3 candidates' passport files breached

What is the reason and who is behind this stunt. We again deserve a full and truthful investigation of this matter, something that is hard to come by lately in the US.

Thomas


BY DESMOND BUTLER and ANNE FLAHERTY Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON - The passport files of the three presidential candidates — Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain — have been breached, the State Department said Friday.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the breaches of McCain and Clinton's passport files were not discovered until Friday, after officials were made aware of the privacy violation regarding Obama's records and a separate search was conducted.

McCormack said the individual who accessed Obama's files also reviewed McCain's file earlier this year. This contract employee has been reprimanded, but not fired. The individual no longer has access to passport records, he said.

"We are reviewing our options with respect to that person and his employment status," McCormack said.

In Clinton's case, an individual last summer accessed her file as part of a training session involving another State Department worker. McCormack said the one-time violation was immediately recognized and the person was admonished.

The incidents raise the question of whether the information was accessed for political purposes.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke with Obama and Clinton on Friday and expressed her regrets. She planned to speak with McCain as well. State Department officials headed to Capitol Hill to brief the staffs of all three candidates.

"The secretary has made it clear . . . to them that this is top priority," McCormack said. "There's nothing else that's more important than make sure go through and do this investigation."

The State Department said the Justice Department would be monitoring the probe in case it needs to get involved. The Justice Department declined to comment on its role.

McCormack declined to name the companies that employed the contractors, despite demands by a senior House Democrat that such information is in the public interest.

"At this point, we just started an investigation," he said. "We want to err on the side of caution."

Sen. McCain, who was in Paris on Friday, said any breach of passport privacy deserves an apology and a full investigation.

"The United States of America values everyone's privacy and corrective action should be taken," McCain said.

It is not clear whether the employees saw anything other than the basic personal data such as name, citizenship, age, Social Security number and place of birth, which is required when a person fills out a passport application.

Aside from the file, the information could allow critics to dig deeper into the candidates' private lives. While the file includes date and place of birth, address at time of application and the countries the person has traveled to, the most important detail would be their Social Security number, which can be used to pull credit reports and other personal information.

The violations were detected because electronic files of high-profile people are flagged.

New Crisis, Old Isms

By David Sirota

The Federal Reserve Bank’s decision last week to address the housing crisis by extending $200 billion of taxpayer-financed credit to Wall Street banks was met with a stunned reaction typical of surprising events. But really, the move was the expression of longstanding isms that routinely package corruption as sound public policy.

Some background: During the housing boom, banks doled out home loans to financially strapped borrowers, often on predatory terms. On the creditor side, these same banks packaged many of the loans as complex securities and sold them off to unwitting investors, generating a handsome profit on the paper transactions. At the same time, Wall Street used campaign contributions to coerce Congress into blocking anti-predatory-lending bills and repealing a landmark law regulating how banks could buy and sell securities.

Predictably, many borrowers are now defaulting on their loans, meaning losses for financial institutions that hold mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. The Fed responded with what author Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism—the age-old practice of using a crisis to enrich corporate interests. In this case, the Fed is using the housing emergency to justify giving taxpayer cash to Wall Street in exchange for its worthless mortgages.

“What the Fed really did was lend money to banks and accept the counterfeit currency as collateral, treating it just as though it were real money,” says Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

But this is not only disaster capitalism, it is also Big Boy Bailout-ism—the kind we’ve become accustomed to since the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s. It is an ideology that rewards wealthy political donors for irresponsible behavior and ignores the real victims.

If you are a banking executive whose risky loans go bad, your industry’s campaign donations get you Big Boy Bailout-ism that makes taxpayers “take the bad loans off the banks’ books,” as one financial analyst gushed this week. If you are a regular Joe who can’t pay your home loan, you get foreclosed on.

The Fed’s scheme also embraces Feed-the-Beast-ism—an ideology that prescribes pumping taxpayer money into a crisis, rather than demanding reforms.

