President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address by David Bergman
"Thanks Antonin!....Who Knew? ...8 years after you SPIT on our Democracy and embarrassed Americans and Sicilians everywhere you will also be given some credit for the entire downfall of the GOP!...High Five!.. ya knuckledragger.
"I had a great time in the Dominican Republic. Wish I could tell you about it."
A data breach last year at Princeton, N.J., payment processor Heartland Payment Systems may have compromised tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions, the company said today.
If accurate, such figures may make the Heartland incident one of the largest data breaches ever reported.
Robert Baldwin, Heartland's president and chief financial officer, said the company, which processes payments for more than 250,000 businesses, began receiving fraudulent activity reports late last year from MasterCard and Visa on cards that had all been used at merchants which rely on Heartland to process payments.
Baldwin said 40 percent of transactions the company processes are from small to mid-sized restaurants across the country. He declined to name any well-known establishments or retail clients that may have been affected by the breach.
Baldwin said it would be unfair to mention any one of his company's customers.
"No merchant of ours represents even [one-tenth of one percent] of our volume, and to put out any name associated with what is obviously an unfortunate incident is not fair," he said. "Their customers might end up having their cards used fraudulently, but that fraud might turn out to have come from their store, or it might be from another Heartland store and no one will ever really know."
Heartland called U.S. Secret Service and hired two breach forensics teams to investigate. But Baldwin said it wasn't until last week that investigators uncovered the source of the breach: A piece of malicious software planted on the company's payment processing network that recorded payment card data as it was being sent for processing to Heartland by thousands of the company's retail clients.
Baldwin said Heartland does not know how long the malicious software was in place, how it got there or how many accounts may have been compromised. The stolen data includes names, credit and debit card numbers and expiration dates.
"The transactional data crossing our platform, in terms of magnitude... is about 100 million transactions a month," Baldwin said. "At this point, though, we don't know the magnitude of what was grabbed."
The company stressed that no merchant data or cardholder Social Security numbers, unencrypted personal identification numbers (PIN), addresses or telephone numbers were jeopardized as a result of the breach.
The data stolen includes the digital information encoded onto the magnetic stripe built into the backs of credit and debit cards. Armed with this data, thieves can fashion counterfeit credit cards by imprinting the same stolen information onto fabricated cards.
"The nature of the [breach] is such that card-not-present transactions are actually quite difficult for the bad guys to do because one piece of information we know they did not get was an address," Baldwin said. As a result, he said, the prospect of thieves using the stolen data to rack up massive amounts of fraud at online merchants "is not impossible, but much less likely."
In many cases where a processor experiences a breach, the affected banks may simply re-issue new cards to some customers. In other cases, consumers may spot the first signs of fraudulent activity by reviewing their bank statements. It is unclear whether consumers who receive new account numbers from their bank will ever be able to definitively tie the re-issuance to the Heartland breach.
Baldwin said it was not appropriate for Heartland to offer affected consumers credit protection or other identity theft protection services.
"Identity theft protection is appropriate when there is enough personal information lost that identity theft is possible," he said. "In this case, the amount of information we know they did not get is long enough that except in very circumscribed cases identity theft is just not possible. At the same time, we recognize and feel badly about the inconvenience this is going to cause consumers."
Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst with Gartner Inc., questioned the timing of Heartland's disclosure -- a day in which many Americans and news outlets are glued to coverage of Barack Obama's inauguration as the nation's 44th president.
"This looks like the biggest breach ever disclosed, and they're doing it on inauguration day?" Litan said. "I can't believe they waited until today to disclose. That seems very deceptive."
Officials from the U.S. Secret Service could not be immediately reached for comment.
Baldwin said Heartland worked to disclose the breach last week.
"Due to legal reviews, discussions with some of the players involved, we couldn't get it together and signed off on until today," Baldwin said. "We considered holding back another day, but felt in the interests of transparency we wanted to get this information out to cardholders as soon as possible, recognizing of course that this is not an ideal day from the perspective of visibility."
