Cuban Blogger Seized From Streets, Beaten & Released
November 9, 2009
NBC Miami
By Janie Campbell
Was it something she spelled?
Trail-blazing Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez says she was headed to a peaceable march against violence with friends in Havana Friday when she and fellow writer Orlando Luis Pardo were confronted by three men in plainclothes presumed to be state security, forced into a car, and assaulted.
“No blood,” she reported to El Nuevo Herald. “But black and blues, punches, pulled hairs, blows to the head, kidneys, knee and chest…[after being] thrown head-first inside, they applied judo or karate holds to us and the punches . . . kept raining down.”
Sánchez says she and Pardo were driven around for about 20 minutes before being “violently thrown on the street” near where they were first accosted. Their friends reported being taken to a police station in a second car, where they were questioned and released.
The group was en route to an event its organizers, local musicians, termed “a peaceful performance-march — neither a protest nor a political demand.” A previous gathering had included group theatre but was uneventful.
Since she began signing her name to blog posts she composes in Cuba and e-mails to friends in other countries for publication, Sánchez has received critical acclaim and several awards for her social commentary and missives about every day life on the island from the government to food to baseball. Though awarded Spain’s Ortega y Gasset Journalism Award and Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize, she has been denied permission to leave Cuba to accept. In 2008, Sánchez, a philologist by training, was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.
Sánchez said the motivation behind the “professional violence” was “evidently” to keep her from participating in the anti-violence march. “Anything else would be pure speculation.”
Click here for the full report.
Obama – One Year After Election
November 2, 2009 by joel
Filed under Government
November 2, 2009
The Christian Science Monitor
By Linda Freldmann
When Barack Obama campaigned for president, the first-term senator from Illinois set a high bar for himself. Making history as the first African-American to occupy the Oval Office almost seemed beside the point. In Reaganesque fashion, he wanted to transform America.
Then the financial markets collapsed. The economy teetered on the edge. By the time Mr. Obama was elected, almost one year ago, an anxious nation was ready for answers. Could Washington stave off a full-fledged depression? Though Obama would not take office for 2-1/2 months, Americans hung on his words as if he were already president.
Fast-forward to today, and President Obama faces debate about what exactly he has achieved since taking office. “Saturday Night Live” lampooned him as having checked no boxes on his “to do” list. The surprise announcement a week later that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, an award he himself said he did not deserve, only enhanced the notion that Obama was more about hope and hype than substance.
Some academics defend him.
“He’s had a good first year,” says Ted Widmer, a presidential historian at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. “Two of his biggest accomplishments are easy to overlook, but they were both important. He kept the financial crisis from becoming worse. And he vastly improved the way the rest of the world thinks about America.”
There’s no doubt that Obama got off to a fast start with Congress, passing a $787 billion stimulus package and expanded healthcare benefits for children. But on the most important issue, jobs and the economy, debate rages over whether the stimulus has been a success or a failure.
Healthcare reform and Afghanistan policy also hang in the balance. The resolution of both will say a lot about how Obama operates as president – and whether his first year is perceived as successful or not.
“A decent-seeming [health reform] would redound to Obama’s advantage and reduce the buzz over whether he is ‘tough enough’ and perhaps lead to a spike in public approval,” says Fred Greenstein, professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University in New Jersey.
Viewed through the prism of how “Obama so far” stacks up against past presidents, the issue of high expectations sits front and center. Twice since Obama’s election, Time magazine has run cover stories on what he can learn from Franklin Roosevelt, the last president to tackle both economic crisis and war. On one, Obama’s face is Photoshopped onto a famously jaunty picture of FDR. Obama himself has wrapped his image in the mantle of Abraham Lincoln.
Obama also set the bar high by imposing deadlines. On his first full day in office, he ordered the Guantánamo Bay prison camp closed in one year. In May, Obama was outmaneuvered in a congressional vote that bars the transfer of Guantánamo detainees to the US, hindering his ability to place them in other countries as well. The closure deadline is likely to be missed.
Obama also gave Congress an early August deadline on healthcare reform, which it missed by a mile. “No one’s afraid of Obama,” the charge went. Obama says he issued that deadline to keep Congress focused, but missing it opened him to charges of ineffectiveness.
David Axelrod, a senior Obama adviser, has allowed that the push for passage of healthcare by summer might have been too ambitious. “I might rethink that if we were to start over again,” he said Oct. 20 at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
The real test will come by year’s end, when Obama needs to have something to show for all his effort before the midterm election season kicks into high gear.
Obama’s election itself raised expectations, says Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. “There was a miracle at the ballot box, and people expect those miracles to continue later,” he says. “But [Obama officials] don’t help themselves by setting deadlines early on that they then don’t meet.”
Obama’s immediate predecessors can all claim some victories in their first nine months in office. George W. Bush cut taxes, passed the No Child Left Behind education reform, and pulled the nation together after 9/11. Bill Clinton passed a major stimulus and deficit-reduction program, was on his way to passing the North American Free Trade Agreement, and presided over a historic Arab-Israeli handshake.
George H.W. Bush’s term, in many ways Ronald Reagan’s “third term,” got credit for his successful stewardship of the end of the cold war. President Reagan launched his “revolution” by enacting the largest tax cuts in history.
It is the start of Jimmy Carter’s presidency that serves as Obama’s cautionary tale. Mr. Carter, like Obama, came in with an ambitious agenda – but in Carter’s case, it fell flat but for passage of the Panama Canal Treaties. His inner circle accompanied him from Georgia and did not mesh well with the barons of Capitol Hill, even though all were Democrats. Obama, in contrast, has peppered his administration with Clinton veterans, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
Early failures don’t always portend a failed presidency.
