Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor last year accepted an invitation to join the Belizean Grove, an elite but little-known women’s-only group.
Founded nearly 10 years ago as the female answer to the Bohemian Grove — a secretive all-male club whose members have included former U.S. presidents and top business leaders — the Belizean Grove has about 125 members, including Army generals, Wall Street executives and former ambassadors.
Sotomayor’s membership in the New York-based group became public Thursday afternoon in a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Since then, the group has been deluged with press calls, said its founder, Susan Stautberg, who explained that “we like to be under the radar screen.”
The group — which on itswebsitedescribes itselfas “a constellation of influential women who are key decision makers in the profit, nonprofit and social sectors; who build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships in order to both take charge of their own destinies and help others to do the same” — hosts periodic meetings around New York, as well as an annual off-the-record three-day retreat in Central or South America at which its members attend cocktail parties with U.S. diplomats and host-country officials and participate in panel discussions on public policy and business affairs.
At last year’s retreat in Lima, Peru, for instance, Sotomayor and the other members attended a reception at the American Embassy with U.S. Ambassador to Peru P. Michael McKinley and several female members of the Peruvian cabinet, Stautberg said.
Sotomayor, a federal appellate judge, gave a presentation on the challenges the judiciary faces in maintaining its independence from the legislative and executive branches.
Read more:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23375.html#ixzz0Hr5IGeTk&C
“It was really about how you need to have that balance of power and that the judiciary needed to have the ability to really be itself and not be influenced politically,” said Grove member Cathy Allen, the chief executive officer of a financial services firm inSantaFe, N.M. Allen said she didn’t take notes on the speech and added, “Everything we do is off the record.”
In a quote on the group’s website, Sotomayor called the Grove “an extraordinary grouping of talented, compassionate and passionate women. I am deeply honored to have been included. The joy of participating in your fun in Peru was wonderful.”
Mary Pearl, a dean and vice president at New York’s Stony Brook University, called the talk “inspiring” and said she came away from it impressed by Sotomayor’s “profound respect for the Constitution and our legal framework in this country.”
The two became friends through the group, which, Pearl said, is kind of the point of it.
“It’s hard if you’re someone who’s a type ‘A’ personality, who’s achieved a lot and who may be in the public eye — it’s hard to make friends, so it’s just a mutually supportive wonderful experience. We get together just for socializing and also just for intelligent conversation,” said Pearl, adding that the group charges a couple hundred dollar membership fee and also participates in charitable work.
But it’s not open to just anyone.
“The way you become a member is people recommend friends to join and we have an advisory board (that makes the final determination),” said Pearl, who is a member of that board. “You have to have achieved something, but you have to have a really good personality, too. You could be the richest person in the world with a resume that goes on for 50 pages, but if you don’t have a sense of humor, then people won’t want you to be a member.”
Pearl called it “elite in the sense that anything that has more people who want to be in it than are in it is elite. But it’s not elite in that people from all walks of life who are interesting can become a members.”
An out-dated memberliston the group’swebsitelists members including former General Services Administration Director Lurita Doan, Army General Ann E. Dunwoody, former Goldman Sachs partner Ann Kaplan and IKEA executive Pernille Spiers-Lopez.
According to Stautberg, a former Washington bureau chief for Westinghouse Broadcasting, Sotomayor was recommended by Mari Carmen Aponte, a former Carter administration official who later served as Executive Director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration in Washington.
Sotomayor “came to some events and got to know some of the members” and then was approved by the advisory board, said Stautberg, who called Sotomayor “a very bright, very decent, very nice woman.”
Stautberg said she hoped Sotomayor could still be a member of the Grove if she’s confirmed to the court, though the WhiteHousedid not respond to questions about her plans.
And Stautberg brushed off a question about whether the Grove’s women-only membership could generate controversy as the Bohemian Grove’s exclusively male membership did in 1979, when the state of California sued the club for not hiring femaleemployeesas its facility there.
Stautberg stressed that male “spouses, partners and adult children” are permitted to go on the optional post-retreat expeditions (last year’s was to Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley) and said that even though “no man has ever applied to be a member. … If they did, we would certainly vote on it.”
The American Bar Association’s judicial codes states that it is inappropriate for judges to belong to groups that “invidiously” discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion or national origin.
On the questionnaire, Sotomayor wrote that “I do not consider the Belizean Grove to invidiously discriminate on the basis of sex in violation of the Code of Judicial Conduct.”
