Got any gold?  It just hit $1016 an ounce.   Sure wish I hadn’t sold mine to pay the rent.  

James Beeland Rogers, Jr. (born October 19, 1942) is an expatriate American investor and financial commentator based in Singapore. He was a co-founder of the Quantum Fund, and is a college professor, author, economic commentator, and creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI). He considers himself of the Austrian School of economics.[2]

Funny, the Austrian School is also the world of economics Peter Schiff inhabits.  He’s another guy who speaks a lot of common sense.

Ben Bernacke, YOU LIE!  I mean, can you freaking believe that Ben Bernacke actually came out and said the recession is over?   Man, did he ever go all “Baghdad Bob” on us.  

Here’s a popular Youtube video, “Peter Schiff was Right”

And indeed he was. And so is Jim Rogers.

So let’s see what America’s plans for the future are.

It’s really easy to find out.  How?  Just look at what “Osama bin Laden” tells us to do, and realize that we will do the opposite.

Let’s look at what he’s telling us to do now, shall we?

1.  He’s telling us that we’re never gonna win in Afghanistan.   That means we’re never getting out of Afghanistan, we’re gonna send more troops and more money until we DO “win”.  Why would we do anything this fool tells us to do, right?  We’ll show him!  We’re gonna stay there and we’re gonna win!  We’re gonna win if it destroys our country!

2.  He’s telling us we should question our close political ties with the war-criminal state known as Israel.   That means we’re gonna be even closer to the war criminal state known as Israel!  We’re not gonna do anything Osama bin Laden wants us to do!  No way!  We’re gonna annex Israel as the 51st state, only with “special privileges” and we’re gonna send even more billions and more weapons so they can commit more war crimes!  

Osama bin Laden is not the boss of me!

The irony of this is so iron-meter-shattering that somebody, somewhere, is laughing their ass off.

Well, even though it’s now 9/12, I didn’t have time on 9/11 to do much of anything at all, so here’s my one-day-late 9/11 essay.

It is a direct copy of the piece that got me banned from DK.  It’s also a story of gross corporate media censorship, of a kind that should scare us all half to death.  

Okay, I’m not gonna copy it word for word.  Because that wouldn’t let me tell the story of how the book — and my piece was about a book that was written by a 9/11 Commission insider, John Farmer — has been “disappeared”.   I mean, this book seems to have simply vanished.

Here’s the original story I wrote over at Dailykos.  In it, I simply describe John Farmer, and his forthcoming book.  

John Farmer is pretty impressive:

John Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, where his areas of responsibility included assessing the national response to the terrorist attacks and evaluating the current state of national preparedness for terrorist attacks and natural disasters, he also served as attorney general of New Jersey (1999-2002), as chief counsel to Governor Whitman, and as a federal prosecutor. He recently served as a subject matter/rule of law expert on security to the special envoy for Middle East regional security. He is currently a partner of a New Jersey law form and an adjunct professor of national security law at Rutgers University Law School. His editorials and articles have appeared in “The New York Times” and elsewhere.

I have since discovered an amazing site called “History Commons”.   If you do a search for John Farmer over there, you discover that it was he who constantly brought attention to the bullshit the Commission was receiving from the Pentagon, the FAA, and many others.  It was he who asked the questions that nobody would answer.  

Here’s a link to that.

Well, he decided to write a book.  And being who he was, none other than Houghton Mifflin Harcourt decided to publish it.  

Here’s what the book was going to look like:

It was scheduled to have been released by now.

Dude, where’s my money?

There’s a scathing report in Vanity Fair right now about how all that TARP money was just thrown into the world with all the responsibility of someone shoveling it out the bank of an armored car while driving down a busy highway.

In other words, nobody knows where the money went.   Any of it.   There was no accountability, no rules for keeping track of it, heck, the banks didn’t have to do anything but take it, like lotto winnings, and do whatever the hell they wanted with it.

This whole crime is going right down the Memory Hole, which is right where the banksters, the guys who “run the place” to quote a few Congresspeople, want it to be.

