There is a somewhat convoluted story flying under the radar about a White House official, Rashad Hussain, who back in 2004 allegedly spoke out in support of Sami Al-Arian, a man accused (and subsequently convicted) of aiding the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization. Hussain has worked in the White House Counsel’s Office since January 2009, and just last week was appointed by the President as his Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).

The source of the allegation is a 2004 article unearthed from the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA) which originally quoted Hussain as saying the following:

Al-Arian’s situation is one of many “politically motivated persecutions,” claimed Rashad Hussain, a Yale law student. Such persecution, he stated, must be fought through hope, faith, and the Muslim vote.

Along with many others, said Yale’s Hussain, Dr. Sami Al-Arian has been “used politically to squash dissent.” The Muslim community must speak out against the injustices taking place in America, he emphasized. Otherwise, everyone’s rights will be in jeopardy.

Here is where the story gets interesting. I said the WRMEA article “originally” quoted Hussain because at some point after the original publication the quotes attributed to Hussain were removed from the version of the article published online. You can see the original version courtesy of the Internet Archive here, and the modified version here.

What explains the discrepancy?

As Josh Gerstein from Politico reports, the editor of the WRMEA is now claiming that in the original version of the article the quotes were mistakenly attributed to Hussain:

Washington Report news editor Delinda Hanley said Tuesday that Hussain’s quotes were taken down because the quotes attributed to him actually came from Al-Arian’s daughter, Laila Al-Arian, who took part in the same panel discussion. “Laila Al-Arian said the things attributed to Rashad Hussain, and an intern who attended the event and wrote up the article made an error, which was corrected on our Web site by deleting the two quotes in their entirety,” Hanley wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO.

But not so fast, the “intern” who wrote the article is standing by the accuracy of these quotes according to Gerstein:

However, the author of the article, Shereen Kandil, said Tuesday that she stood by her original report.

“When I worked as a reporter, I understood how important it was to quote the right person, and accurately,” Kandil wrote in response to an e-mailed query from POLITICO asking about the possibility of a misquotation.

“I have never mixed my sources and wouldn’t have quoted Rashad Hussain if it came from Laila Al-Arian. If the editors from WRMEA felt they wanted to remove Rashad Hussain from the article, my assumption is that they did it for reasons other than what you’re saying,” said Kandil, who also works in the Obama administration as a program analyst for the Middle East in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of International Affairs.

Gerstein further reports that the WRMEA editor Hanley originally claimed on Tuesday that her recollection was that Kandil, the intern who wrote the article, requested this correction herself “many years ago”. But when informed by Gerstein that Kandil is sticking by her original story and that according to her the quotes are accurate, Hanley did some further checking and reported back to Gerstein that her webmaster “thinks the change was made on Feb. 5 2009″, but said that there is not a paper trail to confirm the exact timing, or who had asked her to make the change.

Yes, February 5, 2009. Just a couple of short weeks after the Inauguration and the commencement of Hussain’s employment in the White House Counsel’s Office. Hmmm.

According to multiple reports, the White House is asserting that Hussain has no recollection of making these statements, which of course is not an outright denial.

There is one other relevant fact which has not yet been reported which seems to lend credibility to Kandil’s assertion that the quotes are in fact accurate. As it turns out, Laila Al-Arian was not only the featured speaker at the event where the quotes were attributed to Hussain, but she was also an Editorial Assistant for the WRMEA publication at the time. In fact, she wrote a couple of articles which appeared on the very same page as the article by Kandil.

Given Al-Arian’s role at the publication, their relatively small staff, and the fact that her presentation was the sole focus of Kandil’s article, it seems virtually certain that Al-Arian would have read the article prior to publication. In fact, it seems likely that she would have assisted in editing it given that Kandil was an intern assigned to cover and report on her speaking event. Would she not have sought to correct the error if her quotes were mistakenly attributed to someone else?