Confronting an energy and climate emergency, Republicans’ answer was not massive alternative energy investments, but a 2005 energy bill giving tax breaks to the carbon-belching fossil fuel companies that finance the GOP. In the face of a health care catastrophe, the Bush administration’s 2003 Medicare bill didn’t crack down on pharmaceutical industry profiteering, but instead created a system that effectively subsidizes drug industry campaign donors. The list of examples goes on, and now includes the housing crisis.

The Fed’s action says the solution to the credit crunch is not to re-regulate the banking industry or force it to clean house, but to loan Wall Street your hard-earned taxpayer money, allowing the same destructive system to remain and permitting the same vultures to stay in their jobs—and, of course, to keep writing big campaign checks.

But worst of all is the Trickle Down-ism. For three decades, our government has said economic challenges can be solved with tax cuts for the wealthy—the same people who, not coincidentally, underwrite political campaigns. Trickle Down-ism claims that the wealthy will spend the tax cuts and the benefits will “trickle down” to us commoners.

It’s the same nonsense with housing today. The root of the financial crisis is mortgage defaults—brought on, in part, by Trickle Down-ism’s original failure to raise wages. Yet, rather than help borrowers pay or restructure their mortgages, the government is covering the banks’ losses, claiming that aid will eventually “trickle down” and benefit the rest of us.

During the Great Depression, Eleanor Roosevelt said, “We need not fear any isms if our democracy is achieving the ends for which it was established.” It’s the “if” part that has become the problem.

David Sirota is a bestselling author whose newest book, “The Uprising,” will be released in June of 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network—both nonpartisan organizations.

How will you be affected by the latest FDA mix-up?

The FDA recommends consumers don't go outside of the US to buy less expensive prescriptions but............ Come on FDA, just do your job.


Even I've grown tired of hearing myself beat on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Believe me, I'd like to lay off these guys, but they keep making the gaffes that make me nuts. And I feel compelled to pass this info on to you because everyone should know that the government agency that's allegedly responsible for protecting is often, well … out to lunch.

And this time, it's a big screw up.

The good news is that FDA officials were in China to look into the safety of a Chinese- made drug that's found in heparin, a blood thinner made by Baxter International, that's been linked to four deaths due to allergic reactions. The bad news? They actually evaluated the wrong factory.

The next time you reach for your prescription bottle, remember that it's been approved by the Keystone Kops.

Instead of inspecting the suspect manufacturer, the FDA confused it with another company in the agency's database that has a similar name. Worse still, even though they THOUGHT they had the suspect company, the company that they were inspecting had a history of positive inspections … SO THEY DIDN'T RE-INSPECT IT. You can't make this stuff up, unfortunately.

After discovering the error a month after the fact, the FDA immediately dispatched investigators to the suspect company.

Keeping in mind that there are over 2,000 characters in written Chinese and who knows how many dialects of that language, I'm inclined to say that it was an honest mistake for Western bureaucrats to get a little mixed up with the name of a Chinese company. Given all the recent news stories about shoddy and potentially deadly products from China that have been finding their way into America, it's hard to believe that the FDA wouldn't check and triple check the DRUGS coming from the same place—ESPECIALLY when the ingredient in question could possibly be linked to DEATHS.

In my opinion, the U.S. government should have immediately banned ALL Chinese imports the second the first tube of poisoned toothpaste was discovered. But of course, that would cost big business too much money. And you know that Big Pharma has repeatedly assured their friends in the FDA that the Chinese companies who supply many ingredients to for Big Pharma's vastly lucrative drug brands (at cut-rate prices) are surely on the up-and-up.

So of course the FDA had no need or desire to do the most logical thing: RE-INSPECT EVERY SINGLE CHINESE DRUG PLANT THAT EXPORTS INGREDIENTS TO THE US. And to halt the sale of drugs containing those ingredients until, in the case of heparin, the source of the allergic reactions that caused the deaths could be determined.

