Jesse Ventura Warns Of Obama Assassination Attempt

Former Minnesota Governor says government will target any independent who gets close to White House

Paul Joseph Watson

Wednesday, April 2, 2008
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Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura caused shockwaves during a national radio interview today when he warned Barack Obama to be wary of a potential assassination attempt, saying that the government would target any independent politician who got close to the White House.

The last chapter of Ventura's new book, Don't Start The Revolution Without Me, is a fictional tale about an assassination attempt on his life following a run for President.

The context of Ventura's warning was a discussion about new evidence concerning the assassination of Robert Kennedy, after it emerged that there were additional shooters to accused assassin Sirhan Sirhan.

"I believe very strongly that if an independent candidate like myself - a rogue - were to get into the President's race legitimately, if the polls looked like he had a chance to win, I believe that candidate would either be physically assassinated or would be assassinated credibility-wise or in some manner by our government because I do not believe they would ever allow a true independent or a citizen to become President of the United States," Ventura told The Alex Jones Show.

"I say this in all seriousness - watch out Barack Obama," he added.

Ventura is not the first to warn of a potential future assassination attempt on Obama - British Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing said Obama would be taken out if he became President in February.

"He would probably not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would kill him," Lessing told a Swedish newspaper.

Princeton University political science professor-Melissa Harris-Lacewell echoed the same sentiment a month before, saying: "For many black supporters, there is a lot of anxiety that he will be killed. It is on people's minds."

"You can't make a prediction like this - like he has a 50 per cent chance of getting shot."

"But the greater his visibility and the greater his access to people, there is a danger."

Some speculated that Obama had been set up for an assassination attempt during a February 20 rally in Dallas, after it emerged that Secret Service gave the order to stop screening for weapons a full hour before the event began.

Speak Loudly and Carry a Big Lie

Monday, March 31, 2008

Dear George Bush,

There is a reason the Big Lie will always trump the Truth. The Lie is decoupled from reality, so it can speak with an authority that is denied the Truth because Truth rarely achieves the absolute certainty after which it strives.

But then, telling you this is like preaching to the choir.

In times of disaster, liars always fare better because they are so adept at denying reality. Even as their world collapses around them, they continue to see a sound structure that will endure through the ages. One can only speak with authority when one hasn’t a clue.

This is why you are so important to an America that finds everything falling to pieces.

We need a leader who can claim that the outbreak of a renewed civil war in Iraq shows that the Surge is successful.

We need a leader who can see economic strength in the collapse of Bear Stearns.

We need a leader who clings to the belief that the dollar will reign forever and ever, and that China will bail us out of our economic septic tank.

Let’s go to the video tape and look at each one of these.

In Iraq, we are backing the separatist who want to partition Iraq to make it easier for foreign oil firms to privatize the country’s oil industry. Once again, we are backing a minority that wishes to destroy a majority in the name of democracy and freedom. In the process, we are pissing off the good people of Basara who are in an ideal position to cut off the supply line to our troops in the north.

It is inspiring how you can look at Bear Stearns and see a shining example of the market at work. Here is a firm that took an asset base of $80 billion and leveraged it into a derivative position of $13.4 trillion. And all is well on Wall Street. Oh, and let’s just bail them out while we go easy on anything resembling government oversight.

Your finest delusion is the belief that China is as bound to the dollar as a Siamese twin is to its sibling. You believe they have to protect the dollar because they are so dependent on the exports they send our way. A pain-in-the-ass realist might point out that last year China’s exports to the U.S. amounted to a mere 8 percent of its GDP. Couple that with the fact that 95 percent of China’s 11.2 percent growth last year came from domestic demand, and you have a recipe for a potential decoupling of our two economies.

This is why you must soldier on as you continue to make definitive statements of reassurance. Denial is just a river in Egypt and is the rock upon which your administration has been build from day one.

You have just a few months left before you cede the outhouse that is the Oval Office to your successor--if there is a successor, because with all the poop hitting the fan at once, we are seeing the formation of a perfect storm that just might prove to be the justification for your coronation as President for Life.

Trash Today, Ethanol Tomorrow

UMD invention may lead to a major advance in biofuel production.

University of Maryland research that started with bacteria from the Chesapeake Bay has led to a process that may be able to convert large volumes of all kinds of plant products, from leftover brewer's mash to paper trash, into ethanol and other biofuel alternatives to gasoline.