Whileconspiracy theoristshave cast the Bohemian Grove as a cog in a shadowy right-leaning globalist cabal, Pearl said the Belizean Grove is nonpartisan and stressed, “There’s nothing nefarious about it.”
http://www.belizeangrove.com/grove_overview.pdf
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Sotomayor member of Belizean Grove, female version of Bohemian Grove
Top 10 Obama Apologies (So Far)
Top 10 Obama Apologies - by Human Events
06/17/2009
1. Apology to Europe: Speech in Strasbourg, France, April 3. “In America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe‘s leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”
2. Apology to the Muslim world: Interview with Al Arabiya, January 27. “My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect.”
3. Apology to the Summit of the Americas: Address to the Summit of the Americas, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, April 17. “While the United States has done much to promote peace and prosperity in the hemisphere, we have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms.”
4. Apology at the G-20 Summit of World Leaders: News conference in London, April 2. “I just think in a world that is as complex as it is, that it is very important for us to be able to forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions.”
5. Apology for the War on Terror: Speech in Washington, D.C., May 21. “Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight, that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.”
6. Apology for Guantanamo in France: Speech in Strasbourg, France, April 3. “In dealing with terrorism, we can’t lose sight of our values and who we are. That’s why I closed Guantanamo. That’s why I made very clear that we will not engage in certain interrogation practices. I don’t believe that there is a contradiction between our security and our values. And when you start sacrificing your values, when you lose yourself, then over the long term that will make you less secure.”
7. Apology for America before the Turkish Parliament: Speech to the Turkish Parliament, Ankara, Turkey, April 6. “The United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history. Facing the Washington Monument that I spoke of is a memorial of Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed those who were enslaved even after Washington led our Revolution. Our country still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of Native Americans.”
8. Apology for U.S. Policy toward the Americas: Editorial “Choosing a Better Future in the Americas,” April 16. “Too often, the United States has not pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors. We have been too easily distracted by other priorities, and have failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas.”
9. Apology for the Mistakes of the CIA: Remarks to CIA employees at Langley, Va., April 29. “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes.”
10. Apology for Guantanamo: Speech in Washington, D.C., May 21. “There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world.”
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Drunk American Jews in Israel Hate-On, Threaten Obama ("Fuck Obama!") - CENSORED BY THE HUFFINGTON POST
VIDEO: Drunk American Jews in Israel Hate-On, Threaten Obama ("Fuck Obama!") - CENSORED BY THE HUFFINGTON POST
Redacted
Why Did the Huffington Post Censor the Jewish Obama Hate Speech Video?
http://gawker.com/5281698/why-did-the-huffington-post-censor-the-jewish-obama-hate-speech-video
So: remember that terrible, shocking video of the awful frat-tards spewing racial epithets, screaming and trashing President Barack Obama in ways so debase, they're really not even worth quoting here? Well, The Huffington Post actually censored it. Why?
Max Blumenthal, the filmmaker who took the video, contributed to The Huffington Post previous to this, so it's not a one-off thing, nor a user-submitted video (like the Euna Ling issue at Current TV). He's a contributor. And he notes of his experience:
Within a few hours, I received an email from a Huffington Post administrator informing me he had scrubbed my video from the site. "I don't see that it has any real news value," the administrator told me. "For me it only proves that one can find drunk people willing to say just about anything. Especially drunk, moronic people." For the first time, the premier clearinghouse for online news and opinions had suppressed one of my posts.
...Bringing new meaning to the word "clearinghouse," certainly. Any request for comment has had us referred to Blumenthal's post on Phillip Weiss's blog regarding the fiasco, something it now officially is.
Much of the outrage over the video - which we've re-posted below - falls in line with what The Huffington Post issued: that the guys in the video are drunk, that the video could be a crafted political set-up used to further an agenda, that the entire thing is too outrage-provoking to consider as anything but outright propaganda. That's ridiculous, especially for The Huffington Post, though.
Even though they're mostly just used to aggregating the news of others (or as 30 Rock so nicely put it: telling us what we already know), they're a news site, and this is news, and it's their job to - at the very least - provide some kind of context for this kind of thing. The video's clearly not fake or staged in any regard: why would these very clear faces expose themselves to the world like that? It's the worst kind of "viral" there is. And yes, they're drunk, but as we all well know by now, being drunk doesn't necessarily invalidate the kinds of things you say when you're trashed. Sometimes, in fact: the opposite.
If anything, The Huffington Post's deletion of the video looks like a political maneuver on their part. Maybe they just don't want to be a part of something so hot-button as this, or don't want to chance it on any of the risk that this story may or may not hold. Or it could be agenda-based.
It's probably none of those things. It's probably the equivalent of some tight-assed S & P person over there who thinks they're taking the initiative with their job. What we want to know: Who is this person censoring things over at the Huffington Post? And what would Ariana think?
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Complete NBC Radio D-Day Broadcast (June 6, 1944)
From Archive.Org
http://www.archive.org/details/NBCCompleteBroadcastDDay
| Audio Files | 32Kbps MP3 |
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Friday, June 5, 2009
Two Jews Spy on US for CUBA for 30 years (Walter Kendall Myers and Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers) State Department Employee Spy Case
A married couple was accused Friday of spying for Fidel Castro's Cuba for 30 years while the husband was a top intelligence analyst at the State Department.
Walter Kendall Myers, known as "Agent 202" to the Cubans, and his wife Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, "Agent 123" and "E-634," were nabbed at their home off Embassy Row following an undercover FBI sting.
They allegedly admitted their treachery spanned decades, U.S. officials said.
"It's a serious compromise," said one U.S. official, who compared it to the breaches by Pentagon spy-for-Cuba Ana Montes and FBI agent-turned-Russian spy Robert Hanssen.
Kendall Myers was recruited by Cuban spies in the Communist regime's New York City mission in 1978 while he worked at State's Arlington, Va., language school. The Ph.D. expert on Europe also taught at Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and George Washington Universities.
He worked his way up the career ladder - though his Cuban handlers urged him to join CIA - and eventually landed as a Europe analyst in State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. There, he had one of the highest security clearances: Top Secret-Sensitive Compartmented Information.
Prosecutors said in the year prior to his 2007 retirement, Myers downloaded the crown jewels on Cuba - 200 "sensitive or classified intelligence reports."
"He had access to everything on the computers," the flabbergasted U.S. official told the Daily News, adding that the scope of what he passed to Cuba's spy service is unknown.
They received instructions using a shortwave radio receiving "numbers station" broadcasts from Havana they decoded with a key. Gwen Myers would sometimes pass secrets to Cuban agents - one codenamed "GOD" - by exchanging shopping carts in a grocery, court papers alleged.
Unlike CIA traitor Aldrich Ames, whose betrayal cost the lives of many U.S. "assets" in Russia, the Myerses are not believed to have gotten anyone killed.
"They weren't doing it for money - they were true believers with an affinity for Castro," the U.S. official said.
Myers boasted to the FBI operative he got "lots of medals" from the Cubans, and the couple - who met with handlers in New York and secretly visited Havana many times - spent an evening with Castro in 1995.
The couple has hired ex-Bush White House lawyer Bradford Berenson, who declined comment.
Last month Myers was repudiated by the State Department after calling Britain's relationship with the U.S. "totally one-sided."
"We typically ignore them and take no notice," he told a conference. "It's a sad business."
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/06/05/2009-06-05_husband_wife_arrested_for_spying_for_cuba_for_30_years.html#ixzz0HbdXbvOR&C
Ivy League Sotomayor and Michelle: Still Angry at Whitey!
Is It Going to Be Race and Resentment — All the Time?
[Victor Davis Hanson - National Review Online]
- Many Americans were terrified about our first year in college. Some left farms for sophisticated urban environments and were lost; others were the first in their families to go to colleges, and so on. The Ivy League is by definition snobbish to all outside its traditional insular orbit, whether white, black, brown, country folk, foreigners, etc. But by predicating such common discomfort on their own race and gender, Ms. Obama and Judge Sotomayor deprecate a universal human experience, and instead claim it as something unique to identity politics;
- Once more we see the schizophrenia of affirmative action, diversity, and identify politics — the university is both obliged to select students on the basis, at least in part, of race, class, and gender, but then almost immediately faulted for a climate that, in the eye of the recipient, stigmatizes those to whom it gives unusual consideration (what is the answer? — no race/class/gender consideration at all?; constant race/class/gender consideration that begins at admission and continues through graduation?; damned if you do, damned if you don't?);
- And the remedy for feeling separate at elite colleges is apparently to reemphasize separatism based on identification with the tribe (e.g., Justice Sotomayor's senior thesis, like that once written by Ms. Obama, is predicated on ethnic and racial grievance).
