What The New York Times Is Not Reporting

What exactly is the state of journalism these days.  Is news censored by the personal beliefs and opinions of of the publisher?   What is the invisible hate within what is left in a news room?

from The N Y Times….

SANTIAGO, Chile — On Monday, Pope Francis begins a four-day visit to Chile. For his trip to be successful, he must confront the scandalous sexual crimes of a vile Chilean priest, Fernando Karadima.

From Reuters, today.

“Pope Francis has since visited Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Mexico, Cuba and Colombia, and travels to Peru after Chile. But – possibly wary about getting embroiled in Argentina’s often volatile politics – he is yet to schedule a visit to his home country, which is Latin America’s third-largest economy and fourth-largest ….

From Reuters, today.

“Pope Francis, who hails from neighboring Argentina and once briefly lived in Chile, has defended Osorno Bishop Juan Barros and says allegations that he covered up abuses by one of Chile’s most notorious sexual predators were unfounded. Planned demonstrations in Chile, a staunchly Catholic country…..

Meanwhile, in what Reuters and the NY Times are not reporting…. andCruxNow is:

“Just days before Pope Francis’s scheduled arrival in Santiago on Monday, three incendiary devices exploded in three Catholic churches in Chile’s capital, while a fourth was defused. In one location, the unknown perpetrators left a direct threat to the Latin American pontiff. According to Chile’s Interior Sub-secretary, Mahmud Aleuy, the arson attacks on the four churches “have similarities but are not necessarily connected. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who’ll welcome Francis at the airport on Monday, said Friday that the events which took place on the night of Jan. 11-12 are “very strange, because it’s not something that one can identify [with] one specific group.”

“That threat said, The next bombs will be in your cassock.’ ”

Why are Reuters and the NY Times NOT reporting?  And what is real news and what is fake news based upon opinions and not facts which make your local weather man appear more important in a storm, instructing the serfs how to live? Based upon the money behind the Masters.

Behold the threat of the Pope to the beliefs or the lack thereof of The New York Times! Is it the impossibility of Truth? In just trying to represent Truth to all the world, in what both tried to do?

https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2018/01/12/bomb-threats-issued-pope-francis-ahead-chile-visit/

 

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Greek Mythology

On Monday, all of Greece’s opposition parties – Syriza, Independent Greeks, Golden Dawn and the Communist Party – condemned the shooting which occurred in central Athens before dawn, adding to a wave of politically motivated violence in recent days as Greece struggles with its continuing EU economic crisis based upon currency. “Gunmen” allegedly sprayed bullets into the headquarters of Greece’s governing New Democracy party, though no journalist sighted the gender of the folks pulling the trigger. “Urban political violence has tended to flare in Greece at moments of political chaos and economic deterioration,” Liz Alderman of the NYTimes writes. There was no mention if she speaks Greek, or has studied Greek history.

“Democracy will not be terrorized,” the president said on Monday. According to the New York Times, the latest wave of violence followed the arrest of 101 “suspected anarchists” last week, with “firebombs” confiscated in an operation of riot police in central Athens at a building called Villa Amalia, “a longtime gathering point” for students and far-left groups. This protest in downtown Athens by the so-called “anarchists” ended when police fired tear gas into the crowd. Not to let details get in the way, but Liz Alderman failed to report that what had been confiscated were some 1,500 empty bottles, a canister with flammable substance, helmets and gas masks, along with other material which raised police suspicion. No description has been given how the bottles got there — if plastic water bottles bought by squatters in the building? What does seem apparent is sloppy reporting. What exactly would “long-time” mean in a place like Athens? The YouTube video would suggest that this was a simple demonstration by opposition and dissenters. And some of the confiscated material would be what a prudent protester might bring along.

