The News at a Furtive Glance

When news breaks, Pottersville Central makes sure it stays broken.

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According to ABC's Brian Ross, two of the four masterminds who'd allegedly plotted to blow up an American airliner on Christmas day were released from Gitmo by George W. Bush. It gets better: These two Saudi al Qaeda clowns were enrolled into an art rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia. Yemen had a similar program but was 86'd when it was discovered that you can't turn a terrorist into Andrew Wyeth.

Says Megan Carpentier at Air America (aka the HuffPo 2.0), "Both the families of al-Awfi and Shari attribute their radicalization to their years in detention at Guantanamo Bay." So, bottom line, we jailed two normal guys, turned them into terrorists through torture and illegal detention then turned them out into the world to harm us. Heckuva job, Bushie. Give yourself a big ole thumbs up. There ya go. Asshole.

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You may have heard that about a month and a half ago, Barack Obama actually nominated Dana Perino, Bush's last press secretary, to head up the Broadcasting Board of Governors. You may have also heard that right after her inexplicable nomination, the former press secretary actually said to Sean Hannity, "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term." I guess she was out of town on 9/11.

Well, seems that Mary Matalin is taking up Perino's whiteboarding of history by insisting that not only did Bush inherit a recession from Clinton but he even inherited 9/11 from him, too. (Hey, at least she's brave enough to admit that 9/11 actually happened.)

I guess Mary was also out of town when Richard Clarke and the outgoing Clinton administration officials tried to warn the apathetic incoming Bush administration about the danger represented by al Qaeda or when several foreign governments tried to warn Bush about an impending al Qaeda attack on US soil. I would find it very easy to hate Matalin were it not for the pathetic fact that every night she has to sleep with James Carville.

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Earlier this month, Eric Sprott and David Franklin of Sprott Asset Management LP published a report on the Treasury Securities that are being bought and sold like mad, especially in the third quarter of FY '09. The title of the article is not very reassuring but it seems to strengthen the suspicion we all have of the highly secretive Fed: "Is It All Just a Ponzi Scheme?"

After the federal gov't decided to issue $1.885 trillion of debt for FY 2009, it sold trillions in T-bills. But someone has to have the capital to finance all that public debt so who bought it? Well, "foreign and international buyers", who are supposed to be the target for this unimaginably large refinancing of our debt, bought a respectable $697.5 billion in Q3. The Fed itself bought $286 billion in Treasury holdings. So who or what was the third entity to push the sale of T-bills to over a trillion with a Q3 purchase of over $528 billion? Well, that's where it gets interesting. It was a group eponymously named "Other Investors." So who are they, exactly?

Well, Sprott and his people decided to investigate further by consulting the Federal Reserve Board of Governors Flow of Funds Data and this is what they found: Out of all the groups that make up "Other Investors", all but one nominally increased their purchase of Treasury Securities. These would be insurance companies, pension funds and depository institutions. That leaves another generically-named entity called the "Household Sector." Now, at first, this sounds as if American homeowners were able to somehow buy up over $510 billion of Treasury notes but how could that be when so many of us are out of work and facing foreclosure?

Well, it's not us or foreign governments or insurance companies or banks or the like but phantoms, to use Sprott's and Franklin's word. This mysterious entity that had bought up only $15 billion in treasury bills in all of FY 2008 bought a staggering $528+ billion in the third quarter of this year alone and all without a hiccup. In other words, this Household Sector purchased almost twice what the Fed itself had bought in Treasury bills, T-bills are that are being cranked out like economy-sized confetti to fool foreign investors and governments into thinking we're managing our public debt better than we actually are (shades of Enron). And that's why Sprott thinks the Fed is just a massive Ponzi scheme. Some day all this debt's going to have to be paid by somebody and the other Ponzi architect named Bernard is naively hoping it's going to be leery foreign governments. And don't think they're not watching the actions of powerful bond investor Bill Gross, who's selling his own Treasury notes like crazy.

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You got ten bucks to spare? If not, tough shit, because that's what it'll cost every man, woman and child in the US to bail out GMAC yet again. The government is expected to announce later today that it'll extend another $3.5 billion to the automaker's financial services arm.

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At long last, America's premier conservative is newly single, ladies. Karl "Turblossom" Rove is finally single and available. After a Texas court gave Karl his walking papers, the aforementioned Dana Perino, an official Rove spokesperson, had the gall to say,

“Karl Rove and his wife, Darby, were granted a divorce last week. The couple came to the decision mutually and amicably, and they maintain a close relationship and a strong friendship. There will be no further comment, and the family requests that its privacy be respected.”

Well, I think the still-married Wilsons would have a thing or two to say about respecting family privacy.