The Heartland disclosure follows a year of similar breach disclosures at several major U.S. cards processors. On December 23, RBS Worldpay, a subsidiary of Citizens Financial Group Inc., said a breach of its payment systems may have affected more than 1.5 million people.
In March 2008, Hannaford Brothers Co. disclosed that a breach of its payment systems -- also aided by malicious software -- compromised at least 4.2 million credit and debit card accounts.
In early 2007, TJX Companies Inc., the parent of retailers Marshalls and TJ Maxx said a number of breaches over a three-year period exposed more than 45 million credit and debit card numbers.
In 2005, a breach at payment card processor CardSystems Solutions jeopardized roughly 40 million credit and debit card accounts.
Vice President Cheney will be in a wheelchair for tomorrow's inauguration ceremony, the White House said tonight, after he pulled a muscle in his back.
Cheney was moving into his new house in McLean from the Naval Observatory when he hurt his back moving boxes, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said.
The vice president's doctor found no significant damage from the injury, Perino said. Nevertheless, he advised Cheney to spend the next couple of days in a wheelchair.
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I'm sure War profiteer multi-millionaire DICK Cheney was lifting boxes...why stop lying now?
OK, I'll play.
Boxes of :
The 9 Billion $ that went 'missing' in Iraq
The bones of all the kittens and puppies he's eaten
Michael Connell's stolen elections hard drives
His failed exit strategy
The dirt from Transylvania he sleeps in.
The parka and snow cap he wore at that Holocaust ceremony a few years ago.
His Lies...he will be a sitting symbolism of hate and rejection to his base (the Limbaugh/Hannity/O'Reilly Base) - he won't have to stand up when Hail to the Chief is played or standing applause after Barack takes the Oath.
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A very interesting link on Lynn Cheney.
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another picture From SolongCowboy.com"A weak leader, Bush was just overwhelmed in the job," said Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung under a headline: "The Failure." "He confused stubbornness with principles. America has become intolerant and it will take a long time to repair that damage."
Editorials hit out at Bush for two unfinished wars, for plunging the economy into recession, turning a budget surplus into a pile of debt, for his environment policies and tarnishing America's reputation with the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
Canada's Toronto Star was categorical in its condemnation.
"Goodbye to the worst president ever," it declared. "Bush was an unmitigated disaster, failing on the big issues from the invasion of Iraq to global warming, Hurricane Katrina and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."
"Bush leaves a country and an economy in tatters," wrote the Sunday Times in London. It said America's national debt and unemployment nearly doubled on his watch.
Britain's Daily Mail said he entered office with a budget surplus of $128 billion but exits with a $482 billion deficit.
"He leaves the world facing its biggest crisis since the Depression, the Middle East in flames and U.S. standing at an all-time low.
The Scottish Daily Record observed: "America is now hated in many parts of the world. Bush leaves a legacy of wars and the world economy in meltdown. He has been dismissed as a buffoon and a war-monger, a man who made the world a more dangerous place while sending it to the brink of economic collapse."
The Economist found room to praise Bush on free trade, immigration reform and China. But its overall view was negative:
"He leaves as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America's reputation since World War Two."
The Sydney Morning Herald complained about Bush's "singular lack of curiosity in international matters" in an editorial titled "Farewell to a flawed and unpopular commander-in-chief."
Le Monde:
"It's hard to find a historian who won't say that Bush was the most catastrophic leader the U.S. has ever known," the French daily wrote. "One success: since September 11, 2001, there was no attack on U.S. soil. But this sits alongside an interminable list of failures, starting with the war in Iraq."
Germany, ridiculed as "old Europe" by Bush's former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for opposing the Iraq invasion, took aim at Bush.
"Bush brought great misery to the world with his 'friend-or-foe' mentality," wrote Die Zeit.
Stern magazine said: "Bush led the world's most powerful nation to ruin. He lied to the world, tortured in the name of freedom and caused lasting damage to America's standing."
