NEWS RELEASE FOR DISTRICT FIVE January 27, 2010 FROM DEBORA B. PIGNATELLI, Executive Councilor

January 27, Concord, NH - Listed below are some of the items that were approved at the Governor and Council Meeting on January 27, 2010 that might be of interest to District Five constituents.

The next Governor and Council Meeting will be held on Tuesday,

February 9, 2010 in the State House, Concord, NH.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FINANCE AUTHORITY

Authorized to enter into an agreement with the City of Nashua, NH, for the purpose of establishing financing mechanisms for purchase and redevelopment of foreclosed upon homes and residential properties; purchasing and rehabilitating homes and residential properties that have been abandoned or foreclosed upon, in order to sell, rent, or redevelop such homes and properties; demolishing blighted structures; and redeveloping demolished or vacant properties in the amount of $1,500,000. Effective upon G&C approval through March 9, 2013. 100% Federal Funds.

Dan Pfeiffer, White House Communications Director, wrote on the White House blog that

Let's be clear: Sen. Shelby is preventing qualified nominees who will help protect the American people from being confirmed. He’s not alone, though. This is just the latest example of this kind opposition for opposition’s sake that the President talked about earlier this week.

Which is accurate, as far as it goes, but really just a symptom of a bigger problem.

SOURCE: Alternet.org

BY Chris Hedges

The Obama Brand: Feel Good While Overlords Loot the Treasury and Launch Imperial Wars | Brand Obama makes us hopeful. We like our president and we believe he's like us. But we're being duped into doing a lot of things that are not in our interest.

January 25, 2010

Editor's Note: The following is an adapted excerpt from Chris Hedges' book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009) that first appeared in Tikkun magazine.

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, armies of corporate lobbyists grease the palms of our elected officials, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia, and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, this product is duping us into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.

SOURCE: OpEdNews

ebruary 1, 2010

Roger Shuler on Recent Supreme Court Decision

By Joan Brunwasser

Roger Shuler is an Alabama journalist and The Legal Schnauzer blogger. Welcome back to OpEdNews. The big news of late is the recent Supreme Court decision striking down limits on corporate campaign contributions. Everyone feels strongly about it. How about you, Roger?

My primary interest is how it possibly reflects on the apparent political prosecutions of the George W. Bush Justice Department. In the Paul Minor case in Mississippi, Minor's attorneys have already raised the Citizens United v. FEC ruling in their motion for reconsideration with the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.All sidesseem to agree that a quid pro quo--something for something deal--remains illegal. But Minor's attorneys argue that there was no quid pro quo in his case, and the jury instruction did not require one. Therefore, based on Citizens United, the prosecution and conviction that Minor faced was aviolation of his First Amendment rights.

Samantha Bee thinks President Obama should never have made a concrete pledge to televise health negotiations on C-SPAN.

Watch Samantha's take on the stealth care debate

SOURCE: NY Daily News

UBS whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld deserves statue on Wall Street, not prison sentence

Juan Gonzalez - News

Wednesday, January 6th 2010, 4:00 AM

Take action

AP
UBS whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld

Barack Obama, who entered the White House promising all this change, should be hailing Bradley Birkenfeld as a modern-day hero.

He should erect a statue on Wall Street for this former banker for Swiss giant UBS who blew the whistle on the biggest tax-evasion scheme in U.S. history.

Instead of rewarding Birkenfeld, Obama's Justice Department is sending him to prison. He begins serving a 40-month federal sentence Friday for conspiracy and bank fraud.

SOURCE: USA Today

Opposing view: TARP was a flop

Target relief to Main Street families and businesses, not big banks.

By Paul Hodes

A year ago, as our nation stood on the brink of economic collapse, Congress decided that to stabilize our financial system, we should spend $700 billion to bail out Wall Street banks. I opposed this move. Some now claim that since our banking system averted collapse, the Troubled Asset Relief Program — TARP — must have been the right approach. Unfortunately, the results show the opposite.

When America spends taxpayer money, we need to make sure it is being spent right. But after sending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street with little accountability or oversight, we still haven't seen an increase in lending, we still face a massive foreclosure crisis and no one can say exactly where all the money went.

