He writes a formal letter to The Honorable J.M. McConnell Director of National Intelligence Washington, D.C. 20511

Dear Director McConnell:

I have received a copy of your March 28, 2008, speech at Furman University. In it, you described Senate action on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, stating:

"We had a bill go into the Senate. It was debated vigorously. There were some who said we shouldn't have an Intelligence Community. Some have that point of view. Some say the President of the United States violated the process, spied on Americans, should be impeached and should go to jail. I mean, this is democracy, you can say anything you want to say. That was the argument made. The vote was 68 to 29."

As you correctly noted, the bill was the subject of vigorous debate. Many members of the Senate expressed serious concerns about the lack of checks and balances included in the legislation and the potential impact of the new authorities on the privacy and civil liberties of Americans. Many Senators were also concerned that retroactive immunity for companies alleged to have cooperated with the President's warrantless wiretapping program would undermine the rule of law.

However, I am not aware of any Senator saying or suggesting that "we shouldn't have an Intelligence Community" or that President Bush "should be impeached and should go to jail." I would therefore appreciate your providing a list of all statements made by Senators during the debate that you believe support these assertions. If there are no such examples, you should issue an immediate correction and an apology.

While all sides of this debate deserve to be heard, to falsely attribute statements to United States Senators serves only to mislead the American people. It also undermines your credibility and that of the position of Director of National Intelligence.

Sincerely,

Russell D. Feingold U.S. Senator

Bingo. Bravo Senator Feingold. Bravo.

This is from the Chicago Tribune, but I read about it at the bigpicture blog.

The local market conditions are what seems to determine the abandonment decision. In a region where the job and real estate market is doing anything better than "a little soft," I would surmise that abandonment makes no sense at all.

However, at a certain point, in a weaker region, with declining neighborhoods, certain lenders might make the decision to simply walkaway from a large swath of (potential) real estate holdings, on the simple basis that it might be cheaper to do so.

There are very significant costs to this. Consider what the potential impact of these property abandonments by the lender means:

- Total write off of the loan; - Boarded up homes / neighborhoods; - Loss of tax revenue to the local school district or town; - Long delays before the local town, municipality, or state can take possession due to tax arrears.

Thus, these incomplete foreclosures/abandonments can have very significant impacts.

If this becomes widespread, we could be in the process of creating an entire new universe of suburban slums . . .

But slums are fine with the rich elites that run the financial sector. They don't live there.

I love Tom Toles.

When the elites break the law, they get 6 month furloughs at Federal prisons, or they pay a fine and get to keep 90% of the illegal proceeds. When everyone breaks the law, we lose everything and got locked up with rapists and murders for years.

Keep watching cops 911, so you can maintain your skewed perspective about Justice.

Absolutely incredible. I'm watching this baseball game between the Angels and the Rangers, and then suddenly, a graphic comes on the screen while the announcer states the caption. The Armed Forces Network is broadcasting the game to our forces in 177 countries across the globe.

Did you catch that? This was on the FSN West (Fox Sports Network) but it really did not matter what network. Proudly boasting that we have our troops stationed in 177 countries who get to watch a baseball game back in the homeland. Need I say more.

We are an empire, and we don't even realize we are an empire. This baseball game is a cultural event for troops stationed in 177 foreign lands. Just like British folk Eating Mutton stew in the middle of Shanghai listening to Mozart.

But the American empire is different than the British version, which openly acknowledged and proclaimed the British sovereignty. The navigation of the world's seas during the time period before 1800 was European, and the British navy was essentially the policeman of the waters for European commerce. Today the world's commerce is more widely dispersed: from Korea, to Japan, China, and India, to Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Chile, and Morocco.

To say America has replaced the function of the British Navy is a current historical question. Our navy is certainly unparalleled across the entire globe. No other national naval force even comes close, except that Russia has probably an equal number of submarines. Most of the 177 bases in 177 countries are really just air or naval bases, however, the presence is nonetheless involved and interwined in the local foreign politics.

How many nations does the United States allow to keep full-time military personnel within the borders of the United States?

