I Can't Believe Nancy Pelosi Voted Yes!

Watch Nancy Pelosi's floor speech.

She gave a speech I thought was going down as one of those awesome historical speeches that shows that our representatives have woken up. As cheesy as this sounds (ok, as cheesy as this is), I was close to tears because I was finally seeing someone in a position of power acknowledging that the $700 billion cash grab is the final blow of the ultimate scam that the Bush administration/The Club is trying to pull off. She even gave a solution to the financial disaster that would only cost $35 billion and seemed like a great idea. I was thinking, "Thank God! They are finally catching on! The Speaker of the House isn't one of them after all! "

And then she said it was a good enough bill.

And then she voted for it.

Seriously? Seriously?

Monday Morning Coffee

For this week's Monday Morning Coffee, instead of a mix of reading and short videos, I'm posting a movie.

Congress is going to come back to work today and announce their brilliant plan to save our financial system. I think it is important for us to realize that the system itself might be the problem.

This movie is approximately one hour.

Highlights from Senate "Bailout" Hearing

The Senate today had a hearing during which the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee politely questioned Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson.

Ben Bernanke is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is a banking cartel that controls the printing and distribution of our currency. The creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 was unconstitutional.









Henry Paulson is Secretary of the Treasury. The Bush administration wants him to have absolute control over the $700 billion bailout with no oversight or input from anybody.





I do not trust either of these men. Neither should you.

Some highlights from today.

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Watch how both Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson have minor panic attacks in response to the idea of asking the "institutions" that take our money being asked to give something back if they end up successful:



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Senator Schumer: If you don't plan to spend all the money in the next three months anyway, why can't you take some of the money now, like $150 billion, and if your idea is working, Congress can give you more in a few months?

Henry Paulson: "I think that would be a grave mistake. I think what this is about is market confidence."

So, in other words, give me all the money right now because this is about making people believe that everything is okey dokey with the financial markets.



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Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio is the first to speak for me. It was 3 hours and 29 minutes into the hearing.

And notice how quick Ben Bernanke is to assume we're a bunch of idiots.



Also, I'd like to point out that deliberate greedy actions taken to make someone's friends and families filthy rich are not "mistakes". And Ben Bernanke of the Fedreal Reserve does not think those people owe us an apology in exchange for $700 billion dollars.

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The first time I said, "Exactly!" out loud today.



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What?! Did you guys know that Henry Paulson was the CEO of Goldman Sachs until mid-2006? I didn't. Just when I thought I couldn't possibly trust him any less...



In the first video clip posted, Judge Doom Paulson said that he is very frustrated with the issue of executive compensation.

Oh really?

In the May 30, 2006 CNN Money article that announced President Bush's decision to appoint Henry Paulson as Treasury Secretary, the following was revealed:

Paulson made more $38 million in 2005, according to Goldman's proxy statement, with most of that, $30.1 million, coming from restricted stock awards, and stock options valued at $7.3 million. He got $29.2 million in stock grants in 2004 and $20.8 million in 2003, on top of his base pay of $600,000 each of the last three years.

His Goldman stock holdings at the end of 2005 were worth just under $700 million at current prices, not including the value of his stock options.

Looks like he personally had a lot to lose when Goldman Sachs got into the failure game.

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This is a Republican talking.



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Even the Republicans are with Senator Schumer on the "What's the rush?" argument against $700 billion at once.



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Senator Dodd addresses Section 8 of Paulson's proposal which doesn't allow anyone to know what he's doing with the $700 billion.



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Am I the only one that feels like Roger Rabbit?

Monday Morning Coffee

Start by watching this video



History Repeats

From Wikipedia:

The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s (commonly referred to as the S&L crisis) was the failure of 747 savings and loan associations (S&Ls) in the United States. The ultimate cost of the crisis is estimated to have totaled around USD$160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. government—that is, the U.S. taxpayer, either directly or through charges on their savings and loan accounts^[1]—which contributed to the large budget deficits of the early 1990s.

The concomitant slowdown in the finance industry and the real estate market may have been a contributing cause of the 1990-1991 economic recession.

Might we see this wiki in the future?

The sub-prime mortgage crisis of the late 2000's was the beginning of the failure of the United States financial system. By September 22, 2008, estimated losses from failing financial giants such as Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG had totaled 1 trillion, about 700 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. government—that is, the U.S. taxpayer, either directly or through charges on their bank accounts - which contributed to the debilitating debt of the late 2000's.

The concomitant slowdown in the finance industry and the real estate market may have been a contributing cause of the 2009 economic depression.