Am I naïve to think that the government agency charged with the inspection of drugs sold in the U.S. should do their job? To be fair, the FDA did tell physicians across the country to immediately cease the use of the Baxter's brand of heparin, which has had as many as 350 reported cases of side effects in just 2008 (there were 100 reported cases last year). And Baxter has recalled nine lots of the injectable drug and stopped production while the source of the allergic reactions is investigated.

But like so much with the FDA and Big Pharma, the measures are just temporary and don't go far enough. I write so many negative things about the FDA and Big Pharma that you may get the impression that I think they're out to harm people. I know that's not the case. And I'm not at all surprised that both the FDA and Baxter International have done the right thing and brought an immediate halt to the distribution and manufacture of heparin while these lethal side effects are investigated. What bothers me is that, because of money, they won't take the logical next step which – to my mind – is to stop the use of Chinese drug imports as ingredients in drugs sold in the U.S.

I don't believe the Chinese can be trusted to follow safety regulations that are up to U.S. standards. Plain and simple. This country has exhibited a complete disregard for the safety of the drugs, food, and goods distributed within their own country – why should we expect them to have a higher standard for good meant for export?

The global economy is likely to be a dangerous economy. We need to hope and pray that our government is on its toes. If the FDA is going to allow the import of drugs from China, they need to watch both the Chinese and the U.S. drug manufacturers very, very closely. There's a great deal of money at stake, but patients within the American health care systems shouldn't become victims of a growing economy.

Unfortunately, this is the FDA we're talking about. I know that they don't always make the right decision. Now I'll always be wondering if they're even in the right place at the right time.

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.

Inspector arrested in NYC crane collapse

Here we go again!!! The infrastructure in the USA is decaying and this type of action is inexcusable. The truth of the matter is that this employee has supervisors who are complicit to this horrible tragedy. Money's are being diverted to special political projects while America crumbles. Corruption and fraud are a way of life from the top to the bottom in government now days.

Thomas, Chief Editor


By KAREN MATTHEWS, Associated Press Writer
Fri Mar 21,

Inspectors began rechecking dozens of construction cranes after one of their colleagues was accused of lying about examining a crane that collapsed 11 days later, killing seven people.

Edward Marquette, 46, was arrested on charges of falsifying business records and offering a false instrument for filing, buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster said Thursday.

The accident occurred Saturday, when a 20-story crane broke away from an apartment tower under construction in a dense midtown Manhattan neighborhood. The crane toppled over, killing six construction workers and a visitor in town for St. Patrick's Day.

A complaint about the crane was logged March 4 to a city hot line, officials said, and Marquette said he inspected it. It was later determined he had not.

"We will not tolerate this kind of behavior at the Department of Buildings," Lancaster said at a news conference Thursday. "I do not and will not tolerate any misconduct in my department."

She said it is very unlikely that a March 4 inspection would have prevented the accident because parts of the crane that failed 11 days later were not on site then. The crane was inspected the day before the collapse, she said.

In addition to suspending Marquette, Lancaster ordered an immediate inspection of all cranes he had checked over the last six months. The Department of Buildings said Marquette conducted 423 inspections at 76 constructions sites, mostly in Manhattan, during that period.

Marquette, who earns $52,283 a year as an inspector in the department's division of cranes and derricks, was arrested Wednesday night, said Barbara Thompson, spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney.

He said nothing during his arraignment Thursday in state Supreme Court and was released without bail. If convicted, he faces up to four years in prison. His lawyer, Kate Moguletscu, had no comment.

The crane collapse created a blocklong swath of destruction not far the United Nations, pulverizing a four-story brownstone and damaging at least seven other buildings.

The gigantic piece of machinery fell over when a 6-ton steel collar used to secure the crane to the building came loose, plunging into another collar that acted as an anchor. Without that support, the spindly structure tumbled with terrifying force.

Neighborhood residents had complained for weeks that the crane didn't appear safe. Bruce Silberblatt, a retired contractor who called in the March 4 complaint, said he was stunned by the arrest.

"My first reaction was astonishment. My second reaction is anger that a person would have the gall to do this," said Silberblatt, who is also vice president of the Turtle Bay Neighborhood Association.

