How the Obama campaign used foriegn, laundered money to operate, and created the illusion of mass grassroots donations

Obama is Bought, But Who owns Him?

10.21.08 / Paul R. Hollrah / Red County

In a July 25 column titled “Who Owns Barack Obama?” we discussed Obama’s phenomenal fundraising juggernaut.

In July, Obama boasted that, as of May 31, his contributor base numbered some 1.5 million people, with one-fourth, or $66.25 million of his $265 million, coming from those contributing $2,000, or more… some 33,200 people.  Thus, the remainder, or $198.75 million, came from some 1.47 million people, each contributing $5, $10, $20… or, as Obama assured us, “whatever they could afford.”

While it is true that Obama is the kind of guy who could read Bill Clinton’s golf scorecard and make it sound convincing, simple arithmetic should have told him that $198.75 million dollars cannot be contributed by 1.47 million people in “$5, $10, or $20″ amounts.  Each of those 1.47 million people would have had to contribute, on average, $135 to create a pool of $198.75 million… and that simply does not happen.  It has never happened before in American politics and it is not happening now.

But now, just days before the election, the Obama campaign has compounded their sins.  They are now reporting that their contributor base has increased from 1.5 million to 2.5 million and that the total amount raised now approaches $600 million.  If we can assume that 25% of their contributions still come from individuals giving $2,000 to $2,300, that base has now grown from 33,200 individuals to 65,000 in a time span of just three months, and the number of individuals contributing modest amounts… “$5, $10, $20, or whatever they could afford”… is now up from 1.47 million to 2.43 million, each contributing, on average, $185.

Anyone who believes that is actually happening will believe almost anything.  So how are they doing it?

In our July 25 column we pointed out that UBS Americas, headed by Robert Wolf… along with George Soros, one of Obama’s top two money men… had been accused of highly unethical and illegal banking practices in six months of hearings by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.  According to an article in The Nation, UBS Americas, a subsidiary of UBS, of Zürich, Switzerland, has advised wealthy Americans, including many of our worst villains, how to shelter funds from the IRS, as well as from prosecutors, creditors, disgruntled business associates, family members, and each other.

In a Statement of Facts in the recent criminal trial of former UBS executive Bradley Birkenfeld, it was alleged that UBS took extraordinary steps to help American clients manage their Swiss accounts without alerting federal authorities.   For example, UBS advised American clients to avoid detection by using Swiss credit cards to withdraw funds, to destroy all existing off-shore banking records, and to misrepresent the receipt of funds from their Swiss accounts as loans from the Swiss bank.  According to The Nation, UBS established an elaborate training program which taught bank employees how to avoid surveillance by U.S. Customs and law enforcement, falsify visas, encrypt communications, and secretly move money in and out of the country… “

It is the perfect instrument for funneling illegal campaign contributions into the coffers of an unscrupulous American politician.  Putting two and two together, I suggested that a very wealthy individual, or cartel, wishing to influence the election of the President of the United States, could transfer unlimited sums of money through this device.  A U.S. recipient, such as the Obama campaign, could receive hundreds of thousands of individual contributions via Swiss credit card transfers, with fictitious payees being entered by teams of paid staffers working in a “boiler room” setting.  The owners of the Swiss accounts would receive periodic statements indicating: a) debits of varying amounts, up to $2,300 each, and b) offsetting credits provided by the cartel, or by the wealthy, but unnamed, “international financier.”
For most of the super wealthy, especially those attempting to hide income and assets from U.S. authorities, an unexplained debit and credit of $2,300, or less, would not even raise an eyebrow.  So who would ever know the source of such contributions?  No one.

Now, in an October 20 article in Newsmax, writer Kenneth Timmerman provides details from Federal Election Commission records that give substantial weight to my theory.  In studying Obama’s FEC filings, Newsmax found more than 2,000 donors who had given substantially more than their $4,600 limit ($2,300 in the primaries and $2,300 in the General Election).  The law requires that such excess contributions must be returned to the donor within 60 days of the donor going over his/her limit.  However, many of the donors contacted by Newsmax said that they had not been contacted by the Obama campaign and that they had not received refunds.

But these are relatively minor infractions compared to 66,383 highly suspicious contributions, from 37,265 donors, whose contributions were not rounded to even dollar amounts. For example, Timmerman tells us that John Atkinson, an insurance agent in Burr Ridge, Illinois, gave a total of $8,724.26.  He gave in odd amounts such as $188.67, $1,542.06, $876.09, $388.67, $282.20, $195.66, $118.15, and one of $2,300.

Sandra Daneshinia, a self-employed caregiver of Los Angeles, made 36 separate contributions totaling $7,051.12.  Thirteen of her contributions were later refunded.  However, in an odd coincidence those 13 refunds, in amounts such as $233.88 and $201.44, came to an even $2,300, the maximum amount allowable in any one election.

One contributor interviewed by Newsmax, Ronald J. Sharpe, Jr., a retired schoolteacher from Rockledge, Florida, is reported to have given $13,800… $9,200 over his limit.  However, Mr. Sharpe does not remember giving that much money to Obama, nor has anyone from the campaign ever contacted him about a refund.

Of the 66,383 contributions in odd amounts, 44,410 were in unrounded amounts of less than $100, 15,269 contributions were in unrounded amounts of between $101 and $999, and 704 contributions were in odd amounts greater than $1,000.

Lest anyone suggest that these 37,265 donors either emptied their piggy banks or emptied their pockets and purses periodically and just sent it all to Obama, pennies and all, allow me to suggest something a tiny bit more Machiavellian.  Those 66,383 contributions are the proceeds of conversions of foreign currency, smuggled into the country in foreign credit card receipts, and converted to U.S. dollars.

According to a Newsmax analysis, the Obama campaign finance reports contain some 370,500 unique names… a far cry from the 2.5 million contributor base claimed by the campaign.  Of course, when your money is coming in large chunks from offshore accounts, such as hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time from the Middle East and from Third World African countries, then laundered though UBS accounts in Zürich, it takes a bit of creativity to put authentic-sounding names on all of it for the FEC records.

How massive is this crime?  Since the Obama campaign has refused to disclose their complete contributor list (they continue to hide the identities of some 2 million donors), as the McCain campaign has done, Newsmax estimates that “Obama is financing his presidential campaign with anywhere from $13 million to a whopping $63 million from overseas credit cards or foreign currency purchases.”

Given the massive voter registration fraud committed by Obama’s supporters, the fraudulent votes already cast in early voting by itinerant out-of-state voters, and the massive crime involved in accepting tens of thousands of illegal foreign contributions, John McCain and Sarah Palin simply must close the gap in the closing days of the campaign.  If not, we will inaugurate a man on January 20 who will have to be impeached before his wife has a chance to measure the White House for new draperies.

And here it is – The creators of the Obama campaign logo

Chicago designers create Obama’s logo

2.22.07 / Lorene Yue & Brandon Glen / Crain’s Chicago Business

A team of Chicago graphic designers has given Barack Obama’s campaign its signature look.

Sol Sender of Sender LLC and five others in his firm created the logo the Illinois senator is using for his 2008 presidential bid.

The icon, a gradated blue “o” featuring three red stripes, is prominently displayed on Mr. Obama’s campaign Web site pages and featured on t-shirts, buttons and bumper stickers.

Sender LLC is a Chicago brand consultancy and design studio whose clients include Crain’s

“We were looking at the “o” of his name and had the idea of a rising sun and a new day,” Mr. Sender said. “The sun rising over the horizon evoked a new sense of hope.”

It’s a message that branding experts quickly latched onto.

“It begins to break with tradition while also rooting itself in tradition,” said Peter Krivkovich, CEO of Cramer-Krasselt advertising agency in Chicago. “Patriotism is the foundation, but above that is hope, opportunity, newness.”

David Morrison, president of Philadelphia-based market research firm Twentysomething Inc., said the logo has “a nice, contemporary, dynamic, youthful vibe about it.”

He said the shape and color of the logo “signals by design that Obama has a different message and wants to forge a different type of connection with the voters out there.”

Sender LLC landed the logo project through mo/de, a Chicago design firm working with AKP Message & Media of Chicago. Political consultant David Axelrod, who is working on Obama’s campaign and worked on his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, is a partner with AKP Message & Media.

Mr. Sender said he is unsure if the logo will remain intact if Mr. Obama wins the Democratic nomination.

“I’m sure if he gets the nomination new things will be done,” Mr. Sender said.

This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s White House

11.20.08 / Jeremy Scahill / Alternet

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton’s White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama’s team.

“What happened to all this talk about change?” a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. “This isn’t lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time.”

Amid the euphoria over Obama’s election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton’s  boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.

Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam Chomsky described as the “New Military Humanism.” Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and “free trade” deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.

The prospect of Obama’s foreign policy being, at least in part, an extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several of the individuals at the center of Obama’s transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances. Among them:

– His plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan;

– An Iraq plan that could turn into a downsized and rebranded occupation that keeps U.S. forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future;

– His labeling of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a “terrorist organization;”

– His pledge to use unilateral force inside of Pakistan to defend U.S. interests;

– His position, presented before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that Jerusalem “must remain undivided” — a remark that infuriated Palestinian officials and which he later attempted to reframe;

– His plan to continue the War on Drugs, a backdoor U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Central and Latin America;

– His refusal to “rule out” using Blackwater and other armed private forces in U.S. war zones, despite previously introducing legislation to regulate these companies and bring them under U.S. law.

Obama did not arrive at these positions in a vacuum. They were carefully crafted in consultation with his foreign policy team. While the verdict is still out on a few people, many members of his inner foreign policy circle — including some who have received or are bound to receive Cabinet posts — supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Some promoted the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. A few have worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, whose radical agenda was adopted by the Bush/Cheney administration. And most have proven track records of supporting or implementing militaristic, offensive U.S. foreign policy. “After a masterful campaign, Barack Obama seems headed toward some fateful mistakes as he assembles his administration by heeding the advice of Washington’s Democratic insider community, a collective group that represents little ‘change you can believe in,’” notes veteran journalist Robert Parry, the former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter who broke many of the stories in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

As news breaks and speculation abounds about cabinet appointments, here are 20 people to watch as Obama builds the team who will shape U.S. foreign policy for at least four years:

Joe Biden

There was no stronger sign that Obama’s foreign policy would follow the hawkish tradition of the Democratic foreign policy establishment than his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Much has been written on Biden’s tenure as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but his role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq stands out. Biden is not just one more Democratic lawmaker who now calls his vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq “mistaken;” Biden was actually an important facilitator of the war.

In the summer of 2002, when the United States was “debating” a potential attack on Iraq, Biden presided over hearings whose ostensible purpose was to weigh all existing options. But instead of calling on experts whose testimony could challenge the case for war — Iraq’s alleged WMD possession and its supposed ties to al-Qaida — Biden’s hearings treated the invasion as a foregone conclusion. His refusal to call on two individuals in particular ensured that testimony that could have proven invaluable to an actual debate was never heard: Former Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran diplomat and the former head of the U.N.’s Iraq program.

Both men say they made it clear to Biden’s office that they were ready and willing to testify; Ritter knew more about the dismantling of Iraq’s WMD program than perhaps any other U.S. citizen and would have been in prime position to debunk the misinformation and outright lies being peddled by the White House. Meanwhile, von Sponeck had just returned from Iraq, where he had observed Ansar al Islam rebels in the north of Iraq — the so-called al-Qaida connection — and could have testified that, rather than colluding with Saddam’s regime, they were in a battle against it. Moreover, he would have pointed out that they were operating in the U.S.-enforced safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan. “Evidence of al-Qaida/lraq collaboration does not exist, neither in the training of operatives nor in support to Ansar-al-Islam,” von Sponeck wrote in an Op-Ed published shortly before the July 2002 hearings. “The U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA know perfectly well that today’s Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States. To argue otherwise is dishonest.”

With both men barred from testifying, rather than eliciting an array of informed opinions, Biden’s committee whitewashed Bush’s lies and helped lead the country to war. Biden himself promoted the administration’s false claims that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, declaring on the Senate floor, “[Saddam Hussein] possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons.”

With the war underway, Biden was then the genius who passionately promoted the ridiculous plan to partition Iraq into three areas based on religion and ethnicity, attempting to Balkanize one of the strongest Arab states in the world.

“He’s a part of the old Democratic establishment,” says retired Army Col. Ann Wright, the State Department diplomat who reopened the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 2002. Biden, she says, has “had a long history with foreign affairs, [but] it’s not the type of foreign affairs that I want.”

Rahm Emanuel

Obama’s appointment of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff is a clear sign that Clinton-era neoliberal hawks will be well-represented at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. A former senior Clinton advisor, Emanuel is a hard-line supporter of Israel’s “targeted assassination” policy and actually volunteered to work with the Israeli Army during the 1991 Gulf War. He is close to the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council and was the only member of the Illinois Democratic delegation in the Congress to vote for the invasion of Iraq. Unlike many of his colleagues, Emanuel still defends his vote. As chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, Emanuel promoted the campaigns of 22 candidates, only one of who supported a swift withdrawal from Iraq, and denied crucial Party funding to anti-war candidates. “As for Iraq policy, at the right time, we will have a position,” he said in December 2005. As Philip Giraldi recently pointed out on Antiwar.com, Emanuel “advocates increasing the size of the U.S. Army by 100,000 soldiers and creating a domestic spying organization like Britain’s MI5. More recently, he has supported mandatory paramilitary national service for all Americans between the ages of 18 and 25.”