Publication of a list of more than 2,000 Greeks with bank accounts in Switzerland, which the government was given but did little to investigate, had touched off “a scandal and galvanized public opinion in recent weeks, according to the NYTimes. This news item sounded like the Occupy Wall Street Movement, since it was Goldman Sachs which helped the Greek government hide from public view a transaction treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, as Greece quietly borrowed billions over a decade. With help from the wizards of Wall Street, the Greece government engaged in an effort over a decade to skirt European debt limits. So no wonder the lingering anger by the populace. (Not all that dissimilar to what had happened to those items in the budgets approved by the U. S. Congress that had kept the cost of war in Iraq off the books.)

This attack on Monday morning at the office of the New Democracy party followed attacks on “other symbols of the Greek establishment which are believed to have been carried out by far-left militant groups,” the New York Times reports, without mentioning who it is that believes that ‘far-left militant’ groups were involved. Those attacks over the last week involved home-made gas canister bombs at the homes of five Greek journalists on Friday as well as canister bombs detonated at several government office and banks last week. A Google search to find where exactly the places of “the spate of attacks on other symbols of the Greek establishments” occurred, clarified to be “several government offices and banks”, fails to find any specific mention anywhere else by news media. I wonder if Liz Alderman of the NYTimes would one day cite a specific place in a follow up story.

Claiming unbalanced coverage of the Greek financial crisis to be sympathetic to the imposed austerity programs of foreign lenders and imposed by the Greek government, Lovers of Lawlessness claimed responsibility for Friday’s attacks. In a statement posted on the internet, this group said the news media are the “main managers of the oppressing state designs, manipulating society accordingly.”

After the fall of the country’s military junta in 1974, Greek police in 2002 crushed the November 17 group after decades of attacks “against politicians and businesses. Other groups however have since sprung up, throwing firebombs during anti-austerity demonstrations, attacking police.” In writing about this “mounted” terrorism by “anarchist groups,” Liz Alderman of the NYTimes earlier misstated that Military Minority-Lovers of Lawlessness claimed responsibility for Friday’s homemade gas canister bombs attacks. A correction stated that a group called “Militant Minority-Lovers of Lawlessness, not Military Minority-Lovers of Lawlessness” claimed responsibility. Hmmmmmmmmmmm. Greek is a very tough language to master.

According to the New York Times, a government spokesman warned on Monday of a “dangerous escalation of spreading terror.” The New York Times writer did not seemed concerned how a government might try to use more police powers to capture more political power. Have you ever covered the Republican National Convention in the United States, with mention of what a police state looks like with helicopters flying overhead to protect the delegates and maybe the media? In September 2008 there were more than 800 arrests made during the political convention in Minnesota, with one conviction which in hindsight calls the question of the use of police power; there were homes raided and the same kind of alleged evidence reported by the news media.

What is clear is that at least since World War II, it has never been more dangerous to be a journalist in Europe. “These attacks,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement, “are the most visible expression of an increasingly dangerous climate for all journalists, who are being turned into the scapegoats of a crisis they are just analyzing.”

Perhaps the people in Greece expect journalistic standards to be elevated to reflect a society based upon civility, when journalism rises above the market tensions of those who were forced to sell ads. The same forces of lobbyists trying to affect legislation are at work each day in the world of television news. And this was more and more a generation which got its news from radio and television. There should be a concern, not just between all Greeks, about the fairness and understanding of the talking heads taking in money, paying for all the commercials on radio and television, and somehow capturing the Truth. Referring to dissenters as “anarchists” at a time when everything was being devalued — and you were so personally touched when everything here was devalued — was playing into the hands of those already in power. When some of those in power had along the way just quit doing their job(s).

Yes, stories of terrorism increase viewership/readership in the short-term, before the long-term affects set in on a civilization. Just like the affect of economic unification with continued political independence of nation-states which had fueled this identity crisis for the European Union. Those same factors had fueled a lot of divorces in my neighborhood with affects which lasted a lifetime, among individuals who had lost power in some kind of relationship, in most cases without adding to a “wave of politically motivated” violence.

http://carmenpampafund.org/

http://carmenpampafund.org/

The State of the Union: A New Director of Pork

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Minnesota health executive Lois Quam will lead the $63 billion Global Health Initiative which President Barack Obama in 2009 committed to the program at the U.S. State Department, over six years, aimed at helping developing nations provide more aid for prenatal and postnatal care, improve nutrition, and fight disease. This appointment reunites Quam who had been in the 1990s a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton on Hilary Clinton’s health care task force. A State Department spokesman confirmed Wednesday that Quam will be executive director of the initiative under Secretary of State Clinton.

Lois Quam,of St. Paul is a former UnitedHealth Group executive who co-founded a health consulting firm last year. She was one of the executives who worked under Dr.Bill McGuire grossly enriched by the backdating of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stock options at UnitedHealth Group, the private insurance company whose shareholders have been getting rich off the invasion of disease that threatened people’s lives, for which approximately 70 million took out their health insurance. The exit compensation of McGuire was alleged to be around $1.1 billion, when he immediately stepped down as chairman and director of UnitedHealth Group due to his involvement in the employee stock options scandal.

There is something wrong with this picture. As government leaders work to manipulate people, worldwide under the auspices of the United State State Department. No mention is made in the story if the $69 billion is directed at American citizens overseas, and the issues in their lives of prenatal and postnatal care, the nutrition, and disease on foreign soil.

She is married to Matt Entenza, a former state lawmaker who wanted to be governor of Minnesota but unsuccessfully failed in a primary election for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor nomination for governor in 2010. He was not the endorsed candidate of the party. It was alleged that Ms. Quam financed his campaign.

No mention has ever been made about the issue of clawback for the undue profits that came to the team of UnitedHealth management. Clawback is now being used, under a provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, against those who unduly profited in their investments with Bernie Maddoff.

Where Are You When We Need You, Paul Revere?

Did you notice that Zygi Wilf was, after his purchase of the Minnesota Vikings, as lucky now as Prince Charles? Except for the issue of waiting, with so little hostility directed at the overall process of royalty. “If you got a bill in the mail every year for seven bucks — that’s the cost of a beer at new Target Field — would you consider that a worthwhile contribution for keeping your pro football team?” writes David DeLand in the St. Cloud Times.

Would they ever put the question to the voters in England. About the cost of Buckingham Palace? Or a new house every thirty years? Or about just continued public subsidies to The Royals? In a nation that never believed in royalty, would they ever put the question to Minnesotans?

Where, by the way, had the Kansas City Royals come up with the money to refurbish their stadium, Mr. DeLand of the sports department?

Did you have to be in the souvenir business to notice that licensing fees in the NFL went to the NFL. The NFL that never paid for new stadiums, like was required in Europe. MLB was late to the game over this concept of licensing fees, by about five or ten years. When, beginning in the 1970s and ever since, it was all about the cost of the official logos on your purchases.

Licenses and licensing fees. Driver’s licenses. Fishing licenses. The revenue always went to a government body. Except when it came to sports authorities. In these parts, the local NFL franchises never paid for new stadiums. The one that was demanded in the late 1970s, with a dome. The father of the mayor of Saint Paul spent a lot of time seeing that the bill was passed. Yeah, in a day before there seemed to be franchise rights sold for elected office, which too many politicians somehow had passed along. Since the days of the Kennedys. The Cuomos. The Bayhs in Indiana. All those bleeding hearts. And the Bushes. And the Clintons. Now with their organized ways to show up at every car crash. Or hurricane. Like they cared.

When public service was now something else. About only power. Too many thoughtless if not clueless sons and daughters of politicians. Jock sniffing for votes. Trying to run a show that a Prince Charles could only envy. With real power.

The NFL that never paid for new stadiums, like was required in Europe. Or out east. With too many politicians seeking autographs instead of tax revenue from these athletes. There should be a national tax on MLB and the NFL, for revenues raised to pay for the next sports stadium they felt they needed. And yes on the Player’s Association and the NFL Players’ Union, who got something like 55% or more of the revenue.

Prince Charles could envision himself in the picture, as the role model for local baseball people as they made trips to other fiefdoms in the kingdom of MLB, to view their new palaces. Though Prince Charles had been able once to send his wife, when he was married to a blonde, when he tired of it all.

