Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Re: Ron Paul and the New York Times

Support for Israel has been another strong theme in The New Republic.
According to Martin Peretz, owner of TNR, "Support for Israel is deep
down an expression of America's best view of itself." According to
CUNY journalism professor, Eric Alterman, "Nothing has been as
consistent about the past 34 years of TNR as the magazine's devotion
to Peretz's own understanding of what is good for Israel…It is really
not too much to say that almost all of Peretz's political beliefs are
subordinate to his commitment to Israel's best interests, and these
interests as Peretz defines them almost always involve more war."

On Jan 3, 10:33 am, Bruce Majors <majors.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ron Paul and the New York
> Times<http://teapartiers.blogspot.com/2012/01/ron-paul-and-new-york-times.html>
>  <http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4330204694154064363&postID=...>
>
> A few days before today's Iowa Caucuses,  Jamie Kirchik, the author of a
> 2008 *New Republic* article exposing odious material in some 20 old year
> old newsletters that ran under Ron Paul's byline and for which he was
> publisher, expanded his critique of Ron Paul to suggest that he is not only
> someone who fraternized with bigots, but that he is indeed a kook who
> spends all of his time hanging out with various types of conspiracy
> theorists.
>
> <http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZLE1BWsBQNc/TwMnAtDl4fI/AAAAAAAAA0o/hx6yKvr...>
>
> The piece, entitled "Ron Paul's World," is one of a series of hit pieces on
> Paul that have appeared on *Fox News,* the *Washington Post*, the *New York
> Time*s, and some small political magazines affiliated with establishment
> Democrats and Republicans.  (One of the funny things about the onslaught
> against Ron Paul, something that no one in the media is commenting on, is
> that it is being conducted almost entirely by paid government agents.  On
> FOX News there is a daily interview with such figures as Clinton White
> House advisor Dick Morris, Bush White House speech writer Marc Thiessen,
> and Bush appointee to the United Nations John Bolton on how Ron Paul, his
> monetary policy, or his foreign policy, is "crazy."   Kirchik, in the last
> election cycle was merely a journalist at the Democratic magazine *The New
> Republic,* but who has been for several years now an employee of a
> government agency,* Radio Free Europe *-- a government employee whose job
> is to represent America abroad is writing articles in the *New York Times* and
> the* Weekly Standard *weighing in in a Presidential race.  (Is that legal?)
>  This weekend in the *Washington Post* the aforesaid Bush speechwriter
> Michael Gerson weighed in on how Ron Paul would not effectively conduct a
> new Civil War in America, should we have one next year.)
>
>  It seems perfectly obvious that Ron Paul has always been rather
> promiscuous in being willing to talk to and be interviewed by anyone.  This
> should have been obvious to Jamie in 2011, if not in 2008, as Ron Paul was
> notoriously punked by the comedian Sascha Baron Cohen, who lured him into
> an interview in the guise of a flaming Austrian gay celebrity journalist in
> the movie *Bruno* (2009).  Since Jamie is an urban, secular gay journalist,
> who lived in DC in 2009, it seems hard to believe that he did not either
> see this movie himself or have friends who did.
>
> http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Watch-Bruno-Shock-Ron-Paul-13489.html
>
> Jamie concludes from Paul's "failure" to tell off all of these donors and
> supporters that Ron Paul is a conspiracy theorist.  I conclude that Paul,
> an open and congenial man (I have met him) has been frozen out of public
> debate by the ruling political class for so many years that he will indeed
> go on a conspiracy kook's radio show if invited as long as the kook
> supports his ideas about ending the Fed or the American empire.
>
> Will Jamie also claim that Ron Paul is a flaming gay Austrian?
>
> Jamie concludes from Paul's "failure" to tell off all of these donors and
> supporters that Ron Paul is a conspiracy theorist.  I conclude that Paul,
> an open and congenial man (I have met him) has been frozen out of public
> debate by the ruling political class for so many years that he will indeed
> go on a conspiracy kook's radio show if invited as long as the kook
> supports his ideas about ending the Fed or the American empire.
>
> Will Jamie also claim that Ron Paul is a flaming gay Austrian?
>
> Jamie concludes from Paul's "failure" to tell off all of these donors and
> supporters that Ron Paul is a conspiracy theorist.  I conclude that Paul,
> an open and congenial man (I have met him) has been frozen out of public
> debate by the ruling political class for so many years that he will indeed
> go on a conspiracy kook's radio show if invited as long as the kook
> supports his ideas about ending the Fed or the American empire.
>
> Will Jamie also claim that Ron Paul is a flaming gay Austrian?

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Re: A warning from a former Muslim

watching zionists fear ragheads is fun!

