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Well, well, well, roughly a quarter of the 2.2 billion dollars being spent on Obamaphones, has gone to a company owned by Carlos Slim. Todd Shields of Bloomberg reports: Slim's TracFone Wireless Inc. received about a quarter of the funds from the U.S. government's Lifeline program, according to the latest figures. Today, a House subcommitteeasked why the program, paid for by fees charged to U.S. phone subscribers, tripled in cost since 2008. How many other markets have grown 300% in the years since the crash? Slim is often called the richest man in the world, and owns the cell phone monopoly in Mexico,...

A U.S. intelligence report for the first time links China’s largest telecommunications company to Beijing’s KGB-like intelligence service and says the company recently received nearly a quarter-billion dollars from the Chinese government. The disclosures are a setback for Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.’s efforts to break into the U.S. telecommunications market. The company has been blocked from doing so three times by the U.S. government because of concerns about its links to the Chinese government. The report by the CIA-based Open Source Center states that Huawei’s chairwoman, Sun Yafang, worked for the Ministry of State Security (MSS) Communications Department before joining...

Boy oh Boy the Democrats are such a fickle group. After his endorsement of Barack Obama they rushed to embrace Colin Powell. Flaunting the significance of the endorsement. Yet as recently as February 2007 prominent African American Democrats such as Al Sharpton were calling Powell Bush’s House Negro: Singer, Activist, and Democrat Harry Belafonte Agreed In an interview on San Diego radio station KFMB-AM last Tuesday, Belafonte compared Powell to a plantation slave who moves into the slave owner’s house and says only things that will please his master. “There’s an old saying,” Belafonte said in that interview. “In the...

Cybersecurity experts who held lucrative Pentagon and homeland security contracts and high-level security clearances are under investigation for potentially abusing their government privileges to aid a 2016 Clinton campaign plot to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia and trigger an FBI investigation of him and his campaign, according to several sources familiar with the work of Special Counsel John Durham. Durham is investigating whether they were involved in a scheme to misuse sensitive, nonpublic Internet data, which they had access to through their government contracts, to dredge up derogatory information on Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign in 2016...

Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, 50, was arrested by the FBI and booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center at 4:53 p.m. Thursday. He's been wanted for 12 years, after he was indicted in 2006 on charges of arson, conspiracy and animal enterprise terrorism. In 2008, he was believed to have been living in Syria with family members, and federal officials announced a $50,000 reward for his arrest. (FBI) A fugitive sought for more than a decade and accused of taking part in a string of eco-sabotage attacks across the West is in custody in Portland and was to make his...

In the small hours after midnight on the night of July 16-17 90 years ago, the former Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, children, and four family retainers, were shot in a Yekaterinburg basement by their Bolshevik jailers. Doting family man, vacillating dictator, as weak and rich as Croesus … the doomed Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias was a man small of stature. His reign emerged under a bad star when 1,300 Muscovites were trampled to death in the crush for his coronation largesse; 18 years later, Nicholas‘s support for Serbia against Austria-Hungary was instrumental in pitching Europe into...

Excerpt - Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case. ~ snip ~

Consumer prices surged higher in May. The Consumer Price Index rose five percent compared with a year ago, the Department of Labor said Thursday. On a monthly basis, the CPI rose a hotter than expected 0.6 percent. Economists had expected the Labor Department to report that consumer prices rose 0.5 percent in May compared with April. The consensus forecast was for a 4.7 percent gain when measured against May of 2020, which would have been the hottest reading since skyrocketing energy prices pushed up the index in the fall of 2008.

New documents shed new light on his ties to a leftist party in the 1990s. On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward...

Zuckerberg’s recent donation of $400 million has been thrown into greater controversy with the revelation that his foundation’s lead in policy and advocacy formerly worked as the campaign manager and senior advisor to former President Obama. David Plouffe was hired in 2017 to lead policy and advocacy work at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a charity founded in 2015 by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan “to accelerate progress in Education, Justice & Opportunity and Science.” Plouffe’s background includes extensive involvement as a policy leader in the Obama campaigns and organizations like Uber, CZI, and most recently...