There was a day when kings and queens gave everything away for free. For loyalty. Before the politicians and manufacture’s reps entered the picture, with blackout rights. Did you notice all the hostility directed at the Goldman Sachs who, like all the reptile oil salesmen at the reptile oil emporium, were making so much? And the ensuing jealousies there. Over money and good looking blondes.

Note all the ambivalence of the audience, the ones watching for free, about these thugs who had no investment in the game. Or the carpetbaggers, with only manufacture’s reps working for them as reptile oil salesmen at the reptile oil emporium, until they acquired the local NFL franchise, and entered the picture.

”There’s a critical mass of legislators, fans and business leaders,” said Lester Bagley, the Vikings’ Vice President of Public Affairs and Stadium Development. “Who believe this is the year.” Were they the ones on the bicycles at rush hour, tying up traffic? Mostly on Fridays?

“We know that this is a tough discussion, and the economy is tough,” Bagley said. “But we think we have a good story to tell: What we bring to the community.”

His current neighbor across the street is Hennepin County Medical Center, a hospital in the community that was really bleeding, where they seemed to think 2010 was the year for them. Or hope. Like a lot of Viking fans. With bleeding hearts, over politics and sport. This was finally the year? But at HCMC, those fans would die, actually die, unless something was done about the budget issues. This year.

Just as the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health, yeah under Prince Charles, was being shut down for fraud, the Redcoats were coming. One if by land. Two if by sea. Or maybe by bike. Or ambulance. Camouflaged in purple.

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Slumdog Millionaire, Part III

Alex Rodriguez violated the unwritten code of conduct in baseball last night in Oakland when after Robinson Cano’s foul ball down the left field line, following his own one out single, he cut across the pitching mound and touched the pitching rubber on his return to first base, infuriating the pitcher Dallas Braden.

Braden yelled at Rodriguez, telling him to get off the mound. Rodriguez characterized the confrontation as “pretty funny, honestly.” According to the New York Times, he did not remember where he was running or whether he did, in fact, step on the rubber as he returned to first. ‘It’s not really a big deal,’ he said.”

According to the New York Times, Braden said of the New York Yankees. “It’s kind of disheartening to see that not show through, or be reflected by somebody of his status. They are an extremely classy organization with guys who always tend to do the right thing every time.”

To Braden, it was big deal. After the game, Braden said: “I don’t go over there and run laps at third base. I don’t spit over there. I stay away. You guys ever see anybody run across the mound like that? He ran across the pitcher’s mound. Foot on my rubber.”

This was the A-Rod who in Toronto in 2007 as a base runner called for a pop fly, violating the unwritten code of conduct. Whether written or unwritten, this A-Rod ignores all codes of conduct. Like with steroids. It was in October 2007 when Selena Roberts wrote: “Do you like the new A-Rod who doesn’t care if he is liked?”

Nothing had really changed.

Those Tea Parties

In his book, “The Three Trillion War,” Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes state that the total economic impact of the Iraq War may be $4 trillion or more. And that was before the United States escalated things in Afghanistan.

Former White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired as economic adviser to President Bush partly because of his estimate of the dollar cost of the Iraq war. In an excerpt of his own book in Fortune magazine five years after, Lindsey wrote his projections were partly right. “My hypothetical estimate got the annual cost about right. But I misjudged an important factor: how long we would be involved.” Mr. Lindsey also stated his belief that one reasons the administration’s efforts were so unpopular was the choice not to engage in an open public discussion of the consequences of war, including its economic cost.”

Congressional Democrats had predicted the Iraq war would cost about $93 billion, not including reconstruction. Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said, “It’s clear that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone on longer and have been more expensive than the projections initially suggested,”

So far this has been a tax-free Iraq War, and not included in the Congressional Budget, as I recall a piece that was written in 2002. According to an item that ran on the MSN news page, the cost was carried over. I see little media coverage since that time indicting where the war shows up in the president’s budget.