OpEdNews

SOURCE: OpEdNews

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December 18, 2009

Dissecting Washington with Political Analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson

By Joan Brunwasser

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst as well as the author of ten books and hundreds of articles, many of which can be found at OpEdNews. Over his long career, he has frequently spoken on radio and television and appeared in the national press. Welcome to OpEdNews, Earl. In a speech at West Point on December 1, President Obama announced a 30,000 troop increase for the war in Afghanistan. Was this response ever in doubt?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

In speeches, interviews, and off the cuff talks dating back to August 2007 before he was the Democratic presidential candidate, Obama repeatedly called Afghanistan the war that had to be fought and the war that had to be won. He made it crystal clear that, if president, he would not only fight it, but fight it to win no matter what the time, cost, and military effort required. He's simply done exactly what he long promised. Why anyone, especially anyone on the left, would be shocked at this and rail at the president as a back flipper, betrayer and sell out shows that they've had their head in the sand or, more likely, and more fatally continuing to try to makeover Obama into something he isn't and never was, namely, a progressive, peace candidate. An added note never in the century plus history of the Nobel Peace Prize has it been awarded to a person with no track record for peace, and worse, one who is waging not one but two wars.

SOURCE: nytimes.com

December 21, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST

A Dangerous Dysfunction
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Unless some legislator pulls off a last-minute double-cross, health care reform will pass the Senate this week. Count me among those who consider this an awesome achievement. It’s a seriously flawed bill, we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it’s nonetheless a huge step forward.

It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional.

After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.

SOURCE: OpEdNews

December 17, 2009

Healthcare: First They Came for the Banksters

By Thom Hartmann

With apologies to Pastor Niemoeller:

First they came for the banksters, and showered them with money and put them in the Administration in a way that was not change we could believe in.

Then they came for the military industrial complex, and sent more and more of our children to die in faraway lands that had never attacked us in a way that was not change we could believe in.

And now they've sold out our hope for a national health care system not run by millionaire gangsters in suits. And who is left to speak for us?

President Obama is playing the Bill Clinton game of throwing people a bone and telling them it's steak. Perhaps he's doing it because he thinks it's his only choice; perhaps it's because he's surrounded himself with Bill Clinton advisors (and Hillary as Secretary of State); whatever the reason, while it worked for Clinton, it won't work for Obama.

In a failed state, the government’s priorities are totally separate from those of the people. The US can’t afford health care or a bailout for jobless homeowners, but it can afford a pointless war and multi-million dollar bonuses for banksters who wrecked the economy.

SOURCE: Counterpunch.com

The Twin Frauds of Obama

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Goldman Sachs senior executives are arming themselves with New York gun permits, according to Alice Schroeder on Bloomberg.com. The banksters “are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.”

One can understand why the banksters are worried. The company, now known as Gold Sacks, has a large responsibility for the financial crisis and the fraudulent “securities” that wrecked the world economy and Americans’ pensions. A former Gold Sachs CEO had control of the US Treasury during the Bush regime from which he diverted $750 billion to bail out the banks, thus supplying them with free capital. Gold Sachs made $27,000 million during the first three quarters of 2009 and is paying out massive bonuses, leaving the busted taxpayers with the debt and interest charges.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

SOURCE: Legal Schnauzer

How has the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) changed now that George W. Bush is gone and President Barack Obama is in charge?

It hasn't changed, says former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. And that's distressing news for progressives who hoped to see accountability for the Bush officials who used the DOJ as a political weapon.

It's particularly distressing for Siegelman, who is perhaps the most high-profile victim of a Bush-era political prosecution. But what other conclusion can Siegelman reach? He recently saw U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan, an Obama appointment, file a brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court not to hear the Siegelman case.

In so many words, Kagan is saying, "The Bush DOJ, probably at Karl Rove's direction, got the Siegelman case right based on the facts and the law." That is an outrage, and Siegelman seemed to have a hard time controlling his anger in a recent interview with TPM Muckraker. Reports TPM:

"There's really been no substantial change in the heart of the Department of Justice from the Bush-Rove Department of Justice," Siegelman tells TPMmuckraker in an interview.

Siegelman, a Democrat, served roughly nine months in prison after his 2006 bribery conviction. He was ordered released pending appeal in March 2008. The case, which has been dogged by allegations of politicization and prosecutorial misconduct -- including links to Karl Rove -- centers on what the government called a pay-to-play scheme in which Siegelman appointed a large donor to a state regulatory board.

Siegelman has asked the Supreme Court to consider the definition of bribery, arguing that he merely engaged in routine political transactions. But, in the Nov. 13 filing that raised Siegelman's hackles, Obama's solicitor general argued that "corrupt intent" had been established in the trial.

