08.31.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:01 pm by Administrator
I, your humble narrator, viewed both these videos in the same day.
One is relatively new. The other, 40 years old.
The differences–mind-boggling.
Whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or what have you, I pray you join me in this meditation.
The United States was based on a premise of respect for the individual. We should each be committed to the collective. That may seem contradictory, but it’s not. When the collective recognizes the individual as its cornerstone, the collective is stronger.
The USA has pulled the World out of some deep stuff. We lead through it–up and down. I couldn’t be prouder, or would ever wish I were from another nation. It’s ours to complain, and ours to act.
It is the difference in Socialism and, certainly, Fascism, and certainly the difference of who we are as True Americans, the respects and loyalties to the individual freedoms.
That makes us stronger than anything else ever having been subjected to “diplomacy.”
God bless America. And God bless us all.
This AIN’T America no mo, okay?
Red Skelton’s Pledge of Allegiance
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07.11.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:21 am by Administrator
James King
AlbanyHerald.com
Letter to the editor
An American used to be a person driving this year’s model automobile, wearing last year’s style clothes and spending next year’s money. Now our government is spending money generations in advance. America is hopelessly in debt and virtually bankrupt. I predict eventual bankruptcy by the U.S. government and the end of the U.S. dollar. The world banking system will introduce the “Amero.” America, Canada and Mexico will have the same money.
It has been said that the Iraq war has bankrupted America. I have read both sides of the argument. I still don’t have a firm opinion as to whether the war was justified.
But illegal immigrants, not war, have bankrupted America. They cost America $338.3 billion a year. The breakdown is $11-$22 billion by state governments, $2.2 billion on food assistance programs, $2.5 billion on Medicaid, $12 billion on primary and secondary education for illegal children, $17 billion for education of “anchor babies” of illegal immigrants, $3 million per Day for incarceration, $90 billion per year for welfare and social services. Wages of legal Americans are suppressed $200 billion a year. They send $45 billion per year back to their country of origin. (editor’s note–This number seems too low)
Illegal aliens have a crime rate 250 percent that of legal Americans. Nearly 1 million sex crimes have been committed by illegals. Thirty percent of federal inmates are illegals.
Ignorant voters continue to elect U.S. senators, congressmen and presidents who allow it (Democrat and Republican). That is the reason America’s founding fathers believed only property owners should be allowed to vote. Abraham Lincoln changed America from a republic to a democracy. His unconstitutional actions are responsible for putting the first cracks in America’s foundation. It may be unrepairable. I hope I am overly pessimistic.
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05.30.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:26 am by Administrator
From our graphic artist, Davo Dees:
oh my gosh, I visited Ocey in the hospital today, I was pretty nervous of what I was about to see, was he going to recognizable? Was I going to freak out and start sobbing at the pitiful sight? Last time I saw him two days ago he was dying, fragile, shaking, and dehydrated. What a difference a day makes! I walked in the visiting room and he crawled right into my lap, looking amazing, and I could feel the Ocey personality i know so well. It was almost like waking up and realizing it was all just a bad dream, only a few days ago I was distraught and thinking i would never see him again, and here he is next to me, it is a moment i will never forget. I truly adore this guy, i have had cats my whole life, but I am telling you he is a big being in a little body. Even the surgeon told me twice that this is a very special cat, i don’t know if she tells everyone that, but she looked at me like she was pretty serious. This Ocey is magical. I guess you can tell i am a cat person by now, more like a cat lady, as you see i like to walk my cats throug the park to the amazement of everyone watching. How do you herd cats? The key is actually have one cat that is a really good walker, and the others follow him, and Ocey is my walker, he walks ahead of me, glancing over his shoulder occassionally. This week I tried to walk Cow, it was almost impossible, took forever, he just was barely focused without Ocey there.
But now about money. I have not got the final bill yet. Originally the estimate was 2000 dollars, today she said that it was up to 2300 dollars, and that does not include the hip joint operation that will happen next week. But then she said that there is a new doctor that has never done one, and they would do it for free. YEA.