William Nordhaus from Yale University wrote in the New York Review of Books in December 2002 in an article entitled “The Economic Consequences of War,” about the the long-term management of the economy, with the management of planning cycles. “The fabulous Nineties—with soaring stock market, falling unemployment, declining defense spending, budget surpluses, and bubbly optimism—were followed by the Bush administration which made no serious public estimate of the costs of the coming war. The public and the Congress are unable to make informed judgments about the realistic costs and benefits of the upcoming conflict when none are given. Particularly worrisome is the promise of postwar occupation, reconstruction, and nation-building in Iraq. If American taxpayers decline to pay the bills, this would leave a mountain of rubble and mobs of angry people in Iraq and the region. Closely related is a second syndrome, frequently found in past conflicts, of entering war prepared militarily but not economically. The finances of the nation have deteriorated sharply since George W. Bush took office. The annual federal budget has deteriorated by $360 billion from the spring of 2001 to the fall of 2002, and, even with a short war, budget deficits are likely to mount in coming years. The Bush administration has not prepared the public for the cost or the financing of what could prove to be an expensive venture.”

Nor has the Obama Administration. Market participants, wrote William Nordhaus in “The Story of the Bubble,” at this point do “remember how they lost $6 trillion on absurd and wildly overvalued speculations. A similar exuberance is unlikely to recur in the near future. More likely is an economy in which large federal budget deficits lead to cuts in existing civilian programs and doom critical priorities such as comprehensive health care.”

That tax-free Iraq War, as conceived by the Bush White House, was one ongoing economic consequences of war. There was now the subsequent tax-free Afghan War. These wars would soon change American history. Would you like to come over for tea?

Declarations of Bankruptcy

With the Wednesday anniversary of the $787-billion package of tax cuts and spending in the Recovery Act, in defense of the stimulus, President Obama said, “One year later, it is largely thanks to the Recovery Act that a second Depression is no longer a possibility.” Democratic and Republican leaders in Washington marked America’s legalized corruption by sniping at each other. Bankrupt after 8 years of the leadership of George Bush, Republican lawmakers stepped up their attacks on what was the Paulson-Bush stimulus plan, calling it wasteful and ineffective.

From an article by Simon Johnson in the Atlantic, America’s Legalized Corruption

“The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.”

From the transcript of Frontline on February 16, 2010:

“We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,” says Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] — an obscure federal regulatory agency — who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis.

“They were totally opposed to it,” Born says. “That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?”

They being the same people advising the current president. Then Assistant Treasury Secetary Lawrence Summers, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, as well as Alan Greespan heading up the Federal Reserve. And who did Timothy Geithner worked for through this all? As Henry Paulson got his start working in the Nixon White House; was it for Erhlichman or Haldeman? He learned under the best of hatchet men.

It had taken 40 years of the media making us all world experts, and this expertise along with the lobbyists had bankrupted American government. It was why I felt uncomfortable having my retirement accounts with Fidelity, with Merrill Lynch, with Morgan Stanley. They all had hijacked the government of the United States, through the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

One year later, President Obama was sounding a lot like George Bush, announcing victory in Iraq. Or Henry Paulson and Ben Ben Bernanke, with their similar pronouncements all along, when the Bush Administration on July 13, 2008 rescued Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or Bear Stearns. When that second Depression “was no longer a possibility.”

The Congressional Oversight Panel, chaired by Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, warned on the same anniversary date that it remains “deeply concerned” that commercial loan losses could jeopardize the stability of many banks, particularly the nation’s mid-size and smaller banks. Highlighting yet one more hurdle for this country’s fragile economy, a wave of commercial real estate loan failures could threaten over the next few years America’s already-weakened financial system. The Congressional Oversight Panel was formed as part of oversight for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Blog Networking in Real-time

C-span

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is underway.

According to a Bloomberg piece by Hugh Son, the Federal Reserve of New York, under the leadership of Timothy Geithner, told AIG to withhold documents and delay disclosures of details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails over a five month span starting in November 2008 between the company and its regulator show. The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on contracts tied to subprime home loans threatened to swamp AIGr weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The New York Fed ordered the crippled AIG not to negotiate for discounts in settling the credit derivative swaps, crossing out the reference to discussion of a discount of up to $13 billion that tax payers funded, according to the e-mails. AIG excluded the language when an SEC filing was made public on December 24, 2008. This was a backdoor bailout of Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks which were owed $62.1 billion of the credit derivatives. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid. At the time, Geithner “was recused from working on issues involving specific companies, including AIG.” In a separate statement, a spokesperson said that Geithner, after his nomination for Treasury secretary on Nov. 24, 2008, “began to insulate himself weeks earlier in anticipation of his nomination.”

It is hoped that Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is as affective as congressional oversight after the Mitchell Report was released for Major League Baseball. This bipartisan commission has been given a critical non-partisan mission. In the cultural atmosphere of Washington, with its campus as a political utopia. With a week or two of producing in video and interactive content creation for C-Span, the media division for both Democrats and Republicans, funded by your cable television payments.

Because what is said to the new media does have a huge impact on reputations and on careers. Or to Congress. In the new cultural atmosphere where everyone has an agent. Even Bob Costas is represented by IMG, when television journalist used the same system as your professional athlete. IMG also represents Tiger Woods through Mark Steinberg, Senior Vice President and Global Managing Director of Golf. IMG which owns half of Ari Fleischer’s company. Fleischer, the former White House press secretary who operates Ari Fleischer Sports Communications.

In the cultural atmosphere, IMG is the global leader in event management and talent representation. “Our media division is one of the world’s top independent producers of sports and entertainment television across multiple genres and is an emerging leader in video and interactive content creation for broadband and mobile platforms.”

In the cultural span of c-span, of sports, of television, of entertainment. With all of its sponsors.

Burning Bright

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Twas the night of Thanksgiving and all through his house

Tiger came flying, chased by his spouse.

She wielded a nine iron and wasn’t real merry,

After a bimbo’s cell number was found on a Blackberry.

With a harem, he had cheated on Swede wife Elin,

As each day passed by, another floozie came squealing.

On Holly, on Jaimee, on Rachel, on Cori,

On Joselyn, and Kalika, TMZ had the story.

From the top of the world to above the fold,

Tiger Woood’s sorted tale was told.

With waitresses, VIP Services, there was lots of sex,

And when he wasn’t hosing them, he sent them hot texts.

He crashed his Caddy, but didn’t call OnStar,

Yet he played “spank me daddy” with a skanky old porn star.

He’s been so naughty that with Santa he hadn’t a chance,

Except the big lump of coal that matches the lump in his pants.

But despite all his crying and begging and pleading,

Elin went out and bought a new home in Sweden.

As I heard she’s not pouting, in fact she’s of good cheer,

Because the pre-nup made Christmas come early this year. – STOLEN, AUTHOR UNKNOWN

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
– William Blake

Those Domestic Situations

The New York Times reports today that the Bush administration in 2002 considered sending U.S. troops into a Buffalo, N.Y., suburb to arrest a group of terror suspects in what would have been a nearly unprecedented use of military power.

According to U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) and U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) said that as U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pushed for the Wall Street bailout in September 2008, he brought up that that the crisis might even require a declaration of martial law, as a worst-case scenario.

The Associated Press notes that dispatching troops into the streets is virtually unheard of. “The Constitution and various laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.”

A 1994 U.S. Defense Department Directive (DODD 3025) allegedly allows military commanders to take emergency actions in domestic situations to save lives, prevent suffering or mitigate great property damage. The Clinton administration had set up the Joint Task Force-Civil Support in October 1999 as a “homeland defense command.”

In 2002 the Pentagon established the U.S. Northern Command, charged with carrying out military operations within the United States. Prior to this, under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, the U.S. armed forces had been barred from domestic operations, except in specific, limited circumstances.

So that Associated Press note about “dispatching troops into the streets as virtually unheard of” is a historic note. It is a mistake to say the “constitution and various laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.”

Pentagon officials at one point to end 2008 were projecting some 20,000 active-duty U.S. troops to be stationed in the United States by 2011.