While Obama has at times been critical of Clinton-era free trade agreements, Emanuel was one of the key people in the Clinton White House who brokered the successful passage of NAFTA.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

For all the buzz and speculation about the possibility that Sen. Clinton may be named Secretary of State, most media coverage has focused on her rivalry with Obama during the primary, along with the prospect of her husband having to face the intense personal, financial and political vetting process required to secure a job in the new administration. But the question of how Clinton would lead the operations at Foggy Bottom calls for scrutiny of her positions vis-a-vis Obama’s stated foreign-policy goals.

Clinton was an ardent defender of her husband’s economic and military war against Iraq throughout the 1990s, including the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which ultimately laid the path for President George W. Bush’s invasion. Later, as a U.S. senator, she not only voted to authorize the war, but aided the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign in the lead-up to the invasion. “Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program,” Clinton said when rising to support the measure in October 2002. “He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members … I want to insure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support for the president’s efforts to wage America’s war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.”

“The man who vowed to deliver us from 28 years of Bushes and Clintons has been stocking up on Clintonites,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently wrote. “How, one may ask, can he put Hillary — who voted to authorize the Iraq war without even reading the intelligence assessment — in charge of patching up a foreign policy and a world riven by that war?”

Beyond Iraq, Clinton shocked many and sparked official protests by Tehran at the United Nations when asked during the presidential campaign what she would do as president if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. “I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” she declared. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Clinton has not shied away from supporting offensive foreign policy tactics in the past. Recalling her husband’s weighing the decision of whether to attack Yugoslavia, she said in 1999, “I urged him to bomb. … You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?”

Madeleine Albright

While Obama’s house is flush with Clintonian officials like former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Defense Secretary William Perry, Director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning Greg Craig (who was officially named Obama’s White House Counsel) and Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, perhaps most influential is Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State and U.N. ambassador. Albright recently served as a proxy for Obama, representing him at the G-20 summit earlier this month. Whether or not she is awarded an official role in the administration, Albright will be a major force in shaping Obama’s foreign policy.

“It will take time to convince skeptics that the promotion of democracy is not a mask for imperialism or a recipe for the kind of chaos we have seen in the Persian Gulf,” Albright recently wrote. “And it will take time to establish the right identity for America in a world that has grown suspicious of all who claim a monopoly on virtue and that has become reluctant to follow the lead of any one country.”

Albright should know. She was one of the key architects in the dismantling of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. In the lead-up to the 1999 “Kosovo war,” she oversaw the U.S. attempt to coerce the Yugoslav government to deny its own sovereignty in return for not being bombed. Albright demanded that the Yugoslav government sign a document that would have been unacceptable to any sovereign nation. Known as the Rambouillet Accord, it included a provision that would have guaranteed U.S. and NATO forces “free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout” all of Yugoslavia — not just Kosovo — while also seeking to immunize those occupation forces “from any form of arrest, investigation or detention by the authorities in [Yugoslavia].” Moreover, it would have granted the occupiers “the use of airports, roads, rails and ports without payment.” Similar to Bush’s Iraq plan years later, the Rambouillet Accord mandated that the economy of Kosovo “shall function in accordance with free-market principles.”

When Yugoslavia refused to sign the document, Albright and others in the Clinton administration unleashed the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia, which targeted civilian infrastructure. (Prior to the attack, Albright said the U.S. government felt “the Serbs need a little bombing.”) She and the Clinton administration also supported the rise to power in Kosovo of a terrorist mafia that carried out its own ethnic-cleansing campaign against the province’s minorities.

Perhaps Albright’s most notorious moment came with her enthusiastic support of the economic war against the civilian population of Iraq. When confronted by Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” that the sanctions were responsible for the deaths of “a half-million children … more children than died in Hiroshima,” Albright responded, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.” (While defending the policy, Albright later called her choice of words “a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong.”)

Richard Holbrooke

Like Albright, Holbrooke will have major sway over U.S. policy, whether or not he gets an official job. A career diplomat since the Vietnam War, Holbrooke’s most recent government post was as President Clinton’s ambassador to the U.N. Among the many violent policies he helped implement and enforce was the U.S.-backed Indonesian genocide in East Timor. Holbrooke was an Assistant Secretary of State in the late 1970s at the height of the slaughter and was the point man on East Timor for the Carter Administration.

According to Brad Simpson, director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, “It was Holbrooke and Zbigniew Brzezinski [another top Obama advisor], both now leading lights in the Democratic Party, who played point in trying to frustrate the efforts of congressional human-rights activists to try and condition or stop U.S. military assistance to Indonesia, and in fact accelerated the flow of weapons to Indonesia at the height of the genocide.”

Holbrooke, too, was a major player in the dismantling of Yugoslavia and praised the bombing of Serb Television, which killed 16 media workers, as a significant victory. (The man who ordered that bombing, now-retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, is another Obama foreign policy insider who could end up in his cabinet. While Clark is known for being relatively progressive on social issues, as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, he ordered bombings and attacks that Amnesty International labeled war crimes.)

Like many in Obama’s foreign policy circle, Holbrooke also supported the Iraq war. In early 2003, shortly after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the UN, where he presented the administration’s fraud-laden case for war to the UN (a speech Powell has since called a “blot” on his reputation), Holbrooke said: “It was a masterful job of diplomacy by Colin Powell and his colleagues, and it does not require a second vote to go to war. … Saddam is the most dangerous government leader in the world today, he poses a threat to the region, he could pose a larger threat if he got weapons of mass destruction deployed, and we have a legitimate right to take action.”

Dennis Ross

Middle East envoy for both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross was one of the primary authors of Obama’s aforementioned speech before AIPAC this summer. He cut his teeth working under famed neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in the 1970s and worked closely with the Project for the New American Century. Ross has been a staunch supporter of Israel and has fanned the flames for a more hostile stance toward Iran. As the lead U.S. negotiator between Israel and numerous Arab nations under Clinton, Ross’ team acted, in the words of one U.S. official who worked under him, as “Israel’s lawyer.”

“The ‘no surprises’ policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking,” wrote U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller in 2005. “If we couldn’t put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be? Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one — Israel.” After the Clinton White House, Ross worked for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a hawkish pro-Israel think tank, and for FOX News, where he repeatedly pressed for war against Iraq.

Martin Indyk

Founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Indyk spent years working for AIPAC and served as Clinton’s ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, while also playing a major role in developing U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran. In addition to his work for the U.S. government, he has worked for the Israeli government and with PNAC.

“Barack Obama has painted himself into a corner by appealing to the most hard-line, pro-Israel elements in this country,” Ali Abunimah, founder of ElectronicInifada.net, recently told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, describing Indyk and Dennis Ross as “two of the most pro-Israel officials from the Clinton era, who are totally distrusted by Palestinians and others across the Middle East, because they’re seen as lifelong advocates for Israeli positions.”

Anthony Lake

Clinton’s former National Security Advisor was an early supporter of Obama and one of the few top Clintonites to initially back the president-elect. Lake began his foreign policy work in the U.S. Foreign Service during Vietnam, working with Henry Kissinger on the “September Group,” a secret team tasked with developing a military strategy to deliver a “savage, decisive blow against North Vietnam.”

Decades later, after working for various administrations, Lake “was the main force behind the U.S. invasion of Haiti in the mid-Clinton years,” according to veteran journalist Allan Nairn, whose groundbreaking reporting revealed U.S. support for Haitian death squads in the 1990s. “They brought back Aristide essentially in political chains, pledged to support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the economy, which resulted in an increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians, and set the stage for the current ongoing political disaster in Haiti.” Clinton nominated Lake as CIA Director, but he failed to win Senate confirmation.

Lee Hamilton

Hamilton is a former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and was co-chairman of both the Iraq Study Group and 9/11 Commission. Robert Parry, who has covered Hamilton’s career extensively, recently ran a piece on Consortium News that characterized him this way: “Whenever the Republicans have a touchy national-security scandal to put to rest, their favorite Democratic investigator is Lee Hamilton. … Hamilton’s carefully honed skill for balancing truth against political comity has elevated him to the status of a Washington Wise Man.”

Susan Rice

Former Assistant Secretary of Sate Susan Rice, who served on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, is a potential candidate for the post of ambassador to the U.N. or as a deputy national security advisor. She, too, promoted the myth that Saddam had WMDs. “It’s clear that Iraq poses a major threat,” she said in 2002. “It’s clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that’s the path we’re on.” (After the invasion, discussing Saddam’s alleged possession of WMDs, she said, “I don’t think many informed people doubted that.”)

Rice has also been a passionate advocate for a U.S. military attack against Sudan over the Darfur crisis. In an op-ed co-authored with Anthony Lake, she wrote, “The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan’s oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy — by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing.”

John Brennan

A longtime CIA official and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Brennan is one of the coordinators of Obama’s intelligence transition team and a top contender for either CIA Director or Director of National Intelligence. He was also recently described by Glenn Greenwald as “an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity.” While claiming to oppose waterboarding, labeling it “inconsistent with American values” and “something that should be prohibited,” Brennan has simultaneously praised the results achieved by “enhanced interrogation” techniques. “There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has, in fact, used against the real hard-core terrorists,” Brennan said in a 2007 interview. “It has saved lives. And let’s not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the death of 3,000 innocents.”

Brennan has described the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program — the government-run kidnap-and-torture program enacted under Clinton — as an absolutely vital tool. “I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in,” he said in a December 2005 interview. “And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.”

Brennan is currently the head of Analysis Corporation, a private intelligence company that was recently implicated in the breach of Obama and Sen. John McCain’s passport records. He is also the current chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a trade association of private intelligence contractors who have dramatically increased their role in sensitive U.S. national security operations. (Current Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is former chairman of the INSA.)

Jami Miscik

Miscik, who works alongside Brennan on Obama’s transitional team, was the CIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. She was one of the key officials responsible for sidelining intel that contradicted the official line on WMD, while promoting intel that backed it up.

“When the administration insisted on an intelligence assessment of Saddam Hussein’s relationship to al-Qaida, Miscik blocked the skeptics (who were later vindicated) within the CIA’s Mideast analytical directorate and instructed the less-skeptical counterterrorism analysts to ’stretch to the maximum the evidence you had,’ ” journalist Spencer Ackerman recently wrote in the Washington Independent. “It’s hard to think of a more egregious case of sacrificing sound intelligence analysis in order to accommodate the strategic fantasies of an administration. … The idea that Miscik is helping staff Obama’s top intelligence picks is most certainly not change we can believe in.” What’s more, she went on to a lucrative post as the Global Head of Sovereign Risk for the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

John Kerry and Bill Richardson

Both Sen. Kerry and Gov. Richardson have been identified as possible contenders for Secretary of State. While neither is likely to be as hawkish as Hillary Clinton, both have taken pro-war positions. Kerry promoted the WMD lie and voted to invade Iraq. “Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don’t even try?” Kerry asked on the Senate floor in October 2002. “According to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons … Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents.”

Richardson, whose Iraq plan during his 2008 presidential campaign was more progressive and far-reaching than Obama’s, served as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the UN. In this capacity, he supported Clinton’s December 1998 bombing of Baghdad and the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq. “We think this man is a threat to the international community, and he threatens a lot of the neighbors in his region and future generations there with anthrax and VX,” Richardson told an interviewer in February 1998.

While Clinton’s Secretary of Energy, Richardson publicly named Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as a target in an espionage investigation. Lee was accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Chinese government. Lee was later cleared of those charges and won a settlement against the U.S. government.

Robert Gates

Washington consensus is that Obama will likely keep Robert Gates, George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary, as his own Secretary of Defense. While Gates has occasionally proved to be a stark contrast to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he would hardly represent a break from the policies of the Bush administration. Quite the opposite; according to the Washington Post, in the interest of a “smooth transition,” Gates “has ordered hundreds of political appointees at the Pentagon canvassed to see whether they wish to stay on in the new administration, has streamlined policy briefings and has set up suites for President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team just down the hall from his own E-ring office.” The Post reports that Gates could stay on for a brief period and then be replaced by Richard Danzig, who was Clinton’s Secretary of the Navy. Other names currently being tossed around are Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (a critic of the Iraq occupation) and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who served alongside Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Ivo H. Daalder

Daalder was National Security Council Director for European Affairs under President Clinton. Like other Obama advisors, he has worked with the Project for the New American Century and signed a 2005 letter from PNAC to Congressional leaders, calling for an increase in U.S. ground troops in Iraq and beyond.

Sarah Sewall

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance during the Clinton administration, Sewall served as a top advisor to Obama during the campaign and is almost certain to be selected for a post in his administration. In 2007, Sewall worked with the U.S. military and Army Gen. David Petraeus, writing the introduction to the University of Chicago edition of the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. She was criticized for this collaboration by Tom Hayden, who wrote, “the Petraeus plan draws intellectual legitimacy from Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, whose director, Sarah Sewall, proudly embraces an ‘unprecedented collaboration [as] a human rights center partnered with the armed forces.’”

“Humanitarians often avoid wading into the conduct of war for fear of becoming complicit in its purpose,” she wrote in the introduction. “‘The field manual requires engagement precisely from those who fear that its words lack meaning.”