Donations on Paypal are now around 1400 dollars, More than half way there, hope I can make another push for anybody with an extra 20 bucks, they are adding up, go to paypal and go to davodees@hotmail.com, if you have not donated please consider a little bit for a good cause. Ocey is so wonderful, and I promise a lots of new adventures with this little character.
Thanks to the very deep bottom of my poor beating heart for the support the donations that have come in to help me and my best friend, tears fall really easily when i only think about the people who put they love into this project of bringing back this little guy. I received so many emails, stories I want to acknowledge with a reply, people who could not afford to donate, but did anyway, what can you say to that kind of love? And the well wishes really did help a lot, knowing people care enough to write me does widen my view of the world and the great friends I have met here. You will notice in the video that I am looking pretty puffy, too many days of emotions and ups and downs will do that to you.
Here are some new Ocey videos too.
You MUST see the Ocey spring attack! very funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM_lBYcID1I&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAS37keQJx0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8KRXFMq2g8&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjZtnFxuDUQ&feature=channel
I just downloaded the video of the hospital visit at 7:30 my time here in sweden, 6 hours ahead of New York, so soon they will be available to view, go to youtube see the above videos, click on more from davodees and the new ones are “Dees- Ocey in the Hospital” Parts 1, 2, and 3 Go take a look at how Ocey is today, you will be amazed he only just had major surgery, they said was two hours long to repair a broken thorax, yikes.
thanks and all my love.
david. daveandocey
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05.28.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:52 am by Administrator
For our graphic artist, Davo Dees, and Ocey:
Since I have no children of my own I suppose my cat is family for me. Ocey has his own door, and with total freedom comes the chance he might get hurt. Friday night he disappeared, and by Sunday I was a total sobbing mess. Since his collar has my number on it I could only imagine that he was not dead by the road because someone would call, so in my mind I figured someone had stolen him for their own. We walk in the park most everyday and he has such people skills he can walk up to perfect strangers much to their surprise and give them his total love and attention. So the idea someone took him made sense. I was sickened and horrified all week of the thought of him locked in someone’s third story apartment.
I have just been all cried out and so depressed that I could think of nothing else but Ocey.
The idea of ever seeing my best friend again was slipping away fast.
But last night, Wednesday night, Ocey somehow made it back home in the middle of the night, and I awoke to a big painful meow as he came in and I jumped out of bed. I could see he was not ok. He was very thin and stumbling around and breathing hard, clearly there was something extremely wrong.
Today at the vet we took Xrays and the story was clear, he had been hit by a car and had laid injured outside somewhere for five days with no water, no food, with a broken thorax in his chest cavity and a dislocated back leg. The pain he had suffered was beyond my imagination.
The doctor said if we operate right away there is a chance to save him, but no guarantee. Although she did add that cats have nine lives. With no insurance, and no credit cards I suddenly knew I am in big financial trouble. I am barely able to make rent this month, and then the lady said it will cost two thousand dollars to try and fix him up.
I considered having him put to sleep only for a moment, then I realized that money is nothing compared to the joy and spirit of this wonderful fellow, I told her I will somehow get the money, maybe I can sell my car. So I said to please try to make him better and signed the papers. That was only an hour ago, they will operate soon. I wonder what they are going to say when I walk back in with no money. I pretended that I did have the money, so who knows what will happen.
So I am writing this letter to ask for your help.
Any assignments, any illustration jobs you can offer will be greatly appreciated.
Also I can offer signed large full color digital lithographs of any of my political art for a donation of 200 dollars, or with any generous donation to help us. These pieces are stunning to see framed, would really appreciate whatever you do to help Ocey and me get through this very tough time in our lives.
please send any checks you can help with to..
David Dees
c/o Louise Williams
603 Logsdon Ct.
Louisville, KY 40243
Donations under 50 dollars…
Save Ocey
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03.09.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:42 pm by Administrator
World Bank offers dire forecast for world economy
By Edmund L. Andrews, International Herald Tribune, 8 March 2009
In a bleaker assessment than those of most private forecasters, the World Bank predicted Sunday that the global economy would shrink in 2009 for the first time since World War II.