City officials would not discuss why Marquette failed to do the inspection.

Investigators first interviewed him Sunday and got a copy of his route sheet. He told them that he had conducted the March 4 inspection and that it revealed no problems with the crane.

Marquette was also listed in city records as having responded to a Jan. 22 complaint by another caller who complained about the safety of workers assembling the crane. Marquette said in his report, filed two days later, that he examined the crane and found no violation.

Other safety complaints were called in by neighbors Jan. 10 and Feb. 11, according to city records.

The contractor, Reliance Construction Group owner Stephen Kaplan, declined to comment on the arrest and referred inquiries to a company spokesman, who did not immediately return a phone message.

A publicist for the East 51st Development Company, which owns the site, said the developers had no comment.

Residents said they weren't surprised by the arrest.

"It makes me very suspicious of the whole situation. I'd like to feel that it's safe to live in this neighborhood with all the construction going on," Sandra Graham said. "If he's been arrested, I think he should be made an example of."

___

Patriots Question 9/11

The Internet Post beleives that there is definately more to the 9-11 story and that there is more truth needed to be brought forward. We are continuing to search for more information supporting our veiwpoint.

Thomas, Cheif Editor

Commander Ralph Kolstad, U.S. Navy (ret) – Retired fighter pilot. Former Air Combat Instructor, U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School (Topgun). 20-year Navy career. Aircraft flown: McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom, Douglas A-4 Skyhawk, and Grumman F-14 Tomcat. Retired commercial airline captain with 27 years experience. Aircraft flown: Boeing 727, 757 and 767, McDonnell Douglas MD-80, and Fokker F-100. 23,000+ total hours flown.
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Statement to this website 8/20/07: "I started questioning the Sept 11, 2001 “story” only days after the event. It just didn't make any sense to me. How could a steel and concrete building collapse after being hit by a Boeing 767? Didn't the engineers design it to withstand a direct hit from a Boeing 707, approximately the same size and weight of the 767? The evidence just didn't add up. ...

At the Pentagon, the pilot of the Boeing 757 did quite a feat of flying. I have 6,000 hours of flight time in Boeing 757’s and 767’s and could not have flown it the way the flight path was described.

I was also a Navy fighter pilot and Air Combat Instructor, U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School and have experience flying low altitude, high speed aircraft. I could not have done what these beginners did. Something stinks to high heaven!

Where is the damage to the wall of the Pentagon from the wings? Where are the big pieces that always break away in an accident? Where is all the luggage? Where are the miles and miles of wire, cable, and lines that are part and parcel of any large aircraft? Where are the steel engine parts? Where is the steel landing gear? Where is the tail section that would have broken into large pieces?

I also personally knew American Airlines Captain “Chick” Burlingame, who was the captain of Flight 77 which allegedly hit the Pentagon, and I know he would not have given up his airplane to crazies!

And at the Shanksville Pennsylvania impact site, where is any of the wreckage?!!! Of all the pictures I have seen, there is only a hole! Where is any piece of a crashed airplane? Why was the area cordoned off, and no inspection allowed by the normal accident personnel? Where is any evidence at all?

When one starts using his own mind, and not what one was told, there is very little to believe in the official “story”. ...

Every question leads to another question that has not been answered by anyone in authority. This is just the beginning as to why I don’t believe the official “story” and why I want the truth to be told." Link to full statement


Member: Pilots for 9/11 Truth Association Statement: "Pilots for 9/11 Truth is an organization of aviation professionals and pilots throughout the globe that have gathered together for one purpose. We are committed to seeking the truth surrounding the events of the 11th of September 2001. Our main focus concentrates on the four flights, maneuvers performed and the reported pilots. We do not offer theory or point blame. However, we are focused on determining the truth of that fateful day since the United States Government doesn't seem to be very forthcoming with answers."

The Folks Who Brought You Iraq

Posted on Mar 20, 2008
By Joe Conason

“Well, that’s history. That’s the past. That’s talking about what happened before. What we should be talking about is what we’re going to do now.”