But once the money left the building, the government lost all track of it. The Treasury Department knew where it had sent the money, but nothing about what was done with it. Did the money aid the recovery? Was it spent for the purposes Congress intended? Did it save banks from collapse? Paulson’s Treasury Department had no idea, and didn’t seem to care. It never required the banks to explain what they did with this unprecedented infusion of capital.

You can bet a lot of it was used for embezzlement “bonuses”, I mean, why not?   If someone gives you a few billion dollars and doesn’t care what you do with it, why not put it in your own little Swiss bank account?  

Exactly one year has elapsed since the onset of the financial crisis and the passage of the bailout bill. Some measure of scrutiny and control has since been imposed by the Obama administration, but even today it’s hard to walk back the cat and trace the money. Up to a point, though, it’s possible to reconstruct some of what happened in the first chaotic and crucial three months of the bailout, when Treasury was still in the hands of Henry Paulson and most of the money was disbursed. Needless to say, there is no central clearinghouse for information about the tarp money. To get details of any kind means starting with the hundreds of individual recipients, then poring over S.E.C. filings, annual reports, and other documentation-in other words, performing the standard due diligence that the government itself failed to perform. In the report that follows, we have no more than dipped a toe into the morass, but one fact emerges clearly: a lot of the money wound up in the coffers of some very surprising institutions- institutions that should have been seen as “troubling” as much as “troubled.”

I don’t really have time tonight to do much more than this, but I wanted to pass this along.   We certainly shouldn’t forget about this, not that it will matter with the Obama administration “putting corporations first” and the American people dead last.   They’re sure never gonna do crap about anything, especially this, and especially since Obama put his full 1000% support behind this crime anyway.  

Oh well.  

Meanwhile, millions more foreclosures are on their way.   But wait, didn’t the TARP money have something to do with mortgages?   Naaaahhhh, it was all about giving it to bankers, pure theft to fatten those cats.   The rest of us are left to melt down, even though the whole lie idea behind the bailout was to help out with the whole mortgage crash, right?

Pardon me while I puke.  

So I want to share three stories with the people here, but I honestly can’t decide which one to post tonight.  So I’m doing all three.   Why not?  

First, the bad news.

Apparently, a “Thursday Night Massacre” in Afghanistan, where we blew up a tanker truck and killed at least 90 people and wounded more, almost all of whom were civilians, happened at 2:30 a.m. on the biggest party night of the week.

In short, it happened while everybody was blind stinking drunk.

Afghan alcohol ban after Nato staff were ‘too hungover’ to give explanation for airstrike that killed 70 civilians

There are seven bars on half-square mile Isaf compound. One insider told the Times: ‘Thursday nights are the big party nights, because Friday’s a ‘low-ops’ day. They even open a bar in the garden at headquarters.

‘There’s a ‘two can’ rule but people ignore it and hit it pretty hard.’

The airstrike occurred at 2.30am on Friday morning.

Although McChrystal is publicly saying that alcohol was not a factor in the strike itself (yeah right), check out the evidence to the contrary:

General Stanley McChrystal has banned alcohol at the International Forces in Afghanistan headquarters

Alcohol has been banned from Nato’s headquarters in Afghanistan in the wake of an airstrike that killed up to 70 civilians.

US General Stanley McChrystal, head of the International Forces in Afghanistan (Isaf), decided to bar boozing after launching an investigation into the bombing in northern Afghanistan.

Staff at the Kabul headquarters were ‘either drunk or too hungover’ to answer his questions.

Yeah it sounds like alcohol played no part whatsoever in the strike.   Sure, Stanley, we believe you.  

If there’s one thing I hate worse than an evil Republican, it’s a pussy Democrat.

You know, the hand-wringing, Tom Daschle-ian, “oh gosh we sure wouldn’t want to make them mad” kind of appeasers to the right wing, constantly demonstrating that they are officially the party of losers, nothing but the token “liberals” to the manly alpha-dog Repubs who actually run things.  

I fucking HATE THESE PRICKS.   And the Democratic Party seems to have nothing but members who are exactly like this.   Men who just turned in their fucking balls when they took their oath of office, handed them over to Newt Gingrich to keep in his freezer.  

And now, even our President, the guy who rope-a-doped us with “hope”, and played us for guillible fools, the man who actually seemed to act like a man and got out there and pretended to fight, well he’s just another one of these ass-kissing toadies who dares NOT to anger the Republican Gods!    

