Cyber Security Expert: Hackers Planning To Steal Election For McCain

Spoonamore says electronic voting machines represent national security threat, Israel, China and Russia have capability to rig presidential outcome

Paul Joseph Watson| Prison Planet | Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Stephen Spoonamore warns in a new interview that electronic voting machines represent a national security threat and that hackers are already planning to steal the 2008 presidential election for John McCain.

Spoonamore is a GOP member and a lifelong Republican, having worked on election campaigns with Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. He also has 20 years worth of experience in encrypted and networked communications systems for banks, TV, telecommunications, EMS, Military and other uses.

In an ten part You Tube interview, Spoonamore warns that hackers are planning to steal the election on behalf of the McCain camp and even predicts the margin of victory, that McCain will make a “shocking recovery” and win 51.2 percent of the vote with three electoral votes over Obama.

“This is a national security threat,” said Spoonamore, “it is very possible for a foreign government to begin manipulating that transmission of code just as they attempt to do fairly often with our financial data….we deal with it every day on the commercial side,” he added, noting that China, and not the American people, has a greater chance of choosing the next U.S. president.

Spoonamore also fingered Israel as another foreign government that was planning to attempt to hack the 2008 election.

Ron Paul: Greenspan, Bernanke Should Be Criminally Charged

Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet | Friday, September 26, 2008

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, a former 2008 presidential candidate, gestures during a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008, with third-party candidates to call for greater inclusion of candidates beyond the Republican and Democratic majorities. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Congressman Ron Paul says that the bailout bill is likely to pass, heralding a 10-year plus economic depression for America and the potential for martial law should civil unrest arise as the financial meltdown worsens.

Speaking on The Alex Jones Show, Paul said of the bailout, “They want dictatorship, they want to pass all the penalties and suffering on to the average person on Main Street,” adding, “We will have a depression or recession, it’s locked in place due to previous Federal Reserve actions.”

“When they say that if we don’t do exactly as they say and turn over more of our money and more of our liberties and exempt themselves from any court in the whole nation, they’re trying to intimidate us and lead us into doing the wrong thing,” said Paul.

The Congressman added that serious problems would arise if nothing was done to address the problem, but that more serious consequences would follow should the bailout be passed.

To the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate:

As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan:

1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses. Not every business failure carries systemic risk. The government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.

2) Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.

3) Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, America’s dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.

For these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.

Pictures: “Lego Block” Prison Cells Readied In Utah

Debate rages over blocks that can be snapped together to build prisons anywhere, at any time

Steve Watson | Infowars.net | Thursday, Sept 25 2008

Pictures of concrete prison cells being unloaded from wagons in Utah earlier this month have surfaced on the internet, causing a storm of debate over their purpose.

The cells are designed specifically so they can be snapped together side by side and on top of each other like lego blocks to form rows and columns.

Each block looks to contain 2 cells of little more than six feet square each.

The pictures first appeared earlier this week on the alternative news website Fourwinds10.com.

According to the owners of that website, the pictures were taken on Monday, September 8 2008 at around 3 PM at University Ave, East Bay, Provo in Utah.

Since that time they have spread to various forums and websites, sparking off a lively debate as to who these cells are for and in what circumstances their use is envisioned.

Scroll down for more pictures.

They Claim the Bailout Is Necessary, But Is It Constitutional?

Stanley Kutler | TruthDig | September 25, 2008

Our “conservative” ideologues have steadily advanced their free-market myths during the past 40 years, insisting on minimalist government. Now those voices are quiet as we see the fallout of their laissez-faire notions. But once they reinvigorate financial institutions by transferring their huge debts to the taxpayer, we can be certain they will return.

Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative favorite, has posited “originalism” in his notions of judicial power. Anyone who believes in a “living Constitution,” he said, is an “idiot.” Well then, John Marshall, our first great chief justice, his colleagues and those folks firmly wedded to our history (real conservatives?) are idiots. Maybe even Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, whose bailout bill certainly is “broad construction” of the Constitution at its most extreme.

Paulson and his bailout accomplices propose the nationalization (what else is it?) of Wall Street’s reckless debts, actions that dwarf the excesses of the Gilded Age and the 1920s. The government will assume the bad debts of our financial “industry,” a remedy that will restore “free markets” and “normalcy.” All is forgiven; unfortunately, all is also forgotten. It is an “investment,” Paulson said—without irony.