The result was Ethazyme, which degrades the tough cell walls of cellulosic materials and breaks down the entire plant material into bio-fuel ready sugars in less steps, at a significantly lower cost and with fewer caustic chemicals than current methods.

The process, developed by University of Maryland professors Steve Hutcheson and Ron Weiner, is the foundation of their incubator company Zymetis, which was on display earlier this month in College Park for Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley and state and university officials.

"The new Zymetis technology is a win for the State of Maryland, for the University and for the environment," said University of Maryland President C.D. Mote, Jr. "It makes affordable ethanol production a reality and makes it from waste materials, which benefits everyone and supports the green-friendly goal of carbon-neutrality."

Governor Martin O'Malley praised the university for "leading the nation in scientific discovery and technology innovation." He said, "we must continue to invest in Marylanders like Steve Hutcheson and in their revolutionary ideas to protect our environment, create jobs, and improve lives."

The Zymetis process can make ethanol and other biofuels from many different types of cellulosic sources including plants and plant waste. Cellulosic biofuels can be made from non-grain plant sources such as waste paper, brewing byproducts, leftover agriculture products, including straw, corncobs and husks, and energy crops such as switchgrass.

When fully operational, the Zymetis process has the potential to lead to the production of 75 billion gallons a year of carbon-neutral ethanol.

The secret to the Zymetis process is a Chesapeake Bay marsh grass bacterium. Hutcheson found that the bacterium has an enzyme that could quickly break down plant materials into sugar, which can then be converted to biofuel.

The Zymetis researchers were unable to isolate the Bay bacterium again in nature, but they discovered how to produce the enzyme in their own laboratories. The result was Ethazyme, which degrades the tough cell walls of cellulosic materials and breaks down the entire plant material into bio-fuel ready sugars in less steps, at a significantly lower cost and with fewer caustic chemicals than current methods.

In an e-mail interview, Hutcheson explained the process:

"Ethazyme is a slurry of enzymes that are produced by a bacterium called Saccharophagus degradans at very low cost. This bacterium has the capability to express the largest known diversity of enzymes that degrade the polymers found in the higher plant cell wall to their constituent sugars. The enzyme slurry can be targeted to whole plant material, the hemicellulose, or the cellulose. Because this bacterium can breakdown lignin, depending on the plant material, a less severe pretreatment may be required.

"A pretreatment is still required to sterilize the material and to make the wall more permeable to enzymes. In some cases, where a value stream can be produced, the lignin can be extracted and sold. It makes sense to extract the pentose-rich hemicellulose to facilitate processing of those sugars independently of cellulose. Finally, the lower the crystallinity of cellulose, the easier it is to digest. Some pretreatments are better at this than others. The advantage of the Ethazyme process is that the pretreatments do not have to separate the material into high quality cellulose and hemicellulose fractions. The mixtures of enzymes produced by this bacterium can work with more heterogeneous materials."

To see a video of how Ethazyme can break down newspaper, click here.

Hutcheson projects a US $5 billion enzyme market for biofuels. The energy bill passed by the U.S. Senate in December mandates oil companies to blend in 21 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol with their gasoline by 2022.

Hutcheson and Weiner won the university's Office of Technology Commercialization Inventor of the Year Award in 2007 in the Life Science category for their enzyme system invention.

Founded in 2006, Zymetis entered the university's MTECH VentureAccelerator Program, which provides hands-on business assistance to faculty and students interested in forming companies around university-created technologies.

Zymetis also sought expertise from MTECH's Bioprocess Scale-Up Facility (BSF) staff to determine how to mass-produce S. degradans. The BSF is part of the MTECH Biotechnology Research and Education Program, an initiative dedicated to research, education and the development of biotechnology products and processes for Maryland companies.

Supreme Court Confronts ‘Right to Bear Arms’ in Case

March 29, 2008
Stephen P. Halbrook
North County Times

“That would be an odd ‘right of the people’ if limited to militias,” commented Chief Justice John Roberts in the Supreme Court hearing March 18 in District of Columbia v. Heller.

The case concerns whether the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns violates the Second Amendment guarantee that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Referring to the American Revolution, Justice Antonin Scalia noted that “tyrants took away the people’s weapons, not just those of the militia.”

For the American settlers, Justice Anthony Kennedy added, “Wasn’t there a need for self defense against Indian attacks, robbers, wolves and grizzlies?”

In recent years, Kennedy is the swing vote in close cases.

The founders were not concerned with personal protection, insisted Walter Dellinger—solicitor general during the Clinton Administration, and now arguing for D.C.—but only with “bearing arms” in the militia.