This Van Jones thing is the last straw.  

Here’s what I wrote at another forum, fuck it, I’m just gonna cut and paste it:

It seems Obama’s real function is to recessitate the Republicans.

Now that he’s in power, his sole purpose seems to be to re-legitimize the Republican Party. His whole thing is to be “bi partisan” to a group of irrelevant losers who are only supported by a tiny majority of the population, to let them create the illusion that they ARE still relevant and that they actually do have some power. Neither is true.

If Obama was for real, he and his people would be in the process of planting the daisies over the grave of the Repub Party.

But he’s not for real, so instead, he’s watering their seeds instead, so they can be revived and come back as the “dominant” party yet again in this country.

He’s literally a nursemaid.

And to those of us who actually thought he would do what he promised (I wasn’t one of them, but seeing as how he was gonna be the guy, I did hope that he would turn on his masters and just go ahead with the “right” thing), well, it’s become abundantly clear that WE’RE the ones who are utterly irrelevant, not the losers and psychos and fascists and nutjobs aboard the sinking ship of the the suicided Republicans.

Obama: Ignoring the people who voted for him, nurturing and revitalizing the Republican Party.

He’s a fucking douchebag.

The resignation of Van Jones should be the last straw for anybody paying attention. Let’s see, what was his real crime? Calling Republicans “assholes”. THAT was his crime. He called war criminals, people who should be blindfolded and in line for their turn at the guillotine “assholes” and for that, he must be ostracized from the official government party. Obama gives the Republicans a huge win here, this in fact is a watershed moment for them, this is the lighting that flows into the fetid corpse of the Frankenstein monster and brings it back to life.

Thanks, Obama.

Yes, John McCain can joke about bombing Iran and he’s allowed to run for President.  Michelle Bachman can say all the absolutely fruitcakey things she can say, David Vitter dons diapers and romps with hookers, the list goes on and on, but oh GOSH, one of our guys, and an uppity BLACK one at that, DARES to call the white, male ruling party “ASSHOLES” and he’s shoved right out the door by his OWN PEOPLE.    He DARES to sign a petition about the greatest crime within our nations borders, demonstrating that he actually might be with the majority of New York City residents on this, and he’s immediately kicked out the office window by the embarrassed Democrats.

They fucking HANDED the Repubs a win on this one.  A huge win.  They didn’t even show up to fight, the Repubs just raised a couple of eyebrows and this guy was thrown under the fucking TRAIN.  

What a bunch of pathetic, loser, testicle-free PUSSIES.

I fucking hate these people.  You know why?

Because there are ALWAYS evil bullies in the world.  Always.   There are always Republicans and liars and cheaters and con men trying to take over things and the only reason they don’t (if they don’t) is because other people who know better and who are willing to meet them eye-for-eye and blow-for-blow stand the fuck UP to them and face them down and make it damn clear that they will not be tolerated.

It’s as simple as that.

But wait, maybe that’s not it, check this out:

I just have to pass this along, from the Asia Times:

Bush’s third term? You’re living it

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can’t you just picture it?

There’s Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some “due process” even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn’t torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture “if needed”, and maintaining a prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for all US troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He’d surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new “surge” there. He’d probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan’s tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.

If Bush were still “the decider” he’d be employing mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be expanding the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable corporate executive types. You’d have somebody like John (“May I torture this one some more, please?”) Rizzo still serving, at least for a while, as general counsel at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The White House and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like former Alabama governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.

In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along – with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly have been re-appointed to run the Fed. And Bush’s third term would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around with the North American Free Trade Agreement that the Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in Bush’s third term, no significant new effort would have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.

If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he’d been talking to.

NBC has just hired this person, who is expressing her opinion of the media for which she will now be working:

Yup, you got that right, it’s Jenna Bush, now a budding “Washington-based correspondent” for NBC “news”.  

Maybe they need someone to give a story on where you can best get blink-stinking-drunk in Washington D.C.:

I guess it’s GE’s attempt to curry favor with the Bush family, a family who allowed GE to add billions of dollars to its bottom line by declaring an endless, massive, completely illegal war back in 2003.    GE’s annual report said that the Iraq War was going to be worth several billion dollars to its bottom line.  And that was before the war really even got going!