On Jan 2, 7:36 pm, Travis <baconl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ****
> A warning from a former Muslim    ****
>
> http://tinyurl.com/7y4uzza****
>
>   I was born and raised as Muslim. My whole family is still Muslim. I know
> every genetic code of Muslim. I know Islamic brain. I live and breath with
> them. I am an insider. I left Islam when I understood that Islam is a sick
> and evil religion. The following are the Islamic message to the West.
>
> To the infidels of the West:
>
> The Constitution for the new Islamic Republics of EuroArabia and
> AmerIslamia is under construction.
>
> We will fight the infidel to death.
>
> - Meanwhile American laws will protect us.
> - Democrats and Leftist will support us.
> - N.G.O.s will legitimize us.
> - C.A.I.R. will incubate us.
> - The A.C.L.U. will empower us.
> - Western Universities will educate us.
> - Mosques will shelter us
> - O.P.E.C. will finance us
> - Hollywood will love us.
> - Kofi Annan and most of the United Nations will cover our asses.
>
> Our children will immigrate from Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and
> Indonesia and even from India to the US and to the other Western countries.
> They will go to the West for education in full scholarship. America is
> paying and will continue to pay for our children's educations and their
> upbringing in state funded Islamic schools.
>
> We will use your welfare system. Our children will also send money home
> while they are preparing for Jihad.
>
> We will take the advantage of American kindness, gullibility, and
> compassion. When time comes, we will stab them in the back. We will say one
> thing on the camera and teach another thing to our children at home. We
> will give subliminal messages to our children to uphold Islam at any cost.
> Our children in America will always care more about Islamic Country's
> interest than US interest.
>
> We will teach our children Islamic supremacy from the very childhood. We
> will teach them not to compromise with Infidel. Once we do that from the
> very early age our children won't hesitate to be martyr. We will take over
> the Europe first and then US will be the next. We already have a solid
> ground in the UK, Holland, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Germany, and now in the US.
>
> Our children will marry Caucasian in Europe and in America. We will mixed
> with intricate fabric of the Western society but still will remember to
> Jihad when time comes. Who are we?
>
> We are the "sleeper cells".
>
> We will raise our children to be loyal to Islam and Mohammad only.
> Everything else is secondary.
>
> At the time of the real fight we will hold our own children as our armor.
> When American or Israeli troops shoot at us the world will be watching.
> Imagine,… Imagine the news in the world "Death of Muslim babies by
> infidels".
>
> We know CNN, ABC, CBS are broadcasting live. Al-Jazeera will pour gasoline
> on the fire. The news will spread like wildfire. "Americans killed 6
> babies, 10 babies". "Jews killed two women",
> Keep your Nukes in your curio cabinets. Keep your aircraft carrier or
> high-tech weaponry in the showcase. You can't use them against us because
> of your own higher moral standard. We will take the advantage of your
> higher moral standard and use it against you. We won't hesitate to use our
> children as suicide bomber against you.
>
> Visualize the news flash all over the world, …Moslem mother is sobbing,
> ….crying. ….Her babies are killed by Jews and Americans, the whole world is
> watching live. Hundreds of millions of Muslims all around the world are
> boiling. They will march through Europe. We will use our women to produce
> more babies who will in turn be used as armor/shield. Our babies are the
> gift from Allah for Jihad.
>
> West manufactures their tanks in the factory. We will manufacture our
> military force by natural means, by producing more babies. That is the way
> it is cheaper.
>
> You infidels at this site cannot defeat us. We are 1.2 billion. We will
> double again. Do you have enough bullets to kill us?
>
> On the camera:
>
> - We will always say, "Islam is the religion of Peace."
> - We will say, "Jihad is actually inner Jihad."
> - Moderate Muslim will say there is no link between Islam and Terrorism and
> the
> West will believe it because the West is so gullible.
> - Moderate Muslim all over the world will incubate Jihadist by their talk
> by defending Islam.
> - Using Western Legal system we will assert our Sharia Laws, slowly but
> surely.
> - We will increase in number. We will double again.
>
> You will be impressed when you meet a moderate Muslim personally. As your
> next-door neighbor, coworker, student, teacher, engineer, professionals you
> may even like us. You will find us well mannered, polite, humble that will
> make you say, "wow, Muslims are good and peaceful people", But, we will
> stab you in your back when you are sleeping as we did on 911.
>
> There will be more 911 in Europe and in America. We will say, "We do not
> support terrorism but America got what it deserved."
>
> Muslims, CAIR, ISNA, MPAC and other international Islamic Organization will
> unite. We will partner with Leftist, ACLU, with Koffi Annan, and the UN,
> and if we have to then even with France. Fasten your seatbelt. The war of
> civilizations has just begun.
>
> We will recite Quran and say Allah-Hu-Akbar before beheading infidels, as
> we have been doing it. We will video tape those and send it to all infidels
> to watch. They will surrender - ISLAM means surrender.
>
> We will use your own values of kindness against you.
>
> You are destined to loose.****
>
> ** **

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Re: Yes, @WordPress is Shutting Down Bare Naked Islam’s Site

watching muzzies and zionists fight it out is fun!

On Jan 3, 10:49 am, Travis <baconl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> **
>            New post on *Creeping Sharia*
> <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/author/creeping/>  Yes, @WordPress is
> Shutting Down Bare Naked Islam's
> Site<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/wordpress-shuts-down-b...>by
> creeping <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/author/creeping/>
>
> This is somewhat well publicized by now but below includes an interview
> with BNI. Yes we are also hosted on WordPress and have not had any issues
> yet. We also know that WordPress has also shut down numerous jihadi blogs
> so remember that it works both ways. Find the pro-jihad websites that
> WordPress hosts in [...]
>
> Read more of this
> post<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/wordpress-shuts-down-b...>
>  *creeping <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/author/creeping/>* |
> January 3, 2012 at 11:30 AM | Tags: Creeping
> Sharia<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=creeping-sharia>,
> dhimmi <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=dhimmi>,
> islam<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=islam>,
> Life <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=life>,
> Media<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=media>,
> Muslim <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=muslim>,
> News<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=news>,
> Politics <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=politics>,
> Random<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=random>,
> Religion <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=religion>,
> Sharia<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=sharia>,
> terrorism <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?tag=terrorism> |
> Categories: Alerts <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?cat=10378>, Creeping
> Sharia <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?cat=4115925>,
> Media<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?cat=292>,
> News <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?cat=103>,
> Politics<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?cat=398>,
> Religion <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?cat=116>,
> Sharia<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?cat=29069>,
> Stealth Jihad <http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/?cat=10735225> | URL:http://wp.me/pbU4v-aso
>
>   Comment<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/wordpress-shuts-down-b...>
>    See all comments<http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/wordpress-shuts-down-b...>
>
>   Unsubscribe or change your email settings at Manage
> Subscriptions<http://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=49883164090367a8ae3126d288a16eee&...>.
>
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Re: Comparing Candidates

the ACLU has been infiltrated with
Anti-American/Socialist/Communist ideologues
---
it started off as anti-american, socialist, and communist

know the enemy

On Jan 3, 10:56 am, Keith In Tampa <keithinta...@gmail.com> wrote:
> How sad that the ACLU has been infiltrated with
> Anti-American/Socialist/Communist ideologues.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 7:46 AM, Bruce Majors <majors.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > --
>
> > The ACLU's candidate report card:
>
> >http://www.aclulibertywatch.org/blog_romero_20111230.html
>
> > Gary Johnson finishes first, then Paul, then Obama, then Hunstman.
>
> > As James Taranto points out, the group gave Obama more torches than he
> > deserves on gay marriage. And as Radley Balko points out, Johnson and
> > Paul would be even further in the lead if the drug war and the death
> > penalty were included in the scores.
>
> > __._,_.___
> > Reply to sender | Reply to group | Reply via web post | Start a New Topic
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>
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> > MARKETPLACE
>
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>
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> > .
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Re: [LeftLibertarian2] Comparing Candidates

How sad that the ACLU has been infiltrated with Anti-American/Socialist/Communist ideologues. 

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 7:46 AM, Bruce Majors <majors.bruce@gmail.com> wrote:


--
 

The ACLU's candidate report card:

http://www.aclulibertywatch.org/blog_romero_20111230.html

Gary Johnson finishes first, then Paul, then Obama, then Hunstman.

As James Taranto points out, the group gave Obama more torches than he
deserves on gay marriage. And as Radley Balko points out, Johnson and
Paul would be even further in the lead if the drug war and the death
penalty were included in the scores.