Dear Rachel Maddow,

I wrote to you after the first television broadcast of your new show because I was very disappointed in the content. Since then, I think you have done a much better job.

One thing I would appreciate to see more of is information on the background of nicknamed stories. My generation hasn't been given much real news in our young adult years (I was born in 1982). We need to be let into the loop.

One example I have of what I'm talking about is the "Keating Five" scandal. I watch your television program, listen to your radio show, and listen to Thom Hartmann's radio show regularly, and yet I still have very little understanding of what happened related to the nickname 'Keating Five'. I know John McCain did some bidding for the banking industry related to the savings and loan crisis of the 1980's/1990's and that he got scolded by Congress for it. I know that you and your guests would like for Barack Obama to bring it up more in his campaign. What I don't know is the Keating Five story itself.

Barack Obama can mention 'Keating Five' if his campaign decides to do so, but it won't mean anything to us "young voters" if we have no idea what he's talking about. I can promise you that with all the scandals which have occurred in our lifetimes, very few of us care enough to find out for ourselves.

This is where you guys at MSNBC have the resources to explain it to us well. One thing that needs to be kept in mind about us people in our twenties and younger is that we have always grown up with televisions and computers and have done a lot of our learning through videos. This is why we like to learn from The Daily Show. It more natural for us to learn and remember when we get a lot of digital visuals with stories.

We have also lived our entire lives in the era of Reagonology, and actually educating us (as opposed to privatizing our school system) wasn't exactly a priority. Reaganites educating us on their own illegal behavior is, again, not something they have done well.

As much as I tend to agree with you on your political opinions, I really value your programs when you focus on teaching. That's something I would love to see more of and would help me to explain to people why they should care.

Thanks again for your all your great work. It's about time MSNBC finally added another person to represent the 70%ers in the television media.

They Want to Control Our Money

"The administration is asking Congress for far-reaching new powers to take over troubled mortgages from banks and other companies, including purchasing sour mortgage-backed securities. Administration officials and congressional leaders are to work out details over the weekend."
Associated Press - September 19, 2008

"Senator Schumer... announced, mid afternoon, that the Federal Reserve and Treasury were going to create a new government institution which would purchase all of the toxic debt instruments being held by Wall Street."
Chris Gaffney, Vice President of Everbank - September 19, 2008

The Club (my name for the group of people working together to transform this country into something other than what the founders intended) wants unprecedented power over our bank accounts in the wake of a financial crisis.

Read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. It's happening again right now.



The Fed

The Federal Reserve prints and controls our money but is not a part of our government. It is also not a private corporation. It's the middle man between the two. It's a banking cartel set up under the most secretive of means by the bankers themselves in 1913.

The Constitution says the United States Congress (the branch belonging to us) should be in charge of controlling our money.

A decade later, a follow up scam was pulled so that the banking moguls could seize our treasure and seize societal control. The result of that scam is better known as "The Great Depression".

The Federal Reserve has more power than ever. We are still being scammed.

Down with Depressants

To learn from history is also to look back towards what was done right.

The depression caused major political changes, the most notable among them being the New Deal, which instituted large-scale federal relief programs aimed to aid the agricultural industry and support labor unions. The formation of the New Deal coalition by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was another notable accomplishment. This disaster had a profound effect on the psychology of an entire generation and strongly influenced the development of post-war monetary institutions.
"Great Depression in the United States" Wikipedia

But this time, we are currently in the hands of people who believe in this:

Monetarists, including Milton Friedman and current Federal Reserve System chairman Ben Bernanke, argue that the Great Depression was caused by monetary contraction... He claimed that, if the Fed had provided emergency lending to key banks, or simply bought government bonds on the open market to provide liquidity and increase the quantity of money after the key banks fell, all the rest of the banks would not have fallen after the large ones did, and the money supply would not have fallen as far and as fast as it did.
"Great Depression" Wikipedia

The money supply might not have fallen, but the value of the money itself would.

The Possibilities

The recent paralyzing rise in money supply has been a major contributory factor to rising inflation. The central bank has never denied that it has been printing money to fund some of the country’s critical supplies.
Lance Mambondiani, The Zimbabwe Times - June 12, 2008

This Man Must Not Win

Monday Morning Coffee

Alberto Gonzales Brought the Papers


In March 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft was hospitalized for a few weeks when a gallstone blocked his pancreas and he had to have his gallbladder removed. While he was recovering, the acting Attorney General was his deputy, James Comey. On March 10, 2004, the night that the Presidential order the Bush administration was trying to use to justify illegally spying on all Americans was set to expire, then Bush's work lawyer Alberto Gonzales and chief lap dog Andy Card tried to go behind acting Attorney General James Comey's back to get a signature by visiting Comey's ill boss John Ashcroft after business hours at the hospital. The signature they were looking for is one that would say 'Yes, this Presidential order authorizing the Bush administration spying program is legal'. They had to go behind James Comey's back because he refused to sign it. John Ashcroft, in quite dramatic fashion, refused to sign it too.