Michele Flournoy

Flournoy and former Clinton Deputy Defense Secretary John White are co-heading Obama’s defense transition team. Flournoy was a senior Clinton appointee at the Pentagon. She currently runs the Center for a New American Security, a center-right think-tank. There is speculation that Obama could eventually name her as the first woman to serve as defense secretary. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported: “While at CNAS, Flournoy helped to write a report that called for reducing the open-ended American military commitment in Iraq and replacing it with a policy of ‘conditional engagement’ there. Significantly, the paper rejected the idea of withdrawing troops according to the sort of a fixed timeline that Obama espoused during the presidential campaign. Obama has in recent weeks signaled that he was willing to shelve the idea, bringing him more in line with Flournoy’s thinking.” Flournoy has also worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century.

Wendy Sherman and Tom Donilon

Currently employed at Madeline Albright’s consulting firm, the Albright Group, Sherman worked under Albright at the State Department, coordinating U.S. policy on North Korea. She is now coordinating the State Department transition team for Obama. Tom Donilon, her co-coordinator, was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Chief of Staff at the State Department under Clinton. Interestingly, Sherman and Donilon both have ties to Fannie Mae that didn’t make it onto their official bios on Obama’s change.gov website. “Donilon was Fannie’s general counsel and executive vice president for law and policy from 1999 until the spring of 2005, a period during which the company was rocked by accounting problems,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

***

While many of the figures at the center of Obama’s foreign policy team are well-known, two of its most important members have never held national elected office or a high-profile government position. While they cannot be characterized as Clinton-era hawks, it will be important to watch Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, co-coordinators of the Obama foreign policy team. From 2000 to 2005, McDonough served as foreign policy advisor to Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and worked extensively on the use-of-force authorizations for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which Daschle supported. From 1996 to 1999, McDonough was a professional staff member of the House International Relations Committee during the debate over the bombing of Yugoslavia. More recently, he was at the Center for American Progress working under John Podesta, Clinton’s former chief of staff and the current head of the Obama transition.

Mark Lippert is a close personal friend of Obama’s. He has worked for Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, as well as the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee. He is a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve and spent a year in Iraq working intelligence for the Navy SEALs. “According to those who’ve worked closely with Lippert,” Robert Dreyfuss recently wrote in The Nation, “he is a conservative, cautious centrist who often pulled Obama to the right on Iraq, Iran and the Middle East and who has been a consistent advocate for increased military spending. ‘Even before Obama announced for the presidency, Lippert wanted Obama to be seen as tough on Iran,’ says a lobbyist who’s worked the Iran issue on Capitol Hill, ‘He’s clearly more hawkish than the senator.’ “

***

Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to bring change to Washington. “I don’t want to just end the war,” he said early this year. “I want to end the mindset that got us into war.” That is going to be very difficult if Obama employs a foreign policy team that was central to creating that mindset, before and during the presidency of George W. Bush.

“Twenty-three senators and 133 House members who voted against the war — and countless other notable individuals who spoke out against it and the dubious claims leading to war — are apparently not even being considered for these crucial positions,” observes Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy. This includes dozens of former military and intelligence officials who spoke out forcefully against the war and continue to oppose militaristic policy, as well as credible national security experts who have articulated their visions for a foreign policy based on justice.

Obama does have a chance to change the mindset that got us into war. More significantly, he has a popular mandate to forcefully challenge the militaristic, hawkish tradition of modern U.S. foreign policy. But that work would begin by bringing on board people who would challenge this tradition, not those who have been complicit in creating it and are bound to continue advancing it.

From the new change.gov – The Obama-Biden plan for protecting “the homeland”

The saddest thing is about how there’s a submit your ideas thing to click on, a totally manipulative technique meant to make people feel important, needed, and loved by their new god-king. And it works like a charm. There seems to be some united thing to call Obama and Biden President and Vice-President elect for some reason too. If Selection ‘08 – Buyer Beware v.2 has been read already, none of this comes as any surprise. To those who haven’t. all I can say is, it’s change, baby. Note — this has been wiped from change.gov so if you want to see the full version, go here on his campaign website, now on origin.barackobama.com. Oh, the origin of the superhero, the new Neo, the One.

Protecting our Homeland

“We are here to do the work that ensures no other family members have to lose a loved one to a terrorist who turns a plane into a missile, a terrorist who straps a bomb around her waist and climbs aboard a bus, a terrorist who figures out how to set off a dirty bomb in one of our cities. This is why we are here: to make our country safer and make sure the nearly 3,000 who were taken from us did not die in vain; that their legacy will be a more safe and secure Nation.”

- Obama Speech on U.S. Senate Floor, March 6, 2007

The Problem

Conventional thinking has failed to adapt to a world of new threats. Barack Obama and Joe Biden understand that a range of risks, both natural and manmade, can have major consequences for the security, prosperity, and well-being of Americans at home and abroad. We need a president who understands these new security threats – and who has effective strategies for addressing them.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s Plan

The first responsibility of any president is to protect the American people. Yet, seven years after the 9/11 attacks, we are not as safe as we can and should be. As president, Barack Obama will provide the leadership and strategies to strengthen our security at home.

Barack Obama’s strategy for securing the homeland against 21st century threats is focused on preventing terrorist attacks on our homeland, preparing and planning for emergencies and natural disasters and investing in strong response and recovery capabilities. As president, Barack Obama will strengthen our homeland against natural or accidental disasters and terrorist threats – ensuring the federal government works with states, localities, and the private sector as a true partner in prevention, mitigation, and response.

Defeat Terrorism Worldwide

• Find, Disrupt, and Destroy Al Qaeda: Obama will responsibly end the war in Iraq and focus on the right battlefield in Afghanistan. An Obama Administration will work with other nations to strengthen their capacity to eliminate shared enemies.
• New Capabilities to Aggressively Defeat Terrorists: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will improve the American intelligence apparatus by investing in its capacity to collect and analyze information, share information with other agencies and carry out operations to disrupt terrorist operations and networks.
• Prepare the Military to Meet 21st Century Threats: Barack Obama will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a threat to America. Obama will ensure that our military becomes more stealthy, agile, and lethal in its ability to capture or kill terrorists. He will bolster our military’s ability to speak different languages, navigate different cultures, and coordinate complex missions with our civilian agencies.
• Win the Battle of Ideas: An Obama Administration will defeat al Qaeda in what the 9-11 Commission called “the Battle of Ideas” by returning to an American foreign policy consistent with America’s traditional values and by working with moderates within the Islamic world to counter al Qaeda propaganda. Barack Obama will establish a $2 billion Global Education Fund to work to eliminate the global education deficit and offer an alternative to extremist schools.
• Restore American Influence and Restore Our Values: Thwarting terrorist networks requires international partnerships in military, intelligence, law enforcement, financial transactions, border controls, and transportation security. To make diplomacy more effective, Obama will stop shuttering consulates and start opening them in the tough and hopeless corners of the world. He will expand our foreign service, and develop the capacity of our civilian aid workers to work alongside the military.

Prevent Nuclear Terrorism

Barack Obama and Joe Biden have a comprehensive strategy for nuclear security that will reduce the danger of nuclear terrorism, prevent the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities, and strengthen the nuclear nonproliferation regime.

• Secure Nuclear Weapons Materials in Four Years and End Nuclear Smuggling: Barack Obama will lead a global effort to secure all nuclear weapons materials at vulnerable sites within four years – the most effective way to prevent terrorists from acquiring a nuclear bomb. Barack Obama will fully implement the Lugar-Obama legislation to help our allies detect and stop the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction.
• Strengthen Policing and Interdiction Efforts: Barack Obama will institutionalize the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), a global initiative aimed at stopping shipments of weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, and related materials worldwide.
• Convene a Summit on Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: Barack Obama will convene a summit in 2009 (and regularly thereafter) of leaders of Permanent Members of the UN Security Council and other key countries to agree on implementing many of these measures on a global basis.
• Eliminate Iran’s and North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Programs Through Tough, Direct Diplomacy: Barack Obama will use tough diplomacy – backed by real incentives and real pressures – to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and to eliminate fully and verifiably North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
• Strengthen the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA): Barack Obama will seek to ensure that the Agency gets the authority, information, people, and technology it needs to do its job.
• Control Fissile Materials: Barack Obama will lead a global effort to negotiate a verifiable treaty ending the production of fissile materials for weapons purposes.
• Prevent Nuclear Fuel from Becoming Nuclear Bombs: Barack Obama will work with other interested governments to establish a new international nuclear energy architecture – including an international nuclear fuel bank, international nuclear fuel cycle centers, and reliable fuel supply assurances – to meet growing demands for nuclear power without contributing to the proliferation of nuclear materials and fuel production facilities.
• Set the Goal of a Nuclear-Free World: Barack Obama will show the world that America believes in its existing commitment under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to work to ultimately eliminate all nuclear weapons. Barack Obama fully supports reaffirming this goal, as called for by George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn, and the specific steps they propose to move us in that direction. He has made clear that America will not disarm unilaterally.
• Seek Real, Verifiable Reductions in Nuclear Stockpiles: Barack Obama will seek deep, verifiable reductions in all U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons and work with other nuclear powers to reduce global stockpiles dramatically by the end of his presidency.
• Work with Russia to Increase Warning and Decision Time: Keeping nuclear weapons ready to launch on a moment’s notice is a dangerous relic of the Cold War. Barack Obama believes that we must address this dangerous situation. As president, Barack Obama will aim to work with Russia to end such Cold War policies in a mutual and verifiable manner.
• Appoint White House Coordinator for Nuclear Security: Barack Obama will appoint a deputy national security advisor to be in charge of coordinating all U.S. programs aimed at reducing the risk of nuclear terrorism and weapons proliferation.
• Strengthen Nuclear Risk Reduction Work at Defense, State, and Energy Departments: Thwarting terrorist networks requires international partnerships in military, intelligence, law enforcement, financial transactions, border controls, and transportation security. To make diplomacy more effective, Obama will stop shuttering consulates and start opening them in the tough and hopeless corners of the world. He will expand our foreign service, and develop the capacity of our civilian aid workers to work alongside the military.

Strengthen American Biosecurity

Biological weapons pose a serious and increasing national security risk. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will work to prevent bioterror attacks and mitigate consequences.

• Prevent Bioterror Attacks: Obama and Joe Biden will strengthen U.S. intelligence collection overseas to identify and interdict would-be bioterrorists before they strike.
• Build Capacity to Mitigate the Consequences of Bioterror Attacks: A well-planned, well-rehearsed, and rapidly executed epidemic response can dramatically diminish the consequences of biological attacks. Barack Obama will ensure that decision-makers have the information and communication tools they need to manage disease outbreaks by linking health care providers, hospitals, and public health agencies.
• Accelerate the Development of New Medicines, Vaccines, and Production Capabilities: Barack Obama will build on America’s unparalleled talent to create new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic tests and to manufacture these vital products much more quickly and efficiently than is now possible.
• Lead an International Effort to Diminish Impact of Major Infectious Disease Epidemics: Senator Obama was one of the first legislators to recognize the dangers of a potential avian influenza pandemic and was successful in securing $25 million for U.S. agencies to combat and contain widespread outbreaks of avian flu and worked to provide $4 billion in funding to the Centers for Disease Control to combat avian flu. Barack Obama will continue to promote international efforts to develop new diagnostics, vaccines, and medicines that will be available and affordable in all parts of the world.

Protect Our Information Networks

As president, Barack Obama will lead an effort, working with private industry, the research community and our citizens, to build a trustworthy and accountable cyber infrastructure that is resilient, protects America’s competitive advantage, and advances our national and homeland security.

• Strengthen Federal Leadership on Cyber Security: Barack Obama will declare the cyber infrastructure a strategic asset and will establish the position of national cyber advisor who will report directly to the president and will be responsible for coordinating federal agency efforts and development of national cyber policy.
• Initiate a Safe Computing R&D Effort and Harden our Nation’s Cyber Infrastructure: Barack Obama will support an initiative to develop next-generation secure computers and networking for national security applications. He will work with industry and academia to develop and deploy a new generation of secure hardware and software for our nation’s critical cyber infrastructure.
• Protect the IT Infrastructure That Keeps America’s Economy Safe: The public and private infrastructure that keeps America running is increasingly brought online to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Barack Obama will work with the private sector to establish tough new standards for cyber security and physical resilience for critical infrastructure.
• Prevent Corporate Cyber-Espionage: Innovations in software, engineering, pharmaceuticals and other fields are being stolen online from U.S. businesses at an alarming rate. These losses are making America less safe and less competitive and costing us jobs here at home. Barack Obama will work with industry to develop the systems necessary to protect our nation’s trade secrets and our research and development.
• Develop a Cyber Crime Strategy to Minimize the Opportunities for Criminal Profit: Barack Obama will shut down the mechanisms used to transmit criminal profits by shutting down untraceable Internet payment schemes. Barack Obama will also initiate a grant and training program to provide federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies the tools they need to detect and prosecute cyber crime.
• Mandate Standards for Securing Personal Data and Require Companies to Disclose Personal Information Data Breaches: Nearly 10 million Americans are victims of identity theft each year, costing more than $55 billion. We must ensure that the privacy of personnel data in computer systems is better protected. The federal government must partner with industry and our citizens to secure personal data stored on government and private systems. An Obama administration will institute a common standard for securing such data across industries and will back strong legislation to protect the rights of individuals in the information age.

