Global Markets Fall on Fears of US Recession
Summary of news, views, facts and fictions concerning the Bush** administration and the effort to reinstate Constitutional Rule in America.
"I got my butt kicked."
The nation's top spy, Michael McConnell, thinks the threat of cyberarmageddon! is so great that the U.S. government should have unfettered and warrantless access to U.S. citizens' Google search histories, private e-mails and file transfers, in order to spot the cyberterrorists in our midst.
That's according to a sprawling 18-page story on the Director of National Intelligence by Lawrence Wright in the January 21 edition of the New Yorker. (The story is not online).
In the piece, McConnell returns, in flamboyant style, to his exaggerating ways, hyping threats and statistics to further his bureaucratic aims. For example, McConnell regurgitates the hoary myth that computer crime costs America $100 billion a year. THREAT LEVEL traced down the source of that fake-factoid in September to a former privacy officer for the state of Colorado.
Presumably using unsupported stats like that, in May 2007 McConnell convinced President Bush that a massive cyber-attack on a singe U.S. bank would be worse for the economy than than the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, the article reports. In response, the NSA developed a mind-boggling, but still incomplete, plan to eavesdrop on the internet in order to protect it.
Chain of Custody Issues Loom Over Recount
Irregularities in NH Primary Results Prompt Hand Recount
Clinton Optical scan 91,717 52.95%
Obama Optical scan 81,495 47.05%Clinton Hand-counted 20,889 47.05%
Obama Hand-counted 23,509 52.95%
The percentages appear to be swapped. That seems highly unusual, to say the least.
Massive US Naval Presence Destabilizing Gulf
The Media decided early on that the Democratric primaries were going to be a two-person race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. One could have argued that the two way race is the perfect storm; two big personalities slugging it out. A three-way race would muddy the waters, make it harder to cover. So, you could have argued that for sheer production value alone, Edwards was going to be ignored, marginalized, and possibly vilified.