Monday, May 11, 2009

About and around...

Single payer health care: Senator Charles Schumer has agreed to give the single-payer concept "a seat at the table" -- whatever that means -- if another senator on the Senate Finance Committee joins him in asking for it. That means Kerry, Stabenow or Rockefeller. If you live in their states (MI, MA and WV), then write and tell them that you demand that the case for single payer be given a fair hearing. (Thanks to DCBlogger at Corrente.)

Strange Osama Bin Laden claims: Pakistan President Asif Ali Zadari implies (but does not state) that Osama has been dead since Tora Bora.
Zadari continued: “I have asked my counterparts in the American intelligence services and they haven’t heard [from] him in seven years.”
All right, then -- if Osama is dead, then who is responsible for all of those messages?

Stranger still: Zadari refers to Bin Laden as "your operator" (meaning: A creature of the CIA), whose mission was to destabilize Pakistan.


More stress: If the banks survive the crisis created by funny mortgages and cognate shennanigans, will they also be able to survive massive defaults on credit cards?
In the official stress test results, regulators published losses only on credit cards held on bank balance sheets. The $82.4 billion figure did not reflect another element in their analysis: tens of billions of dollars in losses tied to credit card loans that the banks packaged into bonds and held off their balance sheets.

5 comments:

RedDragon said...

Funny how he states that Osama Bin Laden was ( and is? ) "OUR" agent. I was waiting for that "Talking Monkey" masquerading as a Journalist to jump on that..but that was like hoping Santa Claus would give me a new laptop to replace the one I had to pawn...LOL

Peter of Lone Tree said...

Thirty-three failed banks so far this year (eight more than all of last year).

djmm said...

Great information and comments, Joseph!

Capitalism needs to be saved from itself, again. If the usury laws could be re-enacted, to limit interest to a "mere" 12% a year (or better still 6%), there would be far fewer defaults. But I guess banks and financial service firms are just too greedy for that...

I had thought the "our operator" was incorrect English to mean someone who operated on (attacked) the US. Hmmm.

djmm

Erick L. said...

There are some real questions about whether OBL is alive or dead. Here's one interesting story from CNET about the video messages.

I kind of doubt if anyone in the the USA/HSA/CIA know for sure. I think that if OBL were known to be alive, or known to be dead, that fact could have been spun and used as a focus point to rally supporters of the Bush administration as Bush's public approval and the public's support for the War on Terror in Iraq started to turn against Bush's team.

Of course, it's also possible that the administration and possibly one or two of the major media corporations did know that OBL was dead, and decided to use him as a boogie man to keep the fear levels raised for as long as possible. Maybe.

Anonymous said...

Emmanuel Goldstein (an alleged mastermind super villain) doesn't need to be alive, or to have ever been alive, to perform his function.

In some respects, it is better if he is dead, for ease of manipulating his 'messages.'

But of course Bin Laden was our agent, or under our influence, just as the blind Sheik Rahman (alleged head of the '93 WTC attack cell) only got into the country on a CIA waiver of the State Dept. watchlist, just as the 19 hijackers only entered the country despite massive lacunae in their applications with outside help, and cf: Ali Muhammed.

XI