Quote Kend:Cut the military budget in half then cut every government dept. by 10% and you are almost there. Any thing else I can help you with. LOL

Kend ~ You're starting to make some sense... Another sign of the Apocalypse!?!

Aliceinwonderland: I wouldn't doubt for a minute that your suspicions about shills in those blogs are backed and paid by powerful groups that are trying to do psychological warfare against us.

I agree that electing Bernie Sanders as President would send a really big message to the good-old-boy network in the two party system that their days are numbered. And that they had better start changing their tune if they hope to survive without an all out overthrow of the criminal powers that are currently running this country. When the US starts to look like the Ukraine, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Libya and some of the Central and South American countries, like Venezuela, et al, where the people have ousted their crooked leaders and ruling families, then maybe those hard-liner capitalist pigs will repent and relent. Although, in the Ukraine, it's a bit confusing just who were the hard-liners....I was reading some Stratfor messages on Wikileaks talking about the recent history of Ukraine...those emails were leaked back in 2011 and you can see some of the problems they were having back then. Seems some Ukrainian people were upset because the government was trying to cut back on compensation to soldiers who fought in the war and people who were getting compensation for being injured or displaced in the Chernobyl accident. Sounds very familiar to what our country has been trying to do to us. Some of those Stratfor emails were kind of funny...even x-rated conversations...flirtations...not very business-like.

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/date/2011.html

DAnnemarc: The Ukraine and Russia have lots of raw materials that Greedy Western Bastards would like to control. And they don't mind a bit making people starve and die who are in the way. The GWB would also like to keep Americans...actually, the World, frightened of an evil bogey man because that makes them malleable and controllable.

The cold war worked for them once until the Soviet Union stopped playing that game. It's kinda funny because everyone thought that the US won against an evil empire. But the real evil ones, the manipulators in the US, lost the means to keep Americans afraid of a bogey man. So, they used the drug lords as bogey men until the guns for drug fiasco...then they engineered the "terrorist" bogey men...and now they are going full circle back to Russia as the new bogey man.

The west needed other bogey men to take the place of communists so they engineered a false-flag attack on the US by "terrorists". But in fact, "terrorists" did do 9/11....the US insiders needed a new Pearl Harbor in order to get what they wanted. Now, many people are starting to see that the real terrorists live in our country and are in the highest positions of power in this country. They can see how our criminal government is rotten to the core and have been behind the fleecing of Americans...in various scandals over the years..and are not happy with losing their homes nor with the bailouts of these crooked organizations. They know that it will happen over and over again...or at least some people realize that fact.

The US ruling elite needs new enemies to keep Americans meek and frightened. And the killing of civilians in the Middle East was done mostly in order to create new "terrorists" that the US could point their finger at and say...see there...they hate us...be afraid, be very afraid. I believe these psychotic lunatics will risk an all out nuclear confrontation. And some have long wanted that all along. Several times they pushed for nuclear confrontation in our history...IE: using nuclear weapons against people we were in conflict with....Korea, Vietnam, and there were others. Problem with Obama is that he did not get rid of all those psychotic, war-mongers when he should have. Now, our "Rodney King--'can't we all just get along' " President, let the GWB run all over him...probably re-igniting the cold war and making the world one hell of a lot more scary to live in. And that's what those who want to control us are doing.
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I had read that prior to the 9/11 attack, many who worked in those twin towers had been warned not to go to work on that day. I'd really be interested in knowing how many of those people who didn't go to work that day were higher level execs...compared to the low level office workers who died that day.

Palin, I clicked that link you posted about Bernie running for prez and read much of the long article. Being a subscriber to The Nation, I was able to access it without any trouble. Having heard Bernie a lot, on Thom's show and elsewhere, I'm very familiar with his message and priorities. The idea of having him for president thrills me like no other presidential candidate has in my lifetime. Nothing against Kucinich or Nader; it's the circumstances, not just the person. I'm sensing our fellow Americans are more ready for a true progressive in the White House than they were back when Kucinich and Nader ran. I think more and more people are getting fed-up with this two-party oligarchy we've been stuck in and crave a deeper, more systemic level of change. As an independent, Bernie is offering a viable escape from the stranglehold these two corporatized parties have had on our democracy. And that thrills me to the core.