One of the many problems with Alberto Gonzales's and Andy Card's actions on the night of March 10, 2004 was that hauling around classified documents and speaking about them in a hospital room is an inappropriate way to handle classified information. The Justice Department's inspector general was assigned to look into whether or not Alberto Gonzales illegally mishandled classified information, including whether or not he took Top Secret papers with him when he left his office. After all, if he never took the eavesdropping papers or any related notes outside the White House, how could he bring them to the hospital to get them signed?

The inspector general's office has just released their report. It concluded that Alberto Gonzales did bring home Top Secret documents related to the 'spying on Americans' scheme.

"Comey Don't Play That"- May 15, 2007




He Put Us All in Danger - Literally

During the work day on March 10, 2004, before Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card's prime-time hospital journey, these three guys:




Alberto Gonzales - then the head lawyer for the White House








Dick Cheney - Darth Vader

Micheal Hayden - NSA director (aka - the guy in charge of the spying)






put together an "emergency meeting" in the White House Situation Room to see if Congress could find a way around James Comey's refusal to certify that the spying program was legal. The people invited were some of the most powerful members of Congress known by their media code-name "The Gang of Eight".

During that meeting, Alberto Gonzales took notes. While the notes were meant to record the "Gang of Eight's" responses to the briefing, Alberto also wrote down,

"Specific operational terms associated with the program, as well as the codeword used to identify the program...One of these operational terms was “zealously protected” by the NSA and that designating the references to the term in the notes as TS/SCI was “not a close call.”

(TS/SCI = Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information)

After he wrote the notes containing that super secret information, Alberto Gonzales said he stored them in a safe in the West Wing of the White House. Then, the report concludes that

"On February 3, 2005, when he was sworn in as Attorney General, Gonzales took classified notes about the NSA surveillance program from the White House to the Department of Justice and then to his residence, where he kept them for an indeterminate period of time and stored them there in his briefcase. We further concluded that although Gonzales had a safe in his residence, he did not store the notes in it, and that in any event a SCIF, the only proper storage facility for such TS/SCI materials, was never installed there."

And that, my friends, is a crime.

According to the Justice Department inspector general, anyone who improperly handles classified material in this manner "shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both."

Despite this, the Justice Department has declined to prosecute.

A Tale of Two Safes


In the Justice Department inspector general's report, we also learned something strange about Alberto Gonzales's home decor.

When George W. Bush brought Alberto Gonzales into the White House as his lawyer, the White House provided Alberto Gonzales with some materials he would need for a home office, including a phone, a fax, a shredder, and a safe. When Alberto Gonzales was made Attorney General (the head of the Justice Department), all equipment provided by the White House was supposed to be switched out for Justice Department equipment. On February 26, 2005, everything was switched out - except for the White House safe. That stayed in Alberto's home.

Sometime within the next few weeks, a member of Alberto's security detail called the Executive Office of the President (EOP) to get the combination to the White House safe at Alberto's crib "because Gonzales could not open it" (this is how they know that Alberto didn't store those classified notes in his home safe). The staff at the White House tried to help, but there were no records matching the bar code and serial number for Gonzales's safe. In August, Alberto Gonzales moved into a new home and the White House safe was returned -still unopened- to the mother ship.

Anyone else curious about what was in that safe?

Should Have Claimed Executive Privilege

Monica Goodling was an employee of Alberto Gonzales's at the Justice Department. After graduating from Pat Robertson's "law" university (Regent's University), she went to work for the Republican party as an "opposition researcher", which is a person who digs up dirt on people all day. When the Republicans won (?) the election in 2000, she was given a job at the press office in the White House. She was later moved to the executive office, where she was in charge of "personnel management and evaluation". She was later made "White House liaison to the Justice Department", which means she was the person who coordinated business between the Bushies and Alberto Gonzales.

The President has the authority to hire and fire federal prosecutors. A group of Republicans used this authority to fire prosecutors who were either not willing to play by their rules or had positions those Republicans wanted filled by their own people.

In May 2006, Monica Goodling was granted immunity by the House Judiciary Committee for the crimes related to the firing of those attorneys that she committed in the White House/Justice Department and she testified to Congress. During her testimony, Monica didn't realize what the term 'caging' meant when she said that fellow "opposition researcher" Tim Griffin was in charge of the 'caging lists' for the Republicans in 2004.



Tim Griffin was a right hand man of Karl Rove and US Attorney Bud Cummins was fired so that Tim Griffin could be appointed US Attorney of Arkansas.

The Patriot Act was used to make that possible.

After her testimony, the Bush administration stopped allowing anyone to testify in front of Congress.

"They Got Served" - July 30, 2007




Check for Junk Mail Dated September 5th

A good way to steal a contest is to get the other side to not score points. Even if your team doesn't get a lot of points itself, if you can get enough from the other side to not count, your score can end up higher than theirs and you win.

Imagine if the Giants had paid the referees to reverse a touchdown score in the Super Bowl.

Imagine if Kelly Clarkson found a way to get American Idol vote phone operators not to count calls from guys.

Imagine if the Republicans had found a way to get a bunch of Democratic voters disqualified.

While the first two scenarios are highly unlikely, the third one happened and we know one way they did it. It's called 'voter caging'.

The idea is to get people's votes not to be counted by challenging their eligibility to vote. The party doing the caging (Republicans 1980's, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006) basically says 'This person does not really live at this address, so don't count their vote." The votes get "challenged" and the caged are not allowed to vote.

Caging is done by creating a list of people who would likely vote for the other side and then sending them something in the mail to addresses they may not be living at. In 2004, some reasons the targeted people weren't living at their listed addresses was because they were students or off at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The caging flyer itself is marked "do not forward" so that when it sits in the mailbox for a while, it gets returned to the sender. The cagers are then able to challenge the votes of the people whose names appear on the stack of mail that they get back.

It's like fishing with a net. You won't get them all, but you can still get a lot.

Information about Republican caging efforts, while ignored on television everywhere except BBC, went viral on some American talk radio shows and on the internet and therefore enough people knew this happened in 2004 to know to keep an eye out for it in 2008.

This year's caging letters may have gone out back in March and again on September 5th in Ohio. We also need to keep an eye out in Nevada, Florida, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico. To find out if you have received a caging letter, look specifically for the words 'Do Not Forward' or 'Return to Sender'. The return address and/or sender will be an office associated with the Republican party. They may look like junk mail.

If you think you have received one, you should make sure your local county clerks office, your Congressman, your two Senators, and your local media outlets all receive a copy. Posting it on the internet to get the word out wouldn't be a bad idea either.

PBS Still Has Real News

This is part of a great investigative report on Republican caging in 2004. The two videos are 17 minutes total.





Thanks for reading. Now get to work.

MSNBC Set to Ruin Rachel Maddow

One of my favorite places to get my news from is Air America. The biggest reason is that I don't enjoy reading on computer screens and much prefer to get my information via radio programs that can be loaded onto my Ipod, then researching for accuracy and details later. As opposed to the majority of radio programs that I have sampled on Air America, which largely confuse politics with news, the Rachel Maddow show is contextually one of the best because she starts every day with news from Iraq, covers governmental crimes, interviews constitutional lawyers, Congressmen and Senators, economists, and is ex-military and does a great job of explaining what to make of events in foreign lands. To give you an idea of her character, she definitely has an intellectual crush on Jon Stewart.

However, since she has begun doing pundit interviews consistently for MSNBC, there has been a election-centric shift in her radio programs and I suspect it is because she is asked to talk about political gossip so often on television that she is starting to get sucked in.

Beginning tonight, Rachel will have her own television show to be aired after Keith Olberman at 9pm EST. When I heard that Rachel Maddow got a show, I told a friend that she will either be a force that will elevate television news or television news will ruin Rachel. This response she gave to a question posed by Think Progress doesn't offer much comfort:

What’s the mission of the show going to be?

The mission of the show is…it seems kinda obvious, which is that, in the eastern time zone, Keith Olbermann is on at 8 and then Keith Olbermann is on at 10. It’s repeated. And there’s an hour in between. And Keith has very high ratings. … The idea is, in between two hours of Keith, what can we do to hold on to as many of those viewers as possible and even to attract new ones. And they think I’m the person to do that. So that’s the mission — keep Keith’s numbers.

With the rest of the corporate news stations focused so heavily on election he-said, s/he said, making the entire election into a highly rated Jerry Springer Show with a governmental twist, will Rachel Maddow be able - or willing - to resist?