Improve Intelligence Capacity and Protect Civil Liberties

• Improve Information Sharing and Analysis: Barack Obama will improve our intelligence system by creating a senior position to coordinate domestic intelligence gathering; establishing a grant program to support thousands more state and local level intelligence analysts and increasing our capacity to share intelligence across all levels of government.
• Give Real Authority to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board: Created by Congress and recommended by the 9/11 Commission, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board needs to be substantially reformed and empowered to safeguard against an erosion in American civil liberties. As president, Barack Obama will support efforts to strengthen the Board with subpoena powers and reporting responsibilities, will give the Board a robust mandate designed to protect American civil liberties and will demand transparency from the Board to ensure accountability.
• Strengthen Institutions to Fight Terrorism: Overseas, Barack Obama will establish a Shared Security Partnership Program to invest $5 billion over three years to improve cooperation between U.S. and foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This program will include information sharing, as well as funding for training, operations, border security, anti-corruption programs, technology, and the targeting of terrorist financing.

Protect Americans from Terrorist Attacks and Natural Disasters

• Allocate Funds Based on Risk: Barack Obama believes that the President and Congress should allocate our precious homeland security dollars according to risk, not as pork-barrel spending or a form of general revenue sharing. He will eliminate the waste, fraud and abuse that cost the nation billions of Department of Homeland Security dollars.
• Prepare Effective Emergency Response Plans: Obama passed legislation to provide funding for planning for evacuating individuals with special needs from emergency zones and to create a National Family Locator System to help families locate loved ones after a disaster. As president, Obama will further improve coordination between all levels of government, create better evacuation plan guidelines, ensure prompt federal assistance to emergency zones, and increase medical surge capacity.
• Support First Responders: Barack Obama is committed not only to rolling back the Bush-McCain funding cuts that have affected our first responders – police, firefighters, and emergency medical professionals – but also to increasing federal resources and logistic support to local emergency planning efforts.
• Improve Interoperable Communications Systems: Barack Obama supports efforts to provide greater technical assistance to local and state first responders and dramatically increase funding for reliable, interoperable communications systems. He will appoint a National Chief Technology Officer who will have the responsibility to ensure that the current non-interoperable plans at the federal, state, and local levels are combined, funded, implemented and effective.
• Working with State and Local Governments and the Private Sector: Barack Obama believes the federal government must be a better partner to states and localities, listen to local concerns and consider local priorities. Barack Obama will reach out to the private sector to leverage its expertise and assets to protect our homeland security.

Protect Critical Infrastructure

• Create a National Infrastructure Protection Plan: Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security will develop an effective critical infrastructure protection and resiliency plan for the nation and will work with the private sector to ensure that targets are protected against both natural disasters and terrorist attacks.
• Secure our Chemical Plants: Chemical plants are potential terrorist targets because they are often located near cities, are relatively easy to attack, and contain multi-ton quantities of hazardous chemicals. As president, Barack Obama will work with all stakeholders to enact permanent federal chemical security regulations.
• Improve Airline Security: Barack Obama believes we must redouble our efforts to determine if the measures implemented since 9/11 are adequately addressing the threats our nation continues to face from airplane-based terrorism. Airline passengers are still not screened against a comprehensive terrorist watch list. Such a list must be developed and used in a way that safeguards passengers’ privacy while ensuring the safety of air travel.
• Monitor our Ports: Barack Obama has been a consistent supporter of strengthening our port security, will redouble our efforts to develop technology that can detect radiation and determine the danger it poses, and he will work with the maritime transportation industry to integrate this technology into their operations so as to maximize security without causing economic disruption.
• Safeguard Public Transportation: Every weekday, Americans take 34 million trips on public transportation systems to get to work, school and beyond. Despite recent international attacks on mass transit systems, the Bush administration has invested only a small fraction of the $6 billion that transportation officials have said is necessary to implement needed security improvements. Barack Obama will fill this critical hole in our homeland security network.
• Improve Border Security: Americans know that our national border security system is broken, leaving our country vulnerable. Barack Obama will support the virtual and physical infrastructure and manpower necessary to secure our borders and keep our nation safe.

Modernize America’s Aging Infrastructure

• Build-in Security: Barack Obama will ensure that security is considered and built into the design of new infrastructure, so that our critical assets are protected from the start and more resilient to naturally-occurring and deliberate threats throughout their life-cycle.
• Create a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank: Barack Obama will address the infrastructure challenge by creating a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank to expand and enhance, not supplant, existing federal transportation investments. This independent entity will be directed to invest in our nation’s most challenging transportation infrastructure needs, without the influence of special interests. The Bank will receive an infusion of federal money, $60 billion over 10 years, to provide financing to transportation infrastructure projects across the nation.
• Invest in Critical Infrastructure Projects: Barack Obama will invest in our nation’s most pressing short and long-term infrastructure needs, including modernizing our electrical grid and upgrading our highway, rail, ports, water, and aviation infrastructure. Obama will establish a Grid Modernization Commission to facilitate adoption of Smart Grid practices to improve efficiency and security of our electricity grid. He will also build on his work in the U.S. Senate to ensure that the federal government prioritizes strengthening our critical infrastructure.

Selection ‘08 – Buyer Beware! v.2

by Stefan Fobes

Since it’s July and all, and poison poon Clinton is out, and by demand, I decided to update this some. The other version with the info with Hillary Clinton in it is here. So let’s start out with Barack Obama. In his Blueprint for Change thing, he even has the same navy blue and white color combo and font that a certain upscale clothes store uses on its bags and ads. So I’ll call him Brooks Brother. It’s pretty appropriate, don’t you think?

Barack Obama

There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who’s in a position to execute.” – As quoted in the July 27, 2004 Chicago Tribune on the Iraqi invasion

Well, let’s see how he holds up against the Bush litmus test.

Bush says: We must take the fight to the terrorists so that we can be safe at home.

No difference here, as this Washington Post article shows:

Romney says that “the jihadist threat is the defining challenge of our generation,” as real as the threat that was posed by Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, and he promises an appropriately sized response. Obama, albeit using slightly different terms, agrees: “To defeat al Qaeda, I will build a twenty-first-century military and twenty-first-century partnerships as strong as the anticommunist alliance that won the Cold War to stay on the offense everywhere from Djibouti to Kandahar.

Stay on the offensive? With what money? People seem to have this idea that we have this unlimited cache of money, and we can wage as many wars against as many countries as we want, without care of the consequences to our economy or for the regard of the innocent citizens of countries like Iraq, none of whom asked to be precision bombed to pieces by the coalition forces. The more money the government prints out to fund wars, the less it is worth. People are screaming with joy with the fact that the price of gold is soaring through the roof. It is doing so because it takes more dollars to buy the same amount.

Obama has also declared that he would not hesitate to send US troops into Pakistan, to root out Al-Qaeda.

At a debate in front of thousands of labor union activists Tuesday, Sen. Barack Obama’s Democratic presidential rivals blasted him for his remarks about Pakistan. Last Wednesday, the Illinois senator said that if it were necessary to root out terrorists, he would send U.S. forces into Pakistan without the country’s approval.

And that’s on top of being for going into Iran. He also stated that “if we have actionable intelligence” on bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, and President Musharraf would not act, then we should.” You mean the same Al-Qaeda and Taliban that the US airlifted out of Afghanistan as the fighting broke out, as revealed by Seymour Hersh on PBS NOW?

The Greek philosopher Plato said something 2,000 years ago that rings as true then as it does now. “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” In a CFR essay, Renewing American Leadership, Obama says that he would start “investing more resources to defend mass transit, closing the gaps in our aviation security by screening all cargo on passenger airliners and checking all passengers against a comprehensive watch list.” The Bush no-fly list, no doubt.

Bush says: Illegal immigration is still illegal, but I won’t enforce it. I do ask, however, that you consent to being treated like a common criminal. Do it for the homeland.

In a Senate floor statement, Obama says that yes, the illegal immigrants are disrespecting our laws, but it is totally unreasonable to kick them out. I don’t think so. We are always sold this line of BS! There is always enough money to kill people, but not to feed the starving. There is always more than enough funding and equipment to terrorize the citizens, but never enough to solve real problems. There weren’t any problems during the ’04 Republican National Convention in New York getting a Fuji blimp to glide around the city surveilling everything. There was no problem getting the $35,000 soundwave weapons in, or for the sweeping up of people indiscriminately off the city streets and putting them in a makeshift concentration camp. Now I don’t hate immigrants. I love cultural diversity, but there are tens of millions of people living in abject poverty and too many of them want in here right now. There has to be reasonable regulation of this and we all know it. Obama also goes to bat in the floor statement for the cause of background checks for all Americans. Here are all the loopholes in the immigration bill that got passed. Are you a gang member? You’re in! All you have to do is to “renounce” your membership. Need to get in quick? Just find a non-relative American resident and get them to say you’ve been here for 5 years or more, and you are an instant American.

Bush says: Your car got repo’d and your house is going to be taken away any minute, but an itty bitty $600 check from me will solve all.

From Obama’s campaign website:

“Obama will restore fairness to the tax code and provide 150 million workers the tax relief they need. Obama will create a new “Making Work Pay” tax credit of up to $500 per person, or $1,000 per working family. The “Making Work Pay” tax credit will completely eliminate income taxes for 10 million Americans.”

Oh yes, very gracious. Just how is paying $1,000 less going to do anything, and how will it eliminate income taxes for all those people?

Obama also pushes for a carbon tax which many researchers for years now have been saying would happen based on the Illuminati’s own stated plans. He has sponsored a bill in the Senate called the Global Poverty Act, which commits itself to UN guidelines, specifically those of the UN Millenium Summit which, in the words of Jeffrey Sachs, the head of the UN Millenium project:

We will need, in the end, to put real resources in support of our hopes. A global tax on carbon-emitting fossil fuels might be the way to begin. Even a very small tax, less than that which is needed to correct humanity’s climate-deforming overuse of fossil fuels, would finance a greatly enhanced supply of global public goods.

Just to remove all doubt that he does support a carbon tax, Obama clarifies for us in his “Blueprint for Change”

Obama supports implementation of a market-based cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions by the amount scientists say is necessary: 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Obama ’s cap-and-trade system will require all pollution credits to be auctioned. A 100 percent auction ensures that all polluters pay for every ton of emissions they release, rather than giving these emission rights away to coal and oil companies.

Bold lying is so easy to get away with these people. He knows most Americans don’t read the papers, don’t look up voting records to see if their deeds match their words, and knows that so many are willing to give their power away for an hour of emotional feelgood. He goes on and on about the partisan politics, the bickering, oh it’s so divisive. Just look at the last three debates between him and Hillary Clinton. It is like some three year olds arguing over who has the best action figure. He nags us with the “You have to remember, I was one of the lone voices in the Senate who was against the Iraq war authorization” or some variant of that. Like we are supposed to worship him for doing his job. And he’s even lying about that. He has voted for over $300 billion of war appropriations bills and against removing most combat troops from Iraq by July ’07. He also voted to confirm Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State, voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and joined Republicans in passing the Class Action Fairness Act which as The Nation writer Dan Zegart reveals, closed off many class action lawsuits from being heard in state courts. This forced these cases to the unfriendly and overloaded federal courts, staffed with 678 federal judges as compared to the 9,200 state judges. This had nothing to do with shielding insurance companies from frivolous lawsuits and everything to do with protecting criminal corporations like Wal-Mart, which forced employees to work off the clock for no pay and allowed them no lunch breaks. Recently he also joined 68 other senators in voting for a bill that gives immunity to telecom companies involved in Bush’s warrantless wiretap program, a move which was very disturbing even to his drones. He did that because he was following the orders of the same crew that owns McCain, Bush, and the Clintons.

Echelon, which started decades ago, is a sort of intelligence agency treaty tying together the combined capabilities of the US, Australia, Britain, and other European countries. Every single email, fax, phone call, or other electronic communication is scanned by AI programs for key words or phrases for whatever info they are interested in. As British and US reporters found out, the NSA taps in regularly and steals companies’ inventions and secrets and passes it on to their own people so they can benefit from it. No point in being scared of them, all. So if they have this already then why go forward with a warrantless wiretap program, much less let it be publicized? It’s called intimidation. They don’t have the manpower to go after us all. Serious digression here, but this needed to be said.

Unbelievable as it seems, Obama was the number one campaigner for Robert C. Byrd in one of his election bids, a handler/abuser of mind controlled women and a proud former member of the Ku Klux Klan, who fought in his early days in the Senate to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When is it going to get in the minds of black voters that Obama doesn’t care at all about them? Does he say anything about the real issues that actually affect black Americans? Like the New York City social services taking black kids and handing them over to the drug companies to run drug tests on them? Does he have a plan to help out the struggling black communities and clean out the crime there? He has made it quite clear on several occasions that he is not running as a pro-black candidate, yet the general public somehow has this idea that he is. He would never have gotten elected to the Illinois State Senate if he didn’t do that work in Chicago. He only joined that church of his after being asked repeatedly what church he did go to.

Looking at Obama’s key advisors, we see not change but business as usual.

