The Kennedy School of Grown-up Politics from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
Benghazi: Rupert Murdoch Tries to Run Gen. Petraeus as his Own Personal Presidential Candidate (Audio) from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
Roger Ailles was going to quit Fox News to be Petreaus' Campaign Manager and Rupert Murdoch made a personal commitment to finance Petreaus' ENTIRE Presidential Campaign.
You can't make this stuff up..
Why the US media ignored Murdoch's brazen bid to hijack the presidency.
Did the Washington Post and others underplay the story through fear of the News Corp chairman, or simply tin-eared judgment?
Carl Bernstein
The Guardian, Thursday 20 December 2012
So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch's ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America's democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.
In the American instance, Murdoch's goal seems to have been nothing less than using his media empire – notably Fox News – to stealthily recruit, bankroll and support the presidential candidacy of General David Petraeus in the 2012 election.
Thus in the spring of 2011 – less than 10 weeks before Murdoch's centrality to the hacking and politician-buying scandal enveloping his British newspapers was definitively revealed – Fox News' inventor and president, Roger Ailes, dispatched an emissary to Afghanistan to urge Petraeus to turn down President Obama's expected offer to become CIA director and, instead, run for the Republican nomination for president, with promises of being bankrolled by Murdoch. Ailes himself would resign as president of Fox News and run the campaign, according to the conversation between Petraeus and the emissary, K T McFarland, a Fox News on-air defense "analyst" and former spear carrier for national security principals in three Republican administrations.
All this was revealed in a tape recording of Petraeus's meeting with McFarland obtained by Bob Woodward, whose account of their discussion, accompanied online by audio of the tape, was published in the Washington Post – distressingly, in its style section, and not on page one, where it belonged – and, under the style logo, online on December 3.
Indeed, almost as dismaying as Ailes' and Murdoch's disdain for an independent and truly free and honest press, and as remarkable as the obsequious eagerness of their messenger to convey their extraordinary presidential draft and promise of on-air Fox support to Petraeus, has been the ho-hum response to the story by the American press and the country's political establishment, whether out of fear of Murdoch, Ailes and Fox – or, perhaps, lack of surprise at Murdoch's, Ailes' and Fox's contempt for decent journalistic values or a transparent electoral process.
RULE NO. 9 - Filling Vacancies in Nominations
(a) The Republican National Committee is
hereby authorized and empowered to fill any and all
vacancies which may occur by reason of death,
declination, or otherwise of the Republican candidate
for President of the United States or the Republican
candidate for Vice President of the United States, as
nominated by the national convention, or the
Republican National Committee may reconvene the
national convention for the purpose of filling any such
vacancies.
(b) In voting under this rule, the Republican
National Committee members representing any state
shall be entitled to cast the same number of votes as
said state was entitled to cast at the national
convention.
"In more than 150 instances, electors have cast their votes for President or Vice President in a manner different from that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represented.
Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate.
The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest, or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was the U.S. presidential election of 1836, in which 23 Virginia electors conspired to change their vote together.
As of the 2012 presidential election, there has been only one occasion when faithless electors prevented an expected winner from winning the electoral college vote: in December 1836, twenty-three faithless electors prevented Richard Mentor Johnson, the expected candidate, from winning the Vice Presidency.
However, Johnson was promptly elected Vice President by the U.S. Senate in February 1837; therefore, faithless electors have never changed the expected final outcome of the entire election process."
Tagg Romney said his father "wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life," according to the Boston Globe.
“He had no desire,” the eldest Romney son said. “If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention."
Hillary Clinton went on National Television to blame internet video "The Innocence of Muslims" for triggering a spontaneous protest in Libya which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others.
Because that's the CIA told her had happened.
That's NOT what they told the Romney/Ryan Campaign - they told THEM it was an Act of Terror.
At 10:08 EST, footage of the raid on the Benghazi compound shot (and EDITED) by the attackers themselves had already begun airing on CNN on Anderson Cooper's AC360 9/11 Special.
