Recovery begins with realism and there is nothing to be gained by kidding ourselves. On the topics that I know most about, the administration is beyond being a disappointment. It’s beyond inept, unprepared, weak, and ineffective. Four and again two years ago, the people demanded change. As a candidate, the President promised change. In foreign policy and the core economic policies, he delivered continuity instead. That was true on Afghanistan and it was and is true in economic policy, especially in respect to the banks. What we got was George W. Bush’s policies without Bush’s toughness, without his in-your-face refusal to compromise prematurely. Without what he himself calls his understanding that you do not negotiate with yourself. (James K. Galbraith - Salon)
One of the few newspapers in the U.S.A. which doesn’t vilify WikiLeaks-founder Julian Assange for publishing selected diplomatic cables which shine a light on deceitful American diplomacy in the world is the The New York Times:
NYTimes: For many Europeans, Washington’s fierce reaction to the flood of secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks displays imperial arrogance and hypocrisy, indicating a post-9/11 obsession with secrecy that contradicts American principles.
But there are more. For example former Bush-official Goldsmith said he agrees “with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified. He is unable to see how the publications by WikiLeaks can be distinguished from either that of The New York Times, as well as that of “Bob Woodward, [who], with the obvious assistance of many top Obama administration officials, disclosed many details about top secret programs, code names, documents, meetings, and the like.”
Hacker JeroenzOr is een amateur op computergebied. Vandaar natuurlijk dat hij zo gemakkelijk is gepakt. De rector van Jeroens school in Den Haag: “Deze jongen is blijkbaar onhandig geweest, maar ik betwijfel of hij de gevolgen van zijn daad heeft overzien”, aldus rector Ordelman, die verder opmerkte dat Jeroen niet eens informatica in zijn vakkenpakket heeft.
A hacker collective in The Hague called RevSpace are supoorting ‘Jeroenz0r’, currently in custody for cyberattacks against Mastercard and Visa. They will teach him how to be a real hacker. That is, an ethical hacker.
Wednesday the High Tech Crime Unit of the Dutch police arrested the 16-year-old boy on accusations of distributing DDoS (denial-of-service) attacks against the websites of Mastercard and Visa earlier this week.
Computerworld - The suspect, who sports the online nickname “Jeroenz0r,” is a regular on the IRC chat channels of the local hacker club in The Hague called Revelation Space. Some of its members know the boy. “What he has done is of course out of the question,” says Koen Martens, head of Revspace in an interview with Webwereld, a Dutch IDG publication. [read on] (more…)
Many major donors are saying they may withhold funds from President Obama’s re-election campaign because of the recent tax-cut compromise, the Los Angeles Times reports. “He’s got many great qualities, but he is not a fighter,” said one wealthy donor. “I’ve met with many donors and the level of disappointment is extreme.”
Progressive Americans have been very upset by the deal made by the Obama-administration to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy for two years in exchange for extending unemployment benefits, correctly arguing that the cuts for the rich will do little to stimulate the economy while adding billions to the deficit. Democrat lawmaker Barney Frank said: Unemployment benefits are not a concession.
In a radio-interview yesterday President Obama agreed that the tax cuts for the wealthy will not create “one single job“:
INSKEEP: Let me ask you about something that we heard from one of our listeners. … The question that we got was: “Please ask him how keeping the tax rate for the richest the same as it has been for a decade creates one single job.”
OBAMA: It doesn’t, which is why I was opposed to it — and I’m still opposed to it.
The issue here is not whether I think that the tax cuts for the wealthy are a good or smart thing to do. I’ve said repeatedly that I think they’re not a smart thing to do, particularly because we’ve got to borrow money, essentially, to pay for them. [read on] (more…)
Another story about criminal activity by a major pharmaceutical company. (More here and here.) Phizer Pharmaceutical, the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, hired investigators to find evidence of corruption against a Nigerian attorney general. So he would drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis in Nigeria, according to a WikiLeaked US embassy cable.
Pfizer was sued by the Nigerian state and federal authorities, who claimed that children were harmed by a new antibiotic, Trovan, during the trial, which took place in the middle of a meningitis epidemic of unprecedented scale in Kano in the north of Nigeria in 1996.
[read on] (more…)
This is how Christian love and forgiveness works for some worshippers in the U.S.A. Here the actual proclamation of the Westboro Baptist Church who is going to demonstrate at the funeral of Elizabeth Edwards, the woman once married to presidential candidate John Edwards.
Glenn Greenwald is consumed by the widespread lie in the American media that WikiLeaks ‘indiscriminate’ dumped secret cables of the American government on the internet. This lie proves powerfully how mindlessly subservient the American establishment media has become. They are willing to repeat completely false claims as long as it pleases the right people — the same people to whom they claim they are ‘adversarial watchdogs’.
How reporting on WikiLeaks can and should be done shows this editorial from The Guardian yesterday, in which the British newspaper not only defends WikiLeaks, but also justifies the ‘denial of service’ attacks from anonymous individuals. One of them is the yesterday arrested sixteen year old boy boy from the Netherlands who hacked various companies (MasterCard, Amazon, Paypal, etc.) who are serving in the Government’s war on WikiLeaks.
The Guardian - These companies all considered that their association with WikiLeaks damaged their brand image, a reflection prompted in some cases by a helpful call from the US state department. In essence they are trying to have it both ways: pretending in their marketing that they are free spirits and enablers of the cyber world, but only living up to that image as long as they don’t upset anyone really important…
The hacktivists of Anonymous may be accused of many things – such as immaturity or being run by a herd instinct. But theirs is the cyber equivalent of non-violent action or civil disobedience. It disrupts rather than damages.
[read on] (more…)
How to get them radical American terrorists? Well, see how they do it in Southern California. There, convicted criminal Craig Monteilh spent fifteen months pretending to be Farouk al-Aziz, a French Syrian in search of his religious roots. His endless talk of violent “jihad” so alarmed worshippers atthe local mosque, that they took out a restraining order against him.
The spying game wasn’t all it was cracked up to be for Craig Monteilh, a convicted criminal recruited by the FBI to investigate the march of radical Islam into Southern California. His endless talk of violent “jihad” so alarmed worshippers at the local mosque, that they took out a restraining order against him. [read on] (more…)
De Nederlandse politie heeft in Den Haag een 16-jarige jongen gearresteerd die betrokken was bij de aanval op de website van onder meer kredietkaartmaatschappij MasterCard. De website werd woensdag platgelegd door sympathisanten van WikiLeaks als reactie op de blokkering van donaties aan WikiLeaks door MasterCard.
Dutch Teen Arrested in WikiLeaks-Related Cyber Attacks Politics Daily - 2 hours ago A Dutch teenager is under arrest, suspected of helping to carry out cyber attacks against two major credit card companies that were allegedly masterminded …
Dutch Police Arrest Suspect in Pro-WikiLeaks Hacking Wall Street Journal
all 4,526 news articles »
Royal Dutch Shell says it is “absolutely untrue” that it has infiltrated every Nigerian ministry. The denial comes after a U.S. embassy cable was released by WikiLeaks alleging that Shell’s top manager in Nigeria claimed the company had sources inside of “all relevant ministries and that Shell had access to everything that was being done in those ministries.” Shell said it would not comment further on the cables.
White House reporter James Rosen, one of Fox News straight news reporters, said last night on The O’Reilly Factor, also Fox News, that Americans should be very concerned about national security since Obama said he’s open to negotiating with hostage-takers.
Political insiders in the U.S. stayed up late last night to discuss this alarming development. Almost all analists concluded that this means the end of the political career of Barack Obama. The general opinion was that ‘Obama just made himself a one term president’.
Terrorism experts warned that America should be prepared for a new wave of hostage taking by Al Qaeda and other muslim radicals now that they know that President Obama is prepared to negociate with hostage takers.
The New Republic is a neoconservative magazine where the people gather who made this world into a much bigger mess than it already was. Todd Gitlin wrote an article about WikiLeaks and, as expected of a neocon, it is total rubbish.
Glenn Greenwald pointed that out. Now Todd responds on the website of New Republic. Here is what Greenwald has to say about Todd.
What’s new: ’Whole neocon column grounded in a pure falsehood’
Glenn Greenwald: At The New Republic, Todd Gitlin has now posted what he calls: “A response to Glenn Greenwald.“
I’ll leave it to everyone to decide on their own if what he wrote even remotely constitutes a sufficient or responsible acknowledgment of error, except I’ll just note that his principal excuse — that he wasn’t aware when he filed his piece of the AP article negating his whole premise — doesn’t change the fact that (a) the central premise of his denunciation of WikiLeaks was factually false and (b) all he had to do — and should have done — to know that what he wrote was inaccurate was look at WikiLeaks’ release of cables, which happened to be the topic of his article.
That would have immediately revealed that they were not indiscriminately dumping thousands of cables. By slothfully condemning WikiLeaks for its release of cables that he obviously never even bothered to look at — but instead just repeated what he heard elsewhere — he wrote a whole column grounded in a pure falsehood and now lacks the integrity to acknowledge that clearly.
De Amerikaanse Westboro Baptist Church uit Kansas zien in homo’s de bron van alle kwaad op de wereld. De kerk, voornamelijk bestaande uit een grote familie, heeft de eigenaardige gewoonte om begrafenissen te verstoren van Amerikaanse soldaten die zijn omgekomen in Irak. Hun boodschap is dat de dode soldaten God’s straf is voor het toestaan van homosexualiteit in de VS.
Zo’n soort God dus!
De kerk kondigde gisteren aan te gaan demonstreren tijdens de begrafenis van Elizabeth Edwards, de vrouw van de, vanwege een affaire in opspraak geraakte, voormalige Democratische presidentskandidaat John Edwards.
Westboro Baptist Church will picket Elizabeth Edwards’ funeral
Members of Westboro Baptist Church said today they will demonstrate outside Elizabeth Edwards’ funeral this weekend. The Westboro Church is well known for holding publicity-seeking anti-gay stunts at funerals, particularly at those of U.S. soldiers. Why the church chose Edwards’ funeral to publicly demonstrate their hate for gays, is not clear. On it’s website the church claims Elizabeth Edwards “spent her life in defiance and disobedience to God” and spews other invectives towards her.
What’s most striking about Obama’s deal with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is the extent to which it only reinforces Obama’s image as an inside technocratic dealmaker. It turns out he will negotiate with anyone to get what seems sensible to him.
The problem is that this approach shortchanges the need to carry on a sustained argument on behalf of his overall objectives and rejects the idea that some “fights,” a word Obama uses with disdain (except, perhaps, when he’s criticizing liberals), are instructive and can help accomplish change over the long term.
Has any other President had a self-described “base” who hated him more? Has any other President had a “base” that was constantly attacking him?
That is not the right question. The right question is has any other President (and in particular, the President’s staff) been so eager to let go on his base? How about a top official calling the people who voted you in office: ’fucking retards’? The fact is that the President has never showed his base that he is fighting for them.
About one in four detainees released from Guantanamo are suspected or confirmed to be involved in terrorism activities, the Obama administration said yesterday. Most of the problematic ex-detainees were released during the Bush administration; the Obama administration has transferred 66 prisoners, of whom 5 are confirmed or suspected of post-detention terrorist activity.
Bij ons is de man de baas. Ik beslis alleen over de kleine dingen, waar we ons geld aan uitgeven bijvoorbeeld. Mijn man gaat over de grote dingen, zoals onze houding tegenover Noord Korea.
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Bij ons is de man de baas. Ik beslis alleen over de kleine dingen, waar we ons geld aan uitgeven bijvoorbeeld. Mijn man gaat over de grote dingen, zoals onze houding tegenover Noord Korea.
Mevrouw De Wit