The only alternative, we are told, is unthinkable. The only? That remains to be seen—alas, even offered. Sen. Richard C. Shelby, R-Ala., said that before signing off on the bill he wanted “to make sure we’ve exhausted the alternatives.” Pure congressional blather; Paulson never answered.

John Marshall believed in the elasticity of congressional power to do things “necessary and proper” to carry out the legislative branch’s other powers. As such, he might have broadly approved a bailout. But whether he would have accepted this legislation and its blank check for power is dubious. Marshall would not concede that discretionary power meant “absolutely indispensable”; there were limits—the limits of the Constitution itself.

The practitioners of something called the “unitary executive” have disdained (once again) any notions of checks and balances by other branches of government. Congress is there only for the formality of enacting assumed powers into law. Beyond that, the White House’s grasp for absolute power is breathtaking.

The administration’s version of the bailout legislation provides for review in Section 8, but the Catch-22 is that there is no review. The secretary’s “decisions” are to be “non-reviewable, committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” The non-reviewable provision, along with its other purposes, allows the secretary unfettered, unchecked authority to enter into contracts “without regard to any other provision of law regarding public contracts.” Now we know the meaning of audacious.

Wall Street loves this bailout. It relieves major banks and investment houses of “their mountainous rotten assets,” as William Greider recently noted. Wall Street folks usually reject redressing environmental losses (polar bears be damned), but “what’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction,” Greider added.

“I share the outrage,” Secretary Paulson confessed. “There’s a lot of blame to go around.” Just don’t expect him to point any fingers.

Wall Street will not trouble its collective consciousness with worry over the Constitution. But this bailout bill is virtually unprecedented in its assumptions and its reach for unchecked power. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s bold, sometimes hasty, emergency legislation of the Depression wasn’t this audacious.

Certainly, if New Deal Congresses had discarded judicial or administrative review, judges in the mold of Marshall, covering the political spectrum, probably would have asserted such power as derived from the Constitution itself.

It is, after all, a little late in the day to resurrect the idea that the Constitution did not explicitly provide for judicial review. The non-reviewable dictate of this legislation might be an interesting challenge for Scalia’s “originalism,” as well as his political biases. Oh well, the Bush administration’s draft allowed Congress to fill in the blanks, and it may call the bill whatever it wishes. The Richard Cheney Memorial Act sounds just about right.

Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate.”

Has the Election Just Been Cancelled?

George Washington’s Blog
Thursday, Sept 25, 2008

CNN is reporting that McCain has “suspended his campaign” and is asking Obama to do the same, due to the economic crisis:

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain announced Wednesday that he is suspending his campaign to return to Washington and focus on the “historic” crisis facing the U.S. economy.

Is this the first step in canceling the elections due to “national emergency”?

Is that part of the reason that the U.S. military is permanently being deployed within the U.S. to deal with “civil unrest” and “crowd control”?

Many of us have been warning about this possibility for years.

Hopefully, McCain’s suspension of his campaign is just political posturing, and he will return to the campaign next week. Hopefully, this is not the first step in canceling the election.

Welcome to the final stages of the coup…

Larisa Alexandrovna | Huffington Post | September 20, 2008

If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it. ~ Julius Caesar

Video: The Plot to Overthrow FDR

In 2000, the long fought for and long admired democracy of the United States of America began a slow and steady decline toward fascism – a Bush family tradition – with the installment of a president – a man the citizens overwhelmingly rejected (although the funny math told a still believed myth) – by a few corrupt judges on the US Supreme Court. That coup is now nearly complete and checkmate is all but unavoidable.

Let me first point you to the Bush administration’s so-called Wall Street bailout bill, here, so that you can see for yourself that this treachery is being conducted in the light of day. Fascism is finally and formally out of the right-wing closet even if the F word is not yet openly being used (although it should be, and often).