Austan Goolsbee/Economic advisor – Skull & Bones ’91. Canadian television reported that a discussion took place between Goolsbee and the Canadian ambassador to the US about Obama’s anti-NAFTA stance. In this, alledgedly, Goolsbee told the ambassador that Obama’s stance on this was just campaign rhetoric and nothing to worry about. Since he will not confirm or deny the conversation took place, saying merely that, “They contacted me at one point to say ‘hello’ because their office is around the corner but it is not correct that I contacted them at all,” If that is so, then why not just deny the conversation took place altogether? They were around the corner? Terrible cover story, Austan Goolsbee.

Zbigniew Brzezinski/Foreign policy advisor – Former National Security Advisor, Carter. Founded Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller. In a 1998 interview with the French paper Le Nouvel Observateur he bragged about how the US goaded the Soviets into invading Afghanistan by funding the mujahideen. When asked about having any regrets about the results of this, he said, “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?”
Well the Afghan people certainly do. The Soviet occupation of 1979-89 left more than a million dead, hundreds of thousands crippled, millions of land mines littering the country which kill dozens a month, and leaving the population with an average life expectancy of just 43 years. And then there was the Taliban. To call this guy psychopathic would be too kind.

Dennis Ross/Foreign policy advisor – Bill Clinton’s Middle East negotiator, oversaw US policy towards Israel & Palestine, pressed the idea that the human rights of the Palestinian people must be subordinate to the will of the Israeli government. If they want to expand their territory unchecked, steal houses, shoot children’s legs off for sport, traumatize the people by deliberately sonic booming their houses, or even cooking up ethnic specific weapons, then that’s A-OK!

Sarah Sewall/National security advisor – Clinton’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance. Wrote the introduction to Petraeus’s counterinsurgency handbook used in killing operations worldwide.

W. Anthony Lake/Foreign policy advisor – Bill Clinton’s National Security advisor, driving force behind US invasion of Haiti, supported World Bank & IMF ‘overhaul’ of the Haitian economy which wrecked the agricultural system, the economic walking stick of the country by flooding it with US rice, corn, and sugar surpluses. At present, most Haitians are living on just $2 a day. A 60-cent cup of rice is now to them what a fur coat is to us. Many have even resorted to eating dirt cookies just to survive.

In 1998 Obama joined a United Church of Christ congregation headed by a Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Obama says this shaped his identity as an African-American. BS!
It shaped his strategy of church style mind control over people, more like. This is totally obvious when you see the way he poses and phrases his words and speeches. A lot of pictures and magazine covers with Obama in them have a weird white glow to them, as if to emphasize the “holiness” of Obama. Just look at his campaign website. It’s right there in front of you. These are way too many to be a coincidence. This shows deliberate hypnotism being used on the public. Hitler and the way he acted was described to be very similar to what is seen at an Obama rally. German-Jews who are still alive today from the Nazi days remember him having an eerie charisma, just being swept up by him…”you had to be there to understand it.”

Richard Thaler, a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, talks some great talk about the state of the human mind:

What is the big idea of Richard Thaler, the economist quoted by David Cameron and Barack Obama? It comes down to this: you’re not as smart as you think. Humans, he believes, are less rational and more influenced by peer pressure and suggestion than governments and economists reckon.

“Economists assume people have brains like supercomputers that can solve anything,” says Thaler. “But human minds are more like really old Apple Macs with slow processing speeds and prone to frequent crashes.”

According to this view, voters are less Mr Spock than Homer Simpson and they could do with a bit of help – what Thaler terms a “nudge” – to save more, eat more healthily and do all the other things that they know they should.

And serve their masters. Yes. We know we should, don’t we?

He and another academic, Cass Sustein, co-authored a book called Nudge elaborating on this methodology. This guy is seen as so good in his field that when he stopped by London to do some teaching, five Conservative Party members met with him to pick his brain and see how they could work together. Plans were made too for a future meeting to integrate his nudgings into public policy. But they’re not alone. The Obama campaign made sure that they got on the nudge gravy train.

Sunstein has been friends with Obama since the 1990s, when both were law professors at the University of Chicago, while Thaler met the presidential hopeful when he was in the Illinois race for the senate in 2004. “Back then, Obama was, as he said, ‘the skinny guy with the funny name’ and nobody – including me – had heard of him. But I was just blown away and for the first time in my life wrote a cheque to a politician,” says Thaler.

He “talks a lot” to Obama’s camp, especially the chief economics adviser, Austan Goolsbee. “We gave Goolsbee the book when it was still in proof. He read the whole thing and just lifted some parts.”

Like I said in April in the original version of this article, the Illuminati have switched horses mid-race. Obama, with his holy rockstar style, his skin color to provide him with the body armor of political correctness, and the fact that he has varied and singularly unique (Larry Sinclair and communist leanings) skeletons in his closet, makes him the perfect puppet for the agenda of global takeover. And that’s why he’ll get the presidency. McCain has too much dirt in his closet, and is far too robotic and stiff to ever be seen as the strong god-king leader type most people so love to tell them what to do. Bob Barr and Nader are just there to grab votes away from McCain. There’ll be some table scrap whitey type scandals thrown to the people, and there may be a cliffhanger or two, but, unless there’s some miracle and the American people start thinking for themselves and doing research to see what Obama has actually done while in the Senate, he’s pretty much got this in the bag.

John McCain

“At the smallest provocation I would go off into a mad frenzy, and then suddenly crash to the floor unconscious. When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out.” – McCain on his early youth as quoted by his biographer Robert Timberg

Crazy, huh? This is the image of himself that he’d like you to hold in your mind: War hero, champion of veterans rights, moral crusader, environmentalist, and conscientious objector to business as usual in Washington. Let’s see the image he wouldn’t.

Considering that he is supposed to be this big war hero who endured five agonizing years of torture, it is impossible to reconcile this with the fact that he has consistently and viciously blocked every attempt by families of Vietnam POWs to get them back to the US. He has pushed through and amended legislation in order to block not only the release of information about POWs and MIAs that were still in Vietnam after the war, despite massive evidence of them being alive, but also the release of his own military records.

He comes across as being sympathetic to veterans who are being denied healthcare, who have to pay for their own meals at military hospitals while they recover from getting their arms and legs blown off, and how they have to wait for eons to get their benefits.. But is McCain really speaking from his heart or a script? He has made it perfectly clear he isn’t against torture, when he voted against a bill to ban it, as reported by the NY Times: “The leading Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain of Arizona, a former prisoner of war who steadfastly opposes the use of torture, voted against the bill. Mr. McCain said the ban would limit the C.I.A.’s ability to gather intelligence. “We always supported allowing the C.I.A. to use extra measures,” he said.” Sprinkling in some doublespeak, he says that he believes torture is illegal and should be banned. Voted for the Military Commissions Act, which we are told applies only to enemy combatants. It permits trials without the accused present, gives the Secretary of Defense the power to appoint judges, allows evidence gotten without warrants, and makes it so lawyers cannot see their clients without government monitoring. Former Attorney General Gonzales has said that the president can strip Americans of their citizenship, turning them into enemy combatants, which makes it applicable to American citizens. Voted no to establishing mandatory rest periods for the troops between deployments, which would be a great help in reducing post traumatic stress disorder. Speaking of PTSD, McCain voted against a bill that would have provided $500 million for veterans mental health services like rehab and counseling. These are the actions of someone who hates veterans, not one who sympathizes with them.

McCain’s insane rages are well documented, including his horrible treatment of POW & MIA family members who only wish to have their families whole again. No one is immune apparently, not even his own colleagues on the Senate floor, as this UK Guardian article exposes: “McCain’s political colleagues, however, know another side of the action hero – a volatile man with a hair-trigger temper, who shouted at Senator Ted Kennedy on the Senate floor to “shut up”, and called fellow Republican senators “shithead … fucking jerk … asshole”. A few months ago, McCain suddenly rushed up to a friend of mine, a prominent Washington lawyer, at a social event, and threatened to beat him up because he represented a client McCain happened to dislike. Then, just as suddenly, profusely and tearfully, he apologised.”

He claims to care about the environment, riding the global warming bandwagon, which is a fiction. Record snowfalls this winter in the US and snow in places where historically there has been little or none such as Iraq, tear this apart. Anyway…back in the 80s, the University of Arizona tried to get seven deep space telescopes on forest lands which were home to several endangered plant and animal species, and a sacred mountain to the San Carlos Apache, Mt. Graham. McCain introduced a bill to exempt the project from the Endangered Species Act and the Native American Religious Freedom Act. When the forest supervisor halted construction on the lands, McCain threatened him, saying that he’d be “the shortest tenured forest supervisor in the history of the Forest Service.” When two concerned citizens went to his office to discuss Mt. Graham, McCain let loose on them: “The doctors say that at the mention of the words Mount Graham McCain erupted into a violent fit. “He slammed his fists on his desk, scattering papers across the room”, Silver tells us. “He jumped up and down, screaming obscenities at us for at least 10 minutes. He shook his fists as if he was going to slug us. It was as violent as almost any domestic abuse altercation.”

Another example of McCain’s regard for his fellow man is his helping the Peabody Coal Company, the biggest coal company in the US, to steal coal-rich land from the Arizona Dineh Navajo Indians, which they have occupied for hundreds of years. Spearheading legislation which, in a modern day Trail of Tears scenario, thousands were thrown out their homelands and into a nuclear waste dump site, resulting in the birth defects that inevitably come. McCain’s price? His wife’s beer distribution company getting beer contracts from the Vegas casinos who get low-cost power as a result. A UN report on the environmental impact reads: “The Black Mesa region in Arizona, USA is home to the indigenous communities of the Dineh (Navajo) and Hopi peoples. This region also contains major deposits of coal which are being extracted by North America’s largest strip mining operation. The coal mines have had a major impact on families in the region. Local water sources have been poisoned, resulting in the death of livestock. Homes near the mines suffer from blasting damage. The coal dust is pervasive, as well as smoke from frequent fires in the stockpiles. Not coincidentally, the people in the area have an unusually high incidence of kidney and respiratory disease. “

McCain also was one of the Keating 5, five senators who took more than $300,000 from Charles Keating Jr, who owned Lincoln Savings & Loan, a subsidiary of his American Continental Corp. It was facing bankruptcy and government seizure because of his stealing depositors’ money. He turned to McCain and four other senators, who got federal regulators to back off the case. In the end, the government paid for the bailout, all $2 billion of it. McCain treated reporters pressing him about his wife’s business relationship with Keating to his classic charm, saying, “That’s the spouse’s involvement, you idiot,” and, “It’s up to you to find that out, kids.” Right after that came the “we need to drive out the special interests” McCain. I guess the corporate donors didn’t get that memo. His top donors include employees of Merill Lynch, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley.

Some of the creepy crawlies backing him up include:

Henry Kissinger/Informal advisor – National Security advisor and Secretary of State, Reagan. Also was Secretary of State under Ford. Notorious for his comment about military men, where he calls them “dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy” Assured Indonesian dictator Suharto that, should he invade and conquer East Timor, US-Indonesian relations would remain strong. An estimated 200,000 Timorese were massacred and starved to death as a result. Went the same road with Argentina, after the military overthrew the democratically elected president, assured them that the US was its ally and would not cause it unnecessary difficulties, and urged them to finish up before Congress reconvened. This amid mass executions and “disappearances” of 30,000 people. Also instrumental in ordering the coup in Chile and putting in Pinochet, who also instituted mass civil repressions, executions, and arrests.

Max Boot/Foreign policy advisor – CFR, neocon, advocated putting pressure on China and South Korea to cut off subsidies and fuel shipments to North Korea, an already poverty-stricken population where 2 million people have already starved to death while the hereditary dictator, Kim Jong-il, lives in luxury with a 2,000+ girl harem, private screenings of the latest Hollywood movies, and the finest gourmet food imported from around the world.

Alexander Haig – Knight of Malta, Reagan’s Secretary of State, former head of NATO in Europe. Helped oversee death squads in Central America who killed, tortured, and raped nuns and other religious workers. Famous for his unlawful declaration of “I’m in control here” when Reagan was incapacitated after an assassination attempt.

Brent Scowcroft – National Security advisor, Reagan & HW Bush. After the Tiananmen massacre, went and reassured the Chinese dictatorship that the American public opinion meant nothing and that relations would not suffer one bit.

Robert McFarlane/Energy & National security advisor – Another backer of the contras along with John Negroponte and Alexander Haig.

Robert Kagan/Informal foreign policy advisor – CFR member, neocon swampmonster, co-founder, Project for the New American Century.

Bill Kristol/Informal foreign policy advisor – Editor of the Weekly Standard, Bilderberg attendee, co-founder, PNAC. Stated in ’02 that a war in Iraq could have “terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.”

About the only real difference between McCain and Bush is that one looks like Frankenstein and the other doesn’t. When asked about Iran he rolls out the same lines that Bush, Obama, Hillary and all the rest do. Here’s his wording of the script: “I intend to make it unmistakably clear to Iran that we will not permit a government that espouses the destruction of … Israel . . .and pledges undying enmity to the United States to possess weapons to advance their malevolent ambitions,” Suddeutschen Zeitung quoted the senator as saying.” He is for open borders, as shown by his support for the “immigration reform” bill, says we may have to stay in Iraq for 100 years, and has threatened North Korea with extinction. In too many ways, he is actually more aggressive than Bush, as the LA Times confirms:

More than three years before the Bush administration elucidated the radical doctrine of preemptive war, McCain unveiled a plan during his first run at the presidency called “rogue-state rollback,” in which “we politically and materially support indigenous forces within and outside of rogue states” — including Iraq, North Korea and Serbia — “to overthrow regimes that threaten our interests and values.” And if the “odious regimes” crack down on freedom fighters, the U.S. should respond with force. In that campaign, McCain was the neocons’ choice against the more internationally “humble” George Bush.