Zero. Enough said.

Social Security is a government program supported by a dedicated tax, like highway maintenance. Now you can say that assigning a particular tax to a particular program is merely a fiction, but in fact such assignments have both legal and political force. If Ronald Reagan had said, back in the 1980s, “Let’s increase a regressive tax that falls mainly on the working class, while cutting taxes that fall mainly on much richer people,” he would have faced a political firestorm. But because the increase in the regressive payroll tax was recommended by the Greenspan Commission to support Social Security, it was politically in a different box - you might even call it a lockbox - from Reagan’s tax cuts.

The purpose of that tax increase was to maintain the dedicated tax system into the future, by having Social Security’s assigned tax take in more money than the system paid out while the baby boomers were still working, then use the trust fund built up by those surpluses to pay future bills. Viewed in its own terms, that strategy was highly successful.

The date at which the trust fund will run out, according to Social Security Administration projections, has receded steadily into the future: 10 years ago it was 2029, now it’s 2042. As Kevin Drum, Brad DeLong, and others have pointed out, the SSA estimates are very conservative, and quite moderate projections of economic growth push the exhaustion date into the indefinite future.

But the privatizers won’t take yes for an answer when it comes to the sustainability of Social Security. Their answer to the pretty good numbers is to say that the trust fund is meaningless, because it’s invested in U.S. government bonds. They aren’t really saying that government bonds are worthless; their point is that the whole notion of a separate budget for Social Security is a fiction. And if that’s true, the idea that one part of the government can have a positive trust fund while the government as a whole is in debt does become strange.

But there are two problems with their position.

The lesser problem is that if you say that there is no link between the payroll tax and future Social Security benefits - which is what denying the reality of the trust fund amounts to - then Greenspan and company pulled a fast one back in the 1980s: they sold a regressive tax switch, raising taxes on workers while cutting them on the wealthy, on false pretenses. More broadly, we’re breaking a major promise if we now, after 20 years of high payroll taxes to pay for Social Security’s future, declare that it was all a little joke on the public.

The bigger problem for those who want to see a crisis in Social Security’s future is this: if Social Security is just part of the federal budget, with no budget or trust fund of its own, then, well, it’s just part of the federal budget: there can’t be a Social Security crisis. All you can have is a general budget crisis. Rising Social Security benefit payments might be one reason for that crisis, but it’s hard to make the case that it will be central.

But those who insist that we face a Social Security crisis want to have it both ways. Having invoked the concept of a unified budget to reject the existence of a trust fund, they refuse to accept the implications of that unified budget going forward. Instead, having changed the rules to make the trust fund meaningless, they want to change the rules back around 15 years from now: today, when the payroll tax takes in more revenue than SS benefits, they say that’s meaningless, but when - in 2018 or later - benefits start to exceed the payroll tax, why, that’s a crisis. Huh?

I don’t know why this contradiction is so hard to understand, except to echo Upton Sinclair: it’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary (or, in the current situation, his membership in the political club) depends on his not understanding it. But let me try this one more time, by asking the following: What happens in 2018 or whenever, when benefits payments exceed payroll tax revenues?

The answer, very clearly, is nothing.

The Social Security system won’t be in trouble: it will, in fact, still have a growing trust fund, because of the interest that the trust earns on its accumulated surplus. The only way Social Security gets in trouble is if Congress votes not to honor U.S. government bonds held by Social Security. That’s not going to happen. So legally, mechanically, 2018 has no meaning.

Now it’s true that rising benefit costs will be a drag on the federal budget. So will rising Medicare costs. So will the ongoing drain from tax cuts. So will whatever wars we get into. I can’t find a story under which Social Security payments, as opposed to other things, become a crucial budgetary problem in 2018.

What we really have is a looming crisis in the General Fund. Social Security, with its own dedicated tax, has been run responsibly; the rest of the government has not. So why are we talking about a Social Security crisis?