“A president whom we all admire like John F. Kennedy had to get through the Bay of Pigs before he moved on to his record of accomplishment,” says Mr. Widmer of Brown University.
At least, he adds, Obama has not endured disaster, even if he has yet to pull off a signature piece of legislation in the vein of what Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson achieved early. In the first 100 days alone, Roosevelt pushed through 15 major bills, a record that matched the extraordinary circumstances. By August 1965, less than seven months after winning the presidency in his own right, Johnson had launched Medicare, Medicaid, and the Voting Rights Act.
Prevention of an economic collapse may be Obama’s greatest achievement to date. But at a Democratic Party fundraiser on Oct. 20, Obama expressed chagrin at “collective amnesia on the part of some folks” over where the economy stood nine months before. “We were seeing an economic crisis unlike any that we had seen in generations,” he said. The stimulus, he added, has “made a difference in the lives of families across America.”
Some historians are dubious that Obama deserves all the kudos for saving the economy.
“If he gets credit for that, you also have to give credit to [then-Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson and Bush for rescuing the financial system in the fall,” says Alvin Felzenberg, author of a book on presidential ratings, “The Leaders We Deserved.”
Obama’s early days in office: keep people guessing
His first 100 days in office were marked by the boldest intervention of government into the affairs of business since the Truman era.
Click here for the full report.
World Governments Manipulating Weather with Chemtrails
October 21, 2009
Infowars
By Zachary T. Baker
After reading a Time Magazine article Moscow Mayor Promises a Winter Without Snow last Friday it became evident to me that the spraying of aerosols into the atmosphere exist only if you choose not to believe in it. This may sound Orwellian, but the United States, the Chinese and now Russian governments have all admitted that they are manipulating the weather. Let’s take a moment to ask ourselves why such sick delusional minds would still conjure up such nonsense.
The United States, the Chinese and now Russian governments have all admitted that they are manipulating the weather.
An article titled NASA Rocket to Create Clouds Tuesday was posted on space.com last month which reported on a project dubbed the Charged Aerosol Release Experiment or CARE with the intention of triggering cloud formation around the rocket’s exhaust particles. The artificial clouds were intended to simulate naturally occurring phenomena called noctilucent clouds, which are the highest clouds in the atmosphere.
Wayne Scales, a scientist at Virginia Tech used computer models to study the physics of the artificial dust cloud as it was released. Scales hoped the project would allow scientists to study different aspects of the artificial dust cloud, including the turbulence generated inside the clouds and the distribution of dust particles. “Nothing like this has been done before and that’s why everybody’s really excited about it,” said Scales. CARE is a project of the Naval Research Laboratory and the Department of Defense Space Test Program.
A London Guardian article titled Geo-engineering: The radical ideas to combat global warming published in August of this year argued that the idea of geo-engineering the planet in order to control the climate has been around for more than 50 years, but has remained on the “fringes,” as if it wasn’t already being done.
The story references to a special edition of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society which are made up of climate scientists and engineers that strongly encourage a wide assessment of geo-engineering techniques. Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist based at the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California believes “We are now, or soon will be, confronting issues of whether, when and how to engineer a climate that is more to our liking.”
Under the Freedom of Information Act Cybercast News Service obtained evidence that showed scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C. were conducting tests and developing computer models of what might happen if a huge amount of particulate matter is shot into the stratosphere. “The overall goal of this task is to understand and evaluate the implications of deploying porous glasses as an agent to reduce global warming,” the DOE work proposal said.
In the early 90’s Paul Crutzen , a Nobel Prize winner and Tom Wigley, a world renowned climate scientist both promoted the concept of artificially cooling the planet. By releasing a cocktail of sulfide gases into the upper atmosphere scientist would possess the ability to reflect the sun’s rays away from the earth therefore causing a cooling effect.
According to an AP interview this April with Dr. John Holdren, the current Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, radical methods of slowing global warming such as shooting particles into the upper atmosphere in order to reflect the sun’s rays were not being ruled out. Dr. Death is also known for his work as co- author of Ecoscience, a government textbook promoting insane population control measures such as forced sterilization.
Axelrod and Ailes Meet, but Details Are Few
October 7, 2009
New York Times
By Brian Steltar
Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, met with the White House adviser David Axelrod last month.
And it is a testament to Fox’s influence that that the meeting is newsworthy at all. Politico broke the news Tuesday afternoon, prompting speculation about the nature of the conversation.
A Fox press representative confirmed that the two men met over a cup of coffee last month during Mr. Obama’s visit to the United Nations. The representative called it a “cordial conversation.” Details of the conversation have not dribbled out yet.
“I’ve known Roger for a long time,” Mr. Axelrod told Time magazine in an e-mail message. “We chatted from time to time during the campaign. I was going to be in N.Y., so we got together for a cup of coffee.”
The highly popular Fox News is a perplexing channel for the Obama administration, given its propensity for political commentary by conservatives like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. In June, Mr. Obama said, “I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration,” adding, “You’d be hard-pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front.” The Fox host Bill O’Reilly and others assumed that he was speaking about Fox.
TVNewser notes that Fox News chose not to carry a couple of Mr. Obama’s speeches last month, but that “on the Saturday following the Axelrod-Ailes Manhattan chat,” Fox carried the president’s entire speech at a Congressional Black Caucus event “while MSNBC and CNN did not.”