“Does the amendment have any effect today?” queried Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“Only if a federal law restrained state militias,” Dellinger responded.

So this “right of the people” has shriveled into a meaningless gesture exercised only by permission of the government. But the “exclusively militia” interpretation is only a facade. Those who deny this right of the people would be equally opposed to a robust state militia system in conflict with federal authority.

The text of the Constitution already had a militia clause. As Kennedy noted, the preamble to the Second Amendment—“a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state”—supplemented that clause. “My view is that the amendment guarantees a general right to bear arms without reference to the militia.”

And Scalia added that historically, English bans had been imposed on possession of arms by oppressed groups, such as Roman Catholics and Scottish Highlanders.

Which “arms” are constitutionally protected? One test is whether the arms are of a type “commonly possessed” by the people.

Dellinger tried to scare the court away from sanctioning handguns under this test, on the basis that it would also sanction machine guns, of which more than 100,000 are registered with the feds. Not an impressive number, given our population of 300 million.

Solicitor General Paul Clement argued, on behalf of the United States, that the right is individual, but that the court should not decide whether the D.C. ban is unconstitutional.

This “just don’t know” attitude may be explained by fears that the Justice Department’s prosecutions of citizens under this very ban for 30 years might be reopened.

Clement also worried that voiding the ban would question restrictions on machine guns and armor-piercing ammo, but Chief Justice Roberts reminded him that the only issue is handguns.

Justice David Souter found “keep and bear” to be a unitary concept “what is served by bear, if you can keep?” He quipped that “you do not bear arms to hunt; no one in the 18th century talked that way.”

“Keeping” refers to possession in the home, Clement responded, and “bearing,” to carry.

Jefferson sponsored legislation specifically referring to “bearing a gun” while hunting.

Alan Gura presented the case for Dick Heller, the court security guard who lives in Washington, D.C. and protects judges with a handgun by day, but is not trusted with having one when he goes home.

Justice Stephen Breyer queried how handguns had a militia purpose, and why was it not reasonable to ban them, given the high murder rate?

“The handgun ban,” Gura responded, “weakens military preparedness.”

Some seemed ready to scrap a militia arms test. “The second clause of the Second Amendment,” insisted Scalia, “goes beyond the militia—it is a right of the people. Why not acknowledge that?”

Kennedy stated that a machine gun is more related to the militia than the handgun, but the latter is relevant to the homeowner.

Stevens asserted that “only” two of the original states, Pennsylvania and Vermont, had arms guarantees referring to self-defense, and “all the others were for common defense.”

Yet only two other states—North Carolina and Massachusetts—had an arms guarantee, and both accorded the right to “the people,” even though they referred to common defense purposes. As Gura pointed out, those provisions were interpreted to recognize self-defense.

As is usual, the justices engaged in their own fencing match.

“Look at the murder rate, the crime statistics,” anguished Souter.

“All the more reason to allow homeowners to have handguns,” implored Scalia.

Long guns, even though they must be trigger-locked and unloaded, would do fine for home defense, Dellinger insisted as the last word. He could remove the lock in three seconds, albeit in daylight.

“And how long if you’re awakened at 3 a.m. and you reach for the lamp and your reading glasses?” Scalia asked, to general laughter.

Justice Clarence Thomas asked no questions. But a decade ago, in Printz v. U.S., he wrote an opinion appearing to favor the individual-rights view.

Looks like the Supreme Court is finally ready to recognize the Second Amendment as a real part of the Bill of Rights, and that D.C.’s ban is in big trouble.

Oil, Water and Wheat ...

by Sean Brodrick

If you think you know what water is worth ... what wheat is worth ... and what oil is worth ... check out the latest news from Saudi Arabia ...

The Kingdom is going to start importing wheat early next year — 250,000 tons by next spring. The reason is simple: They need to save water.

Underground water levels in Saudi Arabia are dropping by at least 16 feet a year in areas of "heavy" cultivation, according to a U.S. government report.

Eventually, the Saudis will probably import all their wheat — about three million tons a year.

This could get expensive — the price of wheat has more than doubled in the past year.

But the Saudis don't care about the price of wheat because ...

Water Is Much More Precious
Than Oil in the Middle East

The Saudis get most of their water from aquifers which are being replenished at only about 10% of the extraction rate. Desalinization has its limits and even though the government picks up the fuel tab, a new desalination plant costs about $200 billion.