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Reply to sender | Reply to group | Reply via web post | Start a New Topic
Messages in this topic (1)
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Yes, @WordPress is Shutting Down Bare Naked Islam’s Site



New post on Creeping Sharia

Yes, @WordPress is Shutting Down Bare Naked Islam's Site

by creeping

This is somewhat well publicized by now but below includes an interview with BNI. Yes we are also hosted on WordPress and have not had any issues yet. We also know that WordPress has also shut down numerous jihadi blogs so remember that it works both ways. Find the pro-jihad websites that WordPress hosts in [...]

Read more of this post

Comment    See all comments

Unsubscribe or change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions.

Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser:
http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/wordpress-shuts-down-bare-naked-islam-site/

Thanks for flying with WordPress.com


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Re: A warning from a former Muslim

Most Ron Paul supporters do not subscribe to this Travis,  but thanks for posting anyway!
 
Keith

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 8:36 PM, Travis <baconlard@gmail.com> wrote:





A warning from a former Muslim   

http://tinyurl.com/7y4uzza

  I was born and raised as Muslim. My whole family is still Muslim. I know every genetic code of Muslim. I know Islamic brain. I live and breath with them. I am an insider. I left Islam when I understood that Islam is a sick and evil religion. The following are the Islamic message to the West.

To the infidels of the West:

The Constitution for the new Islamic Republics of EuroArabia and AmerIslamia is under construction.

We will fight the infidel to death.

- Meanwhile American laws will protect us.
- Democrats and Leftist will support us.
- N.G.O.s will legitimize us.
- C.A.I.R. will incubate us.
- The A.C.L.U. will empower us.
- Western Universities will educate us.
- Mosques will shelter us
- O.P.E.C. will finance us
- Hollywood will love us.
- Kofi Annan and most of the United Nations will cover our asses.

Our children will immigrate from Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Indonesia and even from India to the US and to the other Western countries. They will go to the West for education in full scholarship. America is paying and will continue to pay for our children's educations and their upbringing in state funded Islamic schools.

We will use your welfare system. Our children will also send money home while they are preparing for Jihad.

We will take the advantage of American kindness, gullibility, and compassion. When time comes, we will stab them in the back. We will say one thing on the camera and teach another thing to our children at home. We will give subliminal messages to our children to uphold Islam at any cost. Our children in America will always care more about Islamic Country's interest than US interest.

We will teach our children Islamic supremacy from the very childhood. We will teach them not to compromise with Infidel. Once we do that from the very early age our children won't hesitate to be martyr. We will take over the Europe first and then US will be the next. We already have a solid ground in the UK, Holland, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Germany, and now in the US.

Our children will marry Caucasian in Europe and in America. We will mixed with intricate fabric of the Western society but still will remember to Jihad when time comes. Who are we?

We are the "sleeper cells".

We will raise our children to be loyal to Islam and Mohammad only. Everything else is secondary.

At the time of the real fight we will hold our own children as our armor. When American or Israeli troops shoot at us the world will be watching. Imagine,… Imagine the news in the world "Death of Muslim babies by infidels".

We know CNN, ABC, CBS are broadcasting live. Al-Jazeera will pour gasoline on the fire. The news will spread like wildfire. "Americans killed 6 babies, 10 babies". "Jews killed two women",
Keep your Nukes in your curio cabinets. Keep your aircraft carrier or high-tech weaponry in the showcase. You can't use them against us because of your own higher moral standard. We will take the advantage of your higher moral standard and use it against you. We won't hesitate to use our children as suicide bomber against you.

Visualize the news flash all over the world, …Moslem mother is sobbing, ….crying. ….Her babies are killed by Jews and Americans, the whole world is watching live. Hundreds of millions of Muslims all around the world are boiling. They will march through Europe. We will use our women to produce more babies who will in turn be used as armor/shield. Our babies are the gift from Allah for Jihad.

West manufactures their tanks in the factory. We will manufacture our military force by natural means, by producing more babies. That is the way it is cheaper.

You infidels at this site cannot defeat us. We are 1.2 billion. We will double again. Do you have enough bullets to kill us?

On the camera:

- We will always say, "Islam is the religion of Peace."
- We will say, "Jihad is actually inner Jihad."
- Moderate Muslim will say there is no link between Islam and Terrorism and the
West will believe it because the West is so gullible.
- Moderate Muslim all over the world will incubate Jihadist by their talk by defending Islam.
- Using Western Legal system we will assert our Sharia Laws, slowly but surely.
- We will increase in number. We will double again.

You will be impressed when you meet a moderate Muslim personally. As your next-door neighbor, coworker, student, teacher, engineer, professionals you may even like us. You will find us well mannered, polite, humble that will make you say, "wow, Muslims are good and peaceful people", But, we will stab you in your back when you are sleeping as we did on 911.

There will be more 911 in Europe and in America. We will say, "We do not support terrorism but America got what it deserved."

Muslims, CAIR, ISNA, MPAC and other international Islamic Organization will unite. We will partner with Leftist, ACLU, with Koffi Annan, and the UN, and if we have to then even with France. Fasten your seatbelt. The war of civilizations has just begun.

We will recite Quran and say Allah-Hu-Akbar before beheading infidels, as we have been doing it. We will video tape those and send it to all infidels to watch. They will surrender - ISLAM means surrender.

We will use your own values of kindness against you.

You are destined to loose.

 





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Ron Paul and the New York Times

Ron Paul and the New York Times 



A few days before today's Iowa Caucuses,  Jamie Kirchik, the author of a 2008 New Republic article exposing odious material in some 20 old year old newsletters that ran under Ron Paul's byline and for which he was publisher, expanded his critique of Ron Paul to suggest that he is not only someone who fraternized with bigots, but that he is indeed a kook who spends all of his time hanging out with various types of conspiracy theorists.






The piece, entitled "Ron Paul's World," is one of a series of hit pieces on Paul that have appeared on Fox News, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and some small political magazines affiliated with establishment Democrats and Republicans.  (One of the funny things about the onslaught against Ron Paul, something that no one in the media is commenting on, is that it is being conducted almost entirely by paid government agents.  On FOX News there is a daily interview with such figures as Clinton White House advisor Dick Morris, Bush White House speech writer Marc Thiessen, and Bush appointee to the United Nations John Bolton on how Ron Paul, his monetary policy, or his foreign policy, is "crazy."   Kirchik, in the last election cycle was merely a journalist at the Democratic magazine The New Republic, but who has been for several years now an employee of a government agency, Radio Free Europe -- a government employee whose job is to represent America abroad is writing articles in the New York Times and the Weekly Standard weighing in in a Presidential race.  (Is that legal?)  This weekend in the Washington Post the aforesaid Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson weighed in on how Ron Paul would not effectively conduct a new Civil War in America, should we have one next year.)

 It seems perfectly obvious that Ron Paul has always been rather promiscuous in being willing to talk to and be interviewed by anyone.  This should have been obvious to Jamie in 2011, if not in 2008, as Ron Paul was notoriously punked by the comedian Sascha Baron Cohen, who lured him into an interview in the guise of a flaming Austrian gay celebrity journalist in the movie Bruno (2009).  Since Jamie is an urban, secular gay journalist, who lived in DC in 2009, it seems hard to believe that he did not either see this movie himself or have friends who did.



Jamie concludes from Paul's "failure" to tell off all of these donors and supporters that Ron Paul is a conspiracy theorist.  I conclude that Paul, an open and congenial man (I have met him) has been frozen out of public debate by the ruling political class for so many years that he will indeed go on a conspiracy kook's radio show if invited as long as the kook supports his ideas about ending the Fed or the American empire. 


Will Jamie also claim that Ron Paul is a flaming gay Austrian?







Jamie concludes from Paul's "failure" to tell off all of these donors and supporters that Ron Paul is a conspiracy theorist.  I conclude that Paul, an open and congenial man (I have met him) has been frozen out of public debate by the ruling political class for so many years that he will indeed go on a conspiracy kook's radio show if invited as long as the kook supports his ideas about ending the Fed or the American empire. 


Will Jamie also claim that Ron Paul is a flaming gay Austrian?




Jamie concludes from Paul's "failure" to tell off all of these donors and supporters that Ron Paul is a conspiracy theorist.  I conclude that Paul, an open and congenial man (I have met him) has been frozen out of public debate by the ruling political class for so many years that he will indeed go on a conspiracy kook's radio show if invited as long as the kook supports his ideas about ending the Fed or the American empire. 


Will Jamie also claim that Ron Paul is a flaming gay Austrian?

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Beware!



New post on Fellowship of the Minds

Beware!

by catscanner150

Technology Beware: The Picture of a 'Dead' Fidel Castro You're Seeing Could Be a Virus

Fidel Castro has died more than once. That's if you believe the internet rumors that have the Cuban dictator croaking every couple years. But now the latest picture making the rounds as "evidence" could actually be malicious.

Business Insider blogger Joe Weisenthal first noticed the picture making the rounds via Twitter Tuesday morning:

There's a rumor going around, mostly on Twitter it seems, that Fidel Castro is dead.

This rumor goes around every few years or months, and there doesn't seem to be anything new to it, except that this picture is apparently floating around.

Here it is:

Euronews noted that same picture, however, could be more than just a harmless prank:

The latest information suggests that it is not a rumour but a pure and simple hoax aimed at spreading a dangerous trojan computer virus.

It is not the first time that Castro's death, an obviously attractive headline, has been used to spread a virus.

Castro was declared dead last August in an email with the subject "Fidel is Dead", that infected computers once the false video report had been clicked on.

Euronews also provided another version of the picture:

You've been warned.

~Tom in NC

catscanner150 | January 3, 2012 at 8:27 am | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/sKuKY-beware

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For Ron Paul, a moment of vindication – and maybe more


For Ron Paul, a moment of vindication – and maybe more
A throng that greets the Republican congressman from Texas on the eve of Iowa's caucuses reflects the growing support he has won.
By James Oliphant, Washington Bureau
January 2, 2012, 4:43 p.m.
Reporting from Des Moines­

For Ron Paul's supporters, the throng that greeted them at a hotel ballroom Monday was more than cause for excitement. It was a moment of vindication, or even, some thought, the start of something very big.

"This is the beginning of the second revolution," said Monte Goodyk, 37, of the 800-person hamlet of Sully, Iowa. Four years ago, Goodyk campaigned for Mitt Romney, made calls for him. But then a friend turned him on to Paul. And that was that.

"Liberty. It's about small government," Goodyk said as he stared at the gathering of about 500 and the banks of cameras from national and international TV networks. Romney, he said, "just wants the same control everyone else does."

Paul, the Texas congressman, was introduced by his son Rand Paul, a U.S. senator from Kentucky.

"There's energy. It's overflowing. And it's coming tomorrow," Rand Paul told the crowd. "We're going to win in Iowa tomorrow."

Ron Paul was delighted with the turnout. "This is almost like a real rally," he exclaimed. "This is great!"

He said that money was pouring into the campaign and that enthusiasm "is growing by leaps and bounds. The crowds are getting bigger."

Mandie Devries, 32, watched from the back of the room, her 11-month-old daughter, Lucy, cradled against her chest in a baby carrier while her four other young daughters, clad in Paul T-shirts, played contentedly on the floor.

She called the crowd "awesome" and said she would be speaking on Paul's behalf at a caucus in Ankeny on Tuesday.

"I'm trying to get all my friends and family there," Devries said. "That's really all we can do ­ fight for the right thing."

She looked down at her baby girl. "What do you say, Lucy?" she said. The infant clapped her hands and chirped. It was something that sounded a lot like "Ron Paul, Ron Paul."

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-paul-iowa-20120103,0,6270724.story

Michelle Bachmann, Tax Thug


Michelle Bachmann, Tax Thug
by Stephan Kinsella on January 1, 2012 @ 2:08 pm ·

I despise all the Republican candidates for President, Ron Paul and Gary Johnson excepted, but including Michele Bachmann, the fake conservative. I am continually amazed the so-called "conservatives" and "Tea Party" types think she is praiseworthy at all.

What is most annoying about her is that she continually refers to herself as a "federal tax litigation attorney". This is annoying on so many levels.  First, it's an attempt to credentialize, to show she's smart or deserves limited government credibility of bona fides because of this.

Second, I have never heard this kind of description in my entire 20 years of practicing law, many at large law firms. No one calls themselves a "federal tax litigation attorney." Tax lawyer, maybe. Litigator. But "federal tax litigation attorney"? She sounds like a rube.

But this is a ruse. It's just an intentionally ambiguous, made-up job description designed to sound impressive while hiding the fact that she worked for the IRS. Yes, she was an IRS tax goon. As noted here:

You'll never guess what Michele Bachmann, the rabble-rousing, tax-reviling, government-bashing idol of America's tea party movement, used to do for a living. Sue tax scofflaws for the Internal Revenue Service.
As she flexes her credentials as a Republican presidential candidate in a field of former governors and corporate executives, Bachmann is more likely to describe herself as a "former federal tax litigation attorney" ­ as she did in her first nationally televised debate ­ than as a three-term member of Congress. But she rarely, if ever, mentions the one and only employer of her legal services: the U.S. Department of Treasury.

When the revolution comes, this fake, stupid, lying, dishonest, statist, sociopathic socialist poseur will have a lot of crimes to answer for.

http://www.libertarianstandard.com/2012/01/01/michelle-bachmann-tax-thug/

Ron Paul Victory Would Validate, Not ‘Discredit,’ Caucuses


January2nd
Ron Paul Victory Would Validate, Not 'Discredit,' Caucuses
Tom Woods

The political and media establishments, who treat a genuine dissident like a man from Mars, are lecturing Iowans that if they choose the wrong person -- e.g., someone those establishments haven't approved for them -- they will "discredit" the Iowa caucuses. These are the same people who pretend to want to "spread democracy" around the world, remember.

What would discredit the caucuses would be a victory for any other candidate. It is not the job of Iowans, or anyone else, to rubber-stamp the choices the establishment has told them are acceptable and safe. It is their job to make up their own minds -- and if that means telling the establishment to take a flying leap, then so be it.

A Ron Paul victory would prove that Iowans are done with letting the New York Times or Rush Limbaugh do their thinking for them. It would prove that they understand what may be the most important point in all of American politics: whenever someone comes along who refuses to play the game and might actually upset the apple cart, the entire establishment -- from Sean Hannity and Mark Levin to the New York Times and Meet the Press -- goes into Destroy mode.

And it would show that a substantial number of Americans are prepared to say: the more you smear, the more viciously you attack, the more obvious your venom for one particular man, the more we will rally to him. Since this is the only man who actually terrifies the crooks, the flip-floppers, the thought controllers, and the whole range of so-called respectable opinion, he is obviously the one to support.

The other theme these days is that Ron Paul is "dangerous." They've got that right -- he's dangerous to them. He threatens the whole bipartisan establishment. Remember that whenever you hear this Pravda-esque warning. To borrow a phrase from Bill Buckley, the propagandists fear Ron Paul for the same reason the baloney fears the slicer.

http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/ron-paul-victory-would-validate-not-discredit-caucuses/

How Rick Santorum Helped Pass ObamaCare


How Rick Santorum Helped Pass ObamaCare
Reports NewsMax:

Rick Santorum's endorsement of Arlen Specter… the key Senate vote to pass Obamacare, is becoming a key issue as the Iowa caucuses near…

Santorum's support of Specter was cited as a key help to the liberal Specter…
Santorum's support for Specter proved crucial in the primary, in which Specter defeated (Pat) Toomey with just 50.8 percent of the vote.

Conservative criticism of Specter appeared justified. Specter backed Obama's healthcare program ­ giving him the swing vote to pass the legislation in the Senate.

In 2009, Specter faced likely defeat in the GOP primary, once again challenged by Toomey. Specter decided to leave the Republican Party and ran for re-election as a Democrat. Obama backed him strongly.

Specter was defeated in the Democratic primary by Rep. Joe Sestak, who then lost the general election to Toomey.

http://www.ronpaul2012.com/2012/01/02/how-rick-santorum-helped-pass-obamacare/

The coming war inside America








http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/43630?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=0ec3be930f-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email

 

Controlled economic collapse, move toward globalism

The coming war inside America

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By Doug Hagmann Monday, January 2, 2012

As the attention of most Americans was captivated by the shiny object in Times Square this weekend like infants fixated on car keys dangled in front of them, Barack Hussein Obama signed into law H.R. 1540, better known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Regardless of any concurrent executive signing statements that are mere window dressing and not legally binding, Obama and every member of congress who crafted and voted for this act has essentially declared war on American citizens on U.S. soil.

To quote Rush Limbaugh, "words mean things." As a career investigator, I can assure you that words contained in local, state and federal laws most certainly mean things, and provide the legal authority for conduct sanctioned by national or state authorities without regard to any promised judicial or prosecutorial discretion that could be likened to the signing statement. The NDAA now codifies the most controversial aspects of the Patriot Act, which "candidate" Obama publicly opposed. What changed?

Greasing the slope

Any person of reasonable sensibilities should be raising a multitude of questions upon considering the current and historical conduct of the executive and legislative branches of our government. It was the attack on 9/11 that ostensibly paved the way for the Bush administration to craft the USA PATRIOT Act, which was signed into law by congress on October 26, 2001. That legislation broadened law enforcement powers well beyond the rights granted to Americans by the U.S. Constitution. While many of the provisions contained in the PATRIOT Act were scheduled to end on December 31, 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a reauthorization bill containing numerous changes in July 2005, and the House of Representatives submitted a bill that kept most of the original bill intact. The largely unchanged bill passed congressional vote on March 2, 2006 and was signed into law by George W. Bush.

Although the PATRIOT Act has gone through various subsequent incarnations, congress crafted and Obama signed a four-year extension last May, extending certain key provisions that particularly focused on businesses in the U.S. It is important to note that the manner and methods in which the U.S. government interprets and carries out the provisions of the PATRIOT Act are classified and kept secret from the American public, an issue rarely addressed by politicians or pundits. Why the secrecy?

Continuity of agenda

One must also question the obvious continuity of agenda from the Bush administration to the Obama administration, and from the congress seated in 2001 through today. Despite pro-Constitutional campaign rhetoric from both Republicans and Democrats, and the rapid acquiescence of some TEA party candidates who now occupy seats of power, it is obvious that the rights of Americans granted by the very Constitution elected officials swore to uphold are under attack. Why the change?

As one looks at the larger picture, pieces of the puzzle seems to become more recognizable.

The move toward globalism

Once thought to be the fanciful designs of the conspiracy minded, there appears to be an acceleration toward one world governance, or the infamous "New World Order." It is an agenda that has been in place for decades, yet the politically myopic and the agent facilitators deliberately avoid any discussion of its existence. Exposure of this agenda has been hobbled by the merger of major news organizations into a half-dozen corporations who control what is reported. Even many who present themselves as purveyors of the truth decline to discuss the globalist agenda, or are held hostage by big money contracts with editorial stipulations and controls.

While the attacks of 9/11 paved the way for passage of the PATRIOT Act, what could explain the draconian legislation contained in the NDAA of 2012? Looking through the prism of current events, those with intellectual honesty can readily see events unfolding that would create conditions to necessitate its implementation.