Given the confluence of the facts and relationships involved here, I have a really hard time believing that these quotes were misattributed to Hussain, and coincidentally were only corrected soon after he joined the White House last year. In fact, I smell a cover-up. Which if true it seems likely that the changes to the article would have been made at the request of Hussain or on his behalf given that he was the only one who had anything to gain from the “correction”.

Although I have to say that the statements Hussain allegedly made in support of Al-Arian are really not all that damaging considering that he was still in law school at the time, and that Sami Al-Arian’s trial had not even begun. It is certainly embarrassing for Hussain to have been quoted claiming Al-Arian was being politically persecuted given that he ultimately plead guilty to a conspiracy charge, but this seems like relatively small potatoes to risk your career on five years later.

However, a cover-up involving White House personnel is most definitely not small potatoes, and it seems to me that further investigation is warranted.

http://biggovernment.com/mrichmond/2010/02/18/is-white-house-attorney-involved-in-media-cover-up/

"Global warming and the antifactwads"........yeah, on the global warming side

TOP UN Climate Change Official RESIGNS......

http://mingle2.com/topic/show/266217

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/18/more-errors-in-temperature-data/

Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' top climate-change official, announced his resignation yesterday. Good riddance. The bureaucrat's departure is no surprise because his pseudo-scientific global warming religion was proved to be a hoax on his watch.

The list of problems central to the global warming fraud just doesn't seem to end. As if hiding and losing data, the numerous errors in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the suppression of academic research that disagrees with global warming weren't bad enough, now comes word that basic ground-based temperature data may have been biased towards incorrectly showing temperature increases.

Joseph D'Aleo, the first director of meteorology and co-founder of the Weather Channel, and Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and founder of SurfaceStations.org, are well-known and well-respected scientists. On Jan. 29, they released a startling study showing that starting in 1990, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began systematically eliminating climate-measuring stations in cooler locations around the world. Eliminating stations that tended to record cooler temperatures drove up the average measured temperature. The stations eliminated were in higher latitudes and altitudes, inland areas away from the sea and more rural locations. The drop in the number of weather stations was dramatic, declining from more than 6,000 stations to fewer than 1,500.

Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Watts provide some amazing graphs showing that the jumps in measured global temperature occurred just when the number of weather stations was cut. But there is another bias that this change to more urban stations also exacerbates. Recorded temperatures in more urban areas rise over time simply because more densely populated areas produce more heat. Combining the greater share of weather stations in more urban areas over time with this urban heat effect also tends to increase the rate that recorded temperatures tend to rise over time.

Unfortunately, all three terrestrial global-temperature data sets (by NOAA/National Climatic Data Center, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the University of East Anglia) really rely on the same measures of surface temperatures. These three sources do not provide independent measures of how the world's temperatures have changed over time. The relatively small differences that do arise from these three institutions result from how they adjust the raw data.

The findings by Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Watts also explain some puzzles that have bothered researchers. For example, land-based temperatures have been rising while satellite-based measures haven't shown the same increase since 1990. Their answer is that at that point in time, the elimination of weather stations produced a false measured increase in temperatures that didn't affect the satellite readings. There is no evidence (yet) that this effort was consciously designed to increase recorded temperatures, but that is beside the point. The crux of the matter is that fanatics about man-made global warming want to spend trillions of dollars based on conclusions from faulty data.

As the frigid winter days pass and the scandals mount, it becomes clear that claims of man-made global warming aren't based on scientific methods at all. The hysteria is based on fraud.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing....A$$HOLE for sure.

http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2009/20091028162719.aspx

An Associated Press “Fact Check” released Oct. 25 examined the numbers for health insurance companies and found something very different from what people were hearing from Washington politicians and the networks.

“Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That's anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones,” AP wrote.

A combined profit for five companies of 12.2 billion.....for five insurers....and what was Exxon Mobile's profit a few year back -
Exxon Mobile had enough profit to pay Uncle Sam 40 Billion dollars...