There is no social security crisis. There are a bunch of idiosyncratic, desperate elitists who want to destroy the government by the people, and creating a financial crisis enables them to "get government down to the point where you can flush it down the toilet." Rule by spoiled rich trust fund babies and their sycophants is preferable to the collective wisdom of a voting public. These conservatives don't want to conserve the accumulated historical bureaucracy of the government. They want to tear it down and build offices for lobbyists and public relations firms.

Especially when there are prostitutes involving a Governor of New York. Stealing money from the Republican National Committee by a man who was put in the position in 1995 is minor when the Democratic Governor gets busted putting his dilly in the wrong place and paying for sex with high society hooker.

Christopher Ward, the National Republican Congressional Committee's longtime treasurer, was fired in January after committee officials learned that he had been making unauthorized fund transfers dating to 2004, said Rep. Tom Cole, the committee's chairman.

"Based on analysis conducted to date, it appears likely that over a period of several years Ward made several hundred thousand dollars in unauthorized transfers of NRCC funds to outside committees whose bank accounts he had access to, including joint fund-raising committees in which the NRCC participated," Cole said in a written statement.

"He also appears to have made subsequent transfers of several hundred thousand dollars in funds from those outside committees to what appear to be his personal and business bank accounts."

[SOURCE: Brian Todd and Dugald McConnel | CNN | 14 March 2008]

If this would have been the Democratic National Committee, the press would have been all over it. But it's the corrupt Republicans and so the story dies on a windy Friday afternoon.

But after 2+ years, tens of thousands of New Orleanian homeowners are still waiting for the company contracted to disperse the checks to actually do so. Even while the company is making profits, their Public Relations officials whine about sifting through 150,000 applications and about inefficient personnel.

Click here for the MSNBC story.

One individual, according the above article: ~~ Adam Knapp, deputy director of the LRA, said bad publicity ultimately will spur ICF to better perform. “Their stock will rise and fall on their delivery here,” Knapp said ~~

What does bad publicity have to do with the ability of government contractors to exploit their niche and profit off of the tax-payers? Has bad publicity changed Halliburton and the cost-overruns of General Dynamics? $2000 screw-drivers and $50 toilet paper didn't go away because MSNBC did a few stories in between the garbage they normally spew about Brittany and Paris Hilton.

Hat tip to bigpicture

Kicks off by the invasion of Ecuador by the semi- dictatorial corrupt, death-squad loving Presidente of Columbia?

By the way we give $500 million a year to support the Columbian Army as aid in their fight against "terrorism."

They find laptops on the "terrorists" after they blow them away with Uranium shipments on it. Huhn? How could they have cracked the initial user/password screens so quickly? Sounds like more yellowcake from Niger to me.

We can't buy this lie again.

Meanwhile Venezuela sends troops and tanks to the border.

Gulp.

Do a google on "Columbia Ecuador"? Notice the News Alert at the top.

Here is a fair story on the situation from Salem, Oregon.

I am listening to this radio call-in talk show, called Clout, where the host Richard Greene does an excellent job of letting all kinds of people come on the show and talk about what they think and want to say. Congrats Richard.

This guy comes on ranting and raving about how Hillary didn't mean anything about this and that, and then so what, because Obama needs to toughen up and wise up, and that he is so sick of constantly hearing everyone tell Hillary to quit, like she is gonna break the party, and blah, blah. Richard allowed Brent Budowsky comment, and then let the man have his say, and back and forth. Brent was very judicious and warm in his statements. This man appeared to not hear a damn thing anyone else was saying. All he did was complain, while heatedly trying to convince everyone that Hillary is the one to trust, because no matter what, "we can't let another Republican take the Presidency in 2008."

Everyone agrees with that last statement. But it is commpletely disconnected with everything else the man tried to say. Even when Richard and Brent 120% agreed with him, it wasn't enough. It become obvious after 5 minutes, when Richard politely moved on to another caller. Then I got to thinking. Maybe that man was paid to act that way. Maybe the whole point was to try to inflame the listeners of the radio show with some contrived thought process. It explains a whole lot.

That's what television and corporate media are. They disperse ways of thinking that permit weak minded people to cheerlead and hold beliefs that are anti-thetical to their existence.

Ya dig.