Controlled economic collapse

Who could have predicted the economic crisis of 2008, just two months before the U.S. presidential election? Nearly everyone who was aware of the agenda of the global elite. The economic crisis of 2008, an incident which the banking elite used the specter of martial law to fund their global operations, landed a financial sucker punch on every American with the approval of congress. Using such phrases as "too big to fail," banking giants, facilitated by the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury and members of congress knowingly and deliberately defrauded the American public out of trillions of dollars, much of which remains unaccounted for despite dubious internal financial audit reports.

While the corporate media remain lapdogs for the banking and global elite and report recovery on the horizon, the real story has yet to be told by our media and elected officials. There is a controlled demolition of not only our national economy, but the entire world economy. Look at the financial death throes of the European Union, which cannot survive, despite the best fiction from cable news economists hired to hide the truth from the masses. The consequential social upheaval will not be contained to Europe, nor will the economic apocalypse. Due to the Ponzi scheme created by the globalist bankers and government leaders from the Goldman-Sachs bloodline, Americans will find themselves in financial turmoil unseen in modern history.

Perhaps it is for those who cannot seem to take their eyes of the shiny objects, or those who camp out at big box stores for bargains on the latest and greatest electronic gadgets that the NDAA was crafted.

Note: For detailed discussion on the signing of the NDAA, tune in to the new Hagmann & Hagmann Report, broadcast live in audio and video format weeknights from 10:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. ET on the Liberty Broadcasting Network. The new show debuts today. For more information, click here.

 


 


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Repo Men By Kevin D. Williamson (this article explains everything....brilliant!)





 

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com           PRINT

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/286704

 

Repo Men


By Kevin D. Williamson


December 28, 2011 4:00 A.M.

 

If you're making money on the Wall Street scale — which is nothing like your boring, middle-management in the Fortune 500, Hamptons-and-Mercedes, barely–a–1 percenter type money — then you can buy basically anything. When real-estate investor Robert Rosania put part of his storied champagne collection up for sale in 2008, the auction was predicted to fetch $5 million — couch-cushion change to Rosania, who had not yet reached his 40th birthday, making him a good deal younger than many of the vintages in his cellar. (Known in the wine world as Big Boy, he brandishes a special saber designed for decapitating head-clutchingly expensive bottles of champagne. Bespoke vintage-champagne cutlery: That's how you know you're rich.)

Not far from Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street was fragrantly encamped, I noticed a young man wandering into a store to buy a pack of cigarettes on a bright Saturday morning, wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a $237,000 Vacheron-Constantin watch. In a world of $600,000 cars (consult your local Maybach dealer) and $4,300-a-night whores (consult Eliot Spitzer), it's no big deal to buy a president, which is precisely what Wall Street did in 2008 when, led by investment giant Goldman Sachs, it closed the deal on Barack Obama.


For a few measly millions, Wall Street not only bought itself a president, but got the start-up firm of B. H. Obama & Co. LLC to throw a cabinet into the deal, too — on remarkably generous terms. President Obama, for a guy prone to delivering prim and smug little homilies denouncing greed, greed, greed — the only of the seven deadly sins that truly offends Democrats (though Mrs. Obama has done some desultory work on gluttony) — is strangely comfortable among the Gordon Gekkos of this world. Shall we have a partial roll call? Beat the drum slowly and call out the names: With unemployment still topping 9 percent, the catastatic world economy teetering on the brink of another, even larger financial catastrophe, and trillion-dollar U.S. deficits as far as the green-shaded eye can see, let's hear it for Obama's first National Economic Council director, Lawrence Summers (of hedge-fund giant D. E. Shaw and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz), who has had some nice paydays courtesy of Lehman Bros., JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup. Let's hear it for Citigroup's Michael Froman, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national-security adviser for international economic affairs, for Hartford Financial's Neal Wolin, deputy Treasury secretary, for JPMorgan's William Daley, Obama's chief of staff, and for his predecessor, Rahm Emanuel of Wasserstein Perella. Let's hear it for Fannie Mae's Tom Donilon, national-security adviser. (No, seriously: One of the luminous interstellar geniuses who brought Fannie Mae to its current aphotic state of affairs, upside down to the tune of trillions of dollars, is running national security, and the former director of the White House Military Office, Louis Caldera, was on the board of IndyMac when it finally went toes up — sleep tight, America!) And, lest we forget, let's have three big, sloppy cheers for economic-transition team leaders Robert Rubin (Goldman Sachs, Citigroup) and folksy tax enthusiast/ghoulish billionaire vulture Warren Buffett.


That's a pretty fantastic lineup, from Wall Street's point of view, but the real bonus turned out to be Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who came up through the ranks as part of the bipartisan Robert Rubin–Hank Paulson–Citigroup–Goldman Sachs cabal. Geithner, a government-and-academe man from way back, never really worked on Wall Street, though he once was offered a gig as CEO of Citigroup, which apparently thought he did an outstanding job as chairman of the New York Fed, where one of his main tasks was regulating Citigroup — until it collapsed into the yawning suckhole of its own cavernous ineptitude, at which point Geithner's main job became shoveling tens of billions of federal dollars into Citigroup, in an ingeniously structured investment that allowed the government to buy a 27 percent share in the bank, for which it paid more than the entire market value of the bank. If you can't figure out why you'd pay 100-plus percent of a bank's value for 27 percent of it, then you just don't understand high finance or high politics.

But high finance is not the only corporate mystery to be unraveled here: President Obama's repetitious denunciations of Big Oil have not stopped his man David Axelrod's firm from setting up Astroturf campaigns on behalf of Exelon subsidiary ComEd, or stopped the president from appointing GE chief executive/tax-minimization engineer/offshoring guru/bailout baby Jeff Immelt to his risible White House jobs commission, or choosing former Kraft and Duke Energy board member Mary Schapiro to run the SEC.

When President Obama opined during his 2011 State of the Union speech that a corporate tax-rate cut might be just the thing for America after a year of record corporate profits, his left-wing base was shocked and dismayed. Heck, some conservatives were caught offguard, too. Perhaps they hadn't noticed who was running the Obama administration: In large part, the same guys who plan to be running the next Republican administration.


Barack Obama (Nasdaq: bho) has been a pretty good buy for Goldman Sachs et al. Sure, the Frank-Dodd financial-reform bill is going to be a sharp pain in Wall Street's pinstriped posterior, and it's going to cost some moneymen some money, but not enough that anybody's going to be out a champagne saber. Mostly, Big Business has got just what it wanted from the Big Government guys in the Obama administration: Frank-Dodd did not do much of anything to lift the cloud of opacity over the world of structured finance, which is what the investment bankers feared most. President Obama has made some noises about ending the carried-interest treatment that allows the fine fellows who run private-equity funds to pay 15 percent in taxes on their gazillion-dollar take-homes instead of 35 percent, but the private-equity guys know that isn't going to happen, mostly because they've heard this story before, from Senator Schumer, and they recognize it for what it is: an inelegant appeal for campaign donations. Beyond Wall Street proper, your Fortune 500 types are looking at the many-splendored tax credits and subsidies and grants and stimulus dollars lavished upon firms such as the now-defunct Solyndra and the really-should-have-been-defunct General Electric and wondering: How do I get me some of that?