Saudi Arabia has a big water problem on its hands ...
Most of the Kingdom's water use — over 80% — is for food. And Saudi Arabia isn't the only Middle East country with an empty bowl to fill.

Egypt, the world's second-largest wheat importer, saw its wheat imports jump 43% to 5.2 million tons in the first eight months of the year that began July 1.

The Middle East's most populous nation imported seven million tons of wheat last year, half its annual consumption. Bread riots in Egypt killed at least two people recently.

Arab countries have less than 5% of the world's population and control over 40% of the world's oil supply. However, they get only 2% of the world's rainfall and have only 0.4% of the world's recoverable water resources.

Their populations are booming — which means the water has to serve more and more people. So it gets tougher for these countries to feed themselves.

In the end, it's a global problem:

Worldwide supplies of wheat will fall to 110.4 million tons by the end of the marketing year on May 31, the lowest levels in 30 years.

U.S. stockpiles may drop to 6.6 million tons, a 47% drop from the prior year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Other grain supplies are dwindling, too. Soybean stocks are at a 35-year low, and world rice inventories are at the lowest level since the 1970s.

Consequently ...

The Era of Cheap Food Is Over

Over the past eight years, the price of food worldwide has increased 75%; the price of wheat has gone up a dramatic 200%.

And the rate of inflation is accelerating. In a recent report, the United Nations predicted that food prices are likely to remain high for a decade.

Here are some facts ...

As of December, 37 countries faced food crises, and 20 had imposed some sort of food-price controls.


The prices of the world's three main grains — rice, wheat and corn — have all more than doubled in the past year.


Part of rising food prices is due to rising fuel prices — as the Saudis raise the price of oil they sell us, we're going to be raising the price of wheat we sell them.

Another part of the equation is weather. Extreme weather shifts over the past two years have reduced the worldwide wheat harvest by nearly 10%. And it's not just wheat. Since 1971, in the United States, droughts or floods have wiped out up to a third of the Midwest corn crop four times.


Wheat production in South America and Western Europe has been cut from 5% to 20% in each of the past two growing seasons.


Australia was once the second-largest exporter of grain, harvesting about 25 million tonnes in a good year. But the worst drought in a century reduced the crop to only 9.8 million tonnes in 2006 and 13.1 million tonnes in 2007.
Now, this year could be different. If good weather holds, we could see a record world wheat crop. And just this week, we saw grain prices tumble as the government reported that farmers are planting from fence to fence.

On the other hand, people in China and India are changing their diets — eating more and better food.

The Chinese ate just 44 pounds of meat per capita in 1985. They now eat over 110 pounds a year. Each pound of beef takes about seven to 10 pounds of grain to produce, which puts even more pressure on grain prices.

In fact, over the next decade, according to tentative UN and OECD forecasts made in February, the price of corn could rise 27%, oilseeds like soybeans by 23% and rice by 9%.

U.S. consumers know that food prices are already rising. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that ground beef, milk, chicken, apples, tomatoes, lettuce, coffee and orange juice are among the staples that cost more these days.

At $1.32, the average price of a loaf of bread has increased 32% since January 2005. In the past year alone, the average price of a carton of eggs is up nearly 50%.

Overall, food prices rose nearly 5% in 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and should rise by at least that much this year, too.

A survey by the Food Marketing Institute showed the average number of weekly shopping trips falling below two per household for the first time. Food banks are seeing increases in their overall client loads.

Who Is Going to Feed
A Hungry World? The U.S.!


Demand for U.S. wheat supplies has increased 51% since June 1, compared with the same period a year earlier, USDA data show. Wheat was the fourth-biggest U.S. crop in 2007, valued at $13.7 billion, behind corn, soybeans and hay.

In fact, the U.S. accounts for a whopping 40% of the world's grain exports. You can say that we're "the Saudi Arabia of grain."

So everything balances out, right? Well, not exactly. You see, as it turns out ...

The U.S. Has a Worsening Water Problem, Too!

Agriculture takes a lot of water in the U.S., accounting for 80% of the nation's consumption, and over 90% in many Western states.

The Colorado River is the main source of water for many people in the West. If its volume decreases due to climate change, 25 million people are going to have a serious problem.

Bad news: Experts expect a warming climate will reduce the flow of the Colorado River. And if we get a serious drought ... well, who knows?


The Colorado River supplies a lot of water to U.S. Western states.
And it's not just the West we have to worry about. The U.S. government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperatures, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, and just plain old waste.