Since McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, he is not even eligible to be president! But as always, little things like laws will never be allowed to get in the way of the Illuminati agenda. Just ask the New Orleans gun owners. And the survivors of Waco.

Time and time again, we see that every presidential candidate is closely related to European royalty, or to one of the other ones. In 2004 Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke’s Peerage, the encyclopedic bible of European aristocratic genealogy, said about the subject of US presidential candidates:

Brooks-Baker said there has always been a significant “royalty factor” in those who aspired to the White House, with Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan among others all with strong blue blood links.

The chance of winning certainly seems much higher with more royal connections and one could make a big case that royal genes or chromosomes will tell,” Brooks-Baker said.

A common way of pooh-poohing the bloodline connections between presidents is to say the usual, everyone’s related if you go back far enough. Not this closely related! Obama, according to various media outlets is Dick Cheney’s 9th cousin, although Cheney’s wife says that they are actually 8th cousins. She would probably be in a better position to know, wouldn’t she? Hillary Clinton is also closely related to Barbara Bush and the queen demon herself, Elizabeth II of England, as we can see from these genealogical charts. According to New England Historical Society genealogist Christopher Child, Obama’s a 10th cousin once removed of George W. Bush, and McCain is a 6th cousin of Laura Bush. Note that Brooks-Baker said there has always been a significant royalty factor. This means that no election has ever been of the people and by the people. I understand people coming across this information for the first time might rightly be shocked and a little skeptical, but why is it that the ratio of people in positions of power belonging to secret societies like the Freemasons, Skull & Bones, and Knights of Malta is so high compared to those who are not? The Freemasons admit proudly on their own websites that most of the American presidents, royalty, leading businessmen, and heads of state are Freemasons.

Do you want something better for America? Then why hold onto the attitude of, “they aren’t popular, he doesn’t have a chance, I won’t vote for them”. A single grain of rice won’t feed anybody. But lots and lots of grains together can fill even the hungriest tummy. America is pretty hungry. Nourishing America, and the rest of the world, even, won’t start with a new god or Ron Paul. If some hero comes riding over the hill and does all the work for us, we won’t learn anything and just will manifest the same situation somewhere down the road again. No, it’ll start with every individual and the choices each of us make every moment of our lives.

Obama daughter’s birth witheld to coincide with Sirian Dog Days – The symbolism behind that

by Stefan Fobes

Cruising through the Empress Michelle Malkin’s hotair blog, I saw this post a while back of a link to a Washington Times article which contained something that caught my eye. Michelle Obama said something real weird about her daughter.

Mrs. Obama told the elderly audience that her daughter, Malia, “will be 10 on the Fourth of July. Yes, we planned it that way. I cooperated. I was supposed to have her on July 1, but I waited, because my daughter would be more historic.”

As many other researchers into the people in front of and behind the curtain have found, they are obsessed with symbolism, numerology, and death worship. Bill Clinton took part in voodoo ceremonies with ex-Hatian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. Remember when Bill Clinton was going across Africa during his last campaign in countries like Benin? That’s what he was doing. Saddam Hussein had a seven jinn [astral/demonic entity] protection team, summoned the “king and queen of the jinn”, and he was advised by them daily. How would her daughter being 10 on the fourth of July of this year be more historic? And the last thing, how did she get the idea that her daughter would be historic ten years before the election, much less a presidential victory? It’s quite a ways from November, isn’t it? In numerology, the number ten represents perfection, and/or the attempt to achieve an ideal. Also, 1+0 = 1, The meaning of 1 in numerology means a new beginning. This would suggest a meaning, from the Illuminati perspective, that Obama is the father of the beginning of a new ideal. What kind of ideal? Nothing less than the total unity of all under tyranny. Seven years after 9/11, we are still being told that this united us as a nation. Uh, no it didn’t.

People like David Icke and many others have said that there is a sort of energetic release throughout all of reality that is causing all the unprecendented changes that we are seeing in the minds of the public. Some people may ridicule this, because they have been conditioned to do so by “comedians” and shows that make energetic and herbal healing look like psychotic garbage. The people in and behind those shows are the same people who are in the secret societies and use this “New Age” stuff as often as they walk.

And yet I say why? Why now after a hundred+ years of conning by the mainstream media, newspaper subscriptions have dropped 60%? Americans have been shepherded into dozens of criminal military conflicts, and have taken it like champs. Where is this burst of intelligence coming from? It’s definitely not from what we’re exposed to daily. People are coming to alternative news sites like here more and more by the day. David Icke also says that everything in existence is a hologram, and that we are all One. Which I have to say I agree with. The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbott would be a good place to start if you wish to look this subject up. Even if you don’t believe this, the Illuminati do, and along with the cognizance of their belief systems, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s way of presenting the “Unity” track of the Obama campaign makes much more sense.

CNN reports: “The long-awaited Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton unity event in Unity, New Hampshire, on Friday was carefully choreographed, with the images and speeches all designed to achieve one goal: returning Democrats to the White House.

Classic example of symbolism.

And the worst part: “Large signs reading “Unite For Change” and “UNITY” were held aloft throughout the outdoor rally as an enthusiastic crowd cheered Clinton and Obama.”

So dumb. Amazing that some people really feel so good submitting and bowing before another. This alone might be not much to look at in itself, but with the recent Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton global warming ad, where they even say they are left and right, polar opposites, and that they are coming together for anti global warming. Both masons by the way. Al Sharpton is Black, and Pat Robertson is White. The ad is in black and white. The coming together of the polarities, black and white, to become one. If you want a global government, you have to bring together the peoples of the world in the way that you want. Not real unity and friendship, but coming together under your banner. Your will. This is the great ideal, the great perfection, for the Illuminati.

About Michelle Obama saying, “we planned it that way.” “I cooperated”? Huh? Cooperated? Looks more like you were recieving orders from someone. But who?

The Satanic hierarchy, that’s who. Here’s an example from North Carolina where just a piece of the tip of the iceberg has come to light. Two North Carolina Democratic Party officials were arrested, along with the husband of one of them, for performing one of their sick rape rituals, and some beatings and food deprivation on the side. One of them turned herself in, so I don’t want to see any shouts of this is vague or BS or anything like that.

The significance of July 4, at least from what I’ve found, is that July 4 is one of the Dog Days, the hottest period of the year, which in ancient times, the high heat of that part of the year was believed to be caused by the star Sirius. They start in early July and end in about mid August to September, depending on the culture you look at. Sirius is held in high regard by Freemasons, at least the ones close to and at the top who know what the symbolism really means. Sirius was also most notably highly revered by the ancient Egyptians. Even the History Channel regularly has shows on how most of the founding fathers of the USA and the signers of the Declaration of Independence were masons and only one was for sure known not to be.

So this girl has some sort of Sirian symbolism attatched to her. I suppose time, and more research by others will tell the specifics. I touched upon Oneness before. This is the Illuminati’s answer to The One. What happened with Bush won’t happen with Obama. Not again, resisters of the system!

McCain campaign co-chair lobbied against regulations that would have prevented foreclosure storm

On Tuesday’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann, Keith Olbermann reveals that former Senator Phil Gramm, a general co-chair of Senator John McCain’s campaign, actually lobbied Congress on behalf of financial giant UBS to try and stop legislation aimed at installing industry regulations that could have prevented the current mortgage foreclosure crisis.

This is very reminiscent of the 100-0 vote on the Real ID Act. Is there anyone in the US Senate that is not a total traitor to their country?!

Situation synopsis + download link

Obama cousin & Kenyan Prime Minister hopeful Raila Odinga for change!

by Stefan Fobes

Yes! They are both for “change”. Months ago that mini-scandal hit when Obama stole some lines off a couple of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s pre-gubernatorial campaign speeches. Now Obama has shared the wealth with Raila Odinga, a guy who claims to be his cousin and who he held in such high regard that he interrupted his New Hampshire campaigning to speak to him on the phone. Odinga claims to be a Marxist and a Muslim who led his followers to burn Christians to death right inside their own churches. Do not believe he is a Muslim for a second. Wherever you see this sort of activity you will always find Satanism and astral/demonic entity worship when you look hard enough. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the seriously inhuman looking former president of Haiti, comes to mind. If elected, he will bring in the barbaric Sharia law, which gets the Muslim ladies treatment typically like this:

Some of those flogged have been under the age of eighteen. One of the earliest and most publicized cases was that of Bariya Ibrahim Magazu, a teenage girl who had become pregnant and was accused of pre-marital sex. While it was widely reported by the media that Bariya Magazu was seventeen years old, local sources, including the women’s rights organization Baobab for Women’s Human Rights, believed that she was no more than thirteen or fourteen. In September 2000, the Shari’a Court in Tsafe found her guilty of zina (fornication) and sentenced her to one hundred lashes. She was also accused of bringing false charges against three men who she claimed had raped her, for which she was sentenced to an additional eighty lashes. The three men were arrested, but denied the charge and were released after three days. With the help of lawyers hired by Baobab for Women’s Rights, Bariya Magazu appealed the conviction. The lawyers advanced several grounds for appeal, including that the defendant was under eighteen, and therefore could not have consented to the act; nor, if found guilty, should she be given the same punishment as an adult. Eventually, the sentence of eighty lashes for bringing false charges against the men was dropped, but Bariya Magazu was flogged one hundred times on January 19, 2001, even though her appeal was still pending. She was only given one day’s notice that she would be flogged on that date; initially, the flogging was to take place one week later, forty days after the birth of her baby.

He has also named his kids after Fidel Castro and Winnie Mandela, who had her bodyguards, nicknamed the Mandela United Football Club, to commit murder, arson, and beatings against anyone who disagreed with her and her beloved “football club” in South Africa. She even held torture sessions in her own home. And this is a person many people actually look up to in America as a symbol of freedom. It’s the same story every time. Like some big joke. I can’t help wondering, looking at her features, if she has some possible Windsor bloodline in her.

Finally, taking a look at Odinga’s campaign website, we see the slogans which have caused so many to fall under the sway of the Obama Mind Trick: Vote for Change. He is Your Agent for Change! Yeah, I’ll bet if we follow the money we’d see that you probably are one, all right. You can Register for Change too.

Obama has seriously connected scum who are behind him in the shadows like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was responsible for drawing up the plan of goading the Russians into invading Afghanistan. This invasion was a decade long nightmare for the Afghan people which militarily and emotionally crippled them and kept them from effectively resisting the subsequent takeover by the Taliban and then the coalition forces. In short, he’s the ultimate Washington insider. You can read more about Obama and his Bush mirroring aggressive policies in an article I wrote called Selection ‘08 – Buyer Beware!

To all Obama supporters who may come across this, I leave you with this.

Ron Paul and Satanism?

Hell, I’m not 100% sure what to think about this Ron Paul Freemasonic/Satanic connection biz, but one thing for sure is, something is definitely not right here. Setting aside the claims set forth here for a minute. And check out what he does with his hands after getting out of that car in this youtube clip. And then this pic here.

Unmistakable. Something’s not right here…

Selection ’08 – Buyer Beware!

By Stefan Fobes

It really outrages me how people get tricked so easily, time and time again. Like a bunch of sheep, we are supposed to vote for someone just because they are a woman, or just because they have this or that skin color. Over and over again we let ourselves be tapped like keyboards, robotically letting people control us through our emotions instead of asking ourselves how these candidates are going to be best for us, and not just how much they can make us feel good. The newsdroid on TV says this one’s a Democrat, he must be bad. The news media says this one is an anti-semite, and we just take them at face value even though they get caught every week engaged in the most blatant lies and dirty tricks. And we have the gall to complain about how much everything sucks on top of it?! Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud , universally recognized as the father of modern PR, illustrated in his 1923 book, Propaganda, summed it up like this: “But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences. Not many years ago, it was only necessary to tag a political candidate with the word interests to stampede millions of people into voting against him, because anything associated with “the interests” seemed necessarily corrupt. Recently the word Bolshevik has performed a similar service for persons who wished to frighten the public away from a line of action.”

In 1923! For so long this has been going on. If we truly want change, and not just want to be jerked around like a little puppet, we must not fall for this trap that is being so carefully laid out for us.

Many are now, at least, getting awake to the fact that there is no difference between the Republicans and Democrats. The big name candidates like Obama & Clinton are owned by the same people who own Bush and Cheney. Some of them even donate to both parties. This is why you see that that no matter how many times you flip the coin, it will always give you the same face when you look at it.

Hillary Clinton

“Every nation has to either be with us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.”

I wonder where I heard that before…?

According to a Reuters report, coporate donors have been giving at an unprecedented rate. They must really agree with Obama and Clinton about throwing off the control of special interests. The report says that they have been getting the most money. Investment banks, commercial banks and real estate companies altogether have given almost $34 million into the presidential race, with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama getting the most money. Hollywood, including television, film and music, has given $6 million, $5 million of it to Clinton and Obama. The Defense contractors must be ready for change too. Maybe Lockheed Martin has finally seen the light and decided to play fair, and not let Hillary fly around on their jets. Right. And I’m eating a fried pig wing as I write this. She, like her friend John Edwards talks a good talk about helping the people out of the sewer that we’ve gotten ourselves into, pledging to bust up the corporate welfare pipe but when you look at where she gets her money from, you see you are getting the usual stuff.

Individual contributors include Jack Abernathy, Fox Television Stations CEO, Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman, August Busch III, Anheuser-Busch Rupert Murdoch, Newscorp Chairman & CEO, Sumner Redstone, Viacom Chairman, Jeff Kindler, Pfizer CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric Chairman & CEO, Sandy Weill, Citigroup Chairman, Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon Chairman & CEO

Even Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch is running fundraisers for her. How can we expect to see balance and impartiality in the news when this is happening? It’s about time we woke up and stopped letting ourselves be scammed here. Another quote by loving Hillary: “We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

So how different is Hillary Clinton from George W. Bush?

Bush says: We are safer than we were on 9/10/01, but not really safe.

When people are afraid, they look to someone else to shield them from that fear and the `I’ll take anything but that!` mentality prevails. Bush & Co. and Hillary Clinton know this, and indeed it is no surprise that she repeated this same line during the New Hampshire debate because she is controlled by the same people who control George W. Bush.

Bush says: I refuse to say that the Iraq war was a mistake. Obviously, the million Iraqis that died as a direct result of it are inconsequential. Matter of fact, I think I’ll do it all over again in Iran.

She dodged this question at a New Hampshire town meeting. At another one, when asked how she could go about basically threatening other countries’ children with nuclear genocide, responded: “No options are off the table. We cannot abide by a nuclear-armed Iran. It would be an existential threat to the United States.”

Utter ruthlessness. And a lot of women see this in her and mistake it for strength. It is not. Just look at those eyes. Jaws looks cute and cuddly compared to her!

Bush says: Yes to “path to citizenship”, to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security, and to allow them to skip the line ahead of people who wait years to legally get in. He also says that there aren’t enough Americans to do all the work that needs to be done.

Even if you believe the war on terror is real, and not that it is a complete fabrication designed by the intelligence services to paralyze us with fear for control purposes, you have to ask yourself why it is that Bush won’t close down the borders? Why is it that illegal immigrants are allowed to have checking accounts, credit cards, and mortgages? If you think it is ineptness you better check that ego at the door. They NSA sure aren’t inept with their surveillance program, which really started with Echelon back in the ‘40s. They didn’t send in FEMA and the military to help people out during Katrina, but they sure were hot for their guns weren’t they? When it comes down to control, governments are very sharp and calculated because that’s what they were designed for. Regulating and controlling. And we’ve let them. The trick is, now, to unlet them.

From the ’07 South Carolina MSNBC primary debate:

“I’m in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, which includes tightening our border security, sanctioning employers to employ undocumented immigrants, getting the 12 million or so immigrants out of the shadows. That’s very important to me. After 9/11, we’ve got to know who’s in this country. And then giving them a chance to pay a fine, pay back taxes, learn English & stand in line to be eligible for a legal status in this country.”

I didn’t know Bush was a ventriloquist! Damn…he’s good.

And what if you want to refuse to pay for her universal healthcare (welfare) plan? Some of her aides have said that she would consider taking it out of our paychecks. On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos when asked if she would do this, she answered, “George, we will have an enforcement mechanism, whether it’s that or it’s some other mechanism through the tax system or automatic enrollments.”
Isn’t this the same sort of behavior Stalin, Lenin, and Hitler engaged in? Isn’t this exactly what Bush and Co. say all the time? Give up your rights for the common good and we’ll protect you. The various taxes already shave off at least 60% of American incomes. I am not a fan of welfare—it leaves people in an unnatural position of dependency on the government, but if we can spend tens of billions a month on Iraq it is child’s play to finance this without taking anything extra from us. The Illuminati want this because they know that a population working like dogs can’t think straight enough to see the hammer drop till it is much too late.

Her Rogue’s Gallery of Advisors

Madeleine Albright/Foreign policy advisor – Clinton’s Secretary of State, notorious for her callous remark in ’96 when asked on 60 Minutes by Leslie Stahl about the plight of the 500,000 Iraqi children who had died as a result of the backbreaking UN sanctions: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

Wesley Clark – Clinton’s Kosovo Commander, ran bombing of Serbia, announced he was going after civilian targets and key infrastructure such as electrical plants and a TV station.

Richard Holbrooke/Foreign policy advisor – US Ambassador to UN during Clinton years, during Carter he oversaw the shipment of weapons to the Indonesian military invasion effort in East Timor which resulted in the deaths of a third of the population, blocked UN Security Council from enforcing their resolution against it.

Leslie Gelb/Informal advisor – President Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations.

Sandy Berger – Clinton’s National Security Advisor, stole classified documents from the US National Archives.

Gen. John Keane/Military issues advisor – Co-drafted the Iraqi surge.

Jeffrey H. Smith/National security advisor – Former CIA general counsel.

Strobe Talbott/Informal advisor – During Clinton years. oversaw Russia policy, backing of Boris Yeltsin’s policy which resulted in turning over the wealth to the oligarchs, massive deaths ensued, and a 15-year drop in life expectancy throughout much of the country.

It grieves me to no end to see people in abject worship of Bill and Hillary Clinton the Satanists. (Hillary Clinton reportedly higher in the Satanic hierarchy than he is) Gary Aldrich, former FBI liason to the White House, writing in his book Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent inside the Clinton White House, describes the disgusting ornaments Hillary Clinton personally ordered displayed in full view for visitors to see, including children. “Gary, come here, look at this! It was a mobile of twelve lords a-leaping. They were leaping all right. The ornament consisted of tiny clay male figurines. Each was naked and had a large erection. My friend said, “Whoops!” and he dropped it on the floor. Then, “Oh no”, as he stomped on it. He joked, “Man I hope I don’t get in trouble with Hillary for that!”

Other “Christian” ornaments include crack pipes, birds having sex, and cock rings. Look it up on Google Books on pages 104-107.

“It’s change you can Xerox.” Her joke about Barack Obama ripping off lines from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick’s speeches was actually pretty funny. It is even more so when you see that she has done exactly the same thing not once but at least twice. Her 3AM ad is itself a Xerox of an ad run by Walter Mondale smearing Gary Hart during the 1984 primaries. She has also taken stuff off of Bill Clinton and John Edwards speeches, as you can watch here. If they can’t even muster up enough heart to say what they really believe, and then when they get caught just brush it aside as if it were nothing, what kind of things would they get mixed up in as President? Continuing to sexually abuse mind controlled women? Or maybe just keeping up the family tradition of killing their colleagues and associates?

Barack Obama

“There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who’s in a position to execute.” – As quoted in the July 27, 2004 Chicago Tribune on the Iraqi invasion

Well, let’s see how he holds up against the Bush litmus test.

Bush says: We must take the fight to the terrorists so that we can be safe at home.
No difference here, as this Washington Post article shows:

“Romney says that “the jihadist threat is the defining challenge of our generation,” as real as the threat that was posed by Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, and he promises an appropriately sized response. Obama, albeit using slightly different terms, agrees: “To defeat al Qaeda, I will build a twenty-first-century military and twenty-first-century partnerships as strong as the anticommunist alliance that won the Cold War to stay on the offense everywhere from Djibouti to Kandahar.”

Stay on the offensive? With what money? People seem to have this idea that we have this unlimited cache of money, and we can wage as many wars against as many countries as we want, without care of the consequences to our economy or for the regard of the innocent Iraqis, none of whom asked to be precision bombed to pieces by the coalition forces. The more money the government prints out, the less it is worth. People are screaming with joy with the fact that the price of gold is soaring through the roof. It is doing so because it takes more dollars to buy the same amount.

Obama has also declared that he would not hesitate to send US troops into Pakistan, to root out Al-Qaeda.

“At a debate in front of thousands of labor union activists Tuesday, Sen. Barack Obama’s Democratic presidential rivals blasted him for his remarks about Pakistan. Last Wednesday, the Illinois senator said that if it were necessary to root out terrorists, he would send U.S. forces into Pakistan without the country’s approval.”

And that’s on top of being for going into Iran. He also stated that “if we have actionable intelligence” on bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, and President Musharraf would not act, then we should.” You mean the same Al-Qaeda that the US airlifted out of Afghanistan as the fighting broke out?

Bush says: We must strengthen our homeland by spying on you. To protect you, of course.

The Greek philosopher Plato said something 2,000 years ago that rings as true then as it does now. “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” In a CFR essay, Renewing American Leadership, Obama says that he would start “investing more resources to defend mass transit, closing the gaps in our aviation security by screening all cargo on passenger airliners and checking all passengers against a comprehensive watch list.” The Bush no-fly list, no doubt.

Bush says: Illegal immigration is still illegal, but I won’t enforce it. I do ask, however, that you consent to being treated like a common criminal. Do it for the homeland.

In a Senate floor statement, Obama says that yes, the illegal immigrants are disrespecting our laws, but it is totally unreasonable to kick them out. I don’t think so. We are always sold this line of BS! There is always enough money to kill people, but not to feed the starving. There is always more than enough funding and equipment to terrorize the citizens, but never enough to solve real problems. There weren’t any problems during the ’04 Republican National Convention in New York getting a Fuji blimp to glide around the city surveilling everything. There was no problem getting the $35,000 soundwave weapons in, or for sweeping up people indiscriminately off the city streets and putting them in a makeshift concentration camp. Now I don’t hate immigrants. I love cultural diversity, but there are tens of millions of people living in abject poverty and too many of them want in here right now. There has to be reasonable regulation of this and we all know it. Obama also goes to bat in the floor statement for the cause of background checks for all Americans.
Here are all the loopholes in the immigration bill that got passed. Are you a gang member? You’re in! All you have to do is to “renounce” your membership. Need to get in quick? Just find a non-relative American resident and get them to say you’ve been here for 5 years or more, and you are an instant American.

Bush says: Your car got repo’d and your house is going to be taken away any minute, but an itty bitty $600 check from me will solve all.

From barackobama.com:

“Obama will restore fairness to the tax code and provide 150 million workers the tax relief they need. Obama will create a new “Making Work Pay” tax credit of up to $500 per person, or $1,000 per working family. The “Making Work Pay” tax credit will completely eliminate income taxes for 10 million Americans.”

Oh yes, very gracious. Just how is paying $1,000 less going to do anything, and how will it eiminate income taxes for all those people?

Obama also pushes for a carbon tax which many researchers for years now have been saying would happen based on the Illuminati’s own stated plans. He has sponsored a bill in the Senate called the Global Poverty Act, which commits itself to UN guidelines, specifically those of the UN Millenium Summit which, in the words of Jeffrey Sachs, the head of the UN Millenium project:

“We will need, in the end, to put real resources in support of our hopes. A global tax on carbon-emitting fossil fuels might be the way to begin. Even a very small tax, less than that which is needed to correct humanity’s climate-deforming overuse of fossil fuels, would finance a greatly enhanced supply of global public goods.”

Just to remove all doubt that he does support a carbon tax, Obama clarifies for us in his “Blueprint for Change”.

“Obama supports implementation of a market-based cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions by the amount scientists say is necessary: 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Obama ’s cap-and-trade system will require all pollution credits to be auctioned. A 100 percent auction ensures that all polluters pay for every ton of emissions they release, rather than giving these emission rights away to coal and oil companies.”

Bold lying is so easy to get away with these people. He knows most Americans don’t read the papers, don’t look up voting records to see if their deeds match their words, and knows that so many are willing to give their power away for an hour of emotional feelgood. He goes on and on about the partisan politics, the bickering, oh it’s so divisive. Just look at the last three debates between him and Hillary Clinton. It is like some three year olds arguing over who has the best action figure. He nags us with the “You have to remember, I was one of the lone voices in the Senate who was against the Iraq war authorization” or some variant of that. Like we are supposed to worship him for doing his job. And he’s even lying about that. He has voted for over $300 billion of war appropriations bills and against removing most combat troops from Iraq by July ’07. He also voted to confirm Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State, voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and joined Republicans in passing the Class Action Fairness Act which as The Nation writer Dan Zegart reveals, closed off many class action lawsuits from being heard in state courts. This forced these cases to the unfriendly and overloaded federal courts, staffed with 678 federal judges as compared to the 9,200 state judges. This had nothing to do with shielding insurance companies from frivolous lawsuits and everything to do with protecting criminal corporations like Wal-Mart, which forced employees to work off the clock for no pay and allowed them no lunch breaks.

Unbelievable as it seems, Obama was the number one campaigner for Robert C. Byrd in one of his election bids, a handler/abuser of mind controlled women and a proud former member of the Ku Klux Klan, who fought in his early days in the Senate to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When is it going to get in the minds of black voters that Obama doesn’t care at all about them? Does he say anything about the real issues that actually affect black Americans? Like the New York City social services taking black kids and handing them over to the drug companies to run drug tests on them? Does he have a plan to help out the struggling black communities and clean out the crime there? He has made it quite clear on several occasions that he is not running as a pro-black candidate, yet the general public somehow has this idea that he is. He would never have gotten elected to the Illinois State Senate or if he didn’t do that work in Chicago. He only joined that church of his after being asked repeatedly what church he did go to.

Looking at the Obama’s key advisors, we see not change but business as usual.

Austan Goolsbee/Economic advisor – Skull & Bones ’91. Canadian television reported that a discussion took place between Goolsbee and the Canadian ambassador to the US about Obama’s anti-NAFTA stance. In this, alledgedly, Goolsbee told the ambassador that Obama’s stance on this was just campaign rhetoric and nothing to worry about. Since he will not confirm or deny the conversation took place, saying merely that, “They contacted me at one point to say ‘hello’ because their office is around the corner but it is not correct that I contacted them at all,” If that is so, then why not just deny the conversation took place altogether? They were around the corner? Terrible cover story, Austan Goolsbee.

Zbigniew Brzezinski/Foreign policy advisor – Former National Security Advisor, Carter. Founded Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller. In a 1998 interview with the French paper Le Nouvel Observateur he bragged about how the US goaded the Soviets into invading Afghanistan by funding the mujahideen. When asked about having any regrets about the results of this, he said, “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?”
Well the Afghan people certainly do. The Soviet occupation of 1979-89 left more than a million dead, hundreds of thousands crippled, millions of land mines littering the country which kill dozens a month, and leaving the population with an average life expectancy of just 43 years. And then there was the Taliban. To call this guy psychopathic would be too kind.

Dennis Ross/Foreign policy advisor – Bill Clinton’s Middle East negotiator, oversaw US policy towards Israel & Palestine, pressed the idea that the human rights of the Palestinian people must be subordinate to the will of the Israeli government. If they want to expand their territory unchecked, steal houses, shoot children’s legs off for sport, traumatize the people by deliberately sonic booming their houses, or even cooking up ethnic specific weapons, then that’s A-OK!

Sarah Sewell/National security advisor – Clinton’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance. Wrote the introduction to Petraeus’s counterinsurgency handbook used in killing operations worldwide.

W. Anthony Lake/Foreign policy advisor – Bill Clinton’s National Security advisor, driving force behind US invasion of Haiti, supported World Bank & IMF ‘overhaul’ of the Haitian economy which wrecked the agricultural system, the economic walking stick of the country by flooding it with US rice, corn, and sugar surpluses. At present, most Haitians are living on just $2 a day, a 60-cent cup of rice is now to them what a fur coat is to us. Many have even resorted to eating dirt cookies just to survive.

In 1998 Obama joined a United Church of Christ congregation headed by a Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Obama says this shaped his identity as an African-American. BS!
It shaped his strategy of church style mind control over people, more like. This is totally obvious when you see the way he poses and phrases his words and speeches. A lot of pictures with Obama in them have a weird white glow to them, as if to emphasize the “holiness” of Obama. In the Satanic reverse language, evil is good, and black is white. Are we being sent a subtle message that Obama is flooding his worshippers with negative energy? These are way too many to be a coincidence. This shows deliberate hypnotism being used on the public. People described Hitler very similarly to what we see at an Obama rally. People who are still alive today from the Nazi days remember him having an eerie charisma, just being swept up by him…”you had to be there to understand it.” It appears that the Illuminati may have switched horses mid-race. Obama, with his holy rockstar style, his skin color to provide him with the body armor of political correctness, and the fact that he has varied and singularly unique (Larry Sinclair and communist leanings) skeletons in his closet, makes him the perfect puppet for the agenda of global takeover.

Time and time again, we see that every presidential candidate is closely related to European royalty, or to one of the other ones. In 2004 Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke’s Peerage, the encyclopedic bible of European aristocratic genealogy, said about the subject of US presidential candidates:

“Brooks-Baker said there has always been a significant “royalty factor” in those who aspired to the White House, with Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan among others all with strong blue blood links.

“The chance of winning certainly seems much higher with more royal connections and one could make a big case that royal genes or chromosomes will tell,” Brooks-Baker said.”

We see this again with Obama and Clinton. Obama, according to various media outlets is Dick Cheney’s 9th cousin, although Cheney’s wife says that they are actually 8th cousins. She would probably be in a better position to know, wouldn’t she? Also, Hillary Clinton is also closely related to Barbara Bush and the queen demon herself, Elizabeth II of England, as we can see from these genealogical charts.

John McCain

“At the smallest provocation I would go off into a mad frenzy, and then suddenly crash to the floor unconscious. When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out.” – McCain on his early youth as quoted by his biographer Robert Timberg

This is the image of himself that he’d like you to hold in your mind: War hero, champion of veterans rights, moral crusader, environmentalist, and conscientious objector to business as usual in Washington. Let’s see the image he wouldn’t.

Considering that he is supposed to be this big war hero who endured five agonizing years of torture, it is impossible to reconcile this with the fact that he has consistently and viciously blocked every attempt by families of Vietnam POWs to get them back to the US. He has pushed through and amended legislation in order to block not only the release of information about POWs and MIAs that were still in Vietnam after the war, despite massive evidence of them being alive, but also the release of his own military records.

He comes across as being sympathetic to veterans who are being denied healthcare, who have to pay for their own meals at military hospitals while they recover from getting their arms and legs blown off, and how they have to wait for eons to get their benefits.. But is McCain really speaking from his heart or a script? He has made it perfectly clear he isn’t against torture, when he voted against a bill to ban it, as reported by the NY Times: “The leading Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain of Arizona, a former prisoner of war who steadfastly opposes the use of torture, voted against the bill. Mr. McCain said the ban would limit the C.I.A.’s ability to gather intelligence. “We always supported allowing the C.I.A. to use extra measures,” he said.” Sprinkling in a some doublespeak, he says that he believes torture is illegal and should be banned. Voted for the Military Commissions Act, which we are told applies only to enemy combatants. It permits trials without the accused present, gives the Secretary of Defense the power to appoint judges, allows evidence gotten without warrants, and makes it so lawyers cannot see their clients without government monitoring. Former Attorney General Gonzales has said that the president can strip Americans of their citizenship, turning them into enemy combatants, which makes it applicable to American citizens. Voted no to establishing mandatory rest periods for the troops between deployments, which would be a great help in reducing post traumatic stress disorder. Speaking of PTSD, McCain voted against a bill that would have provided $500 million for veterans mental health services like rehab and counseling. These are the actions of someone who hates veterans, not one who sympathizes with them.

McCain’s insane rages are well documented, including his horrible treatment of POW & MIA family members who only wish to have their families whole again. No one is immune apparently, not even his own colleagues on the Senate floor, as this UK Guardian article exposes: “McCain’s political colleagues, however, know another side of the action hero – a volatile man with a hair-trigger temper, who shouted at Senator Ted Kennedy on the Senate floor to “shut up”, and called fellow Republican senators “shithead … fucking jerk … asshole”. A few months ago, McCain suddenly rushed up to a friend of mine, a prominent Washington lawyer, at a social event, and threatened to beat him up because he represented a client McCain happened to dislike. Then, just as suddenly, profusely and tearfully, he apologised.”

He claims to care about the environment, riding the global warming bandwagon, which is a fiction. Record snowfalls this winter in the US and snow in places where historically there has been little or none such as Iraq, tear this apart. Anyway…back in the 80s, the University of Arizona tried to get seven deep space telescopes on forest lands which were home to several endangered plant and animal species, and a sacred mountain to the San Carlos Apache, Mt. Graham. McCain introduced a bill to exempt the project from the Endangered Species Act and the Native American Religious Freedom Act. When the forest supervisor halted construction on the lands, McCain threatened him, saying that he’d be “the shortest tenured forest supervisor in the history of the Forest Service.” When two concerned citizens went to his office to discuss Mt. Graham, McCain let loose on them: “The doctors say that at the mention of the words Mount Graham McCain erupted into a violent fit. “He slammed his fists on his desk, scattering papers across the room”, Silver tells us. “He jumped up and down, screaming obscenities at us for at least 10 minutes. He shook his fists as if he was going to slug us. It was as violent as almost any domestic abuse altercation.”

Another example of McCain’s regard for his fellow man is his helping the Peabody Coal Company, the biggest coal company in the US, to steal coal-rich land from the Arizona Dineh Navajo Indians, which they have occupied for hundreds of years. Spearheading legislation which, in a modern day Trail of Tears scenario, thousands were thrown out their homelands and into a nuclear waste dump site, resulting in the birth defects that inevitably come. McCain’s price? His wife’s beer distribution company getting beer contracts from the Vegas casinos who get low-cost power as a result. A UN report on the environmental impact reads: “The Black Mesa region in Arizona, USA is home to the indigenous communities of the Dineh (Navajo) and Hopi peoples. This region also contains major deposits of coal which are being extracted by North America’s largest strip mining operation. The coal mines have had a major impact on families in the region. Local water sources have been poisoned, resulting in the death of livestock. Homes near the mines suffer from blasting damage. The coal dust is pervasive, as well as smoke from frequent fires in the stockpiles. Not coincidentally, the people in the area have an unusually high incidence of kidney and respiratory disease. “

McCain also was one of the Keating 5, five senators who took more than $300,000 from Charles Keating Jr, who owned Lincoln Savings & Loan, a subsidiary of his American Continental Corp. It was facing bankruptcy and government seizure because of his stealing depositors’ money. He turned to McCain and four other senators, who got federal regulators to back off the case. In the end, the government paid for the bailout, all $2 billion of it. McCain treated reporters pressing him about his wife’s business relationship with Keating to his classic charm, saying, “That’s the spouse’s involvement, you idiot,” and, “It’s up to you to find that out, kids.” Right after that came the “we need to drive out the special interests” McCain. I guess the corporate donors didn’t get that memo. His top donors include Merill Lynch ($177,475), Citigroup ($161,000), Univision ($82,000), JP Morgan Chase ($74,200) and Morgan Stanley ($63,351).

Some of the creepy crawlies backing him up include:

Henry Kissinger/Informal advisor – National Security advisor and Secretary of State, Reagan. Also was Secretary of State under Ford. Notorious for his comment about military men, where he calls them “dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy” Assured Indonesian dictator Suharto that, should he invade and conquer East Timor, US-Indonesian relations would remain strong. An estimated 200,000 Timorese were massacred and starved to death as a result. Went the same road with Argentina, after the military overthrew the democratically elected president, assured them that the US was its ally and would not cause it unnecessary difficulties, and urged them to finish up before Congress reconvened. This amid mass executions and “disappearances” of 30,000 people. Also instrumental in ordering the coup in Chile and putting in Pinochet, who also instituted mass civil repressions, executions, and arrests.

Max Boot/Foreign policy advisor – CFR, neocon, advocated putting pressure on China and South Korea to cut off subsidies and fuel shipments to North Korea, an already poverty-stricken population where 2 million people have already starved to death while the hereditary dictator, Kim Jong-il, lives in luxury with a 2,000+ girl harem, private screenings of the latest Hollywood movies, and the finest gourmet food imported from around the world.

Alexander Haig – Knight of Malta, Reagan’s Secretary of State, former head of NATO in Europe. Helped oversee death squads in Central America who killed, tortured, and raped nuns and other religious workers. Famous for his unlawful declaration of “I’m in control here” when Reagan was incapacitated after an assassination attempt.

Brent Scowcroft – National Security advisor, Reagan & HW Bush. After the Tiananmen massacre, went and reassured the Chinese dictatorship that the American public opinion meant nothing and that relations would not suffer one bit.

Robert McFarlane/Energy & National security advisor – Another backer of the contras along with John Negroponte and Alexander Haig.

Robert Kagan/Informal foreign policy advisor – CFR member, neocon swampmonster, co-founder, Project for the New American Century.

Bill Kristol/Informal foreign policy advisor – Editor of the Weekly Standard, Bilderberg attendee, co-founder, PNAC. Stated in ’02 that a war in Iraq could have “terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.”

About the only real difference between McCain and Bush is that one looks like Frankenstein and the other doesn’t. When asked about Iran he rolls out the same lines that Bush, Obama, Hillary and all the rest do. Here’s his wording of the script: “I intend to make it unmistakably clear to Iran that we will not permit a government that espouses the destruction of … Israel . . .and pledges undying enmity to the United States to possess weapons to advance their malevolent ambitions,” Suddeutschen Zeitung quoted the senator as saying.” He is for open borders, as shown by his support for the “immigration reform” bill, says we may have to stay in Iraq for 100 years, and has threatened North Korea with extinction. In too many ways, he is actually more aggressive than Bush, as the LA Times confirms: “More than three years before the Bush administration elucidated the radical doctrine of preemptive war, McCain unveiled a plan during his first run at the presidency called “rogue-state rollback,” in which “we politically and materially support indigenous forces within and outside of rogue states” — including Iraq, North Korea and Serbia — “to overthrow regimes that threaten our interests and values.” And if the “odious regimes” crack down on freedom fighters, the U.S. should respond with force. In that campaign, McCain was the neocons’ choice against the more internationally “humble” George Bush.”

Since McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, he is not even eligible to be president! But as always, little things like laws will never be allowed to get in the way of the Illuminati agenda. Just ask the New Orleans gun owners. And the survivors of Waco.

There’s only one candidate I would vote for, the only one who has walked the walk with his voting record, one who is not only unafraid to tell us just how bad things are, but also wise enough to offer solutions that are simple, practical and effective. One who does the job he was elected by the people to do, even when the cameras are turned off. And that’s Ron Paul.