Now, if you do not yet understand that the Wall Street crisis is a man-made disaster done through intentional deregulation and corruption, I have a bridge in Alaska to sell to you (or Sara Palin does anyway). This manufactured crisis is now to be remedied, if the fiscal fascists get their way, with the total transfer of Congressional powers (the few that still remain) to the Executive Branch and the total transfer of public funds into corporate (via government as intermediary) hands.

Adam Davidson of NPR blogs about the so-called bailout bill as follows:

I would guess that this has to be one of the biggest peacetime transfers of power from Congress to the Administration in history. (Anyone know?). Certainly one of the most concise.

The Treasury Secretary can buy broadly defined assets, on any terms he wants, he can hire anyone he wants to do it and can appoint private sector companies as financial deputies of the US government. And he can write whatever regulation he thinks are needed.

Most importantly, Davidson points to this passage in the bill:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

The Bush family, in the form of Prescott Bush, has tried a more aggressive coup before in order to install fascism in this country. This treasonous plot was called “the Business Plot,” because the high-level plotters – including Prescott Bush – were Wall Street men who openly supported fascism.

Does the Cold War Have Lessons for Today?

Carolyn Eisenberg | TruthDig | Sep 19, 2008

Until Russian troops rolled into Georgia in August, the Cold War was beginning to recede in memory, with an oddly sentimental glow. Here was a clear-cut American victory, in which not a single shot had been fired, at least not between the main antagonists. Considering the apocalyptic potential of the 40-year rivalry, the architects of U.S. policy appeared a wee bit wiser than they had looked during the gloomy days of Vietnam. And by comparison to the floundering “war on terror” and the breathtaking incompetence and ignorance of the Bush administration, the predecessors look like wizards.

Indeed, it has become a commonplace for Bush critics to invoke the golden era, when gifted statesmen like Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, combining “toughness” with skilled diplomacy, kept Americans safe and inspired the world with our nation’s ideals. Throughout his political campaign, Barack Obama has gone out of his way to genuflect to the old “cold warriors” and to imply a return to their sophisticated ways.

And yet for some of us crotchety folks over the age of 50, those old Cold War policies and leaders do not evoke the same positive “buzz.” And there is more than a faint suspicion that the calamities of the present have some roots in that history.

What was the Cold War about? And what explains its persistence? With the declassification of American records and the opening of archives in many nations, including Russia, historians have never been in a better position to answer these questions. And yet the field itself has withered in recent years, with a widening gulf between the monographic studies in the academy and the knowledge of a literate public. Moreover, as left historians have retreated from any subject focused on powerful white men, the field of Cold War history has been largely left to the traditionalists.

Against this backdrop, Melvyn Leffler’s new book, “For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War,” provides a welcome infusion of intellectual energy into a subject that still matters deeply, and which can help us grapple with more recent events. Although sometimes described as a “center-left historian,” Leffler cannot be so easily categorized. In this book, as in his previous work, certain qualities stand out: an encyclopedic knowledge of the literature, an immersion in archival materials, a regard for evidence and openness to contradictory information, a lucid writing style and the habit of asking fundamental questions.

Naomi Klein Discusses “Disaster Capitalism” On Real Time With Bill Maher (VIDEO)

Naomi Klein, author of the book “The Shock Doctrine,” was a guest on Bill Maher’s HBO Show, “Real Time.” Klein’s book posits that certain people often like when there is a disaster because it allows them to rationalize making radical and unpopular changes that normally the citizenry would not go for. She discusses her theory of “disaster capitalism” within the context of the current economic crisis.

Dodd: US financial system near meltdown

Press TV | Saturday, September 20, 2008

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT), Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke (2nd L), Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox (2nd R) and Treasury Undersecretary for Domestic Finance Robert Steel (R) on Capitol Hill in Washington April 3, 2008. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (UNITED STATES)

The US may be days away from a complete catastrophic meltdown of its financial system, says Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd.

“I’ve been here 28 years. To listen to the language of last evening, we maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system,” AFP quoted Dodd as saying while referring to the late Thursday meeting of the US Congressional leaders with the US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Senator Dodd noted it was “one of the rare moments, certainly rare in my experience here, that Democrats and Republicans decided we needed to work together, quickly.”

“We’re talking hundreds of billions,” Paulson said ahead of talks with Congress on details of the massive rescue effort, unveiled initially late Thursday.