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Archive for the 'USA' Tag
51 post(s) are associated with this Tag
Politics: The opening statements of the “Constitutional Limits of Executive Power” committee
The House Judiciary Committee yesterday held a hearing titled “Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations”.
While almost every speaker tried to express that this is “not a Bush impeachment hearing” it was setup to examine legal and legislative responses to allegations of misconduct and expansions of executive powers by the Bush administration.
In short there has been at least a committee put into place to speak up on these outrageous things that have deteriorated the standing and reputation of the US around the globe.
While we do understand the anger of the millions of Americans, particularly of those who lost their husbands, wives and children in a “war” for Oil and Trillions of Dollars “for the boys” and all those who have lost their homes, life’s work, pensions or possibility to get looked after when their ill, unfortunately history is telling us a rather crude and sad reality.
Many impeachment movements also of the very few (17) in the history of the US that…
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Image: Where is Waldo with Obama
Yesterday Sen. Barack Obama held a speech in Berlin and 200,000 were listening in enthusiastically.
For those who want to get an impression how 200,000 people look like from the viewpoint of the speaker we found an excellent shot at Flickr.
Note that the image only shows the front rows of…
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CNCI - A new cybersecurity program
It’s G.W. Bush’s single largest request for funds in the 2009 intelligence budget and its a “highly classified, multiyear, multibillion-dollar project“.
It goes by the name CNCI aka “Cyber Initiative” and the director National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, calls it a pro-active measure to protect the US Government computing infrastructure and in the future potentially also the computing environments of (US) private entities.
While the secrecy surrounding the program does not even provide specific funding figures or a breakdown, the House Intelligence committee in its report on the program “recognizes” that “…it will be imperative that the government also take into account the interest and concerns of private citizens, the US information technology industry, and other elements of the private sector…“.
They call it a public-private partnership and outlined how the oversight should happen by a panel of lawmakers, executive branch officials and some private sector representatives. And the House has already approved 90% of the requested budget.
So far so good, sounds all nice and positive - a fresh start, “unlike any model currently existing“, well, well, well if your memory in that branch of IT goes back long enough (10 years+) then you will say together with us: Nice words but we have heard them before and when we acted within the scheme we got heavily burned and a bunch of gov. crooks around the world filled their pockets with Billions of Dollars.
So if its a “fresh start” back up your words with actions!
Demonstrate that you have learned from the past mistakes and…
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USA: Largest Wind Energy project approved
With prices of oil and natural gas skyrocketing, Texas, home to some of the largest US petroleum industry conglomerates, is already planning ahead of current boom times for a future that could turn this state into one of the World’s biggest producers of alternative energy.
Following Oil Billonaire T. Boone Pickens’ declaration of “going green” and his initial purchase of about 670 MW wind turbines from GE earlier this year, regulators have now (preliminary) approved a plan to invest about USD 5 Billion into the electrical grid infrastructure connecting new alternative / wind energy projects in the wind-rich West and the Panhandle to the urban areas of Texas.
According to the approved plan…
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USA: Congratulations on the one Millionth Terrorist
We have “recently reported” that Nobel Price Laureate Nelson Mandela has just - after years of diplomatic quarreling - been removed from the infamous US List of terrorist suspects.
Now this week ACLU is reporting another record related to this “list” - the list has just hit the size of one million records. Put this in relation to numbers reported on various other crimes from burglary to official war crime numbers together with the complete swipe of human / civil rights linked to that list and even a blind man should be able to see that there is something wrong here…
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US removes Nelson Mandela from terror list
Just in time for his 90th birthday this month the USA has removed former South African President and Nobel Peace Price laureate Nelson Mandela from the so called “US terrorists watch list”. After the bill had been approved by the US Senate, G.W Bush has now signed it and by that bringing an end to at least one of the most visible quarrels beleaguering this “list” since a long time.
“…Today the United States moved closer at last to removing the great shame of dishonoring this great leader by including him on our government’s terror watch list…” said Senator John Kerry.
Previously Nelson Mandela like other former ANC freedom fighters required…
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Geo-Politics: The New Yorker on war preparations in the USA
The New Yorker in his next issue (July 7 - available online) includes an excellent editorial on the preparations for another war by the Bush administration.
This time its Iraq Iran and based on a Presidential Finding signed by G.W. Bush the congress has already approved 400 Million USD for covert, sabotage and all sorts of other shady activities to “destabilize Iran“…
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RIP: George Carlin
Great US comedian, author and actor George Carlin died yesterday evening in Santa Monica of heart failure. Thanks for all the great time you have given us. (6 video links)…
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Data-Visualization: Oil prices 1861-2008
If every “close encounter” with a petrol station these days gets you into a bad mood and you slowly start believing these gas prices are from another planet, this diagram might not be helping either.
Forbes Magazine brushed up a chart with data from the Commodity Research Bureau and the US Department of Commerce showing the development of oil prices from 1861 to 2008. Data is charted in real prices (constant 2008 Dollar) and nominal.
When you look at this diagram it shows…
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US Credit Crisis: Fed borrowing shown as a chart
If you would like to see the “official version of how much money the Fed is pumping into banks and financial institutions recently, have a look at the chart below.
The gray shaded areas are times officially recognized as recessions. The underlying data is available at the St. Louis Fed web site together with a charting application that allows you to further customize the range and other parameters.
To better visualize the substantial change we have split the data into two charts:
The larger chart shows the borrowing from the FED for the period 1919 to 2007 and the smaller one data for 2008 only. As you can see during these almost 90 years borrowing remained continuously within a range of almost none to max 8 Billion USD per month.
Since the beginning of 2008 the numbers have drastically changed and are now at about 155 Billion USD per month. The monthly figures for 2008 in detail…
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