What's worse is that much of official Washington is looking at Wall Street and asking the same question. The answer: Easy. If Wall Street has done pretty well by investing in Washington, the more despair-inducingly germane fact is that Washington has done pretty well by investing in Wall Street. A catalogue of recent congressional insider-trading, self-dealing, IPO shenanigans, and inexplicably good investment luck would fill an entire volume, and in fact it has: The book has the Tea Party–bait title Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison, by Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution. That's a lot of title for a fairly slim book (176 pages of reportage, plus end notes), but, despite its relatively slender dimensions, it cost me an entire night's sleep: I spent half the night reading it in a single sitting and the other half having nightmares about it. It's the most offensive and disturbing thing I've read since sampling the oeuvre of the Marquis de Sade as an undergraduate.


Some of the highlights: Nancy Pelosi and her husband were parties to a dozen or so IPOs, many of which were effectively off limits to all but the biggest institutional investors and their favored clients. One of those was a 2008 investment of between $1 million and $5 million in Visa, an opportunity the average investor could not have bought, begged, or borrowed his way into — one that made the Pelosis a 50 percent profit in two days. Visa, of course, had business before Speaker Pelosi, who was helping to shape credit-card-reform legislation at the time. Visa got what it wanted. The Pelosis have also made some very fortunate investments in gas and energy firms that have benefited from Representative Pelosi's legislative actions.

The Pelosis made a million bucks off a single deal involving OnDisplay, the IPO of which was underwritten by investment banker William Hambrecht, a major Pelosi campaign contributor. Writes Schweizer: "The same Bill Hambrecht went before the House Finance Committee, chaired by Barney Frank, a Pelosi ally, to push for a change in the registration process for stock IPOs, an exemption called Regulation A. Under current law, a company that plans an IPO of less than $5 million in stock gets an exemption from detailed reporting. Hambrecht wanted the exemption raised to $30 million, which would greatly benefit his business, making IPOs easier, quicker, and far less expensive. As the hearings began, Congressman Frank said, 'I should note also that it was Speaker Pelosi who first called this to our attention earlier in the year. It is something that the speaker has taken a great interest in.'"


Besting Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Gary Ackerman (D., N.Y.) got in on the pre-IPO action, without putting up so much as one rapidly depreciating U.S. dollar of his own assets, when a political supporter — who just happened to be the biggest shareholder of the firm in question — lent him $14,000 to buy shares in the private company, which he then sold for more than a hundred grand after the firm went public. There wasn't so much as a written loan agreement.


On and on and on it goes: Sen. John Kerry invested aggressively in health-care companies while shaping health-care legislation. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R. Ala.) was a remarkably apt options trader during the days when he had a front-row seat to Congress's deliberations on the unfolding financial crisis. The Obama administration poured billions of dollars into solar companies, of which the failed Solyndra is the most infamous. But a lot of that money went to other firms, including First Solar, which is owned by billionaire Obama supporter Ted Turner and by Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is omnipresent. And during the financial crisis, a big piece of Goldman Sachs was bought by Warren Buffett, who stacked up a lot of cash when the government poured money into that struggling investment bank with the support of Barack Obama. When the federal government bought into Goldman Sachs, it negotiated for itself a 5 percent dividend. Warren Buffett got 10 percent — on top of the benefit of having Washington inundate his investment with great rippling streams of taxpayers' money. Republicans are no saints, either, but Democrats were running the congressional show during such crucial episodes as the implementation of the bailouts and the health-care debate — which were big investment opportunities for political insiders with access to market-moving information. Congress has effectively exempted itself from insider-trading rules, not that the SEC would have the guts to go after a Senator Schumer or a Speaker Pelosi for these exploits. And that — not campaign contributions, not lobbying — is the really stinky petri dish of festering corruption at the nexus of Washington and Wall Street. You want a case for limited government? That's it. And Wall Street is on the wrong side of the argument, which is one reason free-market conservatives should not romanticize the lords of finance.

Say this for them, though: Gordon Gekko at least was an honest social Darwinist. He made a lot of money and declared that "greed is good." Michelle Obama (2007 household income: $4,238,165) made a whole lot of money and then lectured a bunch of blue-collar women in Zanesville, Ohio (median household income: $28,854) that they had a moral obligation to forgo high-paying jobs in "corporate America" (which, notice, is not exactly HQ'd in Zanesville, Ohio, poverty rate: 26.3 percent) in order to "work for the community." Like Gordon Gekko, she's a carnivorous competitor at the top of the socioeconomic food chain, but she's telling us to eat our veggies, like good little herbivores.


Wall Street can do math, and the math looks like this: Wall Street + Washington = Wild Profitability. Free enterprise? Entrepreneurship? Starting a business making and selling stuff behind some grimy little storefront? You'd have to be a fool. Better to invest in political favors. As Schweizer points out, until fairly recently the Blackstone Group, the world's largest private-equity manager, had spent only about $250,000 a year on lobbying, which to me sounds like one part-time K-Streeter and a lot of lunches. After a friendly encounter with Senator Schumer, the firm saw the scales fall from its eyes and began to spend millions of dollars a year on lobbying — and hired Senator Schumer's former staff counsel, along with dozens of other Democratic staffers, to do its lobbying. (Senate Republicans will get their chance, don't you worry, as soon as they're back in the majority.) You'd think that the Blackstone Group, along with the rest of Wall Street, would be happy with its investment. But the pinstripes gang is suffering from a collective case of buyers' remorse: Sure, the insurance guys got the keys handed to them with Obamacare, and the structured-finance guys still are sitting securely behind their fortifications of impenetrable complexity and staggering leverage, and the investment banks got to underwrite a lot of "Build America Bonds" and nonsensical stimulus financing. But they want more — that is their nature. And they're sizing up a cozy little investment in Mitt Romney, a fact that should give Republicans pause.