Like Saudi Arabia, we have to look beyond household consumers to agriculture. While just 16% of all harvested cropland in the U.S. is irrigated, this acreage generates nearly half the value of all crops sold.

That brings me to the Ogallala Aquifer. This underground reservoir of water was filled up during the last ice age with enough water to fill Lake Superior. The Ogallala is under eight U.S. states — parts of South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas.

There's another name for the states overlying the Ogallala Aquifer — "America's breadbasket." Corn, wheat and soybeans grow in those states, along with herds of livestock.

Now for the troubling news: The Ogallala Aquifer is being drained at a rate of 12 billion cubic meters per year. To date, that works out to a total depletion equal to the annual flow of 18 Colorado Rivers. Some estimates say the Ogallala will dry up in as little as 25 years

Consider Iraq Defined

Posted on Mar 31, 2008
By Eugene Robinson

WASHINGTON—Quite a “defining moment” in Iraq, wasn’t it? At this rate, John McCain is going to be proved right: The war will last a century.

That is indeed what McCain said, by the way, no matter how his apologists try to spin it. Those who claim that by “a hundred years” McCain was talking about a long-term peacetime deployment like the U.S. military presence in South Korea are being disingenuous or obtuse. In and around Seoul, citizens aren’t shooting at American soldiers or trying to blow them up with roadside bombs—and U.S. combat forces aren’t taking sides in bloody internecine battles over power and wealth.

It was George W. Bush who called last week’s fighting in Basra and other Iraqi cities a defining moment for the fledgling government. By that standard, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been defined as an impulsive leader and an inept general—and his government as a work barely in progress.

Maliki’s decision to send troops into Basra and root out the “criminal gangs” that controlled the city was praised by the White House as a bold move to assert the Iraqi government’s sovereignty. In reality, though, it looked more like an attempt to boost Maliki’s political standing by dealing a blow to the Mahdi Army—the biggest and most powerful Shiite militia—and its leader, the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Iraqi forces launched their offensive and were immediately met by what Maliki’s defense minister called unexpectedly strong resistance. In other words, they ran into a buzz saw. Maliki went to Basra to personally oversee military operations. History will not confuse him with Napoleon.

The government might have suffered a humiliating defeat if not for the face-saving intervention of U.S. and British air power, and a bit of British artillery as well. At least the United States didn’t have to go it alone. It was the British military, after all, that had declared its job done in Basra and withdrawn, knowing full well that the city was controlled by gangs and militias, not the central government in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Maliki’s putsch had inflamed Shiite communities throughout the country, including the vast Sadr City neighborhood in Baghdad. The tranquillity brought about by Bush’s ballyhooed “surge” turned out to be as evanescent as a rainbow.

Maliki was forced to sue for peace, Sadr magnanimously accepted, and the fighting ebbed. The Mahdi Army remains entrenched, in Basra and other cities, and armed to the teeth. Maliki’s regime looks less like a government than just another faction—albeit one with a couple of big brothers who will come in to finish any rashly started schoolyard fights.

All of which illustrates the insanity of the open-ended Iraq war policy that Bush has followed and that McCain vows to perpetuate.

What, exactly, did the United States use its military might to accomplish last week? We intervened in a struggle among various Shiite power centers for control of a city where much of Iraq’s oil industry—and thus much of its potential wealth—is based. We supported a political figure who was trying to weaken another political figure in advance of upcoming elections. We boosted the morale and fervor of the most implacable opponents of continued American occupation.

Does any of this have anything to do with our nation’s vital interests? I suppose you could argue that Basra is important because of the oil, but the city is no more under Baghdad’s control today than it was two weeks ago.

Please note that throughout this episode, you haven’t heard the name al-Qaida. According to Bush and McCain, isn’t Iraq supposed to be the central front in the war on terrorism? Wouldn’t the only plausible reason for continuing the occupation of Iraq be to fight terrorists—rather than help one Shiite leader against another? And what’s the strategic reason for backing Maliki, who recently gave Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a red-carpet welcome to Baghdad, over Sadr, who is believed to be living in Iran, enjoying Ahmadinejad’s hospitality?

Bush’s troop surge, remember, was supposed to buy time for two things to happen: Iraq’s political leaders were to achieve reconciliation, and Iraq’s armed forces were to improve to the point where they could conduct operations on their own. On both counts, we see the results.

If Democrats are going to take several more months settling on a presidential nominee, they had better find some way to stop giving John McCain a free ride on Iraq. He should have to explain why he wants to keep us on George Bush’s long, winding path to nowhere.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group