The bank did not provide a specific estimate, but bank officials said its economists would be publishing one in the next several weeks.
Until now, even extremely pessimistic forecasters have predicted that the global economy would eke out a tiny expansion but had warned that even a growth rate of 5 percent in China would be a disastrous slowdown, given the enormous pressure there to create jobs for the country’s rural population.
The World Bank also warned that global trade would contract for the first time since 1982, and that the decline would be the biggest since the 1930s. READ MORE…
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12.22.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:14 pm by Administrator
This is from a routine distribution from Stratfor strategic forecasters from their weekly Geopolitical Intelligence Report. These guys put out great stuff. Sign up for the weekly Geopolitical Intelligence Report at: Stratfor
Readers should consider the timely nature of this information, particularly considering the roles of media in the recent election, what is happening on the global economic stage, and the theme of this site.
The Death of Deep Throat and the Crisis of Journalism
By George Friedman, Stratfor
22 December 2008
Mark Felt died last week at the age of 95. For those who don’t recognize that name, Felt was the “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame. It was Felt who provided Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post with a flow of leaks about what had happened, how it happened and where to look for further corroboration on the break-in, the cover-up, and the financing of wrongdoing in the Nixon administration. Woodward and Bernstein’s exposé of Watergate has been seen as a high point of journalism, and their unwillingness to reveal Felt’s identity until he revealed it himself three years ago has been seen as symbolic of the moral rectitude demanded of journalists.
In reality, the revelation of who Felt was raised serious questions about the accomplishments of Woodward and Bernstein, the actual price we all pay for journalistic ethics, and how for many years we did not know a critical dimension of the Watergate crisis. At a time when newspapers are in financial crisis and journalism is facing serious existential issues, Watergate always has been held up as a symbol of what journalism means for a democracy, revealing truths that others were unwilling to uncover and grapple with. There is truth to this vision of journalism, but there is also a deep ambiguity, all built around Felt’s role. This is therefore not an excursion into ancient history, but a consideration of two things. The first is how journalists become tools of various factions in political disputes. The second is the relationship between security and intelligence organizations and governments in a Democratic society.
Watergate was about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. The break-in was carried out by a group of former CIA operatives controlled by individuals leading back to the White House. It was never proven that then-U.S. President Richard Nixon knew of the break-in, but we find it difficult to imagine that he didn’t. In any case, the issue went beyond the break-in. It went to the cover-up of the break-in and, more importantly, to the uses of money that financed the break-in and other activities. Numerous aides, including the attorney general of the United States, went to prison. Woodward and Bernstein, and their newspaper, The Washington Post, aggressively pursued the story from the summer of 1972 until Nixon’s resignation. The episode has been seen as one of journalism’s finest moments. It may have been, but that cannot be concluded until we consider Deep Throat more carefully.
Deep Throat Reconsidered
Mark Felt was deputy associate director of the FBI (No. 3 in bureau hierarchy) in May 1972, when longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover died. Upon Hoover’s death, Felt was second to Clyde Tolson, the longtime deputy and close friend to Hoover who by then was in failing health himself. Days after Hoover’s death, Tolson left the bureau.
Felt expected to be named Hoover’s successor, but Nixon passed him over, appointing L. Patrick Gray instead. In selecting Gray, Nixon was reaching outside the FBI for the first time in the 48 years since Hoover had taken over. But while Gray was formally acting director, the Senate never confirmed him, and as an outsider, he never really took effective control of the FBI. In a practical sense, Felt was in operational control of the FBI from the break-in at the Watergate in August 1972 until June 1973.