The Pan-Arab al-Hayat newspaper resorted to bitter black humor under the headline: "We cried a lot and the joke was on us." It recalled his controversial election win in Florida and how he once nearly choked on a pretzel, watching television.
"Perhaps we could say that fate, which let the American people down first in Florida and then with the issue of the pretzel in the president's throat, ultimately helped them by making sure the president would spend half his time on vacation.
"Indeed, he would have caused twice the damage if he had been more active and focused."
Austria's Wiener Zeitung wrote Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even ranked higher in one international opinion poll than Bush:
"The United States was once the symbol of justice in the world but that has been damaged by Bush. A web of manipulation has cost America $900 billion and the lives of 4,000 soldiers -- along with at least 500,000 Iraqis."
In Poland, the Warsaw daily Dziennik lamented the worst part about Bush's presidency: "It was empty rhetoric."
Via So Long CowboyGeorge Bush bought his "ranch" down in Crawford in 1999 shortly before he started running for president. And now that he's done with politics, he is moving out of there as soon as he possibly can. The Bushes have bought a new home in a tony neighborhood (and until recently a whites-only community) in Dallas. So, what happened to retiring down to the ranch?
Well, it's what most of us suspected -- all total bullshit. He was never a cowboy. That ranch had nothing on it. No cows, no farming, just a lot of bullshit brush that Bush pretended to clear (for what fucking purpose?). The ranch was always a political gimmick. It was purchased so that Bush could play the role of the Texas cowboy when in fact he has always been the Andover cheerleader.
So, that pisses me off a little bit. And his brazen abandonment of the ranch as soon as he is out of office just throws it in everyone's face, as if he's saying, "You didn't really believe all that cowboy bullshit, did you? You weren't that stupid, were you?"
But what pisses me off a lot more is how the press never told the American people the truth. Now, it might seem like a small thing, in light of all the horrors of the Bush administration and how the press hardly challenged him on any of it. But it is truly indicative, and it did matter when it counted -- during the elections.
I don't know why the press feels the need to be so credulous, especially when it comes to Republican candidates. Fred Thompson has this fake red truck he uses whenever he campaigns for office. He instantly puts it away when he's done with that shtick. Why doesn't the press mock him whenever he gets in that stupid red truck that he normally wouldn't be caught dead in? Why did they never challenge Bush on his fake cowboy persona? Why didn't they ask him -- hey, what the eff is this ranch for? And isn't it convenient you bought it right before the election?
Why the hell has our press gotten so timid? And when did they think their job became to reinforce the fake images and storylines of politicians rather than to challenge them? It's like they're playing their role in this scripted movie. It's almost as if they're being paid to go along with the fraud. The man grew up in a very exclusive, private boarding school in Connecticut. He was a snotty nosed cheerleader. His grandfather was a United States Senator and his father was the President of the United States of America. He was possibly the most privileged man in America. And the press helped to sell the American people on a line of bullshit about how he was a simple cowboy from a ranch down in Crawford. And it helped to get him elected!
That should be a stain on every reporter who covered him for the rest of their lives.
You Traitorous Liar.
Rick Warren Urges Followers To Emulate Hitler Youth
Warren moved on, from his celebration of Nazi dedication to purpose, and held up Lenin, and Chinese Red Guard efforts during the Cultural Revolution, as behavioral examples for his Saddleback flock, whom Warren called on to carry out a "revolution".[source of Rick Warren speech audio clips used in video above: Saddleback Church website ]
On April 17, 2005, at the southern California Anaheim Angels sports stadium thirty thousand Saddleback Church members, more than ever gathered in one spot, assembled to celebrate Saddleback's 25th anniversary and listened as Rick Warren announced his vision for the next 25 years of the church: the P.E.A.C.E. Plan. [Digg this story]
Towards the close of his nearly one hour speech, Pastor Warren asked his followers to be as committed to Jesus as the young Nazi men and women who spelled out in mass formation with their bodies the words "Hitler, we are yours," in 1939 at the Munich Stadium, were committed to the Führer of the Third Reich, a major instigator of a World War that claimed 55 million lives. Rick Warren has exhorted Christians towards Nazi-like dedication in at least several public speeches and also during a one hour video recording of a talk by Warren, explaining his P.E.A.C.E. Plan,
Concluding his motivational speech, the Saddleback Church founder instructed his ranks in the stadium to hold up signs, from their official programs, with the preprinted message "whatever it takes". Warren then introduced, as leader of the first nation on Earth in which the P.E.A.C.E. Plan would be implemented, Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
In 1998 under Kagame's leadership Rwanda, along with the now officially "Purpose Driven" nation of Uganda, invaded the Democratic Republic of The Congo, touching off a conflict that has claimed more civilian lives than any since World War Two. On December 12, 2008, the United Nations accused Rwanda of aiding Congolese warlord Laurent Nkunda, accused of massacres and human rights violations and whose recent offensive has created several hundred thousand Congolese refugees.