The man who spoke those words is Sen. John McCain, and the subject was the Iraq war and its origins in official falsehood, strategic error and wishful thinking. Expect to hear him repeat those same dismissive phrases again and again as the presidential campaign unfolds.

Understandably, the presumptive Republican nominee prefers to avoid examining how our finest young people and vast amounts of our national treasure came to be squandered in the Middle Eastern desert, since he was among the war’s most excited advocates.

There were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq (as some of us were not surprised to learn), and in particular, no nuclear weapons under construction as advertised. There were no significant connections between al-Qaida and the regime of Saddam Hussein (as the Pentagon reaffirmed in a recent intelligence analysis). There was no legal basis for an invasion. There was no population inviting us to occupy their country as liberators.

Yes, it’s all “history,” or at least it will be someday, and the historians will properly record McCain’s role in the fiasco with all due asperity. But on the fifth anniversary of the war, it is a little too easy to dismiss everything that led us to this point as “what happened before.”

With the Arizona senator fresh from a congressional trip to Baghdad—where he preened for the photo ops along with two of his campaign co-chairs, Sen. Joseph Lieberman and Sen. Lindsey Graham—this is certainly an appropriate moment to evaluate the judgment of the politicians who have promoted the whole enterprise and the consequences of their decision.

How mistaken were the war’s optimistic promoters in 2003? The official line on the expected cost of rebuilding Iraq after ousting Saddam was just under $2 billion, according to testimony provided by Bush administration officials. That estimate did not include the likelihood, according to Paul Wolfowitz, the then-deputy secretary of defense, of whether Iraq’s oil reserves would cover the entire cost of invasion, occupation and reconstruction. Five years later, the estimated cost of the war to American taxpayers is well over $2 trillion, including the care we must provide for wounded Americans over the next few decades. Much of the Iraqi oil, of which production remains sporadic, is being stolen and smuggled away.

The difference between an estimate of $2 billion and a cost of $2 trillion could be considered a significant miscalculation, even in a Republican government.

Yet those figures don’t quite reckon with the real costs, which should include the rise in the price of oil from around $36 a barrel in March 2003 to well over $100 a barrel this month. Some economists go further, blaming the subprime mortgage collapse—and the ensuing deluge of bad paper that may capsize the world economy—on the effects of the war.

What did we get for all our money and blood? What diplomatic and strategic achievements can we attribute to the war? The conflict over Israel and Palestine has grown more intractable, with the rising influence of Hamas and Hezbollah. The influence of Iran, an avowed enemy of the United States, has risen across the region and penetrated deep into Iraq, where our occupation props up Tehran’s allies. The United States military has been badly depleted and demoralized, while our global prestige has dropped.

Still, McCain tells us—and reportedly assured the Iraqi prime minister—of his intentions if elected president. “What we’re going to do now is continue this strategy,” he said, “which is succeeding in Iraq and we are carrying out the goals of the surge ... .”

The announced aim of last year’s troop escalation was to create sufficient stability in Iraq to permit the Shia, Kurds, Sunni and other political leaders to consolidate a government, provide decent public services and begin reconciliation. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces there, has acknowledged that the progress toward those objectives is far from satisfactory. Based on the originally stated purpose, the surge isn’t succeeding. Predictably, the level of violence in Iraq is rising again, with the daily death toll in March so far doubled from its low point in January.

It is telling when a presidential candidate speaks so dismissively of history and urges us to ignore “what happened before.” In this instance, it is a sign of bad faith and worse judgment.

Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer.

Jobless claims jump by 22,000

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer


The number of newly laid off workers filing for unemployment benefits rose last week to the highest level in nearly two months, providing more evidence that the weak economy is having an adverse impact on the labor market.

The Labor Department said Thursday that applications for jobless benefits totaled 378,000 last week. That was an increase of 22,000 from the previous week and was a far bigger jump than had been expected.

The four-week average for new claims rose to 365,250, which was the highest level since a flood of claims caused by the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes.