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Is the CIA Planted in State Governments?
By David V. Johnson on Jul 31, 2009
WhoWhatWhy commenter David pointed us to the following video of former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura discussing his brush with the Central Intelligence Agency as a newly elected state leader . . .
In the video, Ventura discusses material from his recent memoir Don’t Start the Revolution Without...
The Blue Dogs: Best Friends of Big Business
By David V. Johnson on Jul 29, 2009
[Updates below – Ed.]
As the Obama administration attempts to overhaul the nation’s health care, energy, and financial sectors, it faces the growing leverage of the Blue Dog Coalition—the conservative, fifty-two-member faction of the House’s Democratic caucus—to moderate, or obstruct, its...
Conflicts of Interest, and the Appearance Thereof
By David V. Johnson on Jul 27, 2009
There was a time when the mere appearance of a conflict of interest was sufficient to rule out certain media practices. That time seems to have long passed.
Take, for example, the alleged pay-for-play scandal at the American Conservative Union. The organization offered FedEx lobbying support in a labor...
The Foreign-Policy Establishment
By David V. Johnson on Jul 20, 2009
Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, recently wrote an interesting piece for Foreign Policy magazine about what topics are considered “taboo” among establishment foreign-policy wonks—a group that includes Walt himself as a member. The article is...
Opinions to the Highest Bidder
By David V. Johnson on Jul 17, 2009
The American Conservative Union describes itself as “the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots conservative lobbying organization” devoted to, among other conservative ideals, “a market economy.” For the ACU, it seems, everything should be determined by market...
Did Goldman Sachs Manipulate Markets?
By David V. Johnson on Jul 15, 2009
[Update below – Ed.]
Over Independence Day weekend, Sergey Aleynikov, a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer, was arrested by the FBI for allegedly stealing the firm’s high-speed stock- and commodities-trading programming code and uploading it to an unidentified Web server in Germany.
At...
Questions about Developing C.I.A. Story
By David V. Johnson on Jul 14, 2009
An official story is forming about the secret program that the C.I.A. hid from Congress: the agency planned to organize assassination squads to target Al Qaeda terrorists around the world, according to a lead article in today’s New York Times.
Although this account has gained widespread acceptance,...
The Mega-embassy That Wasn’t
By David V. Johnson on Jul 13, 2009
Have you heard that Iran built a mega-embassy in Nicaragua? Word of this development has passed the lips of many a conservative anxious about Tehran’s intentions. As the Washington Post reports:
It is not clear where the report of the embassy in Managua began. But in the past two years, it has made...
CIA Lies to Congress
By David V. Johnson on Jul 9, 2009
[Update below—Ed.]
During last spring’s controversy over whether congressional leaders were briefed by the CIA over its use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Russ called for an investigation into the congressional briefing process. It is now all the more clear that such an...
Florida Regulators Aided and Abetted Stanford
By David V. Johnson on Jul 7, 2009
The Miami Herald published a long investigative piece about how Sir Allen Stanford, whose Antigua-based banking empire has been shut down as a massive fraud, was able to open a Miami branch in 1998 free from regulatory oversight, with the approval of Florida banking regulators.
Stanford got his...
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