get yer barf bag and read on...
Watch Jesus Camp, the Rick Warren prequel here.
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I like this - it sent my OCD into overdrive, you are CORRECT!
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In 42 percent of clinical trials, the agency did not receive forms disclosing doctors’ financial conflicts and did nothing about the problem, according to the investigation, which was conducted by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services and whose results were scheduled to be made public Monday.
In 31 percent of the trials in which the agency did receive the required forms, agency reviewers did not document that they looked at the information. And in 20 percent of the cases in which doctors revealed significant financial conflicts, neither the F.D.A. nor the sponsoring companies took any action to deal with the conflicts, the investigators found.
Karen Riley, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A, said the agency opposed reviewing doctors’ financial conflicts before trials because they represented just one possible source of bias.
A copy of the letter, with the names of the scientists redacted, was provided to The Associated Press by a congressional official.
"Currently, there is an atmosphere at FDA in which the honest employee fears the dishonest employee, and not the other way around," the scientists wrote.
FDA spokeswoman Judy Leon said in response: "We have been working very closely with members of the transition team and any concerns or questions they have on any issue, we will address directly with the team. Separately, the agency is actively engaged in a process to explore the staff members' concerns and take appropriate action."
Should We Take This Seriously?
Mike Mozart is a toy designer who also runs a video blog about new developments in the toy industry.
His reviews are normally light, cheerful affairs and completely apolitical.
If he appears distraught, it's because he is. This is serious.
Mozart has discovered that the US is the ONLY country, including China itself, that still permits potentially melamine-contaminated food on its shelves.
That's right. This poison that killed and injured thousands of people, mainly children, may be in US food. We're the only country that hasn't pulled it from its shelves.
Here's what you need to know
1. Melamine was added to food products manufactured in China to simulate protein content. These food products were imported into the US by the ton.
2. Melamine itself is bad, but much worse - and not reported - is that melamine is an industrial product, not a food product and often comes contaminated with a wide range of dangerous industrial toxins.
Q: It was never the "loneliest office in the world" for you?
THE PRESIDENT: No, not for me. We had a -- people -- we -- I had a fabulous team around me of highly dedicated, smart, capable people, and we had fun. I tell people that, you know, some days happy, some days not so happy, every day has been joyous. And people, they say, I just don't believe it to be the case. Well, it is the case. Even in the darkest moments of Iraq, you know, there was -- and every day when I was reading the reports about soldiers losing their lives, no question there was a lot of emotion, but also there was times where we could be light-hearted and support each other.
And I built a team of really capable people who were there not to serve me, or there to serve the Republicans, they were there to serve the country. And President-Elect Obama will find, as he makes these tough calls and tough decisions, that he'll be supported by a lot of really good people that care -- care about the country, as well.
Team Obama likes to cite Warren’s work on AIDS in Africa to combat criticism about the controversial pastor. But how does burning condoms in the name of Jesus save lives?