In his controversial new book on the 2020 election, Battle For The Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump. Edward-Isaac Dovere repeats a canard that has become something of a staple of Democratic mythology. According to Dovere, in November 2020, then-president Barack Obama had a hard time making sense out of Hillary Clinton's loss "to a man he thought of as a moronic carnival barker." Dovere traced Obama's grudge against Donald Trump to the birth certificate issue. Obama, writes Dovere, "would never forgive [Trump] for turning a fringe obsession with his birth certificate into an issue he'd had...

AEI scholar Peter J. Wallison has a new book out today titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again.” Though the standard narrative is that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by Wall Street greed and insufficient regulation, Wallison argues that US government housing policies played a crucial role. On January 14th, AEI is hosting an event on “Hidden in Plain Sight” — more details here. Below, Wallison answers questions on the future of Fannie and Freddie, the effect of government involvement in the financial crisis, the bankruptcy of...

With a tip of the boonie hat to Brock for the link, so says the ADL: "Rage Grows in America: Anti‑Government Conspiracies. The Three Percenters." Long-time readers may recall we have encountered the ADL's "militia expert" Mark Pitcavage before. Back in the 90s, Mark Pitcavage trolled the internet snitching for the FBI, assisted, he said, by "Sparky, the anti-militia dog." Now he works for ADL, and Sparky hasn't been heard from in years. There are conflicting rumors as to his sad fate. One said that Pitcavage sat on him, smothering the poor beast. Other reports say that Pitcavage ate him...

'Saddam's deputy' in anti-US call The US blames Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri for attacks on its troops A message purported to be from the fugitive deputy of executed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has called on insurgents to make a final push against US forces. The message attributed to Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri urged Iraqi fighters to "make this year... decisive for victory". The message also called on US President George W Bush to "come clean about the scale of US losses". Ibrahim is the most senior member of Saddam Hussein's regime still at large. The message, aired by Dubai-based satellite broadcaster...

Senior advisers to Senator Hillary Clinton have prepared the ground for her to abandon her presidential ambitions within days rather than disputing the Democratic nomination all the way to the party convention in August. Senator Barack Obama is expected to be able to declare himself the party's candidate against Senator John McCain as early as tomorrow, when South Dakota and Montana become the final states to hold their primaries. Howard Dean, the Democratic National Committee chairman, said the nomination would be decided this week: "We don't want to go to the convention, have a big fight at the convention, and...

Megan McCain, co-host of The View and daughter of the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), said her father “despised” Lincoln Project cofounders Steve Schmidt and John Weaver. McCain shared her remarks via Twitter, hours after Schmidt resigned from his seat on the Lincoln Project’s board of directors. “I’ve been very hesitant to comment but since my deceased father keeps getting invoked I will say this: John Weaver and Steve Schmidt were so despised by my Dad he made it a point to ban them from his funeral,” McCain tweeted. “Since 2008, no McCain would have spit on them if they...

More than 4 million people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 did not vote this year. But by applying new voter science, Obama nudged enough replacements in key states — many who were rare or first-time voters — to give him his margin of victory (leveraged even larger by the Electoral College). Years of stealthy multimillion-dollar efforts paid off forAmerica’s left in the 2008 and 2012 victories by President Barack Obama. Using new voter science to get rare and first-time voters to go to the polls, the races have changedAmerica’s electorate — those who make the country’s decisions by...

Back when Sen. Hillary Clinton was just starting her campaign, top aides and advisers had a ready answer when asked if she could win the presidency.

Louisiana pastor facing murder charge running for Congress from jail 3 days ago Louisiana Daily News Victor was charged with murder in 2008 following the death of his 8-year-old stepson, M.L. Lloyd III. ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST PARISH, La. — A St. John the Baptist pastor whose 2014 murder conviction was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court last year is now running for Congress from his jail cell in central Louisiana while he waits for a new trial. Errol Victor Sr., 54, qualified Thursday to run as a Republican in the 5th Congressional District for the seat left vacant...

“The View” co-host Meghan McCain touted the way her father handled defeat in 2008 and suggested President Trump and his family would “melt down” and create “absolute bedlam, anger, and hysteria” if they’re defeated by Democratic nominee Joe Biden. [Snip] “When my Dad lost in ‘08, he huddled my brothers and sisters in a corner and said buck up, we’re the luckiest people in the entire world and we’re not going to feel sorry for ourselves, we made history. He then thanked the secret service and told them to go home to their family,” McCain wrote in a tweet. “I...