Airport rules changed after Paul aide detained

An angry aide to Rep. Ron Paul, an iPhone and $4,700 in cash have forced the Transportation Security Administration to quietly issue two new rules telling its airport screeners they can only conduct searches related to airplane safety.

Full Story: The Washington Times

Bureaucrat

What is a bureaucrat?

Answer:

Beijing's first snow of season 'artificially induced'

BEIJING (AFP) - – Chinese meteorologists covered Beijing in snow Sunday after seeding clouds to bring winter weather to the capital in an effort to combat a lingering drought, state media reported.

Full Story: YAHOO!

Paul's good health care idea won't ever survive

...Americans might risk broken arms reaching for it too fast.

It's this. Whatever a family has to pay for the doctor, the hospital, the pills or the shots, it could deduct on their federal tax return....

Full Story: Pittsburgh Tribune

The Noam Chomsky Show

Spoof:

Ron Paul Strikes Gold

...Which is why Paul's most recent legislative accomplishment is so impressive. He has rallied the majority of the House to support his new cause: an audit of the Federal Reserve. Legislators are sick of not knowing what's going on inside Bernanke's fortress, especially as the Fed becomes further enmeshed in the nation's fiscal policy. Paul's little bill has become emblematic of a larger movement, one that could spell trouble for Obama's troubled regulatory plan. Ron Paul—always an enemy of regulation—is now an enemy of Obama. And a mighty powerful one at that...

Full Story:
Reuters

ATMs to Dispense Gold

Automatic teller machines (ATMs) — 500 of them — dispensing pieces of gold will be available around Germany, Switzerland and Austria by the end of this year.

Full Story:
Reuters

Geithner: AIG untanglement more difficult

WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner foresees a lengthy involvement with American International Group and is not ruling out more aid to the insurance conglomerate...

...Senators criticized the government for letting AIG pay off its top creditors the full value of their debt.

Full Story:
YAHOO!

Senator says KBR Inc. was paid $83 million in bonuses despite evidence company did shoddy work

WASHINGTON - Military contractor KBR Inc. was paid $83.4 million in bonuses for electrical work in Iraq — much of it after the military's contract management agency recognized the contractor was doing shoddy electrical work, a senator said Wednesday...

...At least three troops have been electrocuted while showering in Iraq, and others have been injured and killed in other electrical incidents.

Full Story:
StarTribune.com

See the hearing here: Video

Washington Post 2007: Pelosi Briefed

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Full Story:
Washington Post

Arrest ordered for mom of boy, 13, resisting chemo

NEW ULM, Minn. – Authorities nationwide were on the lookout Wednesday for a mother and her 13-year-old cancer-stricken son who fled after refusing the chemotherapy that doctors say could save the boy's life.

Full Story:
YAHOO!

Jeremy Scahill: “Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama”

Jeremy Scahill reports the Obama administration is continuing to use a notorious military police unit at Guantanamo that regularly brutalizes unarmed prisoners, including gang-beating them, breaking their bones, gouging their eyes and dousing them with chemicals.

Full Story:
Democracy Now

Additional Sources: BBC, LA Times

Hedge Funds Making Big Bets on Gold

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Hedge fund firms Paulson & Co. and Lone Pine Capital made big bets on gold during the first quarter, becoming the No. 1 and No. 2 shareholders, respectively, in the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) exchange-traded fund, according to regulatory filings.

Full Story:

SmartMoney

Local Banks Face Big Losses

Commercial real-estate loans could generate losses of $100 billion by the end of next year at more than 900 small and midsize U.S. banks if the economy's woes deepen, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

Full Story:

The Wall Street Journal

GPS system 'close to breakdown'

It has become one of the staples of modern, hi-tech life: using satellite navigation tools built into your car or mobile phone to find your way from A to B. But experts have warned that the system may be close to breakdown.

Full Story:

The Guardian

Volcker Says Fed’s Authority Probably to Be Reviewed

April 18 (Bloomberg) -- Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said Congress will probably review the authority granted to the Fed following emergency credit programs doubling the central bank’s balance sheet to $2.19 trillion.

“I don’t think the political system will tolerate the degree of activity that the Federal Reserve, in conjunction with the Treasury, has taken,” Volcker, head of President Barack Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said today at a conference at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Full Story:

Bloomberg

It May Be Time for the Fed to Go Negative

The problem today, it seems, is that the Federal Reserve has done just about as much interest rate cutting as it can. Its target for the federal funds rate is about zero, so it has turned to other tools, such as buying longer-term debt securities, to get the economy going again. But the efficacy of those tools is uncertain, and there are risks associated with them.

In many ways today, the Fed is in uncharted waters.

So why shouldn’t the Fed just keep cutting interest rates? Why not lower the target interest rate to, say, negative 3 percent?

Full Story:

New York Times

When the Teleprompter Stops

Are Federal Regulators To Blame For The Crash?

It seems that a good way to survive the economic crisis is to abuse your position in government, and then retire with full benefits.

...Dochow was removed from his job in December after an internal investigation found that he had allowed IndyMac Bank to backdate a transaction, yielding a falsified report that let it be rated as "well capitalized." As we now know, IndyMac subsequently collapsed, making it the second-largest failure to date...The Washington Post reported at the time: "It is the second time Dochow has been removed from a position as a senior thrift regulator."...Now Dochow has been allowed to retire apparently with his full pension based on a $230,000 annual salary -- as opposed to being fired for cause -- according to an ABC News report this week....

Full Story:
CBS

FAA levels record $10.2M fine against Southwest

The agency transferred an FAA supervisor who had been overseeing Southwest to another job and has "taken appropriate action" against an unnamed employee, spokeswoman Laura Brown said.

Full Story:
USA Today

Goldman, Deutsche Got Funds From AIG Bailout, Journal Reports

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG were among at least two dozen financial institutions that were paid $50 billion from the bailout funds received by American International Group Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a confidential document and unidentified people familiar with the matter.

Full Story:
Bloomberg

CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and Silver

In case you missed the Daily Show March 4th, Jon Stewart mocked CNBC for their awful reporting during the economic downturn:



In February, the Wall Street Journal put out a video attempting to debunk the "silver conspiracy." Naturally, they left out some important details that might lead a reasonable person to come to a different conclusion.

Click here to watch the video

First, the concern is not that producers are shorting the market. It is that two banks are the majority short position holders. Here is the actually conspiracy theory, along with the government report from which it is derived.

Second, they failed to mention that the Commodities Futures Trading Commission was recently forced by the public to open yet another investigation into the matter and that the paper did a story on it back in September.

Third, they make no mention of the silver shortage in the physical market, or that the silver will eventually have to be removed from the COMEX to meet that demand - once again previously reported on by none other than the WSJ.

Finally, as usual they fail to discuss the mass sums of money being "printed" these days, and how that will affect the price of silver.

Perhaps the WSJ and CNBC came from the same mold. They somehow gathered the facts over years of reporting, but are still putting out nonsense like this video.