However, reading the blog immediately following that interview-article was a bit of a downer. A fairly large number of those posts were very negative, characterizing Bernie Sanders as just another run-of-the-mill politician who can't be trusted. Brings to mind another long article you availed us maybe a week ago, Palin, via another link, about the many tactics used by fascist "agents" to sabotage blogs, wherever the opinions expressed are of the sort fascists like to suppress. I can only wonder if some of those negative posts were fake. Your opinion?

What a Bernie Sanders candidacy gives me is a tremendous gift, the gift of hope. I've never gone door-to-door for any candidate before; I don't feel safe encroaching on the turf of complete strangers whose dogs might want to eat me, or who might greet me with guns drawn. This is the most conservative area I've ever lived in, unfortunately, and there's a lot of ignoramus rednecks around here. But for Bernie, I will wave these fears aside, put my psychic armor on and my walking shoes, and do the footwork. That's how badly I want Bernie Sanders for president. I've had plenty of time to see how he operates and what he's made of, and this is the kind of leadership our country desperately needs. - Aliceinwonderland

The action in Ukraine is part of a pattern of the shadow foreign policy of exploiting fascist, chauvinistic nationalist sentiment to divide, conquer and take control of an Eastern European country as was done by the U.S. and other Western powers in Yugoslavia in the 1990's.

Payment by debit account, Mark?! I don't like the sound of that one bit, and I'm feeling sorry for those laborers already. This creeps me out. What's being done with those laborers will spread like a viris until it affects all of us. We have the most control of our money - and privacy - when we use cash. I hope I die of old age before cash is made obsolete and ceases to exist. This spells nothing but trouble for us: loss of control, privacy, the ability to protect ourselves from rip-offs... that noose just keeps tightening around our necks as less and less of our daily lives evades the microscope of fascist oversight.

This ain't America anymore. Even that old illusion of the "mythical America" (ala Norman Rockwell) can't hold up forever against this ongoing assault on our privacy, rights, protections and freedom... grows thinner and more brittle day by day!

This sucks. I hate the 21st Century. Beam me up! - Aliceinwonderland

er signed with my finger lol

Bernie Sanders for President? What comes after trillions? I thought Obama could spend money.

Fractionally, when you get rid of the TPP why don't we get rid of lobbiest As well. Nothing good ever comes from them.

Quote thethirdworldtraveler.com:How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate-the Church Committee of the Senate, the Pike Committee of the House and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.
Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name-the National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/TrojanHorse_RS.html

And NED is not the only one...there is also ICNC (International Center for Non-violent Conflict) and Freedom House and others. Noam Chomsky has talked about some of these. They all act a CIA covert fronts to destabilize governments the Neocons want to overthrow.

Quote counterpunch.com:
In reality, NED is part of the US Empire’s tools, and “independent” only in the sense that no elected presidential administration can directly alter its composition or activities, even if it wanted to. It’s initial project director, Professor Allen Weinstein of Georgetown University, admitted in the Washington Post of September 22, 1991, that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Quote counterpunch.com:... instead of waiting for a client government to be threatened by its people and then responding, US foreign policy shifted to intervening in the civil society of a country ‘of interest’ (as defined by US foreign policy goals) before popular mobilization could become significant, and by supporting certain groups and certain politicians, then channel any potential mobilization in the direction desired by the US Government.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/28/the-national-endowment-for-democr...

[quote=consortiumnews.com] NED, a $100 million-a-year agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against targeted states, lists 65 projects that it supports financially inside Ukraine, including training activists, supporting “journalists” and promoting business groups, effectively creating a full-service structure primed and ready to destabilize a government in the name of promoting “democracy.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “A Shadow US Foreign Policy.”]

State Department neocons also put their shoulders into shoving Ukraine away from Russia. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan and the sister-in-law of the Gates-Petraeus adviser Frederick Kagan, advocated strenuously for Ukraine’s reorientation toward Europe.

