obama's inauguration financed partially by bailed-out wall st execs from abc: The country is in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, which isn't stopping rich donors and the government from spending $170 million, or more, on the inauguration of Barack Obama. The actual swearing-in ceremony will cost $1.24 million, according to Carole Florman, spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. It's the security, parties and countless Porta-a-Potty rentals that really run up the bill.
obama reaches out for mccain’s counsel from nytimes: Not long after Senator John McCain returned last month from an official trip to Iraq and Pakistan, he received a phone call from President-elect Barack Obama. As contenders for the presidency, the two had hammered each other for much of 2008 over their conflicting approaches to foreign policy, especially in Iraq. (He’d lose a war! He’d stay a hundred years!) Now, however, Mr. Obama said he wanted Mr. McCain’s advice, people in each camp briefed on the conversation said. What did he see on the trip? What did he learn? It was just one step in a post-election courtship that historians say has few modern parallels, beginning with a private meeting in Mr. Obama’s transition office in Chicago just two weeks after the vote. On Monday night, Mr. McCain will be the guest of honor at a black-tie dinner celebrating Mr. Obama’s inauguration.
big party, small change: baby, we were born to run...the empire from chris floyd: I understand there's a big party going on in Washington this week, where hundreds of thousands of people are gathering to celebrate Bob Gates'retention as Pentagon chief. I mean, that is what this shindig is all about, isn't it? Hope and.... continuity? [See Arthur Silber for more.] We've got Bush's manstill driving the war machine, we've got Bush's generals still waging the "War on Terror" all over the world. We've got a president who is eager to spend his "political capital" on slashing "entitlements," because everyone must sacrifice, everybody's "going to have to have some skin in this game" - everyone, that is, except for the president's Wall Street backers, who are about to receive yet another tranche of billions of taxpayer dollars in what they are now calling openly - and rightly - "opportunity funding." We've got a president honoring homophobic right-wing preachers who urge their followers to imitate the mindless zeal of Nazis and Bolsheviks in doing "whatever it takes" to establish Christianist dominion. We've got a president whose education chief believes in turning over the teaching of America's children to corporations -- and the military. We've even got a president who follows Dick Cheney's "good advice" on interrogating Terror War captives. It seems like the only place you can find "change" in Washington these days is in the cup of a street beggar, left homeless and jobless in the great bankrupting of the nation by Wall Street and the war machine.
obama’s web wasteland from sitepoint: Tomorrow, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and the first African-American chief executive of the country. That is indeed a historic moment in American politics and race relations, and Obama’s campaign certainly had a good deal of significance, especially in terms of how it utilized the Internet. The Internet will play a huge part in tomorrow’s inaugural festivities, but what has happened to the vast social networks that Obama built during that campaign? What will happen to them?
ny councilman proposes mandatory public service for students from epoch times: Councilman Eric Gioia (D-Queens) and representatives from City Year, New York Cares, Common Cause NY, and Big Brothers Big Sisters gathered at the Church of St. Francis Xavier on Sunday, Jan. 18. Gioia proposed that New York City create a requirement of 20 hours of community service for high school graduation, inspired by President-Elect Barack Obama’s calling the nation to service in his Inauguration and Mayor Michel Bloomberg’s pledging to encourage public service at the State of the City address delivered last week.
350,000 conservatives pledge to block obama's socialistic agenda from raw story: A conservative group, Grassfire.org, announced on Monday that its online petition pledging "patriotic" opposition to President-elect Barack Obama has gathered 350,000 signatures. (By presstime, the groups website was claiming a total of 371,453.) Grassfire's founder, Steve Elliot, stated, "This is not a personal attack on Barack Obama. On the contrary, this is a call to action for conservatives who profess love for our country and respect for our institutions. Our disagreements with the President are based in ideology and public policy only. From this firm foundation we are mounting a patriotic, resilient, conservative resistance to Obama's agenda."
masonic rituals live on in inauguration from washington times: President-elect Barack Obama's swearing-in Tuesday will incorporate several elements out of America's Masonic past. One-third of the signers of the Constitution, many of the Bill of Rights signers and America's first few presidents (except for Thomas Jefferson) were Freemasons, a fraternal organization that became public in early 18th-century England. Although it became fabulously popular in America, at one time encompassing 10 percent of the population, Pope Clement XII condemned Freemasonry in 1738 as heretical. The latest pronouncement was issued in 1983 by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI - who called Masonic practices "irreconcilable" with Catholic doctrine. Still, as the first president, George Washington had to come up with appropriate rituals for the new country. He borrowed many of them from Masonic rites he knew as "worshipful leader" of a lodge in Alexandria. His Masonic gavel is on display at the Capitol Visitor Center. Until this inauguration, Washington's Masonic Bible - on which he swore his obligations as a Freemason - was used for the presidential oath of office. President-elect Barack Obama will use Abraham Lincoln's Bible.
new 9/11 brochure for obama inauguration from 9/11 blogger: DC 911Truth has produced an attractive new brochure to be distributed at the Obama Inauguration and surrounding events. On the cover, President Obama is asked to "help America learn the truth about 9/11," (160kb PDF) but the interior is aimed at general audiences who may not be aware of problems with the official account, or who may be quick to dismiss any questions as conspiracy theories.
obama to send more troops to afghanistan from washington post: President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like "surge" of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years. Instead, Obama's national security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current U.S. force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-U.S. NATO troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the "central front on terror."
hillary won't rule out military force on iran from dpa: US secretary of state-designate Hillary Clinton on Tuesday would not rule out the possible use of military force by the Obama administration to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. 'We are not taking any options off the table at all,' Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Comittee during her confirmation hearings to become the top US diplomat.
