100 Slaves 100 Enemies

Years ago Bill Maher asked something to the effect of, “What does raising the security alert to orange mean — am I supposed to wear a sweater before I leave the house?”

So now we know. Security alerts were meant to make you scared and vote for an incompetent fool who claimed that he would protect you.

Former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge says pressure from fellow cabinet members to raise the nation’s terror alert level just before the 2004 presidential election helped convince him it was time to quit working for former president George W. Bush.

via Was U.S. terror alert used for political reasons? – The Globe and Mail.

Frances Townsend is quoted in the article refuting these claims. And it makes me wonder if the reporters who write these articles have heard of a search engine called Google, where you can look up people and see what sort of record they left behind. They even get to use this thing called Lexis Nexis that I can’t afford to use to find everything ever printed about anyone. Except me, I suppose

This blurb from the Huffington Post doesn’t paint a pretty picture. It would seem there’s no point in taking Townsend seriously, especially since she went around telling everyone that Al Qaida was possibly/maybe/might disrupt the 2008 elections. So, it would seem she has a history of using fear as a way to try to manipulate an election. She’s a believer. She must be considering her praise for George Bush when she resigned (in 2007! all these dedicated yet quitter Republicans…), so why bother asking her opinion. She’s a shill for her master.

She’s now a commentator on CNN — her new master. What better way to boost her ratings than to jump into this fray.

New York City has been constructing a park in the sky. What used to be a structure for freight trains that would run overhead has now been transformed into The High Line.

The Beatles catalog has been remastered.

Dean Baker reminds us that anyone who did as bad a job as The Federal Reserve (e.g. causing 10 million people to lose their job) would be fired.

Glenn Greenwald discusses the depressing fact that Attorney General Eric Holder will only be investigating low-level interrogators instead of the authors and enablers of the torture memos. And in an unrelated update at the end of this post Greenwald reiterates:

last month, the Obama White House adopted the Bush/Cheney view of White House secrecy to insist on its right to conceal the identity of coal executives visiting the White House to discuss clean air policies. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent today notes that the Obama White House is now doing something similar but worse: namely, refusing to disclose the list of health care industry executives with whom White House officials have been meeting to discuss health care policy — even as Obama’s vows of “White House transparency” remain on the White House website.