Ironically, the banks that did not get ANY Tarp funds but will fall victim to Obama's bank tax plan for recouperating Tarp funds are the ones proposing the new transaction fee. Those banks are now calling it the "Robin Hood" tax. Any tax ALWAYS gets passed on to the consumer.

In order to pay for Obama new bank tax, banks are considering a .05 fee for EVERY transaction.

How can Congress be so stupid???

Raise the capital requirements of the banks - that will even cut down on some of the bonuses.

Yup, did you see Gibbs interview with Mike Wallace....You could tell that when he answerwed the questions he really didn't believe what he was saying...

So the one ad cost 2.5 million dollars???

The dems want change Tarp to another giveaway instead of applying the money back to the deficit.

There will be no return of jobs under Obama as long as the belief is that "economic growth springs mainly from the genius of government"

So much for all of that Washington talk about a midcourse change of political direction. If President Obama took any lesson from his party's recent drubbing in Massachusetts, and its decline in the polls, it seems to be that he should keep doing what he's been doing, only with a little more humility, and a touch more bipartisanship.

That's our reading of last night's lengthy State of the Union address, which mostly repackaged the President's first-year agenda in more modest political wrapping. "Our administration has had some political setbacks this year, and some of them were deserved," he said, in his most notable grace note.

He also showed more willingness to engage with Republicans than he or his party have shown during the last year of bending to the left on Capitol Hill. But whether this outreach is anything more than rhetoric will depend on a change of policy. And on that score, we heard mostly what Democrats used to say about George W. Bush and Iraq: Stay the course.

That was especially true on the two most important domestic issues of his Presidency—health care and the economy.

On health care, Mr. Obama offered a Willy Loman-esque soliloquy on his year-long effort, as if his bill's underlying virtues and his own hard work haven't been truly appreciated by the American public. He showed no particular willingness to compromise, save for a claim that he was open to other ideas.

And he re-pitched the health bill now in Congress with the same contradiction—covers more people but saves money too—that all but the most devoted partisans long ago dismissed as unbelievable. The President sounded to us like a man who is still hoping Democrats will find a way to sneak this monstrosity into law despite its unpopularity.

Mr. Obama's economic pitch also differed little from last year, when the jobless rate was 7.2%. He offered a spirited defense of the stimulus, though the jobless rate is now 10%, and he promised more of the same this year, especially on "green jobs." He also offered some minor if welcome tax cuts for small business, and $30 billion in handouts for "community banks" to be able to lend more.

Yet at the same time, he couldn't resist more banker baiting, and he promised that he's determined to see tax rates rise for millions of Americans next year when the Bush rates are set to expire. He also pushed more exports while saying he'll raise taxes on some of our biggest exporters, otherwise known as multinationals that "ship our jobs overseas." Mr. Obama believes he can conjure jobs and a durable expansion from the private sector while waging political war on its animal spirits. It can't be done.

This reflects a larger problem, which is his belief that economic growth springs mainly from the genius of government. Thus Mr. Obama presented a vision of an economy soaring to new heights on "high-speed railroad" and "clean energy facilities" and 1,000 people making solar panels in California. He seems not to appreciate that what really drives growth are the millions of risks taken each day by millions of individuals, far from the politicking and earmarks of Congress or the Department of Energy.

Many of the President's opponents will welcome this failure to change because they sense partisan opportunity. But our guess is most Americans will be disappointed because they sense a Presidency that began with such promise but now finds itself at a crossroads and doesn't really know what to do—except to stay on the same road that got it into trouble. This could be a long year.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704094304575029773534378324.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn

Who made the decision to try the X mas day bomber as an everday civilian? Looks like it was Eric Holder by himself.

Director of National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, not consulted

Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, not consulted

Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, not consulted.

Head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, not consulted


So here we have Abdulmutallab trained and equipped by al Qaeda, yet he is a criminal and not an enemy combatant under the Obama administration.

This administration is clueless.....