All this should disturb Democrats because it fuels a general and growing perception (cf. Sotomayor's white-male references, Eric Holder's "cowards" remark, the serial Obama apologies abroad, the confusion about America being an important Muslim nation, etc.) among the public that something very strange is going on — a sort of generic anger being expressed at the highest levels of government that seems fueled by long past resentments against a perceived establishment that at times apparently is to roughly characterized as white, or white male, or rich, or Christian, or something other than poor, of color, or of female?
Is It Going to Be Race and Resentment — All the Time?
[Victor Davis Hanson - National Review Online]
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Black New York Terror Plotters Wanted to 'Do Jihad' (2 of 3 'Native' Born)
US officials say that although the attack was thwarted, it serves as a reminder that the possibility of another terror attack in the US is still very real, reports the Guardian. "While the bombs these terrorists attempted to plant tonight were – unbeknownst to them – fake, this latest attempt to attack our freedoms shows that the homeland security threats against New York City are sadly all too real," said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Many are drawing parallels between this recent attempt and several individuals' plans to attack Fort Dix in 2007. CBS News correspondent Bob Orr reports that, as in the 2007 attempt, "the suspects had serious intent, strong grievances against the United States and a desire to be jihadists."
The group's leader, James Cromitie, claims that his parents live in Afghanistan and told the FBI informant that he was angry about the US military killing Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan, reports the Times of London.
He said that if he died a martyr, he would go to paradise and that he was interested in doing "something to America". In July last year, he told the informant that he wanted to join Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based group designated by Washington as a terrorist organisation, to "do jihad", according to the statement.
The Telegraph reports that Mr. Cromitie was probably motivated by deep-rooted anti-Semitism. In the official criminal complaint, the British paper reports that he used several profane words to describe his hatred of Jews
The group, which apparently showed sympathy toward Al Qaeda, said that the Sept. 11 attacks had already destroyed "the best target," the World Trade Center, so they decided to target the country's Jewish population. "They were filled with rage and wanted to take it out on what they considered the source of all problems in America – the Jews," one law-enforcement official told the New York Daily News.
Although the group had relatively advanced plans for their attacks, The New York Times City Room blog reports that they had little, if any, prior history with organized violence. Police describe the men as "petty criminals" who were working without any affiliation to larger terrorist organizations.
Mr. Cromitie, 53, had lived in Brooklyn and had a record of "as many as 27 arrests" for minor crimes "both upstate and in New York City," Mr. Kelly said. He, David Williams and Onta Williams are native-born United States citizens, while Mr. Payen is a native of Haiti. "We believe they knew each other from prison contacts, for the most part," Mr. Kelly said.
Mr. Cromitie was the oldest member of the group and its leader, while the others were "significantly younger," in their late 20s or early 30s, Mr. Kelly said.
The suspects apparently kept a low profile, not eliciting any suspicion from their neighbors, reports the New England Cable News Network. "Lives right over here with us. Regular dude," one of the suspects' neighbors told NECN.
Friday, May 15, 2009
NYC Asst. Principal with Swine Flu Very Sick! - 3 Schools CLOSED in NYC!
Maintenance workers scrubbed desks and door handles Friday in a flu swine outbreak that shut down three New York City public schools and left an assistant principal hospitalized in critical condition on a breathing tube.
Education Department spokeswoman Margie Feinberg said maintenance crews were thoroughly cleaning and disinfecting two middle schools and one elementary school in Queens where hundreds of students were sent home sick this week.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the school closures Thursday evening, saying four students and the assistant principal at the Susan B. Anthony middle school in Hollis have documented cases of swine flu.
The mayor said the assistant principal, Mitch Wiener, may have had pre-existing health problems — but on Friday, Wiener's son Adam said his father had only suffered previously from gout, which he said was unrelated to his current condition. He said his 55-year-old father is now suffering from kidney failure, dehydration and a lung infection.
"I don't know where people got that," Adam Wiener, 23, said Friday morning as he prepared to return to the hospital where the family was keeping vigil.
"The only pre-existing condition he has is gout, which is unrelated to complications he's experienced now."
Adam Wiener said his father had been sick since at least last weekend with flu-like symptoms "but we didn't think anything of it." Then early Wednesday, he said, the family called 911 after his father began "hallucinating and wasn't coherent."
Wiener's case marks the most severe illness in the city since the city's first known cases of swine flu appeared in late April. At least five schools in the city were closed then, but all have since reopened. Officials say the students who have fallen ill in this latest surge of illness appear to be experiencing mild symptoms, similar to routine flu.