This is what happens when you privatize your government

SOURCE: Truthout.org

Monday 30 November 2009

by: Dina Rasor, t r u t h o u t | Special Investigative Report

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: LizaP)

Recently, the Congressional Research Service released an amazing statistic – it will cost one million dollars a year to support one soldier for one year in Afghanistan.

This mind-blowing number partly includes the cost of private contractors who have moved into areas of support that have been strictly military in the past. Estimates for the numbers of contractors have been as high as one contractor for every soldier. As President Obama prepares to announce his decision on Afghanistan, the price of this war is also on his mind since he included Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, in his last war council.

One of the reasons for the high costs of maintaining each soldier is the lack of oversight of private contractor billings over the course of these two wars. The Department of Defense (DOD), and especially the Army, has fought the auditors and the investigators in the military who have attempted to expose fraud, waste, overbillings and other abuses of costs in contractor contracts. The contractors, using contingency contracting, which is similar to the old cost plus contracts, knew that their profits and, more important, their future task orders and contracts would be priced based on what they spend in the beginning of the wars. So the contractor billing meter, especially in labor costs, spun vigorously in the first years of the war with little oversight. When the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) tried to withhold a small percentage of payment from KBR, the largest contractor, because it believed that the billings were excessive and they wanted to scrub the numbers, the Army pushed past the DCAA and paid KBR the excessive costs. This set the tone to let the contractor billings run wild.

Click here to see Truthout's Matt Renner interview Dina Rasor.

WTO STILL PARTIES LIKE IT'S 1999
on 10th Anniversary of the Battle in Seattle
Bankers' scheme to re-open finance casino worldwide

Monday, November 30, 2009
by Greg Palast for Ring of Fire

GENEVA — Apparently, one meltdown isn't enough for the World Trade Organization. They meet today in Geneva on the tenth anniversary of the "Battle in Seattle," when tens of thousands of people from around the world protested the organization's practices.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

One of the things I am thankful for this year is the way my constituents have supported and treated me during my service on the Governor’s Council, in the State Senate and in the House of Representatives.

Debora

NEWS RELEASE FOR DISTRICT FIVE November 18, 2009 FROM DEBORA B. PIGNATELLI, Executive Councilor

November 18, 2009 Concord, NH - Listed below are some of the items that were approved at the Governor and Council Meeting on
November 18, 2009 that might be of interest to District Five constituents.

The next Governor and Council Meeting will be held on Wednesday, December 9, 2009, 10:00 AM in the State House, Concord, NH.

There will be a Special Meeting of the Governor and Council on Monday, November 23, 2009.

OFFICE OF THE ADJUTANT GENERAL

Authorized that Major Richard D. Lynch, Jaffrey, NH, be confirmed to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, Governor’s Horse Guards, a ceremonial unit under the leadership of the Adjutant General of the State of NH.

SOURCE: OpEdNews

November 7, 2009 at 21:51:52

Manifest Positivity: Talking with Dave Berman

By Joan Brunwasser

I first encountered Dave Berman after the 2004 Presidential election. He had been writing about election integrity for years. Since then, his areas of interest have expanded and evolved. We're here to talk about what he's up to right now. Welcome to OpEdNews, Dave. The subtitle of the second volume of We Do Not Consent is "Advocacy Journalism for Peaceful Revolution." Could you please define advocacy journalism for our readers? And peaceful revolution, for that matter.

Advocacy journalism means transparent use of media as an organizing tool to create the change we want in the world. The transparency is really key as it sets apart true advocacy journalism from the propaganda of the corporate/military/government/media juggernaut that pretends to be neutral and objective ("fair and balanced") while actually deceptively advocating for parameters of acceptable debate and even the nature of reality. The juggernaut has made truth into a wedge issue by creating a rift in the perception of reality.

Why did Representatives Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter vote in support of H Res. 867 (Roll Call 838) which “calls on the President and Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the `Report on the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ (known as the Goldstone Report?”

The vote was 344 in support and 36 opposed.

What did the report say? In part, it recommended that both Israel and Hamas investigate alleged war crimes and take appropriate action or other countries or the International Criminal Court could do so.

Judge Goldstone wrote to the H. Res 867’s main sponsors to correct the many factual errors in the resolution. Congress had the opportunity, but refused, to invite Judge Goldstone to talk with them and answer their questions before the vote.

Why is Congress afraid of hearing the truth?

In the Bill Moyers interview of Oct. 23, Judge Goldstone talked about his experience with investigating abuses in his home country of South Africa, in Bosnia, Rwanda, and other trouble spots. He said: