Globe Map North America wallpaper
There are serious problems with this analogy. When you send something by FedEx, you can track your package and account for its whereabouts at all times. You can have your package insured against loss or damage. That has not been the case with Blackwater. The people who foot the sizable bill for its “services” almost never know, until it is too late, what Blackwater is doing, and there are apparently no consequences for Blackwater when things go lethally wrong. “We are essentially a robust temp agency,” Prince told his fans in Michigan. He’s right about that one. A temp agency serving the most radical privatization agenda in history.
Blackwater may soon be out of work in Iraq. They’re trying to take up the slack with drug trade related counter-terrorism. If we have privately employed secret agents running around the world working for foreign governments in our name on the taxpayers dime there are bound to be issues of accountability. If Congress in consultation with the CIA genuinely thinks this kind of work needs to be done it also begs the question why the taxpayers should want a counter-drug trade/counter terrorism corporation doing the CIA’s job at inflated prices. This is particularly shocking news Dyncorp has been doing similar outsourced work for years.
Total Intelligence, which opened for business in February 2007, is a fusion of three entities bought up by Prince: the Terrorism Research Center, Technical Defense and The Black Group–Blackwater vice chair Cofer Black’s consulting agency.
Senator John McCain McSame believes like the Decider in whos foot steps he would like to follow that presidents of the U.S. are not a co-equal branch of government, but have powers far beyond those in the Constitution, Adviser Says McCain Backs Bush Wiretaps
A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.
As Greenwald and the NYT have noted this is a huge flip flop by McCain. One suspects completely motivated by the sense that McCain feels the need to pander to the base of the rabid Right. Six months ago McSame said,
“There are some areas where the statutes don’t apply, such as in the surveillance of overseas communications. Where they do apply, however, I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is.”
Following up, the interviewer asked whether Mr. McCain was saying a statute trumped a president’s powers as commander in chief when it came to a surveillance law. “I don’t think the president has the right to disobey any law,”
Is this the new honor and patriotism. The ability to spin in completely opposite directions. Supporting the rule of law one day and announcing how superfluous the law is a few months later. In Republican-world this is thought of as foreign policy credentials and good leadership. Maybe in the old Soviet Union, but not in the U.S.
Senator Obama’s purchase of his house seems like a small story, but it typical ankle biter fashion the Right seems to have grown attached to the myth they have created around it and as one would expect just can’t seem to get the facts straight, Hannity, Morris repeat refuted claims about the price of Obama’s house
“The couple who sold Barack Obama his Chicago home said the Illinois senator’s $1.65 million bid ‘was the best offer’ and they didn’t cut their asking price because a campaign donor bought their adjacent land, according to e-mails between Obama’s presidential campaign and the seller.”
They can’t prove that the seller is lying so Hannity and Morris juvenile gossip and speculation becomes the mud they sling in the hopes that enough people believe the gossip over the facts to damage Obama’s reputation. They’re probably preaching to the choir as the Right already believes any vicious smear directed at Obama and there are some crazy ones out there.
The Long Goodbye 