Blackstone's boss, Stephen Schwarzman, will hold a fundraiser for Romney at his Park Avenue apartment in December, and he's encouraging his fellow pirate captains to climb aboard the USS Willard. Romney is himself a Wall Street guy, hailing from a firm with the cartoonishly villainous name of Bain (say it out loud) Capital. Bain, charmingly, is not really backing its founding partner or his party, its donors thus far preferring to channel most of their political contributions to President Obama. But Bain, currently the No. 2 political donor bloc among moneymen, is a tiny minority among the major financial-sector political players in that it is currently leaning Democrat. The top dog — Goldman Sachs, as though you needed to be told — is backing Republicans by a wide margin at the moment. So is practically every other major Wall Street player: Donors associated with Bank of America, Paulson & Co., the American Bankers Association, New York Life, the National Association of Realtors, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, UBS — all are going Republican. At this point in the cycle, only Citigroup's donors have joined Bain in staying Democratic — and, really, how could you blame them, given the sweet deal that Tim Geithner laid in their lap? Romney's ten biggest donor blocs include Goldman Sachs (his biggest — No. 1, as always), Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase. Bain's thrown a little goodwill money his way, too.


So, what does Wall Street want?


Here's what Wall Street doesn't want: It doesn't want to hear from Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann or even Newt Gingrich, or suffer any sort of tea-party populism. It wants you rubes to shut up about Jesus and please pay your mortgages. It doesn't want to hear from such traditional Republican constituencies as Christian conservatives, moral traditionalists, pro-lifers, or friends of the Second Amendment. It doesn't even want to hear much from the Chamber of Commerce crowd, because those guys are used-car dealers and grocery-store owners and for the most part strictly from hick, so far as Wall Street is concerned. Wall Street wants an administration and a Congress — and a country — that believes what is good for Wall Street is good for America, whether that is true or isn't. Wall Street doesn't want free markets — it wants friends, favors, and fealty.


Also, the princes of finance don't want to be hearing the name "Jon Corzine," king of the Wall Street Democrats, former senator from and governor of New Jersey, legendary former CEO of Goldman Sachs, echoing throughout the corridors of power too much in the near future. The too-big-to-fail banks want Corzine crucified, but they want him crucified quietly, because they are looking to wring a little cash and preferential treatment out of his richly deserved crucifixion. And that may be the real reason the Wall Street gang is giving Republicans a second look.


Take a little trip down Bad Memory Lane back to 2008 and the ignominious death of Lehman Bros. A particular Lehman maneuver, infamous in the financial world as "Repo 105," is worth taking a look at. (Warning: Very light and totally digestible financial gobbledygook ahead.) "Repo" is short for "repurchase agreement." A repurchase agreement is something that is used when a big institution that has a lot of assets, like an investment bank, needs some cash, as all such big institutions do from time to time, to run its daily operations while waiting for various deals to mature and unwind. Investment banks don't usually sit on a lot of cash, because cash just sits there. A repo works like this: I give you a whole bunch of securities and you give me a whole bunch of cash, on the condition that I agree to buy back those securities from you in the near future, along with a fee. You get a little profit and I get the liquid cash I need and, if I'm a gold-plated Wall Street name, like Lehman Bros. once was, you probably don't worry all that much about the securities I'm giving you to hold, since you expect me to be able to repay that short-term loan. If the Mister Magoos at Standard & Poor's or Moody's say it's Triple-A, that's good enough for you. Unless the day comes when you actually have to sell them because I can't pay you back.

Repos are a really good and totally legitimate tool for raising short-term cash. But Lehman noticed something interesting about the way repos are regulated: If the ratio of the value of the securities lent out to the cash received is anywhere between 98 cents and 102 cents on the dollar, then it goes on the books as a loan. But if the ratio is, say, 105 cents on the dollar, then the deal is booked as a sale — even though the lender is getting his money back and the borrower is getting his securities back. If the deal is booked as a sale, then you can, if you can find a willing counterparty, get a whole bunch of bad assets off your books and a whole bunch of cash onto them, which makes your firm look like it's in a lot better shape than it is — bonus time! That is true even though there is a repurchase agreement in place, meaning that the deal is going to get reversed and unwound at some point.


You'd think that after the Lehman debacle, all that would have changed. In fact, you'd think that would be practically the first thing to be changed — not credit-card swipe fees or executive-compensation rules or any of the rest of it. But it wasn't. Corzine's firm, MF Global, used something called "repo to maturity" — basically Repo 105 with a facelift — to accomplish the same goal: making the books look better by hiding bad assets, in this case a bunch of losing investments in European government bonds. The bigger problem is that while MF Global was both acting as a broker for its customers and making its own bets, it failed to keep the customers' money segregated from its own, which is why some $600 million in customers' money went missing. Now there's a whole bunch of people wanting to get paid back and not enough money for everybody to get made whole, and the big Wall Street banks want to make sure that they're first in line, with the government rewriting the rules of bankruptcy to put them ahead of the local-yokel customers out in the sticks. If you don't think that the government can just arbitrarily rewrite the bankruptcy rules to suit its political preferences, revisit the General Motors bailout, when it did just that, shortchanging bondholders in favor of the union goons who act as Democratic footsoldiers and dues-collectors.

"At the risk of oversimplifying it," one Wall Street insider explains, "imagine a bank went bankrupt. Then the regulators came in and cracked open all the customers' safe-deposit boxes, even though they knew for certain that none of the contents belonged to the bank. Then they tossed those assets into the pile for the creditors to pick through and told the box holders to get in line as well. That's what folks are saying is happening here. And in a situation like that, who wants a safe-deposit box?"


So there you have it: hedge-fund titans, i-bankers, congressional nabobs, committee chairmen, senators, swindlers, run-of-the-mill politicos, and a few outright thieves (these categories are not necessarily exclusive) all feeding at the same trough, and most of them betting that Mitt Romney won't do anything more to stop it than Barack Obama did. If anything, the fact that Romney is having the least luck with the firm that knows him best speaks better of him than does the enthusiasm he apparently inspires in Goldman Sachs et al.


Either way, the last thing Wall Street wants is for the Corzine scandal to launch a new round of frenzied outrage out there on the fruited plains where dwell people who don't know an IPO from a CDS, and who might suspect that something here is not entirely on the up-and-up. They're hoping that conservatives can be buffaloed with a bit of cheap free-market rhetoric into not noticing that something is excruciatingly amiss here. They are the repo men, headpiece filled with subprime-mortgage derivatives, and they are looking to repossess the Republican party they abandoned in 2008 (see "Losing Gordon Gekko," National Review, March 9, 2009). Free-market, limited-government conservatives should be none too eager to welcome them back, nor should we let our natural sympathy with the profit motive blind us to the fact that a great many of them do not belong in the conservative movement, and that more than a few of them belong in prison.


— Kevin D. Williamson is a deputy managing editor of National Review.

 




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