A physcial tape of the (first) attack, edited on an offline editing suite had been handed to CNN and was broadcast live on CNN within 5 hrs of the shooting starting - Al-Jazeera did not recieve a copy.
At 10:08 EST (4:08am in Libya), CIA Officers Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were still alive.
The CIA sponsored ,militia had just (miraculously) located the super-top secret CIA Secruity Annex and unleashed a SECOND, murderous assault, with the clear intent to leave no-one left alive, only withdrawing when friendly Libyan Militias loyal to the Government arrived to chase off the CIA Contra under the Command of Director Petreaus in Langley,
David Petreaus tried to murder him own people at Benghazi.
"They were gonna kill Romney"
Dick Gregory agrees with me and Webster Tarpley, based on his own (extensive) sources and street-knowledge.
"When he went off to Arizona, and that white woman, the Governor, shook her finger in his face...?
Well, if you're the head of this State, and there's a whole lottsa people who would die for you in the National Guard, then is there somebody up there on the roof...?
I'm takin' my lead from you, yo' the Governor, you're the Head of the National Guard...
And yo' leader she her fist in my face...?
An' the people around him let him keep going...?
Like it's Business as Usual...?
...or is it different protocol for a negro President...?
Huh?"
"Javelin"
"Javelin" on the Stump
Of all the indignities involved in losing a presidential race, none is more stark than the sudden emptiness of your entourage. The Secret Service detail guarding Governor Romney since Feb 1. stood down quickly. He had ridden in a 15-car motorcade to the Intercontinental Hotel in Boston for his concession speech. He rode in a single-car motorcade back across the Charles River to Belmont. His son, Tagg, did the driving.
There is no formal guideline for the Secret Service agents in this situation; it's up to the discretion of the detail leader, who usually consults with the local police to make sure that his protectee's home won't be overrun by protestors and supporters all of a sudden.
But the Service leaves quickly. No more motorcades. No more rope lines. No more bubbles. Familiar faces disappear, never to be seen again.
In 2008, agents offered to see John McCain back to his ranch in Sedona, but McCain insisted on saying his good byes in his suite at the Biltmore Hotel. The next morning, McCain was seen driving his own car to get groceries.
Had Romney won, everything would have been different. A full counter-assault team, "Hawkeye Javelin," was on stand-by in Boston, ready to supplement his detail. A team from the White House Communications Agency, which had been consulting with his informal transition team on secure space for intelligence briefings, was on hand too.
Romney has his family. When the race was close, agents would joke about the number of "j" words they'd need to come up with in order to give every one of his children, their wives, and all of their children code names. That's 29 people who would have received, if not protection, at least a protective survey and recommendations from the Service. Quietly, plans had already been put in place to assign protective details to all of them, just in case.
The Secret Service has had a hellish year. Not only has it been the busiest ever for the small agency, but it has been their most embarrassing since the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981. April's prostitution in scandal in Cartegana, Colombia threatened to demoralize the entity in charge of safeguarding the democratic process right on the eve of their active phase; two conventions, major foreign trips for the president, the presidential debates, the United Nations General Assembly, the campaign season itself (with sometimes more than a thousand agents and officers changing locations daily). An Inspector General's report has concluded that agents did not jeopardize the president's safety, but having spent time with agents over these past few months, their morale has been flagging. The public mockery takes it toll, even on silent soldiers.
And yet, for everything they were confronted with, the Service did its job. Protectees were protected 100 percent of the time. Several assassination plots were nipped in the bud. Thousands of events were secured, perfectly. Results matter, as we learned Tuesday night.
Though no one in the Service was rooting one way or the other for any particular candidate, at least not to colleagues or publicly, not having to secure the Romney family means that agents who have been working 12 hours shifts for eight weeks straight can take some time off before the inauguration. Families of many more agents will get them home for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
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