed.

...

In four instances in 2008, he freed men - all who worked at his mansion - who shot their ex-girlfriends or wives dead.

...


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2084337/Mississippi-Governor-Haley-Barbour-pardons-convicted-murderers.html


(welcome to the New Feudalism)

REPORT: News Networks Ignore Controversial SOPA Legislation

Controversial legislation that the co-founder of Google has warned "would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world" has received virtually no coverage from major American television news outlets during their evening newscasts and opinion programming. The parent companies of most of these networks, as well as two of the networks themselves, are listed as official "supporters" of this legislation on the U.S. House of Representatives' website.

As the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) makes its way through Congress, most major television news outlets -- MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have ignored the bill during their evening broadcasts. One network, CNN, devoted a single evening segment to it. (The data on lack of coverage is based on a search of the Lexis-Nexis database since October 1, 2011. The Nexis database does not include comprehensive daytime coverage, and also does not include Shep Smith's 7pm nightly Fox News program, so both are excluded from the study.)

more at: http://mediamatters.org/blog/201201050008

Jerry Brown's California budget slashes $1 billion from prisons

Gov. Jerry Brown wants to cut state prison spending by a billion dollars in the next fiscal year — mostly by cutting staff. Prison officials say they won’t need as many employees because the number of prisoners they oversee is dropping fast — the state has 11,000 fewer inmates since California’s “realignment” law took effect in October. The law diverts low-level felons to county jails. The state this week met its first court-ordered benchmark for reducing the prison population.

California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations is changing and rearranging and shrinking, as realignment drives the prison population down.

"We see the churning of inmates has stopped, great reductions in our total number of inmates already," Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate said.

http://www.scpr.org/news/2012/01/07/30706/jerry-browns-california-budget-slashes-1-billion-p/

Time to Attack Iran

In early October, U.S. officials accused Iranian operatives of planning to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States on American soil. Iran denied the charges, but the episode has already managed to increase tensions between Washington and Tehran. Although the Obama administration has not publicly threatened to retaliate with military force, the allegations have underscored the real and growing risk that the two sides could go to war sometime soon -- particularly over Iran’s advancing nuclear program.

For several years now, starting long before this episode, American pundits and policymakers have been debating whether the United States should attack Iran and attempt to eliminate its nuclear facilities. Proponents of a strike have argued that the only thing worse than military action against Iran would be an Iran armed with nuclear weapons. Critics, meanwhile, have warned that such a raid would likely fail and, even if it succeeded, would spark a full-fledged war and a global economic crisis. They have urged the United States to rely on nonmilitary options, such as diplomacy, sanctions, and covert operations, to prevent Iran from acquiring a bomb. Fearing the costs of a bombing campaign, most critics maintain that if these other tactics fail to impede Tehran’s progress, the United States should simply learn to live with a nuclear Iran.

But skeptics of military action fail to appreciate the true danger that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to U.S. interests in the Middle East and beyond. And their grim forecasts assume that the cure would be worse than the disease -- that is, that the consequences of a U.S. assault on Iran would be as bad as or worse than those of Iran achieving its nuclear ambitions. But that is a faulty assumption. The truth is that a military strike intended to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, if managed carefully, could spare the region
and the world a very real threat and dramatically improve the long-term national security of the United States.

...and more of this garbage behind a registration wall at: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136917/matthew-kroenig/time-to-attack-iran


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Matthew Kroenig is a professor at Georgetown. Anyone else interested in organizing a protest to get him fired?