Nixon’s motives in appointing Gray certainly involved increasing his control of the FBI, but several presidents before him had wanted this, too, including John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Both of these presidents wanted Hoover gone for the same reason they were afraid to remove him: He knew too much. In Washington, as in every capital, knowing the weaknesses of powerful people is itself power — and Hoover made it a point to know the weaknesses of everyone. He also made it a point to be useful to the powerful, increasing his overall value and his knowledge of the vulnerabilities of the powerful.
Hoover’s death achieved what Kennedy and Johnson couldn’t do. Nixon had no intention of allowing the FBI to continue as a self-enclosed organization outside the control of the presidency and everyone else. Thus, the idea that Mark Felt, a man completely loyal to Hoover and his legacy, would be selected to succeed Hoover is in retrospect the most unlikely outcome imaginable.
Felt saw Gray’s selection as an unwelcome politicization of the FBI (by placing it under direct presidential control), an assault on the traditions created by Hoover and an insult to his memory, and a massive personal disappointment. Felt was thus a disgruntled employee at the highest level. He was also a senior official in an organization that traditionally had protected its interests in predictable ways. (By then formally the No. 2 figure in FBI, Felt effectively controlled the agency given Gray’s inexperience and outsider status.) The FBI identified its enemies, then used its vast knowledge of its enemies’ wrongdoings in press leaks designed to be as devastating as possible. While carefully hiding the source of the information, it then watched the victim — who was usually guilty as sin — crumble. Felt, who himself was later convicted and pardoned for illegal wiretaps and break-ins, was not nearly as appalled by Nixon’s crimes as by Ni xon’s decision to pass him over as head of the FBI. He merely set Hoover’s playbook in motion.
Woodward and Bernstein were on the city desk of The Washington Post at the time. They were young (29 and 28), inexperienced and hungry. We do not know why Felt decided to use them as his conduit for leaks, but we would guess he sought these three characteristics — as well as a newspaper with sufficient gravitas to gain notice. Felt obviously knew the two had been assigned to a local burglary, and he decided to leak what he knew to lead them where he wanted them to go. He used his knowledge to guide, and therefore control, their investigation.
Systematic Spying on the President
And now we come to the major point. For Felt to have been able to guide and control the young reporters’ investigation, he needed to know a great deal of what the White House had done, going back quite far. He could not possibly have known all this simply through his personal investigations. His knowledge covered too many people, too many operations, and too much money in too many places simply to have been the product of one of his side hobbies. The only way Felt could have the knowledge he did was if the FBI had been systematically spying on the White House, on the Committee to Re-elect the President and on all of the other elements involved in Watergate. Felt was not simply feeding information to Woodward and Bernstein; he was using the intelligence product emanating from a section of the FBI to shape The Washington Post’s coverage.
Instead of passing what he knew to professional prosecutors at the Justice Department — or if he did not trust them, to the House Judiciary Committee charged with investigating presidential wrongdoing — Felt chose to leak the information to The Washington Post. He bet, or knew, that Post editor Ben Bradlee would allow Woodward and Bernstein to play the role Felt had selected for them. Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee all knew who Deep Throat was. They worked with the operational head of the FBI to destroy Nixon, and then protected Felt and the FBI until Felt came forward.
In our view, Nixon was as guilty as sin of more things than were ever proven. Nevertheless, there is another side to this story. The FBI was carrying out espionage against the president of the United States, not for any later prosecution of Nixon for a specific crime (the spying had to have been going on well before the break-in), but to increase the FBI’s control over Nixon. Woodward, Bernstein and above all, Bradlee, knew what was going on. Woodward and Bernstein might have been young and naive, but Bradlee was an old Washington hand who knew exactly who Felt was, knew the FBI playbook and understood that Felt could not have played the role he did without a focused FBI operation against the president. Bradlee knew perfectly well that Woodward and Bernstein were not breaking the story, but were having it spoon-fed to them by a master. He knew that the president of the United States, guilty or not, was being destroyed by Hoover’s jilted heir.