So the favor is returned, and the spoiled little brat gets a plum gig with Daddy’s friends.

So you can bet this will be completely underreported in the United States, or not at all.

I find it almost humorously ironic that a man who stole an election in the United States then invaded a country where he set up a faux Democracy, and the puppet that he installed has now proceeded to steal his own election.

All the while we spend $133 million dollars a day — $5.5 million bucks an HOUR, 24/7 to have our military in said puppet’s country, loading taxpayer money into Big Corporate’s pockets.  

It’s almost a perfect perpetual-motion machine of corruption.

This from The Toronto Star:

Afghan vote called ‘mockery’

On the videotape, a couple of mooks are shown blithely filling out a slew of ballots for President Hamid Karzai. Tick-mark. Tick-mark. Tick-mark.

Says one to the other: “We should at least include a few for Dr. Abdullah, don’t you think?”

The man in question, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, can’t prevent a bemused chortle from escaping his lips as he watches the video clips, surreptitiously shot, that purport to show brazen vote-rigging by Karzai boosters of both minnow and barracuda variety – from anonymous foot soldiers to the head of the Independent Election Commission in Ghazni province.

It is, indeed, to laugh. It is, perchance, to cry. It might become a matter of vocal citizen demonstration, too, beyond the formal complaints – some 100 – that Team Abdullah has already registered with authorities over alleged fraud in Afghanistan’s national elections.

This presidential vote, the second-ever democratic poll in Afghanistan, but the first organized and mounted by Afghans themselves, is rapidly turning into a wreck.

I’ve long since quit watching CNN but sometimes when I’m flipping through channels I catch a little piece of it here and there.  The other day I was subjected to an outraged, absolutely outraged Wolf Blitzer confronting Scotland’s equivalent of our Attorney General over the release of the man convicted of being the main perpetrator of the Lockerbie plane bombing.  Wolfie just went on and on about “mass murderers!” and the like, totally ignoring the fact that our own country is engaged in the business of slaughtering far more innocent people, in an ongoing consistent fashion, than any terrorist’s wildest dreams.

Nevertheless, there was never any doubt whatsoever in Wolfie’s little shrink-wrapped brain about the actual guilt of the man in question.   No, he was the “lone gunman”, he was the absolute nexus of evil in this case, right?   The Scottish guy was pretty interesting, he never wavered, never bought into the emotion, and was quick to admit that yes, this was the man convicted.  He never said the guy did it, he just said he was “convicted”.   Which is certainly true.  He was convicted.  

Well why don’t we take a little trip into The Memory Hole about this case, just for the pure rollicking heck of it, not that it will matter, but I’d just like to share a few little tidbits regarding this case that most people don’t even think about anymore, except of course for the families of those killed, as Wolfie was pointing out ad nauseum to the Scottish fellow.

It was claimed some time ago that key evidence in the Lockerbie case was in fact planted by the CIA:

http://www.independent.co.uk/n…

Crucial evidence against two Libyans for the Lockerbie bombing was planted by the CIA, it was claimed in the Commons yesterday.

A fragment of circuit board alleged to have been part of the bomb’s timing mechanism is the sole item of physical evidence linking the two Libyans to the December 1988 bombing. But Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, declared: “I have come to suspect that the timing device in question was not that of Pan Am 103 but a different timing device that the CIA had picked up from the Libyans … I have been driven to the conclusion that the device was a CIA plant.”

Mr Dalyell, a long-standing critic of US and British government insistence that Libya was behind the attack, said an analysis of the fragment had shown it had been exposed to a temperature of 4,000deg C. But a Swiss police specialist had cast doubt on this, saying the explosion would have lasted only a fraction of a second in outside air temperatures of about minus 40C.

Accusing the Crown Office, the Scottish prosecuting authority, of failing to follow up the right leads, Mr Dalyell said – to strident denials from Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the Scottish Office minister – that it had allowed itself for six years “to be suborned by political pressure into failing to carry out its duty”.

He said this was a “wicked” dereliction of duty that brought shame on Britain.