Cramer is dead on, on this one. Mortgage lending is what created the financial mess....it is true that those mortgages were then bundled together and marketed which added greatly to the whole mess.
Investors believed that the banks issued mortgages to qualified buyers who could afford them. Low Fed rates created a flood of people looking for those investments. Congress never knew what happened, until it was too late.

Revenue taken in from most of the big banks from hedge funds and private equity funds is less than 10% of total revenue. I agree with Cramer, the "crisis was about mortgage lending, bad mortgage lending with no standards and no rules."

Yet now, the solution is to tax the banks instead of reform the rules. Higher capital requirements would stop some of those bonuses and should be apart of the solution.

Goldman Sachs is Obama's scapegoat

The president needed someone to blame, so he went after banks. The whole thing is shameful.
Posted by Jim Cramer on Friday, January 22, 2010 6:59 AM

What did Goldman Sachs (GS) do to deserve this? That's all I can think of in the second day of President Obama's nuclear strike against companies that invest in anything other than plain-vanilla loans.

If you parse the words of Obama's statement Thursday, you come away with two thrusts: Smaller banks will keep us out of trouble and will not need to be bailed out, and what causes a bank to need bailing out is private-equity and hedge fund investing.

In other words, Goldman Sachs could cause a bailout because it does the most hedge fund and private-equity investing of any of the publicly traded companies.

No wonder Obama picked the same day as Goldman Sachs' conference call. He was talking about Goldman. I wish he had been on the call.

"Congratulations, guys, on a good quarter. Let this be the last one, because you made so much money," he might have said. At least everyone wouldn't have had to be punished for Goldman's sin of making too much money.

Is that too glib? OK, how about if he was after JPMorgan Chase (JPM) because it has a huge deposit base and it invests alongside its partners? Well, the reason it has such a huge deposit base is that the government asked the company to buy Washington Mutual, a bank that was too big to fail that forced the government to take it over and give it to JPM, which is exactly what happened, because JPM sure didn't buy the "real" Washington Mutual. It isn't that stupid.

So how about this one for irony: A bank that almost brought the whole system down because of reckless mortgage lending, because it did no hedge fund or private-equity investing, gets bought by a prudent bank that does do hedge fund and private-equity investing. If Treasury had decided to let Washington Mutual die instead of Lehman, would we be saying now that banks have to do private-equity and proprietary trading because look what risky mortgage lending did?

OK, well, how about Bear Stearns? What got Bear crushed? Faulty mortgage bonds that it pushed that flowed back because they went down in value? The company had to borrow to finance that inventory. Not prop trading. Not hedge funds. JPMorgan saved the government's butt then, too.

Or how about Bank of America (BAC)? Until the Merrill deal, Ken Lewis had decided to get out of investment banking because he didn't like the risks and the losses. But then Merrill gets in trouble, the stock goes down and he wants to buy. He discovers, alas, big mortgage losses, and he wants to back out. The government, however, won't let him. It wants the investment banking and the prop trading under one deposit institution's roof. Bank of America saves the day.

So, now, here are the three biggest banks that are affected: Goldman Sachs, which caused us no trouble, got it right and doesn't need Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. protection; JPMorgan, which saved the government in Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns; and Bank of America, which wanted to get out of the deal that gave it all of that exposure to the investments Obama is trying to stop it from doing.

This crisis was about mortgage lending, bad mortgage lending with no standards and no rules. The banks that went down took on too many bad mortgages. Fannie (FNM) and Freddie (FRE) underwrote too many bad mortgages. Bear and Lehman bought back too many bad mortgage bonds using too much leverage. Washington Mutual issued too many bad mortgages.

Wachovia, which also had a run on the bank, issued too many bad mortgages. GMAC, which needed a huge bailout, issued too many bad mortgages. AIG (AIG) insured too many bad mortgage portfolios.