obama’s energy czar: socialist agent for world govt from paul joseph watson: Barack Obama’s “climate czar” Carol Browner has been exposed as being a member of Socialist International, a highly influential group headed by a Bilderberg Group luminary that calls for the implementation of global government, despite Socialist International’s attempts to seemingly “memory-hole” information about Browner on their website. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that Obama and his cabinet are preparing to exploit fearmongering about global warming to push new measures of taxation, regulation and internationalism. Obama himself has vigorously promoted the revival of a bill that would slash carbon emissions by 80 per cent, a move that would inflict a new Great Depression, cost millions of jobs, and sink America to near third world status. Obama has also publicly stated his intention to create a new infrastructure of “green brigades” and informants to regulate every aspect of our behavior in the name of saving the planet under the guise of a “national civilian security force,” a cadre we are guaranteed will be as strong or stronger than the U.S. Army.
obama picks cia vet brennan as counterterror adviser from washington post: Barack Obama has picked John O. Brennan as his top adviser on counterterrorism, a role that will give the CIA veteran a powerful voice on the government's use of security contractors and on other sensitive issues in which he recently has played a private-sector role.
spidey goes to washington from nytimes: Among the millions expected to converge on the nation’s capital for Inauguration Day on Jan. 20 will be at least one superhero: Marvel Entertainment is publishing a comic book in which Spider-Man meets President-elect Barack Obama and foils a scheme by the Chameleon to ruin the Inauguration. The six-page story, written by Zeb Wells and illustrated by Todd Nauck and Frank D’Armata, finds the wall-crawler in Washington, where he uncovers a plot to undermine the incoming president. Mr. Obama has previously stated that he is a comic book fan, and a Spider-Man fan in particular. The story will be part of Amazing Spider-Man No. 583 and arrives in stores on Wednesday. Another comic book company embracing the president is Dark Horse, which will be sending him 30 collected editions of comics featuring Conan the Barbarian. Mike Richardson, Dark Horse’s publisher, said he hoped the comics would provide “just a bit of escape in those brief moments away from the office.” The delivery is something of a family affair. It is being orchestrated between Ari Emanuel, a Hollywood agent who represents Dark Horse’s film properties, and his brother Rahm Emanuel, the president-elect’s chief of staff.
obama warns of dire consequences without stimulus from ap: President-elect Barack Obama warned of dire and long-lasting consequences if Congress doesn't pump unprecedented dollars into the national economy, making an urgent pitch Thursday for his mammoth spending proposal in his first speech since the election. "In short, a bad situation could become dramatically worse" if Washington doesn't go far enough to address the spreading crisis, the Democrat said as fresh economic reports showed an outlook growing increasingly grim.
from kurt nimmo: On December 23, the “conservative” preacher Pat Robertson told CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux that he was pleased as punch with the election of Barack Obama. “I am remarkably pleased with Obama. I had grave misgivings about him. But so help me, he’s come in forcefully, intelligently. He’s picked a middle of the road cabinet. And so far, if he continues down this course, he has the makings of a great president,” said Robertson.
Obama’s “middle of the road cabinet” consists of people hailing from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the secretive Bilderberg group. Timothy Geithner, Obama’s pick to head up the Treasury, is head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and is the Fed’s main liaison with Wall Street. Obama’s so-called Economic Recovery Advisory Board will be chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Obama has outlined his geopolitical plans in Foreign Affairs, the mainstay periodical of the Council on Foreign Relations, and his wife, Michelle Obama, is a member of a branch of the CFR in Chicago.
It would seem Pat Robertson does not have a problem with any of this. Last week, Robertson claimed to have a conversation with God and in this revelation — Robertson makes predictions based on his supposed conversations with God at the start of the new year — the preacher was told the “people will welcome socialism in order to relieve their pain. Nothing will stand in the way of a plan by Obama to restructure the economy in the same fashion as the New Deal in the ’30s.”
Obama will restructure nothing and Robertson knows it. Barack Obama is a cigar store Indian propped up to placate the people. He is window dressing for the New World Order. “The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes,” Felix Frankfurter, Justice of the Supreme Court, told FDR, the man credited with the first New Deal. “The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” Obama has stacked his administration with representatives from these financial elements.
Robertson knows this. He wrote a book entitled the New World Order. In the book he stated that Colonel Edward M. House, along with other internationalists, realized that America would not embrace world government without a change in public opinion.
from laissez faire books/google video: This informative and entertaining video presentation explains exactly why capitalism has always brought prosperity and why socialism has always brought poverty and suffering. It's packed with the kind of facts you want at your fingertips when discussing these kinds of issues. For instance, did you know that...
* In the 20 years before the factory system was widely established in England, over 74% of London's children died before age 5, largely from starvation? And that after the factory system was widely established, that mortality rate dropped to less than 32%?
* The average income of the lowest 10% of those living in the 10 most capitalist nations is nearly two-and-a-half times as high as the average income in the 10 most socialist nations?
[Wealth of Nations] contains... chapters on the Early Colonists, Industrial Revolution, Inventions, Soviet Gardens, Immigration, Compassion for the Poor, Genocide Records, Socialism's Appeal, Democracy, the U.S. Constitution, and more.
The sections on democracy are particularly persuasive, arguing that democracy is much more compatible with socialism than it is with capitalism, and that the Founding Fathers feared democracy as a road to tyranny. It argues that the great contribution of the American political experience was not democracy but the concept of limited, enumerated powers -- an aspect of the U.S. Constitution that has not been enforced since Hugo Black joined the Supreme Court in 1937.
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roubini: a big crash is coming, but i don't believe in gold*