Once hailed by Time magazine as “America’s Pastor,” California mega-church leader and bestselling author of The Purpose Driven Life Rick Warren now finds himself on the defensive. President-elect Barack Obama’s selection of Warren to deliver the inaugural prayer has generated intense scrutiny of the pastor’s beliefs on social issues, from his vocal support for Prop 8, a ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage in California, to his comparison of homosexuality to pedophilia, incest and bestiality. Many of Obama’s supporters have demanded that he withdraw the invitation.
Warren’s defense against charges of intolerance ultimately depends upon his ace card: his heavily publicized crusade against AIDS in Africa. Obama senior advisor David Axelrod cited Warren’s work in Africa as one of “the things on which [Obama and Warren] agree” on the December 28 episode of Meet the Press. Warren may be opposed to gay rights and abortion, the thinking goes, but he tells evangelicals it is their God-given duty to battle one of the greatest pandemics in history. What could be wrong with that?
But since the Warren inauguration controversy erupted, the nature of work against AIDS in Africa has gone unexamined. Warren has not been particularly forthcoming to those who have attempted to look into it. His website contains scant information about the results of his program. However, an investigation into Warren’s involvement in Africa reveals a web of alliances with right-wing clergymen who have sidelined science-based approaches to combating AIDS in favor of abstinence-only education. More disturbingly, Warren’s allies have rolled back key elements of one of the continent’s most successful initiative, the so-called ABC program in Uganda. Stephen Lewis, the United Nations’ special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, told the New York Times their activism is “resulting in great damage and undoubtedly will cause significant numbers of infections which should never have occurred.”
Warren’s man in Uganda is a charismatic pastor named Martin Ssempa. The head of the Makerere Community Church, a rapidly growing congregation, Ssempe enjoys close ties to his country’s First Lady, Janet Museveni, and is a favorite of the Bush White House. In the capitol of Kampala, Ssempa is known for his boisterous crusading. Ssempa’s stunts have included burning condoms in the name of Jesus and arranging the publication of names of homosexuals in cooperative local newspapers while lobbying for criminal penalties to imprison them.
Dr. Helen Epstein, a public health consultant who authored the book, The Invisible Cure: Why We’re Losing The Fight Against AIDS In Africa, met Ssempa in 2005. Epstein told me the preacher seemed gripped by paranoia, warning her of a secret witches coven that met under Lake Victoria. “Ssempa also spoke to me for a very long time about his fear of homosexual men and women,” Epstein said. “He seemed very personally terrified by their presence.”
Read on...
I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.
What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.
We've heard and seen many news reports about how unpopular Congress is with the American people. And it is at an all time low, but what most TV analysts are refusing to point out is that it's the Republicans in Congress that are dragging down the approval rating. As a new Gallup poll shows us--Republicans in Congress Less Popular Than Bush:
As Gallup showed last month, congressional Democrats are significantly more esteemed than Bush-- and significantly more esteemed than their Republican colleagues in Congress. According to the latest Gallup Poll, 67% of Americans disapprove of Bush, while 69% disapprove of Republicans in the House and Senate and only 55% disapprove of Democrats in the House and Senate.
I've talked to some of our Blue America candidates and they told me that since '06, the Republicans did everything they could to block and obstruct the daily business of the Congress in hopes that America would have a bad opinion of the House and Senate and it would lead to them retaking or making big gains in '08 and 2010.
The 25% approval rating for the Republicans in Congress establishes a new Gallup Poll low, surpassing the 26% measured about this time last year. Gallup first began asking about approval of the Congressional parties in 1999.
Well, Americans aren't buying their me first---America second attitude and in the end if they obstruct Obama's agenda from the outset then they will only fall deeper into the dark hole they have dug for themselves and America. I'm hoping they do just that so it knocks out some of the bipartisan rhetoric Obama is using, because they will not be willing players in the restoration of America and hand Obama a win. Never. Going. To. Happen. I think Obama will get his first stimulus package through with some grumblings from the Mitch McConnell wing and then it'll go downhill from there.
As the Gallup poll points out for all to see: Nobody likes "Republicans."
Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That's why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama's relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.
And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin. It's in the genes.