Bloomberg said the three schools — with more than 4,000 students altogether — would be closed for at least a week because "there are an unusually high level of flulike illnesses at those schools."
"There are documented cases of H1N1 flu at one of them," the mayor said, using the formal name for swine flu.
New York City's first outbreak occurred when hundreds of teenagers at a Roman Catholic high school in Queens began falling ill following the return of several students from vacations in Mexico, where the outbreak began.
At first, the virus appeared to be moving at breakneck speed. An estimated 1,000 students, their relatives and staff at the St. Francis Preparatory School fell ill in a matter of days.
But the outbreak then seemed to subside. Additional sporadic cases continued to be diagnosed, but the symptoms were nearly all mild. The sick children recovered in short order and St. Francis reopened after being closed for a week.
The middle school with the confirmed cases is two miles from St. Francis.
People at the Susan B. Anthony school said students started going home sick on Tuesday and Wednesday, alarming parents.
"I'm worried," said Dino Dilchande, whose sixth-grade son goes to the school. "The city should have taken more precautions. We should have been notified earlier."
Administrators posted a sign on the door from the Health Department informing students and teachers that the school would be closed for a week. The school is in the Hollis section of Queens, a neighborhood known for producing several rappers including the group Run-DMC.
At the start of the flu outbreak in the United States, government health officials recommended that schools shut down for two weeks if there were students with swine flu. But when the virus turned out to be milder than initially feared, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dropped that advice but urged parents to keep children with flu symptoms home for a week.
So far, the virus has not proved to be more infectious or deadly than the seasonal flu.
CDC officials said schools may decide to close if there is a cluster that's affecting attendance and staffing.
Adam Wiener said his father has been mostly unconscious because of sedation since Wednesday evening, breathing with the help of a ventilator.
One of Wiener's 18-year-old twin sons, Jordan, said his father had been awake briefly and asked him about his leg, which he had injured playing baseball.
"He's always about his kids first," Jordan Wiener said Friday. "He was asking me how I was feeling and how my season's going."
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Majority Minority - (Do Whites Get Special Treatment Now?)
JACKSON, Miss. — Mississippi's Warren County has long been a multicultural hub with its Chinese-owned grocery stores, black funeral homes and restaurants that serve fried catfish and turnip greens to diverse crowds of diners.
Now U.S. Census Bureau data, released Thursday, show the home of Vicksburg is one of six counties in the U.S. that became "majority minority" between 2007 and 2008. They joined 303 of the nation's 3,142 counties that already had a minority of non-Hispanic whites.
The other newcomers last year were Orange County, Fla.; Edwards and Schleicher counties in Texas; Finney County, Kan.; and Stanislaus County, Calif.
The Census estimates that 50.4 percent of the people in Warren County are black, Hispanic, Asian or part of another racial minority. Non-Hispanic whites make up 49.6 percent of the county's population.
Lesley Silver, who is Jewish and grew up in Alabama, moved to Vicksburg as a young bride in 1964. She said the area's racial diversity appeals to her.
"I happen to love differences. So I feel the more ethnic groups here, the better the grocery stores we get," said Silver, whose business, The Attic Gallery, sells an eclectic mix of folk art in a building overlooking the Mississippi River.
Warren County's demographic change has been gradual, not dramatic. Census numbers showed that in 2000, 50.9 of the county's population was non-Hispanic white.
Two of the five county supervisor's districts already were majority black. The new Census numbers show 47.4 percent of the county's population is black, up from 46 percent in 2000.
James Price, superintendent of the Vicksburg Warren School District, said the 8,900-student district had 10 Hispanic students five years ago and 126 now. He said many of the children live in homes where parents speak little or no English.
Price said a few teachers in the district grew up speaking Spanish, and they've been helping their colleagues.
"We hired them to teach our elementary teachers 'survival Spanish,'" Price said Wednesday.
Gertrude Young, a real estate agent, said the Hispanic population in Warren County has increased the past several years because immigrants are working in construction and for a local mobile home manufacturing company.
Young said that when she served as a Vicksburg alderwoman from 1993-2005, she tried to get the police department to hire Spanish-speaking officers and interpreters to help ensure immigrants were treated fairly.
"We still do not have enough," said Young, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor this year.
Silver concedes she's not the type to simplify a statistician's job. She said she'll often skip over questions about her race or ethnicity on Census forms.
"I love layers," Silver said. "Just give me layers and differences, and I'm happy."
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