Mortgages, mortgages, mortgages. Now, if we had regulated the mortgage business instead of encouraging recklessness through aggressive leveraging by Fannie and Freddie, if we had regulated AIG like the bank that it was instead of state by state, if we had forced Lehman and Bear to reveal what their mortgage portfolios were, if we had forced GMAC to stick with auto lending, like Ford Motor Credit, a unit of Ford (F), and we had cracked down on the no-doc lenders by insisting on documentation, money down and, yes, a passport -- they want that now -- then we would not have had to listen to this nonsense and face the losses that are going to occur if Obama gets his way.

His stunning lack of sophistication and Paul Volcker's total cluelessness -- there, I said it -- about what went wrong astound me.

Now, you might say, wait, didn't Goldman Sachs go down and need federal help? And Morgan Stanley (MS)? Yes, but that was because it was so easy to take out credit default swaps and make a run on the bank at the same time -- again, a diagnosis that requires you to have much more sophistication than Volcker has.

That's why Barney Frank wanted to have so much transparency in his now-no-doubt scuttled bill, because we would find out who was making these reckless bets, we would see the trades and we could go after them. With Frank's legislation, Lehman would have had to disclose its portfolio so we would know not to fund it. In Barney Frank's world there is no more reckless mortgage lending, even if some of his actions before did allow Fannie and Freddie to get way too aggressive.

It still all comes back to what Goldman Sachs did. Goldman is a small company in New York City without a broad nationwide deposit base that made a lot of money and didn't get in trouble but is easily identified as the enemy. It is, simply, the perfect scapegoat for a president in bad need of a scapegoat.

The whole thing is shameful.

January 20, 2010 3:09 PM

Buffett blasts Obama's bank tax

Berkshire Hathaway leader Warren Buffett criticizes the president's proposal in a TV interview, saying the government benefited from the bailout.

Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) chairman Warren Buffett is criticizing a tax on financial companies proposed last week by the administration of his distant cousin, President Barack Obama.

The "Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee" would be a tax of 0.15% on the debt of the largest financial companies, such as Citigroup (C), Bank of America (BAC) and General Electric (GE). The proposal says the tax would last at least 10 years but would continue "until the American people are fully compensated for the extraordinary assistance they provided to Wall Street."

Buffett has advised and supported the president in the past, but he does not appear to have been consulted this time around.

In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Buffett, a Democrat and a shareholder via Berkshire Hathaway in Goldman Sachs (GS) and Wells Fargo (WFC), took issue with the notion that the government's bailout under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was for the benefit of banks.

"What was done in the fall of 2008 was designed to save the American economy. It wasn't designed to save the banks," Buffett said, noting the government's multibillion-dollar preferred-stock investments in Goldman, Wells and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) under the TARP, which have since been paid back with interest, have earned it a considerable profit.

Buffett suggested the biggest beneficiaries of the government bailout may be the U.S. autoworkers who kept their jobs. General Motors, which received more than $50 billion, is expected to be one of the biggest losers among U.S. investments under the TARP, along with Freddie Mac (FRE) and Fannie Mae (FNM).

"I'm the last guy to suggest that you should go out and put a special tax on autoworkers, but if you're really looking for the people that benefited from government losses, you'd have to look there -- or if you look at Fannie and Freddie. I mean, are you going to go out and tax the members of Congress who ran Freddie and Fannie?" Buffett said.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/top-stocks/blog.aspx?post=1567449&_blg=1,1567449&=&ucpg=2

I am so tired of people saying voters are influenced by this or that.....most voters aren't "stupid pact following rats"....except when they are flat out lied to....but it's often fool me once but not twice in that situation - voters get the blame also because a lot of voters don't like the choices so instead of voting for someone they cast a vote against someone.

Take the health care reform bill....voters truly understood what was going on with the backroom deals and Mass. was the answer. It's not the voters that are influenced mostly - it's the politicans that don't listen to the people. Many will be saying "Bye Bye" soon.

after Obama's attack on the banks yesterday, they will be hiring in the unemployment offices to process more claims.