This was enormously important news. The Washington Post decided not to report it. The story of Deep Throat was well-known, but what lurked behind the identity of Deep Throat was not. This was not a lone whistle-blower being protected by a courageous news organization; rather, it was a news organization being used by the FBI against the president, and a news organization that knew perfectly well that it was being used against the president. Protecting Deep Throat concealed not only an individual, but also the story of the FBI’s role in destroying Nixon.
Again, Nixon’s guilt is not in question. And the argument can be made that given John Mitchell’s control of the Justice Department, Felt thought that going through channels was impossible (although the FBI was more intimidating to Mitchell than the other way around). But the fact remains that Deep Throat was the heir apparent to Hoover — a man not averse to breaking the law in covert operations — and Deep Throat clearly was drawing on broader resources in the FBI, resources that had to have been in place before Hoover’s death and continued operating afterward.
Burying a Story to Get a Story
Until Felt came forward in 2005, not only were these things unknown, but The Washington Post was protecting them. Admittedly, the Post was in a difficult position. Without Felt’s help, it would not have gotten the story. But the terms Felt set required that a huge piece of the story not be told. The Washington Post created a morality play about an out-of-control government brought to heel by two young, enterprising journalists and a courageous newspaper. That simply wasn’t what happened. Instead, it was about the FBI using The Washington Post to leak information to destroy the president, and The Washington Post willingly serving as the conduit for that information while withholding an essential dimension of the story by concealing Deep Throat’s identity.
Journalists have celebrated the Post’s role in bringing down the president for a generation. Even after the revelation of Deep Throat’s identity in 2005, there was no serious soul-searching on the omission from the historical record. Without understanding the role played by Felt and the FBI in bringing Nixon down, Watergate cannot be understood completely. Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee were willingly used by Felt to destroy Nixon. The three acknowledged a secret source, but they did not reveal that the secret source was in operational control of the FBI. They did not reveal that the FBI was passing on the fruits of surveillance of the White House. They did not reveal the genesis of the fall of Nixon. They accepted the accolades while withholding an extraordinarily important fact, elevating their own role in the episode while distorting the actual dynamic of Nixon’s fall.
Absent any widespread reconsideration of the Post’s actions during Watergate in the three years since Felt’s identity became known, the press in Washington continues to serve as a conduit for leaks of secret information. They publish this information while protecting the leakers, and therefore the leakers’ motives. Rather than being a venue for the neutral reporting of events, journalism thus becomes the arena in which political power plays are executed. What appears to be enterprising journalism is in fact a symbiotic relationship between journalists and government factions. It may be the best path journalists have for acquiring secrets, but it creates a very partial record of events — especially since the origin of a leak frequently is much more important to the public than the leak itself.
The Felt experience is part of an ongoing story in which journalists’ guarantees of anonymity to sources allow leakers to control the news process. Protecting Deep Throat’s identity kept us from understanding the full dynamic of Watergate. We did not know that Deep Throat was running the FBI, we did not know the FBI was conducting surveillance on the White House, and we did not know that the Watergate scandal emerged not by dint of enterprising journalism, but because Felt had selected Woodward and Bernstein as his vehicle to bring Nixon down. And we did not know that the editor of The Washington Post allowed this to happen. We had a profoundly defective picture of the situation, as defective as the idea that Bob Woodward looks like Robert Redford.
Finding the truth of events containing secrets is always difficult, as we know all too well. There is no simple solution to this quandary. In intelligence, we dream of the well-placed source who will reveal important things to us. But we also are aware that the information provided is only the beginning of the story. The rest of the story involves the source’s motivation, and frequently that motivation is more important than the information provided. Understanding a source’s motivation is essential both to good intelligence and to journalism. In this case, keeping secret the source kept an entire — and critical — dimension of Watergate hidden for a generation. Whatever crimes Nixon committed, the FBI had spied on the president and leaked what it knew to The Washington Post in order to destroy him. The editor of The Washington Post knew that, as did Woodward and Bernstein. We do not begrudge them their prizes and accolades, but it would have been useful to know who handed them the story. In many ways, that story is as interesting as the one about all the president’s men.
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