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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (644022)	1/29/2012 8:29:06 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578927

I think the attacks on Newt last week were coordinated on some level. A conspiracy, of sorts.

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (644022)	1/29/2012 11:43:39 PM
From: FJB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578927

How I woke up to the untruths of Barack Obama The President's State of the Union address was as weaselly as any politician's could be. By Christopher Booker from TimF 7:00PM GMT 28 Jan 2012 When I happened to wake up in the middle of the night last Wednesday and caught the BBC World Service’s live relay of President Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress, two passages had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief. The first came when, to applause, the President spoke about the banking crash which coincided with his barnstorming 2008 election campaign. “The house of cards collapsed,” he recalled. “We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them.” He excoriated the banks which had “made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money”, while “regulators looked the other way and didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behaviour”. This, said Obama, “was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work.” I recalled a piece I wrote in this column on January 29, 2009, just after Obama took office. It was headlined: “This is the sub-prime house that Barack Obama built”. As a rising young Chicago politician in 1995, no one campaigned more actively than Mr Obama for an amendment to the US Community Reinvestment Act, legally requiring banks to lend huge sums to millions of poor, mainly black Americans, guaranteed by the two giant mortgage associations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was this Act, above all, which let the US housing bubble blow up, far beyond the point where it was obvious that hundreds of thousands of homeowners would be likely to default. Yet, in 2005, no one more actively opposed moves to halt these reckless guarantees than Senator Obama, who received more donations from Fannie Mae than any other US politician (although Senator Hillary Clinton ran him close). A later passage in Obama’s speech, when he hailed the way his country’s energy future has been transformed by the miracle of shale gas, met with a storm of applause. Not only would this give the US energy security for decades, creating 600,000 jobs, but it could now go all out to exploit its gas and oil reserves (more applause). Yet this was the man who in 2008 couldn’t stop talking about the threat of global warming, and was elected on a pledge to make the US only the second country in the world, after Britain, to commit to cutting its CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by 80 per cent within 40 years. Even more telling than his audience’s response to this, however, was what happened when Obama referred briefly to the need to develop “clean energy on enough public land to power three million homes”. But no mention now of vast numbers of wind turbines – those props beside which he constantly chose to be filmed back in 2008. No harking back to his boast that “renewable energy” would create “four million jobs”. And even to this sole fleeting reminder of what, four years ago, was his flagship policy the response of Congress was a deafening silence. A few months after Obama entered the White House, I suggested here that the slogan on which he was elected – “Yes we can” – seemed to have changed to “No we can’t”. It was already obvious that, having won election as an ideal Hollywood version of what “the first black President” should look and sound like, he was in reality no more than a vacuum. His speech last week was as weaselly as any politician’s performance could be, not least in its references to the sub-prime scandal... telegraph.co.uk

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (644022)	1/30/2012 11:54:59 AM
From: FJB	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578927

A Fast & Furious fib(Lie to Congress) Holes in Holder’s testimony? Last Updated: 1:46 AM, January 30, 2012 nypost.com It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup, goes the old Washington cliché. In the case of the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, it’s both. As Attorney General Eric Holder gets ready to face more congressional grilling Thursday, something’s clearly rotten at the Justice Department. The stench goes all the way to the top — to Holder. Friday, the feds disclosed documents that show that despite Holder’s claim during congressional testimony that he’d only learned of F&F “a few weeks” earlier (a claim later amended to “a couple of months”), he has known (or should have known) about it all along. That information came in a series of e-mails in which the former US attorney in Arizona, Dennis Burke, discussed the F&F’s first fatality, agent Brian Terry, with a Holder deputy. The e-mails were sent in the early hours of Dec. 15, 2010, the day Terry died of wounds received the day before in a shootout 18 miles inside the US border, near Nogales. The deputy, Monty Wilkinson, responded: “Tragic. I’ve alerted the AG.” Burke, an anti-gun fanatic whose appointment as US attorney in 2009 roughly coincided with the start of F&F, goes on to tell Wilkinson later that day: “The guns found in the desert near the murder of the BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store.” That’s right. The government’s top law-enforcement officer has been turning a blind eye to a cancer in his department for more than a year. Yet he’s repeatedly played the innocent in his various appearances before Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee. Watch for Issa (R.-Calif.) to hit him hard on what appears to be close to perjury. The nearly 500 e-mails and other documents, released by Justice at the direction of the White House, also show that Holder’s deputy, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, suggested in a meeting with Mexican officials in February 2011 — two months after the operation had come to light — that some so-called straw purchasers be allowed to transport weapons illegally across the US border, where they could be arrested and convicted because “it may send a strong message to arms traffickers.” So, even after Terry’s death, the administration was still pushing the lie that the primary source of Mexico’s gun violence was American arms dealers — and covering its own rear end. How much worse can this get? The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, under the supervision of the US Attorney’s Office in Phoenix — and over the vehement objections of field agents — encouraged some 2,000 guns purchased in Arizona gun shops to “walk” across the border to Mexico, ostensibly for tracking purposes. In reality, the guns promptly disappeared, only to turn up later at murder scenes in both countries. Yet Justice has refused to come clean about its part in the killing spree, offering an ever-shifting array of “the dog ate my homework” excuses and bureaucratic shuffling, instead of providing Issa and the public with answers. Asked to provide a deposition to Issa’s investigators, the head of the criminal division of the US Attorney’s Office in Arizona, Patrick Cunningham, on Friday pleaded the Fifth and abruptly resigned his government post to take a private-sector job. Cunningham’s actions, says Issa, “suggests possible criminal culpability on the part of a high-ranking Justice Department official.” Issa has requested that Cunningham’s deputy, Assistant US Attorney Michael Morrissey, provide testimony, instead. It’s long past time for heads to roll — and not just the couple of small-fry straw buyers who pleaded guilty in federal court last week. Frustrated with the feds’ stonewalling, Arizona lawmakers have formed their own bipartisan investigative committee. “We just don’t have cooperation from federal officials,” says one local sheriff. Still, more is needed. With a tough re-election fight, President Obama doesn’t need F&F to become a campaign issue. But surely even he realizes that the nation has had enough of Holder’s polarizing tenure at Justice. Given a choice between himself and Holder . . . well, there’s always room for one more under the Obama bus.