Last December, Nuland reminded Ukrainian business leaders that, to help Ukraine achieve “its European aspirations, we have invested more than $5 billion.” She said the U.S. goal was to take “Ukraine into the future that it deserves,” by which she meant into the West’s orbit and away from Russia’s.

But President Yanukovych rejected a European Union plan that would have imposed harsh austerity on the already impoverished Ukraine. He accepted a more generous $15 billion loan from Russia, which also has propped up Ukraine’s economy with discounted natural gas. Yanukovych’s decision sparked anti-Russian street protests in Kiev, located in the country’s western and more pro-European region.

Nuland was soon at work planning for “regime change,” encouraging disruptive street protests by personally passing out cookies to the anti-government demonstrators. She didn’t seem to notice or mind that the protesters in Kiev’s Maidan square had hoisted a large banner honoring Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the German Nazis during World War II and whose militias participated in atrocities against Jews and Poles.

By late January, Nuland was discussing with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt who should be allowed in the new government.

“Yats is the guy,” Nuland said in a phone call to Pyatt that was intercepted and posted online. “He’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the guy you know.” By “Yats,” Nuland was referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who had served as head of the central bank, foreign minister and economic minister — and who was committed to harsh austerity."

That is the video I referred to before.

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/02/what-neocons-want-from-ukraine-crisis/

Aliceinwonderland ~ Palindromedary is right about computer vulnerability. I don't have the knowledge he does either; but, I do have above average knowledge. It only takes a few lines of script to write a keylogger program. Where it gets stored determines how much damage it can do. I once chased a malicious program all the way into my motherboards CMOS chip. Thats the chip that stores the vital brain matter of your computer and tells it how to boot up. Only after erasing, replacing, and reprogramming the Hard Drive multiple times did I get a clue. A friend of mine helped me and together we tried disconnecting the HDD and all other peripherals and performing a CMOS clear using jumpers on the main board. Against my better judgement we then connected the affected Hard Drive to a good computer as a slave, booted up in safe mode and nuked the hell out of it. When we restored the Drive to the affected computer, reset as the master, we were able to load the OS without any problems. It's worked fine ever since. I have never figured out how any program can get stuck in a older CMOS chip. However, according to Palindromedary, the latest versions of CMOS will be even easier to compromise. If that happens to the average user, they might want to donate the box to St. Vincent De Paul for parts; or, better yet, throw it in the trash.

My whole point is that if a novice like myself is aware of the threat, you can bet your financial institutions are on top of it too. I'm just throwing this out to try to calm any fears. Like I said, the bank responded to the theft within minutes. Thats better than most police departments respond to a mugging. They are also covering any losses. What more can you ask for?

Palindromedary ~ Keep up the defensive measures. I trust your instincts. Up until that last incident I didn't believe debit card forgery was possible. The only time I saw it was when it was depicted in the "Die Hard" movie "Live Free or Die Hard." By the way, if you haven't seen that movie yet you need to. There are a bunch of computer super hackers in it you would get a big kick out of. An incredible movie and a must see I recommend to everyone.

PS ~ You're both welcome! I felt it was my duty to share that most unfortunate experience after over glowing about bank security. I don't want to lead anyone astray by mistake.

I too want to thank you, DAnnemarc, for sharing that. Sorry that this happened to you. The more exposure, through using electronic banking or our credit/debit cards, the more likely that we will get stung by someone who manages to steal our sensitive financial data.

I heard that the authorities in the bay area arrested a number of people in a debit card scam. They go around attaching devices to ATMs and gas-station POS terminals...that copy the data off the cards...then they burn their own fake credit/debit cards. Makes me paranoid to even buy gas anymore. I do use my debit card at Cosco Gas...but very rarely anywhere else. But I am always scrutinizing anything unusual about the slot or keypad or for cameras that could watch me key in my numbers.

But, I think in that bay area case...those guys worked for the gas stations and had access to inside of the POS terminals where they attached their devices. There would be no way to detect if something was fishy in such a case.

I always write down when I get gas on the calender and check it against my bank statement every month. The older I get, the more I have to write things down. I'm lucky if I remember yesterday...sometimes, I'm lucky if I remember the last few minutes.

Anyway, I'm glad they caught them!